Wrong. They decided that flying hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center towers would be like Baby Bear's soup: not too hot, not too cold, but juuust right.
If taking down the WTC and hitting the Pentagon made Bin Laden a hero in the Islamic world, imagine what he'd be if he nuked a 100 US cities? Decapitating our govt. and economy before anyone in the US knew what hit them and leaving no one left to figure out who to retaliate against? It would have been the greatest Islamic victory in history.
It would also have mobilized all American citizens and provoked a World War II-level response from a country massively capable of giving such a response -- when push comes to shove. There would be NO Americans taking the position of Daschle & the various other liberal jackasses in that case. There would be NO debate. There would only be massive American mobilization, and massive American action.
They wanted a big, flamboyant attack that would rally Muslims to their side, provide support for larger attacks to be made later on, and hopefully result in the fall of governments in the Muslim world to radical Islam. But not SO big as to push things immediately "out of control."
In fact, the two al-Qaeda leaders interviewed recently by al-Jazeera specifically stated that originally the idea had been to hit nuke plants with the jetliners -- but they backed off from an attack involving nuclear elements specifically because they didn't want things to get "out of control."
Not really. These people are not stupid. The surgical presission with which the 9/11 attacks were pulled off required years of preperation and had a desired end result. Leveling a major population center was not what their 9/11 operation was about. It was meant to get attention and put us on notice. Remember, the chief underlying principal of terrorism is using tactics that terrorize the populace. Al Qaeda knew that the attack would be tracked back to the middle east and central Asia and that would respond violently with the worlds most powerful military. In my opinion, they did not anticipate the level of success that we had in Afghanastan and that we would end up doing no better than the Soviets did in the 70's and 80's. I believe that their objective was to attack us, get us angry enough to move in the men and the hardware and start blasting away,(and as you already pointed out) destabilizing the region in the process and this would encite the extremests in Saudi Arabia to over-throw the house of Saud.
If taking down the WTC and hitting the Pentagon made Bin Laden a hero in the Islamic world, imagine what he'd be if he nuked a 100 US cities? Decapitating our govt. and economy before anyone in the US knew what hit them and leaving no one left to figure out who to retaliate against?
Bin Laden already is a hero to those head-cases, so he wasn't really looking to impress anyone within his circle. Remember the video tape where he was discussing the attack with one of his admirers and that the White House had translated and the media played for days? He admitted there that he had not expected the towers to collapse, and he is an engineer by training. He wanted the world to see the attack. Publicity and panic are what terrorists seek and in New York City there are TV news operations all over Manhattan.
So if he has some of the old Soviet suitcase nukes(and I don't think he would have more than three or four of these), why didn't he use them on 9/11? Because GWB (or his "shawdow government" counterpart, if DC were taken out) would have ordered the boys on-board the boomers to turn the keys and obliterate the middle east. bin Laden wanted the region destabilized, not vaporized.
Judging by the flight path taken by the plane that hit the Pentagon, it is reasonable to assert that it was not the primary target. Taking out the White House or the Capital would be about as symbolic as you can get, but there wasn't time to make another run at it after overshooting the area, so they flew to the secondary target...and the Pentagon is pretty hard to miss.
Think about it. You're in Cheyenne Mountain. Would you take the chance that it wasn't the Chinese or Russians? We'd be at their mercy after such an attack -- a retaliatory strike would be practically mandatory. Remember that before 9-11, relations with the PRC had gotten much worse and that the PLA had been rattling their sword and making not so veiled threats about nuking West Coast cities. No one would have believed that an Islamic terrorist group had that capapbility.
Which would leave the Islamic world sitting pretty with two or three of their major enemies destroyed or ruined.