I just finished a book I consider a must-read for every American who wants to understand our common enemy in this terror war.

After reading Yossef Bodansky's "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," I fear our leaders may be seriously underestimating the capabilities of this terrorist leader.

Read it and you will no longer have any doubts that this war has been waged against us for a long time. Only on Sept. 11 did most Americans wake up to the threat that has been looming for years. This has been, until now, a totally one-sided war.

What do I mean?

I mean I am now 100 percent convinced that bin Laden operatives were behind the downing of TWA Flight 800 and the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, as well as with the terrorist acts U.S. officials have previously charged him – the bombing of the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers bombing and the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Osama bin Laden is one capable terrorist. But he is much more than that.

Bin Laden has worked throughout his terrorist career with many state sponsors – including, but not limited to, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. So cunning is this mastermind of terror that he successfully bridged the ideological and religious gap between Sunnis and Shiites, he successfully brought together in partnership Iran and Iraq despite their bloody differences that resulted in a war that killed more than 1 million people, and he successfully has won the hearts and minds of millions of radical Muslims worldwide.

The worst mistake we could make is to underestimate him and the vastness of his terrorist cabal, which includes many of our so-called allies in this war.

Bodansky reported in this prophetic book, first published in 1999 and republished quickly following the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden's goals of destroying U.S. airliners and other strategic and civilian targets. His No. 1 enemy is the United States. How U.S. intelligence agencies could have missed this threat is hard to understand. All they had to do was read Bodansky's book to have a complete understanding of what makes him tick and how he operates.

This is going to be a tougher fight than the West faced with communism. Mutually assured destruction will not work as a deterrent. They will stop only when their ultimate goal is achieved or they are all dead.

What is their ultimate goal? World domination by the kind of Islamic radicalism we see in the Taliban Afghan regime or in Sudan or in Iran.

"We believe that God used our holy war in Afghanistan to destroy the Russian army and the Soviet Union … and now we ask God to use us one more time to do the same to America, to make it a shadow of itself," bin Laden told an interviewer in 1997.

They have been working on this plan diligently for years. Beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden's operatives and closest allies began establishing a terrorist infrastructure right here in the United States.

Right under our noses, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man, established residency in California, setting up terrorist networks, making key contacts and laundering funds to be used in this war against us.

Let's assume there are, as Muslims claim, some 7 million Islamic followers in the U.S. Is it inconceivable that 10 percent of them are sympathetic to bin Laden's goals? That's an army of 700,000. But maybe that's too many. Let's suppose it's only 1 percent. That's a fifth column of 70,000. But let's be really, really conservative and say it's only .1 percent. That's 7,000 potential operatives living right here in the USA.

No wonder there are those in government who admit the chances of further dramatic terrorist attacks on the U.S. are 100 percent.

While I hope and pray the attacks on Afghanistan inflicted heavy, irreparable damage to bin Laden's death machine in Afghanistan, I fear this war is just beginning. I fear America is woefully unprepared for what's coming. And I pray that our leaders and the citizens of the United States will read this book and begin to understand the danger this foe presents to our civilization and way of life.

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