The War Started Under Clinton, Not Bush

I've got news for those who naively insist we were at peace until George Bush became president. I've been hearing that again lately and can't let it go unchallenged. We've been at war with these terrorists since at least 1993 when they declared war on us by bombing the World Trade Center buildings on their first failed attempt to bring down both towers by crashing one into the other. We just didn't have the guts to fight back the way we needed to until they killed more Americans. Experts said the 1993 explosion could have brought down both towers if the van containing the explosive had been parked a few feet closer to critical support columns. We came that close to having the 9/11/01 disaster play out on 2/26/93 while Clinton was in office. Considering the catastrophe that the 1993 bombing nearly was, a rational person has to ask two questions. First, why wasn't national security, including surveillance tools, made a much higher priority afterwards? Second, why do so many people think this war didn't start until the towers were attacked a second time?

By the way, a man named Ramzi Yousef, who trained with Al-Qaeda, planned the 1993 attack and was one of four men who carried it out. Guess who his uncle is? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Ali Fadden, the principal architect of the Sept 11, 2001 attack! Khalid gave Yousef advice what to do and how to do it over the phone and funneled funds to him by wire transfer. (Doesn't that give you pause to consider even stronger surveillance techniques, not weaker?) Yousef was assisted in assembling the bomb by Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi bomb-maker. Yasin was detained by the FBI afterward and released but immediately left the country for Iraq. This all leads to a third logical question: why weren't our intelligence organizations able to connect the dots to the people and planning involved in the Sept 11 attack and, perhaps, prevent it? I believe the fundamental reason was because most Americans didn't believe or want to believe we were in fact at war.

Too many people still don't take this war seriously enough. This is a stateless, ruthless enemy who is absolutely committed to our destruction. It's an enemy which uses diplomacy like a weapon only to buy time and mislead. We need to wake up and fight this war with determination and commitment appropriate for the threat we face.