He openly talked about “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Twenty-five years later, the bill for our response to 9/11 is still coming due.
Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is worth saying something my fellow Americans might not like.
Bin Laden could not defeat the United States militarily. He needed us to exhaust ourselves and change ourselves.
Not that he won. He didn’t. American special operators found him in Pakistan in 2011, shot him dead, and dumped his body into the Arabian Sea — probably. Al-Qaeda never destroyed the United States, overthrew the Saudi monarchy, conquered Jerusalem, or established the worldwide caliphate bin Laden imagined.
But bin Laden had a strategy. And a disturbing amount of it worked.
He wanted American forces out of Saudi Arabia. The large post-Gulf War presence ended in 2003, although the United States never fully left.
He wanted to draw the United States into long, expensive wars in the Muslim world. We obliged him beyond his wildest expectations.
In 2004, bin Laden spoke explicitly of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” He did not bankrupt us. Not yet.
