Osama bin Laden was likely surprised that crashing a plane into a skyscraper demolishes the whole building. Had he known that in advance, what would he have done differently?
Those steeped in American propaganda -- or even Al Qaeda propaganda after 9/11 -- would probably suggest that he would have chosen a time of day in which the World Trade Center was far more occupied. Instead of the 4,000 killed early in the morning, there would have been something like 50,000 workers in the buildings at the peak time of day (what time?). (Unsure whether 50,000 was per tower, or the sum of both towers. Also unsure whether visitors (tourists) would add significantly to the total.) He may also have chosen to attack more skyscrapers in order to kill more Americans, instead of the Pentagon and wherever Flight 93 was heading, likely the White House or the Capitol.
However, we can imagine a few other scenarios. The goal of 9/11 was to draw America into a protracted War on Islam, whose purpose is to bleed America dry economically (a war of attrition), and ultimately destabilize it (as seen with the Soviet Union and its war in Afganistan), and simultaneously, America's War on Islam would serve to bolster Al Qaeda's recruitment of Muslims, selling the message that America is evil. Would killing (say) 10 times more Americans on 9/11 helped or hindered that goal?
It's easy to imagine that killing more would have hindered recruitment, and in fact, even killing as many as the attacks did hindered that goal: those being recruited have to weigh "Is America evil?" versus "Is Al Qaeda evil?", and the scale tips in the direction unfavorable to bin Laden the more Al Qaeda kills in its first strike. It was fairly early in America's War on "Terror" that the number of Muslims that America killed exceeded (and later far exceeded) the death toll of 9/11, at which point Al Qaeda could easily and concretely justify their message that America is more evil than themselves. That point in time would have become later had 9/11 killed more.
(Those making the decision to join Al Qaeda based on body counts would need to ignore, or be unaware, that America's retaliation after 9/11 -- causing the death of a great many Muslims -- had been part of Al Qaeda's plan from the beginning. Perhaps a recruitee would think of it not as Al Qaeda evilly inducing the killing of Muslims in order to gain political power, but as Al Qaeda revealing an already existing evil anti-Islamic murderous American sentiment, which would have inevitably resulted in mass killing of Muslims regardless. Did recruitees think this way?)
Far more radically (from the point of view of those steeped in American propaganda), we can also consider the scenario that bin Laden was a decent man. Perhaps he did not think himself, nor did he want to be, a mass murderer. Perhaps he thought as a military commander does, to kill only as many as necessary to accomplish those military and political goals described above, and his original calculation was that killing all the plane passengers and a few in the buildings was enough, because he didn't expect the buildings to collapse. (No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.) If so, we can imagine that, had he known planes would demolish the buildings and kill so many, he would have chosen targets or a time of day to kill fewer, not more.
Previously, another reason Osama bin Laden was surprised by 9/11.
No comments :
Post a Comment