Nova_Division comments on Terrorist leaders are not about Terror - Less Wrong
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There was a Washington Post Article about the fact that bin Laden apparently had goals of damaging the U.S. economically instead of purely by death-destruction-terror. It goes on to discuss that in that respect, he might have been very successful.
There is some highly specious reasoning in that piece. First, the notion that the Afghan war bankrupted the USSR and led to their demise was a symptom of Bin Laden's delusions, not a fact about the world. The war wasn't unimportant, but the collapse of the USSR was much more complicated than that, and reflected the over-all trend of trying to outspend the US DOD with significantly less GDP.
This is even more dubious. Certainly there is some relationship between reserve rates and mortgage markets but most of the excess money supply was "created" by the various financial arrangements that buried default risks, artificially lowering the price and returns on the secondary markets.
This piece reads more to me like a not-very-subtle dig at the author's domestic political grievances.
It's an interesting statement, but back in 2008 I read a compilation of Laden statements 1994-2004, and one of the interesting things (besides how bin Laden waffled on 9/11 and how he admitted it worked out much better than expected) was how his economic reasoning does not show up until the end - suggesting that he had no such thing in mind. And you see on occasion some pretty weird economic thinking, like this '97 bit:
This is hardly new, didn't he say something similar himself in his videos? The point was to trick the US into radicalizing the populace via increasingly barbaric acts of warfare and secret policing. He wouldn't be the first terrorist to make such a claim and, tempting as the "don't you see you are playing into their hands!" argument is, it always smells like post-hoc justification for a failed military campaign.
Edit: Sorry should have read the article didn't realise it mentioned the mans own arguments.