I’d hoped to be able to include Ted Koppel’s piece at BBC America tonight, but it’s not available in embeddable format yet (note to BBC: why?). So here’s Ted Koppel in his WaPo op-ed the other day:

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

Remember this: 9/11, just like the friendly-fire that killed Tillman, was a fiasco. It was a total failure from top to bottom. That day was also a social failure — resolved, before it ended, with cell phones and brave passengers.

Just like the underpants bomber was handled by passengers.

Just like the shoe bomber was handled by passengers. Are we seeing a pattern yet?

Until 9/11, no one had ever hijacked an airplane in order to use it as a weapon. American air crews were trained to cooperate with hijackers, and on 9/11 some of them actually attempted to do so. True! It was national policy to let hijacked planes land or fly, even if they left the country. True!

If you watched network news in the 70s, you’ll remember the age of hijackings. They usually involved a disturbed young man and a short, unplanned vacation in Havana for everyone on board. America’s worst experience with terrorist hijacking ended with almost everyone on board still alive, including the terrorists:

Contrary to the “information” Charlie Sheen got got from learning his lines for Navy Seals, until 9/11 the United States military never once used any of its special forces to kill terrorists.

Several plans have been identified in newspaper accounts since 9/11. For example, “snatch operations” in Afghanistan were planned to seize bin Laden and his senior lieutenants. After the 1998 embassy bombings, options for killing bin Laden were entertained, including a gunship assault on his compound in Afghanistan. SOF assaults on al Qaeda’s Afghan training camps were also planned. An official very close to Clinton said that the president believed the image of American commandos jumping out of helicopters and killing terrorists would send a strong message. He “saw these camps as conveyor belts pushing radical Islamists through,” the official said, “that either went into the war against the Northern Alliance [an Afghan force fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan] or became sleeper cells in Germany, Spain, Britain, Italy, and here. We wanted to close these camps down. We had to make it unattractive to go to these camps. And blowing them up, by God, would make them unattractive.” And preemptive strikes against al Qaeda cells outside Afghanistan were planned, in North Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Then in May 1999, the White House decided to press the Taliban to end its support of bin Laden. The Counterterrorism and Security Group recommended supporting the Northern Alliance. These examples, among others, depict an increasingly aggressive, lethal, and preemptive counterterrorist policy. But not one of these operations–all authorized by President Clinton–was ever executed. General Schoomaker’s explanation is devastating. “The presidential directives that were issued,” he said, “and the subsequent findings and authorities, in my view, were done to check off boxes. The president signed things that everybody involved knew full well were never going to happen. You’re checking off boxes, and have all this activity going on, but the fact is that there’s very low probability of it ever coming to fruition. . . .” And he added: “The military, by the way, didn’t want to touch it. There was great reluctance in the Pentagon.”

It was published Pentagon policy that terrorism was a “law enforcement matter:”

During the second half of the 1980s, terrorism came to be defined by the U.S. government as a crime, and terrorists as criminals to be prosecuted. The Reagan administration, which in its first term said that it would meet terrorism with “swift and effective retribution,” ended its second term, in the political and legal aftermath of Iran-contra, by adopting a counterterrorism policy that was the antithesis of that. “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” a report issued by the State Department every year since 1989, sets forth guidance about responding to terrorism. Year after year prior to 9/11, a key passage said it was U.S. policy to “treat terrorists as criminals, pursue them aggressively, and apply the rule of law.” Even now, when President Bush has defined the situation as a war on terrorism, “Patterns of Global Terrorism” says U.S. policy is to “bring terrorists to justice for their crimes.” Criminalization had a profound impact on the Pentagon, said General Schoomaker. It came to see terrorism as “not up to the standard of our definition of war, and therefore not worthy of our attention.” In other words, militaries fight other militaries. “And because it’s not war,” he added, “and we don’t act like we’re at war, many of the Defense Department’s tools are off the table.” The Pentagon’s senior leadership made little if any effort to argue against designating terrorism as a crime, Schoomaker added derisively.

(And yes, this is the source of Cheneyan obsession with the question.) The Pentagon even invoked Posse Comitatus, a favorite issue of conspiracy nuts and yet one more bridge Darth Cheney actually contemplated crossing. What began from deliberate ignorance of the al-Qaeda problem has been vastly overcompensated at a great price in blood and treasure.

Of course, the government itself wasn’t ready. NORAD was trying to be ready, because they had read the same August 10th memo Bush dismissed. The FAA was quite busy doing anything but regulate the industry (remember how Ralph Nader had already advocated securing cockpit doors, for instance?). Before 9/11, Cheney and the military-industrial complex had China in their sights. Everyone old enough to remember 9/11 will also remember this incident:

The real conspiracy of 9/11 came about two and a half hours after the attacks when Rumsfeld demanded to bomb Iraq. It’s one of the best-documented conspiracies in history, much like most genuine conspiracies…because giant, complex arrangements rarely go off as planned. Every one of those illegal, immoral, and wasteful bombs America dropped on Iraq in the invasion-phase of Operation Iraqi Liberation came with at least an inch-thick planning folder (I’ve seen them before; I used to collate such things). Nevertheless, as they say, “accidents happen” — because war is always and forever a blunt instrument.

One lesson Israelis have not learned, and Americans still may not have learned, is that no matter how “precision guidance” your weapons — or just your cause! — you cannot stop terrorism with war. Indeed, the “war on terror” is as unwinnable as a war on drugs or a war on sex. These are actually culture wars disguised as military ones.

That, in turn, is because culture war (kulturkampf) begins at the water’s edge. That’s what we’re seeing right now in microbursts of Islamophobia in America. Some of what Israelis said back in the 80s sounds eerily resonant with what Geller, Gingrich, and Jones have been saying recently to make their case against Cordoba House.

History militates against ignoring terrorism, but it also shows how the United States can stop repeating Israeli mistakes.

PS for those who haven’t seen it, Koppel’s piece is absolutely worth watching.