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The primary thesis is that we are playing into al Qaeda's hands, and with our current attacks we are doing exactly what they want us to do. I don't think that's necessarily true. For one thing, there's good reason to believe that they expected our reaction to be somewhat similar to what happened to us in Somalia. To review, we moved substantial troops into there in support of a peace-keeping mission and to support humanitarian gestures. In the course of that operation there was a firefight in which 18 Americans were lost while killing more than 300 Somalis. After that, the government of the US lost its nerve and pulled out. Another example is Beirut: the US moved substantial troops into Lebanon and a single car-bomb killed 200 Marines at the barracks there, after which the US lost heart and pulled back out. Those events, along with other acts by both the US and Europe over the course of the last 20 years, led to the assumption that the US was gutless and couldn't stand blood-letting, that its morale was fragile and that it was only willing to fight as long as its own casualties were very light, and that in the face of massive losses would turn tail. In that scenario, the WTC attack was intended to be a larger replay of the Beirut bombing, with the expectation of a larger replay of the withdrawal from Lebanon. I honestly believe that al Qaeda thought that we would substantially withdraw from the mid-east after the 9/11 attack. I think that the resolve and murderous hatred it raised in the US caught them by surprise. Another problem with this report is that it contends that a goal of the attack was to get the US to commit substantial military forces into the region where they would become vulnerable, the idea being that in the US they could not be defeated but in the field they could be. This implies that al Qaeda actually expected that it would be possible to achieve a military victory over the US. I think that idea is a bit farfetched, in as much as even in the field there's no indication that al Qaeda or anyone else is actually capable of substantially destroying our military capability without the use of nuclear weapons -- and if they had those, I believe they would have used them by now. They wouldn't be hording them in hopes of using them against a US regiment in the field, they would rather have tried to smuggle one of them into NYC instead of taking out a paltry couple of buildings. (And such smuggling would actually be very easy.) The real problem with this in my opinion is that it overanalyzes. Instead of the cold calculating leadership who were quite literally planning out the course of World War III, I think the explanation is quite a lot simpler and more shallow. For them to do what is described here, they'd have to think like we do, in quite mechanistic terms -- and they don't. They're not trying to goad us into attacking to create a widespread war; I think they're attacking us simply because we're the "Great Satan". They are lashing out at us because they are religious fundamentalists and they have a very polarized and idealistic view of the world. The plan described here is very much the result of a humanistic analysis (i.e. that the course of history is decided by the behavior of humans) whereas our enemies quite literally think that God will get involved in their war, on their side. (If so, they'll win. I'm not too worried about that prospect, though.) In other words, I don't think that our enemies are fighting us because they have a concrete and well thought out plan for victory, I think they're fighting us to rack up points in heaven. That's not to say we should ignore this analysis, because even if this does not describe the plans made by al Qaeda, it still describes some of the secondary and tertiary negative results which might unintentionally come out of it. In that sense it's still valuable. (discuss) |
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