Did the terrorists achieve their goals?

Great Debates
1

Weirddave titled a MPSIMS thread, “Why the terrorists will not achieve their goals.” I beg to differ, but on reflection, I figured GD was the more appropriate place to do it. My best guess is that the terrorists did achieve their objective here.

I take as my text for this sermon a thirty year old, Vietnam war-era, Doonesbury comic strip.

B.D., the American soldier, and Phred, the VietCong guerrilla, are wandering around the South Vietnamese backcountry, when they’re almost blown up by a U.S. Air Force bomb.

Phred shakes his fist at the bomber, shouting, “You heartless air pirates! I hope you can live with it! I hope you can live with all the destruction and carnage you’ve brought to my little country!!”

Up in the bomber cockpit, the pilot and copilot are talking:

“Didja hear the Knicks took two?”
“Heey! That’s great!”

The reality is that the U.S. acts in the world, and people in diverse parts of the world feel the impact of those actions in ways that make no sense to them. Why did we give Iran a Shah when they chose a Mossadegh? Why did we stick Chile with Pinochet when they’d elected Allende? Why did we support D’Aubuisson in El Salvador - a murderous thug if there ever was one, Marcos in the Philippines, Somoza in Nicaragua? What does the average American know about the day-to-day reality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, financed in large part by our tax dollars?

Forget the geopolitics of it all. What’s the worm’s-eye view? What’s it like to be where the brontosaurus flicks its tail?

Garry Trudeau nailed it in one: people around the world feel the consequences of our actions, while we are untouched.

I believe that one of the principal objects of terrorism is simple: to address that asymmetry. They succeeded here.

That doesn’t make what they did here right. It’s still evil; it’s still an abomination. This country will track down the network that spawned this action and pull it out by the roots, with any luck. Nobody better try to make me an apologist for those guys.

This was evil. But it was also fundamentally comprehensible.

Right now, we’ve got to pull up bin Laden’s network by the roots, and deal with it militarily. But once that’s over, perhaps we should think about what we’re doing around the world, and which of those actions we’re willing to incur such people’s wrath over - to acknowledge in advance that our actions have consequences, and decide which ones have to be done anyway, rather than pretending that we touch the world lightly.

We’re doing a better job than we used to in a lot of places - thank God, the end of the Cold War has freed us from feeling we had to support a lot of genuinely heinous thugs - but we’ve still got a ways to go. And over time, our government is being replaced by our corporations - moving their operations around the world like pieces on a chessboard - as the main actors in our name.

When a corporation moves a factory into some Indonesian community, pays them enough so that they abandon their farms to come work in the factory, then five years later, pulls out to move to somewhere even cheaper, having disrupted the ties that made their life work in some fashion before, it will look like America to them. They will not hate us because we represent freedom and opportunity, because they didn’t get any of that. They just got the flick of the brontosaurus’ tail, and that’s what America will be to them.

2

A friend of mine who used to work in the FBI Anti-Terrorism group says that the purpose of terrorism is to prove to the people that their government can’t protect them. The government may be able to protect the country, or the economy, or some specific target, but individual people as a whole are vulnerable to terrorism.

Whoever did this could have killed a LOT more people. They could have done a LOT more damage. They didn’t. All they were aiming for was a simple statement, and they hit their mark dead on.

3

Nice post RT, I hope by god, that we will have learned something from this. It has been reported that 5000 people have been through Bin Laden’s training camps. Another 50000 have been through others sponsored by his organization. It has also been reported that although he may be the head of his organization, there are many disciples of his that can also lead. This is just Bin Laden, not to mention the new generation of Iraqis whose only nourishment for the last decade has been hatred for the US and NATO.

I have read many articles and seen many interviews with extreemly superficial analyses of why this occured. Many vows how this will not change our way of life because “that would mean the terrorists have won”.

This is not unpatriotic, I hope the terrorists have succeded with respect to us acknowledging the impact our actions have around the world. Because the next time (5 years, 10 years, they have shown great patience and planning), when they realize that a couple of buildings wasn’t enough to shake us out of our stupor, it will be much much worse.

I am not American, but my country and many others have supported many of these actions or not voiced our objections strongly enough. We are just as culpable and therefore may also become targets.

