I disagree completely. They couldn't have invaded Aghanistan, but they could have kept up the pre-existing intelligence and military focus on alQaeda, which only MIGHT (note, MIGHT) have made it harder for the 9/11 attacks to happen, but would DEFINITELY have made it easier to execute more effective military action afterwards.

Len,

So your contention is that all problems are solvable in a 7-year timeframe? The Cold War took over forty years.

James,

I was just passing along what your president said.

He said it. I didn't.

More-or-less. That's what I meant by, "Unfortunately, after a nice “mission accomplished” march across the White House lawn, mission creep set in, which beget warlord hunting . . . "

It's unlikely we'd have gone warlord hunting without the Bush mission, though. Once we were involved, then the incentive/pressure to leave the place as something other than a failed state was much greater.

I think that's basically right, which is why I said in the original post "it’s only fully obvious in hindsight that more decisive action should have been initiated earlier."

But it's not as if, absent further provocation, Bush and Company could have done much either. Too much time had passed since the Cole attack and so forth to sell, say, an invasion of Afghanistan.

My point here isn't to criticize Bill Clinton but to point to a concrete example where a situation that festered under one president came to a head during the early part of a successor's administration. That's just the nature of the job, not part of a blame game.

He did as much as you or I would have tolerated him doing at the time. Remember the furor when he launched missiles and everybody thought he was trying to distract attention from Lewinsky?

Whether or not you think he should have done more, the fact is that Bush's crew made this mess a billion times worse by ignoring it. It's as if I sell you a house and warn you that I've been doing patchy maintenance on the front porch but that I'm not sure it's safe, and you ignore that advice and have a big party out there.

Right. Because Clinton hadn't done much to solve said problem. Which had come to fruition almost entirely on his watch, with written notice of war and several acts of war from OBL and company during the Clinton years.

Oh, BULLSHIT. Clinton's guy Clarke told them al Qaeda was the biggest problem they'd face, and Rice and the rest of Cheney's bunch couldn't care less since they wanted to push ballistic missile defense and Iraq War II.

Came out great, didn't it.

Like the good Democrat that he is, dean of political columnists David Broder gives us the lowdown on Senator Clinton's performance with Gen David Petraeus, in Clinton's Partisan Presidential Posturing She began by blaming the Iraq crisis on a "Congr...

I actually think you are right that the whole country could probably vote to get out and he wouldn't do it, but I think he is far more motivated by the fact that he seems to be a true believer in this mission.

He might be wrong, history may prove that he totally screwed up, but at this point I think he truly believes this is the right thing to do.

As for Hillary's comments-she obviously is smart but is not a student of history. I think presidents have passed on one problem or another since the country was founded. Some problems were wars, other problems were political landscape. The fight over slavery wasn't just the 1860's, that fight was going on since the founding of the country, and led to various compromises etc but the fight continued and was a political landmine for many a president and presidential candidate.

I think any candidate that things they should inherite a politically pristine landscape when they take office is probably not the best person for the job.