And I find it curious that leading politicians have not made much mention of the World War II kamikaze attacks, despite the very glaring similarity; I kept on expecting something like "My fellow Americans, we've been through something like this before." To me, a great slogan would be
We survived the Kamikaze! And we can survive THIS!!!
Also, I'm not happy with simply calling it a "terrorist" attack, because terrorism is too generic and broad a term; even the tarring and feathering practiced by some American revolutionaries in the 1770's qualifies as terrorism. So that's why I prefer to call the September 11 attacks the kamikaze hijackings, because that is a more specific description.
I've divided this discussion into sections:
The Sept. 11 attacks were done with hijacked airplanes and against mostly civilian targets. I state "mostly", because the Pentagon is an ambiguous case. It is a giant office building, but it is an office building for the US military command, so it may qualify as a military target. And the airplanes used were all civilian airplanes, with civilian pilots, flight attendants, and passengers.
However, the Pearl Harbor and kamikaze attacks were performed by the Japanese armed forces using their own airplanes, and were directed against US warships and other military targets; they are thus distinct from the many atrocities that the Japanese armed forces had committed against civilians and POW's.
The Pearl Harbor task force departed in great secrecy and took a northerly route, avoiding the usual Pacific shipping lanes; it was never spotted. And even as that task force was on its way to the attack-launch spot, all the way to the day of the attack, Japan's leaders continued negotiations with the US. There were no warnings to "get out of the western Pacific -- or else!!!", no breaking off of relations; simply a continuation of negotiations about what to do about Japan's Pacific conquests.
And before 8 AM (local time), on the day of that attack, December 7, 1941, there was little hint of what was to come. A submarine showed up early that day, and was quickly sunk. However, it attracted no other attention. And a radar operator noticed a squadron of airplanes headed toward that base, and guessed that they were some American ones that were known to be on their way. Only when those planes arrived at the base and started to attack the base's ships and planes did their true nature become apparent. The base's defenders were caught completely off-guard, and the Japanese succeeded in damaging and destroying not only much of the US Pacific fleet, but also many of the closely-packed airplanes there.
I won't go into detail about the actual attack; there are several sites that do so, such as:
About that attack, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had supposedly commented that "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve"; but however excellent that line might be, it first appears in the 1970 movie about Pearl Harbor, "Tora! Tora! Tora!" ("Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!"; from what one of the first Japanese attackers triumphantly radioed as he arrived). Admiral Yamamoto had reportedly thought very highly of the attack, and even composed a poem about it for Japan's Emperor. Perhaps that poem was something like this one, some Haiku I've composed:
Planes attack in stealth Bombs explode, ships sink in place They were caught off-guard
And I have to say that I've seen neither "Tora! Tora! Tora!" nor the recent movie "Pearl Harbor"; though judging from reviews, the former one was very good, while the latter is largely soap opera, even though it reportedly had some good attacker-view and bomb-view shots. One reviewer even called that recent one "Bore-A! Bore-A! Bore-A!".
As to its aftermath, this attack was such a monstrous provocation that the "America First" isolationists were silenced, and Congress almost unanimously voted to declare war on Japan. The US did a major military mobilization, including rationing and stepped-up military production on the home front, making it, in FDR's phrase, "the arsenal of democracy". This mobilization involved hiring women in factories, women symbolized by "Rosie the Riveter". This mobilization had the unfortunate side effect of interning Japanese-Americans in concentration camps for the duration of the war, despite their overall loyalty, and despite the lack of similar measures for German-Americans and Italian-Americans.
This attack was, in the long run, a fatal mistake by Japan's military commanders; they had expected the US to be cowed into letting the Pacific Ocean become a Japanese lake, but the exact opposite happened, and Japan was eventually conquered for the first time in its recorded history. Without that dramatic attack, the Japanese could have conquered several western-Pacific islands, solidifying their would-be Pacific empire, without the US being provoked enough into fighting a big fight over islands that few Americans had cared much about.
In the year before, however, Iraq invaded Kuwait in a quest for Kuwait's oil. Osama bin Laden offered to organize a defense of Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi royal family chose more capable armies, those of the United States and some western European nations. Bin Laden, along with many other pious Muslims, considered it a grievous wrong to station infidels in the nation with the two holy cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. And his response was to vitriolically denounce the Saudi government, for which he was expelled. He settled in the Sudan, where he and his friends helped organize Al Qaeda ("The Base"), an organization of Islamic militants / terrorists. After being expelled from there in 1996, bin Laden settled in his old home in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda grew to becoming a society in a society, and a big supporter of Afghanistan's new rulers, the Taliban.
