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War on U.S. Didn't Begin on 9/11

(Boston Globe) Jeff Jacoby - The war we are in began 22 ago on Nov. 4, 1979, when Islamist radicals stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and, with the support of the Ayatollah Khomeini, proceeded to hold 52 Americans hostage for the next 15 months. Americans living in Lebanon were abducted - and some of them tortured and killed - by Iranian- and Syrian-backed terrorists between 1982 and 1991. A massive car bomb at the U.S. embassy in Beirut murdered 63 people in April 1983, and another attack in Lebanon in October killed 241 Marines in their barracks. And so it went when TWA Flight 847 was hijacked in 1985. When Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland. When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. When two U.S. military compounds in Saudi Arabia were destroyed in 1996. When al-Qaeda blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. When the USS Cole was attacked in 2000. Atrocity followed atrocity, but the fury of the United States was never aroused. What happened on 9/11 is that America began fighting back. And the counterattack was launched not from Washington but from the skies over southeastern Pennsylvania, when the heroic passengers of United Flight 93 rose against the terrorists, and aborted the fourth attack. American eyes have opened to the threat from Islamofascism, the totalitarian ideology that has succeeded Nazism and communism as the foremost menace to the norms of civilization. We have taken the fight to the terrorists, but we have not yet taken on the states that are their mainstay and refuge: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. The governments of those three countries, more than any other, were responsible for Sept. 11 and the 22 years of terrorism that preceded it. Until they are toppled or transformed, the war against us will go on. We are in a fight to the death. Either America will destroy the terror masters or the terror masters will keep destroying Americans. Let us strive to be like the heroes of Flight 93 - to have the moral clarity to see what must be done, and the strength of will to do it.
2003-09-12 00:00:00
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