Christopher Ruddy
Wednesday, March 19, 2003

The terrorists will strike again.

Since 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, America has not suffered a major terrorist strike.

Perhaps Americans have again been lulled into a sense of complacency.

Many people have concluded that the terrorists have been so undermined and weakened, they cannot act.

They believe our efforts to immobilize al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and around the world have worked.

While this may partly explain why we have not been hit, make no mistake about it, the terrorists remain well organized and well funded and continue to have global backing by rogue states around the world.

And these rogue states have long tethers to countries like Russia and China.

And make no mistake about it: We should continue to prepare for worse attacks than 9/11.

Americans have come to believe all is OK. I believe we have misunderstood the terrorists.

The image we get from news programs and Hollywood is that terrorists are deranged individuals, crazy madmen who will do anything – including suicide bombings.

But the crazed suicide bomber is not a lone operator. Behind such crazies are organizations that provide the logistical support to make the terrorism work.

For every terrorist in the field, you can bet there are 20 support personnel helping to fund, back, train and support those terrorists.

The terrorists have a clear agenda and are well organized, as we saw on 9/11.

Bin Laden himself was a successful businessman who ran dozens of business operations in addition to his terrorist network. NBC News reported Tuesday evening that as many as eight wealthy Saudis have been secretly backing bin Laden.

With the capture of bin Laden’s top lieutenants, we believe that the al-Qaeda threat has diminished. Perhaps it has.

But remember, worldwide terrorism is much like an octopus. The tentacles are groups like bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and others.

The head of the octopus was – and remains – nation states, terrorist-sponsoring countries.

These groups and their backers are united in certain principles. One is that they believe in the destruction of the state of Israel.

To varying degrees, they see America as an enemy.

The mother and father of the octopus of terror are Russia and China. Russia and China would like to see America’s role in the world greatly reduced, and have been quietly backing all of the terrorist states, including Iraq. These rogue states serve as useful cutouts for China and Russia, who receive little blame for their evil acts.

Already, I believe, terrorist groups and nations have had the easy ability to “nuke America” – at least with a dirty bomb and certainly with a poor man’s atomic weapon: anthrax. But they haven’t done that.

Again, we must remember that the octopus has a brain. The backers of the terror groups want to win world opinion for their struggle.

In fact, bin Laden in 1998 gave away his strategy when he spoke to British journalist Robert Fisk. Bin Laden said that he needed to provoke America into a war against Islam, because this would be the only way that Muslims around the world would rise up and fight America. Muslims, he admitted, had little interest in fighting the United States.

This is why President Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, was so smart in making clear that this was not a religious war, a war against Islam.

But the American war on Iraq has been portrayed in many parts of the world as America acting as an aggressor, the bully.

There’s no doubt that America’s security interests are at stake in Iraq, and certainly Israel is under an immediate threat if Iraq succeeds in its program of weapons of mass destruction.

But again, if this has been scripted like a Hollywood film, America now appears as the bad guy to the rest of the world. Perhaps in the view of many people, we will get what we deserve after invading Iraq.

Saddam understands this. In fact, in July of 2002, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported that Saddam and his top advisers and sons had met and that Saddam said he would not attack America first, arguing that he would take the moral high ground – if a thug like Hussein could make such a claim.

So, what we have seen since 9/11 is not an end of the war on terror or diminishment of the terrorism. We have lived through a quiet period, a prelude, a period in which the Islamic terrorists and their supporters wanted America to move from the role of victim to the role of aggressor. The brains behind the terrorists realize their struggle is one for world opinion.

In their minds, the stage will be set by the U.S. invasion of Iraq for new attacks against America.

Such attacks may not be immediate, but there will be a response. When that response happens, Americans again will realize, as they did after 9/11, how terribly poor our national security establishment has been.

We can rightly blame the “lost years” during the two terms of Bill Clinton, when America lost its resolve and the Clinton White House systematically undermined America’s national security.

Editor’s Note: Carl Limbacher and Christopher Ruddy predicted months before 9/11 in their book “Bitter Legacy: The Untold Story of the Clinton-Gore Years” that America would be vulnerable to terrorist strikes in our homeland – click here for more info on this great book.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Al-Qaeda
Clinton Scandals
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
War on Terrorism

Editor's note:
FBI Agent Gary Aldrich reveals how the Clintons helped cause 9/11 – Click Here Now!