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We have had almost ten years now to come to terms with what happened in 2001. The death of bin Laden represents an important turning point and an opportunity to more fully understand that terrorism event and where we might go in the future.
Hijacking an aircraft with box cutters, when one is willing to die and kill others in an incredibly brutal way to take over the aircraft, is not an astonishing feat. It is rather the destructiveness of an angry child written on a much larger scale. Destroying things is not all that difficult. Building them is very difficult.
The “feat” of 9-11, 2001, consisted mainly of getting into the US, working undercover for months, getting pilot’s training and then doing near simultaneous hijackings. Yet, the hijackers nearly turned themselves in by mistakes several times. The skill and coordination level where not astounding, but the most difficult part was to keep the plans secret. They accomplished that goal by not telling most of the hijackers ahead of time what they would be doing. They also cynically leveraged the eagerness of their participants and their willingness to die by keeping them in the dark. Would they have participated if they had known in advance? We can never know, nor did they have time to consider once the events were in track. This destructive use of human beings reminds of the Japanese tactic in WW II of forcing pilots to crash their planes into targets or otherwise be killed on the ground.
No one knew the towers would fall, not even bin Laden. One of his gang (perhaps bin Laden himself) is on the video taken the day of the event saying that they did not realize the towers would go down. It was the collapse of those towers that turned a horrible terrorist event into an astounding show that seared itself into our national memory.
By making these events more than they were, a climate of fear is fed upward. We need to do the reverse: understand and thus lessen our sense of foreboding. The methods they used in 2001 can never be used again. Further, each time they might stage of suicide attack, they loose some of their most dedicated, careful people, which is itself a formula for long term defeat.
We should understand that the terrorist attacks by aircraft were not entirely without precedent, though they seemed to be in the public mind in 2001. First, a small plane crashed into the side of the White House while Clinton was president (I have always believed that this might have been the actual inspiration for the hijacking attacks). Second, two south America airliners almost hit the Towers within a week of each other during the 1970s. As almost everyone knows, Microsoft had a flight simulator game out at the time in which one could fly directly into the twin Towers.**
We should have known the terrorists were coming our way. They announced that they planned to attack America. They had bombed two of our embassies in Africa and carried out a bombing run on the USS Cole in Yemen. They did almost everything but put up a sign in Times Square. Yet, the attacks came as if a bolt from the blue, an utter shock. (Of course, the scale of the attacks and death were shocking to everyone.) Had the public been adequately forewarned about pending attacks, the shock would still have been great, but not as great. The time before 2001, of course, was one of a presidential election when the focus was away from such serious matters and on the campaign, which points out one problem with giving over so much time and attention to national politics.
As for how we go forward, we need to understand who we are to the world. We are the best target around, because we are the biggest, richest and most powerful nation on earth. We are a wonderful organizing tool for movements around the world, but now that the Arab spring has bloomed, it might be that better targets have been found. In any case, terrorism is not a day-by-day threat, but we need to understand that we are likely to have some attacks, at least occasionally, for years. Sadly, we just have to understand that this is part of our role in the world. We should also know, however, that such attacks cannot destroy our nation nor, in all likelihood, seriously threaten our larger well being. The British and the Spanish set great examples for us after terrorism hit there: they cleaned up and got on with their business forthwith. The Madrid, the trains were running the next day after the attack.
Doug Terry
**(To go back even further, a crazed passenger tried to hijack an aircraft during the Nixon administration in 1974 and planned to crash it into the White House, but it seems unlikely that an event that distant had any influence on the terrorists. The would be hijacker in that case, suffering from mental illness, was said to have been influenced by an Army soldier who stole a helicopter and landed it on the White House lawn in the previous months.)
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