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MR. MATTHEW A. LEVITT
Senior Fellow in Terrorism Studies, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

PLENARY SESSION I
“The Causes of the 9/ll Attacks and the Scope of the Threat”

The attacks in New York, Washington, and Sommerset County, Pennsylvania, on September 11 brought the specter of international terrorism into the living room of every member of the global community. That morning’s events will go down in history as the “where-were-you-when,” the combined Kennedy assassination and Pearl Harbor of this generation. In fact, September 11 was a watershed event in the history of terrorism. Until September 11, fewer than 1,000 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks in the United States or abroad in over 30 years. Until this attack, no one terrorist operation killed more than 500 people at one time.[i] Citizens of 85 different countries suffered casualties on September 11.[ii]

Most scholars see the 1968 hijacking of an Israeli El-Al flight by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as a watershed event marking the advent of modern-day terrorism. Since then, scholars have asserted time and again that the primary purpose of terrorist attacks is to draw attention to a cause or a plight, not to kill people. In the words of one scholar, “terrorists want a lot of people watching and listening and not a lot of people dead.”[iii] And in fact, the hijackers of at least one of the flights played on this assumption, telling their passengers they intended to land at an airport and present their demands to the U.S. government.

September 11 ushered in a new era of terrorism in which terrorism is not merely a means of conveying a message; in part, it is the message. Some experts recognized this shift earlier than others. In 1994, former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey assessed that “today’s terrorists don’t want a seat at the table, they want to destroy the table and everyone sitting at it.”[iv] In the summer of 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism published a report noting that more and more terrorist attacks were designed “to kill as many people as possible” and that fewer and fewer attacks “were likely to be followed by claims of responsibility or lists of political demands.”[v]

The PFLP has resurfaced over the past 24 months, again posing an immediate terrorist threat in Israel. PFLP terrorists have carried out a series of attacks, including car and suicide bombings and the assassination of an Israeli government minister. Nonetheless, however barbaric and criminal their tactics, they are still trying to convey a message. Groups like the PFLP are not lesser terrorists for focusing on an immediate arena, for killing citizens of one country but not another, but they do pose less of a threat to the international community than transnational groups.

This is no longer the age of radical Palestinian alphabet-soup-groups—the PFLP, the DFLP, the PFLP-GC, et al. This is the age of transnational radical religious extremism. It is the age of loosely affiliated networks of like-minded religious extremists like al-Qaeda—the “base,” which in 1998 adopted the banner name: “The World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders.”

The enormity of September’s synchronized suicide hijackings, the scale of destruction and loss, the killing for the sake of killing, is beyond comprehension. And yet, ironically, this only heightens the desire and need to understand what would drive human beings to harbor such blind hate and engage in this kind of indiscriminate destruction.

As recently as 1998, noted terrorism experts still thought Osama bin Laden was a “Gucci terrorist”—a financier who remained aloof from and uninvolved in operational matters.[vi] It wasn’t long, however, before bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network was prioritized above all other terrorist groups in the U.S. government’s tiered threat matrix.

The threat is real. There are radical extremists out there; they mean to do us harm; and there is no one answer to the burning question: “why?”

Many commentators, both in the Middle East and in the West, have asserted that attacks such as September 11, while barbaric and criminal, are a desperate response to U.S. policies in the Middle East, especially U.S. support for Israel.[vii] In fact, there is no correlation between actual al-Qaeda threats or attacks against U.S. interests and the Arab-Israeli peace process. While there is sincere and deeply rooted anger and frustration in the Middle East toward events that are going on in Israel and the Palestinian territories, attacks such as those on the World Trade Center are carried out as acts of defiance against perceived Western arrogance, economic hegemony, and the morally decaying impact of Western culture on Islamic values and society. All these are widely held perceptions, but only the most radical elements actually carry out abhorrent acts of terrorism.

