Did Osama Bin Laden Win?

20 years later, and Americans are taking off their clothes at security, not allowed to bring water on airplanes, and getting naked body scans to fly to Hawaii. Meanwhile more Americans are dead or in debt following a trillions plus war on terror with nothing to show for it. The dumbest Americans are refusing to wear masks or get vaccines in light of a pandemic that has killed millions, but those same Americans would gladly take their shoes off to fly to Phoenix because brown people scare them.

So, in light of the past 20 years, I ask you:

Did Osama Bin Laden Win?

Oh absolutely. There's a direct line between him and trump.

Well, we're certainly killing ourselves off more effectively than bin Laden could have ever dreamed of.

You forgot the surge in religious extremism.

Nah. Every single thing he wanted to achieve he failed at. There is no Muslim Caliphate. The Islamic world is divided and at war. His eldest son died in battle, and he wrote in his will to the rest of his children they should not join al-Qaeda or work with them in any way, per Peter Bergen's novel on his life.

And no one will ever know where his body is buried.

Of course it cost the US and the Western allies. But that in no way means he won. He absolutely lost.

I've always gotten a "Goldstein" vibe from that... Like, they got him (or the kidney thing did) years earlier, but it gave America something for the evening 2 minutes hate, so they kept the character.

I have a hard time believing that Bush would not take credit for ending the man if it had happened on his watch. Certainly Obama wouldn't have gone along with it.

How so? Because honestly I don't see it. The Tea Party became the deplorables. That was the Koch brothers. Trump took help from Putin to win the Presidency. Where does OBL fit in there?

Rather than having created him in the first place?

Not sure why Obama wouldn't have continued it until it was no longer useful? hence the "burial at sea" or even photos.

"Won" and "lost" imply an endpoint, a final tally of scores.

The world is as it is today, tomorrow it will be different.

I'm not sure the question really holds up.

They actually did dump his body in the middle of the ocean. A boot camp buddy was on the amphib ship that Seal Team Six flew onto and saw 'em do that one

All true, however, I think his overarching goal was to destabilize the U.S. and inflict revenge. I saw a David Cornwell (AKA "John LeCarre") interview where he said Americans were "unhinged" by the attacks and I think he was absolutely right. I can't imagine Trump's rise based on fear, grievance and bigotry against "brown" people and others not like "us" would have found such fertile ground without it.

We let an acute, relatively small-scale attack bait us into 20 years of self-destruction and foreign policy blunders. I don't know that this constitutes a win for Bid Laden as much as it proves how weak we were as a people in the first place.

I don't think he won.

But I don't think the US did either.

I voted yes, but I also think it's important how we would define a "win."

In terms of destruction? Yeah, he managed to pull it off and take down two monster towers that represented US financial supremacy.
In getting the US to shit itself in fear? Yeah, he won that one easily. Overnight we started allowing ourselves to be tied down out of "safety."
In stoking hatred amongst non-Muslims towards Muslims? Absolutely. People like to talk about how 9/12 was about unity, but a lot of Muslims didn't get to feel that unity.

As for the rest, we chose to go to war with Iraq. So he got the side benefit of watching us murder people totally unrelated to the crime committed against people in the US.
Then we ramped up in Afghanistan, and spent trillions of dollars over 20 years to create and then leave a quagmire that the Taliban took over immediately afterward.

We're still feeling the effects of the legislation we introduced, the mindset that has now become "normal" and the US continues to eat itself from the inside out. So only time will tell if he actually "won" in attaining his goals, but it sure as hell looks like he won when it came to showing a super power just how exposed its clay feet were, and still are. He exposed a frail, foolish empire, a massive hulking fighter with a glass jaw, and that still continues to cause damage around the world as a result of the fallout from that exposure.

Well, he did make the american Talipissbabies wet themselves and cry over something that really never harmed them in any small way. But that is sort of their MO, and he did njot do anything more than any woman having an abortion, GLBT person who exists, lib posting on the internet, facemask, black president, or vaccine that helps save your life does.

He also wanted America out of Mecca.

Some of these problems were coming with or without him. He was a great excuse, but entirely convenient to what was already happening.

We were on our way to invading Iraq because GWB and Cheney had a hard on for killing them and Saddam. OBL did not create that desire, he just gave it a good moment to happen.

As for a massive change in our security we already had the imaginary fear of black superpredators in the drug war, and the south american drug cartels. They had been cracking down on airport security for years to catch drug smugglers. Cell phones were already being used to track people in the drug wars. McVeigh had already shown them that lone wolf terrorism threatened the rich and powerful. Again, it was a great excuse as the drug wars were wearing thin, but we really did not have a real movement to end the persecution of black and hispanic people by legalizing drugs to stop the police from destroying their lives. They probably feared it coming, but 9/11 was just a convenient event.

