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The 2000s without 9/11

One thing I have long wondered is if without 9/11, Muslims would have joined the Religious Right in the United States. Most American Muslims voted for Bush in 2000.
 
Ricardolindo said:
One thing I have long wondered is if without 9/11, Muslims would have joined the Religious Right in the United States. Most American Muslims voted for Bush in 2000.
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That is a possible and very interesting scenario, I won’t lie.

It’s more than likely that Islamphobia isn’t as mainstream without a 9/11-style attack and becomes a relatively respected religion in the states ala Judaism.

A Religious Right could lead to some fun culture clashes. What is the Muslim view on Abortion?
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
A Religious Right could lead to some fun culture clashes. What is the Muslim view on Abortion?
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From what I can tell, for Sunnis abortion is always permissible if the mother's life is in jeopardy, although in other circumstances it depends on which legal school you follow. Shia, on the other hand, outlaw it entirely.
 
SpanishSpy said:
From what I can tell, for Sunnis abortion is always permissible if the mother's life is in jeopardy, although in other circumstances it depends on which legal school you follow. Shia, on the other hand, outlaw it entirely.
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Genuinely insightful.

A United States without 9/11 most likely has a culture that’s just a continuation of the 80s/90s. Typical culture clashes regarding Violence in Video Games, Movies and TV, gay rights, abortion etc.

We hear less of "The Muslim Horde is coming to destroy our way of life reeee” and more "Those video game companies are corrupting the minds of our youth.”
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
That is a possible and very interesting scenario, I won’t lie.

It’s more than likely that Islamphobia isn’t as mainstream without a 9/11-style attack and becomes a relatively respected religion in the states ala Judaism.

A Religious Right could lead to some fun culture clashes. What is the Muslim view on Abortion?
Click to expand...
SpanishSpy said:
From what I can tell, for Sunnis abortion is always permissible if the mother's life is in jeopardy, although in other circumstances it depends on which legal school you follow. Shia, on the other hand, outlaw it entirely.
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There is a consensus among Islamic scholars that a fetus is only a life after three months.
However, most Muslims oppose abortion because they view it as a way to escape the consequences of sex. This is arguably true of a big chunk of the Evangelicals too, though.
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
Let’s say that Operation Infinite Reach is successful and Osama Bin Laden is killed on August 20th, 1998 and the 9/11 plot never comes to fruition.

What happens next? What do the 2000s and beyond look like without the September 11th terrorist attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq?
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Another thing worth mentioning- without the zeitgeist of 9/11, and the resulting backlash against Islamic Extremism and Terrorism across the Western World, how much more favorably is it viewed? And what happens with Russia? Let's not forget, 9/11 was what effectively 'ended the Cold War', and really enabled Putin to consolidate his power.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2001/10/24/u.s.-russia-relations-after-september-11-2001-pub-840
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2001-11-01/americas-real-russian-allies
https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/members-event/911-and-us-russia-relations
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/09/08/the-impact-of-september-11-on-us-russian-relations/

Before that, the outgoing Clinton administration’s relationship with Russia had ended on a pessimistic note amid widespread domestic concerns that, in the words of Clinton, "Putin can get squishy on democracy." The relationship was, in the words of one former Clinton adviser, at its "lowest point since 1991." Russia had grown disappointed with US assistance and advice on economic reform, especially following the 1998 financial crisis that forced Russia to devalue the ruble and default on its sovereign debt. Perhaps most damaging to the relationship from both sides’ perspectives was Russia’s backsliding on democracy and the criticism it elicited in the United States, especially after Boris Yeltsin left office at the end of 1999 and Vladimir Putin became president. And when the George W. Bush administration took over in January 2001, it was initially critical of Russia, dismissing it as "a failing state in irreversible decline", and continuing to cite Russia as the greatest threat to the Western World.

But then, on September 9, 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin called his American counterpart George W. Bush with an urgent message: Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban and Moscow-supported Northern Alliance, had been assassinated in Afghanistan by two suicide bombers posing as journalists. Putin warned Bush of "a foreboding that something was about to happen, something long in preparation." Two days later, 9/11 happened; and in so doing, ushered in what would prove to be the high point in U.S.-Russian relations since the aftermath of WW2, with Clinton's final assessment of Putin's Russia quickly giving way to a more positive view, as Putin offered an alliance with the West against the 'shared common enemy' of Al Qaeda and Islamic Terrorism. US-Russian cooperation in the initial stages of the Afghan war appeared to be transformative, and Putin's government likened the anti-terror cooperation to the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II, asserting that the common enemy was Islamic Fundamentalism and together the two great powers would defeat it. And with fewer political barriers and obstacles in place, Russian oligarchs were freed to make increasingly impactful foreign investments in the Western World, and set about building their global business empires; with Putin's Russia having hoped and planned to enter into an agreement with the EU.

