So far as I can see, there's nothing much new in Michael Elliott's Time magazine piece on the Clinton-Bush transition and al Qaeda. After eight years of bungling and negligence, the Clinton administration had finally come up with a batch of proposals to tackle al Qaeda. But it was too late for them to do anything themselves. These proposals were forwarded to Bush officials who incorporated some but ratcheted up others for a plan to "eliminate" al Qaeda, formulated by September 4. The only relevant issue seems to me to be whether the new administration miscalculated the urgency of such a task. I don't think there's any doubt they did. On the other hand, the Clintonites had had eight years to get al Qaeda and had only made the problem worse. So who deserves the most blame - an administration that took eight years to do an insufficient amount or an administration that failed to act urgently enough in its first eight months? I'd say both deserve criticism but the Clintonites deserve the largest part, since they were primarily responsible for letting the problem get so dangerous in the first place. It says something about the brilliance of Sandy Berger's spin operation that he was able to get this piece presented the way it has been. And a sign of the currently anti-Bush movement in the media that it has gotten such swift attention.

-- Anonymous, August 06, 2002