FORD
09-10-2006, 09:17 PM
What if 9/11 had not happened?
Sep. 10, 2006. 08:08 AM
ROSIE DIMANNO
In Ray Bradbury's famous short story, A Sound of Thunder, a time traveller changes the course of evolution by stepping off a designated tourist path and crushing one little butterfly underfoot.
Only a touch more prosaically, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz posited, decades ago, that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America could affect the weather in Central Park.
Cause and effect — extraordinary what-if possibilities, conjecturing about the known and unknown — are as much the purview of imagination as science.
One is driven to speculate: what if ... 9/11 had never occurred?
What if intelligence had been properly shared and Osama bin Laden stopped dead in his tracks?
What if those 19 hijackers had never boarded those planes, the World Trade Center never attacked, 2,749 innocent lives never lost on a crystalline blue September morning — "severe clear," in pilot parlance — in New York City alone?
If a fragile butterfly can have such a profound impact on the world, how to even begin measuring the geopolitical ripples of 9/11, or to envision how civilization might have unfolded without the gutting rupture of that calamity.
"It's an interesting parlour game, but the fact is it did happen," says Peter Bergen, the bin Laden biographer and adventuresome university professor who is more widely recognized as CNN's terrorism analyst.
"On some levels, they got some lucky breaks. But history is made by the lucky and inflicted on the unlucky."
What must be remembered is that 9/11 didn't happen in isolation, that it was bracketed by other Al Qaeda atrocities, though nothing quite so spectacular, and that clearly plotters continue to scheme and dream large, from alleged conspiracies to blow up transatlantic planes simultaneously to persistent sniffing about, we're led to believe, for chemical and biological weapons.
Bin Laden and his closest strategic adherents picked the time and place for their most lethal assault against the West.
If not then, on Sept. 11, 2001, all the evidence indicates that it would have been on another date, possibly aimed at a different target, maybe by other diabolical means. Perhaps not so monstrous in disaster scale but quite likely just as provocative, setting in motion the very same consequences: War in Afghanistan; a casus belli in the White House for war in Iraq; fury in the Muslim universe; the proliferation of decentralized terrorist cells.
"Okay, what if 9/11 hadn't happened and where would we be in 2006?" posits Bergen, playing the counter-factualism game.
"Well, given that they were able to conduct successful operations against U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000, five years would have been an awful long time for them not to have done something.
"If you believe what (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice testified to the 9/11 Commission, (government officials) were formulating an overall strategy for the Afghanistan/Pakistan/Al Qaeda problem.
"There were actually meetings to discuss that strategy in the week before Sept. 11. There might have been a Special Forces action in Afghanistan.
"I could see that — without a big footprint — just going in to kill bin Laden and the top leadership.
"But would there be substantial numbers of Canadian, British, American and other countries' troops in there? Probably not."
Terrorism analysts and academics have been scratching their heads over the last five years, trying to understand why bin Laden rolled the dice — shot his bolt — in the 9/11 attacks. Apart from the fact that he could.
The symbolism may be obvious: those soaring twin towers represented the supreme technocracy of the West, the World Trade Center an irresistible emblem of American power, modernity and finance.
Yet by pouncing when he did — thumbs-up on an audacious broadside, the pupal plot first dangled by alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1994 — bin Laden all but assured that there could be no second act of Grand Guignol theatre-terrorism.
The whole world would be looking for him, plunging Al Qaeda more deeply to ground, which would mean immense difficulties in training, co-ordination, communication and financing. (Before 9/11, it was pretty easy for young jihad-inspired men to get themselves to training bases in Afghanistan; nothing is in the open now and Al Qaeda is as hard to find for potential recruits as it is for the U.S. military.)
"I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, why did bin Laden move in 2001?" muses David Harris, a leading Canadian expert on terrorism. "It might have been an act of strategic genius for bin Laden to have restrained himself at that time.
"We could have been left far more asleep. How many, on Sept. 10, 2001, would have done anything but throw a net over you for suggesting that planes would be used as bombs against our tallest skyscrapers?"
