The Land of Milk and Honey: An American TL
- Thread starter TheMann
- Start date
- Status
An alternate universe where the Baby Boomers don't suck.
Truly this is ASB.
Hey!
My parents are cool...
Yes and yes, the latter because of fear of both the West and Iran, which really didn't want Saddam to have those weapons. I debated having the Israelis take some other facilities out, but I decided against it. The Kamils didn't go back to Iraq, though. They today live quite comfortably in Jerusalem. Saddam had debated trying to take them out, but has decided against it because of the bad attention it will caused.
Nobody will have stationary ICBMs except the Chinese by 2000. Eight countries (US, UK, France, China, Russia, Israel, India and Pakistan) have nuclear weapons in 2000. Mobile ICBMs are used by the US, Russia, Israel and India, while SLBMs are used by by all of the above except Pakistan and Israel. India and Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed IRBM users. All of the above have nuclear weapons carried by aircraft. South Africa had nuclear weapons by the mid-1980s, but dismantled them in the early 1990s. Several other nations had nuclear weapons programs but were not able to build actual bombs, and others (Taiwan, Japan, Canada, Korea, Iran, Brazil, Germany, Australia) maintain the ability to do so at short notice should a situation require it, though most of the nations in this category are very against nuclear weapons.
As for the second question, most suitable solid-fueled rocket launchers will be used as space launchers, yes. IRBMs and liquid-fueled ICBMs will be destroyed, the former because there is no use for them and the latter because they are a pain in the ass to maintain and their chemicals have industrial uses.
I've not even fully fleshed that point out yet.
The Clinton years are gonna see the American military develop dedicated disaster response teams (another idea they got from their friends in the Great White North ) and joint medical units that roam the world, responding directly to health emergencies when needed but the rest of the time going out to do good in the world. The modern American military in my world will still have a number of heavy formations for when big situations happen, but the Army will shrink, while the Navy will still stay large, the Air Force will grow a little and the Marines will grow a lot. The Baker Doctrine is gonna mean more once the Navy has more hulls to deploy such forces from. I'm gonna use an idea of mine from Canadian Power for this, a 12,500-ton or so ship that is effectively a war in a can - twin 155mm guns, Tomahawks and the ability to defend itself, but also built with a well deck, big helicopter deck and hangar, and equipped with a medical team, a company of highly-trained Marines, a LCAC and landing vehicles, four to six fast boats and five or six helicopters, two of them AH-1 Super Cobras. Together, four of these will be capable of landing a well-supported battalion on a hostile beach, but when operating alone, they are the worst nightmare of a pirate, the savior of a ship attacked by them and can (and will) absolutely blast the hell out of somebody who needs it. Terrorists? Better not get too close to shore unless you want the Marines to come and get you. These will be called the Littoral Combat Ships, while the smaller Navy boats will be called Corvettes or Destroyer Escorts, not sure on that one yet.See the above for the solution to that problem.
WRT to the Somalis, I'm envisioning a handful of those things making a regular triangle between Bandar Abbas, Zanzibar and Diego Garcia, while others will operate out of Subic Bay and a couple more in the Caribbean. I will be doing this later, but I need to figure out a class name for them. I'm thinking the Miller-class, after the Pearl Harbor hero, long-time Congressman and stalwart friend of the Navy.
That's done, too. Lots of roads, highways, power lines, rail lines and transit infrastructure built in the 1990s, and there will be more in the 2000s and 2010s, too.
Education's crtiical, and you've already addressed reforming primary and secondary education in the 1970's on.
Hopefully trends in TLOM&H stayed on track and relevant over the last twenty years. Beware the American tendency to scrap what works out of cheapness, ignorance, or blatant chicanery.
Tertiary studies are important but I'm going to say you've built in a very important difference in your alt-US: business is up-front about what it takes to get whatever job with the Business-Labor Partnership AND there's folks giving an objective weight of which students of which schools do best.
Hopefully, public funding of community colleges and private support (paid internships and apprenticeships aggressively recruiting such students going into key fields and trades would help folks find and stay employed at decent wages.
Education OTL has been far more about landing a decent job than educating yourself. YMMDV but I did my upper-divs lately at a state university in a STEM field. No bones about it, I was getting trained, not educated.
Training's useful but ephemeral in how much it helps folks as it ages into irrelevance.
If I wanted to educate myself --expand or deepen our knowedge or technique, that's in grad school. No hate on grad school, you finally get to focus on s/t and explore it in depth IF your grad advisor's aboard with it and you can get funding and survive on ramen another 3-5 years.
There's some compromises you have to put up with in ANY field but it is demoralizing to know that all your struggles may yield you is an adjunct teaching gig or contract employment scuffling along for loose change.
Business ITTL actually wants folks to get and stay gainfully employed, tho IDK if the OTL biz trends toward contract employment and internal entrepreneurship and so forth allow firms to stay flexible and nimble enough to stay profitable and innovative.
You pretty much nailed what I wanted to do with that. Greater funding for education at the Tertiary levels has allowed for rather less focus on job training and more on education. Most universities require learning a second language, for example. Elementary schools teach greater English and history, as well as much more emphasis on physical education. Federal law now makes physical education mandatory in every year of elementary AND high school, with the hope of curbing obesity. (It'll get more prevalent later, too.) Civics, history, science exploration, the arts and other fields also get more prevalent in schools. Standardized testing still happens here, but not nearly to the same degree and not just focusing on reading and math, either.
Japan is a very different nation here. I was gonna flesh that out in one of the side updates to this TL (and still will), but the short form is that Japan is a much more open nation socially than it was before, though that is still very hierarchical and structured compared to most of the West. But one of the results of that is that Japan is a more open to ideas nation than before, and after Korea will have years of learning just what has happened in the past, and it will stun and shock them to a huge degree. The Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, the Hell Ships, the Bataan Death March, the Manila Massacre, Comfort Women, Fukuoka Camp 17 and many others will soon be well known in Japan, and that will have its own effects. Japanese nationalists will soon have a lot of questions to ask themselves and be asked by others. It will have a societal effect as well as an economic one.
Economically, Japan made vast investments all over the world during the bubble boom, and IOTL they offloaded a heckuva lot of these to try and cover their accounts in Japan. Here, the boom was considerably smaller (but still huge), and the losses are such that many companies think that they can be settled through the development of their assets as profitable businesses, and in the process in America they will end up doing a lot of deals with American industry and business and developing influence in a lot of different fields. That will also be true in Europe and much of the developing world as well.
I'm thinking that as NAFTA was viciously opposed by unions and some industries, I'm thinking it won't come to pass. Instead, Mexico and America will do their own trade deals, likewise with Latin America. Mercosur is gonna take a lot of inspiration from the European Union on economic fronts. Development at home will also allow there to be considerably less income inequality.
The (very lucrative) harvest of tropical hardwood and Brazil changing its policies for will make for a lot more of the Amazon not getting destroyed.
There will be a bubble, and the problem of the 2000s - terrorism - will be present here. It will be a helluva ride, too....
Hmm. Where the terrorism originates from should be interesting to see, as I imagine that might change a little here. Bubble, to be fair, isn't quite surprising, so there's that.
Well, I'll wait and see then.
Lockheed's got that one covered. In the aftermath of the OTL Soviet collapse, Lockheed did a partnership with Yakolev on the Yak-141, looking for data on VTOL aircraft. They get a little more than that this time.
Lockheed's working on a supersonic VTOL jet, which will arrive in the mid-2000s as the F-24A. (I'm not sure what the name will be yet. Open to suggestions. ) The F-24A will be a semi-stealth bird with a similar engine and lift-fan configuration to the F-35, but with twin smaller engines (and twin rear jet nozzles) and an airframe configuration similar to the F-15, though rather smaller. This thing will be a little bigger than the Harrier but not so much so that its a bother on the decks of LHAs.Can't wait for more of this stuff and additional posts detailing these new and different things further.
Chapter Twelve: The Challenge of the 2000s
The Millenium began with the massive fear (which came to nothing) of Y2K computer issues and huge celebrations of what was hoped to be a new world for the future. With the world more peaceful than it had been in a century, some historians, particularly in the West, were talking of this being the "End of History", with many, however, pointing out that history was never really over, and the world was still not exactly a truly stable place.
For the Americas, however, things were getting better all the time. Brazil's first Democratic president in decades to serve his full time in office, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, passed power in January 2003 to his successor, Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, in a ceremony that proved to be notable for a bunch of reasons. Argentina was suffering economically from serious problems with mismanagement at the time, but Cardoso's Brazil had proven to be both excellent for investors and the country's poorer masses, hammering inflation down to nil, growing the economy and helping wage growth in the country's poorer and middle classes. Lula did the same only better, taking advantage of a strong economy to create the massive Fome Zero and Bolsa Familia social programs to help Brazil's poor, and the Growth Acceleration Program to build on previous gains in the economy and advance the country's infrastructure. While the firebrand Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was often seen as a pain by some in America's government (despite Chavez's very public statements that he was not opposed to all American actions, just ones he felt were wrong), most of Latin America, having built massively on democratic gains in the 1980s and 1990s, became legitimately growing economic powers in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s, with Brazil and Chile leading the way. These changes for the most part led to increased foreign investment, with the US and Western Europe leading the way, and some investment going back the other way. Brazil and Argentina's development of Mercosur as a way of dispute resolution and economic growth in Latin America swelled in the 1990s and 2000s, a situation that few disagreed with in the Western Hemisphere.
