In October, 1993, 18 American special forces troops were killed in Mogadishu, Somalia during a botched raid to capture senior militia commanders loyal to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Two days later, U.S. president Bill Clinton ordered his country's troops to cease all offensive actions against Aidid's forces and to withdraw from Somalia by the following March.

The world didn't know it then, but Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda had funded and trained Aidid's men, and may even have helped them plot the trap into which U.S. troops were lured.

Mark Bowden, in his masterful 1999 book Black Hawk Down, found several connections between bin Laden and Aidid. And others have reported that bin Laden was emboldened by the American withdrawal to launch bigger and more deadly attacks.

The Battle of Mogadishu, in turn, had been spawned by America's response to the first World Trade Center bombing in February, 1993. That attack had been planned by bin Laden lieutenant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who recently confessed to an entire terrorist litany at Guantanamo, including 9/11). When the U.S. sent agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to arrest the perpetrators -- rather than covert assassins to execute them -- the nascent Islamist terror network deduced it was fighting an enemy that was willing to blindfold and handcuff itself.

In June, 1996, when Saudi Hezbollah exploded a fuel truck outside the Khobar Towers apartments, killing 19 U.S. service men, and again in August, 1998 when hundreds were killed when East African associates of al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, terrorists around the world took note that the U.S. sent FBI agents rather than Marines to hunt for those responsible.

The American 9/11 Commission found one witness who claimed that in February, 2001, just seven months before al-Qaeda's second, more deadly attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, bin Laden was stunned the U.S. had not counterattacked for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole at the port of Aden in October, 2000. Seventeen sailors had been killed while eating dinner.

According to the witness, the al Qaeda master "complained frequently that the United States had not yet attacked." Bin Laden expected reprisals and when none were forthcoming, he vowed ominously "to launch something bigger."

Richard Clarke, Mr. Clinton's former anti-terrorism advisor, warned the incoming Bush administration in early 2001, "Many in al-Qaeda and the Taliban may have drawn the wrong lesson from the Cole: that they can kill Americans without there being a U.S. response, without there being a price."

The same was true of Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in May, 2000. After 22 years of occupation, many terror groups took the unconditional evacuation as sign of weakness. Terrorist attacks in Israel escalated. Palestinian dictator Yasser Arafat walked out of peace talks and began the deadly second intifada.

What's the point of enumerating this long list of Western spinelessness in the face of threats from radical Islam? To point out why it was wrong Friday for Democrats in the U.S. Congress to set a definite date (September, 2008) for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Not only will the insurgents now withhold some of their attacks for a year-and-a-half, knowing that if they can wait that long they will have the battlefield all to themselves. But they will also see this as another Mogadishu, another example of the U.S. cutting and running in the face of casualties and surprising local resistance. Not only will this make Iraq more dangerous in the mid-term, it will make the world more dangerous. Just as bin Laden took weak-kneed responses to attacks in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen as proof it was OK to attack New York and Washington. D.C., so will he and others see an abandonment of Iraq as license to attack Los Angeles, Chicago and London.

The Iraqis, to be fully free, must someday stand up for themselves, handle their own security. But by setting a specific date for U.S. withdrawal, the Democrats are actually delaying the time when Iraqis are ready to defend their country and government by telling insurgents and terrorists just how long they will have to be patient before they can attack with impunity, whether or not Iraqi police and military are ready.

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive