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Did Osama Bin Laden achieve his goals?

Did Osama Bin Laden achieve his goals?

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Amadeus

Amadeus

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Looking back at the last decade, I can't help but feel that Osama actually achieved his goals. What do you think?

Even in Death, Did Osama Bin Laden Win? - Forbes

In 2004, Bin Laden released a tape to Al-Jazeera where the former head of Al Qaeda laid out the purpose of the 9/11 attacks, and the organization’s goals. “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah,” Bin Laden said.

In other words, the goal was not to defeat America in battle. The goal was not to bleed American resolve on the battlefield. The entire purpose of Al Qaeda’s attacks on America was to bleed America’s economy dry. By that standard, even in death, Bin Laden has clearly won.

In January of 2001, as newly elected President George W. Bush prepared to take office, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report outlining its views on the tax revenue and government spending estimates for the remainder of the decade. The CBO predicted that, absent tax cuts or spending increases, the federal budget would remain in surplus throughout the decade. According to the CBO report, “Under current policies, total surpluses would accumulate to an estimated $2 trillion over the next five years and $5.6 trillion over the coming decade. Such large surpluses would be sufficient by 2006 to pay off all debt held by the public that will be available for redemption.”
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Not even close. Osama obviously wasn't a reader of Kensyian economics. 5.6 trillion is nothing.

OBL's problem is he did not have a grasp of government expenditures. The scale needed to spend the US into bankruptcy was severely under estimated. It would need to be 100x the 5.6 trillion with an economic and domestic collapse as well as a reduction of allies willing to allow the US to borrow. OBL did however successfully bait the US but that's a double edged sword that would be terrorist wannabe's will be meeting their 72 virgins much earlier than I'm sure they expected.
 
From Washington Post:

Osama bin Laden didn

Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t. So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?

Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the Communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.

The campaign taught bin Laden a lot. For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States, too.
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“He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions — and these comparisons have been explicitly economic,” Gartenstein-Ross argued in a Foreign Policy article. “For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, ‘continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’ ”

For bin Laden, in other words, success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be measured in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments we weren’t able to make in our country’s continued economic strength. And by those measures, bin Laden landed a lot of blows.
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Amadeus said:
Looking back at the last decade, I can't help but feel that Osama actually achieved his goals. What do you think?
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The goal for Osama was the same as it was done for the Russians. Wait them out until they can no longer afford to fight the war.

The simple fact is the U.S. trained an Army that did not want to fight for a corrupt government in Iraq. While the U.S. can fight wars, it cannot prevent corruption in governments. That is why the best course of action is to stay out of the M.E.
 
Amadeus said:
Looking back at the last decade, I can't help but feel that Osama actually achieved his goals. What do you think?
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If you're interpretation of his goal is correct, then I'd still say he failed. While some people are living worse today than in 2000, most are living the same or better. We have more jobs available today than ever before. In 2000, our population was 281.4 million. National unemployment was 4%. Today, our population is around 317 million. Our national unemployment is about 6.3%. (May) As boomers age, unemployment will take a dive. The jobs they've held won't simply go away. I'd say we probably have a rosy future. (No thanks to OBL, of course.)
 
You know me and my Youtube clips. I had to include an appropriate one.

 
Osama didn't just bleed America of treasure, he had a huge impact on foreign policy, both during after the 9/11 attacks and right up through Obama's presidency. America is so war-weary that Obama couldn't muster support for military intervention if he wanted to. Then there's the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, the ramped up security precautions throughout America, the divisiveness of politics; turning Americans against each other.

Total investment: 19 men with box cutters
 
Amadeus said:
Osama didn't just bleed America of treasure, he had a huge impact on foreign policy, both during after the 9/11 attacks and right up through Obama's presidency. America is so war-weary that Obama couldn't muster support for military intervention if he wanted to. Then there's the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, the ramped up security precautions throughout America, the divisiveness of politics; turning Americans against each other.

Total investment: 19 men with box cutters
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Think how he managed to grow our economy. Lots of good new jobs. Couldn't have made all those good government jobs without him.

Your last line is thought-provoking.
 
MaggieD said:
Think how he managed to grow our economy. Lots of good new jobs. Couldn't have made all those good government jobs without him.

Your last line is thought-provoking.
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I'm not going to pretend to be an economist, but it seems to me that the money spent on growing government, fighting terrorism, and paying Iraqis not to kill each other could have been spent on infrastructure, education, energy investment, and jobs that actually have a positive impact on the US.

I could be wrong, and I'm willing to learn...
 
Amadeus said:
I'm not going to pretend to be an economist, but it seems to me that the money spent on growing government, fighting terrorism, and paying Iraqis not to kill each other could have been spent on infrastructure, education, energy investment, and jobs that actually have a positive impact on the US.

I could be wrong, and I'm willing to learn...
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I won't argue that it's the wisest use of resources. I will argue, though, that we probably couldn't have mustered the political will to do as effective a job at creating those high-end jobs in public service.
 