Other parts of the world varied. The Middle East was a mess by 2000 - while the Saudi Kingdom may well have been saved by the West's intervention in 1991, there was little love for the West in devoutly-religious Saudi Arabia and many of its neighbors, though in the latter case the situation varied by country as most of the small Gulf states, with Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran (which most of them didn't like at all) on the other, the two sides had considerable disagreements, which benefitted Saddam Hussein in Iraq just fine, who sought to play off of both sides - both Iran and Saudi loathed the often-mindless, egomaniacal Hussein, but both saw him as a useful buffer between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In North Africa, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi was the interloper in that he despised the West and they despised him, but the rest of North Africa was on good terms with the West. The Holy Land was a different matter, of course - by 2000, 20 years after the Ottawa Treaty, terrorism in both Israel and Palestine was uncommon and the Palestinians had by some margin the highest standard of living in the region, while Israel by 2000 had a GDP per capita of over $35,000 (Palestine stood at $15,250 a person in 2000, Jordan at $11,950) and was becoming a major tourist destination. Israel, Palestine and Lebanon sent their first representatives to the Council of Europe in 1999 and talked of entry into the European Union in the future. Lebanon, having been able to start recovering from its brutal 1975-1985 civil war, did an unprecedented peace deal with Israel in 1992, normalizing relations and allowing open trade and movement of people between the nations but also asking for Israel's help in stopping the Syrians from again making trouble for tiny Lebanon. Syria's attack on Lebanon's Beqaa Valley in May 1995 put this to the test, and Israel answered it (with Palestinian assistance), providing air and artillery support as well as attack helicopters to the Lebanese Army in their push back against the Syrians, which forced the Syrians to retreat in late June 1995. Such was the advancement of co-operation between the Jewish state and its closest neighbors that the countries organized joint military operations in 2001, most of Israel's excess military equipment found its way to neighboring states (this most a benefit to Lebanon) and a tourist-oriented passenger rail service from Cairo to Beirut via Gaza City, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Tyre, with a connecting Tel Aviv-Jerusalem-Ramallah-Amman service, began in 2004. Indeed, this part of the world in many cases sought more to look abroad for its inspiration because of the difficulties in dealing with the unstable Arabian Peninsula, and they had little difficulties finding that help, particularly because the disaporas of several of the nations abroad.
In Asia, Japan's 1990s efforts to discover everything possible about its past turned up more than a few events which caused headlines. China was only too happy to see Japan expose events of its past and used them in more than one case to justify anti-Japanese sentiments or protests, but most of the rest of Asia, particularly the proud Koreans and the very-nationalistic Malaysians, was more than happy to see Japan look deeply into its past and discover what had once been. Japanese public opinion on this shifted rapidly in the 1990s against the Ukoyu Dentai and other harder-line nationalists, and at the same time Korea's huge efforts in rebuilding the North were soon ably assisted by Japan. The Philippines' discovery of massive gold deposits on the island of Mindanao in 1998 added to this, as the Japanese, Koreans and Americans were all quick to jump into this, though the Filipinos' demand for substantial royalties wasn't well liked by Korea, the Americans and Japanese had little problem with it, as a steady gold price rise in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s made sure that the mines would be profitable. Japan's discoveries so discredited the nationalists that there was a demand, finally accepted in August 2002, to remove the names of the Class-A War criminals enshrined at the infamous Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. As Japan's economy began to recover from the bubble burst in the second half of the 1990s, their new investment overwhelmingly went to its Asian neighbors, and the 2002 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and Korea, was a roaring success - and included a semi-final match hosted at the newly-renovated Korea Future Stadium (the former Rungrado May Day Stadium) in Pyongyang. By that time, Pyongyang was pretty much one huge construction site, but the gargantuan Ryugyong Hotel, completed in time for the games, was where most of the action was in Pyongyang. Plans to build a tunnel between Korea and Japan, an idea going back to the days of Imperial Japan, began to be considered, with a bilaterial planning commission established for it in 2004.
For America, the economic growth in Latin America and Asia presented huge opportunities which export-minded companies wanted a piece of, and geopolitical concerns became less relevant. After the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, the United States and the Philippines together rebuilt the Clark Air Base and the naval base at Subic Bay was transferred to the Philippines, but with American rights to use it. Japan and Korea were granted those rights by the Filipinos in 2001, and economic development across Asia made sure the Americans were paying attention and looking for ways of paying back those who were making big investments from the United States. The Philippines' railroad network's major 1990s and 2000s expansions were almost entirely done with Japanese-built electronic control systems and American diesel locomotives, while the Filipino's license-built rolling stock. Even the rails themselves were in large numbers forged in facilities in the United States, and industrial growth in the Philippines was matched with unprecedented concern towards damaging the islands' natural beauty as little as possible. America's huge industrial investments in Japan to counter Japan's massive investments in America during the bubble era proved to be lucrative on a variety fronts, and as Japanese cars grew in popularity in America (the Detroit automakers in 2000 still held some 77.9% of the American car market, but the rest had the Japanese as the biggest players) that popularity was more than a little bit reciprocated. Likewise, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas had little difficulties grabbing big chunks of the airliner market in the new Asian markets. The Filipinos also got in on the act in one big way - the Philippines Geothermal Energy Company, which by 1995 had gotten 16% of its electricity from geothermal power, did a deal in 1998 with Combustion Engineering where PGEC would build ten geothermal power stations in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California, in return for C-E constructing three nuclear power stations in the Philippines, with the firms transferring knowledge on how to build future stations between the two firms at all stages of operation.
In Europe, the European Union made a massive gamble in 2004 when it admitted, at one time, fourteen nations. The island nations of Iceland, Cyprus and Malta were joined by nine Eastern European nations - the former Warsaw Pact nations of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav nation of Slovenia and former USSR states of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine. It was a bold play for a variety of reasons - including four nations that were formerly part of the USSR was sure to get Russia's attention (and it did, but not in the way the Europeans thought it would) and there was a considerable economic disparity between the two groups of countries. The Europeans, however, saw the massive expansion of the EU as both an opportunity and a way of gaining influence in the world - in the former point, Eastern Europe's economies were still struggling from the end of communism and on the latter point Brussels was by 2004 getting a little sick of hearing about how America dominated in the developed world. Jokes about Polish plumbers were well-known by this point, but having suffered from communism and authoritarian leadership, few in the new nations saw Europe as anything other than a way of escaping the past. Russia, to the surprise of the Europeans, didn't protest a lick at the plans of EU expansions into its sphere of influence....and the reason why became obvious just weeks after the accession of the new states into the EU, when the Russian Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said in a passionate speech in St. Petersburg that he envisioned a future where Russia was "an intersection for commerce, trade, knowledge, science and the arts, a nation at the intersection of Europe and Asia which learns from all and respects all....we serve the interests of Russia when we serve the interests of all mankind." Medvedev's speech was not entirely positively received - for many of the new nations, particularly Hungary and the Baltic nations, distrust of Russia's intentions died hard - but it was clear that Russia, which by that point was starting to show serious signs of economic growth.
In America, the 2000 presidential election began with the Republican primaries, which devolved into a two-man race between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain. Despite the primaries here being among the dirtiest in modern times (Bush's camp claimed McCain fathered an illegitimate child with a black prostitute), the Republicans had learned from 1992 and 1996, and the Republican base was overruled by concerns over beating President Clinton, and the foreign-policy expect McCain, whose campaign focused on this and campaign finance reform, beat Bush's campaigns through strong results in the Rust Belt states, New England and the northeast and many western states. McCain entered the 2000 race paired with famed Army general Colin Powell, who retired from the Army in 2000 to be able to run. Despite being a heavily foreign policy-heavy pairing, McCain and Powell used the concerns over the economy as well as Clinton's personal conduct while in office to paint him as unfit to be president - but the Republicans got the personal points thrown back in their faces by the First Lady, who loudly growled back to the Republicans "I forgive my husband for his past indiscretions. We all make mistakes, it is what makes us human." Despite some members of the right lampooning Hillary Clinton for that, it largely nullified that point (which both McCain and Powell were not real keen on chasing in any case) and focused the campaign on actual issues, a position which allowed Americans a clear choice between two sides, with the Republicans favoring large-scale tax cuts while the Democrats focused on improving the civil service and America's infrastructure. Both points had real merit, and so through the campaign the issues came to matter more than personal matters, a fact which proved to be good news for the lead candidates on both sides, both of whom had checkered personal lives.
