Why doesn't September 11th-level stuff happen more?

[andrewdt85]

I was reading the 9-11 thread on these boards earlier, and it mentioned how Tom Clancy was being interviewed during the attack; he later commented on the attacks, saying how surprised he was at them (one of the reasons being how much against human nature suicide is).

Seeing how many terrorists there are who are willing to kill themselves for their cause- blow themselves up in a car, for example- why don’t more of them want to go out in a bigger bang? This is a strange and horrible question, I know, but- if you were willing to die for your cause, wouldn’t you want to spend your death by coming to America and hijacking a plane and killing much more people?

The reasons why a terrorists would choose instead to only blow up several dozen in his country could include [ul]
[li]He doesn’t have the funding to come to America, learn how to fly a plane, get on one heading towards a major skyline, etc.- this is a big one, b/c I saw the news on how the 9/11 guys prepared and it wasn’t easy[/li][li]The smaller group he wants to target is more what he wants to kill (say, a recruitment line for an army he’s targeting, not America in general)[/li][li]If he tries to do something big like hijack a plane and crash a building, a LOT of things could go wrong (first of all, don’t they lock the cockpits now? Second, the passengers fight back, third the plane is shot down before it hits anything, etc.)[/li][li]And plus, you can’t even get weapons onto planes, and so what can terrorists possibly do nowadays to get into a cockpit and crash a plane? [/li][/ul]

But I’m missing the point- the only suicide bombers you hear about in the news these days are ones who constantly kill US soldiers in Iraq, and they do it to fight America’s occupation of Iraq, not to terrorize our country. The logic behind my original question was: If so many terrorists are willing to die, why not just work together to go out w/ more of a bang like the guys did in 9/11? But of course, I realize that that is completely non-sensical, and is almost enough to make me not post this thread.

Let’s discuss other reasons why, in the four years since 9-11-'01, we’ve seen only a Madrid attack and a London attack and no other major attacks (besides those :rolleyes: ).

[even_sven]

The same reason why everyone who wants to commit suicide doen’t take out a few credit cards and spend their last days living it up.

Most suicide bombers are sad, lonely, wayward young people who are looking for something to believe in. They don’t have the energy or resources to move around much or coordinate something spectacular. It’s a big difference between giving one last “fuck you” to America and the world and working for months to plot something in a distant land. Most suicide bombers probably don’t even have much of a concept of America beyond a few stereotypes (just like most Americans even still couldn’t tell you much about the Middle East) and wouldn’t know where to begin an attack there. We tned to play out the dramas of our lives in the worlds we know, especially when we are at emotional and venurable times.

And the people with energy and knowledge- the people grooming and preparing the bombers- sure as hell arn’t going to give their own lives up.

[Rune]

@andrewdt85

Let’s discuss other reasons why, in the four years since 9-11-'01, we’ve seen only a Madrid attack and a London attack and no other major attacks (besides those :rolleyes: ).

Beslan. A lot others in Russia. Two on Bali. A bunch in Israel. A couple in Egypt. Others in North Africa. And one just the other day in the US.

It surprises me that Tom Clancy would be surprised at suicide attacks. Arab terrorists had hijacked a plane years before 9/11. Forced it to fly over Paris and threatned to fly it into the Eifel Tower and make a burning bomb of it all. And it’s not like there hadn’t been a lot of suicide attacks in Israel before 9/11.

[Rodgers01]

All the reasons listed, plus maybe we’re just getting better at foiling plots before they get off the ground. There’s a headline in the news today that the government has thwarted 10 major Al Qaida terrorist plots.

The bigger question to my mind is why we haven’t seen even small-scale suicide bombings in the US. It takes a lot of planning and dedication to execute a massive hit ala 9/11, but I would think it would be relatively easy for lone fanatics to strap on a bomb and blow themselves up in a suburban mall. So why hasn’t that happened once in the past four years? (Excepting, perhaps, what happened in Oklahoma a few days ago – though last I heard, it’s still unclear what exactly happened there.) Even the best security services can’t prevent that kind of thing from happening occassionally (ie, Israel), and with such a big country you’d think there’d be ample opportunity for it.

[uglybeech]

@andrewdt85

Let’s discuss other reasons why, in the four years since 9-11-'01, we’ve seen only a Madrid attack and a London attack and no other major attacks (besides those :rolleyes: ).

Bali anyone? Russia?

In answer to the spirit of the OP - terrorism is and has always been rare except during war - where you’re quite right, the definition of what constitutes terrorism vs. what constitutes a war crime, etc., gets a bit murky. But officially the annual deaths *worldwide * due to terrorism of any kind average in the mid-100s. If you compare that to deaths from practically any other cause that you can think of, it’s insignificant.

So (outside of war zones) there just aren’t that many terrorists. And specifically there aren’t that many more small-time terrorists than there are large-scale terrorists.

