President Bush’s response to the terrorist attacks has been exactly right. The country is reaping the benefits of staffing the national security team with seasoned veterans of large reputation. Without shrillness they have announced a determination to respond against not just the terrorists and their organizations but the states that have trained, financed, supported, and harbored them. As the administration goes forward to carry out this de facto declaration of war, it must bear in mind three important principles. First, it cannot depend on the sprawling bureaucracy to produce the plans and operations to carry out this campaign. Second, it must prevent the natural tendency to focus obsessively on “getting” bin Laden. Third, it must overcome a long legacy of the failure of American governments to follow brave words against terrorists with firm deeds.

On October 23, 1983, 241 servicemen were killed in a suicide bomb attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon. President Reagan vowed swift retaliation. The whereabouts of the perpetrators and their trainers were exactly known. Behind them were the governments of Syria and Iran, for whom they worked. The bureaucracy met, worried, studied, analyzed, and delayed. Nothing was ever done. There followed a succession of aircraft hijackings, bombings, and killings of Americans.

In October 1985,3 terrorist team working for Abul Abbas seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro and executed an American. They escaped to Egypt, where they were allowed to depart with Abbas himself on an airliner. In an operation brilliantly executed by the 6th Fleet, carrier aircraft intercepted the plane and forced it to land in Sicily. There the Italian government took the perpetrators from American custody and quietly released Abbas, in a tacit deal to keep terrorism away from Italy. Again, nothing was done.

Encouraged by an unbroken record of successes, Muammar Qaddafi’s network carried out increasingly brazen attacks against American aircraft, civilians, and land targets. President Reagan initiated the first successful and effective retaliation against a principal source of terrorism. In 1986 a series of naval operations culminated in the joint Navy-Air Force strike against Libya and, indeed, against Qaddafi himself in his compound, killing his daughter. Except for the Lockerbie bombing, which had apparently been set in motion before the strike, Qaddafi has been largely quiescent since those strikes.

It was only the extreme provocation of his invading Kuwait in 1990 that moved the United States to action against one of the greatest fomenters of terrorism against the United States, Saddam Hussein. Although the campaign itself was most ably prosecuted by the United States, we then committed one of the worst blunders of the postwar era by leaving Saddam in power, thus handing him—and, more important, the entire international terrorist network—a strategic political victory.

President Bush’s current team participated in these operations, and they have presumably learned