The campaign literally ran down to the final days, and it turned out to be the narrowest win in modern times. Clinton and Wellstone came out with 325 electoral votes to 213 for McCain and Powell, but that understates how close it was - the gap in Florida and Ohio, both of which were won by Clinton, were less than 4,000 votes, and two recounts in each were able to faithfully say that Clinton came out ahead. Fox News got themselves in big trouble when they jumped the gun and claimed McCain had defeated Clinton when it turned out to be not true. Clinton's narrow win, however, made sure that McCain primary campaign planks, namely campaign finance reform and flexible armed forces responses, became ideas that were taken up in Clinton's second term. Hillary also claimed a Senate seat in that election, replacing the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and marking the first time that a husband and wife had both been politicians, but the move immediately made Hillary a powerful Senator - having the President as your husband does tend to do that - and a convenient back path to the White House for the Senate, which might not have been so useful in the depths of the Lewinsky affair. Clinton began his first term with ambitious plans for continuing health care reform and plans for additional domestic changes, but his Presidency's focus on domestic affairs was ended on September 11, 2001.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York, Washington, Detroit, Boston and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, were the deadliest terrorist incidents in the history of the United States, starting with bombs detonating in the basements of Washington's Union Station, Michigan Central Terminal in Detroit and South Station in Boston, as well as one going off in a maintenance compartment of a southbound Acela Express train just north of Tacony, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. The bomb on the Acela caused the train to jump the track at 145 miles per hour, smashing into a northbound Chessie System freight and a crowded stationary SEPTA commuter train at Tacony station. The station bombs claimed 109 lives and injured over 700, but the crash of Acela Train 25 at Tacony claimed 235 lives (141 on the Acela, 92 on the SEPTA train and the engineer and conductor of the Chessie freight), and just as news of the train station attacks got out, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York, crashing at 8:46 AM. United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 AM. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon across the Potomac from Washington at 9:37 AM. The fourth hijacked aircraft, United Flight 93, was brought down by passengers, the hijackers crashing the plane into the Three Mile Island nuclear power station south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, missing the reactors entirely but completely destroying Reactor Two`s turbine hall and control center, the East cooling tower and the transformer station, knocking the station completely offline for 21 months and killing 41 people on the ground in addition to the 44 people on the plane. Both of the World Trade Center`s two main towers collapsed, the South Tower collapsing at 10:00 AM and the north Tower at 10:24 AM, that one collapsing to the West, leveling one of the buildings of the World Financial Center complex next door which, thankfully, had been almost entirely evacuated by that point.
The 9/11 attacks claimed 4,157 lives injured over 15,000, the deadliest single day in the United States since the Civil War and topping even the infamous Attack on Pearl Harbor that had brought the United States into World War II. It
The 9/11 attacks proved to be a tragedy followed by a showcase of what could be done by humans for each other. It began right from the start, when US Navy destroyer John Paul Jones, British frigate Westminster, Canadian frigate Toronto and Iranian destroyer Daryush, all three of which launched helicopters to rescue people trapped on the upper floors of the towers by the airliner hits, the British frigate's Westland Super Lynx helicopter being hit by debris from the collapsing South Tower and crashing as a result, claiming the lives of her four crew members. (All four were posthumously awarded the George Cross for their actions.) America closed its airspace down after the attack, forcing hundreds of inbound aircraft to head for other airports, mostly in Canada, which took in 322 US-bound flights. Canadians did unbelievable stories here, the most famous being the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, which took in 41 flights carrying 7,150 people, including the then-Vice President of General Motors, whose Northwest flight into Detroit was one of those which landed in Gander. The Canadians proved to be remarkably good hosts, housing all of the people. Even in the big cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Halifax, arrangements proved to be hard, most notably in places like Gander. That tiny Newfoundland town was changed forever by what the Canadians called Operation Yellow Ribbon. In the United States, thousands of volunteers and rescue workers came in some cases hundreds of miles to try to help. President Clinton, who had been at a campaign stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the time of the attacks, was quick to head back to Washington. The international reaction was swift and pretty much unanimous in its shock and horror.
With the airspace of America shut down and the Northeast corridor jammed between Philadelphia and Trenton as a result of the Train 25 bombing (the site investigation of the attack was completed within 48 hours, and just twelve hours after that Amtrak, Chessie System and SEPTA repair crews had the tracks opened), travel in a lot of the country came to a standstill, but that didn't last. Amtrak was flooded with demands for travel, but their response was to drag out everything they had on hand, digging over 800 pieces of rolling stock out of storage and sending it out. Their own motive power was joined by over 150 diesel locomotives sent to Amtrak by the freight railroads for use, while commuter services and VIA Rail in Canada also sent equipment for use. As Michigan Central Terminal was damaged, Via Rail used its station in Windsor, Ontario, as a destination point for Amtrak trains and took responsibility for bussing passengers back across the river into Detroit. The train stations, despite considerable damage, were back up and operating within 72 Hours. Passenger trains in the week after the 9/11 saw the biggest numbers of passengers since the late 1950s, but Amtrak did its best - and rather more than many expected - to handle the sudden load. The need to move documents and other time-sensitive cargoes was also handled by Amtrak and freight railroads in a better-than-expected manner. This did not go unnoticed - when Congress bailed out American airlines in November 2001, they included an enormous $27.9 Billion appropriation for Amtrak and a demand that they got to work building high-speed rail networks in other parts of the nation, and seeing how they had done on 9/11, the states enthusiastically joined in the building of these lines, causing numerous HSR lines being planned out and beginning construction in the 2000s.
The 9/11 attacks also caused a sudden awareness of terrorism and a demand to deal with it. The 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had gotten everyone's attention, but 9/11 got attention like a shotgun report in a crowded room. It was ascertained within 36 Hours that the terrorist group al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, was responsible for the attacks. The United States didn't take long to locate him in the war-torn of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, bordered by Pakistan to the south and east, Iran to the West and the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north, had been ruled since 1995 by the religious-extremist Taliban, who had harbored bin Laden and loudly denied that he had anything to do with the attacks. Iran didn't buy this, and as the War on Terror began, Iran was about to become the front-line state. The first attacks on Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, with the first actions by American special forces and air units, followed by ground units and heavy support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. This was followed by direct involvement by Iran, which invaded Afghanistan in December 2001. The Taliban's connections to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both ruled by dictatorial governments ruling populations that were strongly anti-American, didn't help matters, but what it did do was get all those opposed to such governments working together. By March 2002, the Arab world was openly divided in both governments and populations, with one significant shift occurring in June 2002 when the Assad brothers, Bassel and Bashar, loudly announced that they would be siding with the Muslim nations which were openly supporting the War on Terror, which by that point included Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Malaysia and Morocco, which gained in additional member in Indonesia in 2003. Buoyed by massive Western support, the Northern Alliance booted the Taliban from power in Kabul in January 2002, but the Taliban managed in many cases to escape Kabul south into the southern provinces and the mountains separating Afghanistan and Pakistan....but the Americans were on to the game by then, as were their allies. Iran's armed forces, by 2002 long loyal to the civilian government and trained as fine an edge as any, ably assisted Western forces in going after Taliban and al-Qaeda hideouts. The Americans got their man on April 23, 2002, when American, British, Canadian and Australian special forces soldiers, backed up by Iranian mountain troops and Iranian, Dutch and German attack helicopters and French and Argentine attack aircraft, scored bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the caves. Both were taken out of Afghanistan alive first by the Iranians, then by the Americans and British.
What to do about bin Laden was settled by the troika which led Jerusalem mere days after his capture, which offered to try him by Islamic Law in Jerusalem for the crimes. Western law scholars followed bin Laden's trial closely when it began on August 19, 2002, in Jerusalem. Bin Laden is said to have been surprised at what Jerusalem had become, but it did little for him. He was convicted in the trial and sentenced to death, but at the request of the Americans (including President Clinton), his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He was then sent to the ADX Florence prison in Fremont County, Colorado, with the goal being to make sure that Bin Laden was eventually forgotten about, which would prove to be the case. The lesser-known al-Zawahiri was tried in New York for involvement in the 9/11 attacks, with little chance of an acquittal. He was convicted on July 18, 2003, and sentenced to death. Zawahiri showed little remorse, and was executed at USP Terre Haute in Indiana on September 19, 2005. The primary planner of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, fled Afghanistan into Pakistan, but he didn't escape justice there - he was discovered (in this case by MI6) and was picked up by American special forces in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on February 5, 2004, being brought back to the United States for trial. As with Zawahiri, Mohammed was tried in New York and as with Zawahiri, he was convicted and sentenced to death, with him also being executed at the same prison as Zawahiri on August 25, 2008.
The fall of the Taliban didn't end with their expulsion from Kabul. With Western pressure shoving on the Pakistanis (already not friends with America because of America's good relations with Iran and improving relations with long-time rival India) to try to seal up their border with Afghanistan but finding huge resistance within the country both from the Pakistani Taliban and other terrorist groups in Pakistan's nearly-lawless tribal regions, the task fell to the forces in Afghanistan to shut down the border to Pakistan in as great a way as possible. Iran's elite 56th Airborne Brigade proved to be good at this, and Pakistan's Army's inability to prevent Taliban infiltration led to additional issues with Pakistan. The presence of troops from several Muslim nations - Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates were involved in the War in Afghanistan as well as the Iranians - made life easier on everyone, ably helped by intelligent leadership on the NATO side, which had a succession of leaders, namely British Army General Richard Dannatt, Canadian Lieutenant General Rick Hillier and French Lieutenant General Sebastien Brasseur, who emphasized a need to get on the good side of the Afghan population, a point the Iranians also emphasized. The Taliban's fighting was by 2004 largely confined to the Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul provinces, the fighters still dangerous but by then the Afghans were coming into the battle line against the Taliban in numbers.
Iran, having become a Western ally in the 1960s and 1970s and becoming an economic powerhouse and a full-fledged democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, proved to be worth their weight in Gold. Having the wealth and connections to massively influence Central Asia, they took the lead in many cases in rebuilding Afghanistan. Having been stuck in an almost-perpetual state of civil war since the late 1970s, Afghanistan's civil infrastructure was a mess and the governing ability of any body in the nation was sorely tested, a problem made infinitely worse by both the Taliban and the shifting alliances of the warlords and factions of the nation. As this went on, Iran was dumping money and support into the nations of Central Asia, allowing Tehran to largely replace Moscow as a place that the mostly-Muslim former Soviet Republics looked to for inspiration. Iran's actions led to their own actions from Turkey, which happily supported other nations in the Middle East, particularly after Iran and Azerbaijan began improving relations in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Iran wisely didn't play up the Shiite dominance in Iran and wishes to create formal alliances in order to avoid formal divisions with the Saudis, but Iran's wide-scale involvement in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia's extensive funding of Islamic fundamentalists of both the peaceful and not-so-peaceful variety made sure that Saudi Arabia began to see problems with foreign relations in the 2000s, and Iran's moves to co-ordinate oil production deals between OPEC and other major oil producing nations (notably Norway, Mexico, Canada and Russia) in the 2000s led to the Saudis positions being weakened further, as Tehran began to seek leadership of that part of the world.