Bin Laden’s rhetoric only recently picked up the theme of the Palestinian cause, much the same way Saddam Hussein sought to draw grassroots support from the Arab world during the Gulf War by firing Scud missiles at Israel and attempting to link his war to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Islamic extremist attacks against the U.S. gained momentum throughout the 1990s, even as the American-driven peace process made headway. We now know that attacks on U.S. forces in Somalia were in part orchestrated by al-Qaeda elements. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Manila-based plot to blow up U.S. airliners in 1995, the attack on the American liaison mission in Riyadh in 1995, the bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the Africa embassy bombings in 1998 indicate a determination to attack U.S. interests irrespective of the peace process. In fact, aside from these known attacks, innumerable credible threats persisted throughout this period, which saw slow but steady progress in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. The September 11 attacks were planned at least two and a half years earlier, long before the breakdown in Israel-Palestinian negotiations. The Palestinian cause is not what drives al-Qaeda, nor is it what prompts al-Qaeda or its affiliated groups to target the West and America in particular. The unfortunate state of Israeli-Palestinian affairs does, however, feed the pool of potential recruits and provide grist for rhetoric and incitement.

Nor are attacks limited to U.S. targets. In fact, several al-Qaeda terrorist plots were foiled in Europe over this period.

On February 4, 2002, French authorities arrested four Algerians plotting to attack the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg in December 2000, among other attacks. One of those arrested is also suspected of providing logistical support to the suicide assassins who killed Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masoud just days before September 11.[viii] In a 20-minute preoperational surveillance video filming the cathedral and the marketplace beneath it, the terrorists are heard saying, “This cathedral is God’s enemy. … Here we see the enemies of God as they stroll about. You will go to hell, God willing.”

Italian and German authorities uncovered an al-Qaeda-associated plot, involving terrorists based in Britain and cells in Frankfurt and Milan. The group planned to release sarin gas into the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France, during a session of Parliament in February of last year. The cells were reportedly directly funded by bin Laden and planned subsequent attacks against prominent buildings throughout Europe.[ix]

Jordanian authorities foiled a series of attempted al-Qaeda terrorist attacks targeting Westerners around the turn of the millennium, including plots against hotels frequented by Westerners and Christian religious sites such as Jesus’ baptismal site on the Jordan River.

In March 1998 European intelligence services broke up a radical Islamic extremist cell planning to bomb the World Cup soccer matches that summer in France.[x]

Sixty people have been killed and many more wounded in seven terrorist attacks targeting Westerners and Christians in Pakistan since October 2001.[xi] Pakistani authorities recently arrested two radical Islamic militants and found in their possession maps of three Christian sites in Karachi with markings showing entry and exit points for a presumed planned attack.[xii]

Today’s international terrorists target a broad range of nationalities, governments, policies, and religions. Telephone wiretaps and microphones planted in the Milan apartment of Essid Sami Ben Khmais (also known as “the Saber”), a senior al-Qaeda operative convicted in Italy with other members of the Milan cell for their activities in support of terrorism, highlight this wide range of targets. “Our enemy is not just the Americans or the Israelis or all the enemies of God,” cell member Lased Ben Heni noted. Specifically noting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Tunisian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and their participation in negotiation processes with elements Heni considered enemies, Heni added, “We have the enemy in our own home because these [Muslim leaders] are negotiating with them.”[xiii]

Many factors drive this radical Islamic threat. One factor is that as domestic Islamic extremist groups were suppressed in states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria, they broadened their tactical sights to include America, which they saw as the regimes’ primary backer.

But the primary factor is an extremist variation of Islam that sees regimes throughout the region as corrupt, insufficiently Islamic, and/or controlled by the West—especially America. Most of all, adherents to this radical ideology abhor the presence of non-Muslims in the Islamic holy land of Arabia. It may not be coincidental that the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked on August 7, 1998. Eight years earlier, on August 7, 1990, the first U.S. troops were dispatched to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under Operation Desert Shield. By these standards, even conservative Saudi Arabia is considered an infidel regime.

A growing trend of hatred toward the United States is also the result of radical religious groups expressing what the National Commission on Terrorism described as “visions of a post-apocalyptic future,” and in other cases of “ethnic hatred.”[xiv]

Tom Friedman is right when he talks of “undeterrables—the terrorists who hate us more than they love their own lives.” But he’s only partly right when he explains that this is the result of what he calls the “dignity gap.” In his words:

These undeterrables are young men who are full of rage, because they are raised with a view of Islam as the most prefect form of monotheism, but they look around their home countries and see widespread poverty, ignorance, and repression. And they are humiliated by it, humiliated by the contrast with the West and how it makes them feel, and it is this humiliation—this poverty of dignity—that drives them to suicidal revenge. The quest for dignity is a powerful force in human relations.[xv]

In fact, something must transform a frustrated and humiliated deterrable—the majority of people in the Middle East, and for that matter the world, who harbor some level of anger—into an undeterrable. The humiliation itself is not enough to drive people to “suicidal revenge,” but it is more than enough for radical extremist elements to play on and manipulate in their efforts to gain recruits, funds, and support.