Ultimately though, it would appear that OTL's 9/11 wasn't nearly devastating or impactful enough to truly enable Putin to forge a true alliance and partnership with the United States, as he'd have surely hoped that he'd be able to do after his November 2001 joint statement with Bush, with the pair declaring that their two countries were “embarked on a new relationship for the 21st century, founded on a commitment to the values of democracy, the free market, and the rule of law” and concluding with a joint commitment "to advance common values [and]... work together to protect and advance human rights, tolerance, religious freedom, free speech and independent media, economic opportunity, and the rule of law." Skepticism toward Russia in the USA, and across the Western World to an extent, gave way to a "new strategic relationship" imbued with a "spirit of cooperation." Islamic Fundamentalism, whilst Islamophobes attempted to decry it as such, never posed nearly enough of a potential existential threat to ever really garner widespread acknowledgement as one, in the manner that Communism/Capitalism had been by the public on both sides during the Cold War.

However, it didn't last; Putin swiftly voiced dissatisfaction with the USA's near-total lack of gratitude or reciprocation for Russia’s cooperation in support of the war in Afghanistan, along with its casual disrespect of Russia’s 'cardinal interests', such as Russian pre-eminence in 'former Soviet space'. Any pretence of this alliance dissolved when Russia led the opposition in the UN to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and the USA retaliated by increasingly criticizing Putin’s backsliding on democracy and human rights. The Russians' list of major disagreements also included U.S. support for the “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005, which Russian officials suspected was part of a U.S. plan to encircle Russia and minimize its influence in the neighboring countries, and Russian opposition to NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, which culminated in Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 (and indeed, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine). By the end of the Bush administration’s second term, the bilateral relationship had fallen to its lowest point since 1991. And of course, we all know how things have continued to go further and further downhill since then, especially in the past year.

So, without 9/11 (with Putin's warning to Bush, on the 9th September, heavily implying that he may well have had intel that 9/11 was going to happen IOTL, but that he chose to let it happen, in order to better profit from the ensuing crisis in the aftermath), would the USA and NATO be open to permitting Putin's Russia to 'come in from the Cold' at all? Or indeed, with a smaller equivalent of 9/11, would Putin even attempt to do so, or might he instead go along with the oft proclaimed popular opinion, among much of the Russian population at the time, that the USA's "chickens had come home to roost" with its backing of Al-Qaeda in the Afghan War, and that the Americans had "gotten what they deserved", leaving the Americans to fight in Afghanistan on their own without any assistance (or backing their own ? Might a different version of the Ukraine conflict have effectively kicked off over the 'Orange Revolution' there back in 2004, with the Ukrainian Protesters there treated in a vaguely similar manner to the Chinese Protesters at Tiananmen Square? In hindsight, mightn't it be argued that OTL's 9/11 simply delayed the start of the "Second Cold War", by about 20yrs at most? And without 9/11, and the ensuing 'War On Terror' against Al-Qaeda and Islamic Terrorism, how much sooner might we have seen Putin's Russia taking their place to be openly proclaimed as the most frightful foe of the Western World?
 
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I mean no 9/11 and no GWOT probably limits some amount of democratic backslide because 1) in the US there isn't the same level of public militarization and surveilance state and 2) there's less of a culture w/r/t western foreign policy of cutting every two-bit and richer-than-two-bit dictator a blank check if they could claim they were doing counterterrorism.
 
I wonder what the Call of Duty franchise looks like ITTL — do they stick to doing WW2 games? Or do they finally do a Vietnam one?
 
Roger II said:
I mean no 9/11 and no GWOT probably limits some amount of democratic backslide because 1) in the US there isn't the same level of public militarization and surveilance state and 2) there's less of a culture w/r/t western foreign policy of cutting every two-bit and richer-than-two-bit dictator a blank check if they could claim they were doing counterterrorism.
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IDK about that- if TTL's 'GWOT' winds up being against the BRICS instead of just 'Islamic Fundamentalism' (probably excluding Brazil and South Africa, depending on how things go there), you could well see an even greater level of public militarization and the surveillance state. And if Western foreign policy officially decries Putin's Russia and Jinping's China as 'terrorist states' (rather than simply doing so informally for a couple of decades), then you could get even more of a culture w/r/t western foreign policy of cutting every two-bit and richer-than-two-bit dictator a blank check if they can claim they're doing 'counter-terrorism' against Russian and Chinese interests.