Turkey's problems with its past came abundantly clear in 2003 when the European Union officially recognized the Armenian Genocide as such, leading Turkey to angrily halt negotiations with the European Union, demanding the EU backtrack on that. Turkey's position got unexpected attacks from Iran, Israel and Japan, all three of which said that there was more than a little evidence of the Armenian Genocide. Israel's Foreign Minister at the time, Tzipi Livni, is known to have said to Turkey's Prime Minister "There is little point in denying the past". Japan's deputy foreign minister, Yuriko Koike, quite openly called Turkey's massive efforts to quash recognition of what had happened to the Armenians "A gross insult to history and a tragedy for those who lived with the suffering". Turkey's Prime Minister responded to these by tossing out the Ambassadors of both nations and loudly saying "We have told the world for years that Turkey did nothing to harm the lives of the Armenians, and it is long past time the world started listening to us rather than the professional victims in Yerevan." Russian Prime Minister Ruslan Khasbulatov chimed in after that, commenting "Turkey wonders why the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians have such a problem with each other and why Russia needs to be always in the area, watching over people. They need only look in the mirror to know why. They caused it. At a time when Japan is spending vast quantities of money to discover the truth of its past and Germany spends huge sums in Eastern Europe and Israel to help their economic development as a way of atoning for their crimes against Jews, the Turks continue to stand there and yell about how a vast crime committed by people long dead never happened, at the same time doing whatever they can to cause trouble for the Armenians. That's why we have to be there and that's why the Armenians and Azerbaijanis are both so territorial." The Turks responded to that comment by funding investigations into World War II crimes by the Russians, but that attempt backfired when Britain's Sunday Times newspaper exposed it in January 2004, leading to more than a little embarassment on Turkey's part.
The conflicts between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey's belligerence were added to by a third problem in North Africa, namely the problems with Sudan and Libya, the latter ruled since 1969 by the enigmatic, vengeful Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had been made an international pariah in the 1980s through his support of multiple European terrorist movements, in particular the Red Factions in Italy and Germany and the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Gaddafi's leadership changed through the 1980s and 1990s, however, as Libya's economic situation changed and the Gaddafi's Pan-Arab nationalism proved to be a dismal failure - the decision of the Assad brothers in Syria to marginalize Gaddafi in their relations after the death of their father in 2000 was seen as the final blow to Gaddafi's Pan-Arab hopes - he instead shifted in the 2000s to trying to normalize relations for his past, inviting Vice-President Wellstone and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Tripoli in 2004, this coming after Gaddafi loudly condemned the 9/11 attacks and helped to organize the African Union, which met for the first time in 2003. Wellstone visited Libya in February 2004, curious to see just what had changed, and he was surprised when Gaddafi offered Libyan help to the efforts to eradicate the Taliban in Afghanistan. His efforts were not in vain on either front, though his position that Africa didn't need to accept foreign help was loudly denied by the leaders of South Africa, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Kenya, all of which were recipients of substantial quanities of foreign aid and investment. The African Union expansions efforts pushed by Gaddafi didn't go far, but his proposals for a number of common standards and large projects did get somewhere, with Gaddafi in 2003 proposing the building of what would be the world's largest hydroelectric dam on the Congo River, the mighty Grand Inga dam, in order to power industrial development in southern Africa. Relations between Libya and its Western-leaning neighbors also improved substantially, and one of Gaddafi's finest pieces of diplomacy occured in May 2005, when he organized a visit to Jerusalem of over two dozen African Union leaders, as well as Bassel and Bashar al-Assad, to not only visit the Holy Land but also meet with the leaders of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. Gaddafi and both Assads, none of which had never visited Jerusalem before, were surprised by the leadership of the arrangements, as it was clear that the way of government worked - Jerusalem by that time was a very wealthy city, and the population of the troika-led city had grown from 614,000 in 1981 to 1,295,500 in 2005, and prosperity was very true for both Palestinian and Israeli residents - and while the Arab leaders had long distrusted and despised Israel, they were not fools, and their visit to Israel turned into a major moment for the Arab world and its divisions with Israel. The widely-televised image of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (one of Israel's greatest military leaders and someone who had masterminded the defeat of Hafez al-Assad's attacks on Israel twice) escorting the Assads and Gaddafi onto the Temple Mount and the three Arab leaders then visiting the Western Wall made headlines around the world, with the Syria-based Arab News Network catching Bassel al-Assad commenting to Sharon "This is what the city in the Holy Land should look like." South African President Thabo Mbeki was also stunned by Jerusalem, saying to a Israel Broadcasting Authority interviewer that Jerusalem was "One of the world's great cities, for many reasons."
The scourge of terrorism had gotten vast attention on September 11, 2001, but what also got attention was America's response. Hate crimes saw a sudden rise in the days after the attacks, but law enforcement and community response to them was swift. The one murder directly connected to a 9/11 hate attack, that of a Shiite Lebanese-descent shopkeeper in Santa Monica, California, saw the three perpetrators charged with murder. The leader of the three, Joshua Miller, was tried and convicted of first degree murder and was sentenced to death on August 20, 2004. Over thirty thousand tons of steel removed from the World Trade Center site during the 2001-2002 cleanup was used in the construction of aircraft carrier USS United States and landing ship USS New York City, the latter being commissioned in New York on September 11, 2005. But what got the most attention in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was the plans for rebuilding.
Twenty-one architecture groups submitted proposals for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, with none being anything less than truly immense. With the destroyed buildings around the center, including the large WTC 7 building (which was destroyed by fire and collapsed in the evening of September 11), there was suddenly a huge gap in the middle of the city, with a city and a country that wanted that hole filled in spectacular fashion. The winning selection was chosen after intense public debate in April 2003, the winning design chosen being one developed by New York City Partners, with Bechtel getting the job of building the complex and the Partners developing the plan.
The plan was centered around an absolutely immense six-story base which covered the whole site, with the former base of the North Tower being used as the memorial at street level, open to West Side Highway with the base wrapped around it. A new transit hub went in south of the site, and three gargantuan center buildings were developed, a 111-story tower in the place of the crushed World Financial Center Two building and two identical 127-story monsters built in the sites of World Trade Center buildings four and five on the Eastern corners of the site, set back somewhat. Red granite steps in the middle of the complex on all sides led to an elevated lookout over the memorial from the East, with the memorial surrounded on three sides by sloping manicured grass and granite-block landscaping. All 4,157 people who died on 9/11 would have their names immortalized on the site, with the memorial in the middle being a vast steel sculpture made from the material from the site. The Base would be the New York Commerce Center, one of the largest shopping malls ever built, with 821 stores and restaurants and two 24-screen movie theaters built into the base. WTC 3, the building on the southeast corner, had floors 92-125 built into the Empire Hotel in New York, the Kempinsky-run property being the first entry into North America by the European hoteliers. The transit hub combined ferries, city and intercity buses and New York City Subway and PATH underground services into one terminal, making the job of transport in the city easier. The design also included five other smaller buildings, the largest of these being WTC 4A and 4B, built in place of the old WTC 7 and the badly-damaged Verizon building to the west of it, two towers on the same base, connected to the main complex by a massive bridge, the two identical towers standing 65 stories tall. The huge complex had numerous creators, including famed architects Sir Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki, Zaha Hadid and Richar Meier. Bechtel and Jacobs Engineering were selected to build the project, and after the site plan was approved by the New York City Council in February 2004, reconstruction began. Work progressed more rapidly than some had expected, and the result was that the original timetable of having the new complex done by 2013 (as the original plan was) was moved up, in the hope of the site being completed in time for the 10th Anniversary of the attacks. That was not quite completed, but the site was officially opened in any case on September 11, 2011, as a very worthy new flagship complex in Lower Manhattan....
The Millenium began with the massive fear (which came to nothing) of Y2K computer issues and huge celebrations of what was hoped to be a new world for the future. With the world more peaceful than it had been in a century, some historians, particularly in the West, were talking of this being the "End of History", with many, however, pointing out that history was never really over, and the world was still not exactly a truly stable place.
For the Americas, however, things were getting better all the time. Brazil's first Democratic president in decades to serve his full time in office, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, passed power in January 2003 to his successor, Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, in a ceremony that proved to be notable for a bunch of reasons. Argentina was suffering economically from serious problems with mismanagement at the time, but Cardoso's Brazil had proven to be both excellent for investors and the country's poorer masses, hammering inflation down to nil, growing the economy and helping wage growth in the country's poorer and middle classes. Lula did the same only better, taking advantage of a strong economy to create the massive Fome Zero and Bolsa Familia social programs to help Brazil's poor, and the Growth Acceleration Program to build on previous gains in the economy and advance the country's infrastructure. While the firebrand Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was often seen as a pain by some in America's government (despite Chavez's very public statements that he was not opposed to all American actions, just ones he felt were wrong), most of Latin America, having built massively on democratic gains in the 1980s and 1990s, became legitimately growing economic powers in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s, with Brazil and Chile leading the way. These changes for the most part led to increased foreign investment, with the US and Western Europe leading the way, and some investment going back the other way. Brazil and Argentina's development of Mercosur as a way of dispute resolution and economic growth in Latin America swelled in the 1990s and 2000s, a situation that few disagreed with in the Western Hemisphere.
