Bin Laden Lost the War. America is Still Paying the Price

[00:00:00] September 11th, 2001. Where were you? I was in math class, Algebra 1. Towers got hit, got pulled out. Pretty soon found out we were trying to figure out where a family member was who was in one of the towers when it got hit. Thankfully she made it out. Not everyone in our community was so lucky. Fast forward 20 some odd years and I'm in Afghanistan. Watching the place fall apart in real time. Going how the hell to be wind up here.

[00:00:30] So for today's Friday morning episode, 25 years after the attacks of September 11th, we're going to go through and we're going to see where things land. Who actually came out on top in this conflict? Did anyone actually win? And what did it cost us along the way? Let's get into it. You know, it's weird to think that not everyone listening was actually even alive on September 11th, 2001. So let's go back and recap what happened that day. America suffered its worst domestic attack since the attack on Pearl Harbor that kicked off World War II.

[00:01:00] Al-Qaeda terrorist group successfully hijacked four different American airliners. They flew two of them into the World Trade Centers, collapsing both buildings. Flew one into the Pentagon. Another one crashed in the field over Pennsylvania when the folks on it decided to fight back after hearing the news about what happened to the other three planes. Almost 3,000 Americans were killed that day. Plus over 5,000 other Americans who died of injuries and illnesses related to the events of that day.

[00:01:31] Now, why did this happen? Well, there was a guy named Osama bin Laden leading a terrorist group called Al-Qaeda who was pretty pissed off at the United States and wanted to take it to us on our own turf. So what was he mad about? Well, it turns out he had four goals in mind when he kicked off this terrorist attack. He wanted to get U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia. That's where he was from, actually. One of America's main allies in the region, key oil exporter. We'd had troops there ever since 1991.

[00:01:59] He thought it was a national humiliation that Saudi Arabia needed to have American troops there to protect it from its neighbor, Iraq. Humiliation to the state. He wanted to end U.S. support for Israel. Lots of folks in the Middle East are mad about that for all sorts of reasons. So he had a bee in his bonnet there. Topple apostate Arab regimes allied with the U.S. He didn't just have an issue with America and the West.

[00:02:23] He had an issue with all the governments in the region who worked with us and then provoked the U.S. into a ruinous, open-ended war. Now, when Bin Laden was a younger guy, the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan, nicknamed the Graveyard of Empires. And he was involved in the effort to expel the Soviets from the country. And the basic game plan that they followed was that they just bled the Soviet Union dry. They never really defeated them militarily.

[00:02:49] They just made the cost of the occupation so astronomically high that eventually the Soviets had to pull out. Shortly thereafter, the entire Soviet Union collapsed. The wall came down in Berlin. And the former Soviet states all broke off into their own little countries. And we were left with Russia again. So he witnessed the Soviet Union overextend himself in Afghanistan, completely collapse the Soviet Empire, revert back to the Russian state. And he thought, you know what? If we piss off America enough, they'll do the same thing.

[00:03:19] And so a quick check on the scorecard 25 years later. Did he get what he wanted? Well, the U.S. did remove troops from Saudi Arabia. Yeah, mostly. We took out most of them in 2003 following the evasion of the Iraq War. Whether or not that was really tied to any of his demands or something that we were just doing organically for our own reasons, working it out with Saudi Arabia. Eh, we just didn't really see a need for troops in the region. So hard to attribute that to what he did on 9-11. But it was a goal of his and it did happen. And U.S. support for Israel.

[00:03:49] Nope. 25 years later, we are still giving them a ton of money, a ton of weapons. In fact, we started a new war with Iran based in no small part on trying to support Israel. Topple apostate Arab regimes. This is an interesting one. One, it failed. But for a while, there actually was the ISIS caliphate, which took over geographic terror, actually governed as an Islamic state.

[00:04:15] But ISIS and al-Qaeda were actually rival Islamist factions during the global war on terror. They didn't get along. So for a period of time, you can say he got what he wanted. But, well, he was dead by the time it happened. And I guess the closest thing you could point to now is that we do have a former al-Qaeda fighter who's now the president of Syria. But he's not really running it as an Islamist caliphate. So that's still in the failed column. Established global caliphate? Obviously not. Bleed the U.S. into bankruptcy.

