Ferrablog

...then why was there no military response to the Cole attack of October 2000? Yes, it happened while Clinton was in office, but understandably Clinton did not want to stick his successor (coming into office within a few months) with a "hot war", having been stuck himself in the same fashion when Bush 41 bequeathed him the action in Somalia (and we all know how well that turned out). I can understand that they did nothing in the first couple of months (transition and all that), but they did nothing to respond to the Cole in the months and months thereafter. If they hadn't done anything by 9/11 (nearly eight months after taking office), they weren't ever going to do something about the Cole, even though in addition to the Cole, we had the African embassy bombings, Khobar Towers and the thwarted Millennium attacks to Al Qaeda's credit.

I guess the key problem for them was that they couldn't tie the Cole bombing to Iraq. As I've said elsewhere, I think the current complaint that the War In Iraq is distracting them from the real War on Terrorism has it backwards when it comes to their perspective; it was 9/11 and the War on Terror that distracted them from their War on Iraq, which was in the planning stages well before 9/11.