In a sense, we are responsible for the transformation of these young men from deterrrables to undeterrrables. True, America is resented for its success and hated for its dominance. But another factor that transforms an otherwise passive and impotent hate into an active and immediate danger is contempt. In the eyes of radical Islamic extremists, they are the ones who won the Cold War by defeating the more ruthless and dangerous of the two superpowers. In contrast, they perceive the United States as soft, pampered, weak, unable to suffer casualties or make sacrifices. Attacks against America—from Somalia to East Africa to Saudi Arabia and Yemen —brought angry words and a few Tomahawk missiles, but little else. The conclusion drawn by bin Laden and others, explains Bernard Lewis, “was that the United States had become feeble and frightened and incapable of responding.” We emboldened the radicals by suggesting that the more undeterrable they become, the more deterrable we become.

The resultant attacks of September 11, explains Professor Lewis, “were intended to be the opening salvo of a large-scale campaign to force America and their allies out of Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world, to overthrow corrupt tyrants America supports, and to prepare the ground for the final world struggle.”[xvi] Even if one were to add rescuing Palestinians and Iraqis from perceived American oppression, reestablishing the Caliphate, and a host of other interim objectives, we would still be hated and the threat would still be there because for the radical Islamic fundamentalists this is a historical and theological conflict. It is our way of life with which they take issue.

Radical Islamic fundamentalists have successfully played upon a deep-rooted persecution complex—that embodies everything from the way Muslims are portrayed in Hollywood to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the conflicts in Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; the plight of Iraqis mistakenly portrayed as suffering from American-led sanctions instead of from Saddam Hussein; and American support for Israel—to draw support, funds, recruits, and more. Radical Islamists manipulate issue-specific examples of conflict and suffering to enlist foot soldiers and indoctrinate them into the larger international Jihadist theology underpinning their war against the West.

Addressing root causes of terrorism is critically important, but whether we find satisfying answers to explain it or not, the fact is that radical Islamic extremists are targeting the free world—in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. We must understand the threat, and we must respond to it.

Another fact is that no combination of counterterrorist tactics will stamp out terrorism, even in the face of an international assault on terrorism of the kind we see today. Terrorism, in fact, cannot be eradicated like polio or smallpox. There will always be grievances, causes, conditions that, coupled with a healthy dose of evil, will lead people to target civilian noncombatants for political purposes or even as a means in itself.

Without belittling the significance of long-term responses to September 11—such as democratization, education, and improving economic conditions, and recognizing the need to resolve outstanding regional security issues surrounding Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Kashmir and the larger Indo-Pakistani conflict—the primary response to the current terrorist offensive must address the immediate threat and vulnerability posed by the September terrorist attacks and the multiple terrorist attacks attempted since then.

The threat of international terrorism is multifaceted. There are domestic groups, international groups, and terrorist groups of “global reach.” There are officially designated state sponsors of terrorism, unofficially recognized state facilitators of terrorism, entrenched networks of front companies and organizations—including purportedly charitable and humanitarian organizations—and wealthy individuals supporting and financing terrorism. There are large-scale attacks and small-scale attacks; attacks of mass destruction and attacks of mass disruption; random attacks, attacks of opportunity, and targeted attacks.

There are many facets to the terrorist threat we fact today, but the most critical component of this threat, what makes it so dangerous, is the nature of the international network of terrorist groups and operatives, the transnational matrix of relationships—both operational and logistical—that together comprise what is commonly described as the “infrastructure” of international terrorism.

One of the key lessons so painfully learned on September 11 is that counterterrorism efforts must target these operational and logistical cells with equal vigor. The attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania could never have been carried out without the tremendous logistical assistance of a sophisticated and well-entrenched support network. The 19 al-Qaeda hijackers were funded and facilitated by dozens of individuals, cells, front organizations, and affiliated groups that provided a variety of logistical support activities essential to carrying out an operation of this magnitude. Among the terrorists subsequently linked to the September 11 plot are a disturbing number of individuals in an alarming number of countries who, while previously known to the authorities as Islamic extremists (and in some cases the subjects of surveillance), were not assigned the priority they deserved because they were merely “terrorist supporters,” not actual “terrorist operatives.”