[00:04:45] Well, we did spend a ton of money, trillions of dollars over the global war on terror. But we're not actually anywhere close to bankrupt yet. Though there are some interesting things going on with the petrodollar. We'll get to that a bit later. And provoke a damaging U.S. overreaction. Yep. That one. That one he did. Or at least we should say America did that for him.

[00:05:09] Now, in response to the attacks on September 11th, 2001, America kicked off a series of military campaigns, brand new wars across the world. We had the war in Afghanistan that started in 2001 as a direct response to the attacks. We had the war in Iraq that started in 2003, which was justified based off being an extension of the global war on terror. Have to go in and get rid of Saddam Hussein. Get rid of weapons and mass obstructions. We know he's working with al-Qaeda.

[00:05:36] Turns out he wasn't really working with al-Qaeda, but al-Qaeda showed up in Iraq after we invaded. And that brings us to the anti-ISIS campaign because we invaded Iraq, destabilized the region. Al-Qaeda went into Iraq. An offshoot of al-Qaeda became super radicalized. Weird to think that you could be more radicalized than al-Qaeda. They left, created ISIS, which then took over, you know, Mosul, large swaths of eastern Syria, created an actual Islamic caliphate for a period of time. Not great.

[00:06:06] Oh, and then also they invaded Afghanistan and started finding the Taliban. And then around the world, beyond those major campaigns, you know, we were doing drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, special operations folks all over the place, you know, conducting operations in 80 some odd countries at any given time throughout the two decades following 2001. All tied to the same authorization for use of military force that Congress approved. So what did all this cost us?

[00:06:35] Well, as a direct result of military conflict, we've got almost a million people killed, combatants and non-combatants, as an indirect cost from the non-combatants, you know, infrastructure being damaged, disease, famine, that sort of thing. Three and a half to four million people killed. We had 7,000, a little over 7,000 U.S. service members and over 50,000 service members wounded during two decades of conflict. 30 to 60 million folks displaced the migrant crisis in Europe.

[00:07:04] We've had over 30,000 post 9-11 in active duty suicides. We have four times as many service members who died from suicide as we did from combat operations. And roughly 8,000 contractor deaths, depending on how you want to estimate it.

[00:07:24] And there's varying descriptions of what exactly those contractors were doing, but almost as many contractors, sorry, as many, if not more contractors than active duty personnel killed. And of course, you got to keep track of the dollars. If you include the current war with Iran as part of these forever wars, and we should, we've spent $10 trillion already.

[00:07:48] And that's expected to balloon to almost $13 trillion when you include care for veterans and all the following costs of current operations. Now, that actually hasn't bankrupted the country. And a very, very small, relatively small, in the grand scheme of things, proportion of that, was used directly for the war in Afghanistan. Which, you know, Bin Laden thought would bankrupt the U.S. But it's still a heck of a lot of money. And you're thinking, how the heck do we spend that much money on these wars?

[00:08:18] Well, it was by accident. We didn't actually think we were going to spend this much. Just for the war in Iraq alone, there was an official budget figure that came out around $50 billion. Then a person in the White House said, like, well, it might be closer to $150 billion. They were fired shortly thereafter. Well, they left their position shortly thereafter. Because that number, according to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was just wildly inaccurate. Then in the final tally, the actual number came out to close to $3 trillion.

[00:08:47] So we were only off by, like, 50x on our budget estimates for how much the war would cost. I'm sure there's no lessons there that we can extrapolate to what current cost estimates for the war with Iran are and how accurate they may or may not be. But ballooning the federal budget and adding a ton of money to the national debt is not the only impact that the wars had. It actually drastically reshaped American security institutions. We created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

[00:09:15] This was a response to the findings of the 9-11 Commission Report that we actually had all the information we needed to prevent the attacks of 9-11 from happening. But FBI, CIA, DIA, all of our intelligence institutions weren't sharing information in a timely fashion, weren't talking with each other. There was bureaucratic infighting. So they actually created an institution to control all intelligence in the U.S.

[00:09:39] and ensure collaboration amongst agencies so that we didn't have stove piping, overly compartmentalized intelligence operations that missed attacks like 9-11. We saw a massive shift in what an effective career track in the U.S. military looked like. You know, back in the day, if you went into special operations as an officer, that was a fun job, but it was a career killer. You were never going to wear stars on your chest.