Formerly chief of strategic planning at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and now director of the international and terrorist intelligence program at Insignis Strategic Research in Ottawa, Harris suggests the trajectory of global terrorism was already in place and might have run even more rampant, unchallenged, if not for the stunning 9/11 wake-up call.
"I have no trouble imagining entire cities disappearing rather than just buildings," he says grimly. "As it is, we're a generation behind reality in understanding the scope of the threat we're living in. We haven't come remotely to grips with the fact that we've had war of an existential type imposed upon us.
"There is a refusal to speak plainly of radical Islamist ideologists making war against the West. And in Canada, we persist with immigration and refugee policies that reflect a sense of extraordinary luxuries we no longer have."
The military historian and author Jack Granatstein observes caustically that, had 9/11 not occurred when it did, "all Canadians would be talking like Jack Layton." Which presumably means there would be even less stomach for robust involvement in Afghanistan — what has the Taliban ever done to us, huh? — and greater detachment from international counterterrorism measures, particularly those that involve actually putting boots on the ground, risking casualties.
"Unless the United States was hit, nobody was going to take the Taliban seriously," Granatstein continues. "Nobody would have cared that the Taliban was pulling girls out of school. Afghanistan was simply not a country that mattered."
Now, Canada has 2,200 troops in that country as part of the NATO stabilization mission and a deep moral commitment, though one vulnerable to the domestic political climate and an isolationist nerve that vibrates whenever a Canadian soldier is killed in Kandahar.
What's palpably evident is that Ottawa would not have redressed long-standing fiscal garrotting of its military, which became a primary platform for the Conservatives in the last federal election.
"The Tories have spent a good deal of time talking about defence and border security," says Granatstein. "Without 9/11, we wouldn't be spending one-tenth of what we're putting into border security."
There's no knowing how heightened vigilance, or its absence, would have played out, whether the British bombing plot would have been discovered in time or, conversely, whether it would have been put into even rudimentary motion.
But might there have been a 7/7 in London — the transit bombings — minus everything that had happened in the previous four years?
It's impossible to quantify how the exaggerated, extremely inconveniencing security precautions at airports have made the public or the planes safer.
For most of us, the ramifications of 9/11 have altered existence only marginally, primarily in the realm of travel, although Muslims would certainly argue that the perception of them has shifted palpably.
The global war has cost billions and billions of dollars, yet there's little sense that it's coming out of our wallet — except indirectly at the gas pumps.
George W. Bush was already in the White House and, as uninspired as his administration was before Sept. 11, there's precious little evidence to support the view that Democrats, lacking even the counterpoint of Iraq, would have been able to wrestle back the presidency after a single term.
North of the border, the Liberals had already done themselves sufficient damage, via scandal and corruption, that the party was hurtling towards an inevitable implosion, regardless of whether Stephen Harper had come along to, as some claim, exploit the wounds of 9/11 and attach himself to Bush's hip.
In any event, over the last five years, terrorism has been erupting throughout the planet, though to what extent this can be attributed to counter-counter-terrorism initiatives — the War on Terrorism initiated by 9/11 spawning more vigorous insurgency — is a complex issue.
Extensive research done by the RAND Corporation concludes that attacks and fatalities have risen dramatically since 2001, but not in the United States, where the war started.
Iraq surpasses by far all the others in the list of Top 10 terrorist targets, but an insurgency verging on civil war can arguably placed outside the global terrorism landscape, insofar as the violence isn't directed randomly outwards.
Several of the countries most severely afflicted by terrorist activity — Nepal, India, Colombia — are contending with chronic, localized opposition, even crime networks, that have no association with radical, revolutionary Islam, which is the core and amorphous terrorist threat.
It is Islamic terrorism, striking far distant from the locus of political and ideological grievance, that keeps intelligence and security authorities awake at night. It is not beyond the pale to imagine radioactive clouds and tens of thousands of casualties. For them, the what-if scenarios — erasing 9/11 from the record — are less about what might have been than what could still be.
