And nothing ever was. Plenty of stupid political decisions today, and untold billions of wasted money some of which is spent today are a direct consequence of 9/11.
"Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.
...
All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat."
The hope was to bankrupt the US, forcing them to withdraw from the ME (especially Israel and Saudi Arabia), like what basically happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan. This did not happen.
Sure the whole debacle did cost US a lot of money, lives and perhaps prestige. But that does not mean al-Qaeda achieved their goals. The US is for better or worse even more entrenched in the ME, with bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Israel and the Saudis are still there.
Some tend to think that anything which is bad for the US means the terrorist are winning, because "they just wants to hurt us". But it doesn't work like that. Terrorism is a tactic employed by certain groups to achieve certain goals. It is possible that both parties are weakened by a conflict.
Al Qaeda believes in a final apocalyptic war between Islam and basically everybody else, ending in a global Islamic Caliphate. Their goal is to provoke that war, which they believe they are already fighting. They just want everybody else to join in.
Yeah, maybe the actual goals of the terrorists was to make everybody wait longer in airports and getting annoyed? As just revenge for the betrayal of Sykes-Picot and the desecration of the holy lands.
No, the actual goal may have been to increase the visibility of Al Quaeda; serve as a recruitment poster and show that their group can hurt the biggest force on the planet with impunity in a way that can not be denied or spun.
The mantra 'never leave a crisis unused' is enough to explain everything else that followed. Getting the United States out of the middle East was never going to happen as a result of this, rather the opposite and that too would have the effect of driving more people in to the hands of the extremists.
America is about as predictable in this sense as it comes, you can speculate all you want about what would have happened if they had left the Middle East but that universe is not the one we live in.
That’s true. Yet I was surprised at how quickly NYC went back to normal. Five years later I was hard-pressed to see any real changes on the ground but for See Something Say Something posters in the subway and the gaping hole and tussle over the buildings’ reconstruction. IDK what I expected.
And nothing ever was. Plenty of stupid political decisions today, and untold billions of wasted money some of which is spent today are a direct consequence of 9/11.