Have the Terrorists Won?

It seems to me that truly historic days live on beyond their normal 24–hour lifespans and continue to influence our lives indefinitely, in ways that are seen and unseen, even if the public's attention has moved on to something else.

In fact, it reminds me of a pebble tossed into a pond or a lake. From that one tiny point of impact, the ripples fan out in ever–expanding circles, affecting everything they touch, until they are stopped by the distant shorelines.

Need a bigger, grander example? Think of the 2004 tsunami that began with an undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean and led to the deaths of more than 225,000 people in nearly a dozen countries.

It was, in fact, months before the scope of the tsunami was understood. Indeed, it often seems to take the distance that time can provide before the full impact of an historic event can be comprehended.

I was thinking about this the other night while I watched a four–hour program on 9/11. That's an event that has been particularly fascinating for me because, at the time it happened, the office in which I worked had no TV set. Unlike most Americans, I didn't see the events as they unfolded.

I've only seen video footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the bodies plummeting to earth from great heights. As appalling as those images are, it's one thing to have seen them as they happened, raw and uncensored, playing out in real time, and it's quite another to see film footage of something that has already occurred.

It's kind of like watching the Zapruder film, knowing that President Kennedy's head is about to be engulfed in a bloody halo and being powerless to do anything about it. You may want to yell at the screen, "Don't make that turn!" but you know that Kennedy's limousine will drive down Elm Street past the Texas Schoolbook Depository into history — and there isn't a thing you can do about it.

It's the same with the hijacked planes on September 11, I suppose. You can see the surveillance film of some of the hijackers being briefly detained at the security checkpoints. You can see footage of at least one of the hijackers with what appears to be a box cutter in his hip pocket, and you may feel tempted to yell at the screen, "Don't let him board the plane!" but you know he will, anyway.

And you know that the four planes will be hijacked and nearly 3,000 people will be killed on a crystal clear, early autumn morning.

Sept. 11, 2001, will always be a significant day in American history. But, once the shock from the attacks wore off and the stock market reopened and planes were allowed to fly again, life began to return to normal.

Even so, I think it can be argued that, as meticulous and methodical as the terrorists' planning was, those hijackings had consequences that the terrorists did not anticipate, consequences that continue to influence American life.

In the months after the attacks, for example, Osama bin Laden reportedly told some of his supporters that he didn't foresee the collapse of the Twin Towers. Is that credible? Bin Laden's academic credentials are unclear, but some have said he earned a degree in civil engineering. If that is so, he must have had some idea of what a fire fed by thousands of gallons of jet fuel could do to a skyscraper.

Whether bin Laden believed the towers would fall, his objective seems more certain. He was driven by a desire to bring jihad to American soil. Thus far, that has not happened. We've been told that additional terrorist attacks were thwarted by policies that were followed during the Bush administration, but we've seen no evidence to support that claim. There are those who believe al–Qaeda has been biding its time before striking again, similar to the eight–year gap that passed between the attacks on the World Trade Center.

But, while bin Laden apparently sought to engage the United States in a bloody conflict, he may not have anticipated the direction it would take.

He may not have realized how obsessed the neocons in the Bush administration were with Saddam Hussein, even a decade after the end of the Gulf War, or that they would use the terrorist attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq that continues to claim American lives and money at a time when both could be used more effectively.

But, from bin Laden's perspective, the terrorist attacks may have succeeded in achieving his goal, albeit in unexpected ways. His words may be contradictory, but I think we can agree that his goal seems to be toppling the United States. Al–Qaeda and the Islamic extremists may have a Dark Ages mentality and their objective may be predicated on the use of force, but in the 21st century, the best strategy for destroying a foe is to undermine that foe's economy.

I'm not suggesting that economists sympathetic to Islamic extremism infiltrated the American economy and proceeded to sabotage it. The greed at the top of America's economic food chain owes no allegiance to any faith — only money.

So what is the relationship between the Iraq war, now more than 6 years old, and the recession?

Clearly, many factors have been involved in the recession. But it can be plausibly argued that the combined cost of sustaining the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 — more than $860 billion so far — has made things much worse than they might have been.

And that begs the question — Have the terrorists won?