The Legacy of Osama Bin Laden
The arrival of the decennial observation of the attacks of September 11, 2001 — at least in the northeastern portion of the country — is marked by at least as much of a literal cloud hanging over us as a figurative one. I am certain that my musings on where we stand as a nation are, in part, clouded by recent natural disasters and the reminder that fate, in the hands of Mother Nature, can leave us feeling lost, damp, and alone in much the same way that mad bombers and plane crashers can.
Still, it’s tempting to polish the apple and chalk one up in the victory column. Tens years after the towers came down, Osama bin Laden, along with many of his top cohorts, is dead. The Taliban, who sought to shield him, is ousted from power and most of their strongholds lie in ruins. The total number of al-Qaeda remaining in Afghanistan is frequently quoted as being down to double digits. Is this not victory?
There’s a reason that it might not feel this way for some of us. The damage didn’t all take place on that one September day — it rolled on for years, draining us of stamina while a new generation came of age knowing nothing but a post-9/11 world.
When England’s King Henry VIII was a young man, he suffered a wound to his leg which was later re-opened and aggravated in a jousting accident in his forties. While he lived an additional eleven years and eventually prevailed over his enemies, owing to the lack of any modern medical knowledge, the injury plagued him to the end of his days. It not only led to other maladies which likely contributed to his early demise, but weakened him in the eyes of his domestic rivals.
I bring up Henry only because his jousting opponent, in some ways, reminds me of bin Laden. He didn’t defeat the United States in any way, shape, or form. But he most assuredly wounded us.
Perhaps things might have played out much differently had we somehow struck back with a decisive knock-out blow. We started out with more than enough exuberance, ready to take on the villains and band together as a nation. Everyone was flying Old Glory and spoiling for a fight. While discussing this subject recently, my wife reminded me of a shopping trip she took a few days after the attacks. She found herself at a stop light in a line of roughly a half dozen cars. Hers was the only one without an American flag on it and she recalls feeling somewhat out of place.
It’s not that we were part of some anti-flag contingent. We had ours flying at home along with the rest of the block. We’d simply not thought to pick up one suitable for display on an automobile antenna. But the point was that everyone was primed for battle and, more importantly, expecting a victory. But that victory failed to materialize.
I can’t help but wonder what the world would look like today if we had killed — or even better, captured — bin Laden at Tora Bora in December of 2001. What if we had wrung out of him the names and locations of all his top associates and staged them at Gitmo for daily frog walks before the cameras in orange jump suits and leg irons? It would have sent a powerful message to the rest of the world and, more importantly, to ourselves that America was not to be messed with. That our power was beyond question and any attempt to knock us down would be met with swift and harsh retribution.
But that never happened. Even with their erstwhile “headquarters” in Afghanistan lying in tatters, al-Qaeda metastasized into global pockets of angry antagonists who had been shown how they might score a victory. The most hunted criminal on the planet spent more than nine years flitting through the shadows like a ghost in the collective consciousness of the world. He had demonstrated that the giant was actually flesh and blood, not an invincible machine. If you cut us, we would indeed bleed.
So the wound remained. And it festered.
We were an extremely divided nation before the planes hit on Sept. 11, 2001. The apparent “unity” after 9/11 is a myth — it was short-lived.
Yes, we needed to strike back quickly, and hard, and then leave it at that. The long-slog path that we took allowed the previous wounds to fester and assured no end ever to the war.
I am not a Dubya hater. I voted twice for him and defended him. But his War on Terror strategy was never workable … open-ended, resource-draining, endless war with no possible victory scenario.
So yeah, that hurts. We needed leadership from the leadership class as a whole post-9/11, and we didn’t get it.
GWB continued the Clintons’ evil policy of supporting the local branches of al Qaeda in the Balkans, against the Christian Serbs who never did us any harm.
As this blog post recounts, a vast number of Islamic terrorists have spread from their US-provided stronghold in the Balkans into the rest of the world.
When will we reverse this policy, clean up the mess, and destroy this vipers’ nest that we allowed our “leaders” to build?
Radical Islam is evil and a threat.
But the vastly more dangerous threat this country faces is the Radical Left.
Radical Islam can cause damage, but it can’t even come close to destroying the country.
The Radical Left is one election away.
