Reply #88: Um, small point here but from what we know Osama bin Laden's [View All]

[coalition_unwilling]

'number one goal' was to re-establish an Islamic Caliphate stretching from Indonesia to Algeria. The United States has had a long and singularly ugly history of supporting brutal dictators in South and Central Asia and the Middle East and OBL's vision of a caliphate meant that the dictators would have to go. Undermining those dictators meant attacking the United States (as the supporter of the proxy regimes). I frankly think OBL could not have cared less whether the U.S. went bust or not, although the U.S.' financial crisis was an unintended consequence of the strategy OBL undertook and sucked us into.