This organization, or more properly, a coalition of organizations, has aimed at being a pan-Islamic revolutionary movement, one that fights a variety of supposed enemies of Islam, and one that aims at setting up what they consider true Islamic rule, with the first "success" being the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is suspected of involvement in several terrorist acts and would-be such acts, some of which its spokesmen have bragged of its involvement in. Acts such as
These attacks would often be proceeded by bragging about unspecified great attacks; the September 11 attacks were proceeded by similar bragging, which put US authorities on alert. However, they expected attacks on US military bases in Japan and South Korea, and attacks on July 4, which came and went without incident. However, a certain Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested on August 17 for minor immigration violations; when he applied to a flight school, his would-be teachers got suspicious about his being interested in in-flight maneuvers rather than takeoffs and landings, which are more difficult. That ought to have tipped investigators off about the possibility of kamikaze hijackings; consider that the original kamikaze pilots had had only basic flight training and not aerial-combat training, because flying into a target is relatively easy. But they may have found it almost too bizarre to consider -- why spend several months learning how to fly airliners for a single mission that one expects to end one's life? Most terrorists try to survive their acts of terror; those with strapped-on bombs or that drive truck bombs seem almost like cannon fodder, easily-expendable low-level troops, but the same cannot be said of suicide-attack airliner pilots.
In addition to this inadequate intelligence, lax airline security was also a serious contributor. US airlines had gotten complacent about security over the last decade, despite warnings such as one prepared by a commission headed by then-Vice-President Al Gore. Not only did they have easy cockpit access, they hired security out to companies that would recruit baggage screeners with very low wages, thus guaranteeing quick turnover as employees departed for greener employment pastures.
And on that fateful day, it is likely that the passengers of the first three of the four doomed flights only found out that they were on kamikaze missions when it was too late to do anything about it. They were told that the planes were going back to the airports, and ground controllers had no reason to disbelieve that either, until the planes started crashing into buildings. And that may have also been true for the hijackers other than those who had piloted the planes; they may only have been recruited for a "martyrdom mission", meaning that they could expect to die in it -- but with no further details until the day of the attacks.
And when the first plane hit the World Trade Center's north tower, that collision seemed to many like some freak accident. Why would an airliner hit a tall building if doing so could possibly be avoided? But when the second plane hit the WTC's south tower, that was asking too much of coincidence, and those following these crashes decided that these attacks were deliberate.
The passengers of the fourth flight, however, became convinced of the nature of their mission well before it reached its intended target, which was likely either the Congress building or the White House in Washington, DC; they were told about the WTC attacks, and came to the conclusion that their plane would be used in a similar sort of attack. At which point they decided to mob the cockpit, overcoming hijackers who wielded knives, who had already stabbed some passengers, and who claimed to have a bomb. The other planes' passengers' unwillingness to attack was likely due to similar threatening actions by the other hijackers; one plane's flight attendant reported that one of the hijackers had also sprayed the passengers with something that stung their eyes, probably pepper spray.
The aftermath of that attack was similar to the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack: a war on the perpetrators, in this case Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. This war is far from finished, but the Bush Administration has decided to hunt down Al Qaeda as thoroughly as FDR and his successor Harry S Truman hunted down Japan. Unlike WWII, however, the administration has been much more dependent on the support of other nations, which may have different goals for the war, and which may not support extending the war to Iraq, which the Administration apparently desires. And as in WWII, there is a feminist element also; the Taliban had created a misogynist's dream world, in which women were to be completely covered up in public, not allowed to leave their homes without being accompanied by male relatives, and barred from nearly all jobs. And where the Taliban has been defeated, many women have gone out without male relatives, taken jobs, and even revealed their faces. Among the many Taliban-forbidden pleasures that have now returned, Kabul's TV station has now restarted, with bare-faced women appearing on it.
A final note is that there are conspiracy theories floating about that indirectly implicate the administrations of both Presidents in the attacks; such theories state that some in those administrations had known that those attacks were going to happen, but that these people had nevertheless allowed those attacks to happen for some purpose or other.
