Terror Never Left America's Shores
By Michael Widlanski
NYPost.com
‘People shouldn’t jump to conclusions before we have all the facts,” President Obama said after Tuesday’s attack in Boston. He’s right, of course: We don’t yet know if the terrorists were Islamists, a new version of Tim McVeigh or something else.
Yet Islamists remain the chief terror threat on these shores: Terror didn’t return to America at the Boston Marathon, because terror never left. There have been more anti-US attacks and abortive attacks (not including Iraq and Afghanistan) in the last four years than in the previous seven years, after 9/11.
This statistic isn’t widely cited at government briefings, in the main news media nor on most college campuses, because those elites would like to pretend that the terror problem ended with Osama bin Laden.
That includes the president and his top aides, who’ve spent the better part of the last two years relying on a mistaken conclusion.
They’ve pretended that there really was no terror problem, but only an al Qaeda problem, and that that problem was solved because bin Laden’s death was a death blow for terror.
They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, dead wrong.
Terrorists often send us reminders just when we think we have beaten them. Israel has seen this happen several times in its fight against Islamist terror. So did Britain in its experiences with both Irish and Islamist terror. And now the United States is learning that fighting terror is not a sprint but a marathon.
Karmi Gillon, then head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, bragged about killing the main terror planner of Hamas in 1996. As he patted himself on the back, Hamas launched suicide bombings that convulsed Israel for several more years until the suicide bombers were uprooted in a massive Israeli military operation in 2002.
Israel has pioneered targeted killings, drones and other high-tech anti-terror methods, but it has also learned you can’t defeat terror just with high tech. There is no substitute for the tough and painstaking collection of intelligence and grinding work on the ground.
Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and others in the administration have done their best to inhibit the collection of such intelligence, while they have at the same time launched probes or proceedings aimed at counter-terror warriors in the CIA and the top units of the US military.
America was kept safe by intelligence gathered earlier; data gathered from pre-Obama interrogations also helped lead to bin Laden himself. Yet those efforts have ended, and US intelligence has been coasting.
Obama & Co. also minimized the role of Islamist terror in previous attacks on the United States, such as Fort Hood and the Christmas bombing in Detroit.
The first step in fighting terror is to realize that there is a terror problem that requires a major national effort, but some of our top “experts” on terror — especially in the Obama administration — demure.
John Brennan, now Obama’s CIA head, wrote in a 2008 paper, “US national security would be best served if Washington publicly acknowledged” that Iran and Hezbollah had moved away from terror. He claimed the West could woo moderates inside Iran’s regime and Hezbollah with sweet talk and some incentives. Events have proved him wrong.
Iran and Hezbollah are trying hard to move advanced weapons and chemical arms from the collapsing state of Syria into Lebanon. Iran also sped up long-range missile development, its bomb program and arms transfers to South America. Since 2008, it has planned or executed terror attacks in Asia, Africa and even the United States.
Obama is right not to jump to conclusions about the Boston attack, but he’d be wise to realize he was wrong in his previous conclusions about terror. As the 9/11 Commission observed, fighting terror means using imagination, not pretense.
Michael Widlanski is the author of “Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat.” He was strategic affairs advisor in Israel’s Ministry of Public Security.