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Source: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/051024/24edit.htm
A Hang-Tough Nation
(U.S. News) Mortimer B. Zuckerman - * The fact is there are radicals out there who want to kill us all - any American, men, women, and children. This culture of death was not created by intervention in Iraq. Iraq may have sharpened the resentments of some radical Islamists and given them a new excuse, but there was no Iraq war in 1993, when they first tried to blow up the World Trade Center, nor before 9/11, when they did blow it up. The attack on the USS Cole took place after U.S. forces contributed to the NATO-led operation in Kosovo that saved the lives of many, many Muslims. * The exploding torrent of Muslim energy, something not seen in 500 years, is being fueled by billions of petrodollars coming out of Saudi Arabia in support of an aggressive anti-Western religious teaching called Wahhabism. And it's spreading not just to other Muslim countries but also to the disaffected among the Muslim communities in Europe who can be trained on the Internet in almost every aspect of terrorism. * The Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggests that there is a very high probability (70%) of a successful terrorist attack within the next ten years with weapons of mass destruction, and the very sober former secretary of defense, William Perry, puts the odds of a nuclear attack in the next five years at 50%. * The president spoke none too soon in his recent speech emphasizing that Iraq has now become the central front in the war on terrorism and restating our larger purposes there. His assertion that we cannot afford to falter, as we have faltered in previous conflicts when the going got tough, is dead-on. Pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq too soon would be the equivalent of rocket fuel for the Islamofascists. Iraq would become the new Afghanistan, a safe base from which to launch attacks on us and wage a war against nonradical Muslim governments.