Middle Eastern Terrorism: From Black September to September 11 by Mark Ensalaco

Author:Mark Ensalaco [Ensalaco, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Ideologies, Middle East, Political Science, Nationalism & Patriotism, History, General
ISBN: 9780812201871
Google: _EW6H-4tQ6cC
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-04-17T11:12:41+00:00

Chapter 8

The Real Enemy Is America

George Herbert Walker Bush took the oath of office in January 1989 as investigators collected the wreckage of Pan Am 103 strewn over the Scottish countryside. When he left office four years later, he could speak confidently about the advent of “a new world order freer from the threat of terror.” The archterrorists of the past had fallen into the hands of authorities or had faded into obscurity: Carlos the Jackal had fled to Khartoum, where French authorities finally arrested him in 1994; Abu Nidal descended into paranoia after murdering his primary rival in the Palestinian liberation movement just before the first Gulf War in 1991, and returned to Baghdad, where the Iraqi secret police murdered him just before the second Gulf War in 2002; and Imad Mugniyah, the chief of Hizb'allah's murderous operations, apparently vanished after the release of the last U.S. hostages in Beirut at the end of 1991. There was not a major terror attack against Americans or American interests during the four years of Bush's presidency.

Historical forces that had been operating for decades produced momentous geopolitical changes. The Soviet Union completed its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union imploded two years later. The sectarian violence in Lebanon burned out, and the last American hostage went free. A bankrupt PLO reluctantly recognized Israel's right to exist and entered into U.S.-mediated talks that eventually produced imperfect peace agreements between Palestinians and Jews. And, the Iran-Iraq War ground to a halt without either Saddam Hussein's Baathi Iraq, or Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic of Iran, having conquered a mile of enemy territory.

The new world order was illusory. Conflicts flared in the Balkans and the Horn of Africa drawing U.S. forces into perplexing ethnic struggles. Saddam Hussein miscalculated the degree of the United States' tolerance for his misadventures and sent Iraqi forces to conquer Kuwait's oil fields in 1990. George Bush presided over America's swift war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait the following year, but the terms of Iraq's surrender agreement left Saddam Hussein in power as a menace to U.S. interests and regional security. The political benefits of the triumph in the Gulf War vanished by the time Americans went to the polls in 1992, and the electorate punished Bush for the dismal state of the domestic economy.

William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton became president in 1993 and inherited the burden to enforce United Nations sanctions on Iraq and to manage escalating crises in Bosnia and Somalia. More ominously, militant Muslims who had rushed to Afghanistan to expel the Soviet invaders heard a call to global jihad against the United States after the Soviet withdrawal. As the United States focused attention on Iraq and a cruel war in Yugoslavia, Arab volunteers to the Afghan jihad took the struggle against apostasy back to their native lands, and Osama bin Laden began to meticulously construct Al Qaeda—the Base—for a global jihadist movement. The Clinton administration was agonizingly slow to recognize the emergence of the threat of Islamist terror.

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