Although I believe that FDR's administration was genuinely caught off-guard, there is some evidence that the current Administration had not cared much for fighting Al Qaeda in its early months. This is possibly because doing so would have been too Clinton-like for their tastes, and possibly also out of fear of offending Saudi Arabia's leaders, who had been paying protection money to Al Qaeda.
Around 1200, a Mongol military leader, Temujin, organized a confederation of tribes, both Mongol and non-Mongol; however, they all became known as Mongols. In 1206, as his conquests progressed, he gave himself the title of "Universal Ruler", or in Mongolian, "Genghis Khan". With the help of well-organized cavalry, he and his successors would build an empire that extended to places as far as Poland; closer to home was China, where his grandson Kublai Khan eventually took power and founded the Yuan dynasty in 1256.
KK set his sights on Japan, offering to establish an alliance, and hinting at military action if Japan refuses. Though Japan's emperor is terrified, having learned of Mongol military prowess and mass murder, Japan's real leader, the Kamakura Bakufu (military regent) refused to go along, sends KK's envoys back with no response. In response, KK organizes an invasion force of 900 ships carrying about 40,000 Mongols, Chinese, and Korean soldiers.
This force departs from Korea, crosses the Tsushima Straits, and arrives at Hakata Bay in north Kyushu, and is met by 6,000-10,000 samurai sent there by the Bakufu. The samurai fight fiercely, but they are pushed back by the Mongols, with their fighting in formation, their archers with their longer-range bows, and the crude gunpowder bombs that they hurled. But at nightfall, they decide to retreat to their boats, fearing being in sword range of the samurai. But a storm comes by, scattering and sinking the boats, ending the first invasion.
Kublai Khan becomes preoccupied with defeating the Sung Dynasty of southern China, and the Bakufu orders the building of a wall around Hakata Bay. In 1281, with the Sung out of the way, KK again directs his attentions to Japan, this time, KK sends a fleet of 4400 ships with 140,000 soldiers, following the previous fleet's route.
This time, however, the Bakufu had raised an army of 120,000. They fight KK's invasion force fiercely at Hakata Bay, and it barely captures a beachhead, forcing much of that force to stay in its ships, where it was vulnerable to hit-and-run attacks and fever.
But then, one day, a hurricane comes by and devastates the fleet. The survivors return home, and Japan becomes safe from invasion for the next five and a half centuries.
This cyclonic deliverance became a part of Japan's national mythology; the result was the belief that Japan is a "divine land" ("shinkoku"), a nation-scale version of the belief of many disaster survivors that they had been protected by God or an angel or whatever, even if that supposed protector had been grossly negligent with regard to others. Thus, this hurricane became celebrated as the "divine wind" or "kamikaze"; the wind qualified as a divinity according to Japan's pagan/animist-like traditional religion Shinto, which features the belief that gods or spirits (kami) are all around us in various places. But as Dr. Isaac Asimov had once pointed out, what might seem like the finger of God to the winner might seem like the Devil's hoofprint to the loser. I have not been able to find out what Kublai Khan and his underlings had concluded from that event; perhaps they concluded that Japan was jinxed. Whatever they concluded, they never attacked Japan again.
Some stuff on the original Kamikaze:
Fast forward to 1944, when Japan was losing the war of the Pacific, having lost a not only a large number of troops, including many experienced pilots, but also ships, airplanes, and Pacific-island territory. The Japanese Navy lost something like 4000 planes and almost as many pilots, including many experienced ones; one battle was one-sided enough to be called on the American side "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot". One American task force could be larger than the entire remaining Japanese fleet. Since attacking the oncoming American fleet had become suicidal, Japan's military commanders grew desperate.
