We Ignored all Those Previous Attacks. Why?

The BBQ Pit
1

Received an e-mail that got me thinking about this.

In 1983 (or maybe it was 1985?) we had the truck bombing of the Marines barracks. Our counterattack? To withdraw from Lebanon.

In 1993, the WTC was bombed for the first time. We got the immediate culprits, we jailed at least one of the ringleaders, an Egyptian cleric, blind, whose name I’m not remembering right now. But we didn’t confront terrorism on a global scale, and get it maybe nipped before it could harm us even more severely in the future.

Somewhere in here, I don’t remember the exact year, we went into Somalia. In a fierce gunbattle, something like 17 of our servicemen were killed. As it now turns out, this firefight was instigated by bin Laden. Our counterattack? Once again, to withdraw.

In 1995, there was the Khobar bombing in Saudi Arabia. We let the Saudis do all the prosecuting of the suspects, and acqueisced in their insistence that we not be allowed to question the suspects, who were subsequently beheaded. As a result, we learned a lot less than we should have about who backed them up and how, although we did know enough to know that bin Laden was ultimately behind it.

In 1998, they blew up two of our embassies in Africa. For that they earned a cruise missile attack, the first time we ever struck at them militarily. It killed a few people, but other than that had no real effect on bin Laden.

In 1999, they attacked the USS Cole in Yemen. No counterattack from that that I can remember, anyway.

Finally, now, in 2001, after a crippling blow to our commercial capital (estimated cost in toto to the NYC economy: 105 billion dollars) and a less successful attack on our political capital, we are finally going after this guy with the gloves off. And his buddies in Hezbollah and elsewhere. But we have to admit that our prior actions only served to embolden these people.

I think we have much to be ashamed of for not insisting earlier that our government do more, a lot more, to get at these people. We paid attention to everything but this very real threat to our lives and livelihood.

2

I agree that the US should have done something earlier but there are a few problems with that. The biggest is getting support and legitimize any retalliation attacks. It took something like the attack on NY to get the arab world to allow us to do what we need to do to stop terrorists. The reason they didnt before is because they don’t exactly want to give the US free rights to do as it pleases in their part of the world (not like that would really stop us… but in todays age we need international support or rather support of NATO allies, and in prior cases did not have that support). In this case, they have no choice BUT to allow the US to launch attacks. Kinda hard not to after 6000 Americans were killed.

Another problem that coincides with this, is the US didnt do anything so as to not over step the rights of those countries. In the case of the Khobar towers, the saudi government persecuted the people responsible. No, it wasnt on a global scale, but it was a sub - reason why the US didnt attack (the same with the WTC attacks in 93)

Finally, the US has to follow the rules of war. The US could not go to an all out war on Osama Bin Laden because its “illegal” to declare war on a person. This is why that in the past the justice department has been the ones fighting the war on terrorism, not the military. The only reason the military is being brought in now is because the pentagon was attacked. Its a military target on American soil. It would be much harder to justify war if JUST the WTC centers were attacked. That, added with the US being able to finally equate Bin Laden with the Taliban (or atleast officially do so in order to justify a war) is why we are just now attacking like we are.

(just an added note for clarification… I dont think anything would be different today if the pentagon wasnt attacked and it was just the WTC, but that was used as an example of why its been hard to go to war. And no, im not forgetting the cole. In reference to the Cole, it was the government of Yemen that controlled a lot of the persecution of the terrorists, again dealing with the issue of the attacks happening withing their soil.)

3

:rolleyes:

You think that terrorism doesn’t occur on a worlwide scale? And do you really think that every terrorist attack is worthy of a military attack on the guilty country? Get your head out of your ass. Not all terrorist attacks will ever be stopped, and I’d venture to say that they will increase greatly due to the publicity of the most recent one.
In order to stop or even faze terrorist attacks, we would have to give up so many of our personal rights that it wouldn’t be worth it.
How many people die worldwide due to terrorist attacks in comparison to, say, AIDS? But instead of researching AIDS on a larger scale, the government pays for million dollar missiles that miss the intended target by one mile and kill 4 and injure 8 Afghanis.

