Comment by throwbrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwbrow | Hacker News Reader

I was riding the 7 train from Astoria, Queens, to my job at the big Citigroup tower in Long Island City. It was after the first plane hit and, with the 7 being an outdoor subway line with a great view of the Manhattan skyline, we in the first car could see the gaping hole and smoke billowing. I assumed it was an accident. When I got to work I said dismissively to colleagues, “That must be the dumbest pilot ever.” We went up to the top floor of the 40-something floor building to watch. Not too long after, the second plane hit and we knew it was no accident. They evacuated the building and sent us all home. Riding the 7 train back and all the passengers shocked and exchanging what they’d hears. Someone said there were planes headed for DC. The 7 stopped at Queens Plaza. End of service, out of abundance of caution for NYC subways. We were all standing on the platform looking at the towers burning. Then we saw the first one collapse. Straight down in a cloud of smoke.

For me, native New Yorker, the skyscrapers are like our heart. Someone cut our heart out. I thought nothing would ever be the same. Months later I felt so panicky on subways, thinking something awful was bound to happen again. The way things snapped back to near normalcy just a few years later was something I never anticipated. Neither did I foresee the way this event would be used to justify an illegal invasion if Iraq just a few years later. I felt and still feel disgusted by how this tragedy has been exploited. But I guess that’s politics.

> I thought nothing would ever be the same.

And nothing ever was. Plenty of stupid political decisions today, and untold billions of wasted money some of which is spent today are a direct consequence of 9/11.

By every measure, the terrorists accomplished their goals and won.

My impression was that the goal was to get the US presence out of the middle east. That goal failed pretty spectacularly.

Stated goals and actual goals rarely align.

Yeah, maybe the actual goals of the terrorists was to make everybody wait longer in airports and getting annoyed? As just revenge for the betrayal of Sykes-Picot and the desecration of the holy lands.

No, the actual goal may have been to increase the visibility of Al Quaeda; serve as a recruitment poster and show that their group can hurt the biggest force on the planet with impunity in a way that can not be denied or spun.

The mantra 'never leave a crisis unused' is enough to explain everything else that followed. Getting the United States out of the middle East was never going to happen as a result of this, rather the opposite and that too would have the effect of driving more people in to the hands of the extremists.

Does that mean they would have lost if they had actually achieved the stated goal?

America is about as predictable in this sense as it comes, you can speculate all you want about what would have happened if they had left the Middle East but that universe is not the one we live in.

This was, in fact, Bin laden’s goal. And he failed.

No, his goal was to sow division amongst Americans, and drag us into wars that only benefit private corporations and waste money.

https://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223...

"Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

...

All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat."

No, his goal was to sow division amongst Americans, and drag us into wars that only benefit private corporations and waste money.

Yes, but what was the end goal? He wasn't doing it just for shits and giggles.

You mean, like the current Shitposter-in-Chief?

The hope was to bankrupt the US, forcing them to withdraw from the ME (especially Israel and Saudi Arabia), like what basically happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan. This did not happen.

Sure the whole debacle did cost US a lot of money, lives and perhaps prestige. But that does not mean al-Qaeda achieved their goals. The US is for better or worse even more entrenched in the ME, with bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Israel and the Saudis are still there.

Some tend to think that anything which is bad for the US means the terrorist are winning, because "they just wants to hurt us". But it doesn't work like that. Terrorism is a tactic employed by certain groups to achieve certain goals. It is possible that both parties are weakened by a conflict.

Al Qaeda believes in a final apocalyptic war between Islam and basically everybody else, ending in a global Islamic Caliphate. Their goal is to provoke that war, which they believe they are already fighting. They just want everybody else to join in.

They didn't really achieve that either.

If at first you don't succeed...

That’s true. Yet I was surprised at how quickly NYC went back to normal. Five years later I was hard-pressed to see any real changes on the ground but for See Something Say Something posters in the subway and the gaping hole and tussle over the buildings’ reconstruction. IDK what I expected.

It's hard to communicate the sense of paranoia that gripped the nation in the years after 9/11. The DC sniper didn't help. It was hopefully the closest thing to mass hysteria that I'll ever face.

I remember people bingeing CNN for days, feeling like the next attack could come at any moment. Every attack scenario you could dream up seemed like a real possibility.

Yeah, to me it felt that's when the 90's with its optimism were truly over.

> When I got to work I said dismissively to colleagues, “That must be the dumbest pilot ever.”

And you weren't wrong!

I was working on a large airport in Europe, on-site. We got notice that US-bound planes were diverted to turn back over the Atlantic and come back to us. Then the news started trickling in. I immediately thought "they are going to hit Iraq for this".

Everyone knew they immediately that they were going to carpet bomb Afghanistan. Iraq, I don't think there was any connection.

Why would you think that?

I just thought that Bush had a score to settle and now there would be no friction to do that. It may have been completely wrong, but that was my instant thought.

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