alt Hacker NewsYes. History will record that bin Laden won. There's a pre-9/11 book about bin Laden, "The Man Who Declared War on America". Bin Laden was interviewed.
Consider the situation at the end of the Clinton administration. The US was at peace. The Soviet Union was gone. The US got along with China and Russia. No major enemies remained. The federal budget was balanced. Bin Laden looked at that, and realized that America had to be weakened before it could be defeated. That was his plan.
Mission accomplished.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Laden:_The_Man_Who_Declare...
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> Yes. History will record that bin Laden won
Or as The Onion has put it:
https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...
The problem started way before Bin Laden; in a large part due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb and his brother Mohammed who taught Osama Bin Laden.
Many Muslims weren't political before the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood got enough influence.
> bin Laden won
are his people better off or are they worse off?
Oh come on. You’re trying to be edgy without any understanding of reality.
It’s like saying History will record Gavrilo Princip as having won WW1. Huh?
America’s current troubles are political polarization and ballooning deficits. Both of which are happening in every developed country, having nothing to do with 9/11. The foreign interventionism is a 100 year tradition in the US, nothing new under the sun.
The only thing Bin Laden accomplished is making air travel annoying, making some military contractors filthy rich, and getting hundreds of thousands of his Muslim brothers killed over values that are slowly eroding in the Middle East anyways.
The American global military empire was always going to decline over time, if anything, his actions reversed that decline and led to more American intervention. He got the opposite of what he wanted.
Whilst I think there’s some truth to this, America’s elite would have brought us to this point anyway. Trump is a symptom of unfettered neoliberalism exporting jobs and destroying communities rather than a cause. Bin Laden drew America into forever wars and solidified their enemies in some dimensions. But America’s great downfall has been the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by its elite. They smashed the social compact and destroyed its institutions in the pursuit of profit.
I think Bin Laden will get a chapter in the book on the fall of America, but Reagan will be on the front cover.
Bin Laden’s ultimate objective was to evict US military forces from the Middle East. In response to 9/11, we massively expanded our footprint in the region and formed even deeper relationships with the Saudi government (whom Bin Laden hated for in his view, “[suspending] Islamic laws, and replacing it with statuary laws”). You can read it all in his original, late 90s declaration of jihad against the United States[1] and decide for yourself if you think he ultimately achieved what he wanted, but for my money, he lost basically everything. In the strictest sense, we did stop “occupying” (stationing troops) in Saudi Arabia itself after we kicked off the Iraq war and concentrated our forces in Iraq and at Al Udeid airbase, but I don’t think that was really the spirit of the thing.
[1] https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Declara...