ITTL, the West's hands haven't been burned by Al-Qaeda that much, after all; they'd almost certainly be willing to actually go out of their way to support, fund and supply the militant separatists in places like Xinjiang (/'East Turkistan', via the Turkistan Islamic Party), Chechnya and the Northern Caucasus, rather than merely finger-wagging at the Chinese and Russians since "Meh, their separatists are supposed to be 'Islamic terrorists', and we are doing our whole 'War on Terror', so I guess brutality's justified just like it was for us in Afghanistan and Iraq".
 
Ricardolindo said:
One thing I have long wondered is if without 9/11, Muslims would have joined the Religious Right in the United States. Most American Muslims voted for Bush in 2000.
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We actually recently had an inkling of what that could've looked like.

SpanishSpy said:
I can certainly see a wing of it doing that - but you have the Evangelicals who support Israel for their millenarian prophecies.
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Worth noting that support for Israel among Evangelicals has been sliding for years and, at as early as 2010, was definitely not known as the majority position.
 
History of Muslims in North America without 9/11 is an interesting one - in Europe they were always going to align with the left because, if not terrorism, then they were the main immigrant group anyways and thus the big boogeyman for anti immigrant politicians. In America though the main immigrant groups are Latinos. Maybe they would lean center right tbh though becoming a part of the religious right is a stretch - allies, sure, “a part of”, nah.
 
SinghSong said:
So, without 9/11 (with Putin's warning to Bush, on the 9th September, heavily implying that he may well have had intel that 9/11 was going to happen IOTL, but that he chose to let it happen, in order to better profit from the ensuing crisis in the aftermath), would the USA and NATO be open to permitting Putin's Russia to 'come in from the Cold' at all?
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Very good post, decided to look into this further from a wider NATO perspective and found this enlightening as well:
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One of the earliest and most influential statements arguing for NATO to admit new members—a 1993 Foreign Affairs article by Ronald Asmus, Richard Kugler, and Stephen Larrabee—outlined six preconditions for such a bold move. The question of how to deal with Russia was fifth on the list, ahead of only that of how to deal with Ukraine.32 Nowhere did the authors raise the issue of the actual military requirements associated with the commitment to defend new neighbors. The question of how to deal with Russia hinged on whether it would become democratic. If it did, then Russia “could play a crucial role as a pillar of security and stability in Europe and Asia.” The consequences for security if it did not become democratic were not considered. In the three authors’ narrative, Russia was no longer treated as a source of credible military threats, and NATO was no longer in a position of concentrating on the “strategic luxury of territorial defense” as an outdated mission.33 A 1996 study by the same influential authors offered an estimate of likely costs of the enlargement that was “anchored in the premise of avoiding confrontation with Russia, not preparing for a new Russian threat.”34​
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In the same vein, when testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997 on the subject of the costs associated with the expansion of NATO, then secretary of state Madeleine Albright argued that “a larger NATO will make us safer by expanding the area in Europe where wars simply do not happen.”35 The received truth that a democratic peace was dawning on a Europe “whole and free,” and that Russia would be part of the new club of democracies, was reflected in significant changes NATO made to its mission, force structure, and capabilities beginning in the early 1990s and running through the first two waves of NATO expansion from 1999 to 2004. During that period, the alliance shifted its emphasis from maintaining high-readiness forward deployed heavy forces to lighter and more mobile units and rapid reaction forces for new expeditionary missions, reflecting the popular view in the middle of the 1990s that NATO had to “go out of area or out of business.” The significant reductions in non-U.S. NATO defense spending and force levels, deployments of U.S. forces and tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, and land, air, and naval forces committed to NATO were all predicated on the assumption that,36 regardless of Moscow’s threat perceptions of NATO enlargement, the alliance was preparing for a new kind of relationship with Russia that had very little purchase in the Kremlin.​
 
lerk said:
History of Muslims in North America without 9/11 is an interesting one - in Europe they were always going to align with the left because, if not terrorism, then they were the main immigrant group anyways and thus the big boogeyman for anti immigrant politicians. In America though the main immigrant groups are Latinos. Maybe they would lean center right tbh though becoming a part of the religious right is a stretch - allies, sure, “a part of”, nah.
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I do wonder how Islam is viewed ― Sure there would be far less of a stigma, but would islamophobia really go away?
 
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