4

I think they did better than achieve their goals:

Frankly, they screwed up in the actual operation; less than 10% of possible casualties achieved and New York will be functioning again next week and the military and Washington were not even slowed down.

So why do I think they did so well?

For three days, people have not been able to go where they need to be and the markets have been closed - a greater economic impact than squashing a couple of buildings.

Every passenger from now on is going to need at least an extra hour to get on a flight (domestic baggage matching) - an hour during which no work will be done. Indirect economic harm.

The new air travel rules will prevent ease of travel (no knives - I sort of agree with the thread on the 2nd amendment here - soon no forks or spoons or glass or any carry-ons) for everyone worldwide and increase ticket prices (no mail or cargo) by a factor of close to three (cargo doesn’t mind crowding!). More indirect economic harm.

Civil liberties will be decreased in the name (everyone agrees, right?) of the safety of our children.

Yes, I think they are crawling all over themselves in self congratulations.

Incidentally, if domestic baggage matching had already been in place, we would not have one of the perp’s bags with all of the evidence it contains. What a great idea, eh?

5

I think I understand what RTFirefly is driving at. And I’m sure I understand that he’s not an apologist for terror bombings. This is only a sort of counter-point to what has been said in the OP.

Perhaps there are as many reasons for what happened Tuesday morning as there have been Arabs cheering on the streets of (how many?) countries this week. But – to my way of thinking – the reasons themselves don’t really matter, because the evil bastards who perpetrated this horror aren’t actually looking for any redress of their grievances.

For them, any reason is sufficient to wish Americans dead. And each new reason will be as good as the previous one. We are kidding ourselves when we imagine that there is any way to get along with people who will gladly trade their own lives for ours. What these people wanted was as many dead Americans in one place as they could possibly muster. And in the pursuit of that goal, they succeeded wildly. Three times.

I’m certain that there are a great many sophisticated statements to be made about geopolitics and social justice in the wake of this monstrosity. But in some sense, they are all entirely beside the point. If we insist upon the notion that this world is filled with reasonable people who will wish us well if only we will learn to get along with them, then we are chumming the waters with our own naievete, and more innocent people are surely going to die. When that happens, the bombers will draw no distinction between those who wish to understand their objectives and those who do not. They will only count bodies.

Rapproachment and understanding between the civilized world and barbarians like Osama bin Laden are goals that will not – and probably should not – be reached. Not all grievances are morally equivalent, simply because the offended parties feel an equal degree of anger over their troubles. The people who did this thing have overplayed their hand. The time for reasonable people to talk with them about root causes has surely passed. What remains is simply for us to protect ourselves. And for the whole world to see those responsible for this swinging from the end of a rope.

I’m afraid that somewhere around “Rapproachment and understanding…”, I left off answering and went to preaching, but I hope folks will forgive it. It’s just two cents that have been sitting around unspent and unshared for a couple of days now. Thanks.

–B

6

The answer depends on the presumed goal(s) of the attacks.

  1. Attempt to pressure the American people into making their government change its foreign relations policies, specifically those relating to the Middle East.

Answer - Unlikely. Even if we do as a people wake up and start paying attention to the potential home effects of foreign policy decisions (and Americans are notoriously poor at remaining interested in what goes on beyond our borders), the chance that we will insist on significant foreign policy changes is very small. Exhibit A to this conclusion is found in Israel, which has dealt with terrorism on a regular basis for years, yet which has such a significant portion of the population still willing to suffer such attacks as the price of an aggressive consolidation policy that one of their political leaders intentionally lit the fuse of the powder keg derailing the very peace process that would have potentially ended such terrorist attacks.

  1. Grab the attention of the government and people of America, ostensibly so that the political interests of the terrorists will be given greater consideration.

Answer - While they do certainly have our attention, the likelihood that we will give such interests greater consideration as a result is non-existent; a contrary result is more likely.

  1. Get out some aggressive hatred feelings by killing a bunch of innocent lives, disrupting the economy, and generally otherwise being pains in the ass because of irrational reasoning.

Answer - Yeah, I’m sure they succeded in this.

