Military

DATE=09/29/2001

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-00992

TITLE=ON THE LINE: HOW TO GET TERRORISTS

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Anncr: On the Line a discussion of United States policy and contemporary issues. This week, "How To Get Terrorists." Here is your host, Robert Reilly.

Host: Hello and Welcome to On the Line. In the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City and part of the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush has called for a war against terrorists. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization are the prime suspects in the attacks that led to over six thousand deaths. Bin Laden's terrorist network, said Mr. Bush, is "linked to many other organizations in different counties, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan." President Bush said, "there are thousands of these terrorists in more than sixty countries." As part of the strategy to defeat the terrorists, President Bush said "we will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism."

Joining me today to discuss the campaign against terrorism are two experts. Michael Ledeen is a resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Laurie Mylroie is the author of the book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War against America, which has just been published in a revised edition. Welcome to the program.

Michael Ledeen, how do you get the terrorists who caused the horror in New York and Washington, D.C., and the network of which they are a part?

Ledeen: You have to track them down, you have to unravel the network, and you have to then either kill or arrest the terrorists. And then just as the President said, you have to go after the countries that have harbored them and given them save haven and given them support, because it really is inconceivable that all of this has happened -- sixty countries, intricate networks, billions of dollars being moved all over the world, without support of several governments.

Host: And also you don't put a network such as that in place overnight.

Ledeen: No. We know that in the United States there have been Arab sleeper networks at work for at least twenty years. When I was in the government, in the early 1980s, we were well aware of these people and they were being followed.

Host: Laurie Mylroie are you confident that the U-S government and other experts know this network well enough to go after it?

Mylroie: I suppose they will be able to go after the network. My concern is that they should understand that the principal state behind the network, supplying the capabilities Michael Ledeen described, is Iraq. It is Saddam Hussein. This is part of Saddam's ongoing war with the United States.

Host: What is the relationship between Iraq and Usama bin Laden and al-Qaida?

Mylroie: Iraqi intelligence and Usama bin Laden work very closely together. Usama bin Laden served to provide a kind of deniability for Iraqi intelligence actions.

Host: Do you agree with that, Michael Ledeen?

Ledeen: I'm fully convinced by Laurie's book. We published it at the American Enterprise Institute, and we are very proud of it. I think that there are many countries involved.

Host: Let me just tease that out a bit. A number of experts have been saying that al-Qaida is also working with Hezbollah.

Ledeen: Yes, I'm sure.

Host: Do you agree with that, both of you?

Mylroie: No.

Host: You don't agree with that?

Mylroie: Hezbollah is Shia and al-Qaida is Sunni, and it is not easy for them to work together.

Host: I understand that. But that makes it all the more remarkable, does it not, that other terrorism experts, like Yonah Alexander and others, say that they are indeed working together? What do you say?

Ledeen: I think that you have to distinguish between a driving force and a working relationship. A driving force is a country like Iraq. A working relationship to accommodate certain requirements, in certain countries, at certain times and certain places, would be other terrorist organizations, whether it is Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, or Hamas, or whatever it is. There are dozens of them out there. And we have seen them over the years cooperate in joint ventures, work together to carry out certain operations. When we were concerned about Lebanon, for example, Hezbollah was operating in Lebanon. Iran controlled Hezbollah. They operated the movement, the organization. Syria controlled the territory. So nothing could happen, they could not operate without both of those two countries. The relationship between Iran and Syria, then as now, is not an easy one. They have plenty of things that they contest. They do plenty of mean things to one another. But at certain times and on certain occasions for certain things, they are willing to cooperate and make things happen.

Host: That was a phenomenon that was familiar during the Cold War, was it not, when a number of disparate terrorist groups, whether it was the ETA in Spain, or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or Middle Eastern terrorists were joined together under the aegis of the Soviet Union. Is what I'm hearing today that the Soviet Union has more or less been replaced by Iraq as the major power behind terrorism?

Mylroie: That's right. Iraq is the major power behind terrorism directed against the United States. One of the points I make is that it is necessary to be very precise about this issue and about every major act of terrorism, to try as hard as possible to understand it as clearly as possible, because the failure to do so is likely to cost human life. It's likely to happen again. So one has to look at who targets the United States and who targets various of our allies like Israel, for example, and be specific in each instance, because it is not necessarily going to be the same thing.

Host: What ties together the attack on the U-S-S Cole last year, the attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the World Trade Center attack in 1993? Do these groups that you have been talking about interweave and form a coherent pattern that can help us identify who has been doing what in all of these?

Ledeen: Well, with the exception of Khobar Towers, which looks like the Iranians might have been involved, but in all the others for sure, there was Iraq. Iraq is the driving force behind the embassy bombings and behind these recent attacks here, as they were behind the original World Trade Center bombing and the plot to carry it out again two years later in 1995. So, Iraq has been driving a lot of this.

Host: What do you say in answer, Laurie Mylroie, to critics who say it is probably not Saddam Hussein who is working with an extremist fanatic of a perverted religious character like Usama bin Laden because, after all, Iraq is the secular state. And, therefore, they are at a certain level incompatible.

