Political Crossfire Forums

Short answer, no, you haven't won.

Long answer, no, you haven't won and never will.

let's review.

a non-governmental organization that at its peak had 5000 active members and probably no more than 2000 fighters has started a war which has:
1. inflicted over 70,000 Western casualties.
2. caused Western states to run up trillions in debt.
3. changed Western culture in such a way that has done permanent damage to our liberal institutions.
4. sparked a chain of events that kicked off revolution after revolution in the Middle-east.
5. even had a small hand in causing the greatest global economic crisis since the great depression.

never have so few done so much to so many. no matter how you slice it AQ won.

Terrorism is an open ended and nebulous threat that can be invoked every time government wants to expand its scope and power. Of course there are many groups that are opposed to US policies and whom use terrorism etc to attack the US and it's interests but I know if it can really be called a "war". I guess there is conflict there, but not in the sense of full scale warfare.

It's more like what street gangs do or the mob does when they have conflicts than, say, WWII or even Vietnam. Asymmetrical, hit and run assassination of key figures. They call it 4G warfare but it's really just having high tech assassination squads out doing your bidding against locals that can't do anything about it other than a random bombing, usually to nil effect.

The 911 attacks are unique in the regard that they had a massive impact. Most attacks do not garner that type of attention or response and are of the character of the so-called "underwear bomber", or "shoe bomber".

Seeing that we launched two failed wars that erased $1.5 trillion in U.S. treasure and brought us absolutely nothing, no: we lost.

Our Iraq invasion cost us 4,400+ lives, Afghanistan is now at 2,300. So we've lost almost 6,000 lives to avenge the loss of 3,000.

On top of that, we erased certain freedoms and privacies all in the guise of "security."

Remember when Bush used to wrongly say that AQ attacked us because they "hate our freedoms"?

It turned out not to be them who hated our freedoms.

BTW I will point out that we never got Zawahiri, who was the real brains of the operation.

And now we've got a White House with unilateral power to wage war in any country without congressional authorization or oversight.

Another ultimate point being: you can't wage war on "terror," just like you can't wage war on "drugs."

For some reason, the US always has to have an "enemy". We seem to be rudderless without it. First, it was England. Then, France. And then Spain. And then Spain again. The Indians were in there for a while. Then Mexico. We had Germany. Then Germany and Japan. Then Russia for a long while.

Now it's "terrorists". The only way that our war with them ends is if another comes along.

I agree, we need an existential threat.

For most of my life (well until the 90s) it was the Soviets and the Cold War. That went away and it seemed like Americans didn't know what to do because it was so ingrained in our collective psyche. A lot of right wingers decided the new enemy was this illusive "left" and you would think that after 9/11 everybody would focus but now it's like every possible conspiracy theory has blown up and you seem them all mixed and matched: it's now the left, Islam, immigrants, non-white people, the Federal gov't (of course), socialism, a war on Christmas, etc.

China is coming to fill that gap.

Its their perfect war, the war with no end.