7

Mr.Billy: Well put, sir. I cannot agree more.

8

Well, since we can’t find any of them to ask, we can only spectulate on what their motives were.

One would have to see through their eyes.

I would guess that they see the USA as rich greedy people & were attempting to affect the USA financial markets by bringing us into the recession thats hanging over our heads.

This happened before, as a matter of fact, & they did bring us into a recession (I think it was the last one we went through?).

I don’t think they expected the towers to colapse though, that was a structural integrity issue.

9

Handy, I think they did want and expect the towers to collapse. They planned long and hard for this. They used planes that were en route to the other coast, and which therefore had a maximum of fuel aboard.

Re their objectives. My first assumption was that this was chickens coming home to roost; that the people who did this hated America because of the activities RT Firefly discussed in the OP. But I’ve seen a few articles, discussions, etc. that suggest that the terrorists are a small group of insane Muslim fundamentalists who actually want to start a world war – Islamic nations vs. everyone else – in the belief that the Islamic nations will win, and thereby assume their proper role of running the world, suplanting that great satan, America. This seems almost too insane to be true… but their actions were insane… Anyone have any takes on this one?

10

I’ve heard this too and it makes sense in a madman sort of way. Restating it…(1) conduct a horrible terrorist act to piss of the U.S. (2) U.S. retaliates heavily against an Islamic country, (3) currently moderate Islamics become upset and begin to side with the extremists, (4) continuing unification of Islamic peoples…suddenly there is an Islamic army 1 billion strong ready to overthrow the U.S. and by extension, western civilization, (5) Islam takes over the world.

Crazy, but would a well-funded & organized madman (or mad-group) with people ready to die for the cause shoot for any less than world domination? World War III could be very different than what we had envisioned during the Cold War.

Crazy, but I think we need to include these considerations in our offensive/defensive planning.

11

Great post, RT. As ever.

12

Except for 4 and 5 I think Bin Laden is openly working on 4 and 5. He’s made it pretty clear that his basic intent is to get rid of the U.S. and western influence in Saudi Arabia and The Muslem world in general. He is trying to seperate the world into Muslem vs non Muslem. I don’t think a World war and a fully Muslem world is his goal, Just two entirely seperate worlds.

Our goal is the exact oposite. We want the Muslem worlds to seperate more and more clearly into the good Muslems(Western thinking progressive) and the bad Muslems(Fundamentalist, anti-human rights, anti west). We are treading a very thin line, and currently I think we are slightly ahead. Pakistan(at least the government) is siding mostly with the U.S. and UAE cut ties with The Taliban. Over reaction pushes more people and countries to the anti U.S. side, but underreaction and failure to show dedication just encourages more wackos to do stuff.

13

Make that “Except for 4 and 5, Bin Laden is openly working on 1,2 and 3.”

14

Are the terrorists’ actions comprehensible? Perhaps so, in some way. But even if the actions are explicable, they are insane–insane in the good old-fashioned meaning of the means not being rationally connected to the ends. Only in the terrorist’s mind could this possibly bring about a unified, purified Islam; everyone else sees that this can only bring more conflict, division, and bloodshed to the Muslim world, more pain and misery to the people the terrorists claim to represent.

This is not like the conventionally political terrorist acts of the 1970s, where every attack brought forth a new group, a new manifesto, a new list of political prisoners to be released. This attack made me think of something much more familar to Americans: the murder-suicide.

We all know the basic story from the papers. A guy (it’s almost always a guy) can’t stand living any more, so he gets a gun and kills as many people as he can before he kills himself. He always leaves a note, and the note always explains why he did it. The people he works with were out to get him, the note might say, or the voices in his head told him to do it, or he wanted his family to be in heaven with him after he killed himself. If you look closer, though, look behind the rationalizations, the only real message the killer has to convey is: Look At Me, Look At Me, I’m Going To Make You Look At Me.

The terrorists are much more sophisticated than the typical murderer-suicide, and much more patient. They took years to put their spectacular plan of self-anihilation into practice. They carefully made sure their own deaths would kill the maximum number of other people. They formulated grandiose rationalizations for their death wish. They even eschewed the traditional note. Yet even so, even looking at the gigantic pile of smoking ruin that serves as the terrorists’ monument, you can still hear the petulant petty whine of the two-bit loser who caps his supervisor before he blows his own head off. Look At Me, Look At Me, I’m Going To Make You Look At Me.

