THE HUNT FOR KSM

Superlative storytelling and crackling reportage define a pulse-pounding narrative - Kirkus

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STARRED REVIEW!

Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Review Issue Date: February 1, 2012

Superlative storytelling and crackling reportage define a pulse-pounding narrative tracing the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

To this day, the bleary-eyed visage of the 9/11 mastermind being hauled off by authorities after a successful raid on his hideout in 2003 remains the most recognizable image of the hated international terrorist. McDermott (101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory, 2010, etc.) and Los Angeles Times chief terrorism reporter Meyer explode that superficial frame with a taught, espionage-thriller–like narrative. The authors render characters on both sides of the law—the hunters and the hunted alike—in rich detail, ably evoking their clear motives and desires. While Osama bin Laden became the main symbol of America’s war on terror, it was actually KSM who tirelessly traveled the globe recruiting young Muslim men for his ongoing war on the West, directing their actions, outfitting their operations and setting them loose upon an unsuspecting populace. FBI Special Agent Frank Pellegrino was on his heels from the very beginning, when, in 1993, KSM tried to destroy the World Trade Center with a truck bomb left in a tower garage. During that time, write the authors, none of Pellegrino’s superiors seemed interested in his investigations, but ultimately, a decade-long game of cat-and-mouse ensued, marked largely by frustration, futility and missed opportunities.

A surprising, sobering look at one of the deadliest terror networks in history, and the American spy agencies charged with bringing it down.

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A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE MASTERMIND

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the making of 9/11.

BY TERRY MCDERMOTT

Since 2006, Khalid Sheikh Moham­med’s family has received one letter a year from him, sent from his cell at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. Ac­cording to rules established by the Amer­ican military, the correspondence must fit on a six-inch-by-six-inch portion of a pre-printed form, and its content is restricted to the familial and personal; all else is stricken by censors. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks against America, mostly sends good wishes to his wife and children, who are now living in southeastern Iran, and to other relatives. He makes repeated refer­ences to his Islamic faith and the benefi­cence of Allah and his prophet. In photo­graphs that accompanied one of the letters, Mohammed appeared shrunken from the man in the famous image taken the day of his capture: a thickset, wild-haired figure, half-dressed in his night­clothes. The image must have infuriated Mohammed, who is vain enough to have complained during a military-court hear­ing that a sketch artist had made his nose look too big. In the jailhouse photo­graphs, he is almost forty pounds lighter. He stares directly at the camera, cloaked in long white robes, with a headdress framing a small, still face and a long black-and-white beard. A copy of the Koran lies open in his right hand.

On June 25, 2009, Mohammed, writ­ing in English, made what could be read as a surprising plea for absolution: “All praise is due to Allah. I praise Him and seek His aid and His forgiveness and I seek refuge in Allah from our evil in our­selves and from our bad deeds.” Even if this were only a ritual expression of obei­sance, it would stand in contrast to his cus­tomarily belligerent behavior. In his few statements that have been made public - a 2002 interview with the Al Jazeera re­porter Yosri Fouda, pieces of the United States government’s interrogations of him, Red Cross prison interviews, and his ap­pearances before military tribunals Mohammed has been cold-bloodedly straightforward. He told Fouda that the Holy Tuesday planes operation, as Al Qaeda called the 9/11 assaults, was “de­signed to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc and to be a big slap for Amer­ica on American soil.” Testifying before a military tribunal in 2007, he likened him­self to George Washington and boasted that he planned “the 9/11 operation from A-to-Z.” Killing, he said, was simply part of his job: “War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people.” In that ap­pearance, he boasted of murdering the American reporter Daniel Pearl: “I decap­itated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Since June, 2002, when the F.B.I. first identified Mohammed as the “master­mind” of 9/11, he has become one of his­tory’s most famous criminals. Yet, unlike Osama bin Laden, he has remained es­sentially unknown. Efforts to uncover more than the outlines of his biography have produced sketchy and sometimes contradictory results. (These include my own, for my book “Perfect Soldiers,” pub­lished in 2005.) Even basic facts have been in doubt; there are, for example, at least three versions of his birth date. For almost the entire decade before he was captured, in early 2003, Mohammed was a fugitive, deliberately obscuring his tracks. Bin Laden, meanwhile, was host­ing television interviewers, giving speeches, and distributing videos and text versions of his proclamations to whoever would have them.

Insofar as we know Mohammed, we see him as a brilliant behind-the-scenes tactician and a resolute ideologue. As it turns out, he is earthy, slick in a way, but naïve, and seemingly motivated as much by pathology as by ideology. Fouda de­scribes Mohammed’s Arabic as crude and colloquial and his knowledge of Islamic texts as almost nonexistent. A journalist who observed Mohammed’s appearance at one of the Guantánamo hearings lik­ened his voluble performance to that of a Pakistani Jackie Mason. A college class­mate said that he was an eager participant in impromptu skits and plays. A man who knew him from a mosque in Doha talked about his quick wit and chatty, glad-handing style. He was an operator.

In at least one important way, though, his boasts are accurate. Mohammed, not Osama bin Laden, was the essential fig­ure in the 9/11 plot. The attacks were his idea, carried out under his direct com­mand. Mohammed has said that he went so far as to resist swearing allegiance to bin Laden and Al Qaeda until after the at­tacks, so that he could carry them out if Al Qaeda lost courage.

The United States intends to try Mo­hammed this year or next, in a venue and a jurisdiction yet to be determined. The specifics of the trial where it should be held, and whether it ought to be a military or a civil hearing have been the subject of intense debate. In the absence of bin Laden, it is hard to imagine a more spec­tacular legal proceeding; even without a location or a prosecutor, it has been called the trial of the century. Wherever Mo­hammed may be tried, he seems to have done much of the prosecution’s work for it, describing himself as a righteous, re­lentless executioner whose version of making war knows no bounds. But the process will be aimed at assessing guilt, not causes. It will not tell us much about who Mohammed is, or about the forces that shaped him, which are, to an alarm­ing extent, still at work in the places where he came of age.

Badawiya, the neighborhood where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed grew up, sits between the sand and the sea on the southernmost edge of Fahaheel, a suburb of Kuwait City. The neighbor­hood mosque overlooks a mile-wide field of rubble and weeds, a buffer against the Shuaiba petrochemical complex, whose flare stacks sputter and glow around the clock. Just a few miles to the west are Ahmadi, the administrative center of the Kuwait Oil Company, and the bountiful Burgan oil field, where the stores of oil that essentially created modern Kuwait were discovered, in 1938.

Mohammed’s parents moved to Ku­wait from Pakistan in the nineteen-fif­ties, at the beginning of the country’s oil boom. His father, his father’s brother, and their young families came together; the brothers, both religious men, had been recruited to head mosques. Mo­hammed’s father became the imam in Ahmadi. The mosque, like most build­ings from that era, was built of drab brown brick and today looks as if it could stand some freshening up. Its twin minarets rise above the Kuwait Oil Company corporate reservation (built by the British before the Kuwaitis na­tionalized the oil industry), a tidy plot of tree-lined streets and white-fenced worker cottages that seems to have been shipped in whole from a greener world.

Sheikh Mohammed and his wife, Halima, had four children when they arrived in Kuwait. Five more were born after their arrival; Khalid was the sec­ond-to-last child and the youngest of four boys. The family travelled on Pak­istani passports, but both Sheikh Mo­hammed and Halima were ethnic Bal­uchis, from a swath of hard, dry land across the Gulf of Oman from the Ara­bian Peninsula. Baluchistan, as it has been called for centuries, includes parts of contemporary Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but existed as an entity long before the boundaries of any of these modern states were drawn.

