On the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it's painfully clear that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, accomplished everything they hoped to achieve with 9/11 and more.
Three of the four planes hijacked in the attack struck their targets, and the two that hit the World Trade Center completely destroyed both buildings. This was, by bin Laden's own admission, more than he expected.
The United States, led by an idiot who is backed by a crew of attention defecit-disordered pirates, was manipulated into cocking back its massive right arm and throwing a roundhouse sucker punch at the wrong target. I find it hard to believe that bin Laden didn't plan this outcome also.
The Iraq War has been a more effective recruiting tool for Islamism world wide than bin Laden and others like him could ever have devised.
Bush, bin Laden said in his latest tape, is "like the one who plows and sows the sea: He harvests nothing but failure." And who can argue?
In the process of our falling into the Mesopotamian pit he dug to trap us, we destroyed one of bin Laden's old enemies (bin Laden habitually referred to him as "a socialist infidel"), then murdered him along with his depraved sons. How sweet this must have been for the "crazed" Islamist, who in today's tape looked and sounded anything but.
After six years of fruitless and disastrous war, the United States has lost nearly a trillion dollars, nearly 4,000 of its best and most passionately committed young people, its global reputation and credibility, and its ability to control events around the world by threatening military force.
Local revolutionaries and malcontents everywhere now know that a gigantic, heavily-armed, technically sophisticated war machine can be easily defeated simply by decentralizing the battlefield. This was the lesson of Vietnam. Bin Laden and other Islamists learned it. Bush and Cheney and the American arms industry never will.
Bin Laden still hasn't achieved everything he wants. He would like the U.S. to work to re-establish Sunni dominance over the Shi'ites before we leave Iraq, and he needs our "help" in bringing down the Saudi royal family. Once he accomplishes those objectives, he can die a natural death at home in bed, with a smile on his face.
Besides the work bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have left to accomplish, they have to live with the fact that nearly a million Iraqis, most of them innocent of any involvement in this struggle, have been snuffed out by the war they enabled. But bin Laden is a fundamentalist, and painful death here on earth means little to him. I'm sure he believes that God will sort out the dead, reward the virtuous, and punish the evildoers.
Bin Laden also encouraged Americans to consider taking up Islam, or at least threatening to do so, as a means of ending the Iraq War, because, he said, "as soon as the warmongering owners of the major corporations realize that you have lost confidence in your democratic system and have begun to look for an alternative, and this alternative is Islam, they will run after you to please you and achieve what you want to steer you away from Islam."
Is bin Laden really our enemy? I believe he is, and so far he's won every round. He's got us outfoxed, outclassed, outmaneuvered, and tied up in so many knots we can't get out of our own way. We're going to have to play our cards a lot smarter if we ever want to have any chance against enemies as good as this guy. Because right now the U.S. is looking like, in the immortal words of Richard M. Nixon, "a pitiful, helpless giant."
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