The Real Path To 9/11

Bill Clinton is outraged.

So is his administration.

Apparently, the upcoming ABC miniseries entitled The Path To 9/11 casts the Clinton administration in a negative light. According to stories, the miniseries implies that the Clinton administration was lax in its management of terrorism.

The members of the administration have every right to be outraged.

But they were, in fact, lax on the threat of terror.

This program is a dramatization. While there is some basis in reality, most of it is fiction. And fictionalizing actual events is a dangerous game, especially when it implies that certain people involved may be partially to blame. The way I see it, this is a classic case of defamation of character. ABC better be very careful.

That said, the Clinton administration did not do nearly enough to combat terror. Neither has the current Bush administration. Or the previous Bush administration. Or Reagan's, Carter's, Ford's, Nixon's, etc.

The mistakes our government has made that had helped lead us to 9/11 go back to 1948.

No, we are not to blame for what happened. Neither are our elected officials. But we need to understand the errors in order to correct them.

In 1948 Harry Truman fully recognized the state of Israel. Without formal borders. He did not formerly recognize a state of Palestine.

Mistake one.

Israel's right to exist is certainly not in question here. But neither is Palestine's right to exist. And no one did anything about Palestine. It was mishandled. By the U.N. By the British, who occupied the territory following World War II and whose failures there were a precursor to the U.S. failure in Vietnam and the Soviet failure in Afghanistan.

No other president following Truman took the diplomatic stand until the 1970's. They all failed in that regard.

Then came Jimmy Carter.

He had it. He actually moved the Middle East more towards peace than any President before or since. He created a peace between Egypt and Israel.

Then Iran kidnapped Americans.

All his steps forward were erased because he mishandled the deal.

Reagan had the tough guy image. His coming presence struck fear in the Iranians. He even bombed Iran and Libya during his term. But even he failed in the face of terror. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut is bombed by terrorists. 63 people are killed. We remove our troops shortly after. Terrorists everywhere learn that Americans cannot stand the sight of their own blood.

Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, ignored Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. We helped them withstand the Soviets, but left them to fend for themselves as soon as the war was over. The country was left in ruins and was ripe for the kind of takeover that would soon happen with the Taliban.

Bill Clinton probably could have done more -- certainly more than the Republican administrations -- but he didn't. He brought the Palestinians and Israelis closer to peace than anyone before or since. But when peace talks failed, so did hope. The embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole bombings were icing on the cake.

We are targets of terror because we support Israel. We are targets of terror because we are a liberal nation -- at least in the eyes of fundamentalist Muslims. We are targets of terror because we have financial dealings with the Saudis and other regimes in the region that benefit us at the cost of the common men and women there.

Those were the reasons 9/11 happened.

That our leaders did not target terror properly before 9/11 is irrelevant. None of them could have expected an attack like what happened. And their mistakes were just that -- mistakes.

What matters is what we've learned from 9/11.

Let's hope the new administration in 2009 understands the lessons. And that we remain lucky until then.