President Bush’s selection of Thomas Kean to chair the commission that will investigate the September 11 attacks only underscores the mistake of chasing Henry Kissinger off the job. As governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990, Mr. Kean’s main foreign policy experience consisted of dealing with the state of New York. Mr. Kean already is co-chairman of a September 11-related commission, the Century Foundation’s Project on Homeland Security. To get a flavor for that effort, one need only look at its Web site, whose index has an extensive section on civil liberties, and another section on “Insurance,” but precious little information on Islamic fundamentalism, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. To find out about Islamic extremism, one might refer to the Web site of the Islamic Culture Theme House at Drew University. Drew is, after all, the institution of which Mr. Kean is president. That site has links to articles like “White House reneges on proof of bin Laden’s guilt” and to other pages that assert of the September 11 attacks, “The world has been too quick to assume the crime was committed by Muslims.” Now it would no doubt be a stretch to blame Mr. Kean for all the follies of a university web site. But if the press, the public, and the politicians haven’t figured out by now what happened on September 11, 2001 and why, it’s a stretch to imagine that any commission headed by Mr. Kean is going to do better. It’s hard to imagine how the ouster of Mr. Kissinger and bringing in of Mr. Kean is going to give Americans a better reprise of what went wrong.