Happy 9/11, everyone

Four years ago, everyone in the world made a startling discovery. The United States was not invulernable as it portrayed itself as - an organized group of fanatics, led by a very competent civil engineer whose net worth is in the hundreds of millions, could mount an attack on its territory, killing more people than any other known non-governmental act of terrorism.

My own personal reaction to this was very different from what you would expect reading my comments here and on Pharyngula and Majikthise. I started commenting on an Israeli online newspaper, saying things like, "This is why Oppenheimer invented the nuclear bomb." I was deeply concerned over what happened to any innocent civilian, as long as he was not Muslim; I thought that the US should use nuclear weapons against Afghanistan and at the same time that the Patriot Act was a fascist law. It took me until about August 2002 to realize Muslims were people, too, and that throwing bombs on civilians wasn't a particularly civilized way to settle things.

But what is more telling is not the reaction of one unimportant then-13-year-old, but the reaction of a certain then-55-year-old Texan named George W. Bush who happened to be President of the United States. After 9/11, the United States had almost everyone's sympathy. In France the headlines read, "Today, we're all Americans." Everybody wanted to console the country, to support it, to join it in its incipient war on terrorism.

The United States, however, wasn't particularly eager to placate a broad coalition. Bush could have made speeches unifying the fledgling coalition of anti-Islamic-terrorist states including not only the entire West but also Russia, India, Turkey, and Japan. Instead he said "You're either with us or against us," expressing the feelings of most patriotic Americans but at the same time playing to the global stereotype of Americans as people who can't find Russia on a map, who are completely ignorant of everything that doesn't involve football, who think they're the best nation in the world and if another country doesn't follow their path then there must be something wrong with the other country. 300 million Americans cheered when Bush said things like this (remember: his approval rates hovered around 90%); 6 billion non-Americans cringed.

Now, furthermore, the USA failed to make any spectacular success in its war on terror. It toppled the Taliban and put in its stead a regime that wasn't particularly democratic but was much better than its predecessor and could pretend to be democratic. But it failed to capture Osama Bin Laden or even Ayman al-Zawahiri. And then, as 2002 continued, Bush started changing his emphasis from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

On the other hand, the war on terror was successful in more or less destroying the ability of Bin Laden's group to mount terrorist attacks. Bin Laden still churns out tapes, but these are to boost morale more than anything; his ability to communicate with his troops is weak, and his actual command of terrorism is nearly nil.

Al-Qaida is not so much a unified group as an umbrella term for a certain brand of terrorism, namely Islamist terrorism that operates globally; thus, whereas most Islamists are drawn to Iraq to attack anyone they disagree with, Al-Qaida groups concentrate on attacks on Britain or France or the United States or for that matter any other country that doesn't go out of its way to appease them. 9/11 and the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania are directly linked to Bin Laden, and the Madrid train bombing is most probably his work as well; about everything else there is just speculation, or, rarely, the knowledge that the group was independent of Bin Laden (the connection between Bin Laden and the 7/7 London bombings is purely ideological, as far as we know). Witness how lately, attacks are in Europe rather than in the USA; the USA is Bin Laden's primary target, but Europe has its own homegrown Islamists and apparently this is what counts lately.

Suppose that tomorrow a high-ranking Al-Qaida operative defects and reveals to the CIA the locations and plans of Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and that consequently in four days the two terrorists are captured along with their closest supporters. The level of terrorism in the world will probably drop as a result, but not significantly. Al-Qaida is not a single hierarchy like an army, but more like multiple small hierarchies like a university's biology department, in which each professor runs his or her own lab. Bin Laden's hierarchy is the best known, of course, and the one that has so far committed the most spectacular, most murderous attacks, but like a modern state, if the leader dies, another will take his place and things will continue as before.

In 1998, the traditional American way of dealing with threats like this - bombing some country - may have worked. But not anymore; if 9/11 changed anything, it's that since then Islamists have been inspired to make their own terrorist attacks, so that intelligence and detective work can only prevent individual attacks but not undermine terrorism itself. The long-term solution needs to be social, such as Europe realizing that ghettoizing minorities and imposing on them an alien Muslim identity, which caused many of them to flee to Europe in the first place, are not good ideas; the only things that can be done in the short term involve Bin Laden's group but not the general problem of Islamic terrorism.