Bin Laden thought the US was weak—and he was correct

FIRST SAY:

In the months following the 9/11 attacks, Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and the proper response to it in a highly charged exchange of letters in The Nation,  including discussion of whether any comparison could be legitimately made between the 9/11 attacks and the 1998 Al Shifa bombing by the US.

Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his former colleagues.

Hitchens strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan, particularly in his “Fighting Words” columns in Slate.

Hitchens employed the term "Islamofascist" and supported the Iraq War, causing his critics to consider him a “neoconservative.”  He, however, refused to embrace this designation.

—Wikipedia

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The 9/11 attacks on America’s political and economic seats of power are remembered today in somber commemoration at several locales, the First Responder Honor Park in Gang Mills, Norfolk Navy, the Thomas Edison Parkway, Ground Zero and Sarasota among them.

But 23 years after the airborne attacks that momentarily brought America to its feet and triggered an onrush of patriotic sentiments throughout this superpower of a nation, various theories are still floated as to the nature of September 11, its motive and its perpetrators and abetters.

Surreal and bizarre ideas continue to gain traction up to today, making one of the most unforgettable moments in the history of the US and the world shrouded in mystery—perhaps forever.

With hindsight, we can now surmise that the attacks on New York City and the Washington D.C. area would not have occurred had al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not got hold of this idea, and clung to it:  that the United States was weak and could be attacked by its own planes falling from the skies like lethal missiles.

This is how Britannica reported the narrative:

“The September attacks were precipitated in large part because Osama bin Laden, the leader of the militant Islamic organization al-Qaeda, held naive beliefs about the United States in the run-up to the attacks.  Abu Walid al-Masri, an Egyptian who was a bin Laden associate in Afghanistan in the 1980s and ‘90s, explained that, in the years prior to the attacks, bin Laden became increasingly convinced that America was weak.

“”He believed that the Unites States was much weaker than some of those around him thought,” Masri remembered, and “as evidence he referred to what happened to the United States in Beirut when the bombing of the Marines base led them to flee from Lebanon,” referring to the destruction of the marine barracks there in 1983, which killed 241 American servicemen.

“Bin Laden believed that the United States was a “paper tiger,” a belief shaped not just by America’s departure from Lebanon following the marine barracks bombing but also by the withdrawal of American forces from Somalia in 1993, following the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemen in Mogadishu, and the American pullout from Vietnam in the 1970s.”

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The world commemorates today the political tragedy that befell the American people 23 years ago today:  Islamist terrorists’ attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon from the air.  The hijackers used domestic commercial airliners filled with passengers as lethal missiles.

A group of Muslim terrorists overpowered pilots and crew members of four large domestic aircraft as soon as they were airborne. The flights originated from three East Coast airports, bound for the West Coast.  American Airlines flight 11 which came from Boston was slammed by the hijackers into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. 

Many Americans thought then that it was an accident involving a small commuter plane.

But when a second plane, the United Airlines flight 175 also from Boston, struck the WTC south tower some 17 minutes later, there was no doubt that the United States was under attack.  

Soon after, a third plane, American Airlines flight 77, taking off from Dulles Airport near Washington D.C., struck the Pentagon, the biggest office building in the world, creating a fire that damaged much of the offices in that part of the building.  

The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) ordered a nationwide ground stop but minutes later, the fourth plane, United Airlines flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, crashed near Shanksville in Pennsylvania following an attempt by its passengers to overpower the hijackers.  

It was a day of infamy for the United States comparable to the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese during World War II.  The difference was that this is the New York City and Washington area, the seat of American political and economic power, and it is located in the mainland US.  Never was the mainland attacked by an enemy in all its history.  

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States also known as the 9-11 Commission was set up by US President George W. Bush in 2002 to investigate the attacks.  It has come up with these grim numbers—2,750 people were killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, 40 in Pennsylvania, while all 19 Islamist hijackers also died.

More than two decades after the fact, Americans and other peoples of the world are still divided on many aspects of 9-11, especially the motive, with various theories being floated, including the complicity of the US government itself.  The official line is that it was perpetrated by al-Qaeda, with leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden prominently mentioned.  The attacks also precipitated the wars against the Taliban in Afghanistan, then the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, in pursuance of Bush’s preemptive war doctrine.

Although there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda in the 9-11 attacks, the US went ahead and invaded Iraq, leading to Saddam’s fall and his death, along with a change of regime in that country.  But that war policy proved to be a weak one for America, for it precipitated the formation and growth of the Islamic State (IS) and resulted in more deaths for young soldiers of the US and other allied nations, along with the victims of their state terrorism.

In a real sense, Osama bin Laden’s appreciation of a weak United States is correct, as its pullout from Afghanistan is yet another proof.  It is just unfortunate that the Philippines stands to share in the burden of the Afghan debacle, as US refugees from this country will soon make the Philippines their temporary home, and we will have to extend all the assistance and accommodations to them as part of our friendly relations with America.