| I refuse to surrender, lest the whole world be like the south of Israel on October 7th. The writer, unfortunately, offers no better ideas for how to destroy militant Islam, nor any inkling that this is a war that’s been going on since the seventh century AD. He is, according to the author blurb, a third year university student, and it shows. |
[InternationalAffairs] In his media appearances and addresses throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Bin Laden carefully laid out the strategy by which he would antagonise and provoke the West, through the use of escalating terrorist attacks, into "bleeding wars." It was by these wars that Bin Laden stated that he would exhaust and bankrupt the United States and its Western allies. With the United States and the rest of the West demoralised and exhausted by a global Islamist insurgency, Bin Laden believed that Al Qaeda would then be able to topple Western-friendly regimes across the Middle East, and purge all defiling Western influence from the Land of the two Holy Places.
The key to understanding Bin Laden’s use of terrorism is that he never saw terror as the end goal, nor did he believe that the West would be defeated by terrorism. Rather, Bin Laden saw terrorism as a means to provoke the West into retaliating and attacking the Muslim nations which were perceived as safe havens of terrorists. Once engaged in these armed conflicts, Bin Laden predicted that the mounting costs and dead soldiers would be unpalatable for the Western public, and that the West will have turned the majority of Muslims worldwide against it by waging bloody wars of attrition in Muslim nations. These factors would then combine to force the West into humiliating withdrawals.
Bin Laden’s objective was to either cause the West to collapse, or to be too exhausted and war weary to fight on. In the latter, he has succeeded. The United States was so determined not to be fighting on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 that Afghanistan was effectively abandoned to the Taliban. For the United States alone, the War on Terror is conservatively projected to cost, in the form of two wars, increased security costs, and future veterans care, at least $8 trillion. Added to this total are at least 800,000 who have died as a direct consequence of the violence of the War on Terror. Of those many deaths, thousands were Western troops, though the majority of those killed were local civilians caught in the crossfire.
There have been many alternative proposals as to how the last twenty years since 9/11 could have gone, though it is clear that there has been no strategic framework guiding the actions of the West to prevent mission creep expanding what had been an act of retaliation into a many-fronted war. Due to this lack of guidance, the West fell right into the trap which Bin Laden clearly and publicly laid.
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