Text 2426, 88 rader
Skriven 2004-09-19 17:25:56 av Alan Hess
Ärende: are we naive re terrorism?
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.pitts19sep19,1,316471.sto
ry?coll=bal-oped-headlines
Americans show dangerous naivete about terrorism


By Leonard Pitts Jr.

September 19, 2004

WASHINGTON - Apparently, some of us have forgotten the attack on the World
Trade Center.

I'm not talking about 9/11, but 2/26. It was on that day in 1993 that a car
bomb exploded in an underground garage. Six people were killed, a thousand
injured.

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of that attack, was eventually captured and
given a life sentence. A wealthy Saudi businessman was named as an unindicted
co-conspirator. His name: Osama bin Laden.

That this episode has been largely forgotten seems obvious when you consider
the strained logic some people are using to defend President Bush against
charges that he blundered in invading Iraq. They contend the war has kept the
country safe by putting the terrorists on the defense.

It's an argument I hear often. As a man named John Nastro put it in a letter to
New York Newsday: "How many terrorist attacks have been made on our country
since 9/11?"

The White House has wholeheartedly encouraged that line of thinking.

"We are staying on the offensive - striking terrorists abroad, so we do not
have to face them here at home," said President Bush this month in New York.

So here's my question. It has been three years since al-Qaida struck New York
City. Before that, the last foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil - not
counting a lone Palestinian gunman who killed a tourist at the Empire State
Building - was the one in 1993. If three years without an attack validates Mr.
Bush's policies, what do eight years without one do for Bill Clinton's? If a
three-year respite makes Mr. Bush a hero, what does an eight-year respite do
for his predecessor?

Or is fighting terrorism perhaps a little more complicated than all this?
Because if it is, then some of us are reading way too much into these last
three years. They forget that those who oppose us are long-term planners. We,
unfortunately, are a short-term nation.

So, while I am appalled at the cynicism the White House shows in claiming three
years without an attack as proof the president has terrorists on the run, I'm
even more appalled at the naivete some of us show in buying it. Have the
lessons of Sept. 11, 2001, gone unlearned even at the cost of 3,000 lives? Can
we really afford to be as oblivious and smug as we were?

Any day on the calendar could be the next 9/11. Anyone who thinks that
impossible or even unlikely because the president has "taken the fight to the
terrorists" is risking a nasty shock.

What Mr. Bush did was to invade a nation with no known connection to the
terrorist attacks. There are those who believe that in doing so he only
inflamed Islamic radicals, confirming their most paranoid fantasies about our
evil intent, thereby increasing rather than decreasing the likelihood of a
terrorist attack.

Consider the military and intelligence experts interviewed in the October issue
of The Atlantic. As one tells reporter James Fallows, "In my view, we are much,
much worse off now than when we went into Iraq. That is not a partisan
position. I voted for these guys."

It's unsettling to know that some of us have bought into the fantasy that in
toppling a desert tyrant, we struck some sort of defining blow against
terrorism. In the meantime, Afghanistan, indisputably the place from which we
were attacked, recedes from consciousness. We knocked that nation off en route
to a preordained confrontation with Iraq and never looked back. The man who
directed the 9/11 atrocity is believed to still be there, but our attention is
not.

How big a mistake that was may become tragically clear some awful morning yet
to come.

As one joker put it, Osama bin Forgotten. But this much I guarantee you: He has
not forgotten us.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald.

Copyright + 2004, The Baltimore Sun

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