[00:10:05] Special operations was at the forefront of military operations at global war on terror. Most of our senior leaders in the military now came out of the special operations background. It went from a way to end your career early to the best way to try to reach the senior ranks of the Pentagon. Massive culture shift. We also had a huge change in the importance of different regions in the world.

[00:10:26] You know, prior to 9-11, if you wanted to advance your career as far as possible, the best place to do that, if you were working in intelligence or working in the military, is you focused on Europe. You wanted to go to the European command. You wanted to serve in units that were deployed to Europe or aligned with Europe. The Middle East was second or third tier on the list. That's not where you went if you were a hard-charging career man or woman. After 9-11, though, all that switched on a dime, and so you had a complete reshuffling of talent inside the Department of Defense

[00:10:54] because all the folks who were assigned to work on the Middle East, they were not the winners in their particular organization. That's why they got that assignment. It's the way bureaucratic politics works. They're now the ones in charge. They're now the ones, by default, that are going to have the best shot at career advancement. So we saw a massive culture shift inside the intelligence and defense institutions.

[00:11:15] And alongside these larger wars, as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria, we had an explosion in where the special operations personnel were being deployed. There's 195 countries in the world, and we were conducting special operations in almost 150 of them during the global war on terror. With very little oversight, not independently authorized by Congress.

[00:11:38] And this institutionalized the idea that the executive branch, the Department of Defense, can operate independently with extremely little oversight from anybody. And let's talk about why that is. In 2001, in response to the attack on September 11th, you know, the Bush administration came down to Congress and asked for broad sweeping authority to be able to go after terrorists wherever they found them in the world. Because these are small, agile, hard-to-define organizations that are everywhere.

[00:12:06] Yeah, we know they're in Afghanistan, but they're probably in Pakistan. They're probably in Iraq. They're probably in Yemen. They're probably in Africa, too. We just don't know where yet. And we need to be able to find them and go after them wherever we see them. So, the Congress passed an authorization for the use of military force that essentially allowed the administration to go after any element they deemed a terrorist organization or supporting a terrorist organization anywhere they found them in the world without oversight.

[00:12:35] And every executive that we've had since that was passed has really liked using it for their own reasons. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, they all use this. Now, why would Congress let the administration use the authorization for use of military force so broadly to justify operations in 150 countries around the world without oversight? Well, a lesson in American politics from 2002.

[00:13:01] So, there was a whole gear up to go into war in 2003 in Iraq. Justification being that Iraq is a sponsor of terror. They're developing weapons of mass destruction or they already have weapons of mass destruction. We can't allow them to give those weapons to terrorist groups that we know they're aligned with, they know they have a tight organizational relationship with. We have the intel. Just ask Colin Powell. So, we need to go into Iraq and topple the regime and create a stable democracy.

[00:13:28] Well, all that ended up being lies and none of that ended up working out as intended. It did fracture the region and lead to the creation of ISIS. Unintended consequences, you know. But, in 2002, the Bush administration actually went to the last Congress to approve the invasion of Iraq. Not a formal declaration of war, but, you know, they're going to need funding and all this other stuff. So, they've got to go to Congress to ask for the money for it. And Congress votes 77 to 23 to authorize that.

[00:13:58] Now, after that, the war started going pretty poorly. The results were terrible. The American people wanted out and didn't support it. Now, for the senators who voted for it, that became a huge problem later. Just ask, you know, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, all of whom ran into political trouble because they're on the record supporting the war. Well, lesson learned there. It's not don't vote for the wars or make sure you're about the administration's information. It's that just don't do votes. If you're Congress, you know, if you vote against the war, you're seen as anti-American.

[00:14:28] You're seen as weak on terrorism. You're seen as a dove. But if you vote for the war and then it's unpopular later, that's going to bite you in the ass. Okay. So, the lesson the American Congress took from this was don't vote for wars. Just don't do it. And it established a precedent of 20 years of the executive branch conducting military operations without oversight.

[00:14:51] You know, people actually criticized Obama when he went to Congress for authorization to conduct military strikes in Syria. Now, one, that was probably a shrewd political move from him because he didn't want to get involved. But that actually was the executive going back to Congress for approval the way the Constitution says it's going to be. Now, let's not give Obama too much credit here. He also oversaw the largest drone assassination program in history, including the killing of an American citizen overseas without due process.

