Not sure why someone would believe a fighter when they say why they fight. It’s not like propaganda is unique to western countries or something. It’s everywhere. It’s a tool that creates effects, you think he’s above using it or something?
getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart.
This assessment of al Qaeda’s goals I have only ever heard from Western propaganda and the popular consciousness, not any serious attempt to analyse them. While bin Laden’s statements could be lies (more relevant than whether they’re propaganda, which can be true), I think it makes more sense to take his word for his own motivations than what amounts to nothing more than the popular Western view of his motivations, filtered through years of our own media. Of course there may be some serious analysis of his goals somewhere I haven’t read - feel free to point me at it. It should come along with some reason not to believe his own explanation though.
I’m skeptical that it exists though, because this understanding of his goals essentially denies that he has any goals beyond hurting America: it’s “they hate us because we are free.” But bin Laden laid out perfectly clearly that his hatred of America developed from seeing Muslims killed in attacks which were enabled by American intervention - something which I see no reason to cast doubt on, and as such see no reason to doubt his explanation.
It makes zero sense though. No people on Earth would just go “oh welp, guess we better go home now.”
Do we seem hesitant to kill people to you?
How does it not make sense? One way of achieving your aims is making it very costly for the people blocking those aims to continue doing so.
No people on Earth would just go “oh welp, guess we better go home now.”
Conflicts often end in a negotiated peace where neither side has been conclusively defeated, often indeed amounting to “welp, we’d better go home now.” The cost to the US military in Vietnam turned public opinion against the war until it became politically unsustainable.
More broadly, this attitude inevitably leads to post-hoc cynicism, where you look at someone who failed to achieve their stated goals, conclude in hindsight that they made no sense and that they therefore couldn’t ever possibly have believed sincerely in them.
If it really made zero sense, it would make zero sense to use as propaganda. The fact that it makes enough sense that you believe bin Laden even used it to convince others means you accept that people could believe it. It’s not unreasonable to think that bin Laden was smarter than the people following him, but you haven’t done the work to show he couldn’t believe it.
I don’t disagree. Just disagree that his method was as simple and straightforward as people here seem to think, just believing what he’s spoon feeding them 100%. He was sophisticated, a leader. Not some simpleton.
As if Americans would just give him what he wants for knocking down a couple skyscrapers. Have you even seen our culture? We shoot each other in our own streets, much less foreign attackers. How people think we could just forego a chance at revenge is just utterly, hilariously wrong in every way.
He believed we would leave because he grew up in a world of Western countries being driven out by anti colonial violence. It’s not that complicated. He wasn’t a political science guy, or an anthropologist. He was a radicalized construction engineer.
