Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

They've never witnessed functioning policy on any front. Bin Laden wanted to destroy America, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The current administration is the logical result of fear and ignorance and xenophobia being elevated to our primary motivations, rather than merely being the position of a few embarrassing reactionary cranks. A prerequisite for winning elections in half the country today is that you must be the dumbest and meanest and most corrupt motherfucker the voters have ever seen. If you're not, somebody dumber and meaner and more corrupt will come along to push you out (e.g. Paxton in Texas for a current example, but it's the entirety of the Republican party and a not insignificant part of the Democratic party).

View on HN

>They've never witnessed functioning policy on any front. Bin Laden wanted to destroy America, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

This is revisionism. The agenda of al-Qaeda was to establish a caliphate. The whole "al‑Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States" meme was just a pivot after they got pummeled by the US army, after 9/11. That's not to say the US won, but the US losing isn't the same as al‑Qaeda winning.

>al-Qaeda[a] is a pan-Islamist militant organization led by Sunni Islamist jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda

Did they need the real estate under the World Trade Center to establish a caliphate?

Which was why it was widely considered a dumb move on the part of Bin Laden. It attracted all sorts of unwanted attention, that ultimately led to the the core group losing all relevance. The other al-Qaeda franchises might be doing well, but the people who pulled off 9/11 (and their successors) have virtually no influence, on top of being hunted by the US.

I didn't say anything about what al-Qaeda wanted. I said, "Bin Laden wanted to destroy America". Am I wrong for believing the evidence of his actions supports that assertion?

>I didn't say anything about what al-Qaeda wanted

Given that Bin Laden is al-Qaeda's leader, it's approximately correct to treat them as the same entity, unless you're arguing that there's some factional struggle inside al-Qaeda.

>I said, "Bin Laden wanted to destroy America". Am I wrong for believing the evidence of his actions supports that assertion?

No, because the "destroy America" objective came afterwards, after his most bombastic attack, so there's a texas sharpshooter fallacy going on, where you're redefining your conditions for success. It's like putin invading ukraine claiming to want to conquer the entirety of it, then after years of stalemate pivoting and claiming all he wanted to do was capture donbas.

I dunno, man.

Bin Laden's words:

"Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!"

American politics has often been about pitting one group against another. Convincing them that others are benefiting at their expense, or that they will in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com