Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't

Is the irony of the current 9-11 commission inquiry apparent to anyone but me? Here we have a commission charged with determining exactly how we could have prevented the 9-11 attacks. Now of course they are asking the question from an intelligence/military/defense standpoint, rather than saying - if we had only pulled our troops out of Saudi Arabia, left Israel to its own devices, converted to Islam (and not just plain vanilla Islam - the kind where we would swear to kill infidels). That is good, of course. So the question of the day is: what could we have done unilaterally, with the force at our disposal, to prevent the 9-11 attacks from occurring?
The answer, if we follow the arguments against the Iraq war, is that whether or not it was feasible to do something, we had no right to do anything! Sure, Osama had created a little trouble here and there, perhaps no more or no less than Saddam (even putting aside the first gulf war). But had we pre-empted, wouldn't that just make us bullies, unwilling to heed the advice of the French? Wouldn't such actions have led to easier recruitment efforts for the terrorist organizations? Apparently we need to be devastatingly attacked before we merit any sympathy from France and others in our efforts to protect American citizens. And until we have such sympathy, we are supposed to just stand by and let a cancer grow. I'm sure you see some difference here, but I guarantee you if Bush (and I wouldn't make the same claim about Clinton) had gone into Afganastan prior to 9-11 to wipe out a few terrorist camps, we would have been treated to daily pictures of moral idiots protesting with signs that portray Bush as Hitler. And John Kerry, the French, the Germans, etc. would have been decrying the move right up until today.