Fighting Terrorism

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Authors: Benjamin Netanyahu

BOOK: Fighting Terrorism
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To all the victims of terror, and to the sons and daughters of liberty who will defeat the evil that struck down their brethren, and so save our world
September 11, 2001, was a day that future historians will call a hinge of history. On that day, a lethal blow was struck in the heart of freedom. From that day on, international terrorism could no longer be considered a tactical threat with no real global implications. On that morning, it became apparent that a terrible and perfidious force was endangering the free world.
The first edition of this book, published in 1995, described this danger—its genesis, its growth, its ambitions, and the terrible consequences to our world if it was not immediately addressed. This danger is now apparent to all but the most obtuse.
What I have to add to the first edition is summarized in the following remarks, which I made in the United States Congress on September 20, little more than a week after the terror bombings in New York and Washington. Although these remarks include some material
developed in the book, they are printed here in their entirety as a foreword to this edition, for I believe that they represent the principles and basic conceptions that must guide our actions in the great and crucial war that lies ahead.
 
 
What is at stake today is nothing less than the survival of our civilization. There may be some who would have thought ten days ago that to talk in these apocalyptic terms about the battle against international terrorism was to engage in reckless exaggeration. No longer.
Each one of us today understands that we are all targets, that our cities are vulnerable, and that our values are hated with an unmatched fanaticism that seeks to destroy our societies and our way of life.
I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say:
Today, we are all Americans
. In grief, as in defiance. In grief, because my people have faced the agonizing horrors of terror for many decades, and we feel an instant kinship both with the victims of this tragedy and with the great nation that mourns its fallen brothers and sisters. In defiance, because just as my country continues to fight terrorism in our battle for survival, I know that America will not cower before this challenge.
I have absolute confidence that if we, the citizens of the free world, led by President Bush, marshal the enormous reserves of power at our disposal, harness the steely resolve of a free people, and mobilize our collective
will, we shall eradicate this evil from the face of the earth.
But to achieve this goal, we must first answer several questions: Who are the evil forces responsible for this terrorist onslaught? What is their motive? And most important, what must be done to defeat them?
The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is
no
international terrorism without the support of sovereign states. International terrorism simply cannot be sustained for long without the regimes that aid and abet it. Terrorists are not suspended in midair. They train, arm, and indoctrinate their killers from within safe havens on territory provided by terrorist states. Often these regimes provide the terrorists with intelligence, money, and operational assistance, dispatching them to serve as deadly proxies to wage a hidden war against more powerful enemies.
These regimes mount a worldwide propaganda campaign to legitimize terror, besmirching its victims and exculpating its practitioners—as we witnessed in the farcical spectacle of the UN conference on racism in Durban last month. Iran, Libya, and Syria call the United States and Israel racist countries that abuse human rights? Even Orwell could not have imagined such a world.
Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust.
The international terrorist network is thus based on regimes—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir
Arafat's Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan. These regimes are the ones that harbor the terrorist groups: Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; Hizballah and others in Syrian-controlled Lebanon; Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the recently mobilized Fatah and Tanzim factions in the Palestinian territories; and sundry other terror organizations based in such capitals as Damascus, Baghdad, and Khartoum.
These terrorist states and terror organizations together form a
terror network
whose constituent parts support one another operationally as well as politically. For example, the Palestinian groups cooperate closely with Hizballah, which in turn links them to Syria, Iran, and bin Laden. These offshoots of terror have affiliates in other states that have not yet uprooted their presence, such as Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.
The growth of this terror network is the result of several developments in the last two decades. Chief among them is the Khomeini revolution and the establishment of a clerical Islamic state in Iran. This created a sovereign spiritual base for fomenting a strident Islamic militancy worldwide—a militancy that was often backed by terror.
Equally important was the victory in the Afghan war of the international
Mujahdeen
brotherhood. This international band of zealots, whose ranks include Osama bin Laden, saw their victory over the Soviet Union as providential proof of the innate supremacy of faithful Moslems over the weak infidel powers. They believed
that even the superior weapons of a superpower could not withstand their superior will.
To this should be added Saddam Hussein's escape from destruction at the end of the Gulf War, his dismissal of UN monitors, and his growing confidence that he can soon develop unconventional weapons to match those of the West.
Finally, the creation of Yasir Arafat's terror enclave gave a safe haven to militant Islamic terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Like their
Mujahdeen
cousins, they drew inspiration from Israel's hasty withdrawal from Lebanon, glorified as a great Moslem victory by the Syrian-backed Hizballah. Under Arafat's rule, these Palestinian Islamic terrorist groups have made repeated use of the technique of suicide bombing, going so far as to run summer camps in Gaza that teach Palestinian children how to become suicide martyrs.
Here is what Arafat's government-controlled newspaper,
Al-Hayat-Al-Jadida
, said on September 11, a few hours before the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: “The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of the Lebanese suicide bombers, who taught the U.S. Marines a tough lesson in [Lebanon] … These suicide bombers are the salt of the earth, the engines of history … They are the most honorable people among us.”