One of them, Vice-Admiral Takajiro Onishi (or Ohnishi), an expert on naval air warfare, noticed that one unusual strategy had a remarkably forceful effect. Occasionally, some pilot whose plane was damaged, or who was wounded, would ram his plane into an enemy plane or ship or some other enemy target; this could be very destructive. One celebrated case was that of US Navy dive-bomber pilot Captain Richard E. Fleming. He had taken part in attacks on four Japanese aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway in June, 1942. After those Pearl Harbor veterans were turned into flaming wrecks, he and some fellow pilots were ordered to chase some heavy cruisers that were trying to escape. The ships' anti-aircraft fire was too strong for the pilots to get good aim for their bombs; all of the pilots' attacks missed. However, Richard Fleming's plane was hit, and it caught fire -- and he decided to make the best use of the little time he had left by crashing his plane into the rear gun turret (or perhaps exhaust funnel) of the cruiser Mikuma, causing severe damage from gasoline leaking into the engine room and igniting. Captain Soji, commander of the nearby cruiser Mogami, later said about this that "I saw a dive-bomber dive into the last turret and start fires. He was very brave." Richard Fleming was posthumously awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor as a result -- for being a sort of American kamikaze pilot.
So Admiral Onishi decided to take a very drastic step: he organized a squadron of suicide attackers who would fly their planes into US ships in cruise-missile fashion; the planes would be loaded with explosives for extra punch. This got called the "Kamikaze Tokubetsu Kogekitai" ("Divine-Wind Special Attack Corps"), sometimes abbreviated as "Shinpu Tokkotai", the "shimpu" being the Chinese reading of the Kanji (borrowed-Chinese) characters used to spell "kamikaze". The analogy with the hurricane of 1281 was widely considered a good one; the attacks were done with the hope that they would do to the American fleet something like what the hurricane of 1281 had done to the Mongol fleet. The Mongol-American analogy could be worked out in detail:
Here are a few more Mongol-American comparisons:
But back to WWII. Onishi's plan was bizarre and unprecedented in the history of large-scale warfare; in principle, survival was always to be possible, even if it was improbable. Even the Japanese military doctrine of the time had rejected deliberate suicide missions. Not surprisingly, the plan provoked some controversy among Japan's commanders, some of whom believed that it would be a waste of pilots and planes, bad for morale, and even a concession that Japan was losing the war. However, they reluctantly went along, and other suicide-attack divisions were formed, not only in the Navy, but also in the Army. Controversies over suicide attacks extended into the lower ranks, with those willing to perform such attacks being called "kichigai" ("madmen") and those unwilling were called "sukebei" ("lechers", because of their wanting the ordinary sort of pleasures).
This strategy had the advantage of not requiring great flying skills; one had to take off, cruise, and land (some kamikaze pilots would return if they did not find good targets), but one did not need aerial-combat skills. And Japan, by then, had lost most of its more experienced pilots. Also, the airplanes themselves did not have to be really high-performance models, meaning that old and barely-functional ones could easily be used -- and were.
There were not only the familiar suicidal plane-crash attackers, but also flying bombs dropped from bombers, explosive-laden boats (Shinyo or "Ocean Shaker"), piloted torpedoes, and even soldiers with strapped-on bombs who hurled themselves onto tanks. These "suiciders", as they were sometimes called by American sailors, were to be joined by bomb-carrying divers -- who never got going. Even the super battleship Yamato was sent out on a one-way mission in the spring of 1945, though the intended end of that mission was to be beached in Okinawa to serve as a super artillery platform until its ammo ran out. The rocket-propelled flying bombs, or "Oka"/"Ohka" ("cherry blossom", in reference to death being like cherry blossoms falling from their trees), were referred to as "Jinrai Butai" ("Divine Thunder Corps"), and their pilots referred to themselves as "thunder gods" -- another reference to that 1281 hurricane. And the piloted torpedoes were mostly the "Kaiten" ("turning of heaven") one-man minisubs; these were rather cranky and had only very limited success, with only a few successful hits. There were other models of minisubs deployed, also without much success.
How well did the kamikaze pilots perform? Did they perform as well as the hurricane of 1281; did they succeed in making the American fleet go the way of the Mongol fleet? Or even anything close than that, such as scaring the Americans away or convincing them of the rightness of Japan's position? Or even making them want to negotiate a settlement of the war? Kamikaze operations started in the Gulf of Leyte in late 1944, but while the kamikaze attacks sunk an aircraft carrier and damaged some other ships, they barely slowed down the invasion of the Philippines. Kamikaze attacks had similar results in the battle for Iwo Jima; some ships were sunk, some were damaged, but the invasion of that island was not stopped. The kamikaze attacks grew very fierce in the battle over Okinawa in the spring of 1945, with something like 1900 kamikazes taking part; though many of them were shot down en route, they nevertheless sunk 32 ships and damaged another 368, some beyond repair, and they killed 4000 sailors and wounded over 4800 more. But even that did not prevent the successful invasion of Okinawa.
