[thewisedude]

For the sake of honest debate... how do you know what exactly it is Osama wanted? Maybe all he wanted was to kill people and didn't care about liberty because he does not know what it is! or he wanted to send some kind of a message to westerners or something else... we will not know. Sure, liberty seems to be lesser in airports...but connecting that to what Osama wanted is a big stretch!

[jballanc]

I think it's pretty clear that Osama wanted the destruction of the US. There's an old adage from the cold war that "You cannot show weakness to the enemy." Study how the Cuban Missile Crisis was eventually resolved, and you'll see this doctrine at work.

The funny thing is, liberty shows strength. Take one country that makes a law against criticizing the government, compared to one that professes free speech on all topics. The country with free speech is saying, in effect, "Say what you want! We're stronger than your words."

So, as the US continues to give up its liberties, the rest of the world is watching, and they see this for what it is: the US is showing its weakness.

[smacktoward]

> There's an old adage from the cold war that "You cannot show weakness to the enemy." Study how the Cuban Missile Crisis was eventually resolved, and you'll see this doctrine at work.

Not really. The "not showing weakness to the enemy" stuff was what nearly destroyed the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It wasn't until the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, sent a long and emotional telegram directly to President Kennedy imploring the President to join with him in taking a step back (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Secret_neg...) that a way out of the crisis began to present itself.

From Khrushchev's telegram (full text here: http://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct26/doc4.html):

Armaments bring only disasters. When one accumulates them, this damages the economy, and if one puts them to use, then they destroy people on both sides. Consequently, only a madman can believe that armaments are the principal means in the life of society. No, they are an enforced loss of human energy, and what is more are for the destruction of man himself. If people do not show wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles, and then reciprocal extermination will begin...

Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you...

Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.

Kennedy took Khrushchev up on this initiative; what defused the crisis was a secret agreement where the US agreed to remove all its nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling theirs out of Cuba.

[jballanc]

Right. What I meant was that all of the actual negotiations happened in secret. They had to, because of the doctrine. There's no shame in showing humility and even offering a friendly hand, but when the offer is made to your adversary, it is almost always done in secret.

[smacktoward]

But it's not secret from your adversary ("the enemy" that you're not supposed to show weakness to), since you're making the secret offer to him.

If anything, the lesson of the crisis is how important it can be to keep from looking weak in front of your friends. Kennedy kept the missile deal secret from the American people for a good reason: he may very well have been impeached had he made it public, and it would have shaken the confidence of our other NATO allies in our overseas commitments if they learned that Kennedy had removed the protection of (obsolete, but still) nuclear weapons from NATO-member Turkey in response to Soviet pressure. And winning even a small concession from Kennedy is probably the only thing that saved Khrushchev from being toppled in a coup by Soviet hard-liners after the Cuba debacle.

Sometimes your friends can be the worst enemies of all!

[jballanc]

Very well put! (I was going to mention that, in reality, it's all about everyone else who's watching, but I think you did a better job explaining it.)

What's most interesting is that (based on anecdotal evidence), lost liberty and ridiculous security theater has done much more to harm America's image among it's "friends" than among it's enemies. I doubt Afghanistan or Pakistan care much about American airport security, but when I'm at Istanbul International, and the flight to JFK is the only one in the entire airport that requires extra screening, I see what that must look like to every European there (hint: they aren't thinking about what a great place this U S of A must be...).

[chii]

"Sometimes your friends can be the worst enemies of all!"

Thats why you keep your enemy close, but your friends closer!

[cpeterso]

In his public statements, Osama said he wanted the US to remove its military bases from Saudi Arabia. So the US moved the bases to neighboring Iraq. Osama won.

[einhverfr]

Worse. We put the bases in Iraq specifically to get them out of Saudi Arabia. I.e. we explicitly gave Osama what he said he wanted.

The troops were in Saudi Arabia to contain Iraq. The way to get them out was to overthrow Saddam. Invading Iraq was therefore a sort of appeasement campaign.

