In two days, I'm sure there will be ample note of the 10th anniversary of the "Mission Accomplished" speech. All the great irony and infamy of that moment will garner the attention it deserves, especially in light of the opening of Bush 43's Presidential library last week.
But today is the 10th anniversary of a real and sustained victory. On this date in 2003, the press buried the story of the US withdrawal from its redoubt in Saudi Arabia. This was Osama bin-Laden's greatest victory-really the one he sought. And the fact that the Cheney-Bush administration buried the news in the run up the Commander Codpiece's ersatz victory dance indicates that Cheney and Rumsfeld and the others who were running things at the time had some sense of the stinging defeat we had suffered.
Before 9/11, what I knew about bin-Laden was that his agenda consisted of 1) global Jihad leading to the prophesied dominion of Islam and the imposition of global Shari'a and 2) the immediate expulsion of infidels (i.e., US military) from the Muslim holy land. Well good luck with number 1--it's a big an diverse world, and not everybody wants to buy that kind of radicalism. But #2 was really what drove the day-to-day operations of Al Qaeda back in those days. Expulsion of US troops was the real plum here.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Saudi Arabia had a lot of attention on it. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and the stark political reality of that country came to light. I recall encountering a story of how Saudi Arabia had become, at that time, a net debtor nation. The corrupt House of Saud monarchy had grown so overburdened by its own profligacy that the country, despite its oil riches, had run into serious headwinds during the Clinton era regimen of oil prices (remember: oil was less than $10 per barrel in January 1999.) At any rate, to relieve the political pressure that is bound to foment around such great disparity in wealth and the attendant lack of vision or care for the greater populace, the Saudi princes decided to control the population through feeding a militant brand of Islam which was promoted to maintain the whole corrupt culture while stifling dissent and channelling frustration with the economic and political system into this doctrinaire, if not fully radicalized, expression. President W. Bandar Bush was, of course, fully in the corner of the corrupt princes--to the extent that the congressional report on 9/11 redacted--the famous pages that were widely speculated to have implicated the Saudi Intelligence service in providing cover and assistance to the 9/11 plotters. But we were not allowed to see that, so it didn't happen. ( Except it most likely did.)
In 2003 I was in the throes of a major 9/11 truthing and sleuthing phase, and I was endlessly flailing and screaming about the nightmare for democracy that the run-up to attacking Saddam represented.When I saw the story about the US parting ways with Saudi bases, I was in deep, next-level conspiracy--we attacked Iraq to provide cover for our exodus--which some (like me) could point out was a complete victory for bin-Laden and al-Qaeda as configured in that 1998-2004. I'm not saying that the Iraq war was a pretext for the US military leaving Saudi Arabia--I've grown less conspiratorial with time--but the war certainly provided the right kind of hand feint to distract the population from reality of bin-Laden's apparent victory.
So in 2013, thanks to $100 a barrel oil, Saudi Arabia's balance sheet is back in the black. bin-laden's dead, and his global jihad is mostly in tatters. We have PATRIOT and Military Commissions and re-ratified FISA in our lives in more ways than we'd care to think. And we have a drone base in Saudi Arabia, which skirts the issue of the presence of infidels in the holy land--only the infidel's toys.
...Same as it every was...