This situation, along with the United States' continued role of supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, pretty much guarantees a steady stream of recruits for any terrorist movement of the kind bin Laden was organizing, for the foreseeable future. In that sense, bin Laden was successful.

This is somewhat remarkable considering that, as many observers have pointed out, bin Laden at first appeared to have made a tactical blunder with the attacks of September 11, since this caused him to lose his base in Afghanistan – the one Islamic state that was at least sympathetic to his organization. But after President Bush decided to use 9/11 as a pretext not only for invading Afghanistan, but also Iraq – these wars combined to put bin Laden and his movement back in business on a larger scale.

Could bin Laden have known that the U.S. response to 9/11 would have made his movement even stronger, even if he lost his base in Afghanistan? I would say it is likely. While it was not predictable that President Bush would necessarily invade Iraq – although it was a strong possibility – it was foreseeable that the U.S. government would seize on 9/11 to create a new overarching theme for its interventions throughout the world.

For a decade prior to the 9/11 attacks, Washington was without such an overall ideological framework. Until 1990, there were four decades of a "war against communism" that was used to justify everything from the overthrow of non-communist democratic governments in the Western Hemisphere (Guatemala, Chile, etc.) to large scale warfare in Vietnam, as well as hundreds of military bases throughout the world. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, but the military bases and interventions continued. Prior to 9/11, the military interventions had to be done on an ad hoc basis (e.g. "enemy-of the-month" as in Panama or the first Iraq war). But this is a weak basis for mobilizing public opinion, and in general, Americans have to be convinced that their own security is at stake in order to acquiesce to most sustained military adventures.