Miss the boat?

In case you missed it, and you almost surely did if you read the American press, a story broke this week about a speech Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser, was originally scheduled to make on September 11, 2001.

The upshot of it is that Rice's speech demonstrated how out of tune the Bush administration was to the threat of terrorism:

The Rice speech argued for the need to confront "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday", and then went on implicitly to criticise the Clinton administration's preoccupation with terrorist groups at the expense of building defences against ballistic missiles.

That's right, we needed to be wasting billions of dollars on Star Wars instead of trying to monitor al-Qaida and make sure they didn't do something drastic, like hijacking four airplanes and crashing them into skyscrapers and defense headquarters.