Fighting them was very unnerving and frightening; the idea of suicide attacks was at least initially very bizarre and shocking to many American sailors, who preferred to stay alive if at all possible. Perhas adding to the shock was the fact that the attacks represented the biggest aviation nightmare, being in a plane crash, suggesting something fundamentally unnatural about the attacks. And at Okinawa, wave after wave of kamikazes would deprive many sailors of food and sleep as they tried to stay on alert. But the US fleet's commanders devised some strategies for coping, such as putting destroyers and picket ships on the outside to watch for the incoming kamikazes -- ships that often became kamikaze bait due to the inexperienced kamikaze pilots' mistaking them for bigger targets. And though the Okas were difficult to stop, their carriers, "Betty" heavy bombers, proved much more vulnerable, and the Okas were used for only a few months. Ultimately, though the ~4000 kamikaze pilots inflicted some of the biggest US Pacific naval losses, they failed to do much more than slow down the US fleet. And when the Emperor surrendered, Admiral Onishi followed an old Japanese tradition: he committed hara-kiri, the ritual suicide of a disgraced samurai, cutting his belly and slowly dying over the next several hours.
As an aside, it's worth noting that the US fleet also suffered attacks by the original kind of kamikaze: a hurricane in December 1944, one in June 1945, and one in October 1945 ("Halsey's Typhoons" and "Typhoon Louise"). Though these storms killed some American sailors and sank and damaged some American ships and planes, the American war effort and its aftermath were affected much less than the Mongol invasion fleet had been.
The question naturally arises of why those kamikaze pilots went on their suicide missions. Were they especially fanatical? Or brainwashed? Apparently no more than most other WWII Japanese soldiers; they tended to consider those missions to be dying for their country. One of them has claimed that he had not been very bothered by his going on a suicide mission, because death was all around him; he may have figured that he was not going to last very long, becoming one of the "turkeys" of battles like the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot", so he might as well go out with a bang. So going on a suicide mission may well have seemed reasonable to many of the kamikaze pilots, since the normal sort of attack on the American fleet was becoming suicidal; their attacks thus become something like Richard Fleming's final attack.
Also, Japan's soldiers have long had a fight-to-the-death ethic, preferring dying to some seemingly-dishonorable defeat. Which made them a very tough foe in WWII; fighting holed-up ones in the Pacific islands cost many American lives, because they would keep on fighting even if it meant their eventual deaths. And some soldiers in no position to fight preferred committing suicide to being captured, often leaping off of cliffs in places like Saipan and Okinawa.
As to what they expected after their deaths, they usually expected what many of Japan's other soldiers expected, to have a ghostly existence in the Yasukuni Shrine near Tokyo, a shrine in honor of Japan's war dead -- making that place a haunted shrine. "See you in Yasukuni" or "I am going to Yasukuni", some of them would say. This place may be best-known for visits of Japanese Prime Ministers to it causing controversy, because those war dead had died while fighting wars of conquest filled with ghastly atrocities. And some of them were told that they would become war gods; perhaps one would become a really big war god if one sank a really big American ship.
And some of them seemed to have a response to American revolutionary Nathan Hale's famous words "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country". They followed a literal interpretation of one old samurai's legendary last words, "Seven lives for my country!", and believed that they could get reincarnated to fight for Japan seven times, implying that they believed that they would have seven lives to give for Japan.
Some discussions of the kamikaze pilots:
The Divine Wind blows Sailors fear, ships take big hits But they keep sailing
Added to the Koran is a great bulk of sayings about Mohammed and other important Islamic subjects, the Hadiths. Much of this bulk's authenticity is questionable at best; examples would be those Hadiths that take sides in the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam. But regardless of questions of authenticity, the Koran and the Hadiths are useful for reconstructing the beliefs and attitudes of those who had composed them.
