This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 7th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The attacks of September 11th, 2001 altered the direction of the US military,

spurring interventions in several parts of the globe.

Ten years later, have we learned the right lessons

from those interventions?

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

It's hard to imagine in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, a response very different from the one that we saw by the Bush administration.

I think President Bush himself deserves frankly a lot of credit for setting the tone in the immediate aftermath of the attacks or

recall that he went out of his way to advise people not to turn this into a question of identity and not a

a clash of identity, not a clash of civilizations, not a war of Islam against other

religions and other peoples.

And I think that's his great credit.

He even was criticized for that at the time.

And I think that, you know, the most important foreign policy initiative immediately after 9-11 was obviously

the invasion of Afghanistan which frankly wasn't an invasion at all who was a target operation to depose

the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda.

Most Americans, most people around the world found that to be a proportionate response.

I think that was correct.

But then we have to look at the whole range of other foreign policy actions that were taken beyond the war in Afghanistan.

Most of them done under the cover of counterterrorism or using the context that was established

by post 9-11 to a, let's just say, a more permissive attitude within the American

...