Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com

In the introduction he declares, “Clinton was tested by a historic, global conflict, the first phase of America’s war on terror. He was president when bin Laden declared war on America. He had many chances to defeat bin Laden; he simply did not take them. If, in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings, Clinton had rallied the public and the congress to fight bin Laden and smash terrorism, he might have become the Winston Churchill of his generation. But, instead, he chose the role of Neville Chamberlain.”

During the course of the next 319 pages, Miniter engages the reader with a deftly told history of bin Laden’s personally-declared holy war or “jihad” on the morally corrupt, “crusader” nation of America. Along the entertaining and informative way, he astounds and maddens us with a catalogue of bungling, half-measures and the sheer unfathomable -- as the Clinton administration fails to grasp that a defining moment in history had arrived in a whirlwind.

For sure there are some successes chronicled during the bloody journey – the capture and prosecution of Ramzi Yousef, the key figure in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, for instance, but from beginning to end, Miniter resists no opportunity to lament the Clinton administration’s seeming paralysis when it came to keeping the anti-terror momentum going, much less boldly seeking out and destroying the enemy:

“On his last night in office as president of the United States, Clinton was at his desk past midnight. He wasn’t issuing last-minute orders to smash al Qaeda or capture bin Laden. He was signing pardons for dozens of well-connected friends. He and the world did not know that September 11, 2001, was less than nine months away.”

Miniter begins his narrative of action-reaction with bin Laden’s December 29, 1992 attack on two hotels in Aden, Yemen – temporary home to about one hundred U.S. service personnel.

Considered the opening salvo in bin Laden’s jihad, the attack was a basic misfire – the American soldiers at the Goldmore Hotel had checked out just 24 hours before. Meanwhile, the Marines at the Aden Hotel were mercifully spared because of an alert security guard.

Within hours of the blasts, all Americans were evacuated from Aden. Ironically, bin Laden’s aim had been to get them out. “The rapid evacuation allowed bin Laden to turn a misfire into triumph,” concludes Miniter.

As the author seriatim reprises the many attacks, big and small, that followed -- straight on through to 9/11 -- the reader is often driven half out of his chair, rooting silently for definitive action as, by way of examples: the bureaucrats fumble and delay the stealthy predator drone weapon to seek out bin Laden, fail to get sufficient Arabic translators on the CIA payroll, or fumble the opportunity to extradite bin Laden.

This reader was reminded of those closing dramatic moments of the movie version of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” when William Holden’s character, seeing that an obstinate British colonel is about to foil the blowing of the bridge, frantically waves his commando’s knife in the air and screams across the expanse of the river, “Kill him! Kill him!” But his voice drifts away in the wind and goes unheeded.

No greater example of such reader-rage comes than in the author’s account of the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing:

“Over the next month, the president made four fateful decisions,” opines the author. “He did not keep the bombing before the public with speeches and actions. He left the case in the hands of the FBI, which was headed by a man he did not trust and was waiting to fire. He treated the bombing as a law-enforcement matter, not a counter-intelligence investigation, thus cutting the CIA out of the fight against terrorism. And he did not even meet with his handpicked CIA director to consider alternative approaches to combating international terrorism aimed at Americans. This ensured future victories for bin Laden.”

Incredibly, Clinton drops the World Trade Center bombing into the lap of Richard A. Clark, a little-known national Security Council staffer:

“Why not a general, a cabinet secretary, or an elder statesman? The thinking inside the Clinton Administration was simple and clever: this was a secret war. If it failed, no one would know and the president would not be blamed. If it succeeded, the president would get the credit.”

Bin Laden Declares War the Fifth Time

In any event, by page 161 of the frustrating drama, bin Laden has publicly declared war on the Western world for the fifth time. The diabolical mastermind adds with a shrug, “If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters.”

This latest affirmation of jihad is in May 1998. By this time, concludes the author, the hapless president is very much preoccupied “fighting for his own political survival, as he faced a series of devastating scandals…”

By the spring and summer of 1998, explains the author, the Clinton administration descends into a deadlock. A timid George Tenet has essentially vetoed covert operations by the CIA to seize bin Laden. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton, has advised against any small surgical operations by Special Forces, recommending a campaign involving thousands of troops. Unwilling to send troops into harm’s way, Clinton freezes up, and the result is a continuing “phony war” -- “while America’s adversaries were waging a real one.”

“Kill him! Kill him!” shouts the raging Bill Holden in the mind’s eye of the squirming reader.

But the only killing was to come from the other side – in the form of the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi, Kenya on August 7, 1998. Ah, but the ubiquitous Monica Lewinsky is testifying before a federal grand jury. By August 14, Clinton has approved a cruise missile strike of several bin Laden camps. On August 17 he is being cross-examined by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

The ad-hoc missile attacks misfire, and bin Laden is handed another victory, triumphantly proclaiming his survival. The Clinton Administration’s already tepid desire to use force against bin Laden evaporates.

And the rest is history.

The author features the deadly attack on the USS Cole in October 2000 as the next key example of the administration’s bewildering weakness in the face of unrelenting provocation and attacks.

Key Intelligence

The author reveals for the first time the astounding intelligence that emerged in July 2000 when a CIA informant disclosed that a terror group based in Lebanon and long affiliated with bin Laden was planning to attack a U.S. naval vessel somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

That somewhere, of course, was Aden, Yemen, where at anchor the Cole is bombed and nearly sunk by high explosives brought alongside in a rubber boat.

With the Clinton administration in its last days and unwilling to fire a parting shot at bin Laden, says the author, “the terrorists were left with another lesson: even American warships could now be attacked with impunity.”

During the Clinton administration, 59 Americans were killed by bin Laden’s operations, the author concludes. And while almost 50 terrorists had been tracked and captured, and dozens of plots had been foiled and six terror cells smashed, the administration had waged no real war against its overt enemy. Instead, the administration reacted in fits and starts – half-measures that frustrated those who knew what needed to be done.

As Miniter gives us our history lessons and lets us stew in our frustration-induced juices, he also lets rip in some new territory: