The Bin Laden miscalculation

 Power Line:

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Bin Laden and the Taliban miscalculated by underestimating the likely response to the 9/11 attacks by the U.S. government:

The miscalculation by al-Qaeda and its allies was not to anticipate that America would respond by launching a full-scale war on Afghanistan. The “worst they had envisaged”, writes Lahoud, was “limited US airstrikes”.

Where could they have gotten that idea? From Bill Clinton.

The bin Laden papers indicate that al Qaeda wanted to pull off more spectacular attacks after Tora Bora, but was unable to do so:

[F]rom 2004, Bin Laden worked tirelessly to rebuild his shattered organisation and at the time of his death was planning another “spectacular”: a coordinated attack on supertankers carrying oil to the United States. He hoped to choke off a third of America’s oil supply, thus producing an economic meltdown and public protests that would lead to a change in US foreign policy.

But al Qaeda no longer had the resources to do much. Bin Laden’s grandiose self-image found no counterpart in reality.

The American response to 9/11 was a great policy success that now is taken too much for granted. We would be living in a very different world if stateless terrorist groups had been able to execute major attacks over the last 20 years, as opposed to sporadically inspiring forlorn ideologues to carry out one or two man operations. The fact that we have not seen a repeat of 9/11–let alone multiple repeats, or something worse–is a credit to George W. Bush and his administration, and to American intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

More at the link, including how bin Laden and his family escaped detection for so long, and how the CIA protected the source of its intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts.

The Bush response evidently surprised the terror group and they never really recovered from it.  It was clearly much more effective than the Clinton response.