Al-Qaeda, an umbrella organization encompassing a variety of like-minded terrorist cells, is in fact a microcosm of international terrorism. International terrorist groups do not operate in isolation, and the links between these disparate organizations highlight the matrix of illicit activity that defines relationships within the circle of international terrorism. Individual terrorists often work for several organizations in their careers, spreading knowledge and methodology from group to group. Terrorist leaders meet and cooperate with one another to plan and execute terrorist attacks. And funds designated for individual groups are often intermingled in a single financial conduit.

Consider the following examples:

•             On February 15, 2002, Turkish police arrested two Palestinians and a Jordanian who entered Turkey illegally from Iran on their way to conduct attacks in Israel. The three were members of Beyyiat el-Imam, a group linked to al-Qaeda. They had fought for the Taliban, received terrorist training in Afghanistan, and were dispatched on their mission by senior al-Qaeda leader Abu Musaab Zarqawi, then in Iran. German authorities have linked Zarqawi, who subsequently moved to central Iraq and is now believed to be in Syria, to a terrorist cell arrested in Germany that had been operating under the name “Tawhid.” German prosecutors announced that the group, based in Britain but controlled by Zarqawi, was planning to attack U.S. or Israeli interests in Germany. Eight men were arrested, and raids yielded hundreds of forged passports from Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Denmark, and other countries. In August 2002, Turkish authorities arrested another Beyyiat el-Imam member, a German-born Turk with links to al-Qaeda and Chechen rebels.

•             The Saudi-funded International Islamic Relief Organization has financed the activities of a diverse cross section of international terrorist groups, from al-Qaeda to Abu Sayyaf to Hamas.[xvii] The al-Taqwa banking system—which the U.S. government added to its official terrorist lists in November 2001 because of the system’s links to al-Qaeda—served as a preferred financial conduit for Hamas funds as well. A 1996 report by Italian intelligence reportedly further linked al-Taqwa to Palestinian terrorist organizations, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, and the Egyptian al-Gama’at al-Islamiyah.[xviii] On August 29, 2002, the United States and Italy, in cooperation with the Bahamas and Luxembourg, designated 25 individuals and institutions linked to al-Taqwa as terrorist entities and blocked their assets.  In its press release, the Treasury Department announced that Bank al-Taqwa was established in 1988 with significant backing from the Muslim Bortherhood and financed radical groups such as the Palestinian Hamas, Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group, Tunisia’s An-Nahda, and Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization.[xix]

•             US officials have established that the USS Cole bombers were directly linked to bin Laden and the 9-11 terrorists, and are therefore especially keen on identifying international terrorist connections stemming from the Cole bombing. For example, two of the September 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, met a Yemeni national named Tawfiq bin Attash in Malaysia in January 2000. The meeting took place just after a failed attempt by bin Attash and others to blow up a US warship, the USS Sullivans, in Aden harbor in 1999. Attash is suspected of playing a central role in the successful bombing of the USS Cole less than a year later.[xx] On February 13, al-Qaeda terrorist Sameer Mohammed Ahmed al-Hada accidentally blew himself up trying to throw a grenade in the course of a police chase in San’a. In fact, al-Hada was a known quantity to Yemeni authorities, who paid him no attention until pressed by the United States. One of al-Hada’s brothers-in-law was Khalid al-Midhar, a hijacker on Flight 77 who participated in the terrorist planning meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 together with suspects involved in the Cole bombing. Another brother-in-law was Mustafa Abdulkader Aabed al-Ansari, one of the 17 terrorists named on the February 11 FBI threat advisory alert, and his father, Ahmad al-Hada, ran an al-Qaeda communications switchboard for bin Laden. The family lived openly in a San’a neighborhood.

