Twenty years ago a gang of monstrous Muslim terrorists carried out one of the worst Islam related terrorist acts in modern history. The attacks on the United States by Al Qaida changed the world beyond all recognition.
As well as those nearly 3,000 people directly murdered by the terrorists in the 11th September attacks, the response to the attacks by both the Americans and their allies such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, along with ongoing Islam inspired terror incidents, have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands more people. The deaths caused by 9/11 did not stop when the last body of the last victim of the attacks was hauled from the rubble of the twin towers, they continued and sadly continue to this day.
The deaths of hundreds of British and thousands of American service personnel in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are the direct result of 9/11 and the response to it. Hundreds of thousands more lives were lost to either terrorism or on the various battlefields on which the War on Terror has been fought.
I remember watching the 9/11 attacks unfold on the news channels whilst at work and seeing the reports change from ‘a small plane has hit one of the towers’ to the full story of fully loaded airliners being deliberately rammed into the buildings. At that point I knew that the world would not be the same again. I remember speaking to my girlfriend at the time on the evening of the 11th and saying to her ‘the response to this will end up in disaster’. Sadly I’ve been proven to be correct.
The affects of 9/11 went far beyond those directly killed or injured by the attacks and the affects of these deaths and injuries on the victims families. After 9/11 we had to get used to increased security at public places and on transportation and seeing the flag draped coffins of allied servicemen and women being brought back from war zones that would not have existed had it not been for the 9/11 attacks. Americans had to learn to live with the sort of security restrictions that Britons and Israelis had had to live under for decades previously because of the threat of Irish terrorism and Arab Muslim terrorism respectively.
Could things have been different? Well if there had not been the intelligence failures that made the American’s unaware that this attack was being planned then of course. A world where 9/11 didn’t happen would have been remarkably different to the one that we live in today. But even if the attack could not have been prevented with hindsight we can see big mistakes in the response to it. There was a lot of justification in going into Afghanistan and dealing with the Taliban who were shielding Islamic terrorists but the policy should have been ‘penetrate, punish and pull out’, not try to drag a seventh century shithole into the relatively modern 19th century, which is all that could reasonably be achieved. Maybe the mistakes go back further and the roots of 9/11 lay in the disastrous error of arming the Mujahadeen to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, an error that played a large part in creating the Taliban.
9/11 and the response to it have brought about many of the problems that the modern West suffers from. The profound distrust that many in the West have for their governments does not, as some say, have its seed planted with Watergate, but with the flawed invasion and subsequent management of Iraq. The falsehoods voiced by those who wanted war regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction which propelled the invasion of Iraq have gone a very long way to poison the relationship between governments and those who are governed. I would go so far to say as that I believe that the various conspiracy theories about things like vaccination that are common in parts of the West and especially in the USA, stem from the dishonesty of and breach of trust by Western governments over the WMD issue. People who were led up the garden path over WMD are now less likely to trust their governments even in areas where maybe the governments should be trusted.
We’ve reached the twenty year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks but the problems of Islamic terror and Islamic extremism are still with us, but then Islamic terror has been a problem for what is now the West since at least the 8th century. Islamic terror and expansionism will, unless there is some sort of miracle, be with us long after 9/11 fades from living memory. After all the world and especially the Middle East, still lives with the residual problems caused by World War One and the world will live with the problems created or exacerbated by 9/11 for a similar amount of time as that which has elapsed from World War One until today.
At this time let us remember the dead of 9/11, condemn the ideology that caused these deaths and also keep in mind those whose response to the attacks have landed future generations with more problems than they might otherwise have had. There were sunlit uplands that humanity could have reached when the West won the Cold War, but 9/11 changed all that and because of 9/11 and the response to it we are back to the days of the early 20th century with lions being led by donkeys in to conflict and oblivion.
