A quote, from August 1, 1996 hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

KERRY:What do we need to do -- what concerns me is that our allies are in many cases practicing a kind of mercantilist policy to the exclusion, of some of the measures that we need to put into place and to the exclusion of a certain level of cooperation. Now, for the first time in history, we have empowered you, and you are in other countries in ways that you haven't been.

Is it your sense that we need to do more, we need to find a greater level of cooperation with our allies because it strikes me that none of these terrorist organizations could survive fundamentally? There will always be a terrorist entity of some kind or another with an interest. But that largest most dangerous of these entities survive with country support, the support of the country of Syria or country of Libya or country of Iran, Iraq and so forth.

And when we have had cooperation such as we did with Italy, at least on some momentary occasion bringing down terrorists, we seem less successful. And yet the chase for jobs and money in the international economic leverage seems to counter our efforts to bring people together, to put adequate sanctions on some of these countries, to mitigate or change outright their behavior.

Some things never change. Even then, the emphasis on allies. And then as now, he understood Iraq to be a state sponsor of terror, oh, wait, never mind.