Zawahiri (Osama's right hand man) said years ago that they could not bring down the super power (the US) but we can make them bring themselves down, we can draw them into an economically backwards crusade and have them destroy themselves.
So, they attack us on 9/11/2001 by flying planes into the World Trade Center, their intentions were not just to kill 3,000 of our citizens, that just came with the job, what they were really after was hurting our Economy, it was strictly an economic attack that happened to kill people in the process. This attack wasn't the main one intended by Osama and Zawahiri, it was the worm on a hook. We took the bait and were reeled over into the middle east and began to pour our money into the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, billions and billions and billions of dollars spent for the deaths of 3,000 people.
Over the course of the war we have lost approximately 4,000 additional Americans in the armed forces and we have taken the lives of nearly 100,000 Innocent Iraqi civilians (atleast thats how many are Documented). So, we tried to revenge the lives of 3,000 people and ended up losing even more than that in even more American blood, killed a hundred thousand or so innocent foreigners, and will have spent nearly what, 2 trillion dollars now to do it? And we didn't even catch the guy that started this in the first place.
Once we got in the middle east and couldn't catch Osama, some red herrings lead us into Iraq because while we were there we might as well take down a corrupt leader and fight some 'terrorists' that we could actually find right? Guess what, Osama is in Pakistan, in a villa, not a cave. But we can't go into Pakistan now can we, too much to risk involved there, we'll just continue beating the dead horse in Iraq instead because we say that it's unstable and it would be disastrous for us to leave right? Well, Iraq's prime minister (Nouri al-Maliki)has asked for a timetable for withdrawal but Bush insists that we should stay for just a while longer (
link).
Now, back to the whole "2 trillion dollar war" thing. Don't you think, maybe, just maybe, that if we hadn't dug ourselves into the the middle east and put ourselves in trillions of dollars of debt, that, maybe, possibly, this whole "financial crisis" thing would not have occured, maybe, just a thought? That the money spent could have been used to fix the mortgage crisis? Isn't this the
core cause of our problems? Falling for a trick played by a desert-gang. Sad isn't it? That an extremist group in a remote region thousands and thousands of miles away from our country, can understand and take advantage of America's weaknesses and use them against us? They shot a barbed arrow right into our stomach, and we carelessly ripped it right out, and now our guts are spilling all over the floor. Who's fault is that? Were we an intelligent and honorable country, wouldn't we have had the constitution (not the document) to handle it with composure and just count the losses and move on? Couldn't we see that the whole purpose of the attack was to hurt our markets, to hurt us within, to aggravate us to strike back? No, we had to take it personally, being the resilient, intelligent Americans that we are. That this was a direct attack on our freedom, that if we didn't fight back we would lose it all. Folks, is this a rational attidute? They shit on us now we have to shit on them?
We're losers, Osama has won. He and his gang are laughing at us as they lounge in Pakistan. They're watching us bleed our financial guts out, scrambling to pull them back inside, and then we decide to pull out more in hopes that we can use these guts to pull other guts back inside.
Have they not completed what they set out to do? Have they not hurt us where it really makes a difference? Has the decline of America finally been initiated?