ABSTRACT
Millions of people in the Middle East watched the Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon live on television. It seems fair to say that their major reaction was a mixture of sympathy with the victims and shock. Regime reaction was more muted. Most regimes took steps to ensure that their own religious establishments anathemized those responsible for the huge loss of life. But there was no particular sense of alarm among the rulers themselves. They knew that they had been fighting their own war on Islamist militancy for several decades, often, like the Syrians and the Egyptians, in close cooperation with the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They were therefore largely untroubled by President Bush’s declaration of America’s ‘war on terrorism’ in his speech to Congress on 20 September 2001. And in the next few months they benefited greatly from the fact that Washington’s need for their continued cooperation meant that not only was there was less direct pressure on them to reform their institutions, but they were also given a window of opportunity to consolidate their own power. In Egypt, President Mubarak used the opportunity to begin to prepare for his own son to succeed him. In Tunisia, President Ben Ali pushed through a constitutional amendment in 2002 extending his term in office from three to five years. Only the Saudi ruling family, shocked by the revelation that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, realized that relations with the United States were going to have to pass through a particularly troubling period, as indeed they did.
