Bin Laden Won

If this post sounds familiar to my reader(s), it is because I have been making this observation, including the literary reference below, every September, 11 since 2018, and intermittently before then.

First, I do not think that Osama bin Laden though that he could destroy the United States, if just because he though that the country was already on the path to destruction.

Rather, his goal was to hasten what he thought was an inevitable downfall of a corrupt and self-destructive society.

He knew that he could not directly change our society, but that he could trigger a response which would hasten the downfall of the west in general, and the USA in particular.

Osama bin Laden never planned on militarily defeating the United States, he planned to trigger a response that would lead us to destroy ourselves.

Once again, I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read Eric Frank Russell's magnum opus Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke a self-destructive overreaction by the authorities:

"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.

"Finally, let's consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face."

"It nearly happened to me once."

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, "The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn't even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap."

………

"However," Wolf went on, "the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain." He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, "Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk."

It's a straight line from 911 to the Great Recession, to Donald Trump, to our defeat in Afghanistan, to our emasculated public health apparatus mishandling Covid-19, to our corroding polity. 

They all have, to one degree another been trigger by our response to the 911 attacks, or by the neglect of our essential infrastructure that was driven by our world wide bug hunt for terrorists.

On a personal, and somewhat bizarre, note, the memory that is seared into my mind that day is my trip back home.  At the interchange between I-695 and I-83, the thought that went through my head was, "Traffic is never that good here."

The mind is a strange thing.