Other parts of the world varied. The Middle East was a mess by 2000 - while the Saudi Kingdom may well have been saved by the West's intervention in 1991, there was little love for the West in devoutly-religious Saudi Arabia and many of its neighbors, though in the latter case the situation varied by country as most of the small Gulf states, with Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran (which most of them didn't like at all) on the other, the two sides had considerable disagreements, which benefitted Saddam Hussein in Iraq just fine, who sought to play off of both sides - both Iran and Saudi loathed the often-mindless, egomaniacal Hussein, but both saw him as a useful buffer between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In North Africa, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi was the interloper in that he despised the West and they despised him, but the rest of North Africa was on good terms with the West. The Holy Land was a different matter, of course - by 2000, 20 years after the Ottawa Treaty, terrorism in both Israel and Palestine was uncommon and the Palestinians had by some margin the highest standard of living in the region, while Israel by 2000 had a GDP per capita of over $35,000 (Palestine stood at $15,250 a person in 2000, Jordan at $11,950) and was becoming a major tourist destination. Israel, Palestine and Lebanon sent their first representatives to the Council of Europe in 1999 and talked of entry into the European Union in the future. Lebanon, having been able to start recovering from its brutal 1975-1985 civil war, did an unprecedented peace deal with Israel in 1992, normalizing relations and allowing open trade and movement of people between the nations but also asking for Israel's help in stopping the Syrians from again making trouble for tiny Lebanon. Syria's attack on Lebanon's Beqaa Valley in May 1995 put this to the test, and Israel answered it (with Palestinian assistance), providing air and artillery support as well as attack helicopters to the Lebanese Army in their push back against the Syrians, which forced the Syrians to retreat in late June 1995. Such was the advancement of co-operation between the Jewish state and its closest neighbors that the countries organized joint military operations in 2001, most of Israel's excess military equipment found its way to neighboring states (this most a benefit to Lebanon) and a tourist-oriented passenger rail service from Cairo to Beirut via Gaza City, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Tyre, with a connecting Tel Aviv-Jerusalem-Ramallah-Amman service, began in 2004. Indeed, this part of the world in many cases sought more to look abroad for its inspiration because of the difficulties in dealing with the unstable Arabian Peninsula, and they had little difficulties finding that help, particularly because the disaporas of several of the nations abroad.
In Asia, Japan's 1990s efforts to discover everything possible about its past turned up more than a few events which caused headlines. China was only too happy to see Japan expose events of its past and used them in more than one case to justify anti-Japanese sentiments or protests, but most of the rest of Asia, particularly the proud Koreans and the very-nationalistic Malaysians, was more than happy to see Japan look deeply into its past and discover what had once been. Japanese public opinion on this shifted rapidly in the 1990s against the Ukoyu Dentai and other harder-line nationalists, and at the same time Korea's huge efforts in rebuilding the North were soon ably assisted by Japan. The Philippines' discovery of massive gold deposits on the island of Mindanao in 1998 added to this, as the Japanese, Koreans and Americans were all quick to jump into this, though the Filipinos' demand for substantial royalties wasn't well liked by Korea, the Americans and Japanese had little problem with it, as a steady gold price rise in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s made sure that the mines would be profitable. Japan's discoveries so discredited the nationalists that there was a demand, finally accepted in August 2002, to remove the names of the Class-A War criminals enshrined at the infamous Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. As Japan's economy began to recover from the bubble burst in the second half of the 1990s, their new investment overwhelmingly went to its Asian neighbors, and the 2002 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and Korea, was a roaring success - and included a semi-final match hosted at the newly-renovated Korea Future Stadium (the former Rungrado May Day Stadium) in Pyongyang. By that time, Pyongyang was pretty much one huge construction site, but the gargantuan Ryugyong Hotel, completed in time for the games, was where most of the action was in Pyongyang. Plans to build a tunnel between Korea and Japan, an idea going back to the days of Imperial Japan, began to be considered, with a bilaterial planning commission established for it in 2004.
For America, the economic growth in Latin America and Asia presented huge opportunities which export-minded companies wanted a piece of, and geopolitical concerns became less relevant. After the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, the United States and the Philippines together rebuilt the Clark Air Base and the naval base at Subic Bay was transferred to the Philippines, but with American rights to use it. Japan and Korea were granted those rights by the Filipinos in 2001, and economic development across Asia made sure the Americans were paying attention and looking for ways of paying back those who were making big investments from the United States. The Philippines' railroad network's major 1990s and 2000s expansions were almost entirely done with Japanese-built electronic control systems and American diesel locomotives, while the Filipino's license-built rolling stock. Even the rails themselves were in large numbers forged in facilities in the United States, and industrial growth in the Philippines was matched with unprecedented concern towards damaging the islands' natural beauty as little as possible. America's huge industrial investments in Japan to counter Japan's massive investments in America during the bubble era proved to be lucrative on a variety fronts, and as Japanese cars grew in popularity in America (the Detroit automakers in 2000 still held some 77.9% of the American car market, but the rest had the Japanese as the biggest players) that popularity was more than a little bit reciprocated. Likewise, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas had little difficulties grabbing big chunks of the airliner market in the new Asian markets. The Filipinos also got in on the act in one big way - the Philippines Geothermal Energy Company, which by 1995 had gotten 16% of its electricity from geothermal power, did a deal in 1998 with Combustion Engineering where PGEC would build ten geothermal power stations in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California, in return for C-E constructing three nuclear power stations in the Philippines, with the firms transferring knowledge on how to build future stations between the two firms at all stages of operation.
In Europe, the European Union made a massive gamble in 2004 when it admitted, at one time, fourteen nations. The island nations of Iceland, Cyprus and Malta were joined by nine Eastern European nations - the former Warsaw Pact nations of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav nation of Slovenia and former USSR states of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine. It was a bold play for a variety of reasons - including four nations that were formerly part of the USSR was sure to get Russia's attention (and it did, but not in the way the Europeans thought it would) and there was a considerable economic disparity between the two groups of countries. The Europeans, however, saw the massive expansion of the EU as both an opportunity and a way of gaining influence in the world - in the former point, Eastern Europe's economies were still struggling from the end of communism and on the latter point Brussels was by 2004 getting a little sick of hearing about how America dominated in the developed world. Jokes about Polish plumbers were well-known by this point, but having suffered from communism and authoritarian leadership, few in the new nations saw Europe as anything other than a way of escaping the past. Russia, to the surprise of the Europeans, didn't protest a lick at the plans of EU expansions into its sphere of influence....and the reason why became obvious just weeks after the accession of the new states into the EU, when the Russian Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said in a passionate speech in St. Petersburg that he envisioned a future where Russia was "an intersection for commerce, trade, knowledge, science and the arts, a nation at the intersection of Europe and Asia which learns from all and respects all....we serve the interests of Russia when we serve the interests of all mankind." Medvedev's speech was not entirely positively received - for many of the new nations, particularly Hungary and the Baltic nations, distrust of Russia's intentions died hard - but it was clear that Russia, which by that point was starting to show serious signs of economic growth.
In America, the 2000 presidential election began with the Republican primaries, which devolved into a two-man race between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain. Despite the primaries here being among the dirtiest in modern times (Bush's camp claimed McCain fathered an illegitimate child with a black prostitute), the Republicans had learned from 1992 and 1996, and the Republican base was overruled by concerns over beating President Clinton, and the foreign-policy expect McCain, whose campaign focused on this and campaign finance reform, beat Bush's campaigns through strong results in the Rust Belt states, New England and the northeast and many western states. McCain entered the 2000 race paired with famed Army general Colin Powell, who retired from the Army in 2000 to be able to run. Despite being a heavily foreign policy-heavy pairing, McCain and Powell used the concerns over the economy as well as Clinton's personal conduct while in office to paint him as unfit to be president - but the Republicans got the personal points thrown back in their faces by the First Lady, who loudly growled back to the Republicans "I forgive my husband for his past indiscretions. We all make mistakes, it is what makes us human." Despite some members of the right lampooning Hillary Clinton for that, it largely nullified that point (which both McCain and Powell were not real keen on chasing in any case) and focused the campaign on actual issues, a position which allowed Americans a clear choice between two sides, with the Republicans favoring large-scale tax cuts while the Democrats focused on improving the civil service and America's infrastructure. Both points had real merit, and so through the campaign the issues came to matter more than personal matters, a fact which proved to be good news for the lead candidates on both sides, both of whom had checkered personal lives.
