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The money we spent fighting him helped drive our country into the hole economically. While he didn't carry out any other of his threats, he did this and that is really all he needed to do.
The money we spent fighting him helped drive our country into the hole economically. While he didn't carry out any other of his threats, he did this and that is really all he needed to do.
Any thoughts?
First of all the U.S. is hardly bankrupt there is a difference between not being able to pay for what you buy and not willing to pay for what you buy. Second, Bin Laden had absolutely nothing to do with the financial crisis or the recession. Did the war in Afghanistan and Iraq increase the national debt... yes, could we have paid for the wars without raising that debt, most certainly. So outside of the realm of economics what exactly did bin Laden accomplish?
He didn't by a long shot bankrupt the country. Look at total spending. Its actually entitlement we need to spend less on as they are driving the deficit to largest degree.
Osama bin Laden was not fighting any "War on Terror", he was an eccentric cult figure with the professed goal of eventual world wide Islamic run theocracies. Step one was supposed to be chasing the west entirely out of the Islamic world. Step two was the eradication of Israel. Step three was the unification of all Muslim nations into a single great power under a single great leader...perhaps himself. Step four would be the collapse of the corrupt secular governments of the west, replaced by Islamic theocracies.
Did he win? Measured by his goals, he not only failed to achieve Step One, he worsened matters because the US reaction to 9/11 was the takeover of an entire Islamic nation, enlarging the western presence in the middle east.
Worse, he was assassinated by the corrupt secularists of the west, and instead of becoming a martyr who has inspired others to step up the war against the US, most of the Mid East seems to be taking a "good riddance to the troublemaker" attitude.
The corrupt secularists continue to thrive and Osama sleeps with the fishes. I don't see his victory.
But the amount of money we spent fighting him would have outweighed any other damage he could have done, correct?
If that is so, it is irrelevant.
ObL's goal was not to get the U.S. to spend X amount of money.
It was to get the U.S. out of the Middle East, either by cowing the U.S. into withdrawing, or by provoking the U.S. to act in a way that resulting in a backlash which threw the U.S. out of the Middle East.
Neither happened.
As a result of his actions, he is dead. The fundamentalist Taliban regime is no longer in power. Whether or not it might return one day is irrelevant to the fact that the net result of 09/11 has led to a diminishing of the power of the fundamentalist ObL-approved regime for 11+ years now.
As a result of his actions, a Shi'ite regime is now in power in Iraq. A crony-ist regime, at that, the very sort of Muslim state ObL railed against. At least Saddam Hussein's regime was nominally Sunni. You are aware that ObL hardly preferred the apostate (his Sunni view) Shi'ites, right?
And it's hard to see any regime changes in the Muslim world where he would have preferred the new regime to the old one. Egypt is just "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". Libya? Tunisia? Yemen? I don't think so.
Your calculus is that an American reaction to 09/11 that has been less than optimal, and downright adverse in many ways, is somehow a 'victory' for ObL. And that is a nonsensical calculus.
But the amount of money we spent fighting him would have outweighed any other damage he could have done, correct?
I suppose it depends on the dollar figure you assign to a human life. Remove Iraq, which in reality had nothing to do with bin Laden or the WOT, when I calculate the amount spent vs the lives lost since 1993 the cost of fighting al Qaeda and its affiliates has, is, and will continue to be worth the cost.
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