The question can be taken to mean many things. Who was behind the attacks that Tuesday morning? What is the origin of the hostility? When did terrorists begin attacking Americans?
I remembered as a junior high school student watching the news coverage of terrorists destroying the empty passenger jets in the Jordanian desert in Black September 1970, and the spectacles that followed: the Lod Airport massacre, the Munich Olympic massacre, the destruction of Pan Am 103, and many other acts of terror. I could not think of a single book that covered the entire history of terror directed at Americans and American interests, so I decided to write one. This book narrates the evolution and transmutation of terrorism originating in the complex and conflictive politics and geopolitics of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
The contemporary era of terror began after Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967, an event that radicalized the Palestinian national liberation movement. It began with a campaign against civil aviation—hijackings, with the first hijacking of an El Al flight in the summer of 1968; automatic weapon and grenade attacks at airport terminals; the sabotage of passenger jets in the air. Richard Nixon was the first U.S. president compelled to confront the threat of Middle East terror. Americans were slaughtered in some of the early terror operations—twenty-nine U.S. Catholic pilgrims to the Holy Land died in the Lod Airport massacre in 1972, and others were held hostage aboard hijacked jets. The terrorists justified such assaults because, in the words of one of those involved in the Skyjack Sunday operation in September 1970, “No one heard our screams or our suffering.”
In 1971, Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO adopted the strategy of terror. This was the origin of the Black September organization. Its terror rampage lasted only three years, until the end of 1973. But in those three short years Black September conducted some of the most memorable operations: the murder of eleven Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972 and of two U.S. diplomats a year later. The man behind Black September resorted to semantics in an attempt to distance himself from terrorism: “I do not confuse revolutionary violence, which is a political act,” he said, “with terrorism, which is not.”
The Israeli response to the atrocities by Black September, as well as the earlier ones by the PFLP, was guided by the biblical maxim of an eye for an eye: Israeli assassins hunted down and killed some of the men who were responsible, or thought to be responsible, for the terror directed against Israelis. The Nixon administration's response was more pragmatic. The CIA established a secret, back channel arrangement with the very men behind Black September. The arrangement was sealed with a warning. “The violence against us has got to stop,” the acting director of the CIA told Fatah representatives, “or much blood will flow, and you may be sure that not all of it will be ours.”
The end of Black September's terror rampage coincided with the end of hostilities between Israel and its most formidable military foe, Egypt. Egypt and Syria stunned Israel with a massive offensive on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, in 1973, only to be defeated after Israel put up a desperate struggle for survival. The outcome of the Yom Kippur War convinced the Egyptian president to turn to the United States to negotiate the return of Egyptian territory lost in the Six Day War six years earlier. It also convinced Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, that U.S. mediation held the only hope for the creation of a Palestinian state. Arafat's tactical turn toward moderation angered those in the Palestinian national movement who clung to the credo that the birth of Palestine demanded the death of Israel. The inexorable result of such logic was the rejection of the peace process and a new wave of terror. So, a month before the American-mediated peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel were to begin, terrorists blew a U.S. airliner out of the sky over the Aegean Sea in the fall of 1974. “We do not want peace,” the slogan went, “peace will be the end of all our hopes.”
Terrorism lost its strategic coherence after the Americans began to broker what would become a separate peace between Egypt and Israel. The era of Palestinian nationalist terror began to fade in this political and geopolitical environment. In 1975 the factions that made up the Palestinian national movement found themselves drawn into a bloody civil war in Lebanon, much of it fratricidal violence between Palestinian factions backed by Iraq. But then there were the final episodes of the campaign the PFLP had begun in 1968. In the mid-1970s, terrorists tried to shoot down Israeli passenger jets, took delegates of OPEC countries hostage, and hijacked French and German jets carrying Israeli citizens. But the hijackings in particular became famous not for the audacity of the operations but for the lethal operations of elite Israeli and West German counterterrorism units. None of the violence impeded U.S. efforts to secure a separate peace between Egypt and Israel. In the fall of 1977, the Egyptian president addressed the Israeli parliament in words that would later cost him his life: “We accept to live with you in permanent peace.”
President Jimmy Carter, who inherited the peace process from Ford and Nixon, managed to achieve a historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1979. An era of terror seemed to have come to an end. But another soon began with a revolution and an invasion. The Islamic Revolution in Iran at the beginning of 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of that year marked the transmutation of terror. Although secular Palestinian organizations continued to commit random acts of terror, militant Islam replaced Palestinian nationalism as the most dangerous inspiration for terror. Jihad overtook national liberation as terrorism's rallying call. The Reagan administration poured money and materiel into jihad against the Soviets. Thousands of Arab men rushed to Afghanistan to fight as mujahideen alongside their Afghan brethren—this was the genesis of Al Qaeda. Then, in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the PLO and laid siege to Beirut. American intervention was inevitable but disastrous. The first U.S. encounter with militant Islam—and with mass casualty suicide attacks—came in Lebanon. Hizb'allah, the Party of God, destroyed the U.S. embassy in 1982 and the barracks housing Marine peacekeepers at the Beirut airport in 1983, killing 268 U.S. diplomats, spies, and Marines. The commander of the Marine contingent of the multilateral peacekeeping force had predicted that Reagan's decision to intervene in Lebanon's sectarian civil war would be catastrophic: “Don't you realize that if you do that, we will get slaughtered down there?”
This was the beginning of America's travails in Lebanon and its confrontation with militant Islam. Hizb'allah began seizing U.S. hostages in 1984 and conducted one of the longest hijackings of a U.S. passenger jet the following year. The hostage crises lasted through to the end of the decade and confounded the Reagan administration, which began selling U.S. arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the dim hope of gaining the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon. The clandestine arms-for-hostage deals ended in a fiasco. During this period, remnants of Palestinian terror organizations mounted a series of lethal attacks, including massacres in Rome and Vienna airports. Libya lurked behind most of these attacks, and a military confrontation with the United States became inevitable. Reagan ordered an air strike in 1986; Libya retaliated by destroying a U.S. airliner over Scotland just before Christmas 1988. Ronald Reagan had been compelled to confront a hydra-headed threat of terror. But he could not entirely make good on his pledge that “America will never make concessions to terrorists.”
There were no major acts of terror against Americans or U.S. interests during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush. The last embers of Palestinian nationalist terror had burned out. Bill Clinton may have thought he had inherited a new world order that would permit him to focus on domestic issues when he entered office in 1993. But there would be consequences from Operation Desert Storm, the Bush administration's short war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Arab mujahideen formed the “Base” of a global terror network around Osama bin Laden. This base—Al Qaeda—would wage jihad against apostate governments in the Arab world and, eventually, the United States. The presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, the most holy land of Islam, convinced bin Laden, a Saudi, that the United States was Islam's mortal enemy. Others thought like him. Militant Muslims attacked the United States at regular intervals during Clinton's first term in office, in 1993, 1995, and 1996. The first of these attacks came on U.S. soil when a cell of Islamist terrorists attempted but failed to destroy the World Trade Center. Muslims had come to believe, as bin Laden exhorted them, that “the real enemy is America.”
There