WORLD NEWS & PROPHECY
20 Years After 9/11: What Have We Learned?
The devastating attacks on the United States on 9/11 should have led its people to learn critical lessons. But did they? by Scott Ashley
14 Beyond Today
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enough accomplices to commandeer and pilot the 20 or more passenger jets they originally planned for. Had this not happened, the United States of America might not exist today as we know it. Let that sink in. Enemies hatched a plan to bring the world’s most powerful nation to its knees—armed only with box cutters. Lessons from the “War on Terror” The “War on Terror” that quickly brought U.S.-led invasions of the terror-supporting states of Afghanistan and then Iraq brought swift results and was originally almost universally supported. The Taliban regime fell, as did Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship in Iraq. Neither stood much of a chance against allied Western nations’ military might and advanced technology. But the enthusiasm and excitement didn’t last long. While America could win the war, it couldn’t win the peace. Efforts to instill Western-style democracy and cooperative government found no foothold or fertile ground among peoples who had never experienced anything of the kind and whose leaders were often local warlords in a tribal culture, Islamic extremists, and thieving opportunists. Rampant corruption swallowed up countless millions of dollars of Western funds that could have helped modernize the nations and improve people’s living standards. Bloody insurgencies by fighters who easily blended into the local populations proved almost impossible to
Hubert Boesl/picture-alliance/dpa/Newscom
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t’s one of those days burned indelibly into our memories. For years afterward people would ask one another: Where were you on 9/11? One American songwriter encapsulated the horror and hopelessness of the day in the title of a song that asked, “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” A generation later, that’s the way many remember that day—an unforgettable moment when it seemed the world stopped turning and forever changed. Although it’s been 20 years, for many the memory remains raw, especially to the families of the nearly 3,000 Americans killed that day when Muslim terrorists flew airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and another jet crashed into a field in Pennsylvania while apparently en route to obliterate the White House or U.S. Capitol Building. Only later, through interrogations of the operation’s captured mastermind, did U.S. intelligence learn that their goal was to bring down the entire nation in a single day by demolishing America’s centers of government, military leadership and economic prosperity through targeted suicide attacks by 20 or more fuel- and hostageladen aircraft simultaneously crashing into key targets in major cities across the country. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who crafted the plan with Osama bin Laden, revealed that the terrorists had to settle for a scaled-back plot because growing pressure from international security agencies forced them to move up their timetable, preventing them from bringing in