Mylroie: What is more important is that they are both Sunni. Islam does not have the separation of church and state that the West does. It is very important that they are both Sunni. Both bin Laden and Saddam are Sunni Muslims. They have the same goal to get the United States out of the Persian Gulf and overthrow the Saudi government. There are known contacts between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden. And even in this attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, it turned out that one of the hijackers met with Iraqi intelligence in Czechoslovakia prior to the attack.

Host: All of the world's attention is focused upon Afghanistan right now and the Taliban. What's the relationship between the Taliban and Iraq?

Ledeen: The Taliban has given bin Laden safe haven and an operational base. It's very hard to carry these things out if you are bouncing all around the world from city to city.

Host: Of course, but then, as many people have pointed out, the Taliban itself is a creation of Pakistan and the I-S-I intelligence services. So we can keep going here.

Ledeen: It is important not to keep going here because, look, as many people undoubtedly have pointed out in these broadcasts, we created bin Laden in the first place. So if you want to keep going back and back, eventually you will find that bin Laden started and al-Qaida was originally created with American money passed through the Saudis to Islamic groups to fight Russians in Afghanistan. That's his birthplace. That's where he first was able to get the money to start operating. This does not mean that the United States government or the other Western governments that supported the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan are responsible for a worldwide terror network that's carrying our operations today. It just shows that, from time to time, certain governments have certain interests in supporting these groups, and they do it. But the one constant driving force throughout the whole thing is Iraq. And Iraq has means, methods, and opportunity. It has all the ingredients. Saddam Hussein hates us. After all, he came within a hair's-breadth of being destroyed by us. He has vowed revenge against us. He is desperately rebuilding all of his capacities to kill even more people. And he has been trying to kill Americans ever since the Gulf War ended. He tried to kill President Bush's father, the first President Bush. And he has been after us ever since and he will not stop as long as he lives, I have no doubt.

Host: In moving against Usama bin Laden and al-Qaida, what's the first thing then that the United States ought to do according to your opinion, Laurie Mylroie?

Mylroie: I guess you get bin Laden by whatever means. It would be, to my mind, an error to become so preoccupied with bin Laden. It's a good thing to get bin Laden, but not to focus on bin Laden to the exclusion of the head of the snake, which is very bad, because one gets bogged down there.

Host: Let me just take a moment to remind our audience that this is "On The Line" and this is Robert Reilly. We are discussing this week "How to get Terrorists" with Michael Ledeen from the American Enterprise Institute, and Laurie Mylroie, author of the book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War against America. The objective of these terrorist attacks is what?

Ledeen: To kill the maximum number of Americans.

Host: To what political effect?

Ledeen: To destroy America's will to fight in the world.

Host: Let me read to you a suggestion from a professor Amin Saikal in Australia from the Arab and Islamic studies center at the National University. He says, "We are flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's bin Laden's program. That's why he did this." Re-enforcing it is the opinion of General Mirza Aslam Beg, a former Pakistani army chief: "The clash of civilizations is not a threat. It's today's reality. Washington should understand that the fuse has been lit." There is no question in reading bin Laden's own statements that that is what he wants, a clash of civilizations. He wants a war between Islam and the West. Does that fit the objectives you think Saddam Hussein wishes to pursue?

Mylroie: Yes, I think it's quite possible that Saddam want us to go fight in Afghanistan.

Host: Certainly bin Laden does, I think.

Mylroie: We have to look at this as a very complex sophisticated attack, done by ingenious and clever people. We have to respond in kind and think about things. My concern is that, if the U-S becomes too preoccupied with bin Laden and forgets about Iraq the problem is to keep Iraq in mind. We go fight in Afghanistan and get bin Laden. And then if there is another terrible terrorist attack that occurs while we are doing that, it is highly likely we'll interpret it in that context and believe that bin Laden is behind it. And that will intensify our campaign against bin Laden. Saddam will become ever more remote from consciousness. And we end up giving him a license to kill with impunity because everything always get blamed on bin Laden, and the head of the snake is never addressed.

Host: Let me put the problem or the question in this way. Many critics say the United States is focusing too much on Usama bin Laden. Even if he is killed, the problem is still going to last and it will take shape in other groups. What if Iraq, what if Saddam Hussein were removed? Would that solve the problem?

