What if the bojinka plot was launched?

What if the bojinka plot was launched?
Pod is no fire in room 603 and Manila cell hires enough people for the hijackings.

Worst case scenario:

Pope John Paul II assassinated
11 planes bombed 4000 people die at the same time
12th plane crashes into the CIA headquarters in the Langley area in Fairfax County, Virginia.
7 more planes crash into The World Trade Center (New York City, New York), The Pentagon (Arlington, Virginia), the United States Capitol (Washington, D.C.), the White House(Washington, D.C.), the Sears Tower (Chicago, Illinois), and the U.S Bank Tower (Los Angeles, California)

Death toll would be in the 5 digits maybe 6

How will the world react to this?


 
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The response to something like that would obviously be a lot more serious than it was for 9/11. The war against Al-Qaeda would be on and I don't see much in the way of people disagreeing with it. It would be a lot more intense and with more international support then in OTL.
 
I don't see all the jets managing to hit their target. I think after the first one or two hits Washington, you see fighters deployed with "Shoot to Kill" orders on any airliners still in the air over the USA.
 
I don't see all the jets managing to hit their target. I think after the first one or two hits Washington, you see fighters deployed with "Shoot to Kill" orders on any airliners still in the air over the USA.

I don't know how much this matters, though, considering how many targets they were planning to hit. Fighters wouldn't be able to be everywhere all at once and it's no small feat for the military to shoot down commercial airliners. I don't think there's any way that they could protect as many locations as the Bojinka plot had in mind. Chicago, LA, DC, NYC, and all of those other planes would be a lot to handle. I'd also expect an exponentially larger response than there was to 9/11. I'd be interested to know what repercussions the US and the international community would make as a result of this. How would it differ from the way 9/11 was handled?
 
Well, first off, of course, Santo subito! The ensuing conclave probably elects Benedict after flirting with the idea of Cardinal Sin, whom Benedict makes Papal Secretary of State. Well, he was the Archbishop of Manila, after all.... Cardinal Sodano becomes Dean of the College.

Boris Yeltsin either goes on the water wagon or drinks himself to death in three months.

The Murrah Federal Building plot is disrupted in the new security atmosphere. Bill Clinton is worried as hell about the 2016 elections. He is right to be. On the one hand, with a centrist Good Ol' Boy Southern Democrat in charge, there's a lot less yapping and little anti-GWOT sentiment. For now. On the other, this happened on his watch.

John Major is buoyed by events. There will be another Conservative general election majority in a sort of khaki election. (There will also be a highly complex operation in getting the Windies side safely to the UK for the Test series.) Diana, Princess of Wales, will get her divorce on schedule, but ... Dodi who? Oooh, look at the pretty butterfly....

Archbishop Carey will get on very well with Benedict. He'll retire early all the same. PM Major sends the only possible name to the Palace to succeed him as Cantuar: the relatively new Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali.

The Republican ticket of Powell-Baker beats Clinton-Gore, around whose collective neck is, albatross-like, a huge intel failure. Qaddafi decides the elder Assad is a good leader to imitate, and works to become, no less an SOB, but the US' and UK's SOB. Iran and Iraq, and such proxies as Hezbollah, continue to choose unwisely. The PRC tries to bandwagon Tibet, &c, as part of its contribution to the GWOT. They get a very frosty reception. Clinton and Powell both agree with John Major that the strategic situation has changed sufficiently that violations of a certain armistice can no longer be overlooked; and Colin Powell and Jim Baker are not the men not to make the case that a violated armistice reinstates the former state of war, without further need for discussion.

This alarms the PRC, as that principle, if applied to the DPRK, is ominous. After all, it was an ASEAN nation which suffered first in all this, and the ROK, Japan, and the Philippines alike remain "hackles raised" in a world still angry enough to be impatient with niceties.

In other news, George H. W. Bush attains the pinnacle of his life's ambition when he replaces Acting Commissioner Bud Selig as Commissioner of Baseball.
 

Archibald

Banned
You have a point. Plus John Paul II wasn't an ordinary Pope, he was extraordinary popular (I grew up in the 90's as a roman catholic, so I speak from personnal experience). And of course he had already survived an assasination atempt. Surely catholics would be extremely pissed off.
 
Remember, Jemaah Islamiyah was still active during the early 90's so I think that this will have some interesting consequences for Southeast Asia.
 
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