Was Washington Lulled into Complacency by Al-Qaeda ?

If the bomb blasts are indeed the work of Al-Qaeda, it had struck with a vengeance at US and westerners outside US soil.

Field Update 13.30 PM by Barry Schweid from AP News:

Most U.S. diplomatic personnel ordered to home from Saudi Arabia by Washington. FBI investigators were flown in to help with the probe.

U.S. officials said Saudi guards posted at the entrance to the complex were shot to death. US officials believed it took the bombers "30 seconds to a minute" to get through the gate guarding a housing complex for employees of the Virginia-based Vinnell Co., drive the truck to the building, and detonate their explosives. "They had to know where the switches were," this official said, suggesting the bombers had inside information.

Vinnell, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corp., has a contract to train Saudi Arabian National Guardsmen. The Saudi National Guard protects the ruling monarchy and is the Saudi equivalent to the Republican Guard of Saddam Hussein, according to John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense policy group. The National Guard is distinct from the regular Saudi Army.

Seventy Americans employed by Vinnel lived in the building, but 50 of them were away on a training exercise at the time of the attack. Northrop Grumman said nine of its employees were killed, including seven Americans. Other employees remained hospitalized after the attack, two in serious condition.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., told reporters at the Capitol. "It took us off the track of the war on terror which we were on a path to win, but we've now let it slip away from us."

Powell was in Amman, Jordan, at the time of the attack, making the rounds of Middle Eastern countries in hopes of producing momentum toward Middle East peace. He flew to Saudi Arabia as planned, and altered his schedule to visit the site of the bombing that killed Americans. "This was a well-planned terrorist attack, obviously," he said.

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After the war in Afghanistan and the just concluded success of the Iraq war, Washington had been striding the world stage with an attitude of " we won" against terrorism and projecting a sense of invincibility.

In the lead up to the war in Iraq, Washington's ears were crowded out by voices of the neo-conservative hawks, and were deaf to voices of concern by others of the possibility of terror attacks on US citizens and westerners around the globe. The Bush Administration's foreign policy is believed to have been held hostage by the neo-conservative hawks, led by Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Aaron Friedberg, who will be officially taking his appointment on June 1, as deputy national security advisor and director of policy planning on Cheney's high-powered, foreign-policy staff. Some analysts claimed the bulk of these neo-con hawks are pro-Israeli lobbyists and right-wing American Jews.

Only more terror warnings were issued to its citizens outside the US, while analysts were fearing that Washington's foreign policy strategies, particularly for the Middle East, are actually stoking the fires of continuing terror attacks by Al-Qaeda and its likes.

In Afghanistan, the fight against the Taliban, accused of harbouring Al-Qaeda is not yet over, as evidence by the recent upsurge of Taliban attacks on coalition forces and continuing demonstrations against the US-backed Karzai Government.

The bomb blasts in Saudi Arabia will bring out echoes of those who had said : "I told you so".

The question that need to ask is whether Al-Qaeda had given Washington a sense of false security in the last year or so? If so, the war against international terrorism is an on-going concern, a war led by countless headless entities, a war that is against other sovereign states is proving to be not the answer.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda had taken responsibility for attacks in Pakistan, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen and Bali.

In an article by ABC News:

• " The U.S. State Department noted that international terrorist attacks declined sharply in 2002, to the lowest level since 1969, according to the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" released at the end of April.
  
  
• There was no apparent response to bin Laden's urging his followers to "avenge the innocent children … assassinated in Iraq," in his audiotaped message during the Iraq war.
  
  
• Then in mid-April, the White House lowered the national terror alert from "high" to "elevated" status.
  
  
• In late April, ABC News was told by intelligence sources that mounting evidence indicates al Qaeda was splintered and ineffective.
  
  
• Last week, U.S. and Saudi authorities crowed they had foiled plans by at least 19 suspected terrorists in Saudi Arabia to carry out strikes.

The bomb blasts in Saudi Arabia has changed U.S. officials' minds. They are no longer as optimistic.

In the words of Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who leads a Senate panel on terrorism and domestic security: "Our recent successes in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the global dismantling of terrorist cells may have understandably encouraged some Americans to begin to turn their attention away from the war on terror toward other pressing concerns,"

Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democratic candidate for president, puts it blunty: "If the question is are we more or less secure from terrorists today than we were a year ago, the answer is we are less secure. It could have been avoided if you had actually crushed the basic infrastructure of al Qaeda, that they would not have had the capability to launch such a sophisticated attack."

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