Exactly 20 years ago on this date, a terrorist attack at the World Trade Center took the lives of six people and injured more than a thousand others. The tragedy shocked the nation but, as with other al-Qaeda attacks in the years that followed, the WTC bombing did not alter the country’s basic approach to Islamist terrorism. For the next eight and a half years, the United States carried on with a business-as-usual attitude toward the subject. The lack of urgency applied to the subject, as well as the disorganized and sometimes slap-dash nature of the security establishment’s counter-terrorist operations, led to the far greater tragedy of September 11, 2001 when al-Qaeda managed to accomplish what it failed to do in 1993: knock down the towers and slaughter thousands.
All these years after 9/11 and the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden, are there any further lessons to be drawn from that initial tragedy? To listen to the chattering classes, you would think the answer is a definitive no. Few are marking this anniversary and even fewer seem to think there is anything more to be said about what we no longer call the war on terror. But as much as many of us may wish to consign this anniversary to the realm of the history books, the lessons of the day the war on America began still need to be heeded.
It should be acknowledged that the United States has come a long way in the last 20 years when it comes to awareness of the forces that launched that first attack. The 9/11 attacks changed the government’s priorities and forced those in charge of the security apparatus to make fighting al-Qaeda a priority, which was something that was nowhere on the country’s radar screen even after the atrocity that took place on February 26, 1993. The death of bin Laden in 2011 seemed to signal that the long battle against the Islamists had been fought and won by the U.S., allowing Americans to go back to sleep about terror–or at least to put it in our collective rear-view mirrors.
But as the 9/11/2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya demonstrated once again, the forces that launched the attacks on America are by no means as dead as bin Laden. Indeed, they continue to be a potent force throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East. The Taliban, al-Qaeda’s old allies and hosts, are poised for a comeback in Afghanistan as the United States gradually abandons what President Obama and the Democrats once called the “good war.”
Even more ominously, al-Qaeda’s ideological allies in the Muslim Brotherhood now rule Egypt in place of a secular regime, which, though undemocratic, was a vital ally in the global war on Islamist terror.
Here in the U.S., cases of home-grown Islamist terror continue to crop up as a new generation of Islamists continue to sow the seeds of an unending war against the “Great Satan” of the United States as well as its Israeli ally.
Unlike in 1993, the problem is no longer whether our intelligence and security establishment is serious about fighting terror, but rather whether we as a nation have the will and the patience to go on doing so. The willingness of the Obama administration to embrace the Brotherhood and to go on, as it did after Benghazi, pretending that the war on terror is over, is a sign that our will may be faltering.
It is no small thing that the Islamist government of Egypt that the U.S. has embraced has called for the freeing of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “blind sheik” who was the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack. As we think back on the 20 years since six Americans died as a prelude to the murder of thousands more by the same group, the sympathy for their killer ought to remind us that the fight against Islamism is far from over.
"….as with other al-Qaeda attacks in the years that followed, the WTC bombing did not alter the country’s basic approach to Islamist terrorism. For the next eight and a half years, the United States carried on with a business-as-usual attitude toward the subject." n nNonsense. As outlined in the book, "The Age of Sacred Terror," the Clinton administration took major steps against terrorism. Clinton's anti-terrorism people asked to meet with Bush's right after W took office. Otherwise engaged, however, the Bush people delayed the meeting until August.
I beg to disagree, HillelA. There were a number of attacks on the United States, our citizens, our emissaries, our property and installations to which our response can be described as slap-dash and disorganized: the Marine barracks in Beirut, the US embassies in Africa, the USS Cole in Yemen. President Reagan did not retaliate in Beirut. President Clinton waved Louis Freeh and the FBI from what Freeh perceived as an urgent investigation of terrorist acts in the Mideast. We as a nation, from the average citizen on up to the presidents, did not perceive how deadly a threat Islamism could be, until they showed us!
The American people are supersaturated with popular entertainments, consumerism, self-actualization and career, which leaves little time or capacity for thinking or caring about the serious things in the world surrounding us. What we have in America today is a broad population of ignoramuses and select few who know some little bit about the big things, but who are rank partisans and can't be trusted to analyze situations or circumstances without an axe to grind. n nThe people who founded the nation wouldn't recognize it today.
"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." – Leon Trotsky. n nMr. Tobin, you and I disagree about what constitutes a war. I think you're off by about twenty years. n nA violent attack in a foreign land on a nation's ambassador or embassy is an attack upon the nation itself, an act of war, whether declared or not, whether by a terrorist group acting on its own or as a proxy for another nation, as much as one declared and then launched by the forces of one nation against another. The Geneva Conventions might not define it this way, nevertheless it is perceived as war by the people who morally or physically support the killers in the commission of the attack or in its aftermath. *They* see it as attack on the nation whose representative they have killed. n nThen the relevant questions for the attacked nation are: Does it consider it an act of war? Does it treat it as such by violently retaliating against the nation or group? And if it does not retaliate with violence, whether immediately or "in good time," what are the consequences of its forbearance? n nChristopher Stevens was the most recent of five U.S. ambassadors who have died by violent attack since 1968, including four at the hands of terrorists since 1973: Cleo Noel (the Sudan, 1973, Black September/PLO ), Frances Meloy (Lebanon, 1976, Palestinian splinter group), Adolph Dubs (Afghanistan, 1979, Islamic terrorists), and Mr. Stevens of course in Libya at the hands of Al Qaeda. n nAnd, of course, there was our embassy's violent takeover in Tehran 1979 ; the Marine Barracks bombing in 1983 (Iran/Hezbollah); and three other murders in Lebanon in 1983-84, Robert Dean Stethem, CIA station Chief William Buckley, and Marine Colonel William Higgins (Iran/Hezbollah). n nWe have been at war for a very long time if you count all these events — long before toppling the Twin Towers was a gleam in Ramzi Yousef's eye. What have we done in response? Not much. n nNow consider this (from Wikipedia): n"Four Soviet diplomats were kidnapped [in Beirut] on September 30, 1985. Arkady Katkov, a consular attaché, was killed by his captors; the other three (Oleg Spirin, Valery Mirikov, and Nikolai Svirsky) were released a month later. [14] KGB operatives in the area had identified several Hamas and Hezbollah operatives in the area. [***] Prior to the release of the Soviet hostages a Hamas leader had been kidnapped by operatives from the Soviet Alpha Group. His mutilated and castrated body was left on the steps of the local headquarters with a note attached reading 'Two of yours a day until we get ours back"[***] n nOur Western instincts in confronting such events, I think, have become much too refined for our way of life to survive into the next century, if the ferocity and ruthlessness of our enemies, and their embracing weapons of mass destruction, are decisive. They know we are their enemy; if we know they are our enemy, then why don't we act like it? n nWhen one considers the demographic suicide all Western nations are committing, in contrast to the demography of some of our enemies (Russia and China excepted, of course) one wonders whether, if the cataclysm ever comes, we would fight the kind of war our fathers and mothers fought in World War II, or choose the Quisling route and accept our fate. n nI remember venting to a colleague in the week after 9/11: "Who do these fools think we are? We're a nation of deer hunters who killed almost a million of our own when we fought each other in the 1860s, and in the last all-out war we fought we ended it by incinerating entire cities." n nNow I read what Tomfoolery wrote and think, who are the real fools?
I think once upon a time, we did not care one wit what the world thought of us, we did what we believed had to be done. Now, we we are the slaves to world opinion and political correctness. We are still better than the rest.
Our government has decided so far to cater to Islamism at the expense of the American people.
What about the Iranian embassy takeover?