The speaker’s credentials were impressive. In 1999, during the Clinton Administration, he had been the chair of a national commission on terrorism. He knew his subject matter well. By coincidence he was speaking on the evening of the same day on which, according to Colin Powell, the administration got solid information tying the attack on the Cole to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and one day more than a month after Richard Clarke had handed in his memo outlining policy recommendations to deal with terrorism.

The speaker was no liberal apologist for the Clinton administration; no disappointed Gore supporter out to gratuitously criticize the new Bush team. The man who uttered these prophetic remarks was L. Paul Bremer III.

Why wasn’t the new Administration paying attention to the problem of terrorism? Well there were many reasons, most of them rooted in the political engagements of the Republican Party with the Clinton Administration and the Republican orthodoxy that the political conflict had bred. When the President had struck back at Bin Laden after the attacks of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania the Republican’s mantra was “ Wag the Dog” and they ridiculed it as an attack on an aspirin factory and a few tents.

The fact is that the Bush team, a product of those anti-Clinton political wars, believed their own party line. They believed that the Clinton administrations fixation on the threat of terrorism to America was overblown and emphasized to divert attention from Clinton’s domestic political problems and, as a matter of fact they still do. The same rhetoric that marked Republican disdain toward Clinton’s anti-terrorism efforts still creeps into the discussion of 911 as when, in his testimony before the 911 commission, Don Rumsfeld disparaged taking out Al Qaeda training camps as “bouncing the rubble”.

The new administration was paying attention elsewhere. Getting Bin Laden and crippling his terror network was a purely defensive move and one that did nothing much to advance American interests – notably the interest of the nation and its energy industry in a secure supply of crude. That is why the new administration focused its attention from the first on Saddam Hussein; the Iraqi oil fields; and a secure base from which American hegemony might conveniently project its power in the Middle East. There was just no profit in bouncing the rubble in Afghanistan.

There still isn’t. And that is why the administration’s attention is still focused on Iraq to the virtual exclusion of completing the hunt for Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. September 11th made it politically impossible for the administration not to deploy troops in Afghanistan to hunt down the terrorist chieftain. But even as the administration sent the Marines to Kandahar it remained focused on what it regarded as the real objective and diverted resources from that effort to planning and preparing for the invasion of Iraq.

Now the administration is borrowing a page from the Nixon play book. L. Paul Bremer III, the prophet of February 2001, is moving to Iraqify the war. Unless it works better than it did in Vietnam there is no profit in that either and certainly no honor.