Ledeen: It would certainly help a lot. Removing bin Laden would help a lot, too. Look, we are not going to destroy evil in this or any other generation. The struggle against evil is going to go on forever, at least in this world. But that is not an excuse not to go and destroy whatever evil you can find and get rid of it. Laurie's point, with which I agree entirely, is that it would be a mistake for the Western world to look at this as a manhunt. It's not just a manhunt. And there are a lot of people trying to drive policy in that direction and moderate the Americans and calm us down and say, hey, we'll help you get Usama bin Laden, but don't drag us into these big adventures of yours, which America is so wont to carry out. But the point is that we in the West have let terrorism go on for a very long time without seriously responding to it. You will notice that there was a drop in terrorism after the fall of the Soviet empire. That was because, up until that time, they got an awful lot of assistance from the Soviet universe. They had training camps; they had false documents; they got weapons; they got transit; they got safe havens -- all the things that a terrorist organization desperately needs. It's not easy to be a terrorist. You have look at it from their point of view and see what is required to put a thing like this together. And then over the years, they found surrogates. And some of them are countries that were allied with the Soviet Union in the Middle East at that time, like Syria and Iraq. Others are countries which have sort of flip-flopped on you, changed their position from time to time. And so, a new kind of global network has been created. There is nothing dramatically new about this. And the West has been proclaiming wars against terrorism for twenty-five or thirty years.

Host: What is new about it certainly is the scale of the attempted terrorist acts. Everyone is shocked at the size of the destruction in New York and in Washington, D.C. They were stopped, however, were they not, in what were called the millennium terrorism attempts to blow up places in the United States and Jordan, and also the attempt to blow up the European parliament in Strasbourg and kill all of the delegates. But tell me now, if both of you are right about Iraq, what does the United States and this coalition that it is assembling do about it?

Mylroie: I think, in the second phase, as the Pentagon has indicated it would like to do, we go after Saddam and get rid of him. Finish the unfinished business of the Gulf War.

Ledeen: Right, the regime has to go. You have to change the regime. And these people who are talking about clash of civilizations, I think, really get it wrong sometimes, because they talk about it as if it were a clash between a religious idealism on the one hand and a materialistic, comfortable West on the other. That's not what the clash is about. The clash is between the despots and tyrants who are threatened by the very existence of a free world. The fact is that no matter what policy the Western world carried out with regard to, say, the Middle East, they would still hate us because our very existence undermines their legitimacy and threatens them, because every tyrant in the world knows that as long as there are free countries, their people would rather be free than enslaved. And so, they are threatened by their own people. So what we are called upon to do now, it seems to me, is carry out a revolutionary war against these tyrants who are supporting terrorism against us.

Host: What do you mean by a revolutionary war?

Ledeen: Overthrow the tyrannical regimes and try to replace them.

Host: Who? The U-S in another Desert Storm Operation?

Ledeen: The best way is to encourage the people inside those countries to rise up against their tyrants and replace them. There are resistance movements in some of these counties. There is an opposition movement and there are fighters inside Afghanistan, fighting the Taleban. There is an Iraqi National Congress that is challenging Saddam Hussein in Iraq and it is getting support from the American government. And we should give full support to these people.

Host: Laurie Mylroie, that certainly has a big appeal and makes a lot of sense in Afghanistan because it is not simply the Northern Alliance that is fighting against the Taleban. There is enormous disaffection within Afghanistan among various ethnic groups and because of the behavior of the Arab Jihadists and the Pakistani Jihadists who have been brought in to do the dirty work for the Taleban in their scorched earth policy. But they don't have the kind of control over Afghanistan that Saddam Hussein and the Baath party have over Iraq. So how much of a chance do you give Mike Ledeen's program for helping internal opposition when Saddam Hussein has been shown to be ruthlessly effective in eliminating any hint of internal opposition?

Mylroie: The population of Iraq hates the regime. It rose up in revolt right after the Gulf War ended, and we should have helped them then. That very hatred of the population toward the regime is what can be useful to overthrowing Saddam. And it should also be remembered that the Kurds control the northern part of the country, as well. There is a lot of disaffection. We should fund and arm and help them to establish the Iraqi National Congress, help them to establish a safe haven in southern Iraq, a no-drive zone we should establish there. And we can support them with U-S air power. And I think that the Iraqi regime will be gone very quickly because the population will go over to them.

Host: Michael Ledeen, the American military today has roughly sixty percent of the size it was at the time of the Persian Gulf War. Is the United States ready to do all that you think is required of it in this war against terrorists?

Ledeen: I don't see us marching on Baghdad. So we don't need a half-million men sent halfway around the world, as we convinced ourselves we needed in 1991. I don't think we needed it in 1991 either, for that matter. And I think if you study the war, you'll see that it could have been done right away with far less military power, concentrated military power. The first order of business is to dismantle the networks and the structures

because we are concerned today about strikes against the Western world by this network of terrorists. And that simply requires the cooperation of Western governments, freedom-loving governments, and anti-terrorist governments all over the world. And I think we are getting that. And I think we will get the intelligence we need. And if we need help from local police and special forces and things like that, I have no doubt that we will get all of that. All you have to do is read the European press on any given day and you'll see reports of terrorists being arrested and suspects being arrested and cells shut down and things locked up. Once they see that we are serious about this, people are a lot more eager to cooperate.

Host: I'm afraid that's all the time we have this week. I'd like to thank our guests -- Michael Ledeen from the American Enterprise Institute, and Laurie Mylroie, author of the Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War against America - for joining me to discuss the campaign against terrorism. This is Robert Reilly for On the Line.