15

I am in general symphathy with the gist of the OP, if not the actual examples given. It is for similar reasons that I think in general a more isolationist foreign policy is called for - it is very difficult to truly understand the nuances of a foreign country and culture, and hence very difficult to appreciate the full and ultimate impact of one’s actions in that arena.

Having said that, I would not be inclined to think that the terrorists were thinking along these broad principled lines. Rather, their short term goals were likely to strike a blow at America - at which they succeeded tremendously. I am not clear as to their long term objectives (if any) so it’s hard for me to say if these will be met as well.

16

Sorry, Wumpus but I have a hard time putting together the loser who loses it, taking out a bunch of people (or more often just an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend - yes, it is almost always a guy) with him, and the terrorist who spends years carefully plotting and preparing for the moment when he (ditto) will take out a bunch of people with him.

Someone whose life is slipping out of his control, and shoots up someone else and himself in an emotional reaction to that fact, is, IMO, very different from someone who can act in an intelligent, dedicated, disciplined manner over a period of years.

That doesn’t make that person ‘good’; such qualities are what I’d call secondary virtues, whose ultimate value depends on the deeper values that they’re placed in service to. But we rarely call persons with those personal characteristics ‘losers’, even when they’re clearly evil. People with such characteristics are generally achievers, and America almost never equates achievement with loserhood, even when we recognize that some ‘accomplishments’ are in fact negative ones, evil ones.

But ‘Look at me, I’m going to make you look at me’ is a pretty important message to the person who’s not even being noticed by his tormenter as his world is getting torn apart. My thesis is that many people who interact with American power and affluence around the world have the impression that we barely notice as we upset their ways of life. Many of them would be right.

This isn’t to say America shouldn’t step on some toes as it acts in the world - just that it’s worth knowing whose toes you’re stepping on, and whether you’re doing so in pursuit of an important goal, or just so GE can have a higher profit margin on its products produced overseas.

17

I’ve been reading some of the same news/analysis pieces as Hazel has been reading, I think, and I’d say there’s a great deal of credence to the idea that the terrorists had goals along the lines that Hazel, Phobos, and wolfman have been discussing.

Still, the motivation for such a plan generally has to come from somewhere. The American colonists didn’t rebel against Britain just for the hell of it; a series of incidents led them to believe in the necessity of independence. And I would expect the same is true here.

So what sparked this perceived need for a united Islam ready to take its place in the world? The continued existence of Israel? The maltreatment of Palestinians? American rock n’ roll? (No, I’m not being facetious.)

The pieces I’ve been reading trace bin Laden’s activism back to the placing of US troops in Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War, and their continuing presence there since that time. I don’t know how accurate that is, or what America could have done about it anyway: keeping Saddam from aiming his armies toward the Saudi oil fields was an essential foreign policy goal then, as it would be now.

But in that instance, if we’d known it might irk some people in the Arab world, we would have counted the cost as best we could, and continued on toward our objective. That’s reasonable. What’s less reasonable is when we have no national objective.

In particular, while I’m partly sympathetic toward Izzy’s preference that we take a less activist role in a world that we rarely take the pains to understand very well, my expectation is that America will increasingly be represented abroad by its corporations. I don’t think they are going to withdraw from the world, and while that’s understandable, it’s also a problem.

Corporations, as I’ve said before, are the ultimate single-issue group: their sole priority is making a buck - and unless legally required to consider national priorities, they can’t be expected to pay any attention to them. We can’t expect people in Third World countries to differentiate between American corporations and the American people. I certainly don’t want to be liable for any ill will those corporations engender abroad. I think it’s reasonable to expect our corporations to act abroad in a manner that’s not too inconsistent with American foreign policy. How to appropriately legislate that would be pretty tricky, I expect, but it may be time to start thinking about it.

18

They achieved a short term goal. As bin Laden himself has stated, his goal is a “holy war” (despicable term!). This he cannot do by himself, he needs us to cooperate. If he can goad us into blind rage, if we attack indiscriminately he figures on casting the struggle as Islam vs US.

