Conservative Advocate: What could bin Laden be doing?
For at least the past year it was widely assumed that Osama bin Laden would launch another dramatic attack in the United States before Election Day. Three years have passed since Sept. 11, and, even on bin Laden’s notoriously leisurely timetable, an encore seemed overdue. Moreover, if his goal was to impress the American people with his ability to inflict damage on us at will, the final month or two of a presidential election campaign seemed the perfect time to demonstrate it.
Instead, however, we were presented in October with another of his chatty videotapes, warning us that further attacks will rain down on us unless we change our “policies.”
Say what you will, a videotape is no match for another Sept. 11, and the fact that he opted for the former rather than the latter suggests one of two things: Either bin Laden didn’t want to launch another attack on the United States, or he simply couldn’t.
It is certainly possible that bin Laden has concluded that Sept. 11, wildly successful as it was tactically, was a strategic mistake. His agents had been conducting attacks on U.S. facilities and interests overseas for years (such as the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole) without suffering serious consequences. But when they demolished the World Trade Center in Manhattan and damaged the Pentagon, an American expeditionary force was promptly dispatched to Afghanistan to topple his Taliban protectors and deprive him of the sanctuary in which he had trained his fighters.
A dozen of his top aides were captured or killed; various sources of financial support dried up; new restrictions hampered international travel; and he himself was forced to seek sanctuary in safe houses, or perhaps even caves, on the wild frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Perhaps he has concluded that attacks on U.S. interests abroad are just as effective, and provoke fewer consequences — witness the recent attack on the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
It is very likely bin Laden badly wanted to stage an attack on the United States before the presidential election, but was simply unable to do so. If that’s so, we can thank the major improvements in battling terrorism that have been instituted by the newly created Department of Homeland Security in the past two years.
The far more comprehensive inspections at airports are a major annoyance to innocent passengers, but there is no doubt that they also greatly inconvenience would-be terrorists.
The improved procedures for granting visas have largely closed another loophole. The exchange of intelligence with our allies on suspected terrorists, and the closing down of sources of funding, have also had a major impact.
Of course, we cannot afford to let down our guard for an instant. As President Bush has pointed out, our measures against terrorism must succeed every time; bin Laden only needs to succeed once. It is only prudent to assume that he and his lieutenants are probing our defenses, looking for a weak spot, and will strike hard if they find one.
That is why the war against terrorism must remain the chief preoccupation of the American government until terrorism is reduced to a minimum. We may not be able to “win” in the sense of eradicating it completely, but we can and must render it strategically ineffective.
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.