I do not think there was an active conspiracy to help 9/11 happen on the part of little Bush and his evil, but I could believe they might have ignored the situation thinking the worse that could happen was an attack happened they could capitalize on, and oooopsie the trade centers went down. I actually think that the trade centers collapsing so quickly was more than any of the people involved thought would happen. Even today passenger jets get shot down and everyone sort of goes on without doing much. The buildings collapsing in such a visual display seemed to shock a lot of people, even those who were harboring an anti-US population.

We know his stated goal, he said so in his manifesto. It was to get the US out of Saudi Arabia and bring down the US regime like they did with Russia. He seriously miscaculated in that regard. It was absolutely not his agenda to get Americans to hate Mexicans and Blacks, and none of his actions impacted that. That existed long before anyone had ever heard of Bin Laden, and dominated our politics for centuries.

The fertile ground of white supremacy had been in the US since inception. We fought a war specifically over how horrible we could be to black people, then the South lynched and legislated for 100 years to try to pretend it didn't lose. We banned Asians from immigrating at all for decades. There was a party of nativists that hated German catholics. Nativist and religion have gone hand in hand, and in the US at least it's always been myopic and hateful.

Nothing you saw in the rise of the right in 2016 after the first black president didn't exist before 9/11 in massive numbers. It was homegrown extremists manipulating fear of Hispanics and Blacks that led to the rise of Trump. It was 'our JERBS!' and brainwashing by the wealthy using grievance politics to attack the party that represented higher taxes on them, and racism was a handy tool for that.

It was the culmination of the Southern strategy of explicitly targeting racists to vote Republican which started in '68. It was the war on drugs that evil politicians perverted into forced labor camps which vastly impacted minorities more than whites, while hanging felonies on them to remove their political power. How many boomers and gen xers rant still about socialism, and the ills of that being personified by their media in the black welfare recipient? This despite the fact that these policies help the same poor white racists at least as much.

9/11 might have been a part of that, but IMO it was a relatively small part - probably more so for the conspiracy theories that propagandists have used to promote insane right wing policies and to attack trust in the government than any specific reaction to minorities.

Because that hate always existed, and has always been magnified by those seeking to benefit from tribalism at the expense of common interest and basic humanity.

This is oretty much it. We have to remember OBL was a product of his environment, not ours. His motivations against americans were probably based on what he saw of americans. At the time he did not have the internet we have now, and his exposure would have been limited like that of a redneck in the middle of nebraska who has no intention of ever going to the middle east.

I have to admit to not knowing all the details of OBL, however, if we look at similarities in society he was most likely a sort of character like jim jones or david koresh. He would be a cult leader, but he would be much more militarized due to his environment.

Think you had some editing issues here, that post wasn't mine.

My apologies, that post has been edited to reflect that.

This is seen entirely through the lens of the far-left, and has about as much to do with reality as an anti-vaxxer raving about shedding.

The US prosecuted a 20 year war overseas with almost no domestic impact. It proved it could remove Middle Eastern terrorists, tyrants and dictators virtually at will. OBL, Hussein, Qaddaffi, Solemani, Awlaki, Nazir, Emwazi, Mansour... all dead.

And there are no attacks on US soil anymore.

That's clay feet to you? Sure. LOL.

This wasn't Vietnam. Completely unrelated to our military fighting multiple overseas conflicts where our grand total of KIA was 6,500 in 20 years. There was no draft here. The massive unrest that occurred in the US had nothing to do with any of these wars.

We lost 260,000 more from just normal violence in the US over the last 20 years than we did to both terrorism and the wars fought overseas. The common refrain from the soldiers is no one here even considered we were fighting a war, that they were invisible. And there's significant truth to that. The war barely impacted anyone in the US.

The terrorists never wanted the US to become a far-right Christofascist state. That makes their job harder, not easier. That's what you are afraid of, not what they were trying to accomplish.

US foreign policy is now moving away from Muslim fundamentalism and reengaging against Russia and China.

The technology for fighting wars and the conditions in which the fighting took place have to be considered when comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam.

One is largely jungle where close quarter fighting and ambushes of opposing infantries led to disastrous casualties. The other was a largely desert and urban action more akin to policing Northern Ireland albeit with drones and had far greater civilian impact.

The question which really springs to mind is the extent of Muslim attacks prior to 9/11. I really don't know how prevalent they were in the US. Over here they were very much seen as outliers compared to the IRA.

