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Identify andevaluate the 'successes' and 'failures' of 9/11 as an act of terrorism.

Al Qaida's attackson the World Trade Center towers in New York City and on government buildingsin the United States capital, Washington, D.C., were an act of stunningboldness. The United States was very fortunate, in fact, that the attacks didnot wreak more havoc, as the plane bound for the Pentagon, the nerve center ofthe U.S. Department of Defense, inflicted relatively minor damage in comparisonto the utter annihilation of the Trade Center Towers. Furthermore, the fourthplane, which crashed into a field in the state of Pennsylvania after thepassengers and crew fought back against their hijackers, was intended foreither the White House or the Capital Building, which houses the United StatesCongress. Perhaps the most chilling piece of retrospective information camefrom the report of the 9/11 Commission, assigned by President Bush toinvestigate the causes, planning, and security/intelligence failures whichresulted in the attacks. The Commission found that the original plan proposedto Osama Bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks was far more spectacular in scale: [a]grandiose original plan: a total of ten aircraft to be hijacked, nine of whichwould crash into targets on both coaststhey included those eventually hit onSeptember 11 plus CIA and FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and thetallest buildings in California and the state of Washington. (NationalCommission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004, p. 154)

Luckily for theUnited States, Bin Laden vetoed the idea as too complex. Nonetheless, the planfor which they settled was a shocking blow to the United States' historicalsense of invulnerability.

Three and a halfyears later, the world is a vastly different place. In the course of a singleday, Al Qaida reoriented the geopolitical landscape into a new polarity.During the Cold war, most nations were either active participants or pawns inthe high-stakes global chess match between Communism and capitalism, primarilymanifested in the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.After the Cold War effectively ended in 1989 with the tearing down of theBerlin Wall, the United States and the West had clearly emerged as the victors,and global politics became a much more subdued exercise in putting out localfires, generally arising out of long-simmering ethnic rivalries. In general,most Western nations turned their attention inward to address domestic issues.The United States was no different. However, just as it had been by the attackon Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States was jolted out of itsself-absorbed, isolationist torpor by the 9/11 attacks, and the global stagewas immediately reorganized into a West vs. Islam polarity. This repolarizedNew World Order, as it were, was memorialized by George W. Bush, perhapsinfamously, when he announced, during a November 6, 2001 press conference withFrench President Jacques Chirac, You're either with us or you're against us inthe fight against terror. (Bush, 2001).

Clearly, then, AlQaida was able to transform the global canvas in a single stroke. But did thisconstitute success? If so, according to whose criteria? Did the attacks havethe effects that Bin Laden and his henchmen desired? The answers are complexand in some cases, subjective.

During the planningstages of the 9/11 attack, which began as early as 1998, there does not seem tohave been much consideration factored into the equations by Al Qaida of thepotential relevance of who would be in charge of the American government.Clearly, Bin Laden had grown increasingly emboldened by the occasionalsuccesses Al Qaida had enjoyed with respect to terrorist attacks in the 1990s.Though the Al Qaida plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on NewYears' Eve 2000 was foiled, as was a scheme to hijack jumbo jets outbound fromthe Philippines in 1996, Al Qaida was getting luckier and more efficient withthe passage of time. A 1993 truck bomb, detonated in the parking garage of theWorld Trade Center Tower One, had failed to do much structural damage to thebuilding, but it was an audacious move nonetheless, which demonstrated to theworld that the United States was hardly invincible on its own soil. Laterattacks on embassies, military compounds, nightclubs, etc., belonging to theU.S. and other nations, and an attack on the U.S.S Cole, an Americanwarship docked off the coast of Yemen, were also successful. Though the UnitedStates had on two occasions launched cruise missiles in an attempt to destroyAl Qaida training camps in Afghanistan, missing Bin Laden by an hour in oneinstance, for the most part the United States had been content to combat AlQaida indirectly. By 1998, the Clinton Administration was well aware that theTaliban were harboring the largest terrorist organization in the world, yetfailed to directly threaten the Taliban with any substantive diplomatic ormilitary pressure. The U.S.' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was bothreluctant and, debatably, without the resources and courage to mount a covertoperation to knock out Bin Laden or any of his lieutenants. The U.S.' FederalBureau of Investigation (FBI), as a general rule of internal organizationalculture, did not consider Al Qaida much of a serious threat within the UnitedStates. Furthermore, the Clinton Administration was stymied in its attempts tointerfere with the banking and monetary aspects of Al Qaida, as TreasurySecretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers were of the peculiarview that such a course of action could disrupt the delicate internationaleconomy. Worse, after their 1993 humiliation in Somalia, the U.S. military wasloathe to take any action at all against an enemy who was as much an abstractidea as a concretely organized and centralized group. Whether Bin Laden wasaware of the institutionalized torpor within the United States government andits military and intelligence organizations, and was using it to his tacticaladvantage, or whether he simply proceeded with continual astonishment at thelack of U.S. aggressiveness against him, or simply did not care, is unclear.What should have been clear to him is that presidential administrations in theUnited States are not interchangeable; each has a different personality andmethodology of approaching domestic and foreign policy. While true that GeorgeW. Bush was elected - or actually, appointed by U.S. the Supreme Court afterlosing the popular vote - with no definable mandate other than to cut taxes,much less take any drastic steps in foreign policy, Bin Laden should have beenperceptive enough to realize that Bush's administration was stacked withreactionary neoconservative warmongers, many of whom had served in thetrigger-happy administrations of George H.W. Bush, George W.'s father, andRonald Reagan.