"My guess is that they're not going to expand to dirty bombs or nuclear weapons unless they're losing," says Douglas Ross, an expert in arms control and political science professor at Simon Fraser University, in reference to the Al Qaeda network, though the same could be said of the multiplying transnational terrorist cadres.
"The more they lose, the more dangerous they become. At the moment, they're not losing, so they're content to wage a war of attrition against the U.S. and its allies. No, they're definitely not losing. But are they winning?"
Bin Laden's original and central objective — overthrowing Middle Eastern regimes, particularly the House of Saud — hasn't happened and looks ever less likely to happen. If anything, 9/11 has given oppressive leaders political cover to tighten the vise on both Islamic radicals and modest democratic movements.
The Palestinian "road map" was essentially derailed post-9/11 as attention and energy focused elsewhere. And destroying America is absurd as an ambition. The U.S. can take a pounding, like 9/11, and pound right back, whether unilaterally or in coalition. The Iraq war may be unpopular but not the broader war on terror, which is why Bush is stumping with the latter as mid-term congressional elections approach.
In the end, a "good news" scenario predicated on wiping 9/11 from the historical loop is an imaginative leap perhaps best left to fabulists and futurists. Such a one is Robert J. Sawyer, Canadian science fiction writer, who is assured — convinced if not convincing — in his crystal ball gazing via the rear view mirror
"There's little chance George Bush would have been re-elected," says Sawyer, expressing an opinion that is no doubt largely shared.
"He went from being the guy who stole the presidency by chicanery to being a commander-in-chief who had to be blindly obeyed, thanks to 9/11.
"Because of 9/11, we got Homeland Security and the loss of civil liberties, the ill-conceived war in Iraq, the resulting devastation of the U.S. dollar on world markets, three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, ineffectual airport security measures and the curtailing of stem-cell research that ultimately might have otherwise saved millions of lives.
"The White House is in denial about global warming and ... creationists are getting more and more powerful. All of that is possible because 9/11 let Bush — an apocalyptist who honestly doesn't believe we have to worry about the long-term — be re-elected."
Just about covers it, no?
LINK (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637041&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home)
Sep. 10, 2006. 08:08 AM
ROSIE DIMANNO
In Ray Bradbury's famous short story, A Sound of Thunder, a time traveller changes the course of evolution by stepping off a designated tourist path and crushing one little butterfly underfoot.
Only a touch more prosaically, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz posited, decades ago, that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America could affect the weather in Central Park.
Cause and effect — extraordinary what-if possibilities, conjecturing about the known and unknown — are as much the purview of imagination as science.
One is driven to speculate: what if ... 9/11 had never occurred?
What if intelligence had been properly shared and Osama bin Laden stopped dead in his tracks?
What if those 19 hijackers had never boarded those planes, the World Trade Center never attacked, 2,749 innocent lives never lost on a crystalline blue September morning — "severe clear," in pilot parlance — in New York City alone?
If a fragile butterfly can have such a profound impact on the world, how to even begin measuring the geopolitical ripples of 9/11, or to envision how civilization might have unfolded without the gutting rupture of that calamity.
"It's an interesting parlour game, but the fact is it did happen," says Peter Bergen, the bin Laden biographer and adventuresome university professor who is more widely recognized as CNN's terrorism analyst.
"On some levels, they got some lucky breaks. But history is made by the lucky and inflicted on the unlucky."
What must be remembered is that 9/11 didn't happen in isolation, that it was bracketed by other Al Qaeda atrocities, though nothing quite so spectacular, and that clearly plotters continue to scheme and dream large, from alleged conspiracies to blow up transatlantic planes simultaneously to persistent sniffing about, we're led to believe, for chemical and biological weapons.
Bin Laden and his closest strategic adherents picked the time and place for their most lethal assault against the West.
If not then, on Sept. 11, 2001, all the evidence indicates that it would have been on another date, possibly aimed at a different target, maybe by other diabolical means. Perhaps not so monstrous in disaster scale but quite likely just as provocative, setting in motion the very same consequences: War in Afghanistan; a casus belli in the White House for war in Iraq; fury in the Muslim universe; the proliferation of decentralized terrorist cells.
