Probably will write more on this later.
But UBL got what he wanted right? The goal was the decline of the American Empire, and he managed it?
I have ordered The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden by Bergen, looking at a few others to better understand the guy, and al-Qaeda in general, to whatever degree that's possible.
But its hard to make the case that he didn't get exactly what he wanted.
We can discuss this in terms of geopolitical power and influence. I was principally thinking about the damage done to American Institutions, and how the wasted resources of Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror writ large were just us playing into a setup we should have anticipated.
I'm sure once Trump cuts my social security disability pay that I won't have time for this kind of thing, trying to squeeze it in now before the homelessness.
That’s one way to look at it, but I don’t think it’s particularly useful to look at it that way. 9/11 is a factor among many for sure. But demographic shifts, changes in media, etc., you can make all kinds of reductionist arguments, but why? Is there anything really gained from a simple narrative?
- But UBL got what he wanted right? The goal was the decline of the American Empire, and he managed it?
The goal was a Sunni Islamist caliphate stretching from Libya to Turkey. UBL wanted the decadent influence of the west to decline to the point where the teachings of Hassan Al Banna and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab could establish a durable nation where the correct practice of Islam could flourish.
The lesson Islamists took from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is that plucky freedom fighters can vanquish immoral foreign empires if they believe it hard enough. UBL in particular saw the lack of appetite the Soviets had for a protracted war while also lacking the perspective to regard the role of greater geopolitics - he saw the helicopters go down and he saw the Stingers but didn't see the half billion dollar a year budget or Pentagon-level planning and logistical support. He saw the dispirited Soviet troops but he didn't see Chernobyl or the black marketization of Peristroika.
Osama bin Laden took the milquetoast American responses to the Khobar Towers and USS Cole as a green light for a large scale domestic attack within US borders. it was the dumbest fucking move in terrorism since the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. It led to the perpetual occupation of Iraq, it led to twenty years of occupation in Afghanistan, it led to a changed dynamic with the Saudi royal family, it led to Houthi uprisings. It's fair to say that ISIS was UBL's goal but "NO NOT THAT WAY!!!!" in that ISIS was primarily decadent Europeans LARPing in the desert rather than enlightened Islamic scholars assembling an enlightened nation-state. ISIS also managed to rally the entire goddamn world against them by leaning on the piracy rather than the religious teachings. You wanna know what happened to ISIS between 2004 and 2011? It was UBL's missives-from-the-cave that kept 'em down. Everything UBL mumbled into a camcorder was anti-ISIS. Fast forward a few months past Abbotabad and we're breaking walls.
It's fair to say that the one single event that allowed the rise of MBS was the death of Osama bin Laden. Prior to UBL's death, American foreign policy required a nominally agnostic, nominally tame power structure within Saudi Arabia. After UBL's death American Foreign policy was able to adapt to a nominally fundamentalist, nominally disruptive power structure within Saudi Arabia. It was Osama bin Laden, after all, who objected to American bases in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War... and it was MBS who allowed direct El Al flights between Riyadh and Tel Aviv.
Osama bin Laden wanted the whole of South Asia to look like Talib Afghanistan. That's why al Qaeda capped Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before the twin towers. Fast forward twenty five years and the ruler of Saudi Arabia is WhatsApp buddies with Jared Kushner. Women can nominally drive. They're building ski resorts and billions have been spent importing European culture.
We all lost on September 11? But Osama bin Laden lost big. Things went exactly the opposite of how he thought they would. He was able staunch the bleeding while he was alive? But the minute he could no longer control the narrative, all hope of a Caliphate was fucking gone.
As far as "decline of the American Empire" I don't know if you've noticed but the only credible militaries in the world anymore are Ukraine and the Americans. Yeah Trump is a dumb fuck arranging Yemeni strikes over Signal but in Civ VI this is what you call "total cultural victory." That's an American jet, with an American soundtrack, aping an American cultural reference while saber-rattling against Americans. The co-opting is complete.
Osama bin Laden didn’t break America. America did.
We did so in thousands of tiny decisions, but we did it to ourselves.
We broke our public schools through funding cuts, educational fads that don’t work, and by watering down the standards for educational achievement. Where in 1940, kids graduating from high school were generally capable of reading and writing at least at a twelfth grade level. In 2024, the median college graduate reads on an eighth grade level. Osama didn’t do that, we did. We’re now to the point in educational decline that students graduating from high school are not capable of reading and writing entire book on a topic, and certainly cannot read analytically.
We destroyed the work ethic to the point that an entire generation is unwilling to get a job despite having spent decades going to school to train for those jobs. It’s now a regular occurrence for that generation to return to mom’s basement where they cry on various forms of social media that no woman wants to touch them. Osama did not create the incels.
For that matter, Osama didn’t refuse to pay to keep up our infrastructure. The potholes, falling bridges, and out of date railways and ports are not caused because Osama did 9/11.
Most if not all of these problems are self inflicted. And I’d put much more of the decline on Reagan and the fiscal conservatives gutting tge funds used to pay for education than to some middle eastern engineers turned jihadist with a kidney problem, Reagan republicans gutted unions, thus making living wages harder to come by. Problem being is that this process started in 1980 and OBL didn’t target the USA until he tried to plant a truck bomb in the WTC in the early 1990s.
Osama’s most lasting legacy is that the USA has been bombing the crap out of the Middle East for decades and supporting Israel bombing the crap out of Palestine. It’s created a massive backlash against Islam in general and convinced much of the west that Muslims are holy warriors who want to behead them and rape their wives. His legacy has been to trash the reputation of Islam across the globe. I don’t see it as a win.
My point was mostly about how the attacks on 9/11 allowed for all of the worst of America to take charge. How we sold our liberty for security and now have neither.
UBL didn't make us refuse to spend money on infrastructure, but he gave every bloodthirsty republican an excuse to spend the entirety of the national budget of my childhood and adolescence on the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
HOLLUPAMINNIT
- Where in 1940, kids graduating from high school were generally capable of reading and writing at least at a twelfth grade level.
22% of people graduated from high school in 1940. High School was a new idea in 1940 related to industrialization and the need for the American economy to pivot from agrarian to manufacturing. Meanwhile the illiteracy rate among minorities in 1940 was over ten percent so... that's gotten rather better? And while there have been some troubling trends related to COVID there's been a lot more right-wing hay made about it than anything else.
- We destroyed the work ethic to the point that an entire generation is unwilling to get a job despite having spent decades going to school to train for those jobs.
That's because we stopped making it worthwhile. This isn't a "work ethic" problem this is a "rational actor" problem.
- For that matter, Osama didn’t refuse to pay to keep up our infrastructure.
Not everyone refuses to pay for infrastructure.
We got problems, agreed. But howling at the moon about how everything has been bad forever doesn't point towards solutions.
No, but I’d say it’s an excellent counter argument for the idea that Osama bin Laden created these problems in the early 2000s. As I said, I think a good bit of our education woes stem more from Reagan GOP budget cuts and Union busting than anything that OBL could ever dream of doing. And thus saying he got what he wanted is a bit much. If anything, OBL was a gift to neocons, AIPAC and Israel — those groups made out like bandits using the Spector of 9/11 to invade two countries and secure more weapons for Israel.