From the most objective, rational standpoint possible, the success or failure of the terrorists' 9/11 scheme did not matter. This is not, of course, to say that it didn't matter to the victims of the attacks and their families.  Or to the firefighters who lost their lives.  Or to the thousands of people who died in the Middle East after we launched our wars of revenge. What we're talking about here is the standpoint of analysis, which can shed light on how we should have reacted.  From a detached perspective (the opposite of George Bush's gut), whether or not the 9/11 plan succeeded or failed was irrelevant, a completely arbitrary variable.  

If the terrorists had failed, there would have been two general scenarios.  One, the authorities could have kept things quiet.  There would not have been a lot of initial news coverage, maybe just some subdued weekend press conferences about a bungled, crude plot snuffed out by regular security measures.  If the terrorists had made it all the way to the planes and had been stopped by passengers and airline crew, then there would have been more media exposure.  The heroes who subdued the evildoers would have been interviewed ad nauseum and likely made the subjects of some bad TV movies.  But in general, if the authorities had not made a big deal out of it, the failed attacks would have faded quickly into hazy memories.  

The other possibility after failed attacks would have been the authorities making a huge deal out of the foiled plan.  I view this as more likely, since the Bush administration was floundering at the time, and would probably have jumped at the chance to remind the public that terrorists were a menace.  And considering the neoconservatives' preexisting desire to meddle in the Middle East, I'm certain that the 9/11 plan would have been utilized as a platform for more aggressive stances towards Iran, Iraq, and other countries in the region. 

But in either of these scenarios after a failed 9/11 (officials keeping quiet vs. official trumpeting), what would have been the general public reaction and the national policy direction?  Would the populace have panicked, buying duct tape and bottled water by the gross?  Would people have cried themselves to sleep night after night, unable to shake the horrible images?  Would there have been the incredible patriotic resurgence, bordering on insane jingoism?  Would there have been the months and years of soul-searching, depression, rage, despair, and steeled nationalism?  Absolutely not.  If anything, I'm guessing that a failed plot would have resulted in a mocking of the terrorists in popular culture.  "They thought they could take down America with little knives that my kid uses to open paper towel boxes at the A&P?  How pathetic!"  I can see a Jay Leno punchline involving carpal tunnel injuries at the terrorist box-cutting training camps.  

On the national policy front, even if the neocons had tried to make as much hay as possible from the situation, would the Bush administration been able to go into Afghanistan and Iraq and wage large-scale wars? Would they have been able to shut down civil liberties at home and ship suspects off to other countries for torture?  Would we have ended up with Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? No way.  Maybe, just maybe, Bush could have put special forces units into the area to flush out bin Laden and company.  But the operations would have been fairly covert and unpublicized, and ironically would have been more successful than the huge quagmires we're involved in now.  But no way would Bush have had the provocation and justification for big wars and constitution-shredding if the 9/11 plots had failed.  His administration would have likely continued its mediocre performance and downward trajectory, and he would have been laughed out of office in 2004 as the underachiever he truly is.  

But as we all know, the plot didn't fail.  It succeeded to a ghoulish degree, and the country descended into full scale insanity after the attacks.  But what the terrorists actually did, the guts of it, was the same, no matter if it had succeeded or failed.  They hijacked planes with box cutters and audacity, the lowest-tech attack imaginable.  The substance of their actual actions was minuscule; and had it failed, it would have been laughed at and discounted.  But by sheer accident, it worked, and Americans were overcome by the sheer spectacle of it.  I would bet that even the terrorists themselves had no idea that both towers would completely collapse.  They were likely looking for spectacular crashes and some fires to burn for a few hours.  But because the actual, arbitrary unfolding of the physics was so horribly magnificent, the nature of the terrorists' actions themselves was blown out of all proportion to what they actually did.  We let the very success of their plan, which was always in doubt, dictate our reactions.  As mentioned in the last post, we let the HOW drown out the WHY, which was the much more important issue.  We gave the terrorists control where none was deserved.  Does the richest country in the history of planet, with a military larger than all others in the world put together, need to go ape shit over the accidental success of a bunch of guys with little knives?  If they had been nabbed, the answer would have been obvious.  We would have gone about our lives, beefed up airport security a bit, and the government would have hopefully sent targeted forces into the Middle East to quietly hunt down the perpetrators.  

Instead, we became victims of the spectacle.  We allowed our immediate emotions and sense impressions overwhelm our capacity to coolly evaluate exactly what happened.  Our leaders certainly failed us, appealing to and exploiting the depths of our sorrow and rage.  But our press also failed us, by running endless loops of the terrible images, fanning the flames of the spectacle itself, and then later treating US invasions themselves as TV revenge extravaganzas.  But also, the American people proved endlessly unable to look beyond the events themselves, to see that the planes and the smoke and the falling bodies were not the important story for the country at large.  We also became overwhelmed by the spectacle, and we all wanted to be intimately involved with the victims and families, like we want to be involved with what Brangelina name their adopted babies.  9/11 brought out the worst in a culture raised and nourished by images.  We allowed our country go to hell because we let the accidental success of a measly plot overwhelm our judgment.