I theorize that the initial response to 9/11 would've been identical no matter who was President. Afghanistan was a unique situation because the CIA had been operating there for years, and was thick on the ground and had existing relationships with local militias and tribes. We were in a position to begin limited SOF action very early, and starting that way determined the future course of that war. The resulting strategy of a limited ground war based heavily on Special Ops working with local forces turned out pretty well, plus-or-minus the odd ObL slipping away. But it did get rid of the Taliban.

I'd say that the history of the Cold War shows aggressive containment to be very effective. It holds up in retrospect as the wise middle course between surrender and global thermonuclear war. I think there's a good case to be made that containment was working just fine in the case of Iraq, and that US national security--in the context of the overriding war on terror--was not at all threatened by Iraq.

Since this is an old argument I know you'll respond that we had all this faulty intelligence that led people to believe in good faith that Iraq might have WMD and might have some tenuous ties to al Qaeda. But the speculation in the faulty intelligence by itself wasn't enough to cause us to go to war, it took the confluence of faulty intelligence plus a predisposition to attack Iraq to make it happen. Gore wouldn't have had that agenda and would very likely have shown the correct skepticism about claims that Iraq was a threat. And we know it wasn't, we know that the containment already in effect would have held, and in this alternate universe the United States wouldn't be transfixed by a war that contributes nothing to our national security. It's a certainty we'd have made more progress in addressing the real threat from al Qaida, and be thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars richer.

But back to North Korea...today's Murky reported on Rice conveying the Administration's response to the missile test, and it basically amounts to registering a sternly-worded protest. Despite its historical belligerance the Bush Administration is starting to look pretty impotent--how many times can they warn Pyongyang of "serious consequences" before nobody listens? About this many times?