Million-dollar missles…kill 4 people…million dollars sent to cancer research funds…possible millions saved.

I can see where the line of thinking would go to that.

In that case, I agree. I really think we should have bombed the shit out of everyone who fucks with us. Because as you all know, “Nobody Fucks With America”, because we aren’t like any other country out there. We’ve got the egotistical attitude down to a science, and are arrogant enough to think that we are untouchable.

I agree with this segment entirely. To be allowed to do whatever we want just because we’re the USA doesn’t make a lot of sense. In short, we’re the world’s bully. We have the biggest guns, so nobody is going to challenge us or they will be annihilated.

So in conclusion, I would like to reiterate…
:rolleyes:

4

One other reason we didn’t retaliate was public support: there was an appaling lack thereof up until this point. In the case of the WTC bombing in 1993, “we got our man” and declared justice done, and everyone got on with their lives.

And as to why we pulled out of Somalia: the U.S. public did not want casualties. The military has been bitching about this for years; they can’t really do anything in a lot of situations (other than look fierce) because they knew if ground troops died the people back home would be pissed. Sometimes we get around this, like we did in Kosovo. We just bombed the shit out of them until they capitualated, but that won’t work in this situation. But another good example out of Kosovo was the pilot who got shot down, and then there was all this media surrounding his being found and rescued. One low-ranking officer made the front page of every major newspaper in the U.S. because it meant no casualites for us.

Also Ladyfoxfyre I’m not sure if you’re for or against the massive amount of money spent on the U.S. military (our defense budget is dwarfs the next closest countries both as a percentage of our budget and total dollar amount), but you need to recall that that was a product of the Cold War when everybody and their mother wanted U.S. protection from the Big Bad Red Bear. I agree we spend too much on defense nowadays, but old habits die hard.

5

Ladyfoxfyre, there are some that would argue that defense spending cuts instituted since the Cold War are partly responsible for the intelligence failure that made the success of the WTC attacks possible.

Agreed that it’s probably impossible to prevent all terrorist attacks, but that doesn’t mean we should cut back on defense spending and give all the money to AIDS research, cancer research, etc. Also, I think your comparison of AIDS and terrorist attacks is silly and insulting. What, we should cure AIDS before retaliating because more people die from AIDS than planes flying into buildings? Get real.

6

Yes, I know the comparison to AIDS was stretching it, but so many people now have the attitude of, “Well, it happened to us so many times before, so why didn’t we just kill everybody back then, and we wouldn’t have this problem now.”

I find that insulting, and ignorant on the part of the person who’s saying it. There is no possible way to prevent all terrorism, ever, and there never will be. In order to come even close, we would have to give up many of our To go back to the whole, “well why didn’t we fix it back then” is an argument that has no end, because the fact is that we didn’t, for whatever reason, and that’s that.

I wasn’t implying that we do cut back on defense spending, merely making note of what the funds could be used for besides mass-destruction.

7

Because there are two ways to respond to any terrorist act from a foreign source. We have to answer this question:

“Are we going to treat it like a crime, or like an act of war.”

We have chosen to treat the previous terrorist acts as crimes, rather than acts of war. Even when we had a good idea that the act has been sponsored by a state.

That is one thing I am interested in knowing about Osama bin Laden. If we are war with him, his capture would make him a prisoner of war. What do we do with POWs when a war ends? We send them home. The alternative is a war crimes tribunal; I’ve not heard anybody official bring this up as the ultimate destination of Osama bin Laden.

If what he did is a crime, then we are authorizing force against innocent bystanders in the pursuit of the criminal. A police tactic that should never be allowed. (Imagine if the St. Louis police department were allowed to shoot innocent bystanders to get a clear shot at a bank robber.)

What we have here is some strange combination of war and criminal prosecution and I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with it.

