Sunday, March 13, 2005
Take a look at this chart of the S&P500 over the last five years.
Note the dip in the last quarter of 2001. We were already in the opening phases of a recession, but the attacks of 9/11 put the hammer to our economy; directly by destroying a major center of commerce, and indirectly by crushing tourism and air travel.
That’s just with the destruction of a set of commercial buildings in Manhattan. Imagine what the effects would have been had al-Qaeda been successful in carrying out the rest of their initial plan of attacking Chicago and the West Coast targets, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told us was their original intent. Thankfully, also according to Mohammed, the government’s swift reaction interrupted al-Qaeda’s planning, so it never got that dire. But what if some terrorist organization was to acquire something more devastating than four jetliners? What if they were to destroy not just a few buildings, but a major fraction of an entire city?
Assuming you were lucky enough not to be killed in such an attack, you’re still in the crosshairs. Do you have money invested in the Stock Market? Where is your retirement fund rooted? Obviously, the cost of such a strike in terms of human life would be horrendous, but we also need to take into account that the attack on 9/11 was not just aimed at killing and terrorizing people; it was also intended as a blow to our economy to restrict our ability to afford projecting our military might around the world, including the Middle East. It was an act of war, and it was effective.
That said, that attack was peanuts on the scale of what could happen should a terror organization get access to, and use, a weapon of mass destruction. And it’s not as if al-Qaeda hasn’t already told us what they have in mind. And now, with the re-emergence of Hezbollah as a potential threat, we have a new (actually old, but forgotten) enemy to contend with.
