A Political and Economic Dictionary of Western Europe, First Edition
On 11 September 2001 four terrorist attacks were carried out on the USA. In total four planes were hijacked: American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York; American Airlines Flight 75 crashed on the Pentagon in Washington, DC; and American Airlines Flight 77 crashed in Somerset County, some 210 km south-east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. About 2,750 people were killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania. The attacks were orchestrated by the al-Qa’ida network under the leadership of Osama bin Laden.
This was the first time since the civil war (1861–65) that an act of warfare had occurred within the boundaries of continental USA.
The USA and its allies responded to the attacks by launching a ‘war on terror’. US-led troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 to overturn regimes that were assumed to have harboured or have had associations with terrorists. While the states of Western Europe were united in their condemnation of the 11 September attacks, they were divided in their response to the subsequent ‘war on terrorism’. While governing parties in the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy supported the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, France and Germany strongly opposed it. In 2003 the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, referred to this division as one between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe.
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