The oil money that drew Moham­med’s family transformed Kuwait. At its first formal census, in 1957, the country had a population of three hundred and six thousand. By 1985, it was nearly six times as large. The boom gave native Kuwaitis a lifelong assurance of comfort: guaranteed jobs, housing, medical care, education, and pensions. The foreign guest workers, known as bidoon mostly Palestinians, Egyptians, and South Asians were not eligible for the bene­fits, though they made up the majority of Kuwaiti residents. The Baluchis were bi­doon. For Mohammed’s family, this was a fundamental fact of life.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accord­ing to the information he provided to the Red Cross, was born on April 14, 1965. His father, who was fifty-seven, died four years later, and his three brothers took over his schooling. Kha­lid was much younger than his oldest siblings and had nieces and nephews his own age. He and his nephews attended Fahaheel Secondary School, in a three-story brick building that accommodated as many as twelve hundred boys. (Girls attended separate female-only institu­tions and did not progress beyond sec­ondary school.)

Mohammed, like his brothers, was a superior student. “He was one of my smartest students in the science sec­tion,” Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous, a fam­ily friend and a teacher at the school, said. He was also rebellious; he told in­terrogators that he and his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim (later inter­nationally known as Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center) once tore down the Kuwaiti flag from atop their school­house. The school had a diverse student body Kuwaitis, Palestinians, Egyp­tians, and Baluchis but the groups were not encouraged to mix. Sports clubs, for example, were formed for the exclusive membership of Kuwaitis.

Most of the teachers in the Kuwaiti public schools that Mohammed at­tended were Palestinians, who at the time made up the largest group of expa­triates in Kuwait. At one point, there were an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians in Kuwait, threatening to outnumber the natives. Hawalli, the area of Kuwait City where many of them lived, was known locally as the West Bank. As in other Arab countries, the Palestinians predomi­nated in the ranks of engineers, physi­cians, and teachers. A United Nations program established after the formation of Israel to help resettle Palestinians in­cluded an ambitious educational com­ponent, and, by some measures, in the nineteen-seventies Palestinians were among the best-educated populations in the world. Kuwait also became a center of Palestinian political activism. Yasir Arafat worked there as a civil engineer, and Khaled Meshal, a founder of Hamas, graduated from Kuwait Uni­versity and taught school in Kuwait City. Fatah, the Movement for the Na­tional Liberation of Palestine, was founded in Kuwait, in the late nineteen-fifties. One of Mohammed’s co-con­spirators told investigators that Pales­tinians in Kuwait were considered forsaken people, suffering at the hands of Israel and the U.S.

In 1979, two events transformed the Muslim world: Shiite Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran and instituted an Islamic Republic; and the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan and installed a puppet government. After the Soviet invasion, a call to jihad went out, and Muslim leaders were eager to ally them­selves with it. It provided an opportu­nity to show their commitment to Is­lamic action without much risk at home. The revolt in Iran provoked a more complicated response. In Kuwait, Shi­ites made up about a third of the popu­lation, and they saw Khomeini’s rise to power as a model for Islamic reform in their own country. The government, to show its commitment to a more Islamic Kuwait, turned to local Islamist groups. Of these, the one that had the greatest effect on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the nineteen-twenties, denounced the iniquities of the modern world and called for a return to a strict interpreta­tion of Islam. The Kuwaiti government tolerated the Brotherhood, which by the nineteen-eighties was dominated by Palestinians, as a hedge against poten­tial threats from leftist groups; in one of the persistent oddities of political life in much of the Middle East, the Brother­hood was at times outlawed and yet still allowed to put up candidates for elec­tion. Daniel Byman, a former member of the 9/11 Commission who is now a professor at Georgetown University, says that this sort of ambivalence allows governments to maintain control of ex­tremist groups. “You keep everyone semi-illegal,” Byman says. “You always have an excuse to crack down. ‘Go ahead and run that school and hospital.’ Five years later you want to clip their wings? ‘Oh, you don’t have a permit? Too bad.’ ”

 PERFECT SOLDIERS 

“The definitive book on the nineteen men who brought such devastation and terror to this country. . . . A well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale.” —Washington Post Book World 

PRAISE FOR

Perfect Soldiers
 

“With a reporter’s exacting discipline and a novelist’s sense of story, Terry McDermott illuminates the lives of the men who attacked us on 9/11. It is a tour de force that demands to be read.”  —Peter Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst and author of Holy  War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden

