Under the headline "Clinton's quiet war on terrorism," Gellman attempts, in considerable detail, to acquit the former administration of the frequently heard charge that it failed to take the terrorist threat seriously enough.

To the contrary, according to Gellman, Bill Clinton and his advisers conducted a concerted, behind-the-scenes campaign against Osama bin Laden and terrorism in general throughout their final years in office. a campaign characterized by "long shots and near misses" brought on by intelligence constraints and the wily nature of their quarry.

Go behind the headline gloss, though, and you discover that Gellman's reporting actually amounts to yet another case of damning with faint praise, an effort at exculpation that ultimately only further incriminates.

The tip-off comes early in the article, when he writes that "Reluctant to risk lives, failure or the wrath of brittle allies in the Islamic world, Clinton confined planning for lethal force within two significant limits. American troops would use weapons aimed from a distance, and their enemy would be defined as individual terrorists, not the providers of sanctuary for attacks against the United States."

Translated, what this means is that the Clinton team fought its "war" against terrorism with one hand tied behind its back, refusing to expend significant diplomatic or political capital; to run risks that implied the possibility of casualties; or, most inexplicable of all, to hold responsible governments that violated international law by allowing their territory to be used for terrorist attacks against Americans.

That last error is highlighted as Gellman's account traces the growing frustration experienced by Clinton over the Taliban's sheltering of bin Laden.

By the spring of 2000, with other tactics having failed, the administration began warning the leaders of the Taliban that they would be held personally responsible for any attacks against the United States carried out by al-Qa'ida. Alas, when those threats were contemptuously ignored, and bin Laden's deadly activities continued largely unhindered, Clinton simply stood down and contented himself with issuing what one official refers to as verbal scoldings.

Thus was committed that most egregious of diplomatic sins, the issuing of threats which were never intended to be carried out.

Having initially ruled out the taking of action against governments that harbored terrorists, even governments as viscerally anti-American as the Taliban, Clinton was left with no choice but to fight a quiet war against terror that really was no war at all.

More damning still, Gellman quotes the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, to the effect that "Absolutely nothing prevented us from running the kind of operation we're running now, if there had been a commitment to do that."

But the commitment was never there.

The Clinton administration officials interviewed by Gellman cite the same basic factor in explaining this failure of resolve--that the political and diplomatic support for a more active policy simply didn't exist before Sept. 11.

Fair enough, and true as far as it goes. But it must also be remembered that it is the unique responsibility of leadership to make an effort to muster popular support for policies that are in the national interest, and to actively defend American security by convincing our enemies that the threats we make should be taken seriously.

The support for a war against terrorism wasn't there, in other words, because the highest officials of the Clinton administration, from the president on down, never tried to build it. Our enemies in Kabul didn't take our threats of force seriously because those threats were never serious in the first place, leaving one to wonder how much of the Taliban's apparently illogical intransigence in the face of pre-war ultimatums from the Bush administration stemmed from the low estimate of Washington's credibility they had acquired from its predecessor.

Thus, as long as Dick Morris said that talking tough and doing nothing would keep the poll numbers high, then that is what happened. And so, too, did the tragedy of Sept. 11.