It’s easy to say don’t repeat the blunders of US policymaking after 9/11, but it’s harder to nail the specific lessons that the Israelis should take to heart.
with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as many observers have recently, you are offering Israel a tacit warning: Don’t repeat the kind of blunders that pervaded US policymaking after the trauma of September 11.repeating blunders?
None of these experiences exactly resemble the challenge that Israel faces with Hamas and Gaza; each of them yielded different outcomes, different problems, lessons that vary with the circumstances. Among all the various factors that led us into Iraq, one shouldn’t underestimate the impulse that we just hadn’t done something big enough in response to the terror attacks, that the Afghanistan intervention alone wasn’t enough to satisfy our righteous rage or prove our dominance.
Reportedly that kind of cruise-missile minimalism is what bin Laden expected from the US after September 11 as well. And not only was it a good thing we didn’t give to him; we couldn’t really have avoided escalation. A restraint that allowed for frequent repetitions of al-Qaida’s 2001 triumph – for mass-casualty terrorism as a consistent fact of American life – would have been politically untenable and would have eventually yielded an even more disproportionate response.
And if there is a longer-term option other than invasion, it has to account for these risks while promising success comparable to what the Bush administration did achieve – again, amid all its failures – after September 11, in terms of dismantling al-Qaida and forestalling organised, mass-casualty attacks and what the Obama and Trump administrations achieved in their destruction of the Islamic State group.
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