Sub statement: Timothy Snyder on how Bush and the US responded to 9/11 exactly the way Al-Qaeda wanted, and how America’s invasion of Iraq led to the decline of rules-based orders and re-emergence of wars of aggression like the Ukraine and Iran wars
DrunkenAsparagus on
I’m as anti-neocon as they come, and I think that America responded to 9/11 in a number of catastrophically stupid ways. However, if you dredged Osama Bin Laden up from Davey Jones’s Locker, how would he react? The US is out of Afghanistan, but it’s still in the heart of the Arabic world, near Mecca. Israel is not only not destroyed, but
more strident and expansionist. Furthermore, most Arab leaders are establishing closer and closer ties to Israel. The main divide in the Muslim world seems to be a cold war between two Muslim powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Bin Laden didn’t share the same genocidal ambitions towards non-Wahabbist Muslims that many of his compatriots did, but I don’t think he’d like that very much.
Now, again, America did a lot of stupid shit in the last 25 years, but these screw ups are largely orthogonal to Bin Laden’s actual goals. Yes America is weaker and has been taken down a leg, which he might take satisfaction in, but in terms of his stated goals, America seems no less involved in the Middle East than when he started.
randomnameicantread on
This just in: Al Qaeda yearned to be utterly decimated in every way, second only to how strongly it yearned for a dramatic increase of US involvement in the Middle East.
There’s a tendency to say “[policy that I don’t like, caused by 9/11] is exactly what the terrorists wanted!!!!” No, the terrorists wanted (and continue to want) very specific things; they are genuine true-believer religious extremists. Bin Laden himself couldn’t have been more wrong in the impact he predicted for 9/11, chiefly that the US would run from the ME tail between legs, his fellow Muslims would rise up against the West-supported decadent false tyrants and establish glorious sharia-compliant realms, and of course that his influence would be the guiding light of all this.
We can, and should, discuss the drawbacks of policies logically instead of appealing to this “this policy is bad because The Enemy likes it [citation needed]” thought-terminating cliche.
It’s just succ-style self-hating smug defeatism: “West/USA bad *and* weak!!! West lost!!!! Guess we should utterly give up on liberalism, become isolationist as a punishment for our imperialist ways, and start Revolution-ing.”
3 Comments
Sub statement: Timothy Snyder on how Bush and the US responded to 9/11 exactly the way Al-Qaeda wanted, and how America’s invasion of Iraq led to the decline of rules-based orders and re-emergence of wars of aggression like the Ukraine and Iran wars
I’m as anti-neocon as they come, and I think that America responded to 9/11 in a number of catastrophically stupid ways. However, if you dredged Osama Bin Laden up from Davey Jones’s Locker, how would he react? The US is out of Afghanistan, but it’s still in the heart of the Arabic world, near Mecca. Israel is not only not destroyed, but
more strident and expansionist. Furthermore, most Arab leaders are establishing closer and closer ties to Israel. The main divide in the Muslim world seems to be a cold war between two Muslim powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Bin Laden didn’t share the same genocidal ambitions towards non-Wahabbist Muslims that many of his compatriots did, but I don’t think he’d like that very much.
Now, again, America did a lot of stupid shit in the last 25 years, but these screw ups are largely orthogonal to Bin Laden’s actual goals. Yes America is weaker and has been taken down a leg, which he might take satisfaction in, but in terms of his stated goals, America seems no less involved in the Middle East than when he started.
This just in: Al Qaeda yearned to be utterly decimated in every way, second only to how strongly it yearned for a dramatic increase of US involvement in the Middle East.
There’s a tendency to say “[policy that I don’t like, caused by 9/11] is exactly what the terrorists wanted!!!!” No, the terrorists wanted (and continue to want) very specific things; they are genuine true-believer religious extremists. Bin Laden himself couldn’t have been more wrong in the impact he predicted for 9/11, chiefly that the US would run from the ME tail between legs, his fellow Muslims would rise up against the West-supported decadent false tyrants and establish glorious sharia-compliant realms, and of course that his influence would be the guiding light of all this.
We can, and should, discuss the drawbacks of policies logically instead of appealing to this “this policy is bad because The Enemy likes it [citation needed]” thought-terminating cliche.
It’s just succ-style self-hating smug defeatism: “West/USA bad *and* weak!!! West lost!!!! Guess we should utterly give up on liberalism, become isolationist as a punishment for our imperialist ways, and start Revolution-ing.”