American presidents have tried the law of the courtroom and the law of the jungle to deter Middle East terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens over the past quarter-century. Each method has gained America only brief respites in this unconventional form of war.
But both jungle and courtroom have their place in a global anti-terrorist strategy, as President Clinton has finally grasped. The question for–and about–Clinton now is whether he will be ready, and able, to follow up on the serious security and human challenges that the Middle East poses to every American leader.
The “Wag-the-Dog” crowd wonders whether the Clinton missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan were justified or necessary. From the evidence presented, it is clear they were acts of national self-defense, as permitted by Article 51 of the UN Charter and a 1996 U.S. law authorizing retaliation.
Much of the evidence seems to come from a member of the Osama bin Laden gang that organized the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the documents the informant has given investigators since his arrest.
Information on bin Laden should not have been that difficult for the CIA to track down, since the agency helped create him during the clandestine war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Pakistani intelligence service, which still is very active inside Afghanistan, channeled U.S. funds and Arab guerrilla fighters like bin Laden, who is Saudi, into that war and the civil conflict that still rages.
But the unintended consequence of the help to Islamic fighters who now fight America as the next godless power to be expelled from the region does not undermine the moral and legal basis of retaliatory strikes.
Clinton did not have to wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt to punish, destroy and deter bandits hiding out in two broken states that lack the will or ability to control them.
Yes, punish. An unstated, and officially unstatable, motive also triggered the raid: vengeance. For diplomatic and political reasons, Clinton cannot openly acknowledge that revenge was a proper motive in this case. But it was. The Americans and Africans who were slaughtered so indiscriminately in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, deserve nothing less than this affirmation in fire that they have not been forgotten.
They in fact deserve more. They, and those who died in previous terrorist attacks such as the bombing of Pan Am 103 by Libya and those who would die in the future operations of bin Laden’s or other gangs, deserve a sustained, focused national policy to bring terrorists to justice and to challenge the authority and existence of states that support or harbor them.
A first step is recognizing that such a strategy will require severe realism. America’s war on terrorism in the Middle East has been long on cause, short on effect.
Ronald Reagan also cited the self-defense argument to justify his airstrike on Libya in 1986. But that raid led to new terrorism from Tripoli, possibly including the bombing of Pan Am 103 in December 1988.
George Bush, putting together Operation Desert Storm in the autumn of 1990 when conclusive evidence of Libyan involvement came into American hands, decided to pursue the Libyans through the United Nations and international law, an effort that still has not brought justice or arrests. The administration’s move to arrange a trial in The Hague on Libyan terms is a cosmetic gesture, intended to embarrass Moammar Gadhafi.
Other outrages have gone without effective retaliation: The assassination of two U.S. diplomats by Palestinian guerrillas in Khartoum in 1973; U.S. diplomats taken hostage in Tehran in 1979; the Syrian-backed bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983; and the attacks on U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996.
America’s open society, its laws and political ethos, all inhibit an exact and systematic taking of an eye for an eye. The scale measuring American victims against successful retribution is always unbalanced, in the terrorists’ favor.
That makes it necessary for an American president to use to the maximum any and every opening he gets to reduce the effectiveness and reach of terrorist gangs and those who support them, especially when he uses force.
Clinton now faces the test of showing that Aug. 20 was not a national security one-night stand.
The administration has vaunted the superb intelligence and evidence it has gathered and the effective force it has amassed in this case. It is hard to believe that U.S. action has exhausted what Clinton could and should do to stop bin Laden’s bloody extremism.
