Many in the chattering classes in the United States recently devoted their energy to the controversy about ABC’s television film “The Path to 9/11.”
Partisanship seems to dominate virtually every discussion these days. So it was no surprise that, just as Republicans have sought to minimize the lack of attention paid to the terror threat by the Bush administration, so, too, have Democrats resisted the notion that the failures of the Clinton administration be highlighted, as the film did with some respects.
With so much attention devoted to wacko conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks available on the Internet, and with seemingly more respectable conversations conducted by our political elites devoted to assigning blame to their foes and absolving their friends, intelligent discussions of the issue have been largely crowded out by the din of nonsense.
That makes for good shouting matches on the all-news cable stations, but like many Americans, my tolerance for the genre is limited. The painful truth about 9/11 is that outside of a few experts on the issue – such as scholar Daniel Pipes or journalist Steven Emerson – there were precious few writing and speaking about the danger of Islamic terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001.
And these men were routinely ignored or derided by more influential figures in the media, academia and halls of power. If the FBI and CIA operatives failed to gain the attention of their political masters for an all-out commitment to resist the murderers before that date (a sore point for some viewers of the ABC film), it was because so few were prepared to speak out about the danger at that time.
Hence, the political support necessary for the drastic increase in intelligence and military resources devoted to the fight was simply lacking. If extraordinary measures such as federal forces’ eavesdropping on suspected terrorists are still considered controversial today by some, even more limited measures aimed at rooting terror front groups were unthinkable prior to 9/11.
And that should lead us all directly to the present-day issue of Iran. Just like Al Qaeda, which, as many have observed, “hid in plain sight” from the view of the West, Iran’s drive to produce nuclear weapons has been anything but a secret.
When not denying the Holocaust or threatening to destroy Israel, Iran’s loopy leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has openly bragged about the possibility. The Tehran regime even held a bizarre public ceremony back in April replete with costumed dancers to commemorate its latest step toward processing uranium in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
And Iran is not only working on a nuclear capability, it is also striving for the acquisition of missiles that will deliver such weapons not only to Israel (the Iranians’ presumed first target) but to Western capitals, too. As former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated, there is no comparison between the Iranian situation and that which confronted the West prior to the invasion of Iraq. Unlike then, “we’re not guessing” about what they’ve got, “we know.”
The prospect of a regime run by Islamist fundamentalist Shiites gaining such a weapon and their ability to use it is one that ought to scare every sensible person in the West.
Some experts tell us that we must learn to live with a nuclear Iran. They have a point, because unless the United States and its allies start acting as if this really matters, it’s only a matter of time before Tehran succeeds in its quest.
But the problem with the notion that this prospect can be lived with lies in the very difference between past nuclear threats and this one. A nuclear Soviet Union was certainly a dangerous foe, but as Netanyahu pointed out, the Soviets would never do anything that endangered their own survival. Thus, whenever disputes between the Soviet Union and the West went to the brink, Moscow was generally as interested as Washington in edging away from the precipice.
But the notion that we can be just as confident about deterring the mullahs of Tehran is highly dubious. Ahmadinejad and his religious mentors buy into an ideology that prizes celestial martyrdom, not terrestrial conquest.
In addition to hoping to generate the return of a “Twelfth Imam” – a Shiite messiah – some in Ahmadinejad’s circle have already made plain that even if Iran were to suffer a nuclear response from Israel after a strike on the Jewish state, they would still “win” since more of them would be left, and those who died would be happy martyrs.