State of Terror

...Are we willing to face the fact that most terrorism consists of acts of war being waged by identifiable nations...

...The list of what Hussein has done during Clinton's watch is long: an attempt to assassinate former president Bush, a threat to re-invade Kuwait, a program to continue developing weapons of mass destruction, an attack on American-backed Iraqi opposition forces, a successful effort to curtail and then end U.N...

...Taking on the role of detective, Mylroie shows how phone records, escape plans, doctored passports, personal histories, and physical incongruities all point to Ramzi Yousef's being an agent of Iraqi intelligence...

...But, early on, as Mylroie points out, those involved in the investigation and prosecution were well aware of both the holes in this theory and the loose ends that strongly suggested Baghdad had covertly manipulated a largely inept and unimaginative group of Muslims—united only in their hatred of America—into conducting the most audacious terrorist attack ever attempted...

...BY GARY SCHMITT In spite of the fact that virtually every major act of terrorism over the past thirty years has been state-supported or state-directed, Americans and their elected officials continue to interpret the phenomenon as the violent, random deeds of the world's lunatic fringe...

...To this day, these leads have never been followed up by the government...

...down both amid a cloud of cyanide gas, killing thousands in the process, has been handled by the government as a plot carried out by a loosely connected group of Islamic radicals...

...Study of Revenge argues that a significant problem in the investigation was the division of labor between the Department of Justice, whose job in these cases is to prosecute individuals, and the national security bureaucracy, whose job it is to find out whether the terrorism has a foreign sponsor...

...intelligence and the American elite were convinced that most of it was the product of indigenous social-political factors, with few connections to our enemies' capitals...

...The key is Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the February 1993 bombing...

...We just try a body...

...The most President Clinton and this team of advisers wanted to do was "contain" Hussein...

...Of course, this bureaucratic indifference doesn't have to rule, if the administration as a whole is interested in getting to the bottom of things...

...But the Clinton administration either refused to notice or, when it did notice, acted indecisively...

...Pursuing evidence that Iraq was behind an attempt to kill thousands of Americans in New York City on the anniversary of Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War was an investigative road they didn't want to go down...

...Laurie Mylroie's Study of Revenge urges that we not repeat this mistake...

...The reason is that, as horrific as terrorism can be, its human and material costs have a minimal impact on the American population...

...Instead, the effort to topple one Trade Center building into the other, bringing Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project for the New American Century...

...But that indignation passes rapidly as the terrorists' deeds fade and the terrorists themselves disappear into the shadows...

...But this war by unconventional means is not recognized as such...

...For Saddam Hussein, the Gulf War never ended...

...Oh, we loudly demand that the culprits be caught and justice meted out...

...And when the individuals have been caught, convicted, and put behind bars, Justice considers the case closed, its job done...

...And the dirty little secret is that governments are often happy that's the case...

...It's as though we would rather see terrorism as akin to natural disasters than to policy made in an adversary's war room...

...It is precisely this dilemma that Middle East scholar Laurie Mylroie examines in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War against America...

...If it had been shown that Baghdad was involved, the administration would have been forced to take action...

...But, as Study of Revenge recounts, the last thing the Clinton White House wanted during its eight years in office was to deal with Iraq in a serious way...

...Coming to terms with that fact would require the American government to take steps to remove him and his regime from power...

...Witness our initial reaction to the attack on the USS Cole...

...Study of Revenge, then, is about an ongoing war...

...As one Justice Department official put it, Ramzi Yousef's real identity is immaterial: "It doesn't matter...

...With hindsight and revelations from the archives of the former Soviet empire, we now know this was mostly wrong...

...No, says Mylroie, as she focuses on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the government's apparent willingness to ignore the evidence that pointed toward Iraq's hand in the effort...

...When first confronted with terrorism in the late 1960s, U.S...

...Given the growing, deadly sophistication of the weapons terrorists can use, it's a point we can't afford to ignore...

...Rather, as Mylroie points out, the conventional wisdom is that terrorism today is chiefly a product of transnational organizations, motivated by religious extremism, only loosely tied together and, more often than not, directed and funded by a single individual, Usama bin Laden...

...If terrorism is state-sponsored, then governments are faced with a choice between waging war in return and ignoring an act of aggression, neither of which is without consequences...

...But once a prosecution is underway, Justice's concerns become primary, pushing all others into the background...

...weapons inspections, and—as Mylroie contends—a global campaign of terrorism against the United States...

...Putting aside for the moment that even bin Laden depends on state sanctuary and state assistance to operate, isn't it reasonable to ask what states had the most to gain from raising the price for our presence in the Gulf...