A few weeks ago, at an FBI seminar, a federal agent said something that chilled me to the bone. He was very matter-of-fact about it. Given their pattern of attacks over the last 20 years, said the agent, terrorists will strike our country again sometime in the next year or two, if not sooner, and there will be little or nothing that the FBI or anyone else can do about it. I think on some gut level, we all realize this. The only question is how much control over our country they’ll be able to usurp by attacking us.
It was easy enough after September 11 for our political leaders to say that we couldn’t “let the terrorists win” by allowing them to influence the way we live our lives. But the people who wrote those lines for the politicians know better. Among my long-time political operative friends, those who make money by getting folks elected to office, the political effects of terrorism are a major cause of concern. They know better than anyone just how much influence terrorists are capable of having in a national election. They are so aware of it, in fact, that among the Republican strategists I know who operate at the Congressional level, discussions of President George W. Bush’s chances of being re-elected are often prefaced with “If there’s no terrorist attack. . .”
The first presidential primary is just nine months away. If terrorists haven’t hit by spring of 2004, I know for a fact that Republican strategists will begin to sweat, and that they won’t stop until the election in November is over.
How much political influence terrorists are capable of having will depend in large part on what they hit and when they hit it. When the US goes to war, or when it’s attacked, the popularity of a sitting president typically surges upward by 10 to 20 percentage points immediately afterward. But let’s say, for instance, that terrorists hit a nuclear plant three months before the next presidential election and Bush is running 15 points ahead of his nearest Democratic competitor. In the weeks after the attack, as the formerly recovering economy tanks and the stock market surges downward, the public would be repeatedly reminded by the media that the US lifted the no-fly zones over nuclear plants a few months after September 11, or that the government failed to protect us in some way, which inevitably, it will have.
In such a scenario, it’s entirely likely that the Democrats would retake the White House and both houses of Congress. Of course, Democrats are no more capable of preventing the next attack than Republicans are. One well-timed attack could put them in office next year — and another could theoretically remove them from office in the next national election.
The implications of this are staggering. By controlling the timeframe in which they hit, terrorists could conceivably become major players in US political elections without ever casting a vote.
Those who think this sounds like some far-fetched conspiracy theory ought to look at what radical Wahhabi Muslims are doing in Russia, a country in which one-seventh of the population is Muslim. According to documented information in Hatred’s Kingdom by former Israeli UN Ambassador Dore Gold, by using billions in Saudi oil money, the Wahhabis — the Muslim sect Osama bin Laden is a member of — have been able to export their radical fundamentalist religion, which mandates death to all non-Wahhabis, strategically across the globe. But these aren’t mere madmen who strap bombs to their bodies at the slightest provocation. They are patient warriors who study the weaknesses of a country before they attack it. For the past decade, the Wahhabis have been funding civil wars and building mosques and schools that double as terrorist indoctrination and training camps in the former Soviet states between the Black and Caspian Seas. It’s part of a strategic plan by fundamentalist Muslims to dominate select states in the Russian Federation, including Dagestan, Georgia and Chechnya, and cut them off from Russia. Why? Because Dagestan controls 70 percent of the Russian shoreline on the oil-rich Caspian Sea, as well as the pipelines that move oil from Azerbaijan through Chechnya and other Russian territories.
Billions of dollars are at stake in a game Russia is losing to Muslim rebels trained and financed with Saudi money. “If extremist forces manage to get hold of the Caucasus,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told the Associated Press in 2001, “this infection may spread. . .to other republics and we will either face the full Islamization of Russia, or we will have to agree to Russia’s division into several states.”
The leaders of the Muslim World League, the oil-rich fundamentalist organization that funds Wahhabi jihad efforts throughout the world, have been frank with the media about their plans to dismember the Russian Federation. They’ve also been frank about their interest in crippling the American economy.
Right now, most of the people of this country feel reassured by our success in the war on Iraq. But the biggest battles against terrorism are yet to come, and in a very real way, they will be for control of the American mind.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2003.
