The rightly perceived weakness and lack of resolve on the part of the Clinton administration is the main reason, in my opinion, for 9-11. From what I’ve seen in the past 100 days, the Obama administration seems to be a clone of the Clinton approach. A cursory glance of Obama’s people shows that most of them are former Clinton staff. Same people--same ideas. This “pre 9-11 mindset” may be leaving us vulnerable to another disaster.

The Clinton approach was to talk and talk and talk, but do nothing else, apart from dismantling our defenses. This was similar to the Carter administration. Neither liked using spies so they didn’t. When 9-11 came, we were in the dark until it was too late. It takes years to build up intelligence networks because a spy can’t just show up in town and get the bad guys to tell him things. Many books have been written, pointing out the mistakes the Clinton administration made in regard to terrorism. Most were penned by now retired military and intelligence experts, whose warnings were ignored prior to 9-11. One would think that someone in the new administration would read some of them before making the same mistakes again.

The notion that he can go around apologizing for our country, offering to destroy our nuclear arsenal and making kissy-kissy with our enemies so that they will be nice to us is clearly not going to produce the results he imagines. Chatting with the leaders of our enemies has been tried in the past. It didn’t work then, so why should it work now? Clinton made a deal with North Korea and had peace talks with Yasser Arafat. But we’re in exactly the same position with them now as we were then. Does Obama believe his magic oratory will get through to our enemies, particularly after it’s been through a translator? Iran is working on its atomic program as fast as it can. They welcome talks with Obama because it gives them more time to work on their weapons.

In an article last week in STRATRFOR Global Intelligence, Fred Burton and Scott Stewart wrote, “Politics and moral arguments aside, the end effect of the memos’ release is that people who have put their lives on the line in U.S. counterterrorism efforts are now uncertain of whether they should be making that sacrifice. Many of these people are now questioning whether the administration that happens to be in power at any given time will recognize the fact that they were carrying out lawful orders under a previous administration. It is hard to retain officers and attract quality recruits in this kind of environment. It has become safer to work in programs other than counterterrorism.

The memos’ release will not have a catastrophic effect on U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Indeed, most of the information in the memos was leaked to the press years ago and has long been public knowledge. However, when the release of the memos is examined in a wider context, and combined with a few other dynamics, it appears that the U.S. counterterrorism community is quietly slipping back into an atmosphere of risk-aversion and malaise — an atmosphere not dissimilar to that described by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) as a contributing factor to the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks.”

We were attacked in 2001 because Osama Bin Laden was convinced that the United States was a paper tiger. After successfully blowing up American Embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen with impunity, there was no reason for him to believe that we would do anything if he destroyed the World Trade Center in New York. He apparently thought George Bush was cut from the same cloth as Bill Clinton. With the way Barrack Obama is starting off, there is a good chance that Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations will see us again as mere talkers and not doers. If that happens and we’re hit again, Obama won’t be able to say it’s Bush’s fault, as he is claiming about everything else.