ABSTRACT
The big photographs on the front page of the New York Times on January 14, 2001 show George W. Bush, the 43rd president-elect of the United States, on the top right and a gruffly-looking Osama Bin Laden on the left. Neither the newspaper nor Bush could have known how foreboding this page was. Bush, it turned out, was literally in a race for time with the radical Islamic terrorist. Shortly after the launch of his administration, he signed off on an interagency review that would search for a new strategy to counter terrorism – the final results of this review were in his reading package on September 10 – and this new policy would have been launched within days from the September 11 attacks. This is not to say that the policy could have prevented the attacks, as it called for a phased in approach of diplomatic, economic and military actions against Al Qaeda and the Taliban that would take years to execute.