“The very best [book] available . . . on the subject.” —Los Angeles Times

“Absorbing. . . . [A] richly textured narrative full of the sort of small, telling details that turn these men from faceless figures of evil into individuals.” —New York Times

“Fascinating. Perfect Soldiers is a simultaneously passionate, compassionate, and dispassionate book that neither indicts Islam nor excuses the terrorists’ crimes but draws a chilling, clear, and cautionary map of the small, fateful steps with which ordinary men cross the dangerous line between faith and fanaticism.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine

“We ’ll never know it all, but Terry McDermott comes as close as anyone has—and perhaps ever will—to explaining how nineteen zealots came to the place they did. It’s all in the details, and they are all here. This is journalism at its best.” —Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker

"It is not for nothing that McDermott refers to the members of the Hamburg cell as 'perfect soldiers.' None of what he says, of course, should be in any way construed as an apology or a justification of what the plotters did on September 11. But it is important to distinguish between moral outrage and pragmatic comprehension. In order to defeat the terrorists, we have no choice but to understand them first—no matter what George Bush's minions might claim to the contrary." --New York Review of Books

“Comprehensively and compellingly traces the lives of the four terrorists who piloted the doomed jetliners . . . with . . . skilled reporting and unbiased writing.” —Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

 “A powerful narrative that presents the most convincing picture of the 9/11 hijackers to date.” —New Statesman

“The definitive account of who the plotters were and how they germinated and nurtured [their] plan. . . . Remarkably insightful for readers hungry to know more about the Sept. 11 attacks, fundamentalist Islam in general, and Al Qaeda in particular. In a literary segment crowded with books, this one stands out.” —The Oregonian

“Engrossing. [Terry] McDermott’s doggedness and eye for detail enable him to get as close as one ever will to answering why a group of fairly ordinary men from intact families and unexceptional backgrounds became the extremists who executed such a monstrous act. Paints a vivid portrait of the pilots who led the devastating attacks.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

 “Thoroughly researched. . . . A disturbing investigation. . . . As interesting and important as the story of the hijackers in Perfect Soldiers is the author’s ability to explain in simple terms the complicated blend of politics, religion, and customs of that area of the world that spawned these radical young men.” —Denver Post

 “The book provides a fascinating account of how this sense of rootless alienation led to the radicalization of Atta and the other members of the al-Quds mosque.” —The London Evening Standard

“The success McDermott achieved in overcoming barriers is remarkable. . . . Bound to become one of the most insightful books ever published about what is now called simply 9/11.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune

“McDermott puts a human face on the hijackers and offers riveting accounts of the final weeks and days as the plotters prepared to carry out their horrific mission.” —Booklist

“Mr. McDermott tells the story like a novelist.” —Embassy magazine

“It’s taken three-plus years for a serious study of the hijackers, but the wait was worth it.”—Publishers Weekly

 “Bound to become one of the most insightful books ever published about September 11.”—Houston Chronicle

“Deeply reported. . . . Top Ten Book of the Year.” —Washington Monthly

 “Painstakingly researched.” —Financial Times

 “A chilling read.” —Kirkus Reviews

Facts, and 9/11

by

Terry McDermott

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving my middle daughter to her Southern California high school car pool when I heard on the radio that a jetliner had flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I'm a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and although I surely didn't know its full portent that morning, I knew we were at the edge of something new and frightening. I dropped off my daughter, returned home, and packed a bag. Within a week I was assigned to write a profile of Mohamed Atta, then thought to be one of the masterminds of the attacks. My editor's instructions were to go wherever I needed to go and stay as long as I needed to stay. Neither of us imagined the reporting would take three years and require travel to twenty countries on four continents.

Perfect Soldiers is the report of what I found. It's important to note what it was I was after. A simple search on Powells.com finds around 500 books about some aspect of September 11. The overwhelming majority of them are, in a fundamental sense, polemics — arguments about who to blame for what had happened. We live in an argument-obsessed age. Opinions are shouted from mountain top, valley, and every destination in between. I wanted, instead of shouting what I believed, to find what was findable, to lay down a baseline of factual information before it disappeared forever, which it might well have.

