Unleashing the Beast

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overseas, one per year for the next five years. I'm not a gloom-and-doom type person, but I will tell you what I see and what most smart people see: The United States is headed for an incident inside the United States. To those operatives in the intelligence field, it has never been a matter of if, but only a matter of when. That is, they knew that eventually terrorists would strike at the U.S. within our borders. The best to be hoped for was to keep tabs on the people who were considered a threat and do everything possible to thwart their attempts. Obviously, on September 11 those efforts failed. To be fair, however, we should say that if someone has made up their mind to die a martyr and take as many with them as possible, little can be done. The fact is, not only have we been expecting such an attack, but we have also known from where it would most likely originate—fundamentalist Islam. For close to 30 years, people have been warning about the expansion of militant Islam and what that portends for the West and, specifically, the United States. We saw the transformation that took place in Iran during the late 70s and early 80s, and apparently assumed it could be contained. A decade later, the West waged a war against a despot in the very cradle of Islam, but saw fit to leave him in power. We know that there have been close calls with Islamic operatives in the past few years within our own borders. Of course, the closest call we know of was the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. It is still baffling