Amadeus said:
Looking back at the last decade, I can't help but feel that Osama actually achieved his goals. What do you think?
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You need an 'Other' option because the war isn't over. There is no Caliphate, the House of Saud has not been overthrown, the United States has not withdrawn from the Middle East or SE Asia, Kashmir is not liberated, East Timor is not reconquered, Israel remains in occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank (not to mention in existence), etc. Almost by definition Osama Bin Laden did not accomplish the objectives he laid out for himself and his organization. His goal was not simply to wound the United States it was to complete an overthrow of the existing order in the Islamic world in favor of a pan-Islamist state and drive the United States from all of its lands--this has palpably not come to pass.

That being said the United States has obviously not succeeded in effecting its objectives, at least not nearly as much as might desire. But we have had our successes to highlight some of the less well known or considered ones you could turn to the annihilation of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the continuing suppression of Islamists in Yemen, the defeat of Islamists in Mali, etc, etc.

But that isn't really the thrust of this article is it? The point raised is that we have spent a prodigious amount in this conflict and therefore Bin Laden has won despite his failures. I'm not sure that is a fair assessment but there may be some truth to it. Nevertheless my conclusion would be that the end of this conflict has yet to be written and it's still too early to decide.
 
Amadeus said:
Osama didn't just bleed America of treasure, he had a huge impact on foreign policy, both during after the 9/11 attacks and right up through Obama's presidency. America is so war-weary that Obama couldn't muster support for military intervention if he wanted to. Then there's the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, the ramped up security precautions throughout America, the divisiveness of politics; turning Americans against each other.

Total investment: 19 men with box cutters
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Total investment? 19 men with box cutters? That's ridiculous.

Try hundreds of millions of dollars, spread throughout the globe, to gin up radical Islamic support, and support terrorism.
 
Amadeus said:
Looking back at the last decade, I can't help but feel that Osama actually achieved his goals. What do you think?
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I think he did. most people scoff at the idea but UBL knew he could never defeat America on the battlefield. He got us, the good old USA to spend trillions on homeland security and to abridge our freedoms prior to 9-11. He got us involved in two wars that we probably would have never been involved in without the 9-11 attack. He is bleeding this nation to death even after his death.

I understand where you are coming from and the results 9-11 produced. But most people will not be able to get off the battlefield to the other causes and effects in our post 9-11 world.
 
Amadeus said:
Osama didn't just bleed America of treasure, he had a huge impact on foreign policy, both during after the 9/11 attacks and right up through Obama's presidency. America is so war-weary that Obama couldn't muster support for military intervention if he wanted to. Then there's the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, the ramped up security precautions throughout America, the divisiveness of politics; turning Americans against each other.

Total investment: 19 men with box cutters
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You're wrong about that investment.

We've killed so many and destroyed so much in the ME, with our armed forces, drone strikes and surgical missiles, I would bet that Al Qaida and the rest of the Middle East denizens wish Bin Laden had never been born. Look at the unwelcome spotlight that has been focused on the Muslim Jihadists around the entire world.

Now Obama has come along and through his bumbling, he has destabilized the entire Middle East and inadvertently caused many, many more deaths.

It's naive to cite an initial small investment as the total cost of a decade long operation. It's been a huge loss for all involved.
 
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ocean515 said:
Total investment? 19 men with box cutters? That's ridiculous.
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No, what I said was correct. 9/11 was the catalyst for the War on Terror.
 
Ray410 said:
Now Obama has come along and through his bumbling, he has destabilized the entire Middle East and inadvertently caused many, many more deaths.
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Quoted for posterity.
 
Amadeus said:
No, what I said was correct. 9/11 was the catalyst for the War on Terror.
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Greetings, Amadeus. :2wave:

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He won the moment we passed the Patriot Act. He could never destroy us or our values (liberty) on a battlefield, but he managed to scare us into doing it to ourselves.

Instead of reacting to 9/11 as we did, we should have just rebuilt the tower EXACTLY as they were and never mentioned his name again. That would have been a big **** YOU to terrorists, it would have said loud and clear "you're not going to scare us, you're not going to change us, we're just going to keep being free; business as usual"
 
Yes. Bin-Laden wanted the US to get dragged into a long sustained war/conflict that alienates many in the countries dominated by the Islamic religion. He also wanted to drag the US into a situation where they spend lots of $$$ of that effort. Seems like to me we played right into what he wanted
 
polgara said:
Greetings, Amadeus. :2wave:

I thought you might be interested in the link below. It is the gift shop here at DP. I ordered some coffee mugs a while back to give as gifts, and they were top notch! They have just about everything for sale, from T-shirts to mugs to ? Highly recommend them, and I hope DP makes a little money in the process to continue this great site!

Http://www.cafepress.com/debatepolitics.
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Cool! Thanks for the link.
 
Lachean said:
He won the moment we passed the Patriot Act. He could never destroy us or our values (liberty) on a battlefield, but he managed to scare us into doing it to ourselves.

Instead of reacting to 9/11 as we did, we should have just rebuilt the tower EXACTLY as they were and never mentioned his name again. That would have been a big **** YOU to terrorists, it would have said loud and clear "you're not going to scare us, you're not going to change us, we're just going to keep being free; business as usual"
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Well said.
 
Amadeus said:
Looking back at the last decade, I can't help but feel that Osama actually achieved his goals. What do you think?
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His goal was to make all nations Islamic and he has failed miserably in that.
 
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