That bomb killed five and wounded over 1,000 people (mostly smoke inhalation and other minor injuries suffered when 50,000 people walked down the towers' stairways). It could have been infinitely worse had the tower supports been fatally breached and one of the towers fell over as was the plan.
That nation, interestingly enough, was Iraq.
Four months after the WTC bombing, President Clinton launched an attack against Iraq's Ministry of Intelligence. As Laurie Mylroie, Clinton's advisor during the 1992 Presidential campaign noted, the decision to launch the cruise missile strike on June 26, 1993, was made in part because Clinton believed Iraq had been involved in that attack. While Clinton publicly stated that the strike was to retaliate for the assassination plot on Bush 41, there apparently was an underlying subtext that it was also in response to the Trade Center bombing.
The response by Clinton to an act of war was a limited strike against a target of dubious value. That limited response clearly registered with other terrorist organizations, particularly al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden. If the US wouldn't go after a nation-state when it appeared to have enough evidence to do so in 1993 after the first WTC attack, what would it do when there's a relatively autonomous terrorist group running around attacking US targets on an irregular basis.
Well, throughout the 1990s, the US response was to merely shrug off the terrorist attacks.
The Africa Embassy bombings.
The USS Cole.
Hundreds killed, a US Navy ship badly damaged, and the only response was to launch a badly conceived cruise missile strike.
The debacle that was Somolia's Black Hawk incident further inspired the terrorists to action since it appeared to show that if the US was unwilling to take casualties in furthering the just and proper goals of going after terrorists, warlords, and bringing peace to Somolia, then it might again not take casualties elsewhere. The withdrawal from Somolia sent all the right signals to bin Laden - who believed that the US could be pushed right out of the Middle East if a sufficiently successful strike against the US were carried out.
Now, there is also evidence that there were links between those now in jail for the 1993 WTC bombing and al Qaeda, but this doesn't diminish the role that the failure to stand up to terrorism wherever and whenever it occurs plays in perpetuating the terrorism.