8

One thing critical variable has changed since 1996. In the past there were countries that had terrorists running around and offered them some safe harbor while maintaining a visage of conforming (to some degree, anyway) to international standards of conduct and diplomacy.

Now, the terrorists actually have their own country.

9

The attacks on NY and Washington were a direct attack on United States territory using guided missiles. There is no doubt that it was an act of war.

We know who one of the parties to the war is - the US. The question is: who is the other party? It takes two to tango.

If it can be shown that the other party is a foreign Government or that a foreign Government was complicit in the attack then the US is morally and legally justified in removing that Government from power.

The US Government has come to the conclusion that at least one foreign Government (that of Afghanistan) was involved because they protect, and are financed by, the people who were responsible for the attacks.

Therefore the US Government is justified in removing the Government of Afghanistan from power. In order to get to al-qaeda it is necessary to first remove their protectors.

The problem that arises however is that it is starting to look like the Government of Iraq may be involved in the recent anthrax cases. See this article www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,573893,00.html.

The article states that it is relatively easy to make skin anthrax but skin anthrax isn’t very effective because you can only infect one or two people at a time and in any case it is curable. It is, however, extremely difficult to make airborne anthrax (which was the type of anthrax in Florida).

It requires huge Centifuges, specialist equipment and costs millions.

Also the strain of anthrax used was similar to a strain known to be possessed by Iraq.

Its as though it has their fingerprints on it.

Therefore I think it is inevitable that, once the Afghanistan Adventure is over, the US is going to go after Saddam.

I think we need to face this fact and accept that it IS going to happen. It has to happen because the Government of Iraq has directly attacked United States territory. Therefore the US must remove the Government of Iraq.

The US will need to come up with more proof than they have at present that Iraq was involved but, as things stand at the moment, thats how it looks to me.

10

What???!!!
Where did this notion come from?
Can you find any reliable cite that would indicate that this is at all the US’s position. I haven’t heard Bush use the Pentagon attack as a justification, he somply declared that the whole incident was an “act of war” and no one really seems to have objected, on any grounds.

11

There were three issues I wanted to bring up here. First, foremost and most important by far is this:

If there’s no public pressure there’s not going to be the effort, which above all must be an intelligence effort, to keep the terrorists in check. Note ladyfoxfyre: not massive military strikes every time, but intelligence (and covert operations). As to the military part, that gets us to number two:

Number two is the “no casualties” thing. This is tough to write about because I certainly don’t want to die, and neither does anyone else. But we’ve seen the cost now of hamstringing our military in this way: in Lebanon, and again in Somalia, we withdrew in the face of casualties. The bad guys got a clear signal of what our limits were, a thing we should never have allowed. It’s not a question of using massive military force every time something happens, it’s that if our military is attacked, they should certainly be allowed to attack and defeat those who do so. I mean, if someone attacks our military, they are declaring themselves at war with us. In the face of this, we withdraw?

Number three: why do we tolerate some of the behavior of our allies, specifically Saudi Arabia? They balked at our using their country to launch strikes against Afghanistan, at first they refused to do anything about stopping the money flow to al-Qaeda, and they stood in the way of our finding out more from the bombers of the Khobar barracks. This is the thanks we get for saving their butts in 1990?

12

IIRC the problem with Saudi Arabia is that the population there believes that the U.S. is anti-muslim, and they’re pissed that the U.S. has troops in their country. Although we may have had a good reason for sending forces to Saudi Arabia in 1991, many people in that region think we took advantage of the situation to station a permanent troop presence there.

Also, I know that many middle eastern countries regard the U.S.'s ongoing bombing raids in Iraq as immoral and is causing innocent people to suffer, this may or may not be the case among the Saudi population, but I think it is.

The Saudi Arabian government has to take all this into account whenever they decide on a course of action regarding the U.S., and the U.S., if it’s wants Saudi Arabia as an ally, has to respect their decision.