If we are restrained, temperate and prudent, we will deny him any hope of achieving his end, for at this point in time he is a pariah. The only people who can change him from moral leper to martyr is us.

Accepting the offer of the ulema clerics to withdraw thier protection, that might have gone a long way. After all, where is he to go? We are much too quick with an ultimatum, IMHO. We need to demonstrate to the world that we are patient and just, that we will exhaust every peaceful means before we bring our awesome military force to bear. Otherwise, we are only proving his point.

Couple of asides: the Palistinian issues dont weigh heavily with bin Lauden. He is perfectly happy to co-opt them, but he has bigger fish to fry. And that remark about rock n roll is not as facetious as it may sound: you can bet Osama hates the gay-liberal-hippy as much as Jerry Falwell (may I be there the day they meet the God they purport to worship!)

Also, I wondered: most New Yorkers, esp. WTC business types, typically go to work around 9 am EST. Why was the attack so early?

19

Excellent post RTFirefly.

I understand completely that you are not being an apologist for the terrorists but I do feel you are scapegoating the US more than is fair or necessary. Indeed, I think you fall into the same thinking that the terrorists and other people who blame the United States for their woes do.

For my part I am not trying to be an apologist for the United States and all of its actions. Without doubt the US has not been a saint in world politics. I too feel ill when thinking of some of the creeps and some of the policies the United States has supported.

Still, these things do not happen in a vacuum. The US, for all of its power, does not dictate its wishes to the rest of the world and have them jump to. To use textual soundbites that seem to illustrate how the US has been a callous member of the world community is unfair and misleading. (Why support Pinochet? Why support Israel? Why support Marcos? etc.) I am making no claim to the right or wrong of particular US actions here but I am suggesting that such quips ignore the context of the situation these decisions were (or are) made in.

Unfortunately most people seem to like to think in ‘soundbites’. They don’t want the semester long course Politics of the 20[sup]th[/sup] Century. They don’t want a graduate degree in economics. They want answers handed to them on a plate in 30 seconds or less. When life is tough they want someone to point to and blame for it. America is a convenient, large target and it is all too easy for people like bin Laden to feed his brand of vitriol to the masses.

I submit that the terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and his ilk are nothing more than your standard, power-hungry SOBs that have littered history. It is possible that he believes his own rhetoric but I wouldn’t even be so sure of that. To suggest that, while evil and despicable, the WTC attack was meant as a wake-up call to the American people gives FAR too much credit to bin Laden. Osama bin Laden and his groups want murder and mayhem against the people they hate. They want to unite the Islamic world under their banner with, of course, bin Laden in the lead.

This goes to what Hazel and Phobos were talking about and are the only reasons that really make sense for Osama bin Laden’s motives. I do not believe Osama bin Laden is a stupid man. He had to realize that such an attack in the United States would bring the United States gunning for him. Why would he want that? Whatever he believes about the United States he must know that we can be a dangerous enemy when roused and not something that one would willing place on their own ass. So why do it? Why not just blow-up a movie theater or something? Why force the US into action against yourself?

There is only one reasonable explanation and that is to bring the US over to the Middle East and force a heavy duty war down the throats of the west and all Islamic governments. Osama bin Laden will force people and governments to take sides. In so doing he hopes to unite the Muslim world and perhaps become the de facto ruler (or the guy pulling the strings even if he doesn’t officially sit in a seat of power).

What should really scare us all is what else Osama bin Laden has up his sleeve to provoke the US further. Once we are in country some hideous act of terror on America will stratify the two sides even further. American commanders may expand the war pushing more Muslims into bin Laden’s fold. American troops may commit atrocities in anger at what is happening at home and push more people into bin Laden’s camp. The Muslim world will be allowed to see vigilanty violence against Muslims in the western world and feel compelled to fight the evil doers.

I’ve never considered myself a doomsayer but I think we’ll see this get worse before it gets better. Hopefully some smart people in Washington will find a way out of the box bin Laden is building for us.

20

Or, once the fighting started, O.b.L. could fabricate whatever lies that he wanted to.