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Did Osama bin Laden Destroy America?
The road from 9/11 to Trump
When Osama bin Laden turned four Boeing passenger liners into de facto missiles and sent them to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Capitol, he was aiming for nothing less than the destruction of America.
It was a Hollywood supervillain plot turned into horrific reality, except that in the Hollywood version, Superman would have thrown off his kryptonite chains and arrived at the Twin Towers just in time to grab the planes by their tails and steer them safely to earth, bringing the Bad Guys to justice. In real life, heroism was left to the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, who saved the Capitol at the cost of their own lives.
In attacking the nerve centres of American financial, military, and political power, bin Laden aimed for a blow so psychologically devastating that it would ultimately bring down the American Empire. It was a reckless and desperate gamble that only a vastly weaker foe could consider, one that almost certainly would result in staggering costs to the Muslim world. Certainly, it could never work.
And yet today, as we watch the U.S. step out onto a dark political road that would have simply been inconceivable at the turn of the century, with a new international axis of illiberal powers on the rise, and America’s reputation massively compromised in the eyes of the world, the question has to be asked: did bin Laden actually succeed? Wherever his bones now lie in the Arabian Sea, his skull is surely grinning today.
According to the usual account, bin Laden’s aim was to provoke the U.S. into a prolonged and ultimately unsustainable armed conflict in the Middle East that would fatally weaken America politically and economically. And yet I would argue that the real question he put to the U.S. was this: can you maintain your pretence of being the world’s Good Guy when you are stabbed in the eye? Or will you lose control, unleash your massive military might on vastly weaker and poorer Muslim nations, thus revealing yourself for the bully you really are? And if you do, what will the consequences be, not only for how you are seen by the rest of the world, but for your sense of identity?
