Runner

The story starts on an early anniversary of the September 11 attacks. On September 11, 2001, the terrorist organization al-Qaida (Deuker spells it like this; the common spelling is al-Qaeda or Al Qaeda) hijacked airplanes. They crashed two airplanes into New York City’s Twin Towers and another into the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania after the passengers fought to keep the aircraft from reaching its presumed target, the US Capitol. The attacks killed more than 2,900 people and precipitated the War on Terror. George W. Bush was president, and his administration swiftly established a Manichean foreign policy framework in which the US stood for freedom and any country that did not support US military actions was its enemy. This framework came to be called the Bush Doctrine—a set of policy positions that justified preemptive war against any entity deemed a threat to US security and emphasized the notion that, as Bush said in a speech before Congress on September 21, 2001, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (“Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People”). In October 2001, the United States and the United Kingdom led a multinational force in the invasion of Afghanistan, where al-Qaida trained.