As I posted 9-11ly, I believe bin Laden won. I believe he killed amurrica, like a hunter convincing buffalo to stampede off a cliff. This has a ramification I didn’t initially consider: any and all 9-11 memorial monuments are functionally gravestones to the US. There’s a line in that SNL sloths video “they eat cocaine off america’s gravestone,” which is objectively hilarious, but was not a thing you could do in real life… or was it? Call up your local sloths, score some coke, and pay your respects.
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I recall listening to one of bin Laden’s many 1990s monologues when he said almost word-for-word: “I’m telling you, America can be defeated.” In my youth it was all hydrogen bombs and the soviets and boomer submarines — How could some fanatical upstart with a massive chip on his shoulder hurt us from the caves of Afghanistan? Then 9-11 happens and congress passes the Patriot Act.
If not gravestones, monuments to OBL’s tactical prowess.
I remember reading a CBC opinion piece back… I’m pretty sure it was the leadup to the 2004 election in the U.S., and I think it was Martin O’Malley who wrote it. (He’s the person who originally made the statement about ‘the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation’ that then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau later used to great effect in the arguments in Parliament about decriminalization of homosexuality.)
It was basically about a tape released by bin Laden while he was in hiding, and had a section talking about how much Bush Jr. was after him… but as the columnist noted, it was also so blatantly a ‘don’t throw me in that briar patch’ conversation. Bush of course used it as proof that he needed to stay in power, exactly as bin Laden wanted.
Bush and bin Laden needed each other: Bush needed an enemy so he could look like he was powerful and ‘doing something’ (and his VP and financial supporters wanted the state of war so they could funnel money in their favour); and bin Laden both wanted to make the U.S. destroy its own reputation and create such a crackdown on Muslims that more of them would flock to his banner for ‘protection’. They both got what they wanted out of the deal, it’s just that bin Laden had longer term plans than Bush did.
I’ll have to see if I can find that article again. Unfortunately a lot of the old opinion column archives on the CBC website aren’t easy to find anymore.