Feature
By George Miller, 9-11-24
On this 23rd Anniversary of the terrorist attack on the NY World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9-11-01, many us reflect on its significance and where we go forward from there.
- It was the greatest civilian loss of life in an attack in the USA at least since the Civil War; the greatest attack by foreigners at least since the War of 1812 by the British.
- The U.S. responded mainly by attacking the country that gave sanctuary to the mastermind Osama Bin Ladin and did not focus on the fact that nearly all of the attackers were actually Saudis. In fact, the Saudi royal family was flown home, even as Americans and foreign travelers were blocked from flying.
- The heroism of first responders and some people on the scene was awe-inspiring.
- It showed the impact of religious fanaticism combined with deliberately and longstandingly promoting hatred of the USA “Great Satan.” Muslim countries polled strongly supported it.
- It was an excellent example of “asymmetrical warfare,’ where meager, low cost resources and forces were used to exact an extremely disproportionate toll on their enemy- in this case the U.S.
- Our transportation system, military and security forces (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc) were almost totally unprepared to detect, prevent and react to it.
- The eventual reaction was to create the huge and costly TSA bureaucracy and a 22 year war in Afghanistan which cost a fortune and didn’t change much. It was being slowly wound down by Obama and Trump, until Biden/Harris (she’s now taking credit for it) very abruptly pulled out, with a loss of American life., loss of huge amounts of weapons and materiel (now being used against us), abandonment of our in-country allies/employees/contractors, with no known concessions extracted from our enemies there- and and loss of confidence in USA reliability.
- The military allegedly finally tracked down and killed Bin Ladin.
- The only good thing about the whole affair is that the reaction temporally created a greater sense of national unity. It also created more of a focus on dealing with terrorism and asymmetrical warfare in general.
- After two+ decades, our country is now more divided than ever, but for different reasons.
- As far as going forward from here, the U.S. is better prepared to help prevent and deal with such things, but constantly misses important clues. We are told that many subsequent attempts have been prevented and that is probably true. We have made little progress in dealing with underlying causes. In fact, we are nearly helpless in dealing with the Yemeni Houthis attacking shipping, Somalian pirates, etc. We did have success in tamping down ISIS, but they threaten to rebound. The Taliban still runs Afghanistan and Iran sponsors war and terrorism in many places. Threats have evolved into potential attacks (not only by terrorist groups, but countries such as China, Russia, Iran, N Korea, etc.) on infrastructure, sporting events, shopping, miliary assets, using asymmetrical weapons such as drones, explosives, small groups, hacking and AI. It is unclear what and how much hostile human resources have been smuggled into the US via the huge wave (10-20 million, depending on who you ask) of illegal migrants enabled by our present administration.
George Miller is Publisher and Co-Founder of Citizens Journal Florida, based in Fernandina Beach. He is a “retired” operations management consultant, software and publishing executive (10 years) and manufacturing management professional.
