The Real Threat
A son amends.

September 18, 2001 8:40 a.m.

hat is that gurgling, sucking sound?

We are not there yet. Despite his brave words, the president has still not given a clear mission to his troops, and without that mission there can be no concentrated effort. He will have to decide whether we will be satisfied with the destruction of one or more terrorist organizations, or whether, as so many of his men have said over the last week, we are determined to destroy the terror states themselves.

This is no small debate. If he is content to destroy bin Laden and his ragtag allies, we are doomed to relive September 11th. If he seizes the moment history has delivered him, we may yet assert the preeminence of Western power and virtue.

The forces in play are the same as they were during the Cold War, and they are using the same arguments and the same methods as they did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took office. At that time, both Reagan and his newly appointed secretary of state, General Alexander Haig, had proclaimed their intention to wage war against terrorism, and specifically against the states that sponsored it, above all the Soviet Union. The diplomats and the intelligence mavens were dead set against it. The diplomats wanted arms control and a negotiated detente with the Soviets, and the spooks told anyone who would listen that there was no evidence of a Soviet connection to international terrorism. A best-selling book, Claire Sterling's The Terror Network, laid out considerable evidence of the Kremlin's terrorist activities, and the CIA set out to discredit it, just as they did everything possible to discredit those who had argued, just a couple of years earlier, that the Ayatollah Khomeini was a Muslim fanatic who hated everything Western.

The intelligence analysts were wrong about Khomeini and wrong about the Soviet role in terrorism, yet they are still at their game. Now they are insisting that there is no evidence of state involvement in the activities of Osama bin Laden, and they have apparently convinced the vice president, who firmly told the nation on Sunday that we had no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the bin Laden attacks against us. In private conversations, analysts are suggesting that anyone who believes that Iraq, or any of the other terror states, are involved in the terror assault, are conspiracy nuts.

The diplomats are moving in tandem, warning that the entire Arab world will rise against us if we take on one of the terror states. They speak darkly about "losing the Arab streets" (as if they were ever ours to lose) and threatening the stability of our moderate Arab allies, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And so, inch-by-inch, they are trying to roll back the president's proclamation that we will undertake a long and difficult war to rid the world of terror and those who support it. They have elevated bin Laden to the status of a demigod, ascribing to him powers that no terrorist has ever had before, and they are talking about an entirely new kind of terror organization, unprecedented in its outreach and sophistication, its diabolical planning abilities, and its technological savvy.

There is, indeed, something new about terrorism these days, but it is not what the government's experts think it is. The new thing is the ability to maintain a sleeper network of kamikazes. Hitherto, the suicide terrorists we knew about were indoctrinated, sometimes with the use of drugs, and kept in a state of wild passion until they performed their missions. The men who killed so many of us on September 11th seemed to live normal lives in the United States — notably irreligious lives, by the way, if the reports about their love for alcohol and carousing are true — until the orders arrived. But even this is not entirely new; indeed, it was best described in The Manchurian Candidate, the famous movie of the 1950s starring Frank Sinatra about a brainwashed American soldier programmed by the North Koreans to commit murder when a coded message was given to him.

But the Manchurian candidate was run by a foreign government, and we have long known about sleeper networks of Arab terrorists within the United States, which were also known to be in touch with Soviet intelligence officers in North Africa. Why should we believe that bin Laden is any different from the others? Indeed, what we know for sure about bin Laden does not track with this picture. We have many stories about his organization that show its incompetence, its internal divisions, its inability even to maintain a small airplane. The "analysis" simply doesn't track with the known facts.

Yet it serves a purpose: It deflects our attention from the real problem, from the real threat. For if you believe bin Laden is the whole story, you will not persevere against Iraq, Iran, and the others. In fact, you might even work with these terror regimes to catch bin Laden, and don't think for a minute that Saddam and the Ayatollahs in Tehran wouldn't be delighted to deliver his head to us. Saddam is so concerned at this moment that he appears to have scattered his armed forces all over Iraq, so that they cannot be attacked in one or two locations.

The president should not be gulled by love letters from terrorist despots, and he should not put much stock in the claims of our intelligence community, the very same crowd that failed to give us timely warning before September 11th. It is fine and dandy to have a great international coalition to fight terror, but bringing Syria and Iran into the coalition is like inviting Communist Bulgaria and Poland to join NATO during the Cold War.

We are now paying a terrible price for failing to pursue our legitimate interests in the past decade. Some are now saying that it is all because of our support for Israel, but those who say it do not understand either America or the world at large. Our support for Israel is not a tactical maneuver, subject to regular reconsideration. We support free democracies, and since Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, our support is automatic and obligatory. It is, indeed, the only Middle East country that truly matters to us. If you want to find the foreign-policy blunders that helped us reach the current crisis, look to our failure to destroy the evil regime of Saddam Hussein when we had him at our mercy; look to our failure to support the opposition to Saddam, even though we had promised it; look to our failure to respond forcefully enough to terrorism over the course of the past thirty years.

There is now a great battle for the soul of the president, between those who are willing to undertake a mission worthy of a superpower, and those who insist on the unworthy and ultimately ineffective steps that would limit us to a manhunt. It is a battle between those who talk of "proportional response," and those who know that when a superpower is attacked, the response must be utterly devastating, so that our enemies are not tempted to try it again.

It is altogether appropriate that George W. Bush be faced with this awesome decision, since his father failed his historic test a decade ago. Now the son can make amends.