An American History

1106 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

public places in New York and Wash-

ington for weeks, grim reminders of the

lives extinguished on September 11.

The Bush administration quickly

blamed Al Qaeda, a shadowy terror-

ist organization headed by Osama bin

Laden, for the attacks. A wealthy Islamic

fundamentalist from Saudi Arabia, bin

Laden had joined the fight against the

Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the

1980s. He had developed a relationship

with the Central Intelligence Agency

and received American funds to help

build his mountain bases. But after the

Gulf War of 1991, his anger increasingly

turned against the United States. Bin

Laden was especially outraged by the

presence of American military bases in

Saudi Arabia and by American support

for Israel in its ongoing conflict with the

Palestinians. More generally, bin Laden

and his followers saw the United States,

with its religious pluralism, consumer

culture, and open sexual mores, as the

antithesis of the rigid values in which

they believed. He feared that American

influence was corrupting Saudi Arabia,

Islam’s spiritual home, and helping to keep the Saudi royal family, which failed

to oppose this development, in power.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, terrorist groups who held

the United States and other Western countries responsible for the plight of the

Palestinians had engaged in hijackings and murders. After the Gulf War, Osama

bin Laden declared “war” on the United States. Terrorists associated with Al

Qaeda exploded a truck- bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six per-

sons, and set off blasts in 1998 at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in

which more than 200 persons, mostly African embassy workers, died. Thus, a ris-

ing terrorist threat was visible before September 11. Nonetheless, the attack came

as a complete surprise. With the end of the Cold War in 1991, most Americans

felt more secure, especially within their own borders, than they had for decades.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, gave new prominence to ideas deeply

embedded in the American past— that freedom was the central quality of

The twin towers of the World Trade Center after
being struck by hijacked airplanes on Septem-
ber 11, 2001. Shortly after this photograph was
taken, the towers collapsed.