Patient and Persistent

Outside of the practical knowledge we hope to gain from the 9/11 commission report, while reading through the beginning of the executive summary of the full report, I found a passage that we should keep fresh in our minds.

The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamist extremists had given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers. Although Usama Bin Ladin himself would not emerge as a signal threat until the late 1990s,the threat of Islamist terrorism grew over the decade.

In February 1993,a group led by Ramzi Yousef tried to bring down the World Trade Center with a truck bomb. They killed six and wounded a thou-sand. Plans by Omar Abdel Rahman and others to blow up the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and other New York City landmarks were frustrated when the plotters were arrested. In October 1993,Somali tribesmen shot down U.S. helicopters, killing 18 and wounding 73 in an incident that came to be known as “Black Hawk down. “Years later it would be learned that those Somali tribes-men had received help from al Qaeda.

In early 1995,police in Manila uncovered a plot by Ramzi Yousef to blowup a dozen U.S. airliners while they were flying over the Pacific. In November1995, a car bomb exploded outside the office of the U.S. program manager for the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, killing five Americans and two others. In June 1996,a truck bomb demolished the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. servicemen and wounding hundreds. The attack was carried out primarily by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization that had received help from the government of Iran.

Until 1997,the U.S. intelligence community viewed Bin Ladin as a financier of terrorism, not as a terrorist leader. In February 1998,Usama Bin Ladin and four others issued a self-styled fatwa, publicly declaring that it was God’s decree that every Muslim should try his utmost to kill any American, military or civilian, anywhere in the world, because of American “occupation” of Islam’s holy places and aggression against Muslims.

In August 1998,Bin Ladin’s group, al Qaeda, carried out near-simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands more.

In December 1999,Jordanian police foiled a plot to bomb hotels and other sites frequented by American tourists, and a U.S. Customs agent arrested Ahmed Ressam at the U.S. Canadian border as he was smuggling in explosives intend-ed for an attack on Los Angeles International Airport.

In October 2000,an al Qaeda team in Aden, Yemen, used a motorboat filled with explosives to blow a hole in the side of a destroyer, the USS Cole, almost sinking the vessel and killing 17 American sailors.

The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were far more elaborate, precise, and destructive than any of these earlier assaults. But by September 2001,the executive branch of the U.S. government, the Congress, the news media, and the American public had received clear warning that Islamist terrorists meant to kill Americans in high numbers.

The tendency, especially by those who think that the War on Terror is just a marketing term for enriching Haliburton at the high cost of American blood, is to view 9/11 in isolation. I've said here before that I believe America's war with militant Islam started a decade earlier than 9/11/01, and that we only bothered to show up to the game once it was made tragically obvious that the terrorist weren't going to simply go away in deference to all the great fun we were having making money in the 90's.

I will continue to say this until I look around me and start seeing people taking seriously the idea that we are at war with a devious, intelligent, dangerous enemy. Toppling a dictator and a stone-age tribal government were steps toward winning that war, but we have a long way to go before we should allow ourselves the luxury of believing we live in peaceful times (regardless of the campaign promises of our President).

The terrorists are nothing if not patient. The terrorists are nothing if not persistent. While we long for a return to normalcy, they plot the next bridge bombing or tunnel bombing or aerial suicide mission or dirty bomb explosion or kidnapping and beheading.

The most important thing I think we need to take away from the report, aside from the obvious need to re-think the way our intelligence communities interact with each other and the way we think about national security, is to feel a sense of urgent vigilance to carry us through the rest of this war.

They--the terrorists and their supporters, the people who believe that diplomacy is carried out with the beheadings of innocents, and the people who brought us that impressive list of terrorist attacks from the commission report--aren't yet through with us. They haven't been cowed into submission, they haven't exhausted their supply of heinous attacks on civilization, and they certainly aren't convinced that their methods won't work (thanks, in part, to those nations who bowed to the demands of terrorists).

No, we have a long way to go, and we had better respect the patience and persistence that our enemies have shown. Otherwise, we'll lull ourselves back into a sense of security that we haven't yet earned; al Quaeda will be happy to exploit that at the cost of thousands of more dead. Where will it be next time? Downtown Chicago? The Denver Mint? A tainted water supply or a suicide bomber at a sporting event?

Download your copies of the report.

Posted by zombyboy at July 22, 2004 01:01 PM | TrackBack