Al Qaeda has done the precise action at the precise time to increase American world power and opinion as much as possible. If they could have predicted this course, I’m sure this is the course that they would have chosen. Successful terrorist attack, inevitable short-lived world sympathy followed by long-term terror of the American rulers and public. This leads to retaliative strikes at the easiest targets, who are only tangentially related to al Qaeda. The end result is decreasing world opinion of America with al Qaeda only nominally affected. They have had no issues, it would seem, it carrying out terrorist strikes outside of the US, inflicting US casualties in Saudi and Iraq, and perhaps are still in waiting for attacks in the US.
But to the OP. I think you have to transport yourself back to August 2001 in order to begin to predict this. A time when our biggest news stories were shark attacks on the eastern seabord and Gary Condit, another weasely Democrat in inappropriate relations with a Jew. I’ll admit to bias, but there were only a handful of things that had pissed me off from the Bush camp before 9/11. The biggest was his moralistic refusal to negotiate on repatriation in the Koreas. Clinton had worked on this and had gotten all sides to sit down. He basically bribed North Korea into weapons inspection, and had pretty much managed to contain them. Bush came along, with Rumsfeld and all of his talk about “rogue states” and National Missile Defense, and holding NK up as an example, stopped negotiations. Our relationship, never quite lovely to begin with, quickly soured.
Maybe this is what Bush wanted. His pet NMD project depended on rogue states with ICBMs. China and North Korea were the only two close, and China’s relationship with the US had been steadily getting better, apart from that spy plane incident. So North Korea it was. I was pissed because it seemed like we were intentionally souring the well so we could build a missile shield which had been miles away from operational on all tests.
Continuing along this course, I see North Korea being the biggest deal for Bush. I see the situation worsening because IMHO 9/11 just let us ignore North Korea, thereby not actively worsening the situation. Without 9/11, there would have been more focus on them, and therefore more crises.
Second, I think it is impossible to tell what would have happened to the economy without 9/11. Bush had passed a huge tax cut, but I have heard differing opinions as to whether the tax cut has had anything to do with the recent bounce in indicators. I have heard a number of people attribute it to things like the tremendous amount of US government expenditure put into Homeland Security and Iraq, and thus predicting that the bounce is unsustainable. Without 9/11, Bush couldn’t have spent so much. This means that while he would have certainly had a deficit, he wouldn’t have had record setting deficits.
Lastly, I see a lot more focus on other issues if 9/11 hadn’t happened – health care reform, environmental policy. These things we have ignored because we have the two big issues (economy and war) to worry about. So Bush would have been forced to address this. His environmental record, according to most, has been a bit spotty, and he to the best of my knowledge has never firmly addressed the whole health care picture beyond prescription drugs for Medicare. It would have been interesting to see him tackle those problems.
