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Conclusion
- University Press of New England
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CONCLUSION The effects of an act of terrorism are not measured by the immediate body count. The full misery lies in the malign trauma hanging in its aftermath, the corrosive mushroom cloud of collective fear that blooms up thickly and wafts far beyond the explosion. Ordinary people, physically distant from the point of impact, must be emotionally transported to the scene and infected with looking-over-theshoulder disquiet at death’s stalking. Anxious governments must be persuaded to divide the world into suspects and victims, while left unable to distinguish the one from the other. For all the blood spilled that dark day in Africa, and tears shed ever after, little impression was left on the American conscience despite the embassy bombings being the worst act of terrorism ever directed against American targets (though not the deadliest in terms of American casualties). The attacks occurred in too obscure a part of the world, at a place few imagined they might ever find themselves . They sparked little more than the passing clucks of sympathy emitted for half a dozen international tragedies that blip through any twenty-four-hour news cycle. Without popular outrage—an emotion, history teaches, not much distinct from widespread panic—it was easy for U.S. policy makers to defer decisive action and ignore those few dedicated bin Laden hunters in the law enforcement and national security communities who were arguing that al Qaeda posed a grave threat to the country. Not until the spectacular tragedy of September 11, 2001, would the name Osama bin Laden resonate throughout the land. The dark genius of 9/11 was twofold. First, the delay between the planes striking the north and south towers of the World Trade Center afforded enough time for the media to get in place to broadcast the latter strike live, thereby maximizing the number of witnesses. Second, the mundane circumstances of the victims were easily relatable: passengers aboard routine commercial flights; working people going about their Conclusion 211 business in large office towers. For those reasons, we all reacted very personally to 9/11, the way we shudder when we learn that someone near our own age has suddenly been stricken with cancer. And, through our imagination, the experience became our own. --The the historian John Lukacs observed, “Whatever we know, or think we know, of the future is hardly anything but the projection (and often an exaggeration) of some things we see occurring at the present.”1 Which was exactly the trap before 9/11—when complacency reigned—and after—when fear rose to its apex, with exaggerated projections of the bows remaining in al Qaeda’s quiver. Choking on the dust that shrouded Manhattan, unable to look across its skyline without seeing those missing towers, it was natural to imagine Islamic fundamentalism triumphant. In bin Laden’s serene confidence we perceived our own defeat. But Gilles Kepel, a scholar of the Middle East at the Institut d’ études politiques de Paris, recognized something different. Writing soon after 9/11, he asserted, “September 11 was an attempt to reverse a process in decline, with a paroxysm of destructive violence.”2 He went on, “Terrorism does not necessarily express the true strength of the movement to which it claims to belong. Despite the devastation it can cause—even such shocking devastation as the entire world witnessed on September 11—desperate terrorist acts do not translate easily into political victory and legitimate power.”3 Al Qaeda is capable of perpetrating violence, but not of consolidating it to any purpose. As Nelly Lahoud says, “Al Qaeda offers an antiestablishment concept, but nothing in the way of a solution or alternative. It came into being to wage jihad, but has never identified anything for after the jihad.”4 Even though it offered no coherent governing plan, it did promise, in terms as vague as they were utopian, a sweeping theocracy encompassing all the lands where Islam had ever been dominant; rather as if some latter-day English zealot aspired to assert dominion to the farthest reaches over which the British Empire once reigned supreme. Over the succeeding decade, al Qaeda’s influence has diminished in the face of American resolve to defend itself, as well as its own failure at mass appeal. President Bush’s promise that radical Islam would join fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism in “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies”5 may have been fulfilled when bin Laden’s death coincided with the so-called Arab spring...