Saturday, September 09, 2006

James Wolcott Gets It Right

So we've discussed he effects of September 11 five years down the road for America. What about the harm it did Osama bin Laden?

Well....none. If anything, it helped him. From Wolcott:
"Bin Laden might boast that he had achieved terrorism's equivalent of an atomic chain reaction: a self-regenerating cycle of outrage and foreign-policy overkill, aided by anniversary journalism and fuelled by the grim scenarios of security lobbyists. He now had only to drop an occasional CD into the offices of al-Jazeera, and Washington and London quaked with fear. The authorities could be reduced to million-dollar hysterics by a phial of nail varnish, a copy of the Qur'an, or a dark-skinned person displaying a watch and a mobile phone."
We lost a lot more than he won, but he did win.