INTIMATIONS OF TERRORISM
Near the close of his administra- tion, George H .W . Bush sent Ameri- can troops to the chaotic East African nation of Somalia . Their mission was to spearhead a U .N . force that would allow the regular movement of food to a starving population .
Somalia became yet another leg- acy for the Clinton administration . Efforts to establish a representative government there became a “na- tion-building” enterprise . In Oc- tober 1993, American troops sent to arrest a recalcitrant warlord ran into unexpectedly strong resistance, losing an attack helicopter and suf- fering 18 deaths . The warlord was never arrested . Over the next sev- eral months, all American combat units were withdrawn .
From the standpoint of the ad- ministration, it seemed prudent enough simply to end a marginal, ill-advised commitment and con- centrate on other priorities . It only became clear later that the Somalian warlord had been aided by a shad- owy and emerging organization that would become known as al-Qaida, headed by a fundamentalist Muslim named Osama bin Laden . A fanati- cal enemy of Western civilization, bin Laden reportedly felt confirmed in his belief that Americans would not fight when attacked .
By then the United States had already experienced an attack by Muslim extremists . In February 1993, a huge car bomb was explod- ed in an underground parking ga- rage beneath one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan . The blast killed seven people and injured nearly a thou- sand, but it failed to bring down the huge building with its thousands of workers . New York and federal au- thorities treated it as a criminal act, apprehended four of the plotters, and obtained life prison sentences for them . Subsequent plots to blow up traffic tunnels, public buildings, and even the United Nations were all discovered and dealt with in a similar fashion .
Possible foreign terrorism was nonetheless overshadowed by do- mestic terrorism, primarily the Oklahoma City bombing . The work of right-wing extremists Timo- thy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, it killed 166 and injured hundreds, a far greater toll than the 1993 Trade Center attack . But on June 25, 1996, another huge bomb exploded at the Khobar Towers U .S . military hous- ing complex in Saudi Arabia, kill- ing 19 and wounding 515 . A federal grand jury indicted 13 Saudis and one Lebanese man for the attack, but Saudi Arabia ruled out any ex- traditions .
Two years later, on August 7, 1998, powerful bombs exploding simultaneously destroyed U .S . em- bassies in Kenya and Tanzania, kill- ing 301 people and injuring more
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than 5,000 . In retaliation Clinton ordered missile attacks on terrorist training camps run by bin Laden in Afghanistan, but they appear to have been deserted . He also ordered a missile strike to destroy a suspect chemical factory in Sudan, a coun- try which earlier had given sanctu- ary to bin Laden .
On October 12, 2000, suicide bombers rammed a speedboat into the U .S . Navy destroyer Cole, on a courtesy visit to Yemen . Heroic ac- tion by the crew kept the ship afloat, but 17 sailors were killed . Bin Lad- en had pretty clearly been behind the attacks in Saudi Arabia, Afri- ca, and Yemen, but he was beyond reach unless the administration was prepared to invade Afghanistan to search for him .
The Clinton administration was never willing to take such a step . It even shrank from the possibility of assassinating him if others might be killed in the process . The attacks had been remote and widely separated . It was easy to accept them as unwel- come but inevitable costs associated with superpower status . Bin Laden remained a serious nuisance, but not a top priority for an administration that was nearing its end .