"Okay, what if 9/11 hadn't happened and where would we be in 2006?" posits Bergen, playing the counter-factualism game.
"Well, given that they were able to conduct successful operations against U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000, five years would have been an awful long time for them not to have done something.
"If you believe what (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice testified to the 9/11 Commission, (government officials) were formulating an overall strategy for the Afghanistan/Pakistan/Al Qaeda problem.
"There were actually meetings to discuss that strategy in the week before Sept. 11. There might have been a Special Forces action in Afghanistan.
"I could see that — without a big footprint — just going in to kill bin Laden and the top leadership.
"But would there be substantial numbers of Canadian, British, American and other countries' troops in there? Probably not."
Terrorism analysts and academics have been scratching their heads over the last five years, trying to understand why bin Laden rolled the dice — shot his bolt — in the 9/11 attacks. Apart from the fact that he could.
The symbolism may be obvious: those soaring twin towers represented the supreme technocracy of the West, the World Trade Center an irresistible emblem of American power, modernity and finance.
Yet by pouncing when he did — thumbs-up on an audacious broadside, the pupal plot first dangled by alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1994 — bin Laden all but assured that there could be no second act of Grand Guignol theatre-terrorism.
The whole world would be looking for him, plunging Al Qaeda more deeply to ground, which would mean immense difficulties in training, co-ordination, communication and financing. (Before 9/11, it was pretty easy for young jihad-inspired men to get themselves to training bases in Afghanistan; nothing is in the open now and Al Qaeda is as hard to find for potential recruits as it is for the U.S. military.)
"I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, why did bin Laden move in 2001?" muses David Harris, a leading Canadian expert on terrorism. "It might have been an act of strategic genius for bin Laden to have restrained himself at that time.
"We could have been left far more asleep. How many, on Sept. 10, 2001, would have done anything but throw a net over you for suggesting that planes would be used as bombs against our tallest skyscrapers?"
Formerly chief of strategic planning at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and now director of the international and terrorist intelligence program at Insignis Strategic Research in Ottawa, Harris suggests the trajectory of global terrorism was already in place and might have run even more rampant, unchallenged, if not for the stunning 9/11 wake-up call.
"I have no trouble imagining entire cities disappearing rather than just buildings," he says grimly. "As it is, we're a generation behind reality in understanding the scope of the threat we're living in. We haven't come remotely to grips with the fact that we've had war of an existential type imposed upon us.
"There is a refusal to speak plainly of radical Islamist ideologists making war against the West. And in Canada, we persist with immigration and refugee policies that reflect a sense of extraordinary luxuries we no longer have."
The military historian and author Jack Granatstein observes caustically that, had 9/11 not occurred when it did, "all Canadians would be talking like Jack Layton." Which presumably means there would be even less stomach for robust involvement in Afghanistan — what has the Taliban ever done to us, huh? — and greater detachment from international counterterrorism measures, particularly those that involve actually putting boots on the ground, risking casualties.
"Unless the United States was hit, nobody was going to take the Taliban seriously," Granatstein continues. "Nobody would have cared that the Taliban was pulling girls out of school. Afghanistan was simply not a country that mattered."
Now, Canada has 2,200 troops in that country as part of the NATO stabilization mission and a deep moral commitment, though one vulnerable to the domestic political climate and an isolationist nerve that vibrates whenever a Canadian soldier is killed in Kandahar.
What's palpably evident is that Ottawa would not have redressed long-standing fiscal garrotting of its military, which became a primary platform for the Conservatives in the last federal election.
"The Tories have spent a good deal of time talking about defence and border security," says Granatstein. "Without 9/11, we wouldn't be spending one-tenth of what we're putting into border security."
There's no knowing how heightened vigilance, or its absence, would have played out, whether the British bombing plot would have been discovered in time or, conversely, whether it would have been put into even rudimentary motion.
But might there have been a 7/7 in London — the transit bombings — minus everything that had happened in the previous four years?