Opinions are easy, broad, and often trivial. Facts are hard, granular, and sometimes revelatory. Would it inform us more to be told that one author thinks, without much basis, that 9/11 was the fault of a conspiracy involving the Saudi royal family and Texas oilmen or to learn that the first thing Mohamed el-Amir Atta usually did when he came home to his student apartment in Hamburg was to exchange his street shoes for a pair of blue flip-flops? I don't know about you, but complicated conspiracy theories that tie far-fetched ideas together in an unending string that circles the globe don't help me much.

I don't think the world works that way. I look for more organic, natural processes. As a friend put it to me once, if you hear hoof beats in the distance, they're probably coming from horses, not zebras. The flip-flops could be a powerful instrument to help explain the men who attacked us. They're horses. Conspiracy theories are zebras.

Here are a few more hoof beats: September 11 pilot Marwan al-Shehhi habitually carried a bag of candy with him wherever he went and shared it with whomever he met. Hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah frequently signed his e-mails with long strings of exclamation points; he was the favorite uncle of his nieces and nephews, the one who would take them to the beach or out for ice cream. When the hijack pilots moved to the United States to train, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a would-be pilot who could never get a U.S. visa, stayed behind in Germany and had an affair with a ballet dancer in Berlin.

These mundane facts of daily existence are the raw materials of lives that, if accumulated in sufficient quantity, can begin to give some insight on the forces behind large events. They help to inform us once again of a fundamental aspect of men who commit horrific acts of inhumanity. It is in a way the oldest story — that of the banality of evil, the nearly organic way in which these men came to be who they became.

I, like almost every writer, have literary ambitions. My intentions in this book, however, were almost anti-literary. The events of September 11 didn't need to be remade and rethought in heightened dramatic fashion. They needed to be understood. The way I conceived of doing this was no great revelation. It was the only way I knew to be available to me: to go where the 9/11 hijackers had lived and learned and even loved and tell the stories of their lives, to attempt to fit those mundane details into the larger courses of history through which they floated. If there was to be any literary ambition in this, it would be to construct a poetry of fact.

This very modest goal proved to be immensely difficult.

Recently, there were three books on the national bestsellers lists about Scott Peterson, a man who murdered his pregnant wife. That was doubtless an horrendous act, but do we really need three books about him. Meanwhile, there were — other than this one — no books devoted primarily to the 9/11 hijackers.

The reason, pretty simply, is that information about them is scarce and very hard to find. This was without question the most difficult reporting I've ever endured. And endurance is what was required. During many weeks in the reporting, I went backwards — that is, I lost rather than gained information. But I am above all else stubborn and I committed to the long haul. If it was there, I was going to get it, or exhaust all means in the attempt. Whatever success this book represents is the result of that stubbornness.

One of the consistent oddities of being a reporter has to do with the most fundamental aspect of it — you ask people questions and they answer you. Why? It always astonishes me that no matter what the event or circumstance, you can find people with relevant knowledge who will talk. In the instance of most disasters or other horrific events, people often talk to reporters out of a sense of remorse or some slight responsibility. It's that "if only" feeling: If only I had done this, or: If only I had seen that. Because they feel this way, they are often persuaded to talk. In fact, they are often eager to talk, have been waiting to be asked. That had been my experience prior to this project. I interviewed more than 500 people for this book. Not five of them were eager to talk. In large part, this was because they didn't believe the men had anything to do with it, or, if they believed it, felt no remorse about it.

One of the consequences of the paucity of information was the proliferation of rumor and gossip and their solidification into fact. If you go back and review what else has been written about the nineteen hijackers, you'll find a huge quantity of words based on a miniscule amount of information. You'll also find conclusions based on the thinnest of threads.

