It's Too Quiet
Bush vs. The Axis of Evil
'It's Too Quiet'
Excerpt from Christopher Hitchens in the debate ‘Was the War on Terror Unavoidable?’
'It's Too Quiet'
Excerpt from Christopher Hitchens in the debate ‘Was the War on Terror Unavoidable?’
“The dawn of the twenty-first century promised the dawn of a new era. Colonialism, Fascism and Stalinism had all had their intellectual and moral foundations fatally undermined, leaving a city on top of the hill for all the world to aim towards. One where we had ultimately decided that it was better to live than to die, of mutual existence over mutual annihilation, that the principles of democracy were something worth having for their own sake. Though we in the West had accepted these battles as won, like Hiroo Onoda prowling the jungles of the Philippines in the uniform of the army that was perhaps the foreshadowing of the religious fanaticism that the West would face, the scattered theocratic despotisms stood ready to prove the adage that a war isn’t won until your opponent says it is. A hermetically sealed Hermit Kingdom whose ruling ideology of Juche seemed little different to IngSoc, a Babylonian concentration camp that doubled as a mass grave beneath its terrorised surface, and a Persia grabbed by its scalp in Counter-revolution by Jihadists as motivated to subjugate the world under their rule as they were to throw battery acid in the faces of young girls who dared to allow a strand of hair to fall through their hijab. These three were not exactly made for each other. One declared the authority of Allah while the other declared the authority of Kim Il-Sung, One declared the territory of the other his and launched a war whose destruction and trauma linger in the minds the aggressor and defender as the Trench warfare of Flanders lingers in the minds of Englishmen and women even today. But of these three, they shared one thing in common that was more important than anything else: a near psychopathic level of being evil not simply to enact their wishes, but to prioritise their evil even to stifle their wishes. Those who believe that a war with the Axis of Evil (a name that gains snorts from those with short memories) was simply the cretinous blundering of an idealistic Texan, invariably those who never saw these regimes first-hand, should try and remember the shock on September 11th. Not to drown out reason and nuance, but simply to ponder the horror and the terror that was unleashed that day, and to realise that to the enslaved millions beneath those dictators’ jackboots that horror and terror was not a tragic moment but an unchanging daily, weekly, and yearly reality. Do you remember? When the rats that had been buried with the films of the emaciated survivors of Dachau, Belsen and Mauthausen, crawled once more up from the sewers to die in a free city?”
Excerpt from ‘Broken Dreams: How the War on Terror Changed America’ by Linda Reins
Islamic Fundamentalism had begun to rev up in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, the failed Saudi Revolution attempt in Mecca, and the Afghanistan War. The 90s had seen the Taliban take Kabul, a horrific bloodbath in Chechnya, and the increasing influence of Hamas inside the Israel-Palestine conflict. The US scored some wins here and there, for example taking out the leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group Osama Bin Laden in an air strike in 1998, but with a distracted public soaking in the joy of the end of history a full commitment to wipe out the Jihadists was simply impossible. Few unaffected beyond geopolitics aficionados greeted news of Israel’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon with anything more than a shrug, barely remembering what all the fuss in Lebanon had been about in the first place. But one party that was paying a lot more attention to goings on in America than from America to Lebanon was precisely the one who now basked in their own adulation: Hezbollah. The Shia religious fundamentalist group had become an unlikely hero to many Lebanese of non-Shia sects (though most certainly not all) for being able to successfully repel the Israeli army in what had been a humiliating withdrawal for the Israelis. Wracked with victory disease, Hezbollah’s ambitions grew with Icarus-style hubris. Their bombing of the US Barracks in 1983 had led to the mighty Ronald Reagan run in terror, their slaughter of nearly one hundred Argentine Jews (of no connection to Israel) had been met with the Argentine government crumpled to its knees in submission and allowed the slaughter of their own citizens, and now the Israel that had blasted its way through the Six Day War had fallen to its Iranian-backed might [1]. In these circumstances Hasan Nasrallah had found himself at the centre of both a personality cult and his own delusion. It was only in these rapturous moments that he would set the course for what would be one of the most fateful days in history.
Nasrallah had one good thing to say about Israel – it was good that the Jews had all come to one place, that they could be destroyed [2]. It would seem that Nasrallah wanted to accelerate the process and increase Jewish flight to Israel, where God would ultimately grant him (should he be so blessed) or another Arab leader the honour of obliterating Israel and the Jews from existence. To that end, Hezbollah through their various assets around the world would inflict a devastating series of attacks against Jews globally to send a message to Jews that there was nowhere on Earth they were safe. And the centrepiece target would be the ‘Heart of the Zionist system’, the Twins Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. To Nasrallah it was a symbolic totem of the West’s economic might, the godlessness of capitalism, and of the Zionist control of the West in general. The Hezbollah leadership wanted to further supplant the moribund Al-Qaeda who had been linked to the first World Trade Centre bombing and make themselves as the most distinguished ‘Resistance Movement’/Terrorist group in the world by committing a far more public display of terrorism. Having often been cited as the group that popularised the strategy of suicide bombing in the Middle East, it was not unreasonable that this inspired them to devise their own strategy for striking the Twin Towers: suicide attack by airplane. It was not actually anticipated to collapse both structures, but to create hundreds of deaths in the initial blast into the buildings and cause the destruction to be visible to all parts of New York to remind Americans (particularly American Jews) of their inability to defend themselves. Perhaps an eye-wateringly huge repair or demolition would have to result. Having heard of the story of the B-25 bomber crashing into the Empire State Building and the building obviously surviving to tell the tale, it was assumed a similar non-fate would befall the skyscrapers, though Hezbollah had seemingly not understood both how significantly larger a 767 jet would be, and the level of shoddy construction work that had gone into the Twin Towers.
