Just in case anyone ever asks you how Bill Clinton was, to some degree, responsible for the Sept 11 Attack on America, remember....
[size=4]Bin Laden’s Failed Strategy[/size=4]
[b]A dream destroyed[/b].
By James S. Robbins November 16, 2001 9:25 a.m.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks a colleague of mine and I were discussing future attacks — not ours but bin Laden's. We figured that al Qaeda had gamed various scenarios and were poised to take swift retaliatory action as soon as the United States responded. We guessed they had planned two, three, maybe four moves ahead. They knew our reaction would be very determined, would have planned for that contingency, and still been baffling us by this point. But after a few weeks it became clear that we were giving bin Laden far more credit than he deserved. And now with his Taliban patrons in retreat and his network collapsing, it is obvious that bin Laden the Strategist leaves much to be desired.
Any strategy begins with an objective, and bin Laden's is not to create terror for terror's sake. He wants to detach the United States from the Middle East, leaving his radical Muslim faction and their sympathizers to deal unmolested with the moderate ruling elites and the "Zionist entity" of Israel. Bin Laden and his planners were inspired by prior examples of United States retreat, most notably the defeat in Vietnam, but more proximately the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1994 following the disastrous attempt to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, and the pullout from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1984. The impression had grown that the U.S. was a paper tiger. American forces had a technological edge and massive firepower, but if a foe could inflict a bloody nose, the skittish American public would demand withdrawal, and politicians would hold hearings to place blame. As Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam said to American negotiators after the Beirut bombings, "The United States is short of breath. You can always wait them out."
The bombings in Riyadh in 1995, at Khobar Towers in 1996, at the African embassies in 1998, and of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, were all battles in bin Laden's anti-American campaign, and all were victories. The U.S. replies to these provocations were ineffectual, and in some cases counterproductive. [b]The Clinton administration apparently did not understand how its weak responses would be perceived abroad[/b]. A key American misstep was the failed 1998 attack on the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. By singling out bin Laden after the embassy bombings and launching a "million to one shot" cruise-missile barrage into the Afghan mountains, Clinton converted bin Laden into a radical Muslim folk hero. A recent analysis in the Egyptian opposition press observed, "What better proof that Bin Laden had hurt the United States and satisfied the desire of the Muslims than for Clinton himself to stand up and repeat the name of Bin Laden [b]three times[/b] as he announced the strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan?... Had the United States not responded in this way, Bin Laden might not have become such a legendary hero." Note that in his August 20, 1998 address to the nation the President referred to bin Laden and his network [b]eight times, not three[/b], and called him "perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today."
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