Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer Read Free Book Online Page A

be advantageous for bin Laden’s comparable project, but it would drive the Taliban from power, destroy all their achievements, and send them back to the hills as mere guerrillas for another decade or more, even if they won in the end. The two men may have been as close as brothers, but in the circumstances it would have required a great leap of faith for bin Laden to have confided his specific plans to Omar beforehand. He probably didn’t do so.
    So the attacks went ahead as planned on September 11, 2001, and some three thousand people, the great majorityof them Americans, died on live television before the horrified eyes of their fellow citizens. It all seems inevitable in retrospect, and in this case it probably was, once bin Laden got his Big Idea. A great deal of what followed did not conform to his expectations, but in the broadest sense he got what he bargained for.

CHAPTER 3

JIHAD: THE AFGHAN PHASE, 2001–2003

 
    T here was a popular conversation game in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks called “What would Al Gore have done?” Would things have turned out better had the Florida vote recounts gone in Gore’s favour in the 2000 election, so that Gore would have been in the White House in September 2001? They would probably have gone better in the long run, but nobody could have handled the immediate American response to the attack better than George W. Bush and his senior colleagues.
    We will probably never know the name of the evil genius who came up with the idea of attacking the Twin Towers in New York City with aircraft, but it certainly met bin Laden’s requirement for a terrorist extravaganza so spectacular that the American government would be compelled to respond in the way that al Qaeda wanted. After the damp squib of President Clinton’s response to the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998, it was clear to the plotters that the majority of the victims in this case had to be Americans, and that there had to be a lot of them. But it was not enough that many Americans be killed in a terrorist attack; they had to bekilled in a dramatic and visually unforgettable way, and on home soil.
    This is actually quite hard to arrange. You can bomb some huge political rally or sporting event and cause mass casualties, but you will probably not get the toll up into the thousands, and the nature of the pictures—shots of people fleeing, shots of people down, perhaps a shaky video clip of the flash of the explosion—will not adequately convey the scale of the event anyway. Attacks on mass transport offer crowds of potential victims and the possibility of dramatic collisions, crashes or sinkings, but you can’t count on anybody getting good footage of it at the right moment (unless you shoot your own), and the pictures shot later by the networks will be identical to the sort of stuff they churn out after any other train or plane crash. How are you going to trademark this as a terrorist attack, so huge and uniquely horrible that something very big must be done about it?
    Numbers of dead alone may not do it. The 9/11 attacks killed about three thousand people, but another three thousand Americans died in road accidents in the same month (and another three thousand died of gunshot wounds). What counted most were the images, and the al Qaeda planner chose well: civilian airliners sailing serenely across a clear blue sky and smashing into arrogantly tall buildings; those same buildings in flames in the very heartland of global finance; hundred-storey towers collapsing on their trapped occupants in a waythat nobody had ever seen before. It created exactly the sense of utter shock that al Qaeda needed, and made it inevitable that the U.S. government would have to invade Afghanistan in order to root out the authors of the atrocity. But it did not actually mandate how Washington had to do the job.
    The people around President Bush happened to know the Middle East well.