Mullah Omar, rulerof the Taliban, registered his concern that such a vicious attack on the UnitedStates would surely prompt a military reaction that could tip the balance ofAfghanistan's civil war against the Taliban. By the time of the 9/11 attacks,the Northern Alliance -- the loose coalition of opposing warlord-ruled factionsthat opposed the harsh fundamentalist Islamic rule of the Taliban - was closeto defeat, occupying only a tiny portion of the northeast corner ofAfghanistan. Mullah Omar was concerned that the United States might beinclined to not simply retaliate against Bin Laden, lobbing the customaryhandful of cruise missiles across the ocean, but instead intervene in the waron the side of the Northern Alliance. Bin Laden dismissed Omar's concerns witha mixture of naïveté and bravado. He was convinced that the attacks on theUnited States would not only cripple the U.S. and perhaps the global economy,but destroy the United States government by killing the President, VicePresident, and much of Congress, rendering the U.S. either unwilling or unableto retaliate against anyone.

Unfortunately, aswell-researched and meticulously executed as the 9/11 plans were, apparentlynobody thought to obtain President Bush's schedule - a publicly available item- for the morning of September 11, 2001. The President, as it happened, wasnot even in Washington, D.C.; instead, he was in Florida reading a book called MyPet Goat to a classroom full of elementary school teachers. Anothertactical mistake was in the timing sequence of the four attacks. Given thepredicable slowness of response of the United States civilian air control andthe military as the attacks were happening, the wisest course of action wouldhave been to fly planes into the White House and Congress first, then the WorldTrade Centers. As it happened, the World Trade Centers were hit significantlyearlier than the Pentagon, giving enough advance warning within the White Housethat Vice President Dick Cheney and many other key members of the administration,including its military leaders, were able to evacuate to safe locations. Alsounanticipated by Bin Laden was the fierce resistance put up by the passengersaboard United Airlines Flight 93, which as alluded to above, was destined to becrashed into either the White House or Congress, a choice to be made on themorning of the attack at the discretion of the hijackers in the cockpit. Thepassengers on the flights targeted at the World Trade Center had little or notime to process the enormity of what was about to transpire, nor did thepassengers on the plane that hit the Pentagon. However, Flight 93's takeofffrom Newark, New Jersey had been delayed by 41 minutes to traffic congestion,so by the time it was airborne, hijacked, and had made its circular turn awayfrom its original destination, San Francisco, and turned back towardsWashington, D.C., the passengers on board had become aware, through cellularand onboard telephones, that other planes had been hijacked and the World TradeCenters had been hit. The passengers were not aware of the intended target oftheir airplane, but they elected to take matters in their own handsnonetheless. A brave handful attacked and overwhelmed the hijackers, thenstormed the cockpit and attempted to reclaim control of the aircraft. Forreasons still somewhat unclear, the plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvaniashortly thereafter. The 9/11 Commission concluded that had this not been theoutcome, the plane would likely have reached one of its intended targets in Washington,D.C.: NORAD [North American Aerospace DefenseCommand] officialshave maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down United 93. Weare not so sure. (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the UnitedStates, 2004, p. 323)

Therefore, theUnited States government and military command structure were completely intacton September 12, and the Bush Administration, though the American stock markettook a severe beating, quickly managed to stabilize the economic situation.Within weeks, the nation - so badly divided due to the hotly contested 2000presidential election - had rallied behind Bush and his approval ratingshovered near 90%. Less than a month after the 9/11 attack, the U.S. began itsair war in Afghanistan. The Taliban were annihilated and driven from power inless than two months. Bin Laden narrowly escaped capture by slipping into themountain caves of Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan. Khalid ShaikhMohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 plans and its direct operationalsupervisor was captured by American and Pakistani agents in Pakistan in March1003. There have been no successful terrorist attacks on American soil since9/11.

