Retaliation: Not An Easy Choice
Uploaded by toro99 on Oct 18, 2001
“September 11, 2001, like Dec. 7, 1941, will live in infamy. For the first time since the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor, Americans have been attacked on their own soil,” said Senior San Diego Police Spokesman Bill Robinson. On this date terrorists hijacked four planes, all heading for major American landmarks. Two planes crashed into and leveled New York City’s World Trade Center towers, one plane drove itself into the Pentagon, and the last plane crashed in Pennsylvania. The hijackers, members of an Afghanistan home based terrorist organization named al-Qaeda, and its’ leader, Osama bin Laden, left President George W. Bush with a daunting and complicated decision of how to react.
President Bush was faced with an assault that “was so sudden and so shocking that it seemed to obliterate many of the doubts that were the legacy of the country's tortured Vietnam experience. Polls show that up to 90% of Americans support a military response,” wrote Mark Barabak. Simultaneously, President Bush and his administration encountered a potentially dangerous and sensitive situation in the Middle East. Any type of intervention, be it Diplomatic Intervention or Military Intervention, would be viewed by the predominantly conservative Muslim Middle Eastern countries as the “start of a hobnailed Western Victory march, justifying extreme actions in self-defense” (Biema et. al. 34). Before acting, President Bush had to take into consideration Bin Laden’s motives for the onslaught. Boaz Gabor, the executive director of the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT) and a Reason Magazine journalist, defined in the ICT’s web-based newspaper, Bin Laden’s Motives for the September 11th attacks:
Bin Laden and his followers regard America as their main enemy because it is America that leads the Western and democratic world, and supports the moderate Arab regimes. Moreover, America is regarded in their eyes as controlling and contaminating the holy places of Islam—particularly those in Saudi-Arabia—through the presence of military personnel there and in other countries in the Persian Gulf since the Gulf war in 1991. America also is condemned by Bin laden for its support of Israel, which he regards as the “arrowhead in the heart of the Islamic world,” which must be rooted out and destroyed.
Needless to say, either course of action to be taken by the United States needed to fire a message to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the rest of the terrorist community that terrorism absolutely and under no circumstances would be tolerated...