For a few long moments, as the dust was settling and the bodycount pending, America felt like she was at war.

Because terrorism, “like war, and perhaps even more so… preys on minds and wills”^9.2 and “finds its meaning in death.” For war and terrorism alike, “the cause is built on the back of victims, portrayed always as innocent. Indeed, most conflicts are ignited with martyrs, whether real or created. The death of an innocent, one who is perceived as emblematic of the nation or the group under attack, becomes the initial rallying point for war. The dead become the standard-bearers of the cause and all causes feed off a stead supply of corpses.”^9.5

It as the ’93 WTC bombing that provided the first of those corpses. As ineffectual as the attack was, it set a precedent and showed what was possible. And so its importance is impossible to overstate, as “it is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of being threatened.”¹⁰ Yousef was just as much a failed Assassin, a clumsy commando, as a terrorist. In his head he was a soldier, in the eyes of his victim he was the lowest form of terrorist. His goal, after all, was simply to kill the enemy, not terrorism in the purest political sense of the word.

Although the two always go hand-in-hand to some degree, here it was very casually so. Yousef himself conceived the attacks as an act of war. He was simply visiting the same level of innocent death America herself had earlier visited on her own foe in World War II in his attempt to end America’s military influence in the Occupied Territories. His goals were not ideological, they were political. And he was not acting on behalf of al-Qaeda; al-qaedaism was simply his axiom.

Lacking formal affiliation with a unified organization, not intending to provoke retribution, with no means to further his assault, and with no overarching ideological inspiration – Yousef teaches us as much about commando tactics as he does about political terrorism. These two concepts are not mutually exclusive; they lie on the same spectrum of asymmetric aggression. Although Yousef did present the United States with a list of demands centering on disbanding any assistance to Israel, his threats had no organized backing.

At most they were just a vehicle for his hubris. After he failed to kill even one-tenth of one-percent of his stated goal he simply fled the country and moved on to other targets.

As a political terrorist Yousef was a flop – he incited no retaliation and the only concrete civil policies his attack created were commonsense traffic regulation in and around the Twin Towers. Inherent in true political terrorism is the goal of inciting an overreaction by the attacked entity, to cause a system’s true colors to rear their head as it retaliates with further oppression against those the attackers claim to be defending. So as a pure political terrorist, Yousef failed in that he provoked a substantial backlash only against himself, and not any group, organization, or ideology.

And yet in terms of being a commando he’d proven his mettle, and to understand exactly why that is we must trace terrorism’s path back to the ancient great-great-godfather of all commandos.