Bin Laden Wins

Thank you, George.

In the beginning, bin Laden said he couldn't bring us down. But, he said he'd figured out how to sucker us into bringing ourselves down. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was not a military maneuver, it was an economic gambit.

Knowing full well that we would follow him into the wastelands of Afghanistan, his initial plan was to retreat (which he did) and we'd get bogged down in an endless war of attrition that would eventually bankrupt us. His precedent was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In ten years of fighting, the Soviet Union found it had a tremendous drain on its economy. The unpopular war divided the people of the USSR. The end result was a Soviet withdrawal and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. They went bankrupt!

But Bush went bin Laden one better. Finding that Afghanistan lacked significant targets for a glorious war, the Bush administration used the 9/11 attack as an excuse to pursue plans to invade Iraq ... a priority from day one of the administration. Bin Laden must have cheered! The move took the pressure off bin Laden, provided an unprecedented recruiting tool for his cause throughout the Middle East, and we found ourselves embroiled in an unwinable war. Our lack of intellectual curiosity led us into a quagmire with multiple enemies - the Sunni, the Shi'a, the Kurds, and the former Baathists of the deposed Saddam Husein regime. Our ignorance turned it into an exercise in "learning on the job" and the lesson we learned was that no matter what we did in Iraq, we pissed off one heavily armed faction or another.

The exercise drained our economy at a rate of $10 Billion a month while the economic house of cards we'd built over decades of domestic deregulation started showing signs that it was coming apart at the seams.

Our Keystone Cops response to bin Ladin's simple act of hijacking a couple planes and flying them into a couple of prominent buildings in Manhattan became a text book demonstration of chaos theory which posits that the motion of a butterfly's wings on the slopes of Mount Fuji can set currents in motion that eventually result in typhoons in the South China Sea. Bin Laden was a butterfly and the economic consequences of his single act on 9/11 have set in motion economic currents that are about to swamp our ship of state.

It's hard to say you're winning the War on Terror when you just went bankrupt. With a national debt rapidly approaching $11 Trillion that forces us to borrow vast amounts just to service the interest, it's difficult to make the case that we are not.