Seeing the Evil In Front of Us.(Column)

The moment of confrontation had come. President Bush warned Saddam Hussein that if he continued to interfere with United Nations weapons inspectors and to shoot at American warplanes over Iraq, he would have to pay the consequences. So Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression. Chechens in Persian-lamb hats, Moroccans in caftans, delegates who hailed "from Jakarta to Dakar," as one Senegalese put it, poured into Baghdad's Rashid Hotel, where Saddam's minions urged them to embrace jihad as "the one gate to Paradise." And the greatest holy warrior of all? "The mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers," they were told. "Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state," declared Saddam's deputy Ezzat Ibrahim. The Americans had colonized Lebanon; they had colonized Saudi Arabia. But the line against them would be drawn in Iraq. Believers would triumph, said Ibrahim: "Our stand now can lead us to final victory, to Paradise."

That was in January 1993. I was there, and every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist ideologue" who has nothing to do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it.

I also think of that same night, when the cruise missiles launched by Bush as one of his last official acts in the White House soared through the brilliantly lit skies of Baghdad. They followed computerized maps and took their bearings off landmarks, among them the enormous Rashid Hotel. Antiaircraft guns caught some of them in their sights, and one missile, apparently hit by Iraqi flak, smashed into the Rashid's lobby. The jihadists were sure the Americans meant to kill them. Saddam couldn't have planned a better propaganda coup to win the sympathy of holy warriors around the world.

I thought of that day and those speeches, too, six weeks later when I heard that a truck bomb had been detonated on the second level of the World Trade Center parking basement, with the aim of bringing one tower crashing down on the other. ...