Gotta love this ~20 year old limitation, conjured up because some idjit (more likely a committee of idjits) believed in some crackpot theory about terrorists cooking up liquid bombs: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_t...
What Bin Laden et al wanted to do was inflict long term economic pain, and they absolutely accomplished that goal. This just shows they’re still succeeding, really.
I don't think they ever cared about damaging the US in general, they just want the US and the west in general out of their backyard.
You also don’t hit that economic target with two planes full of people because you’re trying to imply you’ll stop if they do.
Asymmetric warfare is almost always about bleeding the big, fat, slow moving one of his resources, and anyone that punched America in the face from Afghanistan understood that history, while also knowing how much (expensive, for decades) hell was going to come to rest on his doorstep.
He was trying to inflict economic pain and also goad an idiot president into invading the graveyard of empires of his own accord. He didn’t want them out of his backyard, he wanted them stuck in his backyard.
And he succeeded. On all counts. Dude got exactly what he wanted.
I know that's basically the official story (they just hate America in a supervillain kind of way), but it doesn't really make any sense.
If America were to leave them alone, why would they care about America?
Their entire problem with America is that America doesn't leave them alone, whether for oil or to give their transplanted local enemy starting with an 'I' a massive artificial resources advantage over them.
You are telling me that if America became isolationist towards the ME with respect to foreign policy actions and only engaged with the ME via consensual trade, that Bin Laden or whoever would still want to take America down? If so, why?
The official story from say Little Bush might have been “they hate us”, but the actual story is more accurately “they hate anything that substantially contradicts the message of and/or tempts (in their mind) Muslim youth away from their Salafist literalist interpretation of the Qu’ran and the Hadith.” An extremist like Bin Laden coming out of the Salafi tradition is basically the Islamic version of a Fred Phelps; the only truth is in the Qu’ran and the Hadith, that truth is literal and immutable, and the only way to behave correctly is to behave exactly as the righteous few who were there with Muhammad behaved. Anyone else is either an unbeliever (and to be enslaved by the caliphate) or, worse, an apostate (and to be put to death). This relatively small band of utter nutters really do represent a tiny fraction of Muslims, but they’re a tiny fraction who exist within a death cultist worldview that truly does want to see the world either ruled according to their interpretation of God’s message or, as an alternative, for the world to end according to God’s message (as they’re interpreted it).
> If America were to leave them alone, why would they care about America?
In the modern iteration of particularly jihadist-leaning Salafism (via Ibn Wahhab) America essentially is the resurgent inheritor of Rome and a modern Crusader state. Bin Laden and Al Quaeda essentially saw modern American liberal capitalism as the most decedent form of culture imaginable, and saw it corrupting and ensnaring souls away from good and into evil via music, movies, Coca Cola and cultural hegemony. Move on to Da’esh / ISIS / ISIL and they’ve injected the idea that Americans are literally the direct continuation of Rome in their mad reading it’s a battle with Rome that leads to the arrival of the Mahdi and Jesus and the judgement, which by the way is supposed to happen any day now.
> Their entire problem with America is that America doesn't leave them alone, whether for oil or to give their transplanted local enemy starting with an 'I' a massive artificial resources advantage over them.
The bulk of their problem with America has more to do with Saudi politics and who has control over the mosques at Mecca and Medina than you might imagine. America’s closeness to the Saudi regime (and that regime’s willingness to defile their holiest sites by allowing Crusader armies to set up camp there) put a real bee in their bonnet, after they’d successfully chucked the Soviet infidels out of Afghanistan having American infidels invited into spitting distance of the holiest sites in Sunni Islam was a step too far.
> You are telling me that if America became isolationist towards the ME with respect to foreign policy actions and only engaged with the ME via consensual trade, that Bin Laden or whoever would still want to take America down? If so, why?
Sure they would, and for much the same reason that Americans wanted to take the Soviets down. Folks like Bin Laden see Islam as the most powerful political force in the world and they’re trying to establish a new, righteous Caliphate (the previous one only failed, ending the Islamic golden age, because it wasn’t conservative and orthodox enough, you see), and the natural enemy of that caliphate is any infidel state, with the biggest enemy being the biggest and most powerful such state. If China supplants America they’ll switch to taking down China, even though China hasn’t meddled in anything like that same fashion… the meddling and the foreign policy aren’t the issue, it’s the lack of adherence to the faith.
Their message to the arab world was to unite against a common enemy, hated and proven vulnerable.
The article addressed it pretty well. They have a fairly strong desire to not blow up in the taxi to the airport, so you can't carry premixed TATP around. And it won't work to just dump it into the toilet or sink and let the reaction rip, you won't get enough TATP out of that to matter.
Terrorism doesn’t work, as a political program, by seeking repeat success, it works by capitalizing on your very occasional successes by making the targeted people spend way more resources on defense than you do on offense.
That’s my whole point… they don’t need to actually succeed at taking down the aircraft to make a return on investment. If they sacrifice a few pawns on failed attempts they get the worldwide airline industry and governments around the planet to spend more on persistent security theater then several thousand times the operating budget of all the world’s terrorists combined, they’ve achieved their goal.
It's amazing how much of the world runs off inefficient databases! Certainly rigging a benchmark would do a lot more than a ziploc full of some volatile peroxide.