Before September 11, 2001, Americans generally considered themselves safe from foreign attack. The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon--all within two hours on September 11, 2001--shattered that illusion and demonstrated American’s shocking vulnerability to terrorism.

In the second edition of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War against America (AEI Press, 2001), author Laurie Mylroie examines the first terrorist attack against the United States--the 1993 World Trade Center bombing--and Iraq's key role in this conspiracy. A new foreword by former CIA director R. James Woolsey stresses the relevance and importance of Mylroie’s lucid analysis.

The author reminds readers that while no nation has been able to challenge the United States on a conventional battlefield since the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of people have been cautioning for years that such a devastating attack was possible and that America’s enemies would probably resort to deception to conceal the hand of an enemy state behind the strike. This is exactly what happened. Recent acts of terrorism against the United States have almost invariably involved militant Muslims, but Mylroie points out that we rarely ask whether a state is working with them and sponsoring the violence and, if so, which state.

A decade ago, the predominant view of terrorism was that major terrorist attacks on American targets were almost always sponsored by states. Mylroie argues that the Clinton administration, during its eight years in office, transformed America’s understanding of terrorism, making it appear to be a series of isolated events--orchestrated by individuals such as Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and Osama bin Ladin--and treating it as a law enforcement issue.

Laurie Mylroie publishes the online newsletter Iraq News and is an adjunct fellow at AEI. Before that, she was an adviser on Iraq to the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. She has taught at Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College and is the coauthor, with Judith Miller, of the New York Times number-one bestseller Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.