History never moves as neatly as first reports suggest. After 9/11, conventional wisdom coalesced around the notion that the Clinton administration had botched its response to Osama bin Laden’s terror threat in its 1998 missile attack on bin Laden’s Khost training camp, a response to U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. If only Clinton had done a better job of retaliating then, the thinking was, maybe we wouldn’t have faced the disaster of the al-Qaida attacks.

But a fascinating in-depth report in Time suggests that responsibility for the failure to act against al-Qaida ought to be at least equally shared with — if not mostly borne by — the Bush administration. It seems that the Clinton national security team handed its Bush-named successors detailed plans to dismember al-Qaida in Jan. 2001. But the proposals “became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials.” Read and weep. (Joe Conason offers more detailed comment here.)

Meanwhile, Friday’s Wall Street Journal offered a piece about the state of al-Qaida’s relationship with the Taliban through the late ’90s that challenges our view of events from a different direction. The Journal, which last year lucked upon a laptop computer filled with al-Qaida files that it has been mining for stories ever since, reports that, from the time of bin-Laden’s arrival in Afghanistan through 1998, the al-Qaida Arabs and the Taliban Afghans disliked and distrusted each other: bin Laden’s people looked down their noses at the Taliban hicks, and Mullah Omar’s people thought bin Laden was a publicity-hungry grandstander abusing their hospitality. On the eve of the Khost attack, in fact, the Taliban seem to have been preparing to evict bin Laden’s gang. Once the U.S. missiles landed, however, bin Laden became a folk hero — the Islamic leader who’d stood up to the Americans — and the Afghan-Arab alliance was fortified.

Does this mean Clinton goofed by not hitting al-Qaida harder? On one level, sure, that’s obvious. But “hitting harder” without actually killing bin Laden would probably not have made a difference in the long run to 9/11. Unless one of those cruise missiles lobbed at Afghanistan had actually taken bin Laden out — or unless the U.S. had geared up for a much more extensive assault on bin Laden’s entire organization, which in those Monica-mad times would have been viewed as a gigantic “Wag the Dog” exercise — it’s hard to see how anything would have changed.

In response to this weekend’s suicide bombing in Israel — ostensibly a retaliation for the Israeli army’s missile attack that killed a Hamas leader and nine children, and the latest bloody act in a cycle of violence with no exit in sight — President Bush had this to say: “There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started, and we must not let them.”

Now, if the problem were “a few killers,” the solution would be simple, and it would be Ariel Sharon’s solution: Peace would be a straightforward matter of, in Bushanese, smoking ’em out and hunting ’em down. But Sharon and the Israeli army have been doing that for months now, and for all their effort, the bombings continue.

Perhaps at one time Israel was at war with a handful of militants, but it seems increasingly plain that what the Israelis now face is a mass movement, radicalized by years of privation, hopelessness, bad leadership and propaganda. Any plan to end the bombings and move towards peace that fails to take this reality into account seems doomed to me.

More valuable than most conventional journalism on this subject, I think, was this weekend’s heartbreaking reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on NPR’s This American Life (Available soon at the show’s Web site).

While we are still digesting the unsurprising but still flabbergasting report about the Bush campaign’s use of Enron and Halliburton corporate jets during the Florida recount fracas, Al Gore comes out punching — finally — in a Times op-ed today. Looks like Gore is mad about comments from Joe Lieberman and others that he was wrong to play the populist card in 2000. My only question is what took the once and presumably future candidate so long to enter the fray. Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee spokesman Bill Buck wins the soundbite prize: “The Bush-Cheney administration literally flew into power in Enron’s and Halliburton’s corporate jets.”

President Bush is a kinder, gentler Republican, it turns out. He’s kind and gentle to those who work for him. He may have cast himself as the first CEO-style president, but he doesn’t seem to have the stomach to fire anyone.

Paul O’Neill’s failure as treasury secretary to establish stature or rapport with the financial world would probably have earned him the boot in any previous administration you might pick. But O’Neill shows no sign of going anywhere.

Army secretary Thomas White is a former Enron official who either (A) knew what was happening at that company and therefore shares responsibility in its ignominy or (B) was completely in the dark about Enron’s escapades. A he’s a crook, B he’s a boob (of the “Sgt. Schultz defense” species); either way he has no business in a critical military post at a time when we are nominally at war. But President Bush stands by his Enron man.

Then there’s SEC chief Harvey Pitt, who — in an act of jaw-dropping flat-footedness — decided to push for his own promotion to cabinet-level status at the very moment when much of the rest of the country is trying to figure out why he has not yet resigned. Bush still thinks Pitt, who took office by promising to make the SEC a “kinder, gentler” regulator of his friends in the accounting industry, is the right man for the job.

What do you have to do to get fired from this administration, anyway? Get arrested for drunk driving?