Christopher Ruddy
Monday, May 17, 2004

Recently I was on Bob Grant’s radio program on New York’s WOR.

Bob began his on-air segment with me by noting that in the summer of 2002 he saw me in Orlando with a group of people. At the time, he said, I predicted the “quagmire” and much of what has come to pass in our war against Iraq.

As I mentioned to Bob, I didn’t oppose the war. Going to war was better than doing nothing. But I had grave reservations. The U.S. invading an Arab state would be akin to Israel invading and occupying such a country.

There is no question that Saddam Hussein was a danger and a menace, weapons of mass destruction or not. But with U.S. taxpayers spending $30 billion a year in intelligence, couldn’t we have tried to exhaust other possibilities first, including Saddam’s assassination?

Playing Monday morning quarterback is too easy and not fair to George Bush. The war was not a mistake, but mistakes were made in how the war was prosecuted.

The brutal beheading of Nick Berg shows what we are up against and why Bush’s war on terror has been fundamentally right.

After 9/11, the famed journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave described the condition that faces us today: We are not at war with Islam; it is radical Islam that is at war with us.

The distinction is important to understand and repeat. Many Arab countries, including the largest, Egypt, have been staunch allies of the U.S. for many years.

President Bush has been wise in clearly not putting the U.S. at war with Islam. We are in a defensive war against radical Islam.

Terror’s Ground Zero

Radical Islam didn’t incubate in a vacuum.

Radical Islam found life in the Iranian revolution and overthrow of our Iranian ally, the shah. Jimmy Carter allowed that to happen – and it was the most significant foreign policy blunder of the last half-century.

I would argue that the U.S. allowance of the radical Islamic government in Tehran was even worse than the U.S. Vietnam fiasco.

Iran became, as former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “ground zero” for Islamic terror.

The Israelis should know.

For more than a decade Israel has suffered wave after wave of domestic terrorism.

The allowance of this terrorism, and its apparent success from the Palestinian point of view, could only mean one thing: more terror.

The Israelis have been desensitized by terror. No doubt they could have easily quelled and greatly reduced their terrorism problem by using harsh measures.

But worries about “world opinion” and an aggressively antagonistic U.S. State Department have handcuffed the Israelis from acting. Israel is on a tight leash, receiving some $3-4 billion a year in foreign aid and needing the umbrella of U.S. security.

But in no small way the U.S. has sown the seeds of its own terror problem by hindering Israel’s efforts to stamp it out. By not allowing Israel to crush terrorist sources, the terrorists have grown in number and method.

In the face of such terror, Israel has been reeling and demoralized. Its various governments, including the one now led by Ariel Sharon, have offered concession after concession.

It was only a matter of time before the terrorists turned their sights on the U.S. We saw the face of Islamic terror on Sept. 11.

Now, in Iraq, we see the full brunt of radical Islamic terror against Americans such as Nick Berg and our troops.

Israel has been suffering a similar problem for years, and we have been complacent at best and critical of Israel at worst.

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