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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 Citys 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 (Beta 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 ICTs web-based newspaper, Bin Laden's Motives for the September 11 th 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 Islamparticularly 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 by the United States. The message had to be clear and on Thursday, September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered it: We will pursue you, if youre a terrorist and / or provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. President Bush had to first weigh the costs of a possible military intervention.
On one hand, he had at his disposal the most technologically advanced and elite force in the world. From air to land to sea, the nation's arsenal includes, but is not limited to, surveillance aircraft, laser-guided bombs, attack submarines, stealth bombers and Tomahawk missiles. As a given, the worlds strongest military, in any new war, would enable it to use new technologies. According to Washington Post reporter Greg Schneider anywhere from a lexis-nexis-style online search system for intelligence documents to a new sniper rifle that can penetrate light armor from nearly a mile away, technologies developed since the Persian Gulf War would help (the) U. Sight an unpredictable foe.
Another reality that weighed towards a possible military intervention was that the Taliban, Afghanistan's terrorist harboring ruling government, has a small, scattered military. According to MSNBC. coms The Afghanistan Files, though accurate numbers for troops are unavailable, it boasts between 40, 000 and 50, 000 lightly armed infantry 10 Su- 22 fighter-bombers, 5 MiG- 21 fighters, 10 transport helicopters, (and) 40 cargo airplanes (but) many are inoperable due to lack of spare parts. Because of its air-military superiority Americans have grown accustomed to clean, quick hits over the past generation: (Examples include) Grenada. Panama.
Have. (And) Iraq, wrote reporter Howard Kurtz. Alternately, this point was like a double-edged sword for President Bush. As Kurtz affirms, if there is a serious attack on countries such as Afghanistan, its not going to be a video-game war like the Persian Gulf conflict a decade ago. Afghanistan's natural terrains protect the country from any type of international aggression. Afghanistan is a country of jagged ridges and deep gorges that is about the size of Texas.
It is natures gift to guerrilla warfare (Hirsh and Berry 36). Afghanistan's modern history of slaughter, of skewered hubris, goes back to 1842, when 16, 500 British soldiers and civilians were killed in a winter retreat from Kabul; only one escaped (36). Consequently, as both British and Russians unavoidably and horrifically discovered, even with the most technologically advanced fighting equipment, winning the war in Afghanistan turf would take a considerable amount of time; something that the American people would more recently not be accustomed to. More importantly, another point that mainly detracted President Bush from a military retaliation is the fact that after Vietnam, the U. S.
has become seriously sensitive to casualties. Of all the obstacles (American) generals are facing, this is the most difficult (Clark 47). Any type of military attack, be it with foot soldiers or air strikes, will carry a certain degree of danger and American casualties will be sustained. Besides in doctoring a military intervention, President Bush had a more temperate approach available: Diplomatically intervene against both terrorists and those who support them. Antiwar advocates argued that diplomacy was more preferable than a military strike. The editorial Nation-Building in Afghanistan from the New York Times asserts, Afghanistan is a feudal society organized around many tribes and clans with a long history of mutual alliances, betrayal and strife.
The one force uniting them over the centuries has been a common outside enemy: in modern times (military aggression from) the British and more recently the (invasion by the) Soviet Union. A military onslaught against the Taliban government and the al-Qaeda organization might insight the Muslim States, Islamic nations, countries, and organizations to join into the worldwide anti-Christian, anti-American, "Crusader" appeal of these radicals. The New York Times editorial Afghanistan specifies another argument pro diplomatic intervention to this crisis. It states Afghanistan is more than a terrorist camp overseen by an implacably fundamentalist regime.
Its also the site of one of the world's greatest humanitarian crises, with up to 1 million people in danger of starvation this year. If the White House were to oppose...
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Research essay sample on Persian Gulf Bin Laden