If this is all that would have happened, perhaps the anger unleashed by Hezbollah that September 11th, 2001 (but only perhaps) would have been no more serious than how Lockerbie resulted in nothing more than the bombing of military bases in Libya. But Nasrallah thought he understood Reagan and how the incoming Republican Presidency of George Bush (a party wrapped in a suffocating layer of Reagan-nostalgia) would therefore repeat their prudency as had happened in 1983 in Beirut. What Nasrallah did not understand was that perhaps he understood Reagan better the incoming Republican Party did, a party now taken with the ascendence of a new brand of Conservative – the Neo-Conservative, often ironically former liberals. After Reagan’s idealist foreign policy banished the cold, Nixonian realpolitik of Kissinger and was seemingly vindicated by the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Republican Party did not simply copy Reagan’s foreign policy (one with only highly limited or swift military interventions) but extended it to now support a form of rollback that called for full military interventions against the worst Anti-American states. While incoming President Bush had expressed little interest on foreign policy (further feeding Nasrallah’s miscalculation), the cabinet of Cheney and Rumsfeld that he surrounded himself with was determined to take advantage of America’s standing as the sole hyperpower to take out their biggest enemies. With his first mistake of overestimating the rigidity of the Twin Towers and his second mistake of not understanding the new players in Washington, Nasrallah had sown the wind, but not only he would reap the whirlwind.
Throughout this process, Iran had been relatively hands off on Hezbollah, whom they continued to support and even applaud for their victory over the Little Satan of Israel. However, Iran throughout the late 90s and before 9/11 had actually been defined by a hopeful series of reforms that inspired hope that the Rule of the Clerics could be resolved peacefully and that reproachment with the West was a possibility. President Khatami was relatively liked by the population, unlike the Ayatollah Khamenei whose religious fanaticism was as alien to the Persians as it was to the Japanese. However, while Khatami presented a new image of the Islamic Republic, at the end of the day, it was still Khamenei who had overriding power. While Khatami may have been interested in pursuing a Two-State solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, some form of agreement with the US over Iran’s budding nuclear program, he still had to say ‘Death to America’ as sure as any other politician in Iran had to. It was known to the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard that Hezbollah would be launching an attack on American and Israeli assets, but its specific targets and scale were far beyond what the Iranians had expected. However, even this information was withheld from Khatami by the Revolutionary Guard and even as high up as Khamenei, who had increasing doubts about his loyalty to the Rule of the Clerics and whether he wanted to install a Western democracy in Iran beneath the Ayatollah’s nose. It was also known that Khamenei was jealous of Khatami’s genuine popularity and was perhaps hoping to sabotage the reproachment by putting Hezbollah back in the news. If the Revolutionary Guard or Khamenei knew just what Hezbollah were going to do, perhaps they would have put pressure on them to stop, but due to the politicking inside Tehran, calamity would soon befall the land of Cyrus. Similarly, the incoming Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was granted intelligence indicating that Hezbollah were planning something big. It is debated to what extent Assad knew about the attack, and if he knew about it whether he supported it or was simply cowed into allowing it to happen due to his unexpected rise to recent power. Regardless, Assad would not stop Hezbollah’s attack – no one would.
Excerpt from ‘They’ll Hear From All of Us Soon’ by John Horowitz
That morning, the stormy weather on the night of September 10th had turned into a beautiful, cloudless morning over New York City. A quiet, optimistic city woke up in the last normal morning millions would ever have. It was perhaps, to borrow from the Reagan campaign slogan, the final ‘Morning in America’. Though she was called the city that never slept, countless yawns arose from the workers of the Twin Towers as they entered the lobby that day to their offices on the upper floors. The Twins were perhaps not the prettiest buildings, but in their seemingly unshakable presence coupled with the pride accompanied in working there, it was in many ways a perfect symbol for New York City. Many of those workers, just doing the normal harmless jobs of their day, may have seen Flight 11 careen towards them in their final moments. Others would have never known until their lives had already been stolen from them by mass murderers. Others would have gone in minutes from enjoying the company of friends and colleagues they had spent years of memories with from Christmas parties to weddings, to choosing between being burned alive or plunging hundreds of feet to their deaths. Those close to the scene could even hear the pitter-patter of bodies smashing to the concrete. Others from the other tower may have looked on in horror before their lives too were suddenly taken, this time with the eyes of every camera in the world upon them. On that clear September morning, everyone in New York could clearly see the murder from afar, the declaration of war from all that was evil, and the first realisation among many that while they went about their lives in kindness and charity to family and friends, there were people around the world who still wished for nothing more than to kill them. But soon further reports began to trickle in. The first was the report of an explosion at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC at the hand of a truck with high explosives in a suicide attack that would ultimately kill fifty-four people. Meanwhile, a Hezbollah group exploded another bomb at the Jewish Community Centre in Washington DC, killing roughly seventy-eight people excluding the terrorists.
