Does Policy Structure Need Update? (ABC)

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/US/Politics/condi_rice_040330-1.html?POLITICSad=true

W A S H I N G TO N , March 30 — The Bush administration has been forcefully clear that the war on terrorism would be its mark in history, so it is not surprising that it would be evaluated and eventually judged — especially in an election year — according to performance in that war.

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After the appearance of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on CBS's 60 Minutes Sunday, during which she said she didn't know how "we could have done more" to stop the 9/11 attacks, the already high heat has only turned up on both Rice and the whole Bush foreign policy team.

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Tanter says the Clinton administration was successful in creating the foreign-domestic coordination "ad hoc," as seen in the successful derailing of a planned terrorist attack on Los Angeles International Airport in late 1999. (emphasis mine)

But he says the noninstitutionalized way in which that coordination was organized meant it was not automatically carried over into the new administration. Another factor, he and others say, is that the top members of the Bush foreign-policy team were largely focused on state sponsors of terrorism, at a time when the threat was increasingly from nonstate groups like al Qaeda — as Sept. 11 would show. "When they took office, based their foreign policy on their prior experience, their own long histories, and that history had much to do with conventional states rather than nonstate actors like terrorist groups," says James Mann, a security expert at the Center for Security and International Studies.

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But the State Department is not the White House, they are saying.