Here's a challenge to the dominant perspective that hopefully get's you thinking (after you get over being pissed off):
Great. Osama's dead. Good job to my former compatriots in tier one. Unfortunately, Osama may have already won strategically (see Boyd on al Qaeda's Grand Strategy for more) by the time they got to him. How? He was able to cause an over reaction whereby the US did serious harm to itself. Here's the run down. You decide.
- $3 Trillion in expense and thousands of lives fighting two optional wars that helped plunge the US gov't in fiscal crisis. Osama's attack made it possible for defense and homeland security spending to skyrocket to levels not seen since the darkest depths of the cold war (where we were in a struggle with a global superpower). The US now spends as much on defense as the rest of the world combined with little expectation that this spending will be reduced.
- Osama was able to force the US into creating a masssive internal security apparatus (the Homeland Security Department) that is still growing rapidly. It now represents the largest internal security market in the world and is a hefty tax on all productive economic activity.
- A perpetual state of emergency has been declared in the US. Liberties have been suspended indefinitely. Technological scanning of communications and data is not under any meaningful oversight. Anybody can be held indefinitely w/o trial or commication. Anbody can be tortured through rendition. The President can even designate any American an enemy combatant (a list of people we can expect to see grow rapidly over the next decade), which means that they can be killed on sight w/o trial or due process.
So, my question to you is: who won?