Comment by nine_k
Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(
Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(
Well, no, not really - Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit attrocity so great against the American people that they will have to look into who those people are and why they did it, at which point hopefully they will discover their own government's work in the middle east and rise up against the government in protest.
Obviously, that didn't happen - I don't think your average American had any interest in looking into any of it, they just went "Arab people bad, let's invade", and of course accepted even greater invigilation and intrusion into their daily life and travel than ever before, all in the name of "safety". So yeah, terrorists made our lives miserable - but they failed to achieve their goals.
"Letting the terrorists win" is an expression from not long after 9/11 using a combination of the following logic. First, the Bush administration said something along the lines of "they hate us for our freedom" about the 9/11 terrorists, and if the terrorists hate freedom then enacting freedom-reducing policies in response to an act of terrorism is playing into their hands. Second, a common definition of terrorism is using fear to achieve political ends, so anyone who uses an act of violence to justify oppressive policies is sadistically taking political advantage of a tragedy at best and even meets that definition of a terrorist. Therefore enacting oppressive policies in response to an act of terrorism is letting the terrorists win.
> Therefore enacting oppressive policies in response to an act of terrorism is letting the terrorists win.
Completely agree. Terrorists destroyed the USA by destroying all of its freedoms and values. They happily gave up freedom for security in spite of the warnings of their founders. All it took was two aircraft.
It's my favorite thing about "Inside Job" conspiracies. Whether authority has covertly orchestrated an event behind the scenes or if they were quietly and deliberately lax in preventing the event, if they were just incompetent, or simply failed through no fault of their own: the event has now happened, so the important bit is that they have overtly capitalized on it to create policies with harmful consequences.
Is it though? I mean the US supported Bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians. Essentially we had a pet snake and complained when it bit us.
I think that the same case with Hamas which I believe was a mossad creation.
Most of these problems are self inflicted.