•             In two separate cases in Jordan, 18 terrorists have been indicted on terror-related charges. In one case, 13 people were accused of participating in a 2001 plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Amman; in the other, several people were charged with plotting, with Iranian support, to fire rockets at Israel from Jordan and to smuggle weapons from Syria to Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in the West Bank via Jordan. Indicted in absentia with the latter group was Abu Miliq, a Palestinian with Syrian travel documents who is accused of providing the group with explosives and arms. Abu Miliq was convicted in absentia in September 2000 by the Amman State Security Court for planning attacks for al-Qaeda-associated terrorists targeting tourist sites in Jordan during the millennial celebrations. The joint terrorist plot by al-Qaeda-linked Abu Miliq and the Iranian-sponsored would-be rocketeers is especially interesting in light of reports that first appeared in the Times of London on February 1, 2002, that a senior bin Laden operative—a Yemeni who goes by the alias Salah Hajir—has been meeting in Beirut with leaders of Hezbollah, Iran’s main terrorist proxy.

•             The Return Brigades (Kata’ed al Awda), an amalgam of secular and Islamist Palestinian groups dominated by Fatah radicals from Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm, and al-Nathir (the Harbinger) another radical Fatah offshoot, have been linked to renegade Fatah Colonel Munir al Maqdah (Abu Hassan), who is closely linked to Syria and Iran.[xxi] The Return Brigades has taken credit for several attacks and reportedly tried to assassinate the head of PA General Intelligence in August 2002.[xxii] Al Maqdah, whose headquarters is in the Ayn al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court in 2001 and is also wanted by Lebanese authorities.[xxiii] Palestinian officials believe al Maqdah was behind a Return Brigades leaflet distributed in Nablus and Jenin in August 2002 announcing that several Israeli leaders were on its “hit list.”[xxiv] According to a mainstream Fatah official, al Maqdah “has very good ties with Syria and Iran. These countries pay him millions of dollars. He is using the money to undermine the local Fatah leadership and establish his own bases of power here.”[xxv] According to press reports, Iran has traditionally funded Palestinian dissident groups in the Lebanese refugee camps, including al Maqdah’s, through the Institute of the Palestinian Martyrs.[xxvi] Israeli authorities confirmed al Maqdah’s link to terrorist elements in the West Bank when they arrested Nasser Aweis and Jamal Ahwal. Al Maqdah apparently sent Aweis between $40,000 and $50,000 for weapons, expenses, and bomb-making materials, and Aweis reported back to al Maqdah by telephone on the success of his attacks.[xxvii] Ahwal reportedly received an average of $5,000 a week from al Maqdah for similar purposes.[xxviii] Al Maqdah also funded Ahmed Abu Hamidan (abu Fahdi), a colonel in the PA’s National Security Organization who manufactured explosives and supplied, funded, and directed terrorists to carry out attacks.[xxix]

•             According to American and European intelligence officials cited in the Washington Post, Hezbollah is “increasingly teaming up with al Qaeda on logistics and training for terrorist operations.”[xxx] The alliance is described as “ad hoc,” “tactical,” and “informal,” involving mid- and low-level operatives.[xxxi] American and European intelligence officials cited in the Post reiterated this concern just last week, noting “the most worrisome” of al-Qaeda’s new “tactical, ad-hoc alliances” is with Hezbollah.[xxxii] Acknowledging that the cooperation between these Sunni and Shiite groups marks a shift from their “years of rivalry,” the intelligence officials said al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have in fact “recently cooperated on explosives and tactics training, money laundering, weapons smuggling and acquiring forged documents.[xxxiii]

•             Iran provides safe haven to two senior al-Qaeda leaders plotting further al-Qaeda attacks and “dozens of other al-Qaeda fighters, and possibly more.” The two al-Qaeda leaders, Saif al Adel and Mahfouz Ould Walid (also known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian), live openly in the eastern border towns of Mashhad and Zabol. Al-Adel, an Egyptian affiliated with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and the head of al-Qaeda’s security committee, is featured on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list for his role in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. Abu Hafs, whom the Pentagon mistakenly declared killed in Khost, Afghanistan, in January 2002, is a senior bin Laden deputy who heads al-Qaeda’s religious committee. Together, al Adel and Abu Hafs are said to function as al-Qaeda’s military committee in lieu of Ayman al Zawahiri, who has gone into hiding, and Mohammed Atef , who was killed.

