Daily Inspiration Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

Blumenthal’s line has the cool, bureaucratic cadence of a defense memo, and that’s the point: it tries to turn a sprawling, messy history into a single credential. “Very early on” is doing most of the work. It doesn’t claim Clinton solved terrorism, even addressed it effectively; it claims clairvoyance. Awareness becomes a proxy for leadership, a way to grade a presidency on foresight rather than outcomes.

The subtext is protective, almost prosecutorial. Blumenthal isn’t merely praising attentiveness; he’s pre-arguing against a familiar critique that the 1990s treated jihadist violence as a distant nuisance, a law-enforcement matter, or a headline that flared and faded. By insisting on early recognition, he reframes the decade as one of nascent, underappreciated threat - and casts later catastrophes as less a failure of imagination than a failure of consensus and follow-through. The implication: don’t confuse a government’s inability to mobilize the public, bureaucracy, and Congress with a president’s ignorance.

Context matters because “international terrorism” is a moving target. In the 1990s, it meant embassy bombings, the first World Trade Center attack, Khobar Towers, a growing intelligence picture around al-Qaeda - but also a policy environment that still thought in post-Cold War terms, with humanitarian interventions and trade ascendant. Blumenthal’s formulation narrows that complexity into a single narrative thread, one designed to salvage continuity and competence: Clinton didn’t miss the storm; he saw the clouds, even if Washington declined to build a roof.