Although Al Qaidahad killed over 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks, they also managed a featunseen since World War II: they united the entire citizenry of the UnitedStates and acutely focused its attention. Bin Laden had badly underestimatedthe resolve and character of the 'infidels' whom he regarded with such scornand hatred; his lack of judgment and distorted conviction that Allah hadblessed his jihad (holy war) against the United States led to a seriesof serious reversals of fortune for Al Qaida worldwide, most notably inAfghanistan, where the sort of fundamentalist theocracy so passionatelyadvocated by Bin Laden and his followers had been summarily replaced by ademocracy that restored equal rights to women. Though the United States is toblame, most likely, for allowing Bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora, due to theirover-reliance on Afghan tribal allies with shifty allegiances, and theirreluctance to engage American ground troops in bloody hand-to-hand combat, AlQaida's infrastructure was badly damaged between October 2001 and March 2003.Additionally, one of Bin Laden's biggest grievances, the presence of the UnitedStates military on the holy Islamic soil of Saudi Arabia, continued unabated.By most objective standards, then, the 9/11 attacks had been a failure, not asuccess.

However, Bin Ladenand Al Qaida received a tremendous gift from the United States in March 2003when the United States made a foolish tactical error in the course of pursuingits new war on terrorism - it invaded Iraq. Ironically, there was noconnection whatsoever between Iraq and Al Qaida with respect to the planningand execution of the 9/11 attacks, but the bizarre insistence of the BushAdministration that there was, in fact, such a connection provided a completereinvigoration of purpose for Al Qaida and therefore a new judgment on the worthinessof the 9/11 attacks. Bush played directly into Bin Laden's hands and, inessence, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by inexplicably invading Iraqat the zenith of the effectivity of the American war on terror.

Theneoconservatives in the Bush Administration had long been irrationally fixatedon Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and despite these ideologues' persistent efforts toobfuscate the facts, Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction had little todo with the invasion. The Bush Administration had, in fact, openly discussedplans to invade Iraq even before 9/11. According to former U.S.Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke, in the immediate aftermath of theattacks, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary of DefenseDonald Rumsfeld seemed desperate to fix some measure of blame on Iraq, and evenPresident Bush himself asked Clarke to double-check that there was no Iraqconnection despite all intelligence clearly pointing to Al Qaida'sresponsibility. It became a politically expedient tactic, after the mostlysuccessful prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, to make a link between Iraqand Al Qaida, and when that failed, to paint Iraq as the next logical step inthe war on terrorism despite Al Qaida's ongoing virulent presence in otherlocations worldwide, particularly within the borders of Saudi Arabia.

The invasion ofIraq was a colossal blunder, however, as it diverted much-needed military andintelligence resources away from continuing counterterrorism operations inAfghanistan and around the world, allowing Al Qaida to slowly begin aresurgence. In addition, the grotesque mismanagement of the post-invasionoccupation of Iraq confirmed to many Muslims of even moderate attitudes towardsthe United States that Bin Laden's paranoid conspiracy theories about theWest's fundamental disrespect of Islam and Muslim countries contained merit.Iraq therefore became a lightning rod and a rallying cause for Al Qaida to notonly recruit new members, but regain support among Muslims who may previouslyhave been cool to the idea of supporting Al Qaida after the atrocious slaughterof civilians in the 9/11 attacks. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new Al Qaidarecruits have streamed into Iraq from 2003 to the present, joining forces withdisgruntled former members of Saddam Hussein's regime and ordinary Iraqicitizens disgusted about their treatment at the hands of their Americanoccupiers, resulting in a bloody debacle that continues unabated -- even afterthe Iraqis held their first free governmental elections (in January 2005) sincebefore Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule.

It is highlylikely that any U.S. president, including Bush's 2000 campaign rival, formerVice President Al Gore, would have immediately invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11attacks, assuming their immediate success on that day had gone approximatelythe same way as it did under Bush. It is also highly likely that only Bush,though, by virtue of his administration's arrogance and irrationality, wouldhave made the blunder of invading Iraq in response to 9/11. In doing so, heinvigorated Bin Laden and Al Qaida's cause and therefore, the attacks of 9/11,which would have been considered by the history books to be a failure in thelong-term, will now likely be regarded as at least moderately successful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

National Commission on Terrorist AttacksUpon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report. July 22, 2004.Available from:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

You Are Either with Us or Against Us,CNN.com article, November 6, 2001. Available from:

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/

Klein, Joe. The Natural: TheMisunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. New York: Doubleday Publishers,2002.

Mann, James. The Rise of the Vulcans: AHistory of Bush's War Cabinet. New York: Viking Press, 2004.

Clarke, Richard A. Against All Enemies:Inside America's War on Terror. New York: The Free Press, 2004.

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