I said all I had to say about 9/11 on the morning of the anniversary last year. Or so I thought.

A year later, the date has taken on additional meaning. By the end of last year's anniversary, or the wee hours of the following day, violent protesters had overrun our embassy in Cairo and jihadists had killed our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans in Benghazi, the same city where our military intervened a year and a half earlier in the name of preventing an atrocity by a teetering dictator.

On Sept. 11, 2013, America stands in a confused posture regarding another potential military intervention in the name of preventing further atrocities by the embattled dictator of yet another country.

The attack in Benghazi, in large part because it occurred during a critical juncture of a tight presidential election, has been politicized beyond all recognition. On the right, there is a resolve to use it as an illustration of President Obama's failures in foreign policy. On the left, there is such a determination to refute this argument that partisans have in effect, if not intent, trivialized the deaths of four Americans under circumstances that remain unclear. News networks have shown more interest than our authorities in seeking out those believed to be culpable for the killings.

In fact, we have arrived at a situation in which we have taken no known actions to avenge the deaths of Americans in Libya but are now being urged by many of the same people who play down their deaths to take action in Syria.

So, there is more to say about 9/11 than I thought just one year ago.

Twelve years after airplanes crashed into buildings in New York and Washington, and another one was retaken by passengers and crashed in Pennsylvania to prevent another attack, we are no more certain of or united in our approach to those who wish us harm than we were when first responders were still rushing toward the jet-fueled fires. Obama is fond of saying the tide of war has receded, even as we still do battle with Islamic terrorists across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond, and even as he subtly adopts tenets of the Bush Doctrine (i.e., prevent future American deaths via weapons of mass destruction) in making the case for another war (just don't call it "war").

We have the specter of those who railed against "dumb wars" while running for the presidency (not just Obama, but his new secretary of state, John Kerry) now branding as "isolationists" those who believe he wants to lead us into yet another one -- while playing down questions about the deaths of Americans in the last country where we intervened as "phony scandals."

We have rejected the policy of fostering democracy in the region via regime-change and nation-building, and instead engaged in "limited" participation (Libya, and perhaps Syria next) or benign neglect (Egypt) as other regimes are overthrown and their nations spiral into chaos, breeding the same kind of extremism we were trying to defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. We choose to intervene in favor of democratic protesters in countries where our national interest is unclear (Libya and perhaps Syria) but stood by in a similar situation where the threat couldn't be any clearer (Iran's stillborn Green Revolution in 2009).

Article after article in the overseas press and our own foreign-policy publications describe frustrated counterparts in other countries, bewildered by the lack of a coherent U.S. strategy or policy framework. So haphazard are our actions that a slip of the tongue stands to become policy, as our administration alternates between denying the possibility and desperately trying to make it work.

If our credibility has diminished in recent years -- and it almost certainly has -- the ebb began before Assad crossed the "red line" or Obama set it.