The message "we can remove you at will" is really a double edged sword. Relying on it commits you to keeping that force projection credible going forward and, yes, the criticisms of Empire. Like it or not western action has been a destabilising influence in anything but the most specific short term and few would want to see the US tied into "stabilising" swathes of the world with long term military occupations, as you yourself have argued, especially where the death toll becomes so significant as to provoke questions of comparative evils.

Do you really want a Pax Americana which relies on the constant application of overwhelming military force?

Do you really want to go from being an empire in spirit to a more literal form of expansionism?

Do you really want history to be putting you in the same bracket as the oppressor you fought for independence from?

Say you don't give a damn about how many innocents we kill to stay on top without saying you don't give a damn about how many innocents we kill to stay on top.

You could have just said "no white people were murdered, so no one died."

Seriously, this is a prime example of Amero-centrism, and exactly why the US is going to find it more and more difficult to carry out her wars without forcing allies into it.

To be sure, the other being a vast improvement in trauma recovery allowing far more soldiers to survive their wounds. But that just shows increased capability. As does the fact we fought a 20 year wear in a land locked nation with no port capability, the only country in the world that could have projected power in that manner in this age.

The question is did we 'show our clay feet.' Clearly the answer that the left doesn't want to respond to is no, and I guarantee you the perception in the Middle East that the US is a paper tiger is not valid.

Hell, ask the Russians. They attacked a US base in Syria and were annihilated without any US casualties just 3 years ago.

In the US proper? Virtually none. Then they spiked for a decade, they've been going down for the next decade, and we are back to none. There were notable attacks overseas prior to 9/11, and of course several attacks on airliners.

Few people remember that a Palestinian changed US history when he killed Robert Kennedy. Of course, that's was a Christian Palestinian, so that's swept under the rug.

Sure, but you are changing the nature of the question. Should we vs can we. We just proved that we could, which I'm confident the historians will assess correctly, even if from a moral or philosophical assessment they argue we shouldn't have.

Personally, I'm for the US withdrawing more from the world stage. Keep our navy intact to ensure trade routes.

But I think you'll find that wars increase, not decrease, if we do that, and that nations such as China and Russia will enforce their authoritarian worldview.

He engendered fear in the electorate that the GOP used. Trump is the end product.

Dogma. You got your ass kicked on the specifics of your previous assertions, so you are going to absolutist morality, like you always do.

You are just as ridiculous now as you were when you were a religious zealot. And for the same reason.

Not at all what I said. And not what I was disputing in your assertions previously.

NATO responded to an attack on America. The leadership of virtually every western ally we had agreed to send combat troops to Afghanistan because of their attack on the West, and many of them had already suffered and would continue to suffer attacks on their home soil due to Islamic fundamentalism.

But at least the Anarcho-Communists sat this one out.

Like they always have to. Because they have no power, anywhere, and there's no indication they ever will.

So you'll always get to moralize, because your crew never takes action on anything. It's easier that way, isn't it? LOL

The United States crushes countries that try to nationalize their resources, instigates coups in nations that won't open their economies to the US market, bombs and drones anyone who looks vaguely like a terrorist (brown), a police force that murders black people in the street, a judicial system that prioritizes the incarceration of the poor and minority groups, who has a prison system that holds 25% of the world's population, that pours $800 billion a year into its military, has between 700 and 1000 military bases around the world, and yet calls other nations "authoritarian" and insists it has the moral high ground and the imperative to stop them.

This is how we got the moniker "world police." We just act with impunity and then moralize those actions, like when we bombed civilians in Afghanistan and said they were enemy combatants after the fact. A nation that will brutally drone and bomb innocent men, women, and children out of a sense of national security is a bully and a warmonger. To pretend the United States is anything else is to buy into the white supremacist lie of manifest destiny, that we do these actions because it is our fate to be the arbiter of goodness and morality.

@Demiurge, you give a prime example of that way of thinking, and why it will lead to the US collapsing, though not before fucking over a lot more people on the way down. You mock the notion of the US and its clay feet, and then go on to aptly describe them in so many ways. You didn't even take a moment to consider the hundreds of thousands of people murdered by our wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan. You glossed over them entirely, naming many of the people, like Saddam Hussein, whom we put into power. We created Osama bin Laden. We are responsible for so much blood, and so much pain, we engender so much death, but because it never touches our shores, you consider it a success. You *brag* about how we haven't had another terrorist attack since 9/11, as if our murdering people in countries most people can't find on a map is the reason behind that, as if our increasing police state isn't murdering innocent lives *here* in the name of security and order. You've bought the US narrative hook, line, and sinker.

At the end of the day, I feed, clothe, and shelter people.
At the end of the day, you moralize the deaths of children you never cared about but freely weaponize when more people need to die.

Go on, though, keep bragging. You're Dayton3 with MAGA blue.