The campaign literally ran down to the final days, and it turned out to be the narrowest win in modern times. Clinton and Wellstone came out with 325 electoral votes to 213 for McCain and Powell, but that understates how close it was - the gap in Florida and Ohio, both of which were won by Clinton, were less than 4,000 votes, and two recounts in each were able to faithfully say that Clinton came out ahead. Fox News got themselves in big trouble when they jumped the gun and claimed McCain had defeated Clinton when it turned out to be not true. Clinton's narrow win, however, made sure that McCain primary campaign planks, namely campaign finance reform and flexible armed forces responses, became ideas that were taken up in Clinton's second term. Hillary also claimed a Senate seat in that election, replacing the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and marking the first time that a husband and wife had both been politicians, but the move immediately made Hillary a powerful Senator - having the President as your husband does tend to do that - and a convenient back path to the White House for the Senate, which might not have been so useful in the depths of the Lewinsky affair. Clinton began his first term with ambitious plans for continuing health care reform and plans for additional domestic changes, but his Presidency's focus on domestic affairs was ended on September 11, 2001.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York, Washington, Detroit, Boston and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, were the deadliest terrorist incidents in the history of the United States, starting with bombs detonating in the basements of Washington's Union Station, Michigan Central Terminal in Detroit and South Station in Boston, as well as one going off in a maintenance compartment of a southbound Acela Express train just north of Tacony, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. The bomb on the Acela caused the train to jump the track at 145 miles per hour, smashing into a northbound Chessie System freight and a crowded stationary SEPTA commuter train at Tacony station. The station bombs claimed 109 lives and injured over 700, but the crash of Acela Train 25 at Tacony claimed 235 lives (141 on the Acela, 92 on the SEPTA train and the engineer and conductor of the Chessie freight), and just as news of the train station attacks got out, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York, crashing at 8:46 AM. United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 AM. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon across the Potomac from Washington at 9:37 AM. The fourth hijacked aircraft, United Flight 93, was brought down by passengers, the hijackers crashing the plane into the Three Mile Island nuclear power station south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, missing the reactors entirely but completely destroying Reactor Two`s turbine hall and control center, the East cooling tower and the transformer station, knocking the station completely offline for 21 months and killing 41 people on the ground in addition to the 44 people on the plane. Both of the World Trade Center`s two main towers collapsed, the South Tower collapsing at 10:00 AM and the north Tower at 10:24 AM, that one collapsing to the West, leveling one of the buildings of the World Financial Center complex next door which, thankfully, had been almost entirely evacuated by that point.
The 9/11 attacks claimed 4,157 lives injured over 15,000, the deadliest single day in the United States since the Civil War and topping even the infamous Attack on Pearl Harbor that had brought the United States into World War II. It
The 9/11 attacks proved to be a tragedy followed by a showcase of what could be done by humans for each other. It began right from the start, when US Navy destroyer John Paul Jones, British frigate Westminster, Canadian frigate Toronto and Iranian destroyer Daryush, all three of which launched helicopters to rescue people trapped on the upper floors of the towers by the airliner hits, the British frigate's Westland Super Lynx helicopter being hit by debris from the collapsing South Tower and crashing as a result, claiming the lives of her four crew members. (All four were posthumously awarded the George Cross for their actions.) America closed its airspace down after the attack, forcing hundreds of inbound aircraft to head for other airports, mostly in Canada, which took in 322 US-bound flights. Canadians did unbelievable stories here, the most famous being the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, which took in 41 flights carrying 7,150 people, including the then-Vice President of General Motors, whose Northwest flight into Detroit was one of those which landed in Gander. The Canadians proved to be remarkably good hosts, housing all of the people. Even in the big cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Halifax, arrangements proved to be hard, most notably in places like Gander. That tiny Newfoundland town was changed forever by what the Canadians called Operation Yellow Ribbon. In the United States, thousands of volunteers and rescue workers came in some cases hundreds of miles to try to help. President Clinton, who had been at a campaign stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the time of the attacks, was quick to head back to Washington. The international reaction was swift and pretty much unanimous in its shock and horror.
With the airspace of America shut down and the Northeast corridor jammed between Philadelphia and Trenton as a result of the Train 25 bombing (the site investigation of the attack was completed within 48 hours, and just twelve hours after that Amtrak, Chessie System and SEPTA repair crews had the tracks opened), travel in a lot of the country came to a standstill, but that didn't last. Amtrak was flooded with demands for travel, but their response was to drag out everything they had on hand, digging over 800 pieces of rolling stock out of storage and sending it out. Their own motive power was joined by over 150 diesel locomotives sent to Amtrak by the freight railroads for use, while commuter services and VIA Rail in Canada also sent equipment for use. As Michigan Central Terminal was damaged, Via Rail used its station in Windsor, Ontario, as a destination point for Amtrak trains and took responsibility for bussing passengers back across the river into Detroit. The train stations, despite considerable damage, were back up and operating within 72 Hours. Passenger trains in the week after the 9/11 saw the biggest numbers of passengers since the late 1950s, but Amtrak did its best - and rather more than many expected - to handle the sudden load. The need to move documents and other time-sensitive cargoes was also handled by Amtrak and freight railroads in a better-than-expected manner. This did not go unnoticed - when Congress bailed out American airlines in November 2001, they included an enormous $27.9 Billion appropriation for Amtrak and a demand that they got to work building high-speed rail networks in other parts of the nation, and seeing how they had done on 9/11, the states enthusiastically joined in the building of these lines, causing numerous HSR lines being planned out and beginning construction in the 2000s.
The 9/11 attacks also caused a sudden awareness of terrorism and a demand to deal with it. The 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had gotten everyone's attention, but 9/11 got attention like a shotgun report in a crowded room. It was ascertained within 36 Hours that the terrorist group al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, was responsible for the attacks. The United States didn't take long to locate him in the war-torn of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, bordered by Pakistan to the south and east, Iran to the West and the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north, had been ruled since 1995 by the religious-extremist Taliban, who had harbored bin Laden and loudly denied that he had anything to do with the attacks. Iran didn't buy this, and as the War on Terror began, Iran was about to become the front-line state. The first attacks on Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, with the first actions by American special forces and air units, followed by ground units and heavy support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. This was followed by direct involvement by Iran, which invaded Afghanistan in December 2001. The Taliban's connections to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both ruled by dictatorial governments ruling populations that were strongly anti-American, didn't help matters, but what it did do was get all those opposed to such governments working together. By March 2002, the Arab world was openly divided in both governments and populations, with one significant shift occurring in June 2002 when the Assad brothers, Bassel and Bashar, loudly announced that they would be siding with the Muslim nations which were openly supporting the War on Terror, which by that point included Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Malaysia and Morocco, which gained in additional member in Indonesia in 2003. Buoyed by massive Western support, the Northern Alliance booted the Taliban from power in Kabul in January 2002, but the Taliban managed in many cases to escape Kabul south into the southern provinces and the mountains separating Afghanistan and Pakistan....but the Americans were on to the game by then, as were their allies. Iran's armed forces, by 2002 long loyal to the civilian government and trained as fine an edge as any, ably assisted Western forces in going after Taliban and al-Qaeda hideouts. The Americans got their man on April 23, 2002, when American, British, Canadian and Australian special forces soldiers, backed up by Iranian mountain troops and Iranian, Dutch and German attack helicopters and French and Argentine attack aircraft, scored bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the caves. Both were taken out of Afghanistan alive first by the Iranians, then by the Americans and British.
What to do about bin Laden was settled by the troika which led Jerusalem mere days after his capture, which offered to try him by Islamic Law in Jerusalem for the crimes. Western law scholars followed bin Laden's trial closely when it began on August 19, 2002, in Jerusalem. Bin Laden is said to have been surprised at what Jerusalem had become, but it did little for him. He was convicted in the trial and sentenced to death, but at the request of the Americans (including President Clinton), his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He was then sent to the ADX Florence prison in Fremont County, Colorado, with the goal being to make sure that Bin Laden was eventually forgotten about, which would prove to be the case. The lesser-known al-Zawahiri was tried in New York for involvement in the 9/11 attacks, with little chance of an acquittal. He was convicted on July 18, 2003, and sentenced to death. Zawahiri showed little remorse, and was executed at USP Terre Haute in Indiana on September 19, 2005. The primary planner of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, fled Afghanistan into Pakistan, but he didn't escape justice there - he was discovered (in this case by MI6) and was picked up by American special forces in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on February 5, 2004, being brought back to the United States for trial. As with Zawahiri, Mohammed was tried in New York and as with Zawahiri, he was convicted and sentenced to death, with him also being executed at the same prison as Zawahiri on August 25, 2008.
The fall of the Taliban didn't end with their expulsion from Kabul. With Western pressure shoving on the Pakistanis (already not friends with America because of America's good relations with Iran and improving relations with long-time rival India) to try to seal up their border with Afghanistan but finding huge resistance within the country both from the Pakistani Taliban and other terrorist groups in Pakistan's nearly-lawless tribal regions, the task fell to the forces in Afghanistan to shut down the border to Pakistan in as great a way as possible. Iran's elite 56th Airborne Brigade proved to be good at this, and Pakistan's Army's inability to prevent Taliban infiltration led to additional issues with Pakistan. The presence of troops from several Muslim nations - Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates were involved in the War in Afghanistan as well as the Iranians - made life easier on everyone, ably helped by intelligent leadership on the NATO side, which had a succession of leaders, namely British Army General Richard Dannatt, Canadian Lieutenant General Rick Hillier and French Lieutenant General Sebastien Brasseur, who emphasized a need to get on the good side of the Afghan population, a point the Iranians also emphasized. The Taliban's fighting was by 2004 largely confined to the Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul provinces, the fighters still dangerous but by then the Afghans were coming into the battle line against the Taliban in numbers.