[00:15:22] So, you know, it's complicated. But that's the lesson the Congress took from that. Just don't vote on wars. Let the executive do whatever they want. And if it goes well, huzzah, yay America. And if it doesn't, boo the executive and let's take them down in the next election. Or at least cover my own ass if I happen to be in the same party because I wasn't for it.

[00:15:43] Now, this actually turned a tremendous American strength that we developed post-World War II and turned it into a massive strategic liability. And that's the all-volunteer force. You know, post-Vietnam, we ended the persistent draft and we switched to an all-volunteer military. And boy, we developed a professional military force that was the envy of the world. And when it comes to conducting military operations, bar none, hands down, just absolutely superb.

[00:16:13] We had the first Gulf War in 1991 where we kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and just proved the case that the all-volunteer force was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And for conducting military operations, it is. As a policy tool, though, when you have an all-volunteer force plus a Congress that refuses to provide oversight,

[00:16:35] what that gives is an overzealous executive a tremendous tool to be used without any constraints around the world. So the same volunteer force that is so effective in combat actually turns into a strategic liability because it's being employed by an unconstrained executive.

[00:16:56] Now, that arrangement is not a foregone conclusion, but that is what follows from Congress not exercising oversight authority over when military force is actually used on behalf of the United States as a policy tool. Now, here's where we're really screwed up in this whole process. Now, if we go back to 2001, 9-11 happens. We go into Afghanistan. Very high-level support by the American people. Lots of international support.

[00:17:25] NATO joins the fight. Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight 20 years later, we can go year by year, month by month, day by day, and decisions made in that war and how they could have been better or been done differently. But that war didn't cost America a ton of credibility up front. The war in Iraq did. The one in 2003.

[00:17:48] And what the war in Iraq in 2003 did was prove that there was going to be no long-term life to the unipolar moment and the rules-based international order. What do I mean by that? Back up a decade. 1991. In 1991, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. Takes over territory by military force. In response, the U.S.

[00:18:14] Leads a global coalition to reclaim Kuwait and liberate it from the Iraqi army. We had everyone with us. Even Russia came in and joined the fight. You know, Russia, the remnant of the Soviet Union that had collapsed years before. Very, very shortly before. And we had this moment where America is the global hegemon. There is a rules-based international order.

[00:18:38] And the entire globe gets behind the idea that we will expend blood and treasure to enforce the rules of the international order for the sake of enforcing the rules. Because Saddam Hussein broke the rules by taking over territory by force. Full stop. Don't need any more justification than that.

[00:18:59] That same war proved out the theory of American military dominance tied to its incredible economy and the excellent all-volunteer military force that it produced. Fast forward 13 years later. Now we're invading Iraq. We have allies, but we don't have the global coalition. We say we have all the evidence we need to justify preemptive war in Iraq. That's all proven out to be false. So we launch a war of aggression against a state that had not attacked us.

[00:19:29] And as a result, we destabilize the region, create the opportunity for ISIS, contribute to the migrant crisis. We completely delegitimize the idea that there's a rule-based international order and that we're all just here trying to do the right thing and play by the rules. American hypocrisy in that regard is on full display for the world to see.

[00:19:50] And immediately, every nation-state in the world starts questioning whether or not America is a reliable partner, whether or not America is a reliable arbiter of who is or is not following the rules, and whether or not the institutions that America created post-World War II and that everyone bought into after the collapse of the Soviet Union had any durable effect.

[00:20:12] And that's before we look at stuff like the fact that China and Russia got to watch us conduct operations for 20 years and go to school on how exactly to counter us if we ever got into a war with them. So whatever hope we had for a rule-based international order, whatever belief we had that America was the indispensable nation, you know, coming out of the 1991 war, yeah, 2003, that year didn't end that. But it put us on the course for it to inevitably fall apart by the time we were done on Iraq.

[00:20:42] Now, all good things come to an end, but that was an unforced error on our part. We did not have to do that. We chose to do that to catastrophic effect. So with all that, who actually won the global war on terror? Did bin Laden actually come out ahead on this? Well, the case for it is pretty simple. He wanted to lure America into a forever war in the Middle East that would, you know, bankrupt and destroy the country. And, well, we did invade Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Syria.

