The Sponsor/Facilitator/Mechanic Model Applied to 9/11

[Carsten Wiethoff]

There's simply no way the US, under Bush and the neo-cons, would not have gone to war in the Middle East even with the Towers remaining standing.

That may well be, given that eloborate War Plans for Afghanistan were ready before 9/11 and Iraq was on the agenda completely independent of any involvement in 9/11.
BUT the psychological mass effect, in the US and internationally, would have been completely different. The deliberate programming of the world population by endlessly repeating the second airplane vanishing into the tower on TV, followed by the apocalyptic images of the dust in NY achieved an enormous and lasting effect, which would be greatly diminished, had the towers survived. I doubt that the attack on the Pentagon alone, or the hijacking of one or two airplanes would have had any lasting effect at all, surely not enough to initiate anything like the War on Terror or the Patriot Act or the Department of Homeland Security.
The utter destruction of the towers was absolutely essential to that.