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Jewish World Review Jan. 11, 2001 / 16 Teves, 5761
Michael Ledeen
International terrorism flourished in the seventies and eighties largely
because of the active support of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin provided
the terrorists with the wherewithal to conduct their murderous activities:
training camps, ideological manuals, weapons, plastic explosives, forged
passports and other travel documents, diplomatic pouches to secretly
transport guns and bombs, and safe havens after attacks. The Soviets
trained PLO terrorists, Italian Red Brigades, and Latin American killers,
some directly, some through surrogates like the East German Stasi
(which ran weapons to West European terrorists) and Fidel’s infamous
secret police.
With the defeat of the Soviet Union, the terrorists were deprived of this
invaluable infrastructure, and the surviving rogue states — North Korea,
Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq, along with Afghanistan under the Taliban and
the wicked regime in Sudan — had far fewer resources. That is why
terrorism was less threatening in the 1990s than it had been in the recent
past. To be sure, there were still tyrants who knew that terror can bend
their enemies’ wills, and they continued to support terrorism on a
reduced scale. A welcome infusion of capital from the renegade Saudi
millionaire, Osana bin Ladin, helped replace the Soviet shortfall. But the
terrorists were far more vulnerable than before; their patron states were
far less threatening than the component parts of the Soviet Empire.
Had we seized our opportunity, we could probably have rid the world of
at least some of the nastiest terrorists, and we had every excuse to do it:
after all, Saddam sponsored an attempt to kill former President Bush.
We should have gone all out to bring down his murderous regime.
Instead, we lobbed a few cruise missiles at unmanned radar installations,
and then later, in an act of duplicitous cowardice, we seduced and then
abandoned Saddam’s enemies — the Kurds and the Iraqi National
Council — when he moved against them. And just in case anyone
missed the message, Clinton’s killer Immigration and Naturalization
Service arrested several of the Iraqis when they sought refuge in
America, and tried to send them back to Saddam for torture and death.
Along with the bombing of the aspirin factory, that pretty much sums up
our anti-terrorist campaign, which is best symbolized by Clinton’s hiding
behind a barricaded Pennsylvania Avenue. Is there a threat to the
president? Hide. Is there a threat in Rome? Close down the embassy.
And Clinton unhesitatingly prods our allies to do the same. Bombings in
Israel? Give more to Arafat. Worried about weapons of mass
destruction in North Korea? Send Madeline to dance with the dictator in
Pyongyang.
It’s not a policy, it’s a joke.
None of this has been lost on the terrorists and their backers. Iran and
Iraq are running substantial terrorist networks on several continents. The
Caucuses have been invaded by radical Muslim terrorists from our old
friends in the Hezbollah, and another tentacle has reached South
America, threatening Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Our intelligence
community is well aware of all this, but we are not told about it because
what we don’t know can’t hurt the administration.
Instead of fighting the terrorists, we get William Cohen parading before
Congress, waving a bag of sugar and intoning that a similar amount of
chemical or biological weapons could kill millions and millions of people.
True enough, but not likely. Despite all the fevered talk about biological
and chemical weapons of mass destruction, you still get much more bang
for your buck from the old-fashioned plastic explosives. Consider that
the Japanese terrorists who unleashed lethal chemicals in a Tokyo
subway station a few years back were superbly trained in Moscow
(many with Ph.D.s), had top-of-the-line laboratories, and still couldn’t
produce the desired carnage.
Weapons of mass destruction may turn out to be effective in warfare —
poison gas was quite popular in the Iran-Iraq War — and they make for
great TV and cinema, but they are devilishly difficult for terrorists to use.
And while we’re dazzled by the vision of a chemical or biological
holocaust, our guys are getting blown up by plastic explosives on a
rubber boat in the Persian Gulf.
Our guys are getting blown up, and the bad guys are still at large. It’s
quite likely that terrorists will keep on killing us and our friends, and it’s
only a matter of time before people start to demand that our government
do something about it. Clinton & Co. is shutting down, so W. is going to
have to deal with it. He’ll get lots of clever advice, but the bottom line is
as simple today as it ever was: If you want to stop the terrorists, you
have to attack them, and you have to bring down or at least weaken the
regimes that support them. That means you have to stop dancing with
them in North Korea, and you have to stop sending open love letters to
them in Tehran, and you have to be serious about ridding the world of
the evil regime of Saddam Hussein.
And you have to track down the terrorists and put them out of business.
That means either arresting them, or doing unto them what they have
done unto us, and the problem with this latter method is that it is
forbidden by a long chain of executive orders, beginning with Gerald
Ford. These executive orders forbid assassination, and consequently
stop us from mounting armed attacks against individual terrorists,
because even if our intent is to arrest them, they might not go quietly and
we might have to shoot at them. As a result, we are caught between the
rock of legalistic impotence (asking Interpol to arrest bin Ladin if he
shows up at Heathrow Airport) and the hard place of excessive violence
(we can’t shoot a terrorist, but it’s ok to bomb a facility we think is used
to train terrorists or to produce terrorist weapons — like the aspirin
factory), virtually guaranteeing the deaths of innocents.
A president who is serious about fighting terrorism will abrogate the
blanket prohibition against assassination, and work with congressional
leaders to agree on effective action against those who have killed
Americans.
And a president who is serious about fighting terrorism should begin by
showing the world that we won’t be intimidated by them. Open
Pennsylvania Avenue to the people, and make sure the Marine Guards
on the Via Veneto in Rome have live
12/26/00: Continuing Clinton's shameful legacy
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