Do you realize that Al Qaeda is close to completing their strategy?

[sinkingfeeling]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Insurgent_forces

"On March 11, 2005, Al-Quds Al-Arabi published extracts from Saif al-Adel's document "Al Quaeda's Strategy to the Year 2020".<33><34> Abdel Bari Atwan summarizes this strategy as comprising five stages:

1. Provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country.
2. Incite local resistance to occupying forces.
3. Expand the conflict to neighboring countries and engage the US in a long war of attrition.
4. Convert Al Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against countries allied with the US until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
5. The U.S. economy will finally collapse under the strain of too many engagements in too many places, similarly to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Arab regimes supported by the US will collapse, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will be installed across the region."

[NC_Nurse]

1. Yes. Our brilliant "strategy" has played right into their hands. We continue to

Give up the freedoms they supposedly hated us for, and we're falling further and further into debt due to these useless wars. And the added bonus is that many Americans are at each other's throats now because of the relentless fear and paranoia stoked by the Right with their constant references to 9/11.

It's been a win-win-win for Al Qaeda. And the Republican war mongers...

[anarch]

2. two sides of the same ugly coin

[Fumesucker]

3. It's been obvious since late 2003..

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the history of the Middle East could have predicted the disaster in Iraq..

Unfortunately having a modicum of knowledge about pretty much anything at all was seen as a disqualifying characteristic by the Bush administration..

[Romulox]

4. Conspiracy theories be damned--I believe there is worldwide collusion

I don't believe in accidents, or, in this case, a systematic series of blunders. I believe there is an international consensus (to which our own politicians are a party) to intentionally diminish the standard of living here in the US. The Bin Laden fable is basically that--a children's story constructed to conceal the far uglier truth.