fubarobfusco comments on What is the most anti-altruistic way to spend a million dollars? - Less Wrong

-4 Post author: Punoxysm 24 March 2014 09:50PM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 March 2014 04:26:17PM *  -1 points [-]

I stipulate that the U.S. government has put unreasonable and unjust burdens on travelers.

But whether the attacks were a success or a failure at advancing the attackers' political agenda has nothing to do with that.

The stated goal of the 9/11 attacks was not to put burdens on American travelers, but to change U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia — notably to end U.S. support for Israel and force the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Muslim-majority nations. Another motive some scholars have inferred was to provoke a global war between the West and the Islamic world, leading to a global caliphate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks

Since the attacks, the U.S. has continued to increase foreign aid (including military aid) to Israel; has prosecuted two aggressive wars in Muslim nations; and maintains significant military presence in a number of Muslim-majority nations including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Afghanistan.

The U.S. also killed the leaders of the groups responsible for the attacks.

The only stated goal of the attacks that can be charitably interpreted as having come to pass is the removal of U.S. soldiers from Saudi Arabia specifically. Those soldiers had been there as a force against the former Iraqi regime, no longer a concern.

Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers' political agenda.

Your and your mother's ill-treatment at the hands of U.S. officials is indeed an offense to good sense, common decency, and good government. But that injustice and inconvenience does not appear on the political goals of al-Qaeda. It is a consequence of domestic maladministration, sloppiness, and corruption.

tl;dr: If Clippy fails at turning the world into paperclips and is shut down, but some asshole uses Clippy's existence as an excuse to punch you in the gut, we would not say that Clippy had accomplished its goals. We would say it sucks that some asshole punched you, but Clippy still failed.

Comment author: betterthanwell 30 March 2014 05:48:48PM 1 point [-]

Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers' political agenda.

Osama Bin Laden (2004):

...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 Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida 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 to 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 Mujahedin bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah is willing and nothing is too great for Allah. That being said, those who say that al-Qa'ida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise because when one scrutinizes the results, one cannot say that Al-Qa'ida is the sole factor in achieving these spectacular gains. Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations -- whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction -- has helped al-Qa'ida to achieve those enormous results. And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States even if the intentions differ. And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (when they pointed out that) for example, al-Qa'ida spent $500,000 on the event, while America in the incident and its aftermath lost -- according to the lowest estimates -- more than 500 billion dollars, meaning that every dollar of al-Qa'ida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah besides the loss of a huge number of jobs. As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record, astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahedin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan with Allah's permission.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov1.html

Comment author: Lumifer 26 March 2014 04:40:33PM *  0 points [-]

Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers' political agenda.

I disagree. I think you're misreading the attackers' goals, in particular the time scale.

First, in contemporary ideology of terrorism there is a pretty standard way in which terrorism is supposed to work. The sequence looks as follows: terrorist acts cause fear and panic; the government reacts by clamping down and increasing repression; the people chafe under repression until they revolt; a revolution sweeps away the government and ruling elites.

Note that I'm stating no opinion on whether that sequence is likely to succeed -- I'm just pointing out that in the terrorist world this is a typical expectation of how things will work.

Given this, the al-Qaida attack has clearly achieved stages one and two.

Second, a major goal of islamic fundamentalists is to bring down the Great Satan, the USA. A collapse would be preferable, but weakening it, from their perspective, is a move in the right direction.

I submit that the (anticipated) response of the US to the 9/11 attacks significantly weakened the US. In other words, the US is losing the War on Terror in a pretty spectacular fashion.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 March 2014 06:36:10PM 0 points [-]

First, in contemporary ideology of terrorism there is a pretty standard way in which terrorism is supposed to work.

What's the evidence that it actually does work that way — or, for that matter, that these particular attackers believed it would?

I find Abrahms' theories (described by Schneier in the link upthread; use your favorite search engine to find Abrahms' papers) to be substantially more descriptive of how the world actually works. In gist, terrorism is ineffective as a means of political change, and terrorist groups are better modeled as gangs of disaffected young men than as political agents seeking change under desperate circumstances.

Also, the poor domestic policy choices of the U.S. government after 9/11 were not inevitable. Contrast them with the substantially more narrowly-tailored responses to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Comment author: Lumifer 26 March 2014 06:48:26PM *  0 points [-]

We don't have to concern ourselves with the general question of whether terrorism is a viable tactic for achieving political ends. We're discussing a more narrow question: were the 9/11 attacks "successful" and in which sense.

My position is that the attacks were successful beyond the hopes of al-Qaida -- they damaged the US in a major fashion (with enthusiastic cooperation of the US government, both Republican and Democratic administrations, I might add).

Comment author: mwengler 26 March 2014 05:09:49PM -1 points [-]

Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers' political agenda.

In my opinion, it is more meaningful to examine the terrorism against reasonable counterfactuals rather than againswt absolutes. I.e., grade on a curve. I.e., maybe the terrorists have failed, but they still did far better than anybody else using any other policy had done at advancing their agenda.

The world has spent about $5Trillion to prevent the terrorists from succeeding. $5Trillion cash, what are the additional expenses of all the delays of all the passengers, the business lost because foreigners could not get visas to enter the US in a timely fashion (I watched international standards meetings stop picking US destinations for any of their regular meetings, for example).

If in the alternative to spending the $5Trillion we had acceded to their demands and abandoned support for Israel and withdrawn our goyische military from Muslim countries, one might very well argue that we would have taken far more than the $5Trillion+ hit we took. I agree!

SO in conclusion, the terrorist approach to achieving these goals, at a cost of a few $million (?) to the terrorists, cost the West at least $5Trillion to counter, $5Trillion to ensure that the terrorists did not achieve their goals.

What might the terrorists have done otherwise to advance their agenda that would have accomplished more than that?

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