What 9/11 was About

In an erev Shabbat email, a friend in metro-NY commented that he was surprised that al-Qaida’s 9/11/2001 attack on the US homeland had not been repeated.

That got me thinking. Why was that?

I mean, besides the fact that the terrorists who planned it – having lost their safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan – were being hunted down and systematically eliminated. And because America repaired the intelligence holes that enabled 9/11 in the first place.

Yet, in a sense, a mega attack did not need to be repeated because the damage done that day 21 years ago achieved its purpose beyond the wildest dreams of its despicable perpetrators.

Who would have imagined the ease with which 19 Jihadist terrorists could hijack four American airliners? And while Islamist suicide bombers had struck many times previously – who would have guessed that they would use civilian planes like bomb-laden dump trucks?

Who would have dreamt that both NYC WTC Towers would collapse in the resulting infernos?

Who would have thought that the Pentagon was so vulnerable? Who could have imagined that America would suffer nearly 3,000 fatalities in one day?

Who could have predicted that the attacks would forever alter the entire experience of air travel?

9/11 still boggles the imagination.

A comparatively small band of Muslim fanatics were able to plot and implement an attack that ensnared the US in two dead-end wars.

So, beyond the initial shock and destruction of the day itself, America was stampeded into occupying two Muslim countries, Afghanistan (starting on October 7, 2001) and Iraq (March 20, 2003).

Occupations that only added fuel to Muslim ire, victimization, and grievance.

The long wars in these lands sapped American willpower and confidence once and for all.

Victory might have been an option had the US been capable of making a WWII-like investment – in personnel (reinstating the military draft), material, treasure, and a willingness to stay for as many decades as it would take to reshape these fragmented Islamic polities into Western democracies. In other words, victory was never an option.

At least in Afghanistan-Pakistan, al-Qaida 1.0 was destroyed.

However, the invasion of Iraq proved to be a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It had no weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s presence empowered Shi’ite Persian Iran to flourish and pursue its imperialist designs in the Middle East. As a consequence of the Iraq debacle, the US is psychically powerless to stop Iran from fielding nuclear weapons when it chooses to do so.

Iraq/Afghanistan-Pakistan exposed the desperation of both the Obama and Trump administrations to withdraw America from the quagmire of endless unwinnable (on the cheap) wars (undeclared) in the Near East.

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What motivated the 9/11 attacks was Osama bin Laden’s anger that Saudi Arabia had allowed debased Westerners to set up militarily in his adopted country. What made the attacks achievable were the skills of Ayman al-Zawahiri. What united the two was the decision to take the war for Islam’s soul to the West.

The Islamist war against the West did not begin on 9/11 but with the first WTC bombing in February 1993, accelerating with the East African embassy bombings of August 1998.

Al-Qaida has served as a terror incubator – others like ISIS, regional spinoffs, and freelancers took up the banner of jihadist imperialism, among them the July 2005 London attackers and the May 2017 Manchester fanatics, plus those who carried out smaller-scale explosions and stabbings in the UK, Europe and around the world. Let us not forget that British authorities thwarted scores of other attacks, such as the planned blowing up of St Paul’s Cathedral in 2020. 

Meanwhile, in America, while there have been “no more 9/11’s,” there have been many jihadist attacks in the US since 2001. Here is a partial list https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/terrorism-in-america/who-are-the-terrorists/

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The danger will continue because the threat of violence is largely the result of an internal struggle within Islam over coming to grips with modernity. By that, I mean the notions of tolerance, respect for minorities, and democracy. Islam has yet to experience civilizational reform (like Christianity and Judaism). 

But let us allow ourselves to imagine what a reformed Islam might look like: It would be comfortable sharing space with other peoples and faith traditions literally, spiritually, and symbolically. It would no longer seek to spread Dār al-Islam over what it considers Dār al-Ḥarb (the West and Israel).

We are not there yet.

 

 

Further Reading

Partial Listing of Muslim Terror Attacks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

 

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/lawrence-wright