Chapter 2

[SuperScout]

The War

On February 26, 1993, eight months prior to the Mogadishu attack, al-Qaeda terrorists had struck the World Trade Center for the first time. Their truck bomb made a crater six stories deep, killed six people, and injured more than a thousand. The planners?s intention had been to cause one tower to topple the other and kill tens of thousands of innocent people. It was not only the first major terrorist act ever to take place on U.S. soil, but?in the judgment of a definitive account of the event??the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted, anywhere, ever.?

Six Palestinian and Egyptian conspirators responsible for the attack were tried in civil courts and got life sentences like common criminals, but its mastermind escaped. He was identified as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, an Iraqi intelligence agent. This was a clear indication to authorities that the atrocity was no mere criminal event, and that it involved more than individual terrorists; it involved hostile terrorist states.

Yet, once again, the Clinton administration?s response was to absorb the injury and accept defeat. The president did not even visit the bomb crater or tend to the victims. Instead, America?s commander-in-chief warned against ?overreaction.? In doing so, he telegraphed a clear message to his nation?s enemies: We are unsure of purpose and unsteady of hand; we are self-indulgent and soft; we will not take risks to defend ourselves; we are vulnerable.

The al-Qaeda terrorists were listening. In a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden told ABC News reporter John Miller:

We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage Cold Wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut, when the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than 24 hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia. We are ready for all occasions [to attack]. We rely on Allah.

Among the terrorist entities that supported the al-Qaeda terrorists were Yasser Arafat?s Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO had created the first terrorist training camps, invented suicide bombings and been the chief propaganda machine behind the idea that terrorist armies were really missionaries for ?social justice.? Yet, among foreign leaders Arafat was Clinton?s most frequent White House guest. Far from treating Arafat as an enemy of civilized order and an international pariah, the Clinton administration busily cultivated him as a ?partner for peace.? For many Washington leftists, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men but the product of social conditions?poverty, racism and oppression?for which Western democracies, including Israel, were always ultimately to blame.

The idea that terrorism has ?root causes? in social conditions whose primary author is the United States is, in fact, an organizing theme of the contemporary political Left. ?Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ?cowardly? attack on ?civilization? or ?liberty? or ?humanity? or ?the free world???declared the writer Susan Sontag, speaking for this faction??but an attack on the world?s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?? (Was Susan Sontag unaware that Iraq was behind the first World Trade Center attack? That Iraq had attempted to swallow Kuwait and was a regional aggressor and sponsor of terror? That Iraq had expelled UN arms inspectors?in violation of the terms of its ceasefire?who were there to verify the destruction of its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs? Was she unaware that Iraq was a sponsor of international terror and posed an ongoing threat to others, including the country in which she lived?)

During the Clinton years the idea that America was somehow responsible for global distress had become an all too familiar refrain among left-wing elites. It had particular resonance in the institutions that shaped American culture and policy: universities, the mainstream media and the Oval Office. In March 1998, two months after Monica Lewinsky became a White House thorn and a household name, Clinton embarked on a presidential hand-wringing expedition to Africa. With a large delegation of African-American leaders in tow, the president made a pilgrimage to Uganda to apologize for the crime of American slavery. The apology was offered despite the fact that no slaves had ever been imported to America from Uganda, nor any East African state; that slavery in Africa preceded any American involvement by a thousand years; that America and Britain were the two powers responsible for ending the slave trade; and that America had abolished slavery a hundred years before?at great human cost?while slavery has persisted in Africa without African protest to the present day.

Four months after Clinton left Uganda, al-Qaeda terrorists blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.