Osama bin Laden makes a great public enemy No. 1. His unusually tall frame, trimmed with that wiry beard and constantly clad in army fatigues and a Soviet assault rifle, creates a villainous image even Disney animators would admire. But in our obsession with this "Wizard of Odd," we have lost sight of the man behind the curtain.

Bin Laden makes a great puppet, but Saddam Hussein pulls the strings.

Had the Iraqi puppeteer had his way, the World Trade towers would not have fallen on Sept. 11, 2001; they would have fallen on Feb. 26, 1993. In September of 1992, one year after the Gulf War ended, a group of terrorists carrying Iraqi passports took up residence in several Jersey City apartments. From there, according to phone logs, they called chemical companies and surgical supply manufacturers inquiring about hazardous chemicals, gloves, masks, and rubber tubing. In January 1993, after over a year living in the United States, the terrorists bought another Jersey City apartment where they constructed a truck bomb.

Two years after the attack, their leader was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan and extradited to the United States for trial. According to the presiding judge in his 1995 trial, the terrorists' goal was to topple the city's tallest tower onto its twin, collapsing both. Sound familiar?

In January 1995, the leader of the 1993 World Trade Center attack was involved in another stupendous terrorist plot. The man, who entered the country on an Iraqi passport under the name Ramzi Yousef, conspired with associates to blow up 11 commercial aircraft in one spectacular day of terror.

Sept. 11 was not as unprecedented as we first thought. Now enter Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Ramzi Yousef (the only terrorist named with bin Laden in the title of a 1999 Simon Reeve book on the future of terrorism) is suspected of being an Iraqi intelligence agent. What's more, most of the conspirators in both the 1993 Trade Center bombing and the attempted airline hijackings were Iraqi.

Yousef, the Iraqi mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack, and Bin Laden, the architect of the second, are closer than they would have us believe. Though Bin Laden denied knowing Yousef in a 1997 interview, Yousef once lived in bin Laden's Pakistani boarding house.

And so we come to Sept. 11, 2001, the 12th anniversary of President George Bush's address to Congress on the Persian Gulf crisis in which he vowed "Saddam Hussein will fail" in his takeover of Kuwait. Hussein, still bitter from his Gulf War defeat, looked across the Atlantic and saw some old friends in the White House. Dick Cheney, secretary of defense during the Gulf War, and Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time were back in office. And of course, the heir of his nemesis, George W. Bush, was at the helm. Apparently even rogue tyrants have a keen sense of occasion.

Despite links between Hussein's Iraq and Sept. 11, however, little pressure has been placed on his regime. Since the Gulf War, he has repeatedly defied international agreements by turning away scores of weapons inspectors. All the while, according to CIA assessments, he has been rebuilding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.

In short, Saddam Hussein is the primary threat to United States national security, and it is time he is stopped.

With experienced Gulf warriors in the White House and general international support for the country's efforts against terrorism, the time is now to end the Hussein regime.

Recently George W. Bush has been hedging toward such action. Last Thursday, he called Hussein "a menace," and said "we're going to deal with him." He reduced bin Laden, whom he once wanted dead or alive, to a secondary figure in the war on terrorism.

Though it is entirely possible that the Bush administration has been planning an invasion of Iraq from the war's outset, many have been lulled into thinking the war is nearly over. With success in deposing the Taliban and capturing many al-Qaeda leaders, it is easy to feel the war is won. We must resist this temptation. The war on terrorism cannot end in Afghanistan. It cannot end with Osama Bin Laden. To defeat terrorism, we must attack its source. We have done well to cut off the puppet; now we must go for the puppeteer.