betterthanwell 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

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