Today will be widely marked as the 25th Anniversary of Al Queda's attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and attempted attack on the White House and Pentagon.
This blog existed at the time, but it was very inactive. Indeed, most of the posts that are found in the 2001 section of this blog were posted, actually, in 2026 and then moved back to that date as they track historical events in sequence. At that time my computer time was devoted to a forum on cavalry topics.
I'm not going to go into huge depth on the topic. It's 25 years ago but seems like yesterday in a lot of ways to me, but at the same time it must be noted how much time has passed. The country really rose to the occasion, and then starting in the 2010s betrayed itself massively, showing that history isn't written at the onset, but the conclusion. I've written a prior partial introspection on the event here:
September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.
Al-Qaeda is of course the entity that made the assault. It was, and remains, a radical Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization who seek to restore an Islamic Caliphate. Various caliphates have existed since Muhammed, but the last anyone could claim that one existed was in 1924. That year the Ottoman Empire dissolved and the caliphate that was claimed by the Ottomans dissolved with it. Like all such larger empires, it'd had grown fairly icky, and nobody would want to restore an empire of that type. Al-Qaeda has more of a hardcore Sunni empire in mind.
The organization was founded in 1988 with that goal in mind and the intent to use violence to bring it about. Contrary to what some people like to claim, forcing a goal such as this is common in Islam. Islam itself was forced upon the Middle East by violent expansion. At the time of Muhammed, the Middle East was well in the process of becoming an entirely Catholic region of the globe, although large populations of pagans and Jews lived throughout the region. The extent to which Muhammed founded a religion that would mirror Islam today is quite debated, and frankly there are quite strong reasons to believe his original religious views were significantly different from modern Islam's. It seems fairly evident that Muhammed was influenced by his first wife, Khadija, who was either Catholic or Coptic. While Muslims hate the idea, and therefore reject it, his much older wife (she was 40, he was 25, when they married) had one daughter who clearly was Catholic and was married to a Catholic.. Muhammed also was influenced by an uncle of hers who seems to have been a Nestorian priest as well as Catholic monks.
Like a lot of would be religious reformers, he seems to have started off pretty conventional, to the extent we can tell, and then basically justified his own vices through his claim to be a prophet. He'd adopt polygamy and clearly had an eye for women. This extended right down to minors as the youngest female he married, Aisha, was only six years old at the time and was nine when he first had sex with her. Fully sanctioning armed expansion of his faith by that time, he seems to have justified taking sex slaves in order to satiate the lust of his troops who were complaining about being away from their wives.
All this sounds gross, and it is, but it's not really unique. Other would be Christian leaders have gone off the rails along these lines as well, sort of, with Joseph Smith perhaps being the best example of a conventional American lay preacher who founded his own religion.
Anyhow, in Islam there's no separation really between the faith and government. There's also no one real head, and the divisions within the faith are gigantic. It's never been the case that all Muslims have accepted one religious or secular ruler, but Al Qaeda would force that, which is why, in spite of American confusion on the issue, Al Qaeda has no support in Shi'a cultures, including the one we're presenting loosing a war to.
The rise of Al Qaeda in general reflects an odd event that the end of the Cold War helped bring about. In 1992 Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History arguing that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy and the dissolution of the Soviet Union humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
He was way off the mark.
Indeed, what Fukuyama, and darned near everyone else, failed to realize that that the Cold War had resulted in the suppression, some voluntary, some not, of hardcore, non liberal, conservatism, everywhere. In the Middle East much of the regions underground, and above ground, political forces had been completely secular. Communist parties and movements were strong. The Baath Party was a fascist party. There wasn't a single country in the Middle East that took the took the thought of an Islamic state seriously until the Islamic Revolution installed a theocracy, to everyone's surprise, in Iran in 1979, which was thought to be a freakish exception attributable to Shia, which is a minority millennialism branch of the faith.
But the end of the Cold Wat took the lid off of such forces everywhere. They were there all along, but with the threat of Communism gone, and the support of the USSR ended, very conservative religious forces emerged and began to threaten the stability of Islamic states, and for that matter non Islamic ones. Indeed, the US is going through such a struggle right now with millennialist Evangelical conservatism.
Al Qaeda's complaint with the United States is and has always been significantly different than Iran's. What Al Qaeda objected to was the presence of U.S. military forces in the region, which it regarded as intolerable and a sort of religious defilement.
On February 26, 1993 Islamic terrorists, some with connections to Al Qaeda, attempted to blow down the World Trade Center, something that seems to now be completely forgotten. In October 2000 Al Qaeda itself attacked the USS Cole. After that action, it was ready to try something more bold.
By that time the organization was hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan, having effectively been driven out of Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was ruled then, as it once again is due to Trump's surrender, by the Sunni Taliban, which was at that time engaged in a civil war against more moderate forces.
The concept, which was inept, was that attacking the towers (again) would destroy the U.S. economy and attacking the Pentagon and the White House would decapitate the U.S. government.
Of course, that didn't occur.
We could play out the conventional history from there, but we'll large omit it. The US and its Allies went to war in Afghanistan, and mistakenly in Iraq. The Baath government was defeated in Iraq, which now has a shaky democracy. A long war in Afghanistan more or less defeated Al Qaeda there, but the American people grew tired of the long protracted was there and betrayed the Afghanis, with Donald Trump surrendering to the Taliban.
A budding civil war is developing there. As we've often stated here, wars change everything, and the wars this sparked are no exception.
The US overreacted to what was effectively a criminal assault on the US by converting it into sort of a global war. Domestically the US government consolidated agencies into the Naziesque named Department of Homeland Defense, creating a sort of permanent war time footing where it did not need to exist. It acclimated itself to the use of the military, and intelligence organizations, in extra legal operations. "First Responders", in the form of firemen and policemen, were regarded as heros, legitimately, with their occupations, along with that of veterans, to go on and receive hagiographic treatment, which is not good at all.
An entire generation of Americans have grown up thinking this is normal. First
And the structure and atmosphere that created set up a condition in which a rogue President could use that force in a way that no Cold War era President ever could.
After World War One strong empires ruled by hereditary families supported by ultra conservative forces fell. In some countries, the war brought about more liberal governments, which an expansion of democracy. In others, it brought about radical right and left wing governments.
Al Qaeda did not bring about a caliphate as a result of September 11, 2001. It did succeed, however, in making the world worse. The US can pull out of its own descent into fundamentalism, but the question is whether it will or not.
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