"You don't blame Clinton for not recognizing that Al Qaeda represented a quantium leap in terrorist activity?
He was the one, who in 1996 said that Al Qaeda was the biggest significant threat of our generation.
And then when he did do anything, he was wagging the dog..."

Sorry my point hasn't been clear, Jim. The Clinton administration was confused as to how to deal with Al Qaeda. When treating them like a criminal organization like the Baader-Meinhof Gang didn't work, they tried treating them like terrorist nations. The attacks on Al Qaeda were meant to be retaliatory, not wipe them out. Pin pricks that accomplished very little anyway, particularly given Al Qaeda was warned by senior leaders in Pakistan prior to the attacks. All it did was motivate Ben Laden to order more direct attacks on the US. That wasn't the desired result was it? That's clearly not the way to handle them.

That's the reason the US moved from a policy of containment to one of desctruction in 2001. It just didn't get implemented in time and we were still effectively using the policy from the Clinton years.