Scramble the film backwards. Rewind. Go back to the day 10 years ago when the air here in Manhattan was thick with ash and Osama bin Laden was gloating. There were two options for the US government – to pick up a scalpel, or to pick up a blowtorch. With the scalpel, you go after the fundamentalist murderers responsible with patient policing and intelligence work, and steadily drain them of their support. With the blowtorch, you invade a slew of countries and embark on slaughter and torture, and swell the army of enraged jihadis determined to kill. History branched in two possible directions that day.
We know which Osama bin Laden preferred. He wanted to draw the West into endless bloody wars that haemorrhaged billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. He told his supporters: "We conducted a war of attrition against Russia for 10 years until they went bankrupt. We are continuing in the same policy, to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy." To achieve this, "all we have to do is send two mujahideen [to a remote, irrelevant area] and raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make the [US] generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses." He knew that every ramped-up attack would appear to vindicate his narrative about the "evil" West waging "war on Islam", and swell his army of recruits.
When Bin Laden's favourite son, Omar, defected, he told many unflattering stories about his father – including that he tortured his pets to death. So it's highly unlikely to be a double bluff when he explained that the day George W Bush was elected, "my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country".
The West reacted to 9/11 by giving Bin Laden precisely what he wanted. We tossed aside our best values, making them seem a hollow charade. And each time we did it, the number of jihadis grew. Studies by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank found that the invasion of Iraq, and the torture used there, caused a seven-fold increase in global jihadism...
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