Some al-Qaeda operatives were apparently told to leave Iran after President Bush called Iran a member of the “axis of evil.” Yet an Arab intelligence officer told the Washington Post, “A number of captured al-Qaeda operatives said the Iranians told them before their departure that they may be called on at some point to assist Iran. But they were not told how.”

The Iranian link to al-Qaeda, however, is not new. According to U.S. intelligence reports cited by the New York Times, bin Laden operatives approached Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) agents in 1995 and again in 1996 offering to join forces against America.  In fact, phone records obtained by U.S. officials investigating the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania revealed that 10 percent of the calls made from the satellite phone used by bin Laden and his key lieutenants were to Iran.

Meanwhile, the threat of new and devastating terrorist attacks is still very real. Based on intelligence found in Afghanistan, 13 individuals were arrested in Singapore for planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy, American business interests, and buses shuttling U.S. servicemen.[xxxiv] Richard Reid almost successfully blew up an airliner en route to America, and a combination of solid intelligence work and good luck led to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomber.”[xxxv] In his State of the Union address, the president warned that thousands of terrorists are “spread throughout the world like ticking bombs.”[xxxvi] Long litanies of terrorist attacks have been thwarted and operational cells rounded up over the past year. The anniversary of the September 11 attacks was met with several credible and specific threats, from multiple sources, leading to the closure of a string of embassies and consulates and the heightening of the color-coded threat alert system from yellow to orange.

The war on terrorism requires clarity and consistency. While the objective of eradicating the Taliban and al-Qaeda and securing a stable transition to peace in Afghanistan is clear, the goals of the broader war on terrorism, beyond those two organizations, remain poorly defined. For some time, Washington policymakers have discussed phase two of the war—that is, liberating the Iraqi people and eliminating the real and immediate Iraqi threat to the United States and its allies. But the parameters and tactics of phase one and a half—dealing with the rest of the terrorist groups and state sponsors in this transnational matrix—are still being debated.

As the war on terrorism proceeds, it is critical that the international community define the war on terrorism not in terms of ethnicities, religions, or regions, but rather as a war against terrorism of any kind, for any reason—as a means of expression, rebellion, or resistance or to further a political, social, national, or any other goal.

The need to live up to the grand statements about this being a war on terrorism writ large is critical. History shows that an even greater risk to the global community will emerge if world leaders fail to live up to their grand pledges to fight terrorism; such a failure will doom future pleas to end terror to be nothing more than diplomatic background noise.

More ominously, how long will it take for the acceptance of suicide bombing as a legitimate form of expression or resistance—even for a cause as legitimate as the establishment of a Palestinian state—to make its way from the Middle East to other corners of the world? How long before frustrated groups with stagnating causes start blowing up buses in Europe, North America, Russia, and beyond? Any terrorism we fail to address today will come back to haunt us tomorrow.

For example, Palestinian groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have asserted in interviews and official manifestos that Americans are “enemies of the Palestinian people” and declared that Americans “are a target for future attacks.” In June 2002, an official Hamas website featured a chat-room discussion on murdering a group of five to fifteen American citizens. The chat-room participants discussed how best to kill the “American dogs,” covering such options as running them over, throwing a Molotov cocktail at their car, burning them in their cabin on the beach, poisoning them, or shooting them “as an example for others like them.” Such murders would make “Americans understand they are not safe in Muslim countries.”

There can be no acceptable terrorism. This means addressing issues such as state sponsors of terrorism, especially Syria and Iran. It means addressing the threat from rogue regimes like Iraq, and addressing the real and immediate threats posed to the national and global security interests of the world community from “terrorist groups of global reach” —including, but by no means limited to, al-Qaeda. As Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld stated earlier this month, “Murderers are not martyrs. Targeting civilians is immoral, whatever the excuse. Terrorists have declared war on civilization, and states like Iran, Iraq and Syria are inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing.”[xxxvii]

Terrorism will always occur, which is why there is no exit strategy to fighting it. Counterterrorism is a form of conflict management, not conflict resolution. To bear any fruit, counterterrorism techniques must be used as comprehensively, consistently, and cooperatively as possible. The war on terrorism will only succeed in dismantling terrorist groups’ operational, logistical and financial networks—and, by extension, preventing terrorist attacks—if the governments and agencies involved act in concert and if they fight terrorism on all its fronts, in all its iterations. There can be no good terrorists.