May 13, 2003 - Two more American soldiers were killed in an Iraqi ambush near Tallil Airfield in southern Iraq. With the five Americans who died last week, 3 in a Black Hawk crash and two shot in the Baghdad streets, it brings the Allied death toll to 182. Apparently not everyone heard the President’s Mayday speech from the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln. In Afghanistan the tempo of attacks on Americans is increasing. That is the forgotten war that Secretary Rumsfeld declared was over the day following the President’s Top Gun extravaganza.

This morning the price of regular gasoline went to $1.55 a gallon. It had been $1.33 last night. It was last night that the Al Qaida scorpion proved that it could still sting despite America’s military might. Four separate coordinated bomb attacks on three foreign workers residential compounds and one Saudi-American business killed a number of Americans, British, Italian and other western expatriates. Accurate counts of the dead and injured have not yet been made available but photos of the devastation make it almost certain that the final tally will far exceed the 8 American acknowledged tonight. In a refrain that has become almost too familiar the President declared, “The United States will find the killers, and they will learn the meaning of American justice.''

Last night’s attacks demonstrated that Osama Bin Laden is back from the margin to which President Bush consigned him. The operation was almost a replay of the coordinated attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. 4 separate cadres shot their way into the compounds and then detonated the car bombs they had constructed. Last week Saudi authorities were trumpeting their less than successful raid on what they and the State Department described as an Al Qaida cell. Claiming that the cell got its instruction directly from Bin Laden the Saudis announced that they had broken up a plot against American interests by seizing a cache of arms and explosives. After what is described as a sharp gun fight the 19 members of the cell all got away – one Yemani, one Kuwaiti immigrant from Iraq and 17 Saudis. The Bush Administration embraced the Saudi claims and distributed them to the news media as evidence that Al Qaida was on the run. The answer came last night.

No amount of posing as a heroic fighter pilot will disguise the fact that while the Bush Administration was chasing phantom weapons of mass destruction Bin Laden’s guerrillas were planning and setting up the strikes that occurred last night. No amount of stage craft can hide the fact that American intelligence had intercepts warning of attacks on American interests in Saudi Arabia but nothing was done to increase security for the 15 to 30 thousand Americans living and working in Saudi Arabian oil industry. Bringing them and their families home would have disrupted the flow of oil to fuel the troubled American economy. Leaving them at risk was an economic imperative. At least 8 Americans have paid the ultimate price for the Administration’s decision to look the other way.