[andrewdt85]

@Rodgers01

The bigger question to my mind is why we haven’t seen even small-scale suicide bombings in the US. It takes a lot of planning and dedication to execute a massive hit ala 9/11, but I would think it would be relatively easy for lone fanatics to strap on a bomb and blow themselves up in a suburban mall. So why hasn’t that happened once in the past four years? (Excepting, perhaps, what happened in Oklahoma a few days ago – though last I heard, it’s still unclear what exactly happened there.) Even the best security services can’t prevent that kind of thing from happening occassionally (ie, Israel), and with such a big country you’d think there’d be ample opportunity for it.

My guess would be like that Mad TV sketch- the terrorist gets here, settles in to do his terrorist act, then realizes he likes the American way of life (comfy chair, digital cable, fast food) and never blows anything up or reports back to Afghanistan.

[BobLibDem]

My guesses:

1. The September 11 attacks served their purpose, whatever that might have been. They probably weren’t able to forsee that Bush would us it as a springboard for invading Iraq, that was just an unforseen bonus for alQaeda.

2. You might as well ask why the 17 year cicadas didn’t come out this year. It just wasn’t time. These terrorists, who act on hatreds built up over centuries, just don’t think on the Western time scale. Their patience is one of their most effective weapons, they have no problems waiting until the US lets up its guard.

3. To an extremely limited degree, the War on Terror is working. The flow of money is disrupted. Airlines are much more resistant to attack, so the next attack will likely involve another tactic. The coordinated effort needed to pull off a 9/11 attack is harder now than it was then.

[Pushkin]

@andrewdt85

I was reading the 9-11 thread on these boards earlier, and it mentioned how Tom Clancy was being interviewed during the attack; he later commented on the attacks, saying how surprised he was at them (one of the reasons being how much against human nature suicide is)

I thought Clancy had planned a book featuring a terrorist attack in the manner of the WTC attacks before the attacks occured and was only surprised that he had been told to keep the terrorists to one plane as friends thought 3 or 4 too many…

[mks57]

@andrewdt85

But I’m missing the point- the only suicide bombers you hear about in the news these days are ones who constantly kill US soldiers in Iraq, and they do it to fight America’s occupation of Iraq, not to terrorize our country.

Many of the suicide bombings in Iraq appear to be targeted at the provisional Iraqi government, and at Shia Muslims, in an effort to start a civil war.

Suicide bombers in Iraq have the advantage of easy access to huge stockpiles of military weapons and explosives. Explosives are much more difficult to get a hold of in the United States, especially in large quantities.

[DarrenS]

@Pushkin

I thought Clancy had planned a book featuring a terrorist attack in the manner of the WTC attacks before the attacks occured and was only surprised that he had been told to keep the terrorists to one plane as friends thought 3 or 4 too many…

Indeed. In Debt of honor, he describes a hijacked plane crashing into the capitol building.

[SlyFrog]

Depending on where you live in the U.S., it is a bit harder to carry such things out simply because of things like skin color and ethnic background. One of the interesting things about multiculturalism is that it makes it easier for such events to occur, in that it is more difficult to spot potential terrorists as such.

I do not care what you think about racial profiling and whether it is right or wrong to do; the fact remains that if the largest pool of terrorists are Middle Easterners, it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to spot a Middle Eastern terrorist cell in Cheyenne, Wyoming than it is in New York City.

In Iraq, it is considerably more difficult to spot the suicide bomber based on, “He doesn’t look like he’s from around here,” instincts alone.

[Hunter_Hawk]

@even sven

Most suicide bombers are sad, lonely, wayward young people who are looking for something to believe in. They don’t have the energy or resources to move around much or coordinate something spectacular.

Care to provide a cite for this? I was under the impression that a surprising number of terrorists were middle-class, though I don’t recall seeing anything specifically on suicide bombers.

Example:

Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing - the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they’re just plain evil.

Taking these perceived root causes in turn, three quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority—90 percent—came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that’s usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.

Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73 percent were married and the vast majority had children. Those who were not married were usually too young to be married. Only 13 percent were madrassa-trained and most of them come from what I call the Southeast Asian sample, the Jemaah Islamiyya (JI). They had gone to schools headed by Sungkar and Bashir. Sungkar was the head of JI; he died in 1999. His successor, Bashir, is the cleric who is being tried for the Jakarta Marriott bombing of August 2003; he is also suspected of planning the October 2002 Bali bombing.

As a psychiatrist, originally I was looking for any characteristic common to these men. But only four of the 400 men had any hint of a disorder. This is below the worldwide base rate for thought disorders. So they are as healthy as the general population. I didn’t find many personality disorders, which makes sense in that people who are antisocial usually don’t cooperate well enough with others to join groups.

[Marley23]

@Hunter Hawk

Care to provide a cite for this? I was under the impression that a surprising number of terrorists were middle-class, though I don’t recall seeing anything specifically on suicide bombers.

The middle class thing may be true of higher-level terrorists, but I don’t know if it’s true as a larger generality. I remember reading that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers had cut ties with their families (the one apparent exception was Ziad Jarrah).

