Terrorism has been with us for a long time, and it will stay with us as long as men find cause to rage against an establishment they view as oppressive. Terrorist tactics were bad enough before, when they blew up shops and buses, hijacked planes, held people hostage. But now we arc under attack by men who wreak havoc on a scale earlier terrorists could only dream about. We no longer just face single individuals with a gripe, or small groups bent on changing a political system. These new terrorists are bent on purging civilization of all those who do not share their beliefs.
The new terrorists have created an organizational web of cells operating in many different countries, but outside of any country's laws — cells that can be called upon to wage war on a scale much larger and more complex than ever before. What they have become, in fact, is their own virtual — or shadow — government, powerful enough to intimidate and strike fear into many actual governments. They are directly supported — financially, militarily, or otherwise — by sympathetic "legitimate" governments, and receive support from sympathetic wealthy individuals or organizations.
Islam is one of the world's great faiths, one that brings great riches to all the world's human community. Most of these new terrorists proclaim their total and undying faith in Islam, yet they justify their actions by their own interpretation of their religion. Their Islam is not the true Islam. In effect, they have hijacked their own religion.
On September 11, without warning, they committed the most barbaric act ever carried out against the United States, one specifically designed to kill as many innocent people as possible. The most powerful nation in the world could do nothing but watch. All our military might stood passive.
Such scenes and our feelings of helplessness will remain etched in our minds forever.
Their objective was to cause us to lose trust in one another and in our government's ability to protect its citizens, to cause us to imprison ourselves. We won't do that. But if we're smart, this will serve as a wake-up call.
For years, many of us have been concerned about our vulnerability to terrorism. To us, this attack was no surprise — though the form it took was. In fact, it could have been even worse — and maybe someday it will be.
We have all had many questions in the attack's aftermath:
"Why is the United States a target?"
"How did such an attack happen here?"
"Will there be more attacks?"
Let us begin to answer them.
WHY IS THE UNITED STATES A TARGET?
Most nations and people respect the United States. Our freedoms, and the help we have given to oppressed and impoverished people, have made us a beacon and a model for much of the rest of the world. But not for everyone. Certain groups hate us so deeply that they dream of violently destroying us.
Their hatreds come from several sources: religious differences; a culture they see as promiscuous and sinful; our foreign policies, particularly our support of Israel (an especially large grievance among Shiites); the U.S. support of Iraq during the four-year Iraq-Iran war; our support for the Christian-dominated government of Lebanon in the early to mid-eighties; the Gulf War and its aftermath, the embargo of Iraq, which has harmed many innocent Arabs; and the continued presence of our troops on the sacred territory of Saudi Arabia. All of these perceptions, and many more, combine to make the United States a magnet for attacks by extremist groups.
The terrorist war against the United States probably began as far back as November 4, 1979, when militant Iranian students took over the American Embassy in Tehran and held sixty-six Americans hostage for 444 days. This event turned into a major political crisis for the United States, but far more important, it served as a catalyst for other states to sponsor terrorist organizations that could be used to pursue their own political objectives.
Thus the 1980s were dominated by terrorist attacks against U.S. interests abroad, carried out by state-supported fundamentalist extremist groups. Terrorism quickly became a calculated, formalized, and cheap means of warfare. Attacks increased in frequency and complexity, and suicide attacks (self-induced martyrdom) grew more and more common.
Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini declared a holy war against the United States. His objectives were to drive the United States out of the Middle East (particularly Lebanon) and to spread his Islamic revolution throughout the area.
Syria's president Hafiz Assad, a secular leader of a Muslim state, hoped to use terrorism to attain one of his chief foreign policy goals — to gain dominance over Lebanon as a strategic buffer against Israel.
In April 1983, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed and sixty-three people were killed, among them the CIA station chief and all but two of his staff, neutralizing the U.S. intelligence apparatus in that part of the world. Six months later, in October 1983, the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut was bombed, killing 241 U.S. Marines. Shortly thereafter, all peacekeeping forces were withdrawn from Lebanon. Khomeini and Assad had each achieved major objectives.
The United States was not prepared to deal with this form of warfare, and acts of hostage-taking, hijacking, and bombings against U.S. interests increased. In 1986, Libya's Muamar Qaddafi joined the fray by launching a campaign in Europe against U.S. targets.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union changed all this for the worse. Until then, the Soviets had considerable leverage over states and organizations that sponsored terrorism, and were reluctant to sanction acts that could draw them into a confrontation with the United States. The end of the Soviet Union opened up a Pandora's box, and turned former puppet states and organizations loose to pursue their own interests, most of which were hostile to those of the United States. To make matters even worse, many Soviet scientists and technicians who had been involved in developing or producing weapons of mass destruction were now without jobs. Many were sucked up by renegade states and put to work developing advanced capabilities that could be used for attacks against the United States.
Terrorism finally reached U.S. shores in 1993, with the bombing of the World Trade Center by a group of Islamic extremists. I have never been able to learn whether this event was state-sponsored or only the work of an Islamic extremist group.
In the same year, the wealthy Saudi expatriate Osama bin Laden emerged as a mastermind and organizer of terrorism, with an especially virulent hatred of the United States. His organization, called Al-Qaeda (The Base), was a network of terrorist organizations and cells around the world, united in a holy war against the United States.
Bin Laden is believed to be responsible for the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, as well as the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000, in the harbor of Aden, Yemen. And he is considered the prime suspect in the attack of September 11,2001.
In other words, a war has been waged against the United States for several years. It took the attack of September 11 to wake us up to it.
HOW DID SUCH AN ATTACK HAPPEN HERE?
The answer is simple: Our intelligence services failed us massively in the days before September 11, 2001. They must be much improved.
Let's look at a few facts:
The infrastructure necessary to support operations of such magnitude and sophistication had to be very sizable. The terrorists had to operate abroad as well as here in the United States. And these operations had to have been launched long before the act itself was committed.
The attack was extraordinarily efficient. Agents had to case airports to determine security operations. Support cells and infrastructures had to rehearse their parts so they could perform efficiently at the appropriate time. The hijacking teams probably rode on flights like the ones they would actually hijack when the code signal came.