This article on the analysis of the Bin Laden files is interesting reading. But this does not compute:
The Associated Press reported tonight that some of bin Laden’s writings show him musing over how many Americans he would have to kill to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Arab world and concluding that the body count would have to be in the thousands.
Wasn’t 9/11 in the thousands? And I seem to recall that lead to a justification for invading and toppling one Islamist regime, and one Arab dictator. I’m not sure the math on that one works out too well for you beardy. Plus, there’s only so much you can jack the American body count before we’re getting out of the Arab world because we need to wait for the radiation levels to come down a bit before we move in to pump out the rest of the oil.
Sebastian, no need to wait, we can do horizontial drilling.
I seem to recall the Japanese once tried to calculate how hard they’d have to hit us to shock us into submission, too.
Thinking you can demoralize Americans through a frontal assault on us is a fundamental misunderstanding of our character. You demoralize Americans by drawing us into a war we can’t win, but can’t withdraw from without losing face. If bin Laden was really trying to plan additional attacks on US soil, he was planning to interrupt an enemy in the course of making a mistake.
A lot of things don’t compute.
Did you believe that Bin Laden was hiding in a cave, billionaire leader of a vast criminal organization that he was?
Bin Laden was a mathematically challenged sociopath, but Islam is about faith not facts. Their book says chop off body parts, so they chop off body parts. No problem! It’s the will of Allah is what it is, so it’s all good!
Of course, they don’t have enough sense to even manufacture a car, but Allah is okay with dysfunctionality, in fact, he often requires it – he’s given them enough sense to make car bombs, so that they can stop praying with their asses in the air long enough to blow themselves up. It works for them! Sort of, I mean, as long as you count being dead as “working”, and it seems that they do look at it that way. Some cultures just have different ideas about what constitutes functionality, I guess. Just got to wonder where all their hate and resentment towards the rest of the world comes from. Lack of success, maybe?
Just a few train bombings with relatively low body counts, spread out at random and repeated as often as needed to keep people on edge, is all that would be required to make life here in the states unbearable.
Count me as one who is more afraid of our response to terrorism than terrorism itself. Our Seal team killed the man, but his ideas will prove much harder to kill than anything that can be accomplished with force.