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  3. How different would the world be today if there had been no 9/11? What if the attacks had been foiled or bungled? One obvious an

How different would the world be today if there had been no 9/11? What if the attacks had been foiled or bungled? One obvious an

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问题     How different would the world be today if there had been no 9/11? What if the attacks had been foiled or bungled? One obvious answer is that Americans would probably care a lot less than they do about the rest of the world.
    Back on the eve of destruction, in early September 2001, only 13 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. should be "the single world leader." And fewer than a third favored higher defense spending. Now those figures are naturally much higher. Right?
    Wrong. According to the most recent surveys, just 12 percent of Americans today think the U.S. should be the sole superpower—almost exactly the same proportion as on the eve of the 9/11 attacks. The share of Americans who want to see higher spending on national security is actually down to 26 percent. Paradoxically, Americans today seem less interested in the wider world than they were before the Twin Towers were felled.
    In the past 10 years, the U.S. has directly or indirectly overthrown at least three governments in the Muslim world. Yet Americans today feel less powerful than they did then. In 2001 just over a quarter felt that the U.S. had "a less important role as a world leader compared to 10 years ago." The latest figure is 41 percent.
    Three explanations suggest themselves. First, wielding power abroad proved harder in practice than in neoconservative theory. Second, the financial crisis has dampened American spirits. A third possibility is that 9/11 simply didn’t have that big an impact on American opinion.
    Yet to conclude that 9/11 didn’t change much is to misunderstand the historical process. The world is a seriously complex place, and a small change to the web of events can have huge consequences. Our difficulty is imagining what those consequences might have been.
    So let’s play a game like the one my friends at the Muzzy Lane software company are currently designing, which has the working title "New World Disorder." The game simulates the complex interaction of economics, politics, and international relations, allowing us to replay the past.
    Let’s start in January 2001 and thwart the 9/11 attacks by having Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz heed Richard Clarke’s warnings about Al Qaeda. The game starts off well. Al -Qaeda is preemptively decapitated, its leaders rounded up in a series of covert operations and left to the tender mercies of their home governments. President Bush gets to focus on tax cuts, his first love.
    But then, three years later, the murky details of this operation surface on the front page of The New York Times. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, denounces the "criminal conduct" of the Bush administration. Liberal pundits foam at the mouth. Ordinary Americans, unseared by 9/11, are shocked. Osama bin Laden issues a fierce denunciation of the U.S. from his Saudi prison cell. It triggers a wave of popular anger in the Middle East that topples any regime seen as too close to Washington.
    In other words, if things had happened differently 10 years ago—if there had been no 9/11 and no retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—we might be living through an Islamist Winter rather than an Arab Spring.
    Replaying the history game without 9/11 suggests that, ironically, the real impact of the attacks was not on Americans but on the homelands of the attackers themselves.
More Americans feel the U.S. is not that important as a world leader now probably because ______.
选项 A、the U.S. topples less governments now than they did in the past
B、less Americans believe their country should be the leading superpower
C、using the threat of force in realty is not as simple as written in the textbook
D、the government decides to cut the expense on national security
答案C
解析 属事实细节题。通过题干，迅速定位至第四段。第五段第一句即提到了解释这一问题的三个原因。选项C意为“在现实中采取武力威胁要比教科书里写的困难”，这与第五段的第一个解释意思相同，故正确。第四段第一句只提及过去十年美国推翻了三个穆斯林国家的政府，并无过去与现在的对比，选项A属于无中生有。选项B出现在文中第三段，陈述正确，但犯了答非所问的错误。文中并未提及政府削减国防经费问题，故选项D属于无中生有。
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