[00:21:10] There was a whole thing in Libya and then a whole bunch of other small scrape-ups in countries around the world. Now we're in a war with Iran. But it hasn't actually bankrupted the U.S. yet. And, you know, it's important to point out that although we did invade Afghanistan to go after the al-Qaeda training camps, you know, that war at the end was costing like $50 billion a year. We had 2,500 troops on the ground, some contractors. You know, we decided it wasn't worth it anymore, but it wasn't really a cost problem. We could have floated that war for a lot longer if we wanted to.

[00:21:38] And it clearly hasn't bankrupted the nation. Now everything that we did after that, well, people wanted to go into Iraq and invade and topple Saddam Hussein for a long time. GWAT was kind of a convenient excuse. Kind of hard to credit that to Osama bin Laden because, you know, you give folks like Cheney long enough, they're going to find a way to do what they want to do anyway, likely. So they pulled the GWAT lever to get us into Iraq. But if they hadn't had that, they probably would have found something else, you think?

[00:22:09] And when you look at the final tally for al-Qaeda, I mean, yeah, they were able to get us into a war in the Middle East. Okay. Yeah, we did eventually pull out of Saudi Arabia. Okay. But the caliphate that did eventually form wasn't theirs. And now it's gone. We saw the Arab Spring Movement in 2011, expression of Arab nationalism, not religious fundamentalism.

[00:22:34] States in the region are doubling down on maintaining control over their populations. We're not really seeing a religious revival at the time. And the pushback we are getting on Western powers is very nationalistic in origin. You know, it's Palestinian rights. It's Iranian sovereignty. These are very national identity-based issues, not religious ones.

[00:23:03] And religion does appear to be taking a backseat to national interests in the Middle East. So, oh, and all the regimes he wanted to overthrow are still in power. The Saudi royal family is still the Saudi royal family. We have a new Ayatollah in Iran, but nothing else has really changed. Jordan Markney is still there. Lebanon's still doing Lebanon's thing. Egypt is still, like, none of the governments have toppled. So he had a hat trick.

[00:23:31] Like, he thought he could pull us into the Middle East and bankrupt us. And once we're bankrupt, our support for these other regimes he didn't like would go away. But I think he drastically underestimated just how rich America is. Because it may have been financially irresponsible. It hasn't been financially catastrophic yet. So he pulled off the hat trick. Didn't really get anything else out of it, though. Oh, yeah, killed. So, you know, sucks to be him.

[00:24:00] Oh, it looks like I had a slide for that that I didn't click to. But, yeah, I just laid out everything I just talked about. So now there's an interesting argument that a person can make that the war with Iran is actually moving us closer to the type of world that Osama bin Laden was trying to create. Especially if you look at the status of American empire and our ability to project power around the world. You know, the American empire is supported by an aligned structure that allows us to project power globally. That aligned structure is under incredible strain right now.

[00:24:30] We're seeing it fray left and right. And additionally, it's based off a global economy. Where we get to export our inflation by issuing treasuries to other countries that they use to buy oil through the petrodollar. And we're seeing that being put under strain as well. The security guarantees that we offered the Gulf states to get them to only transact in dollars. They're not worth what they used to be, to put it mildly.

[00:24:55] So we've seen states look or become open to the idea of transacting in other currencies. And if that becomes too widespread, that actually puts a huge amount of pressure on American treasuries, the bond market, our economy. And yikes, that gets pretty bad pretty quick. Well, it actually gets bad really, really slowly and then catastrophically over at once. So, but again, that's all based off actions the U.S. is taking. It's hard to credit somebody else for that.

[00:25:21] And along with that, we're also seeing a resurgence in national identity, a resurgence in the idea that nation states need to protect their own sovereignty. All of which goes against the idea of a global Islamic caliphate. So, again, American empire, we're not doing anything to help ourselves right now. But also, this Islamic world that Bin Laden envisioned creating by bankrupting the United States.

[00:25:47] The world also seems to be moving farther and farther away from that, not towards it. And you could probably tie most of this to the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity in the international system, rather than the actions of any individual state or terrorist organization. So, let's be careful with how much we try to attribute cause and effect here. Anyway, that'll be a fun topic for some other day, I'm sure. But that's it for now. Y'all take care. And I hope you're in a better spot now than we all were 25 years ago.

[00:26:18] See ya. See ya. See ya next time. See ya. See ya. See ya. Thank you.