The (Ex) Washington Realist

The September/October 2006 issue of The National Interest will feature a special symposium for the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In light of the plot to use liquid explosives to destroy American airliners, some of the comments are quite relevant to this developing story.

Michael Scheuer opened his remarks quite simply: “America will be attacked by Al-Qaeda again, and more destructively than on 9/11. Why? Simple. Our bipartisan governing elites willfully refuse to recognize the severity of the Islamist threat. They are waging a feckless war that misrepresents the enemies' motivation, keeps borders open, applies insufficient force, and pursues status quo foreign polices, ensuring the next Islamist generation is more anti-American and numerous—and still has the opportunity to strike the American homeland.”

Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation reminds us that, despite “the scale of the damage caused to the United States, the 9/11 attacks neither required much money to execute, nor did they take a large number of plotters. Terrorism is a cheap form of warfare—the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, for instance, only cost a few thousand dollars. This is particularly the case when you have a cadre of young men willing to engage in suicidal terrorism. According to court documents entered in the trial of Al-Qaeda’s Zacarias Moussaoui, the entire 9/11 operation cost a little over $200,000, a trivial sum considering the damage it inflicted on the United States. Furthermore, no amount of money will buy you 19 young men willing to commit suicide in a terrorist operation. The pilots who flew the hijacked planes into two of the world’s most famous buildings saw what they were doing as an act of worship.”

Anthony Sullivan points out that “it is often assumed that any Al-Qaeda operation would necessarily be designed to achieve a greater body count than 9/11. This may not be true. Whatever else it is, terrorism is psychological warfare. Recall the enormous psychological impact of the anthrax attacks, and their ability to cause mass hysteria and paralyze the federal government, despite the fact that only a handful of victims died. The fact is that Al-Qaeda may now not consider an enormous body count to be necessary, when nearly the same societal impact might be obtained by using a stinger missile (for example) to knock down one civilian aircraft landing or taking off, or placing a few bombs in different malls around the country, or (as was planned in 2000 for the Radisson Hotel in Amman, Jordan) by placing poison in a luxury hotel’s circulation system. In any such case, public hysteria would explode, and a significant part of the U.S. infrastructure would grind to a standstill.”

Alexis Debat of the Nixon Center joins with TNI’s editor Nikolas Gvosdev to warn, “The ability to inflict mass destruction is no longer expensive or does it require particularly advanced technology. Richard Reids shoebomb explosive in December 2001 was a crude and deadly home-made nitrocellulose mix made of melted ping pong balls and nail polish remover it was not a clever James Bond-style device that could only have been provided by the intelligence service of a major power. A BBC investigation estimated that the 7/7 London bombings, which killed 52 people and injured hundreds and paralyzed the British capital, cost only slightly more than $1,000 to carry out. While it has not disappeared as evidenced by the events in Lebanon this summer state-sponsored terrorism is gradually receding in the face of ego-terrorism, or political violence waged by a single individual or non-state group but with the means of a state. Whatever happens next in the „war on terror, mass destruction will remain only a mouse click, a credit card and a rental truck away. During the Cold War, we could not all be potential superpowers, but today, we are all potential terrorists.

“Being the most open society in the world, America is not well organized for this type of conflict. Its federal structure and philosophy of competition between centers of power are considerable, if not insurmountable roadblocks to the centralization of intelligence or homeland security responsibilities, and its archipelago of law enforcement entities from the local to the federal level makes homeland security a Herculean task. The biggest strength of Al-Qaeda is its capacity to hide its operatives, finances, and bomb-making material within the global flows on which the United States draws its economic and political power to turn the free flow of goods, people and information as weapons against us. We cannot pay the price of isolationism; we have to develop better tools for trying to filter the global pathways and determine what level of risk we are prepared to accept in exchange for the benefits of an open global system.”