Extract from the book Occam's Nightmare,
Available early 2013
By S Peter Davis
The terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, was one of the most implausible series’ of events in human history. Make no mistake, Osama bin Laden had some pretty over-ambitious plans. I can only imagine how many of his fellow jihadists thought that he was off his tree – the plan, after all, was to hijack several large aircraft and kamikaze-bomb them into a whole catalogue of American landmarks. That’s basically the plot of every Roland Emmerich film ever made, but it’s not the blueprint of a traditional terrorist attack.
In fact, 9/11 was a stupid plan from the beginning. Sure, if it was pulled off, it would change the world as we knew it, but there were so many variables to consider, so many things that could go wrong along the multiple steps that have to fall in place. Terrorists prefer simplicity – (1) make a bomb, (2) drive it up to a target, (3) detonate said bomb. It doesn’t do much damage, but the goal is to make the people abandon their trust in their security, and lots of successful, small-scale explosions are more effective than one big, lumbering, idiotic landmark apocalypse that fails miserably. When bin Laden was describing his plan to his lieutenants, we can only imagine the incredulity in their expressions when he got up to around step 47. If 9/11 had failed, it would have made them look like idiots.
But 9/11 didn’t fail. It didn’t entirely succeed (the fourth plane they captured, probably headed to either the White House or the Capitol Building, crashed 30 minutes away from its target) but three out of four hits is still better than anyone in their right mind could have expected, and it got the point across quite nicely. Some aspects didn’t go as well as Al Qaida probably would have expected (though 125 died, the plane that hit the Pentagon may as well have been a Buick for all the damage it did), but others probably went much better (the New York towers collapsing was probably a pleasant surprise for them, like finding a carton of beer that turns out to be padded with winning lottery tickets).
The point is, bin Laden was an idiot who got lucky. He’s the bowler who tripped over his own shoelaces and managed to knock down eight pins. He didn’t even get a strike. He’s just one fool in history who managed to achieve better-than-average success despite the odds, sandwiched in between a whole bunch of idiots through history who failed where failure was expected. The laws of chance dictate that some of those idiots are going to fail upward.