It's impossible to quantify how the exaggerated, extremely inconveniencing security precautions at airports have made the public or the planes safer.
For most of us, the ramifications of 9/11 have altered existence only marginally, primarily in the realm of travel, although Muslims would certainly argue that the perception of them has shifted palpably.
The global war has cost billions and billions of dollars, yet there's little sense that it's coming out of our wallet — except indirectly at the gas pumps.
George W. Bush was already in the White House and, as uninspired as his administration was before Sept. 11, there's precious little evidence to support the view that Democrats, lacking even the counterpoint of Iraq, would have been able to wrestle back the presidency after a single term.
North of the border, the Liberals had already done themselves sufficient damage, via scandal and corruption, that the party was hurtling towards an inevitable implosion, regardless of whether Stephen Harper had come along to, as some claim, exploit the wounds of 9/11 and attach himself to Bush's hip.
In any event, over the last five years, terrorism has been erupting throughout the planet, though to what extent this can be attributed to counter-counter-terrorism initiatives — the War on Terrorism initiated by 9/11 spawning more vigorous insurgency — is a complex issue.
Extensive research done by the RAND Corporation concludes that attacks and fatalities have risen dramatically since 2001, but not in the United States, where the war started.
Iraq surpasses by far all the others in the list of Top 10 terrorist targets, but an insurgency verging on civil war can arguably placed outside the global terrorism landscape, insofar as the violence isn't directed randomly outwards.
Several of the countries most severely afflicted by terrorist activity — Nepal, India, Colombia — are contending with chronic, localized opposition, even crime networks, that have no association with radical, revolutionary Islam, which is the core and amorphous terrorist threat.
It is Islamic terrorism, striking far distant from the locus of political and ideological grievance, that keeps intelligence and security authorities awake at night. It is not beyond the pale to imagine radioactive clouds and tens of thousands of casualties. For them, the what-if scenarios — erasing 9/11 from the record — are less about what might have been than what could still be.
"My guess is that they're not going to expand to dirty bombs or nuclear weapons unless they're losing," says Douglas Ross, an expert in arms control and political science professor at Simon Fraser University, in reference to the Al Qaeda network, though the same could be said of the multiplying transnational terrorist cadres.
"The more they lose, the more dangerous they become. At the moment, they're not losing, so they're content to wage a war of attrition against the U.S. and its allies. No, they're definitely not losing. But are they winning?"
Bin Laden's original and central objective — overthrowing Middle Eastern regimes, particularly the House of Saud — hasn't happened and looks ever less likely to happen. If anything, 9/11 has given oppressive leaders political cover to tighten the vise on both Islamic radicals and modest democratic movements.
The Palestinian "road map" was essentially derailed post-9/11 as attention and energy focused elsewhere. And destroying America is absurd as an ambition. The U.S. can take a pounding, like 9/11, and pound right back, whether unilaterally or in coalition. The Iraq war may be unpopular but not the broader war on terror, which is why Bush is stumping with the latter as mid-term congressional elections approach.
In the end, a "good news" scenario predicated on wiping 9/11 from the historical loop is an imaginative leap perhaps best left to fabulists and futurists. Such a one is Robert J. Sawyer, Canadian science fiction writer, who is assured — convinced if not convincing — in his crystal ball gazing via the rear view mirror
"There's little chance George Bush would have been re-elected," says Sawyer, expressing an opinion that is no doubt largely shared.
"He went from being the guy who stole the presidency by chicanery to being a commander-in-chief who had to be blindly obeyed, thanks to 9/11.
"Because of 9/11, we got Homeland Security and the loss of civil liberties, the ill-conceived war in Iraq, the resulting devastation of the U.S. dollar on world markets, three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, ineffectual airport security measures and the curtailing of stem-cell research that ultimately might have otherwise saved millions of lives.
"The White House is in denial about global warming and ... creationists are getting more and more powerful. All of that is possible because 9/11 let Bush — an apocalyptist who honestly doesn't believe we have to worry about the long-term — be re-elected."
Just about covers it, no?
LINK (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637041&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home)