[tdfx]

  "I tell you, freedom and human rights 
  in America are doomed. The U.S. government 
  will lead the American people in — and the 
  West in general — into an unbearable hell 
  and a choking life." [1]

[1] http://articles.cnn.com/2002-01-31/us/gen.binladen.interview...

[InclinedPlane]

We know what Osama wanted, he's made many public statements. He wanted the western world to stop interacting with the Muslim/arab world because he thought the west was a corrupting influence on traditional Islamic and arab values.

[CWuestefeld]

Sure, he's a mass murderer. But he'd never stoop to lying in a public statement.

[InclinedPlane]

I get your meaning but it doesn't have much weight without any evidence. Certainly Osama has lied, and is capable of lying. But we do not automatically question the stated motives of murderers and bombers without additional evidence. We do not second guess whether abortion clinic bombers are actually anti-abortion. We do not hypothesize what the real motives of the unabomber were, we take it on face value that he opposed the advance of industry and technology etc.

Similarly, we have no good cause to question Osama's stated motives. When an organization repeatedly makes clear their motives through public statements; when that organization undertakes combat operations at such great risk and cost that they employ suicide squads to carry them out and when those operations comport with their stated motives; and when their other activities also closely align with those statements why question those motives? The only reason is because someone has a political cause they wish to shore up by portraying a major political force like Al Qaeda as something it's not.

For what it's worth, Osama was right. The west has been a corrupting influence on the Arab and Muslim world, eroding traditional values such as misogyny, oppressive political and social institutions, stultifying economic systems, etc. For the most part I think this has been a good development, as I value individual liberty, education based on rationality and science, the spread of industrialization and broadbased wealth, etc. But such things are roadblocks to the creation of a new caliphate, or something much like it, in the Islamic world, which is the ultimate secondary goal of groups like Al Qaeda after they have managed to isolate the Islamic world from external influences.

[CWuestefeld]

we have no good cause to question Osama's stated motives. When an organization repeatedly makes clear their motives through public statements; when that organization undertakes combat operations at such great risk and cost...

Let me ask everyone who believes OBL's stated motives: when GWB tells us repeatedly in public that we must invade Iraq because of the threat of WMD, and that the objectives have nothing to do with protecting oil supplies, should we take that statement at face value? I mean, the US through GWB has invested tons of resources, including the lives of its troops, into fighting that war, so surely the President's statements regarding the motivations can be accepted without question, right?

I'm not taking sides here. I'm trying to say that nobody ever truly knows the motivations of another person; in fact, frequently we don't truly understand the roots of our own motivations. See, for example, discussion in Mises' Human Action.

[roguecoder]

But Bush did tell us why we invaded Iraq: "He tried to kill my dad." Before he was even elected he indicated a desire to invade Iraq because he saw it as the hight of his father's presidency left unfinished. "If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it," he said on the campaign trail. He never once stuck to the WMD story; it was just what they made Powell say in public as a cover for all the other reasons he gave (see the Downing Street Memo for more details.)

If Osama had came out with a multitude of mutually-contradictory statements we'd have reason to doubt him, but he was amazingly consistent from when the CIA started funding him until the US military gunned him down.

[babblefrog]

I think GWB really did think there were WMDs there. And protecting the oil supplies from who, exactly? They were going to go onto the market anyway.

[rooshdi]

Are you really suggesting murdering hundreds of innocent people is more honorable than lying for the sake of easing people's fears? I don't respect lying either, but let's not get crazy here.

[seclorum]

Its America we're talking about here, where every single US President of the last 100 years has been responsible for the mass murder of innocents...

[rooshdi]

I'm not defending the war crimes of the US either. All I'm saying is do not conflate lying with the obviously more extreme act of actually killing people.

[seclorum]

I agree, you can't say they're equivalent acts, but its no surprise that lying happens after killing ..

[davidhollander]

> we will not know

We could try checking the internet

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden