On the heels of the good news of Zarqawi's death, the A P reports that the USS Cole has left its port in Norfolk, Virginia and is bound for the Persian Gulf region - the first such deployment since al Qaeda terrorists hit it on October 12, 2000. With former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other Clinton folks ratcheting up their criticism of the Bush administration, this may be a good time to revisit Reuel Marc Gerecht's October 30, 2000 piece, " G-Men, East of Suez," on the Cole bombing. He noted:
More important, the FBI's methods reveal, again, the strategic vacuum at the heart of the Clinton administration's counterterrorist policies. Trying to arrest and prosecute terrorists--treating terrorism as crime--actually endangers American power overseas. Traditional realpolitik and gunboat diplomacy--the only meaningful responses to terrorists who kill Americans--gets cast aside in favor of far-off prosecutions that may well do more damage to America than terrorism…. As a case in point, let us look at Usama bin Laden, who, odds are, is with his buddies in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad lurking somewhere behind the bombing of the USS Cole. It's doubtful there are many souls left in the National Security Council, the Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency who really believe that bin Laden is just a "guest" of the Taliban. They may not fully appreciate how bin Laden has helped the Taliban define its own raison d' tre and foreign aspirations, but they unquestionably know that if the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, really wanted to shut down bin Laden's operations or hand him to the Americans, he could certainly do so…. One would think--given bin Laden's terrorist actions in Africa, the repeated worldwide embassy alerts that Washington ascribes to the Saudi militant and his allies, and the eminence bin Laden has in America's multi-billion-dollar counterterrorist programs--that someone might seriously consider militarily retaliating against Mollah Omar and his close Afghan associates. We can find them, in Qandahar, Afghanistan--unlike bin Laden and company. But the criminalization of terrorism allows timidity and caution in foreign affairs--always the bureaucratic default choice in American foreign policy--to hold the foreground. The strategic aspect to counterterrorism--incorporating America's fight against this or that terrorist into a larger regional game plan--haphazardly happens, if at all. The State Department and the National Security Council, of course, cannot conceive of doing anything more forceful than utter reproaches and reprimands, which inevitably preface new appeals to the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service with very close links to the Taliban, to do something about bin Laden. If bin Laden is discovered to be behind the attack on the USS Cole before January 2001, the Clinton administration, given the past, can be expected to fire more cruise missiles at tent and mud-brick Afghan training camps. CIA director George Tenet and his minions will complement the attack by leaking to the press that "we now have bin Laden in a box." Counterterrorism budgets in Washington will inevitably go up, further increasing the possible size of the next FBI-led team sent overseas to investigate a bombing.