The goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Was the US sufficiently terrorized by 9/11? It'd be near-impossible to argue that we weren't. Not only did we shed quite a few civil liberties, and subject our own citizens to a wide range of inconveniences and violations, but we also spent trillions of dollars in an ongoing "War on Terror" that seems to have no end and no realistic, tangible goals. (As with the "War on Drugs," it reifies an intangible concept, and then attempts to fight that concept as if it were tangible).

Getting the US out of the Middle East is a long-term goal of Al Qaeda and similar organizations. But the short-term goal, i.e., how they plan to get us out of the Middle East, is by causing our society to collapse -- financially and socially. To paraphrase one of OBL's treatises, Al Qaeda wants to "bleed" us to death. Terror is their chief tactic in pursuit of that strategy.

OBL is dead, and depending on whom you ask, Al Qaeda is either spent or significantly weakened. But that's sort of beside the point. Those guys never really expected that 9/11 would cause us to withdraw immediately from the Middle East. In fact, their entire plan was to draw us deeper in, where we could waste blood and treasure and engender further ill will in the region. And the fact that we whipped up a security frenzy in our own country (PATRIOT act, airport security theater, paranoia, etc.)? That's either icing on the cake, or part of the cake itself, but it's certainly a big win in Al Qaeda's column.

Now, if you take the long view, you could argue that there's still time for us to correct our course. The terror and repurcussions of our reaction to 9/11 can still be undone. We recovered from McCarthyism. We recovered from the Alien & Sedition Acts. Time and again, our country has temporarily threatened its own principles or abandoned rationality, and then come back to its senses in the long run. It's entirely possible that the post-9/11 security frenzy ends up being another historical footnote.

On the other side, the United State government benefits, as they are seen as more important than ever and they can justify further tax increase In other words, they benefit from a situation they did not create.

Of course, it was not rational in the long run. But for the careers of certain individuals, it is a good thing. The harm may be so dispersed that they barely felt it or they are shielded from it altogether. Furthermore, they are fueled by our irrationality of perceiving rare, media-worthy like a terrorist attack as more important than many common death scenarios and the more common(and arguably more important) horror.

Keep in mind that organizations will either choose to expand, or disappears. If the US government choose the rational way for society and enlightened self-interest, it would have make itself disappear by unemploying themselves in the process. Of course, the government choose to makes job for the insider instead.

In some sense, this is what the party of the US government wanted and what terrorists desire. But if they aren't so wrapped up in the government or being a terrorist, they might have a different perspective.

It's like being a luddite at the dawn of the industrial revolution. We saw that we are losing our jobs, but we don't see that eventually our quality of life is going to increase. Now that we don't have to make clothes, we can enjoy the finer thing in life.

I agree that the chance they thought this (US Govt. terrorizing their own citizens) is what would happen is slim. However, their goal of wanting to hurt the US population / Government in a significant way was far more successful than they could ever imagine.

The additional intervention in the middle east was a given either way so I don't think that can be looked at as a loss for them.

I would think they wanted more intervention in the middle east. Why? To drum up more support for their cause and to have an easy villan. I would say their attacks were fairly successful.

Bin Laden very much wanted the US to invade Afghanistan. He wanted to draw the US into the same kind of war the Soviets were sucked into.

Agreed

I don't think the terrorists won, but it's hard to deny that the American people lost.

Good point. It's easy to see who profited most from the 9/11 attacks.