13

xanakis, that article on Iraq is more than a little interesting. But my own surmise is that they’ll deal with Iraq only after Afghanistan has been taken care of.
It’ll be interesting, should this occur, to see what the Saudi reaction will be.
From the same source, this article, which ends with the observation that blood tests should be done on suspects taken into custody in connection with the hijackings to see if they’re carrying antibodies to anthrax:

14

It seem to me that we have something going on here that is a little more disturbing than the Law Enforcement – Act of War Distinction. If we can conclude that Binladen’s people were behind the Lebanese Marine Barracks, Kobart Towers, WTC I, Somalia, and the African Embassies, it might be thought that the difference between those incidents and September 11 was, in addition to the number of dead, that all the people killed and maimed in the previous attacks were soldiers (or sailors or airmen or Marines) State Department people or foreigner. It looks like Joe Six-pack just doesn’t much care if only a few government employs are blown up. Old Joe is not inclined to become indigent about blowing up people as long as there are relatively few of them and they aren’t Joe Six-pack. While WTC I did kill and wound American civilians that incident was never treated as if it was the product of an international operation. Rather, it was treated as if it was something along the lines of the later bombing in Oklahoma City and was the product of the machinations of a relatively few politically deranged wackos.

You will remember that when the government was persuaded that the bombing of an off-duty joint in Berlin was the doing of Libya, the government went out and ran a bombing raid on Libya. Thereafter Libya left US soldiers alone and concentrated on blowing up airliners. While the airline bombings were moderately upsetting, the bad act took place overseas, in Western nations that did instigate pretty vigorous criminal proceedings and pretty much did it on their own without US intervention. While I do not know it, I suspect that the Scottish authorities may have asked that the US keep its nose out of the Lockarbe bombing.

When the US airliner blew up over Newfoundland, we were all ready to conclude that Libya was at it again, but the facts got in the way of that conclusion. When the Air Egypt flight went into the ocean off Long Island, we were all ready to be offended again but the evidence seems to indicate that one was the doing of a lone fruit cake. I have never heard that the apparently deranged Egyptian co-pilot was connected with Binladen’s outfit.

September 11 presented us with a new problem. We had an attack on the national territory which killed an unthinkable number of civilians done apparently by an outfit that was very actively thumbing its nose at us. Joe Six-pack can tolerate a lot of stuff but he cannot tolerate that. Thus, we now have a political will that we did not have before. As evidence of this, I turn on the Sunday football games and find that several motor companies and a couple airlines all love America. They apparently did not love America all that much before September 11, but they do now. I expect that a couple of breweries will discover patriotism just as soon as their ad agencies can dump the Swedish bikini team and find some file footage of a back lighted Stars and Striped flapping in the breeze.

The real question is will the present political resolve last when young men and women start coming home in coffins and taxes have to be increased to pay for it all.

15

Bingo. When it’s just soldiers and politicos getting killed, nobody really cares. When you rock the world of the financial fatcats…ah, then America moves.

My view is just the opposite of Pathros. If it had been just the Pentagon hit but not the WTC, we wouldn’t really be doing anything.

16

Maybe not quite as openly as some would prefer, but there were good reasons for that. Also, the SCOPE of the crime, you have to admit, is something that has not been duplicated in recent history. Most mass-casualty situations like this seem to be natural disasters.

See this article: http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/03/ret.bin.laden/index.html

2 previous plans to get the SOB are summarized there.

[stream of consciousness ramble]
As for those who see a disturbing mish-mosh of war/crime punishment intended for this man and his organization: do you have a better idea? International law and International government has not developed to an extent to protect the people of Earth from those who would do any one of us harm from the safety of a foreign nation. Hopefully, this disaster will see us draw up plans that will have all signees agree to turn over criminals to an international tribunal to be tried for a. crimes against humanity (which is what this truly was) and b. war crimes. I realize that laws are already in place against these, but if a group (ie. The Taliban) is not a member of international government (ie. the UN) there is no way to gain their complicity. Are there rules that say ‘we have proof, so either you give him to us or we can do X’? Trade sanctions seem ineffective at this point.
[/ramble]