WI: President Al Gore kills Bin Laden before 9/11
- Thread starter darklordoftech
- Start date
It somewhat depends on when this happens? I rather presume that the outrage had been in the planning stage before January 20 2001
I know that Gore and Clinton were aware of the threat that Al Qaeda posed at this time (more so than the Bush administration), but it seems a little quick to just find and kill him within a year when it took like 8 in OTL unless there's some specific plan.
Sadly, I don't think he could have been brought down before the attacks. There just wasn't enough time. At best, what with Gore knowing the kind of threat Al Qaeda posed, he could have commissioned the CIA to find out which Airports the bombers would be at, send a few CIA and FBI agents to each and then they may have been stopped at the before they even got on the planes. Or, if they somehow managed to get through security, they could have had the planes searched before takeoff.
dcharles
Banned
Bill Clinton: 'I could have killed' Osama bin Laden in 1998
A day before Sept. 11, 2001, former President Bill Clinton told an audience that he could have had Osama bin Laden killed, but chose not to, because an attack could have endangered innocent women and children in Afghanistan.
www.latimes.com
Let's say that Clinton resigns and it happens then.
(Obviously this modifies the original WI somewhat)
This seems very unlikely. The POUS has virtually zero to do with intelligence outside the highest level. Is Al Gore going to personally go through the mile high stack of paper that the various alphabet agencies generate every day? I doubt Al Gore would have acted any different with regards to Afghanistan than Bush did, at least not significantly. Iraq is another matter as Hussein didn't try to have his dad killed.
No one had a clue Al Qaeda was going to hijack airliners, and crash them into buildings, or who was going to be on the mission. Some brilliant analyst wrote a memo "Bin Laden plans to attack the United States", and then after the attack says, "What else did you need to know? I warned you." He then parlays his psychic prediction into a career as an MSNBC contributor, and general know it all. "Those fools didn't apricate the quality of my work." "If they'd listened to me all the pain, and suffering of the last 20 years would have been avoided." The memo said nothing, that's not actionable intelligence.
The hijackers used boxcutters, which you could carry on planes before 9/11, they didn't have to get anything past security. And incidentally TSA has never caught terrorist. Everyone who's tried to bring down an airliner in the United States since 9/11 has been stopped by passengers, and flight crews. All the TSA does is think of new ways to harass passengers. 97% of the time they fail to detect test bombs, they make us no safer, and nether does Homeland Security. We just added another layer of bureaucracy to make the public think we were doing something to coordinate the work of the intelligence Agencies.
If President Gore had Bin Laden killed before 9/11 no one would care, because no one would know he was important. 9/11 would probable happen anyway. We suffered from a failure of imagination, not lack of information. In fact information overload may be part of our problem.
This part isn't accurate. OBL was responsible for the Khobar Towers, embassy attacks, and USA Cole. Still a valuable target.
Agree that once 2001 came around, it was too late for killing OBL to prevent 9/11.
I know I would be pissed if someone tried to kill one of my relatives. Like it or not people are effected by emotions including both people you like and don't like. Bush is effected by emotions, Gore is effected by emotions, Obama is effected by emotions. Guess what ? They are human beings. To pretend emotions have nothing to do with a president's decisions, any president, is ridiculous.
Actually, I agree with him. Gore would have gotten a bump in his popularity but it would have been brief, maybe a week or two at most.
When W came into office in January 2001 they had no intention of overthrowing Saddam, the policy was containment. The Clinton Administration had launched an air campaign in Iraq to punish them for the assassination attempt on the former president, but pointedly didn't try to kill Saddam. Trying to kill an ex national leader is an act of war requiring a response, but we elected not to remove the problem, just to kill some random Iraqi soldiers, whom Saddam could have given a rat's tail about.
After 9/11 the administration, and the public thought in different terms about how to deal with national security threats. Instead of seeing terrorist, and regional security threats as problems to manage, we thought in more aggressive terms of eliminating them. Saddam had been a regional threat for decades, and Bagdad had been a haven for every secular terrorist group in the ME, so he qualified on both counts. He'd launched 2 major regional wars that had cost over 1,000,000 lives, and done untold damage to the world's economy, and was an ongoing threat to his neighbors. After Afghanistan he was up next in the Axis of Evil.
In 2020 most people can't seem to remember that the overwhelming majority of the general public, and elite opinion in the United States supported the Iraq war. Funny how memory works. "Did I vote for that?" "Well Bush tricked me by using the same intelligence briefing I got myself, but he knew there were no WMD's." As if that was the underlining reason for the war, it wasn't, the status quo was just no longer sustainable. Simplistic explanations that the war was about a personal grudge were used as a political attack line to ovoid a more complicated discussion of what happened, and who supported the war, and why.
If bin Laden was the CEO, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the COO and more directly responsible for the full execution. Killing bin Laden in 2001, presumably through missile or early drone strike, wouldn’t likely derail 9/11. It wouldn’t disrupt the cells or hijackers in Europe and the US, unless there is a butterfly of the hijackers acting more irrational after the attack and getting exposed.
The end result will likely be a minor news story about the death of a somewhat unknown terrorist leader to the public, then some time later the retribution.
The end result will likely be a minor news story about the death of a somewhat unknown terrorist leader to the public, then some time later the retribution.
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marathag
Banned
Almost nobody knew who OBL was before 9/11, despite his efforts in Africa since 1997
It would be a page 4 story
'Terrorist financier killed by airstrike' if happened before 9/11.
And as point out above, whacking him in 2000 won't stop it.
Here would be a textbook pre-911 Bush cabinet meeting on Iraq in DoF by Peter Baker.
Over time the ideas became more imaginative.
Post 911 the WH and public acceptance of the status quo dropped like a rock while the public tolerance of casualties skyrocketed two trends that led in the same direction.
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I realize that, but like everything else in real life it's complex. How much did his emotions effect his judgement? It is at least subject to debate. Would he have just ridden it out if 9/11 didn't happen? Who knows ?'The same question is about his dad. If SH didn't try to kill his dad would he have invaded Iraq? We will never know.
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