> American soil that every average American will have to look up Al Queda, find out why they attacked America, and in the process discover all the attrocities comitted by American military

The way you put it, It looks like Al Queda had a noble goal. It's a shame that they did not win then.

But I am more cynical than that, I don't believe in the idealistic goals of these organisations. In my opinion, all local warlords fight for power, glory and spreading their influence.

Looking at the final situation, I would say that they achieved exactly that. Globalism is dead, the liberal culture of the west is significantly degraded thus cementing their influence in the region. Their power is now much less contested and they can rule happily thereafter.

The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how you can read my comment and think I'm defending the group or even that their goals were noble. It's bending the intepretation of what I said so much it hurts.

Maybe let me try again - terrorist group says their goal is X. Terrorist group fails to achieve goal X. Therefore, terrorists didn't "win", by their own definition of winning.

Is that less.....offensive?

I'm not trying to misread you. On reflection, "letting the terrorists win" is a really loaded phrase. So loaded you might be on the same side of an issue and still misunderstand where someone's coming from. As a guy who participated in sometimes violent protests against the Patriot Act, and our initial lockdown and our invasion of Iraq and the general warlike stance in NYC after 9/11, our interpretation of the terrorists "winning" was that they could put America into a posture where we lost our civil liberties as a result of the fear they were able to inculcate in in the populace. Now, at the time, Bush said if we stopped shopping or you know, otherwise engaging in mass capitalist idiocy, that would mean the terrorists won. To me, they won, because they saw a weakness in our free society where by a careful application of very directed force they could open the dam for totalitarian control and a breakdown of open, free, liberal democracy. By that measure, they succeeded remarkably well, but they really only had to use our own inertia against us.

So I don't mean to misread you. I think our society as it stood was a lot more noble than the Taliban. In some ways it still is. They have brought us down a bit toward their level, and that's something worth fighting against.

The terrorists have - on a shoestring budget no less - done more harm to the USA, it's standing in the world and its ability to do business than many years of cold war between the USA and the USSR have done. They succeeded wildly beyond their - and probably anybody else's - imagination and the damage they did is felt every day, including the increased polarization in the United States which is having its effect as we speak.

Denying this is closing your eyes to some major problems and as long as you deny something you are categorically unable to fix it.

> including the increased polarization in the United States which is having its effect as we speak.

The increased polarization in the United States is a product of the end in the mid-1990s of the overlapping pair of partisan realignments starting just before WWII and a return to the normal condition encouraged by the US electoral structure of a strong, stable, sharp partisan divide, combined with modern mass media technology.

The 2001 terror attacks are coincidental, not a cause.

Denying this is closing your eyes to major structural problems with the political system in the United States and, as long as you deny something, you are categorically unable to fix it.

You are completely entitled to your own opinion, but personally I believe that the 2001 attacks accelerated the divide to the point that it may have made the difference between Trump getting elected or not. Without the Iraq war a whole pile of stuff that laid the ground for Trump would not have happened.

We agree that this was already happening prior to 2001, but I simply doubt it would have resulted in the extreme situation that we have today. Social media, similarly is an accelerator, not a cause.

So they'll win when Hollywood makes a movie that portrays them as noble savages? I'd say they certainly did a great deal of damage to our basic freedoms, not to mention sense of self. We were right to go into Afghanistan. And right to kill Bin Laden. We weren't right to use it as a pretext to degrade our own democracy.