I'll admit I'm a bit surprised by early reports coming from the 9/11 Commission saying America should have acted militarily against Al Qaeda sooner than we did. I've referred to the panel as a "political sideshow", but perhaps I was wrong.
WASHINGTON — The Clinton and Bush administrations secretly considered but ultimately rejected a range of military actions against Usama bin Laden (search) and his Al Qaeda (search) network prior to Sept. 11, 2001.It sounds like we had a few potential chances to hit OBL with cruise missiles or commandos that we didn't take because we didn't want to risk failure and/or killing civilians.A preliminary report by the Sept. 11 commission found that while the U.S. government pursued diplomacy and sought a better military plan, bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders eluded capture. A recurring theme in the report is that U.S. leaders believed they lacked "actionable intelligence" — timely and reliable information — on bin Laden's whereabouts.
I'm now much more interested to hear what the panel comes up with as its work progresses.
Update:
Here's a key passage from today's article:
Tuesday's report also said that both the Clinton and Bush administrations engaged in lengthy, ultimately fruitless diplomatic efforts instead of military action to try to get bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.Sometimes diplomacy just isn't the way to go, as much as we might prefer a peaceful solution. Since planning for 9/11 began in 1998 and the hijackers were all in the US by the time President Bush took office (right? or maybe two weren't yet) it's not likely that military action so late in the game could have made a difference. But if President Clinton had walked rather than talked in the 1990s maybe 9/11 could have been avoided. Hindsight is always 20/20, but this doesn't seem like rocket science.Both Rumsfeld and Powell expressed doubt that the administration, which took office less than eight months before the attacks, could have stopped them through military force.
While I agree that Osama should be taken out, would that really have stopped 9/11? Wouldn't someone else have stepped up and carried out the same scenario or possibly an even worse one?
Petra: As I said in my update, in order to have prevented 9/11 we probably would have had to have attacked Afghanistan before 1998. The 9/11 attacks took a lot of coordination and money, and if we had broken up the Hamburg AQ cell before its members came to the US we could probably have prevented the attack.
But what I'm saying is that evil and hatred towards us (the "White Devils") will always be around. Let's bomb Afghanistan. Then, the young children growing up there right now will come and find a way to blow even more of us up in 20 years.
By the way, I do agree with you that Clinton should have done much more than just talk. I just doubt 9/11 could have been prevented OR if it could have been, there would have been some other evil mastermind to come up with another idea. I'm sure there are dozens of middle easterners who hate us and are trying to plan our demise right now. Well, maybe not dozens - that sounds a little paranoid. However, I don't think we've seen the end of terror on our soil and there will always be someone to replace the last evil dictator, terrorist, etc.