Knowing the consequences would Osama Bin Laden have gone ahead with Sept 11?

Great Debates
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[QUOTE=Marley23]
I am pretty sure he said the same thing publicly and privately.
[/QUOTE]

Taking this as a serious debate point, I gotta wonder. The man was not a dummy.

He could see for himself that the various terrorist attacks (suicide bombing and rocket launchers) did not cause Isreal to fold over time. Why would/did he think the US was any different?

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The purpose of asymmetrical warfare is twofold, and neither is the outright defeat of the nation in question:

  1. to bleed the opponent/target nation in question financially (and possibly physically, but that is secondary).

  2. to cause the opponent/target nation in question to render itself abhorrent to its more mainstream citizens and the rest of the world, by prodding it to institute more draconian anti-terrorism measures, optimally a police state. This makes the opponent/target nation far less stable and vulnerable to either external attack or internal revolution.

Osama bin Laden succeeded very well in both these areas, and the US response to 9/11 was better than he could ever have imagined as a recruiting tool for anti-American organizations. Gonzo, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it’s been well established from almost the very start that ObL was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The fact that Bush/Cheney managed to twist that into rationalization for the invasion of the utterly uninvolved Iraq was just icing on the cake for bin Laden. As a direct result of 9/11, the United States was provoked into openly torturing and abusing Muslims, as well as instituting the fairly ridiculous and ineffective Patriot Acts. That we aren’t far worse off than we are in the eyes of the world is mainly due to the world thinking we’d regained some degree of sanity when we finally elected President Obama.

bin Laden got more than he’d hoped for with 9/11 and survived pretty darned comfortably for ten years thereafter. That’s not bad for a man who already had been an outlaw, and was in, as I understand it, pretty poor health to begin with. Yeah, I think he’d do it again in a heartbeat.