Islam makes a big issue out of martyrdom, willingness to die for it. Though Islam is far from alone in celebrating those that have died for it, Islam, in the fashion of some other religions, teaches that good Muslims, including those who have died for Islam, will have everlasting happiness in the next world. And what this next world, the Islamic Paradise, has is most delectable. It has
That aside, the Islamic Paradise is rather obvious wishful thinking, especially when one considers that the Koran was composed long before 20th-cy. technology was available -- technology that has made much of it readily accessible. Water is a rather obvious craving of someone who lives in a desert; consider the numerous 20th-cy. water projects in desert areas, like Saudi Arabia's big investment in the desalination of seawater. Milk having constant flavor is undoubtedly a reference to what milk tends to do unless it is treated with some 20th-cy. technology such as pasteurization: it spoils. Luscious fruits do not stay luscious for long in dry climates; they tend to dry out. However, keeping them cold and wet will keep them luscious; something else made easy by 20th-cy. technology. Last, but not least, a harem of lovely ladies is the clear wishful thinking of a heterosexual male; but there, our technology has yet to produce successful robotic Stepford Wives (2001 is very unlike "2001", sad to say). By comparison, getting to haunt the Yasukuni Shrine seems like a rather pale fate, though being worshipped might have its pleasures.
Fast forward to the late 1000's, when Hassan i Sabah / Hasan bin Sabah / ..., the "Old Man of the Mountain", led the sect of Hashishin and ruled the mountain fortress of Alamut ("Eagle's Nest") in the Elbruz / Alborz Mountains in northwestern Iran. He would send out young men to murder those political and religious officials that he disliked; these men became known as "Assassins", thus giving rise to that word. Before being sent out, these men would be drugged and taken into a palace garden with lots of pretty ladies, which was described to them as a foretaste of the Paradise they'd get if they succeeded in their missions -- which had a high probability of them getting killed by their targets' bodyguards.
Fast forward again to 1983, when 241 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers guarding Beirut International Airport were killed by two truck bombers who drove in and exploded their vehicles -- with them inside. The "Islamic Jihad" claimed responsibility; this is a group thought to be backed by Iran, which had recently been turned into an "Islamic republic" by militant Islamists, which viewed the US as the "Great Satan", and which had held some US embassy personnel hostage for 444 days. Iran was also fighting a war with Iraq, and was compensating for a shortage of heavy weapons by employing "human wave" tactics. Iran's Muslim-cleric leaders sent large numbers of troops against Iraqi positions, having told them that they'd be Islamic martyrs if they died, complete with an assurance of making it into Paradise. And would sometimes win. So the Beirut truck bombers may have been inspired by this example.
Interestingly, kamikaze truck-bomb attacks had never been used in the War of the Pacific, most likely because most of that war's battlefields were unsuited for that tactic. Much of the war was fought in various Pacific islands, and at sea; only a few places, like the Philippines, were convenient for truck bombing. And even in such places, the only way to pull off a truck bombing would have been to send infiltrators to behind the American lines. Where they would have had to acquire trucks and a few tons of explosives. By contrast, the Beirut bombers could hide amidst some local population, and could use readily-available infrastructure to deliver their explosives.
The latter was also true of the Palestinian suicide bombers who were to plague Israel starting in the 1990's; they are young men with strapped-on explosives sent by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and assured of Paradise if they succeed. And whose families are greatly rewarded and whose deaths are described as marriages to houris. Some of these gentlemen have revealed that they are typical young men by their inability to stop thinking about those houris. These kamikaze kids have detonated themselves in a variety of places in Israel, such as at a disco and at a pizza parlor; they are one reason for the popularity in Israel of such nostrums as walling off the Palestinian areas and driving them all into other Arab countries.
These organizations of Islamic militants include Muslim clerics who have justified suicide attacks by claiming that they are not the usual sort of suicide but martyrdom -- dying in battle. Which is what the original kamikaze pilots had tended to think of themselves as doing. However, Saudi Arabia's chief religious authority has disagreed, and suicide attacks have caused some controversy among some of the militant Islamists themselves.
