The Terrorist Threat
Urging Swift Action, Panel Warns Deadlier Attacks are Likely
“The [911] commission chairman, Thomas H. Kean… said an attack
“of even greater magnitude” than the one in which terrorists used
hijacked airliners to destroy
the World Trade Center, blast a hole in the Pentagon and kill about 3,000
people is “possible—even probable. We do not have the luxury of time,
Mr. Kean said
at a news briefing accompanying release of the book-length report, the product
of many months of inquiries and an agonizing self-examination of many units
of government….
“The commission’s vice chairman, former Representative Lee H. Hamilton,
said military action and heightened security would not be enough.
He said the United
States must promote an “agenda of opportunity” in impoverished countries,
and join “the battle of ideas,” so that those regions do not become
incubators
of future terrorists.”
~ New York Times
“I believe that for the moment the world remains blind to the biggest
totalitarianism of the twenty-first century, which is Islamic fundamentalism.
Now we must prepare ourselves seriously to face this danger. For
me, this totalitarianism is without any shadow of a doubt comparable
to Stalinism and Nazism, the biggest scourges of the twentieth
century.”
~ Pilar Rahola, Spanish feminist and former parliamentarian
“On September the 11th, 2001, the terrorists left their mark of
murder on my country and took the lives of 67 British citizens. With
the passing of months
and years, it is the natural human desire to resume a quiet life and to
put that day behind us as if waking from a dark dream. The hope that
danger has
passed is comforting, understandable and it is false. The attacks that
followed in Bali, Jakarta, Casablanca, Bombay, Mombasa, Najaf, Jerusalem,
Riyadh,
Baghdad and Istanbul were not dreams. They’re part of a global campaign
by terrorist networks to intimidate and demoralize all who oppose
them. These
terrorists target the innocent and they kill by the thousands. And they
would, if they gain the weapons they seek, kill by the millions and
not be finished.”
~ George W. Bush in London, November 19, 2003
“We are presently engaged in a world war for our civilization and
its vision of a just and humane society. Our values will either
endure this present struggle and indeed be invigorated by the ordeal,
or
like once great civilizations of the past we will stumble in the
face of barbarism and lose all that we hold dear.”
~ Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
“….we have reached a juncture, I think, where people have to agree…
about the nature of the threat, or disagree. The threat is the
proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass
destruction, and the existence of people willing to use these
technologies against large civilian populations or whole nations.
That, in sum,
is terrorism.
“For those of us who agree about the nature of the threat, I think
the time has come to recognize, in a formal way, that we have
entered a period of history analogous to the Cold War—and that we
now need
Cold War institutions to win the war on terror.
“We don’t require another mass murder next week in London, and
the week after in New York, Madrid or Sydney to understand
that this
threat will recur for years until it is defeated… A grand struggle
is unfolding, and it will need structures outside government
to win it… [for] this is a war in which ideas fight alongside
men in arms.”
~ Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal
An American Hiroshima is all too likely.
“If a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, a midget even smaller than the
one that destroyed Hiroshima, exploded in New York's Times Square,
the fireball would vaporize or destroy the theater district,
Madison
Square Garden, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal
and Carnegie Hall (along with me and my building).
“The blast would partly destroy a much larger area, including the
United Nations. On a weekday some 500,000 people would be killed.
“Could
this happen?
“Unfortunately, it could - and many experts believe
that such an attack, somewhere, is likely. The Aspen Strategy Group,
a bipartisan
assortment of policy mavens, focused on nuclear risks at its annual
meeting here last week, and the consensus was twofold: The danger
of nuclear terrorism is much greater than the public believes,
and the U.S. government hasn't done nearly enough to reduce it.…
“William
Perry, a former secretary of defense, says there is an even chance
of a nuclear terror strike within this decade - that
is, in the next six years. ‘We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe,’
Perry warns. ‘This is preventable, but we're not doing the things
that could prevent it.’”
~ Nicholas Kristof, New York Times
"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on
the success of liberty in other lands. So it is the policy of the
United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements
and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate
goal of ending tyranny in our world."
~ George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address
“Explosives that used
to be difficult to obtain are now a phone call away. Esoteric
know-how is posted on Web sites. We can't fight
the dispersion of knowledge, but we can stop the dispersion of
deadly materials. The errors over Iraq should not obscure the reality
that
terrorists are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons,
and would not hesitate to use them. Counter-proliferation—using
bribes, sanctions and even, on occasion, military force—needs to
move to
the center of foreign policy.
“What drives terrorism, however, is not easy means but strong
motives. Militant, political Islam has brainwashed thousands
of young Muslims
around the world who believe it is their duty to fight against
the modern world. This ideology of hatred has grown as the Western-supported "moderate" regimes
of the Middle East miserably failed to deliver economic opportunity
or political freedom to their people.…
“The Saudi and Pakistani cases show that once you nurture radical
ideologies, they become uncontrollable, even to the states
that created them. That's why the only way to combat this new global
terror is
to fight the ideology that fires it everywhere. So the war
on
terror is really a war of ideas. And I'm not sure we are winning
it.”
~ Farid Zacharia, Newsweek Magazine
“…unless we partner with Arabs and Muslims to change
their context, unless we help them create the free space for a war
of ideas that
will allow for a new discussion out front and out back, we're
just begging for another 9/11.”
~ Thomas Friedman, New York Times
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