ONE OF THE KEY FINDINGS of the 9/11 Commission is that al Qaeda was a terrorism innovator. Al Qaeda’s “new terrorism,” as the commission calls it, is more than just using aircraft as weapons and turning hijackers into pilots, it’s about transforming the relationship between terrorists and rogue states. Old-style terrorists, such as the Palestinian groups, have generally been surrogates of states. By contrast, al Qaeda redefined these connections following its expulsion from Sudan in 1996, all but taking over the state in Afghanistan while loosely cooperating with other states–yet refusing to be controlled by them.

For decades rogue states used terrorism as a form of low-level, low cost warfare. Gaddaffi’s Libya and the Baathist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq knew that they could not win conventional battles against either the Americans or the Israelis. Instead, they sent terrorists to murder their opponents and extract concessions from them. For these regimes, terrorism was a standard tool of statecraft, a bloodier version of the old diplomatic note.