Osama bin Laden Won
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
“All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, 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 for their private companies.” – Osama bin Laden, 2004
I wrote this take six years ago today for Paste Magazine, and evidence has only mounted in its favor since, as outlets like Foreign Affairs and New York Magazine have written this same headline as well. Everything that Osama bin Laden set out to do in the 9/11 attacks, he accomplished. We have suffered human, economic, and political losses without achieving anything of note other than some benefits for our private companies. We did chase a piece of cloth across the entirety of the Middle East, leaving a trail of blood in our wake. The War on Terror is a failure of historic proportions, and bin Laden was able to pull it out of America because he understood us better than we did at the time.
September 11th is a solemn day, a day to remember those we lost, but it’s important to properly honor their memories and be honest about why they were killed. Terrorism isn’t some mindless bloodthirsty rage–it is by definition, a violent political attack against civilians aimed to achieve political ends. There are clear explanations behind Osama bin Laden’s plan to drag the United States into a self-destructive rage, and “terrorists hate our freedoms” is a nice story we told ourselves to keep the fairy tale of American exceptionalism alive, but it has no basis in reality. Just listen to bin Laden explain his motivations from this 2004 speech.
I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is an event where Ronald Reagan did a basic foreign policy thing to rein in the IDF that Joe Biden has struggled to do in Gaza, and Reagan even called Israel’s bombing campaign a “holocaust.” There is no propaganda powerful enough to obscure the clear fact that Osama bin Laden and Ronald Reagan found themselves allied in horror in 1982. This speaks to obvious truths about American foreign policy that we ignored up until that fateful September day when bin Laden violently changed the world and forced us to confront our government’s many sins across the globe.
The 9/11 attacks were so successful in fracturing the West that the dynamics they unleashed repeated themselves in Israel after Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7th last year, where their massacre of civilians was also a response to an imperial occupation. The pressure point here is and always has been obvious ever since the United States and the United Kingdom established their forward operating outpost in Israel in the 20th century. One of the sick and twisted ironies of being a Jew living in a rare age of the state of Israel is that after centuries of imperial immiseration, this iteration of Israel was created explicitly by and primarily for agents of empire, and now it is cited by terrorists like Osama bin Laden as one of the chief rationales for his attacks against the West.
The lesson of all empires in history is that empire inevitably comes home to brutalize its own citizens. Typically, that notion is used as a description of the empire itself bringing imperial tactics used abroad back home, like the hyper-militarized response to the Ferguson protests with weapons of the Iraqi and Afghan wars in 2014. But empire’s vast hegemony blows back in more ways than one, and the excesses of foreign conquest have created terrorist fighting forces willing to massacre thousands of civilians in order to point out the hypocrisy of countries like the United States and Israel doing the same.
Osama bin Laden figured that if he could activate America’s most jingoistic impulses, that he could bog us down in the graveyard of empires and loosen our grip across the Middle East. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq receding into the background, Americans could be forgiven for believing we had withstood bin Laden’s assault. One President Trump and a botched Afghanistan withdrawal sending President Joe Biden to a farm upstate later, and it’s clear that Osama bin Laden’s attacks still reverberate through to today.
And that’s before you get to how Israel has essentially speedrun America’s depraved response to the 9/11 attacks after October 7th. All the jingoism and rallying around the flag and bloodthirsty violence we went through in those subsequent weeks, months and years has been repeated by our chief client state. Israel is an American creation in so many ways, and their unhinged response to 10/7 is more proof of how my people’s supposed Jewish salvation comes primarily as an echo of American empire.
Osama bin Laden stole two decades and counting from us. He killed over 3,000 people hoping that it would eventually divide us, and President Donald Trump was the outcome of his dreams. Every day it seems as if American soft power becomes weaker than the one before, and it is obvious that this century is unlikely to be an American one like the last. Twenty-three years ago, Osama bin Laden irrevocably changed America and perhaps Israel too, proving that if incentivized properly, we will willingly enter a self-destructive cycle of which we have yet to escape from.