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wingnutx

Registered: 09/24/00
Posts: 2,287

TERRORIST DESPAIR

#1834065 - 08/20/03 03:15 PM (20 years, 7 months ago)

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/3609.htm

TERRORIST DESPAIR

By RALPH PETERS

August 20, 2003 -- THE first strategy employed by Iraqi dead- enders and their terror- tourist allies failed miserably: They attacked U.S. forces head-on - and paid a bitter price.
With their comrades killed, wounded or captured, their leaders apprehended (another one yesterday), their bases of support whittled away and U.S. resolve only hardened, our enemies have turned to a new, desperate strategy.

Over the past several days, the Iraqi hardliners and their terrorist allies attacked an oil pipeline and a water main. Yesterday, a terrorist drove a truck bomb into the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing dozens and wounding more than 100 people.

Our enemies' initial "Mogadishu Strategy" - based on the faulty notion that if you kill Americans they pack up and go home - was a disaster for them. Our response devastated their already-crippled organization. Now, with reduced capabilities and decayed leadership, they've turned to attacking soft targets. It's the best they can do.

It's ugly. But it's an indicator of their weakness, not of strength.

Demoralized by constant defeats, our enemies have become alarmed by the quickening pace of reconstruction. Consequently, we will see more attacks on infrastructure, on international aid workers and on Iraqis laboring to rebuild their country.

We'll also see al Qaeda and other terrorist groups become the senior partners among our enemies, as Ba'athist numbers and capabilities dwindle. There is more innocent blood to come.

Yet the bombing of the U.N. headquarters at the Canal Hotel was a self-defeating act. Even if it frightens the U.N. off (and it just might accomplish the opposite) the attack reminds the world yet again of the savagery of radical Islamic terrorists and the brutality of those whom we deposed in Baghdad.

Like 9/11, the Canal Hotel attack, though impressive at the moment, will prove another disaster for the terrorists.

Our enemies are frantically trying to prove to the people of Iraq and the world that they remain powerful and viable. But they aren't powerful or viable: They're reduced to a faltering program of assassinations, blowing up aid workers and infrastructure attacks that will alienate the people of Iraq. Any support they gain through such actions will be negligible, while the anger they have rekindled can only harm their cause.

Our enemies hope to make Iraq ungovernable. Yet, contrary to the images on TV, the country is making swifter progress than we had any right to expect:

* It was our Kurdish allies who captured Iraq's former vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, and turned him over to us yesterday.

* For all his rhetoric about raising an army of believers, Moqtada Sadr, a hate-filled Shi'a mullah greedy for power, is afraid to attempt anything of consequence. Senior Shi'a clerics despise him, while the people of the Shi'a heartland distrust him.

* Even the Sunni-Arab center of Iraq has become less restive than it was a month ago.

The signs for the dead-enders are all bad. They had to do something dramatic.

And if the remaining Ba'athists are despondent, the traveling terrorists of al Qaeda are outraged that the Iraqi people have failed to rise up against the infidels. It's likely that a non-Iraqi drove that truck into the Canal Hotel.

Why attack the United Nations? Other than the ease with which it could be struck? Several reasons.

First, the U.N. dealt a blow to the hardliners when the Security Council recently recognized the legitimacy of Iraq's Governing Council. Second, the Ba'athists will never forgive the U.N. for its support, no matter how lukewarm, for sanctions and weapons inspections in the past - or for failing to restrain coalition forces last March.

And for al Qaeda and associated terrorists, the United Nations is a Western-dominated tool of Christians and Zionists - despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We are not facing reasonable men. They have a deep and furious need to hate.

The attack on the U.N. headquarters also was an effort to undercut reconstruction efforts. Our enemies hope that, by attacking aid workers, they can prevent other international agencies from coming to Iraq, that they can drive a wedge between the coalition and the Johnny-come-latelies nudging their way into reconstruction programs.

This will be a moment of truth for the United Nations. America and its partners have demonstrated that we will not be deterred by bloodstained bullies. Will the U.N. honor its dead by showing some backbone? Or will it flee Baghdad, handing the terrorists a real, if minor, victory? If the United Nations discredits itself by running away, it will hasten its long decline. If it takes a stand against terror and goes right back to work in Iraq, it may regain a good bit of its faded luster.

The truck bomb didn't simply attack the U.N. - it struck at the U.N.'s idea of itself. The lesson the U.N. must take away is that no one can be neutral in the struggle with evil.

Within our own country, every potential Howard Dean voter will declare that the U.N. headquarters bombing proves, for all time, that our occupation has failed, can never succeed, should never have been tried, and, anyway, that we're all bad people for disturbing poor, innocent dictators. Then they'll trot out the nonsense that, since Iraq has become a magnet for international terrorists, we've failed on that count, too.

On the contrary. We've taken the War Against Terror to our enemies. It's far better to draw the terrorists out of their holes in the Middle East, where we don't have to read them their rights, than to wait for them to show up in Manhattan again.

In Iraq, we can just kill the bastards. And we're doing it with gusto.

Yes, the Canal Hotel attack proves that terrorists are rushing to Iraq like moths to a hurricane lamp. But when that happens, the lamp wins, not the moths.

Retired Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters' next book is "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."

Extras:

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