Presumably as part of the observance of the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center New York Magazine has commissioned a series of speculative pieces from various contributors on the following: what if 9/11 never happened? Participants include Thomas L. Friedman, Doris Kearns Goodman, Tom Wolfe, Fareed Zakaria, and the blogosphere’s own Andrew Sullivan.
Several of the contributors take the position of the durability of history: that, had the attack not occurred on September 11, 2001, it would have occurred the next day or the next or the next year or the year after that.
Some of the pieces have minor insights; some are mildly interesting; most not particularly so.
I think a far more interesting question would be: what specific steps or policies could have been taken that might conceivably have precluded the likelihood of the attack occurring at all, ever?
I think that over the, say, last 30 years or so there have been several short windows of opportunity in which there were courses action that circumstances had made politically possible that might have changed things. Two of these windows were, for example, following the oil embargo of the 1970’s and in response to the occupation of the U. S. embassy by Iranian “studentsâ€.
So, what if?
It’s probably odd given that I make my living writing sf and fantasy and other highly speculative things that I’m never very interested by “what if’s” of this type. Life is far too complex to imagine that we can move a single piece of the puzzle and have any notion of the consequences.
That having been said: We could have backed the Shah to the hilt. We could have written off the Iranian hostages and retaliated massively if they were harmed. We could have protected the 241 Marines in Beirut. We could have left the Russians alone in Afghanistan. Or, going even further back, we could have let Stalin have Iran. Or we could have left Mossadegh alone. We could have, as you point out, done something to reduce our consumption of oil. We could have imposed and guaranteed a two state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
No way of knowing of course.