You know, this is so obtuse that I am having a hard time believing that it is meant as a serious analysis. Al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center was not a serious threat to American power, or to the welfare of any but a small number of Americans (some of whom I've met: one of my three-year-old niece's best friends lost her father, and Eugene Steurle lost his wife). This would have still been the case had Al Qaeda killed--as they had hoped--30,000 rather than 3,000.
But what nearly everyone in America was wishing for on the afternoon of September 11 was not dramatic retribution via the killing of tens of thousands of innocents in the Middle East, but dramatic prevention of future atrocities. After all, 300 dead in the embassy bombings in 1998, 3000 dead in the WTC in 2001, and if you continue the series you have 30,000 dead via some CB attack in 2004, and 300,000 dead from a low-yield nuke in 2007.
The American point-of-view is that we need to build a world in which nutboys who want to restore the Medieval Caliphate don't blow up cities full of people thinking that they are obeying the will of God. For nutboys like Osama bin Laden to enjoy the protection of and be given freedom of action by state governments is not a good thing. And for states ruled by the likes of Kim Jong Il to acquire weapons of mass destruction is not a good thing either. (The question of whether Saddam Hussein is more like Josef Stalin--a crafty monster who can be safely deterred--or like Kim Il Sung--a paranoid megalomaniac who might do anything, anytime, to anybody--is not one on which I have an informed view.)
For Anderson to focus attention on what Al Qaeda did in 2001 rather than on what Al Qaeda is planning to do in 2004 or 2007 is, in my view, to turn himself into an intellectual three-card-monte player.
Brad DeLong