Connie du Toit has an interesting post speculating about Bin Laden's real goals. I'll only make a couple of short comments, then urge you to go read it.
1) The popular imagination has it that you could create more damage, kill more people, ramming an airplane into a nuclear power plant. Having read a few books on the subject and talked to some nuclear engineers, I can tell you that nuclear plants are not that good a target, and the damage from hitting one wouldn't be as bad as many people tend to think. Although it would scare the holy hell out of people, it's not as good a target of opportunity and not likely to kill as many people as hitting the WTC did. It's also not as dramatic as doing something in the middle of the world's biggest city.
2) Connie, Connie, Connie. What kind of geekette are you? That's Lex Luthor, not "Luther." Tsk, tsk.
3) Bin Laden's known to hate the Saudi royal family. Driving the Americans out of there and reforming the nation has long been known to be one of his goals. That he probably wants to be the Caliph of Arabia has long seemed rather self-apparent to me, and I'm rather surprised at how many people don't think this is a big part of his goal.
I have no love for the two-faced Saudi snakes. One of my biggest reasons for believing we needed to take Baghdad was to give us substantial leverage against the Saudis, to force their hand, force them to choose sides. From what I can see, that's working: their cooperation with the US has been visible in some areas, and the administration keeps assuring us that they're helping us in other areas. They're cracking down more all the time on religious extremism in the region, and getting more and more defensive about the terrorism issue--which is all to the good from where I stand..
Much as I'd like to just go throw the bums out of there, I think that's an irresponsible thing to try without a much bigger excuse. But I do think we're getting more and more out of them all the time. If things continue to go well in Iraq--and in my view they are going incredibly well, much better than I expected in fact--then in 10 years we'll have a Middle East that looks almost nothing like it does today.
Some think I'm silly to think all this. But I do think it.
Now, go read Connie's piece.
Seoul (spelling?) Korea, is the world's biggest city (population-wise).
Dowingba, are you sure? I thought it was Mexico City, pop. 20,000,000.
That said, I imagine Dean meant it in more metaphorical terms. Some blogger (Stephen Green?) called NYC the de facto capital of the whole freakin' world, and he had a point.
Dean,
That Connie person is an excellent strategic thinker - but I think she hasn't raised her point of view high enough to perceive what bin Laden was after (bin Laden's dead, guys and gals) and what each and every tin-plated tyrant in the middle east is after in one form or another: a revived Caliphate.
Of course, each tyrant and wanna-be tyrant imagines only himself in the role of Caliph, but this is besides the point; its what they want. In one way or another each and every one of them want a united Arab/Moslem world under the command of one man. They want this so that, in their view, the Arab/Moslem world will be accorded its proper respect in the world and, most importantly, to serve as a base for the total Islamization of the world.
Nonsense? Certainly - but Hitler and Lenin believed just different varieties of this crap. It matters not how stupid or ultimately impossible the dream actually is, it only matters that our enemies believe it.
Its good to go an read the documents of all these varied States and groups which agitate the Arab/Moslem world - they all pre-suppose an unbreakable Arab/Moslem unity in the face of the West - all of them aim, by whatever path, at a unitary State for the Arabs/Moslems. And being a piss-ant doesn't deter from grandiose dreams...Quaddafi with his 5 million Libyans imagines himself one day ruling over 1 billion Moslems; I think he styles his government as the Libyan Arab Peoples Jamariya or some such garbage - and this shows mindset.
This is the special cachet which gives our Islamo-fascist enemies their moral power - all of the beaten down masses of the Arab/Moslem world would like a better future...and all of them have been fed on the stories of Arab/Moslem glory in the days when there was a Caliphate. One plus One equals Two: to get back to a good life, get back into a united Moslem empire. It makes sense, don't you see, to someone who is ignorant of the actual streams of history and who only understands his current misery - it also makes all kinds of sense to the idealistic and nationalistic sons of the upper class: Nazism made sense to the German youth of the upper middle class, too - Afried Krupp was donating his allowance to the Nazi's in his 20's and literally thousands of upper class German youth sacrificed their lives with a shout of "Heil Hitler" as they died - the men who carried out 9/11 were no different than the men who leapt in front of Belgian machine-gunners in 1940 just to keep the advance going without a check....
