Crisis Management by Clifford D. May on National Review Online

Crisis Management by Clifford D. May on National Review Online: "During the 1990s, most of us thought we were living in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. We even spent the “peace dividend” — cutting resources for intelligence and the military. The Cold War was over. We had no enemies worth worrying about. That was the conventional wisdom, the accepted narrative of that giddy era.

The fact that Americans were being attacked with regularity by Islamist terrorists — for example, in New York City in 1993, at Khobar Towers in 1996, at two of our embassies in Africa in 1998, off the coast of Yemen in 2000 — did not lead most politicians to conclude there was a crisis that urgently needed to be addressed. As a result, the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 came as a shock and a surprise."