In August of 1998, Wag the Dog, a Hollywood movie that depicts a president who declares war as a ruse to divert attention from his personal life, seemed to become a script for real life. In the midst of the scandal surrounding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, President Bill Clinton fired missiles at six sites in the Muslim countries of Sudan and Afghanistan. According to Muslim-American writer Akbar Ahmed, Clinton’s actions “confirmed, to the point of caricature, what many in traditional Muslim societies already believed—that America has little to offer the world but sex and violence.”

Clinton and other policy officials, however, defended the air strikes as a necessary retaliation to the terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—believed to be the acts of Islamic fundamentalist Osama...