Iran, having become a Western ally in the 1960s and 1970s and becoming an economic powerhouse and a full-fledged democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, proved to be worth their weight in Gold. Having the wealth and connections to massively influence Central Asia, they took the lead in many cases in rebuilding Afghanistan. Having been stuck in an almost-perpetual state of civil war since the late 1970s, Afghanistan's civil infrastructure was a mess and the governing ability of any body in the nation was sorely tested, a problem made infinitely worse by both the Taliban and the shifting alliances of the warlords and factions of the nation. As this went on, Iran was dumping money and support into the nations of Central Asia, allowing Tehran to largely replace Moscow as a place that the mostly-Muslim former Soviet Republics looked to for inspiration. Iran's actions led to their own actions from Turkey, which happily supported other nations in the Middle East, particularly after Iran and Azerbaijan began improving relations in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Iran wisely didn't play up the Shiite dominance in Iran and wishes to create formal alliances in order to avoid formal divisions with the Saudis, but Iran's wide-scale involvement in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia's extensive funding of Islamic fundamentalists of both the peaceful and not-so-peaceful variety made sure that Saudi Arabia began to see problems with foreign relations in the 2000s, and Iran's moves to co-ordinate oil production deals between OPEC and other major oil producing nations (notably Norway, Mexico, Canada and Russia) in the 2000s led to the Saudis positions being weakened further, as Tehran began to seek leadership of that part of the world.
Turkey's problems with its past came abundantly clear in 2003 when the European Union officially recognized the Armenian Genocide as such, leading Turkey to angrily halt negotiations with the European Union, demanding the EU backtrack on that. Turkey's position got unexpected attacks from Iran, Israel and Japan, all three of which said that there was more than a little evidence of the Armenian Genocide. Israel's Foreign Minister at the time, Tzipi Livni, is known to have said to Turkey's Prime Minister "There is little point in denying the past". Japan's deputy foreign minister, Yuriko Koike, quite openly called Turkey's massive efforts to quash recognition of what had happened to the Armenians "A gross insult to history and a tragedy for those who lived with the suffering". Turkey's Prime Minister responded to these by tossing out the Ambassadors of both nations and loudly saying "We have told the world for years that Turkey did nothing to harm the lives of the Armenians, and it is long past time the world started listening to us rather than the professional victims in Yerevan." Russian Prime Minister Ruslan Khasbulatov chimed in after that, commenting "Turkey wonders why the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians have such a problem with each other and why Russia needs to be always in the area, watching over people. They need only look in the mirror to know why. They caused it. At a time when Japan is spending vast quantities of money to discover the truth of its past and Germany spends huge sums in Eastern Europe and Israel to help their economic development as a way of atoning for their crimes against Jews, the Turks continue to stand there and yell about how a vast crime committed by people long dead never happened, at the same time doing whatever they can to cause trouble for the Armenians. That's why we have to be there and that's why the Armenians and Azerbaijanis are both so territorial." The Turks responded to that comment by funding investigations into World War II crimes by the Russians, but that attempt backfired when Britain's Sunday Times newspaper exposed it in January 2004, leading to more than a little embarassment on Turkey's part.
The conflicts between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey's belligerence were added to by a third problem in North Africa, namely the problems with Sudan and Libya, the latter ruled since 1969 by the enigmatic, vengeful Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had been made an international pariah in the 1980s through his support of multiple European terrorist movements, in particular the Red Factions in Italy and Germany and the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Gaddafi's leadership changed through the 1980s and 1990s, however, as Libya's economic situation changed and the Gaddafi's Pan-Arab nationalism proved to be a dismal failure - the decision of the Assad brothers in Syria to marginalize Gaddafi in their relations after the death of their father in 2000 was seen as the final blow to Gaddafi's Pan-Arab hopes - he instead shifted in the 2000s to trying to normalize relations for his past, inviting Vice-President Wellstone and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Tripoli in 2004, this coming after Gaddafi loudly condemned the 9/11 attacks and helped to organize the African Union, which met for the first time in 2003. Wellstone visited Libya in February 2004, curious to see just what had changed, and he was surprised when Gaddafi offered Libyan help to the efforts to eradicate the Taliban in Afghanistan. His efforts were not in vain on either front, though his position that Africa didn't need to accept foreign help was loudly denied by the leaders of South Africa, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Kenya, all of which were recipients of substantial quanities of foreign aid and investment. The African Union expansions efforts pushed by Gaddafi didn't go far, but his proposals for a number of common standards and large projects did get somewhere, with Gaddafi in 2003 proposing the building of what would be the world's largest hydroelectric dam on the Congo River, the mighty Grand Inga dam, in order to power industrial development in southern Africa. Relations between Libya and its Western-leaning neighbors also improved substantially, and one of Gaddafi's finest pieces of diplomacy occured in May 2005, when he organized a visit to Jerusalem of over two dozen African Union leaders, as well as Bassel and Bashar al-Assad, to not only visit the Holy Land but also meet with the leaders of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. Gaddafi and both Assads, none of which had never visited Jerusalem before, were surprised by the leadership of the arrangements, as it was clear that the way of government worked - Jerusalem by that time was a very wealthy city, and the population of the troika-led city had grown from 614,000 in 1981 to 1,295,500 in 2005, and prosperity was very true for both Palestinian and Israeli residents - and while the Arab leaders had long distrusted and despised Israel, they were not fools, and their visit to Israel turned into a major moment for the Arab world and its divisions with Israel. The widely-televised image of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (one of Israel's greatest military leaders and someone who had masterminded the defeat of Hafez al-Assad's attacks on Israel twice) escorting the Assads and Gaddafi onto the Temple Mount and the three Arab leaders then visiting the Western Wall made headlines around the world, with the Syria-based Arab News Network catching Bassel al-Assad commenting to Sharon "This is what the city in the Holy Land should look like." South African President Thabo Mbeki was also stunned by Jerusalem, saying to a Israel Broadcasting Authority interviewer that Jerusalem was "One of the world's great cities, for many reasons."
The scourge of terrorism had gotten vast attention on September 11, 2001, but what also got attention was America's response. Hate crimes saw a sudden rise in the days after the attacks, but law enforcement and community response to them was swift. The one murder directly connected to a 9/11 hate attack, that of a Shiite Lebanese-descent shopkeeper in Santa Monica, California, saw the three perpetrators charged with murder. The leader of the three, Joshua Miller, was tried and convicted of first degree murder and was sentenced to death on August 20, 2004. Over thirty thousand tons of steel removed from the World Trade Center site during the 2001-2002 cleanup was used in the construction of aircraft carrier USS United States and landing ship USS New York City, the latter being commissioned in New York on September 11, 2005. But what got the most attention in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was the plans for rebuilding.
Twenty-one architecture groups submitted proposals for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, with none being anything less than truly immense. With the destroyed buildings around the center, including the large WTC 7 building (which was destroyed by fire and collapsed in the evening of September 11), there was suddenly a huge gap in the middle of the city, with a city and a country that wanted that hole filled in spectacular fashion. The winning selection was chosen after intense public debate in April 2003, the winning design chosen being one developed by New York City Partners, with Bechtel getting the job of building the complex and the Partners developing the plan.
The plan was centered around an absolutely immense six-story base which covered the whole site, with the former base of the North Tower being used as the memorial at street level, open to West Side Highway with the base wrapped around it. A new transit hub went in south of the site, and three gargantuan center buildings were developed, a 111-story tower in the place of the crushed World Financial Center Two building and two identical 127-story monsters built in the sites of World Trade Center buildings four and five on the Eastern corners of the site, set back somewhat. Red granite steps in the middle of the complex on all sides led to an elevated lookout over the memorial from the East, with the memorial surrounded on three sides by sloping manicured grass and granite-block landscaping. All 4,157 people who died on 9/11 would have their names immortalized on the site, with the memorial in the middle being a vast steel sculpture made from the material from the site. The Base would be the New York Commerce Center, one of the largest shopping malls ever built, with 821 stores and restaurants and two 24-screen movie theaters built into the base. WTC 3, the building on the southeast corner, had floors 92-125 built into the Empire Hotel in New York, the Kempinsky-run property being the first entry into North America by the European hoteliers. The transit hub combined ferries, city and intercity buses and New York City Subway and PATH underground services into one terminal, making the job of transport in the city easier. The design also included five other smaller buildings, the largest of these being WTC 4A and 4B, built in place of the old WTC 7 and the badly-damaged Verizon building to the west of it, two towers on the same base, connected to the main complex by a massive bridge, the two identical towers standing 65 stories tall. The huge complex had numerous creators, including famed architects Sir Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki, Zaha Hadid and Richar Meier. Bechtel and Jacobs Engineering were selected to build the project, and after the site plan was approved by the New York City Council in February 2004, reconstruction began. Work progressed more rapidly than some had expected, and the result was that the original timetable of having the new complex done by 2013 (as the original plan was) was moved up, in the hope of the site being completed in time for the 10th Anniversary of the attacks. That was not quite completed, but the site was officially opened in any case on September 11, 2011, as a very worthy new flagship complex in Lower Manhattan....
Last edited:
Always interesting, TTL.
One partner nation in the Middle East that's not mentioned here is Turkey. I know there's something of a cultural rivalry between Turkey and Iran (honestly between Turkey and every country bordering Turkey) but they have a lot of the same issues. Muslim countries trying to walk a secular path, allies of the West during the Cold War, and even a joint stake in the Kurdish Question.
We've seen Turkey attempt to be pragmatic with Israel IOTL, and I would imagine that's led to some very positive developments ITTL. If only Syria had its act together, you'd have one geographically contiguous group of nations around the top of the Arabian Peninsula.