[clairobscur]

@Rune

It surprises me that Tom Clancy would be surprised at suicide attacks. Arab terrorists had hijacked a plane years before 9/11. Forced it to fly over Paris and threatned to fly it into the Eifel Tower and make a burning bomb of it all…

Not exactly. It never came cose to Paris. The french government had received informations about the intents of the hijackers. They didn’t mentioned it themselves, of course. So they had the plane land for “refueling” in southern France where it was stormed.

Asked after the 9/11 whether he would have ordered the plane to be shot down, had it not landed, the then minister of interior stated that he would have, the informations he had about the hijacker’s actual plan being convincing enough.

[rippingtons_fan]

I always halfway expect terrorists here in the U.S. to do things like shooting a few RPG rounds onto an air force base at night (and then slinking away) or leaving an explosive somewhere in a shopping mall, grocery store or even an elementary school for their next murder spree.

If they do enough of these types of terrorist attacks here often enough, they won’t need one single Sept. 11 style attack, they can do the same things by degrees.

[Askance]

The terrorists don’t have to go to America to kill Americans any more, the US have kindly shipped a couple of hundred thousand over to Iraq where they can be got at much more easily, in a chaotic environment much more friendly to sustained terrorist operations.

IMO the US have fallen for one of the great sucker-punches in history.

[Marley23]

@andrewt85

Let’s discuss other reasons why, in the four years since 9-11-'01, we’ve seen only a Madrid attack and a London attack and no other major attacks (besides those ).

Most broadly put? I think it’s primarily because of a huge increase in anti-terrorism intelligence efforts and cooperation. There’s also the military arm of things and increased security domestically. Attention to people on watch lists is a biggie.

Here’s the thing: Islamic terrorism and Al Qaeda are not the same thing they were four years ago. I think government annoucements and news reporting give you the sense that AQ is a much more rigidly defined and unified group than it really is. Think about how often you hear the word “links” with regard to Al Qaeda and terrorism. The group has become so disrupted and decentralized - things that make it harder to do something as huge as September 11th, or the Operation Bojinka plot that inspired it - that I’m not sure if the Al Qaeda of September 2001 exists anymore. It may be considered more of a movement than a group now.

Something on the scale of September 11th is just plain hard to do, as evidenced by the fact that it only happened once. I don’t minimize how terrible any other attacks were, but September 11th killed more than ten times as many people as Madrid or Bali, and we’ve not seen anything close to that since.

@rippingtons_fan

I always halfway expect terrorists here in the U.S. to do things like shooting a few RPG rounds onto an air force base at night (and then slinking away) or leaving an explosive somewhere in a shopping mall, grocery store or even an elementary school for their next murder spree.

If they do enough of these types of terrorist attacks here often enough, they won’t need one single Sept. 11 style attack, they can do the same things by degrees.

I sometimes think the same thing. But the problem is that whoever does those things is probably going to get caught, and with the small numbers of people they have available, they need to try to save them for big attacks. The random stuff would scare the hell out of people, but I don’t think it makes sense from their perspective. If - and I stress this is an if - Al Qaeda is trying to send a particular message to the people in America and the West, I think random attacks like that would not advance it the same way the big ones would.

[aamco]

@andrewdt85

Seeing how many terrorists there are who are willing to kill themselves for their cause- blow themselves up in a car, for example- why don’t more of them want to go out in a bigger bang? This is a strange and horrible question, I know, but- if you were willing to die for your cause, wouldn’t you want to spend your death by coming to America and hijacking a plane and killing much more people?

I’m pretty sure this is a mischaracterization, propagated either by the media or by the government.

I’d guess that most of the people who blow themselves up have a specific grudge at a specific country (Israel). It’s more likely an emotional thing than a rational thing. People go for convinient, not high-value, targets.

There is also likely a great disparity between people who report they want to do something to the U.S. and people who, in reality, would. Think of the number of Americans, say, who might boast about flying out to Saudi Arabia and putting a few bullet holes in civilians to show them what terrorism feels like – but most of them are highly unlikely to actually do it in real life.

I think the number of suicide bombers in the world is a greatly exaggerated figure. I would say (without any proof whatsoever) that suicide bombers are used up as quickly as they are formed. There is no large pool of people waiting in line to blow themselves up.

Let’s discuss other reasons why, in the four years since 9-11-'01, we’ve seen only a Madrid attack and a London attack and no other major attacks

Quite simply, because these attacks take a lot of planning. Look at the history of major attacks before 9/11: 2000 USS Cole bombing, 1998 Embassy bombings, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, 1993 WTC bombing. These attacks are few and far between anyway.

[Mr.Duality]

How long did it take for the 9/11 terrorists to organize and carry out their operation? Roughly four years, wasn’t it? That seems to be a reasonable time-frame for something so complicated. So if planning for a new operation began soon after 9/11, it isn’t seriously overdue yet.

The next 9/11-type attack may involve cargo aircraft (i.e. Federal Express) for which security isn’t nearly as hi-profile as it is for passenger aircraft.