The Surprising 9/11 Response

If the planners of the 9/11 attacks really expected no immediate and deadly response, from Bush or any American president, they were a lot dumber than their planning indicated.

The source for this assertion is the man called the mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, through a book by James E. Mitchell. Rather than taking this at face value, it may be worth considering the advantages that both men have in proposing an alternative narrative at this time. Revealing that Khalid Mohammed talked to him about what went wrong makes Mitchell seem like a hero. Calling Bush's response effective encourages a Republican government to repeat the mistakes made then.

The 9/11 attacks were planned to destroy the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Capitol, using 4 airplanes with more innocent civilians aboard. The Towers alone could have meant the death of ten thousand people, and I recall estimates of up to fifty thousand on that day. It was fortunate, as far as it goes, that total casualties were only three thousand, with one of the terrorist cells unable to complete its mission. The 9/11 attacks were the deadliest day on American soil since Antietam, 149 years earlier. and comparable to Pearl Harbor, 60 years earlier. Knowing ahead of time the magnitude of expected casualties, and believing the response would be comparable to, say, the 1993 Twin Towers attack that was less than 1% as deadly, requires a vast misunderstanding of not just American policy but of human psychology.

When there are complaints about George W. Bush, they are usually not that his response was too violent or immediate. It’s that he went into Afghanistan, “The Graveyard of Empires,” with no plan for success or withdrawal. It’s that he set up a “detention center” that was not suitable either as POW camp or for civilian prosecution. It’s that a year later he pushed through an attack on Iraq using bogus intelligence fed to the United Nations. It’s that the Iraq war similarly had no realistic plan for success. It’s that the United States still has people in both of these war zones 16 YEARS after the 9/11 attacks that Bush so brilliantly responded too.

Responding quickly and militarily wasn't a mistake. Everything else was.