Last
week, Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld warned that more
terror attacks are a certainty and may involve the detonation of an
atomic weapon on American soil. They have concentrated the mind
wonderfully. Even a small, crude nuclear device, exploded in a U.S. port
or city, could kill many thousands more than died on Sept. 11.
Rightly, the U.S. government is focused on how to anticipate such an
attack, prevent it, prepare for it. But there has been no debate over
the most critical question. Why? Why do these Islamic radicals so hate
us they are willing to commit suicide, if they can take hundreds or
thousands of us with them?
They don't know us. They cannot defeat or destroy the United States,
even with an atom bomb. What can they hope to accomplish? Are they
simply madmen?
In our focus on improved intelligence, preemptive strikes,
color-coded alerts and evacuation plans, have we overlooked a course of
action that could end the threat of cataclysmic terror? Like Poe's
"Purloined Letter," is a way out right there on the
mantelpiece in front of us?
Consider: While no Western nation has endured an act of terror on the
scale of 9-11, all have known terror. Brits were ambushed by the Irish
in the war of independence from 1919 to 1921. British civilians were
blown up by Zionists in the King David Hotel in 1946. Settlers were
murdered by Mau Mau in Kenya. French were massacred in movie theaters
and cafes by the Algerian FLN until 1962. U.S. Marines were blown up in
Beirut in 1983. From Netanya to Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, Israelis today
die in terror attacks and suicide bombings.
In all these atrocities, terror was a weapon of the weak and
stateless against Western powers they could not defeat with arms. In
each case, terror was used to expel an imperial power or drive out
foreign troops. In each case but one, terror ended when the Western
power went home.
The dynamiting of the King David Hotel convinced the British to
accelerate their departure from Palestine. Zionist terror ended. Mau Mau
terror ended when the Brits left Kenya. When De Gaulle cut Algeria
loose, FLN terror ended. When Reagan withdrew his Marines from Beirut,
anti-American terror ended in Lebanon.
Lesson? The price of empire is terror. The price of occupation is
terror. The price of interventionism is terror. As Barry Goldwater used
to say, it is as simple as that. When Israel departed Lebanon,
Hezbollah's attacks fell off almost to nothing. But as long as Israelis
occupy the West Bank, which Prime Minister Barak conceded belongs at
least 95 percent to the Palestinians, Israel will be hit by terror
attacks.
Either Israel gets out, or it pays the price of staying in:
terrorism.
But this column is not about Israel -- it is about us. It is about
why we are being told by our leaders, in tones of resignation and
fatalism, that it is not a question of whether, but of when, the next
act of cataclysmic terror occurs here, and why we must accept the
possibility that a nuclear weapon will be exploded here.
But when Americans ask, "Why do they hate us?" and
"Why do these Islamic radicals on the other side of the earth want
to come over here and commit hara-kiri killing us?" we get
responses that ought not to satisfy a second-grader. They hate us, we
are told, because we are democratic and free and good, and we have low
tax rates.
Well that is no longer enough. Before, not after, the next terror
attack on this country, America's leaders should start telling the
truth: Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we
are over there. They are not trying to kill us because they dislike our
domestic politics, but because they detest our foreign policy.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. They did not fly
into those twin towers to protest universal suffrage or to advance
self-determination for the Palestinian people. As Osama bin Laden said,
they want us to stop propping up the Saudi regime they hate, and to get
off the sacred Saudi soil on which sit the holiest shrines of Islam.
They want our troops out of Saudi Arabia – and if we don't get out,
they are coming over here to kill us any way they can.
That is reality. Now while America should use every weapon in her
arsenal, from intelligence to diplomacy to war, to prevent terror and to
punish terror, we must address the central issue: Terror on American
soil, and eventual cataclysmic and atomic terror on American soil, is
the price of American empire.
Is the empire worth it? French, Brits, even Soviets said no. They
went home. And nothing over there – not oil, not bases in Saudi
Arabia, not global hegemony – is worth risking nuclear terror over
here. I may be the only right-winger in America who loves D.C., but then
I grew up here. Washington is my hometown. It comes first, and empire
isn't even a close second.
