Comment by avhception 3 days ago
I'm still mad, and I'm not even American. Even over here in Germany, it was a massive shock wave that went through society and I still remember the day it happened vividly. The effects in society are felt to this day.
The US did exactly what he wanted them to.
He wanted to radicalize Muslims worldwide against the West and drain American resources through prolonged wars.
It's also interesting how infrequently Americans know OBL's motivations for the 9/11 attacks. A big part of it was the American support of Israel, and OBL's belief that this would lead to further oppression of Muslim people in Palestine.
He did terrible things but was pretty accurate in his predictions.
as an American I very much want to live in the reality where Gore won and 9/11 didn't happen.
Not the parent, and I'm not saying it definitely wouldn't have happened (I have no idea), but it's at least possible. There was advance intelligence around the event that might have been treated differently by a different administration.
Even if it had happened, the response would also have been different.
In Richard Clarke’s book he details the intelligence community’s multiple warnings to the new Bush administration that spring and summer. They were ignored.
As Gore came from the Clinton admin he and the people around him would have had a lot more experience dealing with and familiar with the threats and actors, who were already known.
The Bush administration let the attacks happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-k...
I have no idea; I'm just saying that with different people in charge, they wouldn't have reacted in exactly the same way.
If I had to guess, I'd say at least no Iraq war, if we consider that part of the response. Patriot Act probably would have looked different. I expect there still would have been military action in Afghanistan, but likely with differences as well.
Bush's team ignored Clinton's team attempt to handover what they knew about the threats (in these threads someone mentioned Richard Clarke's book, I remember reading a 2003 TIME article, you can probably also read the results of the congressional investigation).
If the Supreme Court hadn't done the shenanigans in Florida, Clinton's team would've been Gore's team, and who knows, maybe those hijackers would've been caught...
One could argue that Osama bin Laden did succeed in destroying the US if not the entire Western order.