Not unusually for a large news event, a public narrative of the 9/11 attacks and attackers was constructed with astonishing speed: by the end of the first week after the attacks, the central story had been set and the characters cast. Unfortunately, as is also usual in big news events, much of the initial information was either factually wrong or, more commonly, irrelevant and misconstrued. The hijackers were caricatured as evil geniuses or as wild-eyed fanatics. While there might well be trace elements of both of these extremes in some of the men, they were largely neither of these things.

I think portraying them as motivated by this one thing or the other is understandable, but misleading. The forces that drove the men in the 9/11 plot are many and complicated; they include broad historical trends, specific political objections, devout if wholly misguided religious belief, psychological alienation, and self aggrandizement.

For a long time in my reporting, I struggled to find who had recruited these men to this cause. In the end, I was forced to admit they weren't recruited. They were volunteers. They delivered themselves.

What can we do to stop them?

This question, without close competition, is the one I'm most often asked about the post 9/11 world. It's the central question going forward, one we're going struggle to answer for decades.

When it is posed in public forums, there is invariably at least one person in the room who knows exactly what to do: Kill them. Kill them all. Hunt them down, dig them out, and rid the world of their wretched existence. This solution has a lot to recommend it. It's decisive, no dilly-dallying around there. It's pure hearted, good versus evil. It's satisfying in a cinematic, righteous-justice-delivered-at-the-
business-end-of-a-cruise-missile-with-great-fiery-effect sort of way. And it's elegant in its logic. Obviously, if they are all dead, they can't harm anyone ever again.

Unfortunately, even if this were your desired policy, it seems upon even casual inspection impossible to execute. It's surpassingly difficult to even begin to find them all, much less finish the job. It's revenge fantasy, not reason.

Start at the most basic level: Who are they? Where are they? How will we know them much less find them? Where do we start? Where do we end? When does one become a they? Is there a line between sympathizer and soldier? Wouldn't we be likely to kill a bunch of people who only looked, or perhaps talked, or thought, like bad guys?

I have been distressed to discover the degree to which casually malevolent ideas are ambient in much of the contemporary Arab world, at how much the view from there has been shaped by mythic beliefs. I say mythic in the same sense that Karen Armstrong uses it to describe the nature of belief among fundamentalists in all religions, that the nature of their beliefs are pre-rational and unshakable by the existence of contrary fact. I must have been told a hundred times during my research that 9/11 could not have happened without the connivance, indeed, the active execution, of either or both the American CIA and Israeli Mossad. Those who espouse these theories hold a view that the United States is omnipotent and, therefore, nothing of this scale could happen unbeknownst to us. All evidence to the contrary — which is depressing in its own way — matters not a bit. I was repeatedly told no Jews died in the World Trade Center. One of my own interpreters, an upper middle class Cairene whose career goal was to come to the United States and open a chain of LASIK eye surgery clinics, in other words, a Westernized Arab, a scientist, would ask me every two or three days why the Jews stayed home that day.

That is the situation at the heart of contemporary, moderate Islam. It goes downhill, quickly, from there to the fringes where there exists a cult, a large cult with millions of members, who choose to find within their religion's historical texts a rationale to attack, and kill, any who oppose them. They think they are at war. No, they are at war. The men within radical Islam see themselves as soldiers in that war. They see what they were doing as having the obligations of soldiers, serving the righteous cause of an army with the winds of redemption at its back.

The cult, not accidentally, is centered in Saudi Arabia and in the explicitly political and allegedly literal interpretation of Salafist Wahabism embraced there. Whatever else is done to combat terrorism, this interpretation of Islam has to be confronted.

That at least is a place to start. You can't have spent as much time as I have studying these people without wondering what to do and, yet, I haven't found a solution that satisfies. Perhaps that's because there is no single answer. Just as there are many causes that brought these men together, so are there many reasons that drive them apart from us.

Like, I imagine, most people, I had in the beginning assumed the hijackers — and those who would follow them — were in some ways extraordinary individuals, that they otherwise couldn't have accomplished something so huge. The biggest surprise to me was they were nearly the opposite — all too common among young men in similar circumstances across the Muslim world. The obvious implication of them being ordinary is that there must be many more men just like them. I think there are. I think they're waiting. I think this is the world we will live in for a long time to come.