Over this time, the US's response to Al Qaeda was rather tepid. Part of this may be due to the humiliating failure of an attempt to catch Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid in 1993; since then, President Clinton had carefully tried to avoid risking US troops. Clinton was more successful in the territories of former Yugoslavia, having both military success and few casualties despite doing big bombing raids. And after the embassy bombings of 1998, he directed his attention to Al Qaeda, sending some cruise missiles toward some of Al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps and also a pharmaceutical plant in El Shifa, Sudan that his Administration had claimed was really a nerve-gas-production facility. These cruise missiles were launched from warships a few hundred mi/km distant in nearby ocean waters; cruise missiles might be described as high-tech kamikazes, meaning that no US military personnel had to go near the targets and risk their lives there -- let alone go on one-way missions. These strikes were less-than-successful; Osama bin Laden had departed from one camp a few hours before one of the cruise missiles arrived, and there has been controversy over whether the El Shifa plant had really been used to covertly produce nerve gas. Clinton hoped to follow up with some covert actions, but a military coup in Pakistan and similar events intervened.
During that time, Osama bin Laden came to the conclusion that of the two Cold War superpowers, the United States was more cowardly than the Soviet Union; the SU had stubbornly stayed in Afghanistan for 10 years, while the US chickened out of Somalia *very* quickly.
Clinton's performance may also have been impaired by the bitter attacks on him, his family, and his Presidency -- bitter attacks from a community of right-wing Clinton-haters. The depth of their emotion may be indicated by their attacks on Clinton for doing things that they normally approve of, such as law-and-order measures and exercise of military force. And though they normally consider criticism of exercise of US military force traitorous and anti-American, they attacked Clinton's military adventures as allegedly being "wag the dog" distractions; "Wag the Dog" being a satirical movie about a President who starts military adventures to distract people from his troubles. So while the kamikaze hijackers were preparing and training for their acts, the right wing preferred doing endless investigations of the Whitewater scandal and Clinton's sex life, as if those were matters of supreme importance.
Interestingly, one of those professional Clinton-haters became one of the victims of those kamikaze hijackers -- Barbara Olson, who was in the plane that was crashed into the Pentagon, and who died in that crash.
I now get to the checklist letter found in those hijackers' luggage. Though sort-of-titled "The Last Night", it might be summarized as "Allah is our co-pilot". Much of it was straightforward stuff like being well-groomed and not being quarrelsome, but there was some stuff in it about the example of Mohammed and his early followers triumphing over much bigger armies, and also some stuff on the rewards of martyrdom, and how some well-dressed houris will be present to welcome them into Paradise. It is curious that there was nothing on any of those hijackers' other goals; Suspected hijacker Mohammed Atta had once expressed the rather Chomskian gripe that the US is the cause of most of the wars in the world, but there was none of that in that letter; there was also no mention of Al Qaeda's various causes, such as the US troops in Saudi Arabia and the sufferings of Muslims in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, etc. There is no mention of why they thought that the US might be an especially worthy target, though being on the "wrong" side of several of Al Qaeda's causes might qualify as a "good" reason. Compare the original kamikaze pilots, some of whom had stated that they had hoped to make a difference in the war effort, to help keep the US from conquering Japan.
I finally consider the question of the motive behind these kamikaze hijackings. First, unlike the original kamikaze attacks, these were not a desperado move by a military force that had suffered crushing defeats and that was facing a serious prospect of being conquered -- for the first time in its history. By contrast, Al Qaeda was on a clear upward trajectory, having gotten the free run of Afghanistan with the help of its Taliban friends, having built itself into a several-thousand-strong militia, and having pulled off several terrorist attacks. However, there could have been a similarity, in the sense that kamikaze truck bombings and kamikaze hijackings were ways of pulling off attacks that otherwise would have been very difficult; previous truck bombings had made abandoned trucks seem very suspicious, and most airliners are not designed for quick bailout during flight.
As to broader purposes, one clear possibility is to bring the Western world to its knees with terror, thus helping the Islamists in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and other such battle fronts. Another possibility is that this was a provocation designed to start a war between the Western and the Islamic worlds; Osama bin Laden and his friends can then wail about what evil Muslim-killers the US and its friends are. And the ultimate goal? At the very least, the replacement of existing Islamic-nation regimes with Taliban-like, supposedly pure-Islamic ones. And perhaps also the conquest of the non-Islamic world and the establishment of Islamic rule there. And perhaps even the "restoration" of the Caliphate, though who gets to be the new Caliph will doubtless be a contentious issue. Which may be why Osama bin Laden has been vague about the ultimate goals of Al Qaeda -- because it's easier to get cooperation and unity by focusing on shared enemies. Which appear, in his case, to be most of the non-Islamic world.
To my Notebook-Binder Page