Threat Analyst Ken Abramowitz is author of “The Multifront War”
Editor: Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, President, American Center for Democracy (ACD)
See the sources for this article and more research in the Additional Reading section
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“September 11 impressed upon us that life is a precious gift…. And I think we all have a duty to devote at least a small portion of our daily lives to ensuring that neither America nor the world ever forgets September 11.”
— U.S. Senator Bill Frist
We Must Never Forget 9/11- Ken’s Thought of the Week
Twenty-two years ago, America was attacked by the Islamist terrorist organization al Qaeda. The 19 perpetrators,16 of whom were Saudis, hijacked four passenger planes and crashed two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing 2,750 innocent people, as well as 343 firefighters and 71 law enforcement officers, who tried rescuing the victims. The terrorists crashed another airplane into the Pentagon just outside Washington DC, killing 185, and the fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania, killing 40 people. Since then, more than 71,000 first responders, clean-up crews, and neighbors have been plagued with medical and psychological disorders. More than 300 have died since 9/11. Direct and indirect costs exceeded $100 billion.
In response, President George W. Bush, armed with a $100 billion allocation from Congress, set out to fight Islamic terror worldwide. He ordered the attack of al Qaeda bases and their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. In 2013, American soldiers invaded Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and remove Saddam Hussein from power. These two wars cost the lives of 6,800 American soldiers (2,300 soldiers died in Afghanistan and 4,500 in Iraq), and the US spent at least $2.5 trillion fighting radical Islamists in Afghanistan and an estimated $8 trillion for its overall war on global Islamist terrorism.
But twenty-one years later, in the days leading up to August 30, 2022, none of these were considered by President Joe Biden, who had finalized the US armed forces’ disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan. 2,500 American soldiers still remain in Iraq to help maintain the peace, although neighboring Iran now essentially controls the country.
In 2011, under the Obama Administration, American soldiers finally found al Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, hiding in plain sight in an army base in Pakistan and killed him. In the meantime, an al Qaeda offshoot, the Islamist State (ISIS) tried to fill the void in eastern Syria and western Iraq. ISIS recruited 40,000 terrorists who attacked in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. President Trump’s 2017 initiative seemed to have ended most of these attacks.
So, how are we doing 22 years later? A fair assessment of the situation would give the US government a “D minus”. Since it misjudged the situation, its policies and strategies failed to solve the problem. The US refrained from characterizing the enemy properly and avoided identifying the ideology that drives them. Despite ISIS terrorist attacks in European countries, they, too, have avoided identifying the doctrine behind ISIS. The US and its allies seemingly decided to keep their heads in the sand, hoping radical Islamism would disappear. However, radical Islamism or Political Islam’s two main elements are physical terror and cultural terror, also known as stealth jihad. In the past twenty-two years, we focused on physical terror but did not address cultural terror – the underlying ideology of physical terror.
So now, with millions of illegal migrants, many of whom are “refugees” from Islamist terror-ridden countries, flooding the US, and with more than one million “gotaways” among them, who may be potential terrorists, we at Save the West are worried. We encourage all Americans to remember 9/11 and demand that the Federal government fulfill its obligation, as required by the Constitution, to protect the US borders and defend our national security.
