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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Thoughts About 911

This is Steven Petrick posting.

This past Sunday was the tenth anniversary of the attack by Al Qaida.

At least, it is the attack that all of us who were older than about five or six on that day remember.

What is forgotten is that it was not the first attack Al Qaeda launched on us. In the 1990s they bombed two of our embassies in Africa, tried to sink the USS Cole in Yemen, among other atrocities. It was not even the first time they attacked us in our own homeland since the previous bombing of the trade towers was also their handiwork.

What makes 911 so memorable is that the towers fell (an image carried into our homes and endlessly repeated over the succeeding decade), and travel by air was never going to be the same.

We treated Al Qaida as a "law enforcement problem" in the 1990s. Despite the organizations proven desire to inflict "mass casualties" (it has been noted that the first bombing of the trade towers was itself intended to bring them down, i.e., the bomb was supposed to topple one tower into the other). It was more luck than anything else which denied Al Qaida its goal of tens of of thousands of dead Americans. It was our luck that their first failure resulted in plans to evacuate the towers if there was ever a repeat. Those plans could not help those on the upper floors of the buildings, but they did much for those who were below the floors where the planes crashed. The delay interval between the two attacks also helped us immeasurably as the evacuation of the second tower was well under way before the second plane hit.

Our "law enforcement" effort to deal with Al Qaida in the 1990s did nothing more than make us seem a clumsy giant floundering around helplessly and uselessly. We spent great treasure in a cruise missile strike on their training camps in Afghanistan (most notable for a cruise missile that crashed virtually intact in Pakistan that was then turned over by the Pakistanis to China for examination). To this day, no pictures (at least none I am aware of) have ever been released showing the "damage" to the Al Qaida camp which we spent several million dollars to hit.

We did get a great deal of press for bombing an "aspirin factory" in Africa, however (disclaimer, our government continues to claim said factory was in the process of manufacturing chemical agents for Al Qaida to employ).

Since the towers fell we have spent billions treating Al Qaida as a military threat, and radical Islam (not Islam as a whole) as a threat period. The argument goes back and forth on which is better.

It can be proven that treating AL Qaida as a law enforcement problem did not destroy it, but demonstrated weakness on our part and Al Qaida did not lack for funding or volunteers to attack the "Great Satan," i.e., us.

It can be argued that treating Al Qaida as a military threat has not made us safer, but by invading Muslim lands has fired the Islamic Zeal of fundamentalist Moslems to fight the "Great Satan," that fighting Al Qaida and its adherents has only made Moslems around the world hate the U.S. more and want to destroy us.

What cannot be argued is that in the decade that followed the first attack on the towers, Al Qaida was able to initiate more attacks on the U.S. and its citizens, and had resources to make large scale attacks, to include 911. In the decade since 911 Al Qaida has dwindled to little more than an on line presence and has not actually managed to stage a large scale attack since that day.

None of this means that Al Qaida could not stage a comeback if we, due to our own desires for peace and an end to the fighting, were to back off of our pursuit and allow it.

It is actually what Al Qaida's remaining adherents are hoping for, in fact, what they have been hoping for since the first retaliatory smart bombs began falling on their base areas in Afghanistan.

If we do back off, then Al Qaida may, indeed, rise again. And more of out innocent civilians will in the future be killed, and fingers will be pointed.