Also, a much more stable and wealthy Iran could have massive consequences for central Asia. There are already significant cultural and linguistic links between Iran and many of the central Asian ethnic groups. And many others have similar links with the Turks. If the two of them worked together while Russia has its head pulled in, they could find themselves the economic patrons of a significant region of the globe, from Afghanistan maybe all the way up to Kazakhstan.
That might sound like a stretch, but if Russia really does falter much more significantly ITTL, the central Asian nations are going to be looking somewhere; and China's buried in the sand, and India and the West are both more alien than their fellow Muslims.
And speaking of that aspect of it, at the very least I would imagine Iran's doing what it can to keep terror funding out of Afghanistan, where there is a significant Persian-speaking minority and a long shared border.
One partner nation in the Middle East that's not mentioned here is Turkey. I know there's something of a cultural rivalry between Turkey and Iran (honestly between Turkey and every country bordering Turkey) but they have a lot of the same issues. Muslim countries trying to walk a secular path, allies of the West during the Cold War, and even a joint stake in the Kurdish Question.
We've seen Turkey attempt to be pragmatic with Israel IOTL, and I would imagine that's led to some very positive developments ITTL. If only Syria had its act together, you'd have one geographically contiguous group of nations around the top of the Arabian Peninsula.
Also, a much more stable and wealthy Iran could have massive consequences for central Asia. There are already significant cultural and linguistic links between Iran and many of the central Asian ethnic groups. And many others have similar links with the Turks. If the two of them worked together while Russia has its head pulled in, they could find themselves the economic patrons of a significant region of the globe, from Afghanistan maybe all the way up to Kazakhstan.
That might sound like a stretch, but if Russia really does falter much more significantly ITTL, the central Asian nations are going to be looking somewhere; and China's buried in the sand, and India and the West are both more alien than their fellow Muslims.
And speaking of that aspect of it, at the very least I would imagine Iran's doing what it can to keep terror funding out of Afghanistan, where there is a significant Persian-speaking minority and a long shared border.
@ TheMann-- Exquisitely tasty stuff in the Oughts.
In the ME- your posited triumvirate of Israel, Jordan, and Palestine is both an economic and military juggernaut. Having Lebanon make peace with Israel as well as having genuinely friendly relations with Egypt would make it sucidial for Syria to start #$%^.
Iran staying pro-Western and economically thriving would be diversifying its economy in so many ways would do a lot of good investing in I-J-P, Turkey, and maybe making inroads into many discussions about cooperation with NATO and EU.
Expat's WI of how this TL bumps Turkey's economic, military, and political prospects of being secular, democratic, AND prosperous is a tasty prospect as well.
The Pacific is shaping up to be a much more peaceful situation- united Korea,
Philippines is more economically and politically vibrant, Japan is heavily invested in staying open and involved abroad.
I'm kind of curious how Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma/Myanmar, Australia, and NZ share in this prosperity.
Do the Russians share in this as well?
In the ME- your posited triumvirate of Israel, Jordan, and Palestine is both an economic and military juggernaut. Having Lebanon make peace with Israel as well as having genuinely friendly relations with Egypt would make it sucidial for Syria to start #$%^.
Iran staying pro-Western and economically thriving would be diversifying its economy in so many ways would do a lot of good investing in I-J-P, Turkey, and maybe making inroads into many discussions about cooperation with NATO and EU.
Expat's WI of how this TL bumps Turkey's economic, military, and political prospects of being secular, democratic, AND prosperous is a tasty prospect as well.
The Pacific is shaping up to be a much more peaceful situation- united Korea,
Philippines is more economically and politically vibrant, Japan is heavily invested in staying open and involved abroad.
I'm kind of curious how Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma/Myanmar, Australia, and NZ share in this prosperity.
Do the Russians share in this as well?
Would it have been easier to execute bin Laden, by beheading? He's a very dangerous man.
Orville_third
Banned
Two minor quibbles.
First, Libya. Ghaddafi was trying to improve his profile in the 2000's, both in Africa (organizing and funding the African Union, negotiating peace talks, promoting foreign aid) and beyond- including buying up lots of bananas.
Second, the helo rescue. OTL it was hard enough for the NYPD to respond to the disaster in their helos. I'm not sure how well the militaries would have done- and helos off destroyers aren't the same as dedicated SAR choppers.
Would the shock of 9/11 lead to improved funding for disaster preparedness, and increased disaster training? Would this lead to an improved response to other disasters, like Katrina, Rita, and Sandy? (To say nothing of Greensberg and other places.)
First, Libya. Ghaddafi was trying to improve his profile in the 2000's, both in Africa (organizing and funding the African Union, negotiating peace talks, promoting foreign aid) and beyond- including buying up lots of bananas.
Second, the helo rescue. OTL it was hard enough for the NYPD to respond to the disaster in their helos. I'm not sure how well the militaries would have done- and helos off destroyers aren't the same as dedicated SAR choppers.
Would the shock of 9/11 lead to improved funding for disaster preparedness, and increased disaster training? Would this lead to an improved response to other disasters, like Katrina, Rita, and Sandy? (To say nothing of Greensberg and other places.)
And that was my point. At ADX Florence he cannot communicate with the outside world to any great degree, so the loons at Al-Qaeda don't get a martyr but they don't get anything in the way of guidance from him. Instead he sits locked in a cell in the middle of the American Mountain West, very far from any of his supporters, with no chance of escape or breakout, soon to be completely forgotten, as it should be.
The guards can prevent him from reading the Quran. They can only address him by number. Or they can just act like he doesn't exist. That would be effective.
That's pretty counterintuitive, denying him basic rights and his own identity, terrorist or otherwise. At ADX Florence, these prisoners are effectively cut off from the world-at-large as it stands, and that's how it tends to stay.
This TL has done well thus far with defining itself in contrast to the failures of our recent history. I hope any kind of Guantanamo Bay-type situation can be avoided.
He was a very dangerous man. And he killed more people ITTL.
On a different matter, World Financial Center shouldn't have been destroyed, 7 World Trade should have like OTL. But the Calder sculpture outside should've survived (With refurbishment taking longer TTL and thus preventing it from being there on 9/11).
On a different matter, World Financial Center shouldn't have been destroyed, 7 World Trade should have like OTL. But the Calder sculpture outside should've survived (With refurbishment taking longer TTL and thus preventing it from being there on 9/11).
Yes, Bin Laden was a dangerous man. But him being at ADX Florence is about as severe a punishment as it gets. There is no reason to sink to their levels, which is why he'll always be able to read the Quran. The rules will drive him insane, no question, but I rather suspect there won't be much in the way of sympathy for him.
The World Financial Center had a building destroyed for a reason - I am gonna rebuild the World Trade Center, only rather a lot bigger. Oh, you knocked down two 110-story buildings, killed 3,400 people there? Alright then. You know what we're gonna do in response to that? We're gonna build a brand new complex there, MUCH bigger than before. The new World Trade Center is gonna include one of the world's biggest shopping malls (850 stores on six stories) on the former superblock there, with three massive towers (one 111 stories and two 125 stories) built on top of that, including a six-star hotel, museum, massive transit hub and a truly vast quantity of office space, as well as memorials to those lost on 9/11. The steel from the destroyed buildings? We're gonna make warships and monuments out of it. Oh, and just to make sure nobody gets the wrong ideas, included in that complex is gonna be a quite large mosque and consulates for several Muslim-majority nations as well as a synagogue and a church. And we're gonna make sure that Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda operatives in American jails know just what we built there, so they get to know that while America remembers its losses, when they want to make a statement about those losses, it gives the people who did the harm a great big figurative middle finger.
Well, this is a rapid-fire TL, and it's going great, so you should keep doing what you feel. But I just have to rant for a minute...
I appreciate the sentiment, and I suppose if it'd happened in real life it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. But:
- Those buildings were universally hated by New Yorkers until they came down.
- Only a very small (though vocal) minority wanted them rebuilt.
- More people wanted the site left bare as a mass grave with two beams of light shot into the sky (also not the best use of the space, just saying popularity-wise)
- Shopping malls are awful! The worst! Everybody knows it now, we were just figuring it out then.
- Super blocks are awful! The worst! One of the only democratic decisions about the site that's stuck IOTL is the return of the street grid.
- The owner of the building, Larry Silverstein, is a complete turd-blossom. NYC went through a lengthy, exhaustive, multi-stage review process for the site plan that included architectural notes that were widely praised by citizens of the city and nationwide...and this prick just ignored them and built the hybrid monstrosity that sits on the site today. At the end of the day, he doesn't care how much of a "moment" the country or the city needs, he does what he wants. He's a money-grubbing Scrooge. He also- very specifically- has control over the architecture of the buildings. He can build them back any way he wants. If he'd wanted to build them back as twin towers, or triple towers, he would've done it IOTL. He didn't. He also didn't do what the people voted on. Asshat.
The idea of a mosque is a nice, symbolic touch.
I'm not too keen about a lot more office space down there, as the whole area's kind of glutted. But if you're improving the transport links, I can see it happening, especially if folks symbolically take space in the buildings (which the owner will frigging gouge the prices on, lemme tell you.)
It would be nicer to put in living space to at least take some of the antiseptic quality out of the old site. It was truly a monument to the follies of modernism: unappealing, un-walkable, un-liveable.
But if you turn the tip of Manhattan into a transit hub, hotel, and shopping mall, it will only be used by tourists and commuters from New Jersey. You will have just effectively annexed the tip of Manhattan...into New Jersey. You monster.
Daring design. Very daring design. Who were the architects for the individual buildings?
Last edited:
- Status