A video grab from an undated footage from the Internet shows Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden making statements from an unknown location. Credit: Reuters/REUTERS TV
How Osama Bin Laden Outsmarted the U.S. and Got What He Wanted -- David Samuels, The Tablet
The point of Sept. 11 wasn’t to terrorize the West. It was to get the U.S. out of the Muslim world—and it worked.
“If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” President Barack Obama told David Remnick in a newly published New Yorker interview, by way of dismissing the current incarnations of al-Qaida. As far as planning another Sept. 11-style spectacular on American soil goes, Obama may be right. But to understand al-Qaida as an NBA franchise-style operation suggests a profound misunderstanding of the strategic purpose of the Sept. 11 attacks—which was not to create circumstances favorable to more big attacks on American soil, or to ensure organizational continuity, but rather to set off a history-altering chain reaction that would transform the Middle East into a region where the United States was no longer in charge of much of anything.
Unlike Obama, who hailed the so-called Arab Spring as the dawning of a new age of democracy in the Middle East, or Bush and his adviser Condoleezza Rice, who imagined Iraq as a model for other Arab states, Osama Bin Laden was never interested in short-term results, or in Western-style democracy. Despite his fondness for sound-bites, he thought in historical time, guided by his own strategic vision—which he hoped would lead to the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.
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My Comment: David Samuels nails it in this analysis. Osama Bin Laden's focus was to get the U.S. out of the Middle East so that the U.S. would not be in a position to be able to support those that Osama Bin Laden was waging war against. On this point .... with U.S. forces leaving the Middle East and South East Asia .... he and his followers have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
This post is a must read.
2 comments:
The article is suggesting that Bin Laden had managed to predict what would happen several years down the road along with very flimsy stuff suggesting that this was his strategy all along. I call it a set of circumstances that an outsider will look at and possibly apply credit to such an individual that isn't warranted.
Makes a good point though, but since the whole analysis is wrong, in my opinion.
9/11 was always a One-Time Event.
(1.) Exactly which building does one think of blasting out of the earth after Pentagon and The Twin Towers after such an event has already happened on September 11, 2001? After the Parliament Building getting blown up there is nothing in London to blow up for the mythology of Guy Fawkes to 'give hope to the people.' The same singularity goes for Pearl Harbor. The same singularity goes for Masada. Only the intellectually poor think otherwise.
(2.) Exactly how many pilots can anyone recruit to be Kamikaze Pilots after the fully-fueled Passenger Zeroes have zeroed in on Twin Towers and Pentagon? Once you sink one Titanic the very design and architecture of the huge ship is obsolete except when it is an Aircraft Carrier and Destroyer. Every other attempt will be diarrhea and stomach flu on a romantic cruise. And it sure is. Self Immolating Suicide Bombers do not a Samurai make.
(3.) As to OBL, he was always interested in 50 year effect. That we need to give him credit. Whether that will turn into a Caliphate will have to wait 50 years, but whether OBL's 9/11 will turn into a hubris for the Western Civilization, the answers to that we know already. So, I suggest give that 'Thin Tall Lanky White Circumcised Ashkenazi Jew' called Osama bin Laden parading as Arabian Sunni Mujahadeen, credit where it belongs.
As with Hitler and Stalin, Osama effected 'Punctuated Equilibrium.' And did it well. War, like God, has no morality.
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