IRVINE, CA--"If the 911 Commission wants to know what made September 11 possible," says Dr. Onkar Ghate, "the answer is not intelligence failures. More than anything else it is our accommodating, range-of-the-moment, unprincipled U.S. foreign policy that invited death to this country--for decades."

Dr. Ghate notes that in spite of "the years of mounting evidence of our enemies' bloody intentions--the taking of hostages at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000--our government responded to each atrocity with short-sighted, self-contradictory, diplomatic appeasement."

U.S. officials, for example, "sought rapprochement with Iran in a secret weapons-for-hostages deal, refused to support Israel's efforts to destroy PLO killers, and dropped a perfunctory bomb or two on suspected al-Qaeda camps, while waiting for the attacks to fade from the headlines--instead of responding with overwhelming moral outrage."

If the 911 commission does its job properly, says Dr. Ghate, "it will, unfortunately, find that little has changed in U.S. foreign policy since the reign of Islamist terror begun by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran twenty-five years ago this week--notwithstanding Afghanistan and Iraq--and it will recommend a new foreign policy that responds to terrorist attacks with annihilating retaliatory force."

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Onkar Ghate, Ph.D. in philosophy and a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, is available for interviews.

Contact larryb@aynrand.org or (800) 365-6552 ext. 213.