I keep seeing this article reposted all over Lemmy and I feel like I need to comment on it.

I remember 9/11. I was a senior in high school when it happened. After the dust settled (so to speak), the common explanation for the attacks was that Osama Bin Laden wanted Americans to be enraged at the local attack on our soil and rise up against Bush Jr. and the government. Potentially overthrowing him and replacing him with a less warmongering leader who stayed out of Middle East affairs.

That never happened. In fact, the opposite happened. An attack on our soil turned Americans super patriotic and we became even more involved in the Middle East. We were so blindly enraged, we went after any foreigners who supported the attacks. And our government used it as an excuse to raid the Middle East of resources (oil, in particular).

We started a war with Iraq (which had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian), and after ousting their leader, we turned our attention to hunting down Osama hiding in Afghanistan with the Taliban. And we spent the next 2 decades heavily involved in Middle East affairs. Instead of staying out of their politics, we instead tried to push our own on them, promoting Democracy everywhere we set up camp. I know; I was in the US military during that time and served in Iraq briefly in 2007.

And no, I didn't sign up because of 9/11. I already had a contract to join the US Air Force, which I had signed in August 2001. A month later, 9/11 happened and I thought, 'Shit. I'm gonna die in some foreign war now.' Thankfully, that never happened, but I wasn't proud of our government's response to the attack and our foreign involvement since.

Osama Bin Laden's attack on America has led to our downfall as a country, as our response led to more invasive government policies that took away our rights in favor of security. But as far as Osama's goal for attacking us? He completely failed, and it eventually ended with him hunted across the globe as America's most wanted terrorist, and eventually dead and buried at sea. He greatly underestimated our culture and how revenge-prone we'd be.

I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, but from what I can read, this article doesn't seem to remember history correctly. Osama simply wanted a regime change, not the entire collapse of America. He was just trying to incentivize Americans to start a revolution, not understanding how blindly loyal we were to our country at that point in history, and how strongly we'd defend it from foreign attacks.

Osama may have been deeply involved in politics and pissed off at America's involvement in the Middle East. But the average American was completely blind to politics back then, having no real knowledge of what our government was up to. 9/11 woke up a lot of people, but our involvement in politics was misguided and quickly redirected away from what our government was up to, and instead what our government was doing in retaliation. We focused on the wrong politics for far too long and let our government take advantage of the confusion to restrict our rights and assert more power and control instead. And we've been on a steady decline ever since.

To this day, even with a dictator-wanna-be as our president, we still haven't started a revolution and overthrown our own government. And we have WAY more incentive to do it today than we ever did in the early 2000s. Osama completely failed in his goal; Americans just aren't used to fighting against their own government. Not since the Civil War, anyway, and no one alive today lived through that. We've been too fat and happy in our lives these past 161 years, and our government, on both sides of the aisle, are very careful to promote peaceful discourse instead of violent revolution. Unless Trump isn't getting his way, then he's all about violent revolution in his favor (see: Jan 6th attacks).

We're so focused on peaceful discourse that politicians have learned no consequences will come their way if they break laws, especially if they can pay their way out of it. So we're stuck in this situation where we need a revolution to change the current system, but nobody wants to be the martyr to start it. And what few people have actually attempted to start something have been quickly demonized and punished/killed (see: Luigi, the Trump "assassination" attempts, etc.).

Our media is blindly loyal to the government and true journalism is dead in our country, so most Americans aren't getting actual news anymore. And our lives are disrupted, but not completely unlivable yet. We're still limping along with a promise of a better day coming. Americans haven't hit that point of hopelessness where risking death for government change is worth it to them yet. So for now, our dictator government, which is still heavily involved in Middle East affairs, persists while we do practically nothing about it. Osama Bin Laden lost.