Making Osama's Dreams Come True

Bob Keller, a professor emeritus at Western Washington University, writes,

History, I suspect, will conclude that the 19 hijackers accomplished more than Osama bin Laden ever dreamed possible, "a world changed forever": the long stock market tailspin, bankruptcy of major airlines, massive federal spending by a GOP president, alerts at the Super Bowl and Fourth of July celebrations, vast expansion of our central government, an invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, bellicose threats to invade Iraq, huge new budget deficits, violation of traditional American civil liberties and legal due process, long lines and delays at U.S. airports, a severely depressed tourist trade in Spain, Italy, France and Germany, merchant seamen unable to disembark from ships visiting U.S. ports.

To take this a little further, Bill Berkowitz recently observed that "The future of Afghanistan is beginning to take on the look of a major league American quagmire." He continued,

Destabilization of Afghanistan and the entire region fits handily in al Qaeda's long term objectives. In a thorough-going essay published in Intervention Magazine entitled, "According To Plan -- But Whose Plan?" Stephen Morgan, looking at the bigger picture, asks "are U.S. troops close to winning the war or is al Qaeda about to release a devastating death trap?" Morgan, author of The Mind of a Terrorist Fundamentalist, is a former executive member of the British Labour Party National Executive Committee and currently a political and management consultant based in Brussels, Belgium. He fears that the US and its allies may be "overestimating" its successes in the one-year old battle against terrorism...

If, as Morgan hypothesizes, "events today are going roughly as al Qaeda and the Taliban planned," what's next on their agenda? Morgan posits that bin Laden's "Afghan strategy" was only meant as temporary - "a staging post for far more important aims, in regards to destabilizing the region and provoking the U.S. into further interventions in the Middle East as part of a plan to entrap the Americans and inflame the anti-imperialist sentiment in the region."

Echoing what Paul Rogers, Michael Albert, and Steve Shalom have suggested, Berkowitz concludes: "Bush administration policymakers appear to be dead set on pursuing just the type of strategy that Osama bin Laden's forces may have enticed them into and hoped they would follow."