Connie, the author of this submission, makes the point that the Arabs destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon building, and, presumably, were targeting the United States Capitol building with the plane that our civilian heroes brought down into a field in Pennsylavnia. She posits that the Arabs intended symbolic damage to the United States, rather than causing a greater number of American casualties such as might have occurred had the flown one of the planes smack into a nuclear reactor and thereby released enormous amounts of radioactive poisons into the air.
Well I can understand that, and appreciate its nuance as well. Because I thought the appropriate response to such an attack against the United States would have been the permanent, irrevocable thermonuclear incineration of Mecca and perhaps Medina for good measure, the very epicenter of all that the islamists consider holy. How's that for symbolic damage to our enemy?
On the other hand, if the US Strategic Air Command had been ordered to destroy Riyadh, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Alexandria, with the purposeful killing of the entire Arab populations of all these places... Well, I would have understood that as well, glanced briefly at the satellite camera images of these places glowing in the dark, then turned back to my work or my beer, depending on the hour. I too can be as vindictive and pitiless as our enemies. And there a lot of Americans just like me. So...
"Don't tread on me."
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I should have said "the nation's biggest city." Sorry.
By the way, last I heard, Tokyo is the world's most populated city, with a population of 25 million.
Mexico City is also huge. I don't know about Seoul.
I heard Seoul had 24,000,000 or something. The thing with the statistic is that it's impossible to be accurate. Most cities have very ambiguous populations and some consider the "Greater area" in their populations while some don't, and so forth.
Ms. Du Toit has, I think, missed the point of terrorism. It isn't just casualties; it's terror. And to terrorize the opposition you need to strike into their hearts. Hence the WTC, the Pentagon, and (putatively) the White House.
Arnold:
You have just illustrated why Jacksonian Americans are some of the scariest sons-of-bitches on the planet, after (perhaps) the citizen-soldiers of Republican Rome.
People like that are serious about what they do. They'll just fuck you up, without even thinking about it, instead of all that "horse head in the bed" or "bomb the symbol" nonsense.
Most Americans hate to play soldiers. They'd rather join up, waste the bastiches responsible for (whatever), then de-mob.
If Connie DuToit is strategic thinker, I'm a Heisman Trophy winner.
I posted a long and detailed rubuttal as a comment on her post and I'll work it up for posting on my site later today.
Botton line: nothing bin Laden has done supports her idea of what he is trying to do.
Casey, thanks for the lift.
About that slogan. Ask any politically-active gun owner in this country dedicated to the proposition that all law-abiding American citizens are entitled to exercize their fundamental right to keep and bear arms as an individual liberty; he or she knows all about the yellow flag with the snake and the slogan "Don't treat on me." Other folks don't seem to read history anymore, and probably no more about the movies of Samuel Jackson than about the military leadership and presidency of Andrew Jackson. Too bad.
When pushed an inch too far, Americans will respond to our country's enemies with massive violence. Ask the families of the Germans and Japanese whom our blockbuster and firestorm bombing attacks killed in great numbers just two generations ago. We're talking millions.
Does anybody think we would do any less to the rag-heads? There's a great deal about Germans and Japanese that Americans tend to admire. Me included. I can't quite think of anything about Arabs that I find admirable, especially after seeing them up close in the Middle East for two years in the 1970s. And certainly nothing that would compensate for the fact that in the worst attack ever made by foreigners on our soil, they destroyed the commercial heart of our greatest city, killed 3000 Americans, destroyed part of our national military command headquarters, and had a suicide flight aimed at the Capitol of the United States.
So if it ever comes to incinerating some multiple millions of them -- in order to teach the survivors better behavior toward the civilized world -- then that's just the way the cookie crumbles.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Donald,
I've responded to you on Mrs du Toit's blog...whats your blog so we can have at this some more?
Which, Arnold, is the reason I'm worried about another major attack succeeding on American soil.
Another WTC would be bad enough; some idiot setting off a dirty bomb, and all bets are off.
What still bugs me is why so many terrorists think it would be a great thing for them if they managed that. Are they really that stupid?
My long essay on OBL's incompetence as a strategist is now up, wherein I address many of the points Mrs. D has made. It is here.