Mind-Munitions

The World after 11 September 2001 315
Chapter 27
The World after 11 September 2001
The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on ‘9/11’
prompted a major debate in the United States about ‘why they hate
us so much’. Clearly American assertions about being a ‘force for
good in the world’ had failed to convince the terrorist network
behind the attacks identified as al-Qaeda (‘the base’) led by Osama
bin Laden, a Saudi businessman who had been simmering with
anti-American resentment since the Gulf War and the arrival of
American troops into the Holy Land of Mecca. The World Trade
Centre had been attacked before, in 1993, although subsequent
American targets had been outside the USA – on the American
embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salam in 1998, and on the
USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000. But the hijack of four
domestic commercial passenger jets, full of aviation fuel, and the
successful strikes on the twin towers of New York and on the Pentagon
– that symbol of American military might as the world’s sole
superpower in its very own capital city – was of a much different
order, with the deaths of innocent civilians on a much greater scale.
It was a classic asymmetric attack. Moreover, in the 16 minutes
between the strikes on the first and second towers, New York’s
newsrooms had scrambled their helicopters and were able to
capture the second plane hitting its target live to a global audience.
It was therefore also a spectacular example of the ‘propaganda of
the deed’. The initial American reaction was to hunt down the
perpetrators, and the ‘war’ on international terrorism was declared,
although wars are usually defined in international law as being
between two or more nation states. Within a month, on 7 October,
American planes began bombing al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan
where their Taliban sponsors had also been identified as a