@ 1 proreason
I propose a neologism for this evil confluence:
S I N I S L A M
which combines sinister (Latin for ‘left’)
which hopelessly dreams of a nightmarish ‘utopia’,
with islam, which you know means submit to Iblis (Satan).
The fact that it looks like sin + islam is by the by.
Seven short years after 9/11 the United States elected the son of a Muslim as its President. The country did so despite the fact he was completely unvetted. Anyone who questioned the qualifications of this gross incompetent was dismissed as a racist. Since his election, the pretend-Christian in the White House has caused untold damage which will take decades to undo. Causing the strongest nation in the world to respond like Swedes to an attack on its financial centre and capital is victory.
Every president we have had since Reagan left office has done his part to sell us out to Muslim interests, whether intentionally or otherwise. On the part of GWB, I believe it was out of ignorance or misplaced idealism. On the part of the Clintons, GHWB, and Hussein, it was deliberate, and I do not shrink from calling it treason.
We cannot rely on the left-wing “mainstream” media to “vet” the candidates. The media knew perfectly well just how bad Obama was, and they kept quiet about it on purpose.
Au contraire, mon ami, he did more than wound us; I’m sure he won way beyond his expectations because of our idiotic and fear-filled reaction and response. We sent ground troops to become sniper targets and IED fodder when air raids and other types of raids would have been far more effective and cost effective; we mortgaged the future of our grandchildren for security and airport upheaval, we divided our nation into various unhappy factions. Had we had a Teddy Roosevelt instead of Bush followed by disastrous Obama the problem would have been solved. The potential for the current Jihad has existed for 1400 years. It was petro-dollars that activated it. Hit the financiers of Jihad instead of bowing to them, cut off the funding for hate-preaching mosques and madrasahs, for bomb making schools, and Islam will settle back in camel dung proselytizing among only backward nations which is what they’ve done all along. Our ignorance and political correctness is what gave him his biggest victory and continues to inspire and encourage his followers.
I entirely agree with Anonymous, and certainly not with the author of this essay. We are thoroughly infiltrated by the enemy and are doing very little to stop them. At stake is oil, as Anon points out. I wrote about that history here: http://clarespark.com/2009/09/11/oil-politics-and-obamas-view-of-israeli-history/.
We didn’t need a GWB, we needed a Vlad Tepes.
And we still do.
“Meet Me in the Stairwell,” A Prayer for 9/11
The following was received as an email in 2010 and posted here with minor editing on September 11th, 2010. It hasn’t lost any of its significance. If anything, with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 without allowing the presence of any clergy or the expression of any prayerful invocations, “Meet Me in the Stairwell” is more valuable than ever.
(Read “Meet Me in the Stairwell, A Prayer for 9/11″ at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5407.)
What jigoistic nonsense!
Of course Osama won.
The US Adminstration is taken over by Bolsheviks.
The US Congress is rife with self-serving mobsters.
US Justice exists only to excuse soldiers of the Left.
The Palace itself is run by an Islamophile and his socialist emirs.
And the generals hide while their Sec’y unctuously quibbles.
Osama didn’t win?
There is always the question: Do events create or reveal character, or a little of both? As a country, the postmodernist, PC and sentimentalist rot was far deeper than many of us supposed. I believe our government, meaning both parties, to some extent colloborating with an international elite, reacted to 9/11 in ways designed to protect itself (i.e., the elites) and the Muslims against the American people.
This sounds way more paranoid and kooky than I mean it. I am not an Alex Jones fan or anything like that. I mean that there is an international elite who simply looked after their own interests first, without regard for, and to a large extent blind to, how their actions would play among ordinary Americans. I am talking about things like hustling the bin Laden family out of the U.S. immediately post 9/11, or George W. Bush’s meeting with the Saudi prince in Crawford, TX, and Dubya’s eventual agreement to continue to allow Saudis to have student visas in the U.S., even though abuse of that program from that country was crucial to 9/11.
These actions still bring tears to my eyes — how the U.S. government and our alleged European allies seemed to do everything in their power to prevent and deny any kind of emotionally satisfying response to 9/11. We were not allowed to see the dead body of Osama bin Laden — must deny anything that might be emotionally satisfying to us. But the elite — they get to see the pictures.
It’s not that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda won: It’s they exposed deep fault lines, not only vertical lines like liberal/conservative, but horizontal ones by class.