<Mistral wrote interestingly and intelligently>
The truth is, any culture could have produced people capable of this. The culture of the Goethe and Bach produced the Nazis. We Brits have slave trader ancstors responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands (although we're also the nation that used military force to end the mass international slave trade.) Inherently community-oriented and humane African village cultures produced people like Idi Amin. That the people responsible for the September 11 attrocity were probably Arabs does not make Arab culture uniquely evil. Which isn't the same as saying all cultures are the same - Islam is a warrior religion whose most scared text provides enormous justification for the use of force against unbelievers, let alone the forces of Satan. Meaning the West in general - and Israel, the US, and UK most of all (usually in that order.) And unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam is singularly lacking in modernizers, moderates, and liberals - especially in the Arab world.
*BUT* I'm sure that the most important goal of this attrocity was to force a large part of the Islamic world to an extreme position anti-American position, in a similar way to Saddam's Scud attacks did during the Gulf war, but to a much greater extent. This isn't happening. The scale of the attack has created genuine horror and sympathy, and the US's controlled but determined response is shaping into exactly the opposite of the sort of heavy-handed and badly-aimed action that the perpetrators must have been aiming at, believing it would radicalize Islamic opinion. Which isn't to say that I believe that the US response will be - or must be or can be - free of what is euphemistically known as collateral damage - ie dead civilians. But the US will make every reasonable effort to spare civilian lives, while mounting an effective counter-attack - and that the moral difference between this and the attrocity its enemies staged will be clear to the majority of the Islamic world. I'm basing this assessment on US behaviour so far, and the influence of Colin Powell in the administration.
I also suspect that the terrorists naively believed that the Israelis would take this opportunity to carry out extremely aggressive policies in the West Bank, again radicalizing opinion. This is natural: the terrorists and almost any Arab government would have done so in an equivalent situation. The Israelis, of course, are much smarter than that.
Finally, the terrorists must also have hoped to place a distance between the US and the Europeans - especially the Germans, French, and Belgiums, who have shown a huge ability for moral compromise, an ability to pander to terrorists, and a dislike for US policy in the Middel East. This doesn't seem to be happening, although I'm still waiting to see what the French do.
That the US seems to be making such rapid progress in tracking down its enemies is useful, but probably not as important as these factors.
The US government failed to understand its enemy and miscalulated tactically - ie in the degree of security on internal airflights. The terrorists misunderstood both their enemy and their own people, and miscalculated strategically. Comparisons to Pearl Harbour are indeed valid.
- Jonathan