After the cease-fire in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, America’s attention turned away from its adversary, Iraq. But the Gulf War never truly ended. For the United States, the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq and the frequent bombings of Iraqi territory are an outgrowth of the war. For his part, Saddam Hussein has successfully thwarted UN weapons-inspection efforts (see related article), crushed the U.S.-backed Iraqi resistance, and steadily eroded the resolve of the international coalition against him.
In Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War with America, Laurie Mylroie convincingly argues that Saddam has employed another tactic in seeking his revenge against the United States: sponsorship of terrorism. The book, a follow-up to Mylroie’s New York Times number-one bestseller Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (coauthored with Judith Miller), links Iraq to the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted on U.S. soil: the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Mylroie relates how the bombing conspirators plotted to topple the north tower onto the south tower amid a cloud of cyanide gas. Had they succeeded, their elaborate plan would have resulted in thousands of deaths and massive destruction. Mylroie contends that because U.S. national security bureaucracies and the Justice Department are not to interfere with each other’s work, authorities never conducted a proper investigation into the bombing’s origins.
Many Americans familiar with the World Trade Center bombing and the attempted bombing of the United Nations a few months later believe that these incidents were results of a low-level conspiracy led by the radical Islamic Egyptian cleric Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman, when in fact he was charged with inspiring only some of the participants in each plot. Shaykh Omar was not the operational director of the conspiracies, Mylroie argues. That person was Iraqi intelligence agent Ramzi Yousef. Mylroie warns that, in light of the continuing hostilities between the United States and Iraq, similar acts of terrorism will occur until authorities shift their focus from arresting individual terrorists to attacking the hierarchy and structure that support them.
R. James Woolsey, who directed the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995, praises this "brilliant and brave book." Mylroie, he says, "shows that a thorough, incisive, solitary scholar can be worth far more than battalions of bureaucrats. Not only does she make a sound case that Saddam Hussein was key in the attempt to topple the World Trade Center, she casts fundamental doubt on the Clinton administration’s single-minded emphasis on arresting and prosecuting individual terrorists: ‘combating malaria by swatting mosquitoes.’"
