Central planning and September 11th

Central planning caused September 11th. Well, sort of. Bear with me:

The Islamic world was ascendant for most of its history. From Mohammed to the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam moved from triumph to triumph. When, from the 18th century onward, the West, so long cowed by Muslim might, started to become more and more globally dominant, Muslims started asking the same sorts of questions Americans are asking today: Why are we losing our dominance? What must we do to regain our lost power? Once outright colonialism ended after the Second World War, two main competing answers arose. The first was to out-West the West, to identify and adopt those Western policies and ideals that led to Western dominance. The paragon of this strategy was Ataturk, and adherents include Nasser, Mossadeq, and Ba'athists. The second was to return to Islam's (imagined) core strengths- fundamentalism, as represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and Osama bin Laden.

The former strategy failed disastrously. Why? Well, because when it was adopted, the West's leading lights were enthralled with planning. Bright young Egyptians, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, etc., heading to the West's finest universities to learn how to better their own countries, would learn the gospel of economic planning, even what we think of as the "West," to say nothing of the Soviet Bloc. And remember that the prestige of the USSR was very high at this time in history, just after the Second World War- the Soviets had crushed the Nazis and appeared to be moving from triumph to triumph, industrializing at a breakneck pace, launching Sputnik, etc.

As history tells us, planning faceplanted hard in the 1970s. In the free West, we experienced some economic turmoil, but we had quite a cushion to protect us against the negative consequences of our experiment with planning. The Islamic world had no such cushion; these were societies just leaving agrarian poverty. The strategy of Westernization, or at least of co-opting selected aspects of the West, was broadly discredited. The rest is, as they say, history.

Update: Maybe the economic cushion wasn't as important as the ideological one- in the West, we had the ideology- liberalism- that made us wealthy to begin with upon which we could fall back. The Muslim world had Islamic fundamentalism as its strongest alternative.