'The real objective of the 9/11 attacks was to prompt American overreaction: to goad Washington....'

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


Obama Does ‘Stupid Stuff’ in ISIS War
October 2, 2014

President Obama famously counseled his foreign policy team “don’t do stupid stuff,” but he is now violating his own principle by plunging into an incoherent war policy in Iraq and Syria rather than challenging the stupid “group think” of Official Washington, as Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett explain.

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett


While President Barack Obama continues — at least for now — to resist redeploying large numbers of U.S. soldiers to fight the Islamic State on the ground, the military components of the anti-Islamic State strategy he has laid out effectively recommit the United States to its post-9/11 template for never-ending war in the Middle East.

In the end, such an approach can only compound the damage that has already been done to America’s severely weakened strategic position in the Middle East by its previous post-9/11 military misadventures.

Thirteen years after the fact, most of America’s political and policy elites have yet to grasp the strategic logic that motivated the 9/11 attacks against the United States. Certainly, al-Qa’ida was not averse to damaging America’s economy and punishing its people. But Osama bin Laden knew that effects of this sort would be finite, and thus of limited strategic value; he had no illusions about destroying “the American way of life.”

The real objective of the 9/11 attacks was to prompt American overreaction: to goad Washington into launching prolonged military campaigns against Muslim lands. These campaigns would galvanize popular sentiment across the Muslim world against the United States, mobilize Middle Eastern publics against regional governments (like the one in bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia) that cooperate politically and militarily with it, and rally them in favor of jihadi fighters who resist American domination. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/02/obama-does-stupid-stuff-in-isis-war/

[Initech]

1. The aftermath of 9/11 was a carefully planned coup by the military industrial complex.

To establish never-ending war for profit in the Middle East. It was signed, sealed and delivered with the Patriot Act.

[nashville_brook]

2. i keep hoping this is the "lesser of stupid stuff"

and then i think "wow, that's quite a rationalization."