Introduction

In Part II, I trace variations in decisions to use force in response to acts of terrorism across the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. While the 9/11 attacks serve as a ‘most likely’ (Odell, 2001: 166) case, they clearly show the shift between principled interpretations and the more refined cognitive interpretations as the forms of ideas changed. Unlike attacks on foreign embassies or military vessels, an attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) in the middle of Manhattan using passenger aircraft as flying bombs was bound to spark a more principled response. In this chapter, I first examine the responses to the rising threat of terrorism across the Clinton administration. I show how the Clinton administration adopted cognitive types of responses to acts of terrorism from the bombing of the WTC in 1993, to the 1998 Embassy bombings, and the bombing of USS Cole. During this time, the potential threat posed by al-Qaeda largely went unnoticed by the public. This lack of public attention limited the administration's scope, and perceived need for action despite vocal principled appeals by the PNAC, a neo-conservative think tank, calling for a more ‘forward-leaning’ foreign policy, particularly in relation to Iraq, a leading state sponsor of terror.

Where Clinton did respond to the Embassy bombings, he was accused by some members in Congress of ‘bombing sand’ as a ‘diversionary tactic’ (Gugliotta and Eilperin, 1998) in a ploy to distract from his impeachment woes. Overall, the administration responded to the attacks with regard to utilitarian styled concerns for ‘what works’, taking action only in a limited way upon the acquisition of ‘actionable intelligence’. As such, the fight against terrorism was broadly cast as a second-tier threat and not a global problem that the US was, or should be, responsible for fixing. In this way, the administration largely ‘repressed’ any call for a more expansive foreign policy to target potential threats including going after state sponsors of terrorism, specifically, Iraq, instead favouring more restrained approaches to global challenges. As such, the attacks against the WTC in 1993, US Embassies in Africa in 1998 and the bombing of USS Cole in 2000 failed to gain traction with the American public as they were, for the most part, in ‘faraway lands’.