September 11th

15 years ago today, 19 Arab guys, 15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from UAE, one each from Egypt and Lebanon, funded by a wealthy scion of the Saudi regime and partly inspired by the same Wahhabi fundamentalist crackpotism that inspires the Saudi regime, attacked America and killed about 3000 of us.

Our initial response was to invade Afghanistan, which was a failed state and not involved in the attack, but some of the warring parties allowed some of bin Laden's other projects to train there and it appears that bin Laden himself was there for a time.  It didn't really address what had caused the attacks, but it made a little progress against Afghanistan's real problems.  But like our efforts 20 years earlier, after the first superficial successes, we gave up on the real solutions (e.g. schools and a way for ordinary Afghans to make a decent living) and moved on to making yet another failed state in Iraq.

All together, our response to the September 11th attacks have killed more than 3 times as many US and allied soldiers, wounded far more than that, killed hundreds of thousands in the countries we've attacked, exacerbated the problems of Afghanistan, created newly failed states in Iraq and Syria where there had been stable states before, and created a far more deadly terrorist organization in ISIS than bin Laden's al Qaeda ever was.

By any standard I can think of, the "war" on terror has given a huge victory to the terrorists, and to the cause of nihilism in general.

The Saudi regime in Arabia is extremely repressive, and their huge wealth allows them to stay in power in spite of it.   The Arab guys who attacked us 15 years ago knew there was no point in attacking their oppressor.  As long as the money keeps rolling in, the family of ibn Saud will use it to retain power.  So they attacked the enabler of their oppression.


Meanwhile, we have been quietly increasing development of US petroleum reserves.  Corrected for inflation, the price of gasoline is about where it was in the mid '70s, down from all-time highs.   The Saudi are feeling the bite, but they're still making good money.   But more important than that, we've been installing renewable energy sources, mostly wind and solar, at a rapidly increasing rate.   In another decade or so, we may be able to stop buying buying from them entirely.  Once that happens, and the profligacy of the Saudi family burns through all that money, there will be regime change in Arabia.

That will be a victory for all of us.