Who Learned What From 9/11

It's hard to know what to make of this assertion by Fouad Ajami:

The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him.

While I think Ajami is correct to emphasize the Arab origin of 9/11 (something the current nation builders in Afghanistan would do well to remember) it still made no sense for Iraq to become the object of our "instruction." The "pathologies" that bred al Qaeda germinated in America's allies in the region - not our ostensible enemies like Iran and Iraq. After 9/11, a proper strategy would have internalized this understanding and repositioned our relationship with countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Instead, we simply proceeded with the geopolitical hobbyhorses of the 1990s.