Rice uncooked.(At War II)

CONDI RICE had her turn before the 9/11 commission, which has increasingly sullied itself with partisan gotcha games. Rice stymied hectoring Democratic commissioners with a cool and persuasive performance. The central point of her testimony was that for decades the terrorists had been at war with the United States, although we hadn't been at war with them. The idea that President Bush in August 2001 could single-handedly have shifted the country onto a war footing is absurd. This argument is especially rich coming from Democrats who barely support a proper war against terrorism even now, after the September 11 attacks.

Could Bush have done more prior to 9/11? Absolutely. But Rice convincingly argues that the administration was taking all reasonable steps, given the context of the time. It was building on Richard Clarke's ideas for an offensive against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, widening the proposed policy to include aid to anti-Taliban forces besides the Northern Alliance and preparing a new approach to convince Pakistan to dump its support for the Taliban. When warnings of a potential terrorist attack mounted in the summer of 2001, almost entirely having to do with overseas targets, the administration repeatedly alerted the U.S. military, and the CIA undertook disruption operations worldwide.

Clarke has argued that if the administration had gone to "battle stations" that summer, convening a series of cabinet meetings, a sense of urgency might have been imparted to the bureaucracy and the 9/11 attacks somehow averted. Clarke's model is the Clinton administration's response to the terrorist threat around the time of the millennium. Back then, an alert Customs agent kept a terrorist from crossing the Canadian border in a car filled with explosives. Rice punctured Clarke's case by pointing out that an after-action report said foiling this attempted infiltration had been a matter of luck and that U.S. Customs wasn't even on ...