DAMNED PRESIDENTIAL WARMONGERING: Read this simplistic and bloody-minded statement:

Our target was terror. Our mission was clear – to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama Bin Laden, perhaps the pre-eminent organiser and financier of international terrorism in the world today.

The groups associated with him come from diverse places, but share a hatred for democracy, a fanatical glorification of violence, and a horrible distortion of their religion to justify the murder of innocents.

They have made the United States their adversary precisely because of what we stand for and what we stand against. . . . We’ve worked to build an international coalition against terror. But there have been and will be times when law enforcement and diplomatic tools are simply not enough. . . . countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens.

Such simplisme.

UPDATE: On a more serious note, read this Austin Bay column about what we knew, and didn’t imagine, back in 1998.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Thomas Conway emails:

So why did Bush get so much grief from the press for 16 words in his SOTU address and Clinton got a pass for these 12 words defending a cruise missile attack against a factory in Sudan: “The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.”

Everyone knows these intelligence estimates can turn out to be wrong, Thomas, so criticizing him for that would have been unpatriotic Monday-morning quarterbacking. Oh, and he was a Democrat.