[link|http://www.techcentralstation.com/DefenseCommentary.asp?id=158| Melana Zyla Vickers]

Excerpt:

What\ufffds more, the officials don\ufffdt come out looking good at all. Instead their efforts add up to a long list on what not to do in a campaign against terrorism. Among the \ufffddon\ufffdts\ufffd:


Don\ufffdt let states off the hook. Clinton officials sought to \ufffdcriminalize\ufffd terrorism, presenting bin Laden as a murderer who needed to be strung up in court and Al Qaeda as a global terror mafia, and doing little more than criticize verbally the Taliban and other terror-supporting regimes. This tactic let the regimes that harbor and assist terrorists off the hook, allowing them to build the terrorists up still further. Yet the Afghanistan war shows that the Bush doctrine of attacking states that harbor terrorism robs the terrorists of safe quarter. Ideally, the doctrine of ousting regimes that harbor terrorists will deter other states from doing what the Taliban did, eventually leaving terrorists with no state helpers.


Don\ufffdt use half measures. The Clinton administration decided a priori to rule out ground forces in any war on terrorism, to operate from a great distance from their targets, and to avoid confronting states. They stopped short of rolling up the financial underpinnings of Al Qaeda that they knew about. And while they doubled the budget for counterterrorism on the one hand, they were overly gentle with the other. Who can forget Madeleine Albright\ufffds move to change the term \ufffdrogue states\ufffd to \ufffdstates of concern\ufffd? Yet laboring mightily below a certain threshold of effort is as bad as not laboring at all; it aggravates the adversary but does little to actually defeat him. By contrast, the Bush administration declared war on the terrorists and so far has prosecuted it fully. And while bin Laden is not yet eliminated, much of the Al Qaeda network has been felled.


Don\ufffdt dilute U.S. air power. The Clintonites tried to strike particular targets with one-time assaults, despite recognizing that their information about people at the targets was always half a day out of date. Using air power in this piecemeal fashion rendered it ineffective. For example, flinging a handful of cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training site in 1998 reached the targets too late, serving only to waste expensive weaponry, embarrass the U.S., and embolden the adversary by signaling that the U.S. has tied its own hands behind its back. Yet if used properly in sufficient quantities, U.S. air power can now win wars. Afghanistan shows how sustained precision strikes from U.S. aircraft, called in by a minimal number of soldiers on the ground, can rout an adversary.

I say:

It's well and good that the current administration has seen fit to learn from the mistakes of previous ones. But that's nothing for the mistake-makers to brag about.

Perhaps the real legacy of the Clinton administration is to serve as a warning to the future.