Soon after the suicide bombing, the first of the Twin Towers fell to the Earth. The mass of steel and concrete that had soared over the New York Skyline for a quarter of a century was turned to dust. The lives of thousands in an instant were stolen. They were firemen who ran to help, the old and weak who could not run quick enough, the employee who simply worked at a floor higher than the impact site. They were White and Black, Jewish and Gentile, American and foreign. The only thing they had in common as they shared their last moments together was that not one of them deserved what had happened to them. And it was the same when the other tower fell moments later There was nothing America had done or could have done that would have brought justification to the abomination that had transpired. Just as the Nazis in the name of higher civilisation had committed an atrocity worse than even the fictitious, villainous version of Jews in their heads could have conceived, Hezbollah had, in the name of God, committed an act Satan himself could take no pride in. Nasrallah may have opened the gates of hell upon the world, but he also opened them upon himself.
As President Bush attended an elementary school class in Florida that morning, he had assumed the first crash had been an accident. It was only once he was in front of the children and reading along that he was informed of the second plane strike. As he sat in isolation, every camera in attendance firmly faced towards him, the magnitude of what was happening began to process in his mind. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had years of anticipation before the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Lyndon Baines Johnson was already stepping into known territory when he escalated American involvement in Vietnam. Now, with not even a second’s preparation, George Bush realised that whoever he was or wanted to be had died that very moment, and that he had to be someone else. He needed to be the wartime leader he never dreamed or even conceived of being. He could never have believed, however, that the scale of the war he thought would be so larger still.
Excerpt from President Bush’s 9/11 Address from the Oval Office
“Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbours. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror, many simply because they were Jews.
"The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong.
"A great people have been moved to defend a great nation. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve, nor our unshaking commitment to our friends and allies abroad, to Israel and all countries that yearn to live free.
"America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, shining with the ‘light from above’ that our great songwriter Irving Berlin wrote about when he wrote ‘God Bless America’; a land where Jew, Christian and Muslim alike could find home. And no one will keep that light from shining, nor stop the Jewish people from existing.
"Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. The same evil we saw in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, and the same evil we will defeat again. We responded with the best of America -- with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbours who came to give blood and help in any way they could. They did not care what their neighbour’s religion was, or their race was, because they were American first.
"Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it's prepared. Our emergency teams are working in New York City and Washington, D.C. to help with local rescue efforts.
"Our first priority is to get help to those who have been injured, and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from further attacks.
"The functions of our government continue without interruption. Federal agencies in Washington which had to be evacuated today are reopening for essential personnel tonight and will be open for business tomorrow. Our financial institutions remain strong, and the American economy will be open for business, as well.
"The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them.
"I appreciate so very much the members of Congress who have joined me in strongly condemning these attacks. And on behalf of the American people, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their condolences and assistance.
"America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism. Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.
"This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. To see this racist, and evil assault on free people as an attack upon us all. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. Goodnight, and God Bless America.” [3]
Excerpt from ‘They’ll Hear From All of Us’ by John Horowitz
Three thousand people had been murdered. Across the country, indeed across the world, terrorism had lived to its name. The skies over America were devoid of civilian planes for the first time since the Wright Brothers took off from Kittyhawk. Schools were closed and almost every skyscraper and Jewish community centre was evacuated. Given the identification with Israel and the assumption that Islamists had been behind the attack, a wave of spontaneous attacks on Muslims began across America and a lesser extent in Europe. Almost every world leader from then mere Semi-Dictator of Russia Vladimir Putin to even Yasser Arafat condemned the attacks unreservedly. But there were two notable exceptions – Saddam’s Iraq, who set out an initial report praising the attack before rowing back, and Iran, who went on radio silence as the repercussions were already being felt within the power structures of Iran. The Waking Giant that had made Admiral Yamamoto tremble now set its sights on those who had murdered its citizens. It would be a war larger than expected, even to the extent some still call it World War Three. It would be fought from the shores of the Mediterranean to the back alleys of Pyongyang. It would be the bloodiest war America had fought since Vietnam, the biggest by geography since the Big One itself, and even as it recedes into bitter memory with the fresh atrocities of the world, many wonder if it hasn’t simply made the international situation worse. It would be fought between the forces of the West, led by a President who had never imagined the task he would be faced, against the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’.
And it would be called ‘The War on Terror’ (2001-2003).
[1] – Both the Beirut Barracks bombing and AMIA bombings were heavily suspected to be Hezbollah though this has not been entirely confirmed. For narrative purposes, it is assumed ITTL that Hezbollah committed both acts.
[2] -
Nasrallah did indeed say words to this effect.
[3] – The same speech he made on 9/11 with minor changes.
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