A simple rule prevails here: The success of terrorists in one part of the terror network emboldens terrorists throughout the network.
This then is the Who. Now for the Why.
Although its separate parts may have local objectives and take part in local conflicts, the main motivation driving the terror network is an anti-Western hostility that seeks to achieve nothing less than a reversal of history. It seeks to roll back the West and install an extremist form of Islam as the dominant power in the world. And it seeks to do this not by means of its own advancement and progress, but by destroying the enemy. This hatred is the product of a seething resentment that has simmered for centuries in certain parts of the Arab and Islamic world.
Most Moslems in the world, including the vast majority of the growing Moslem communities in the West, are not guided by this interpretation of history, nor are they moved by its call for a holy war against the West. But some are. And though their numbers are small compared to the peaceable majority, they nevertheless constitute a growing hinterland for this militancy.
Militant Islamists resented the West for pushing back the triumphant march of Islam into the heart of Europe many centuries ago. Believing in the innate supremacy of Islam, they then suffered a series of shocks when in the last two centuries that same hated, supposedly inferior West penetrated Islamic realms in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf.
For them the mission was clear: The West had to be pushed out of these areas. Pro-Western Middle Eastern regimes were toppled in rapid succession, including in
Iran. And Israel, the Middle East's only democracy and its purest manifestation of Western progress and freedom, must be wiped off the face of the earth.
Thus,
the soldiers of militant Islam do not hate the West because of Israel, they hate Israel because of the West
—because they see it is an island of Western democratic values in a Moslem-Arab sea of despotism. That is why they call Israel the Little Satan, to distinguish it clearly from the country that has always been and will always be the Great Satan—the United States of America.
Nothing better illustrates this than Osama bin Laden's call for a
jihad
, or holy war, against the United States in 1998. He gave as his primary reason not Israel, not the Palestinians, not the “peace process,” but rather the very presence of the United States “occupying the Land of Islam in the holiest of places.” And where is that? The Arabian peninsula, says bin Laden, where America is “plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, and humiliating its people.” Israel, by the way, comes a distant third, after “the continuing aggression against the Iraqi people” (
Al-Quds Al-Arabi
, February 23, 1998). For the bin Ladens of the world, Israel is merely a sideshow. America is the target.
But reestablishing a resurgent Islam requires not just rolling back the West; it requires destroying its main engine, the United States. And if the United States cannot be destroyed just now, it first can be humiliated—as in the Teheran hostage crisis two decades ago—and then ferociously attacked again and again, until it is brought
to its knees. But the ultimate goal remains the same: Destroy America and win eternity.
Some may find it hard to believe that Islamic militants truly cling to the mad fantasy of destroying America. There should be no mistake about it. They do. And unless they are stopped now, their attacks will continue, and will become even more lethal in the future.
To understand the true dangers of Islamic militancy, we can compare it to another ideology which sought world domination—communism. Both movements pursued irrational goals, but the communists at least pursued theirs in a rational way. Any time they had to choose between ideology and their own survival, as in Cuba or Berlin, they backed off and chose survival. Not so for the Islamic militants. They pursue an irrational ideology
irrationally
—with no apparent regard for human life, neither their own lives nor the lives of their enemies. The communists seldom, if ever, produced suicide bombers, while Islamic militancy produces hordes of them, glorifying them and promising them that their dastardly deeds will earn them a luxurious afterlife. This highly pathological aspect of Islamic militancy is what makes it so deadly for mankind.
In 1995, when I wrote
Fighting Terrorism
, I warned about the militant Islamic groups operating in the West with the support of foreign powers—serving as a new breed of “domestic-international” terrorists, basing themselves in America to wage
jihad
against America:
“Such groups,” I wrote then, “nullify in large measure
the need to have air power or intercontinental missiles as delivery systems for an Islamic nuclear payload.
They
will be the delivery system. In the worst of such scenarios, the consequence could be not a car bomb but a
nuclear
bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center.”
Well, they did not use a nuclear bomb. They used two 150-ton fully fueled jetliners to wipe out the Twin Towers. But does anyone doubt that, given the chance, they will throw atom bombs at America and its allies? And perhaps, long before that, chemical and biological weapons?
This is the greatest danger facing our common future. Some states of the terror network already possess chemical and biological capabilities, and some are feverishly developing nuclear weapons. Can one rule out the possibility that they will be tempted to use such weapons, openly or through terror proxies, or that their weapons might fall into the hands of the terrorist groups they harbor?
We have received a wake-up call from hell. Now the question is simple: Do we rally to defeat this evil, while there is still time, or do we press a collective snooze button and go back to business as usual?
The time for action is now.
Today the terrorists have the will to destroy us, but they do not have the power. There is no doubt that we have the power to crush them. Now we must also show that we have the will. Once any part of the terror network
acquires nuclear weapons, this equation will fundamentally change—and with it the course of human affairs. This is the historical imperative that now confronts us all.
And now the third question: What do we about it? First, as President Bush said, we must make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that support them. It is not enough to root out the terrorists who committed this horrific act of war. We must dismantle the entire terrorist network.
If any part of it remains intact, it will rebuild itself, and the specter of terrorism will reemerge and strike again. Bin Laden, for example, has shuttled over the last decade from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to the Sudan and back again. So we must not leave any base intact.

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