The Terrorist Threat in America

The first bombing of the World Trade Center occurred in 1993, while Bill Clinton was President. Six people died when a urea/nitrate bomb enhanced with hydrogen exploded beneath Tower One. Investigators concluded that the principal operatives behind the attack were two Kuwaitis, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, his uncle. Ramzi Yousef is serving a life sentence in the federal Supermax facility in Colorado, and KSM is awaiting trial by military commission in Guantanamo for his role in the attacks of September 11.

In 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols exploded a urea/nitrate bomb enhanced with hydrogen in Oklahoma City, destroying the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killing 168 people. McVeigh was executed and Nichols is serving a life sentence. At the time of the OK City attack, it was the deadliest terrorist incident in United States history. It was, of course, eclipsed by the attacks of 9/11, which succeeded in the object of Yousef's plan: to topple the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

That is more or less a complete list of the big terrorist attacks against the United States homeland in modern times. There have been other attacks against U.S. possessions and facilities overseas, of course, and Americans have been killed there, including two embassies in Africa, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the U.S.S. Cole.

I have a simple question to which I doubt that I will ever get a meaningful, let alone definitive, answer from any responsible government official: just how serious is the threat of Islamic terrorism against the United States?

Vice President Dick Cheney often points out that there have been no attacks on the U.S. homeland since September 11, 2001 (which occurred, not mentioned as often, during the Bush/Cheney Administration). Cheney doubts that this is a "coincidence." He believes that the absence of further terrorist incidents owes to stepped-up security measures. Of course, it is also true that there were no Islamic terrorist attacks within United States borders between 1993 and 2001, a period longer than the surcease to which Cheney proudly points, and during this period the whole issue of "national security" was not the front-and-center, 24/7 Fortress America Reality Show it has become under Bush/Cheney.

That's what I wonder about. Have Bush & Cheney frightened away all terrorists, or interdicted all their plots, or, another possibility -- is the threat overblown?

One way in which I think we have been paradoxically blessed is that the Man Who Declared War on America, Osama bin Laden, seems to me a kind of Jihadist Drama Queen. He doesn't like plots that aren't showy and spectacular. He needs to take down a whole embassy, or the Capitol Building, or - and here he succeeded by joining the Mohammed/Yousef conspiracy already in progress - the World Trade Center. Big Symbols of American Power. He doesn't want to knock over Taco Bells or 7/11's, even though far more Americans identify with chain stores than with the World Trade Center. He doesn't send jihadis to blow up gas stations, or drop bombs in post office boxes, or, taking it up one notch, to park and detonate a panel truck as McVeigh/Nichols did. Or, more pertinently, al-Qaeda does not engage in the systematic bombing of buses and cafes in the United States, as Arab terrorists have done in Israel, even though American security is completely lax compared to the Israeli equivalent in such situations.

The effect of bin Laden's actual attacks has been aided immeasurably, I think, by the reaction of the Bush/Cheney group. The decision of the Bush Administration to politicize the terrorist attacks for partisan advantage, and to use them as illegitimate cover for an unrelated war in Iraq, greatly exacerbated the effects which the events of 9/11 would otherwise have had. I don't know if bin Laden actually "foresaw" all that. Sometimes he's given qualities that are more properly ascribed to fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes's nemesis, Dr. Moriarty. America actually "got over" the 9/11 attacks, in terms of economic recovery, in a reasonably efficient manner. What we're struggling unsuccessfully to overcome now, as the economy disintegrates, is the effect of Bush's reactions to the attacks.

If a group of Islamic terrorists actually (a) existed and (b) were capable of inflicting real damage against the American homeland and (c) were motivated to do so against the United States, common sense tells you it would be happening right now. Terrorists don't really need spectacular events to disrupt and paralyze the U.S. Recalling such episodes as the D.C. Sniper or the anthrax attacks of October, 2001, it seems that the kind of attack or crime wave that most disrupts everyday life here (as it would most places, as it has done in Baghdad) is the random, small-scale event that makes everyone wary, causes them to change habits, instills suspicion and pervasive fear. Regardless of what Dick Cheney says, it isn't really possible to stop such attacks in a bustling, crowded, anonymous place such as a large American city. The anthrax episode was never solved, for example. Smaller scale bombing in American city centers is probably not a great deal more complicated logistically than the drive-by shootings that are part of the normal abnormal life in Oakland, California and South Central L.A. It simply requires the will to do so.

It's generally conceded that American borders are like a sieve; thus, a terrorist can enter the country, if he's really determined. The wherewithal to build bombs (as McVeigh and Nichols did) can be obtained. It is estimated that there are as many guns available in the U.S. as there are Americans - freely accessed, thanks to our rights vouchsafed by the Second Amendment and Justice Antonin Scalia. And America is full of crowded downtowns, where bombs and guns can do terrible damage.

Things like that don't happen. Our streets are not like Baghdad's during the worst of the sectarian violence, or like Israel's during the Intifada. I don't think most of us expect random acts of terrorist violence to happen, except as a rare (and regrettably spectacular) occurrence. Yet I don't think we could actually stop terrorists from small-scale attacks any more than we can bring an end to all violent crime in America. Does that not say something about the true nature and extent of this endless obsession that dominates our budgeting and national priorities?