In the quest to not seem as if a person has suffered a loss the there can be no end to the lengths certain people's egos will go. It happens in all areas of life and when highly competitive people lose, it can be as though they have suffered the death of someone close to them. For those that care only about the competition, such as many athletes, it's probably just as much if not more about the work they put in to achieve a win only to suffer a loss. For people in other situations sometimes it is all about image and the thought of being humiliated, embarrassed and looking bad. There are even those that feel everything is about their image for them losses can send people to extremes with desperation written all over their actions.
Most people deal with a loss in their own ways and move on hopefully learning from it in the process. Then there are those that just can't accept a loss and will drag everyone around them down with them in their struggle against what has already happened. Usually, they are hardened on the outside, but all fragile on the inside.
That latter personality type can also be highly sensitive to anything on the horizon they believe could be perceived as a loss. They build up personalities based on false notions of being immortal, invulnerable and unable to be defeated. There are those individuals or even groups that don a mask painted with colors meant to reflect this invulnerable front.
Yet their invulnerability itself is non-existent. It is a myth and a hope of vain people so disconnected from reality they feel they are unable to suffer any sort of loss. Yet, their subconscious awareness of their weaknesses allows any undefeated streak they may have to devolve into just a long series of instances of them trying to convince everybody they have no weaknesses. Once that happens the longer they persist to keep up the charade the more energy they put into what they are most afraid of- an embarrassing demise - as opposed to just the humbling realization they can suffer defeat and admitting as much out loud.
Once aware at some point they will lose, essentially the loss has occurred. Then they can choose how best to live with that knowledge, how best to deal with the eventuality. If the problem shifts from not being able to deal with a real loss to not being able to keep up the facade of being untouchable, they lose themselves. The more that happens the more they lose, not to any actual thing they are afraid of, but the monster they've dreamed up and believes exists – what they feel will happen if they lose.
When we were hit by the attacks of 9/11 we fell victim to a terrorist attack. A terrorist attack is not necessarily a smaller group with few resources organizing an attack designed to have the most impact on a larger group with more resources. It is a group using an attack designed specifically to instill fear in another usually larger group to provoke a specific reaction growing out of the fear inspired in the victims from the attack. Not all attacks are terrorism. The term terrorism has the root 'terror' for a reason.
When planning his strategy for war on the West, specifically us as a country, Osama Bin Laden wanted to plan attacks that, among others, would spell two things. First he wanted “a conflict between the Arab-Muslim world and the West.” (http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html) He wanted to provoke fear through his attacks and the other emotions that tend to grow out of fear, like anger and revenge, that would then lead us to make irrational decisions based out of those emotional responses. In other words he wanted us to see his face and the face of the people that carried out the attacks and, as people do when they are afraid, angry and want revenge, irrationally decide all people 'like that' needed to be attacked.
He wanted not calculated military strikes against his organization and a clear cut military campaign against them. He wanted all out cultural and religious war. He wanted to sucker us by playing on our emotions, specifically fear, to effectively terrorize us into following his path, not our own. People do irrational things out of fear, anger, revenge, prejudice and hatred like focus on the wrong targets. An example of this might be when a person from one oppressed group focuses on another equally or similarly oppressed group to vent their anger and hatred as opposed to looking at the roots of the real problem, which is never a large group in the end, but very specific individuals usually. When two or more such groups are tricked into hating each other through base emotions like racism etc, they take their eye off the ball and can ruin themselves in the process.
The second thing he wanted his attacks to spell was ruin for us financially by using our fear and anger induced by his group's assaults to provoke us to expend all or large portions of our financial resources in huge blanket crusades. He said as much in one of his infamous video tapes released on November 01, 2004. He said, “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.” (http://articles.cnn.com/2004-11-01/world/binladen.tape_1_al-jazeera-qaeda-bin?_s=PM:WORLD)
Ezra Klein further elaborated in and article in the New York Times published May, 03 2011, stating, “Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/bin-ladens-war-against-the-us-economy/2011/04/27/AFDOPjfF_blog.html) The previous super power being the former USSR when, with our help and specific planning, the USSR was dragged into a war in Afghanistan that eventually bankrupted them.
It was us after all that figured out and taught Bin Laden that strategy and funded him and his rebels secretly in that war. As Zbigniew Brzezinski stated, once he realized the Soviets were committed to Afghanistan, “I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” (http://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/) Only unlike Vietnam the rebel fighters in Vietnam successfully bankrupted The USSR.
Looking at where we are now, regarding Afghanistan, we are heading down the same path. We have won the war. We met our goal, yet as though we were blind to the large banner pronouncing that, we are staying on past that point. The Soviets never even met their goal. We won, yet there are those advising decision makers like the president that are so afraid of even a perceived loss they wish to stay and expend money we don't have and more lives of our soldiers. They wish to do this because they are insecure about whether or not we won.
The goal was never to extinguish the Taliban, merely to squash their resistance in Afghanistan to our finding the person we deemed responsible for 9/11. We succeeded in driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan and successfully caught up with Bin Laden. The goal has been met. If we wish to further whittle down Al Qaeda, it does not take tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of troops. We have been doing that with just special forces, drones and intelligence with far better results than all the daisy cutters and the rest.
Osama Bin Laden lost because we caught him, he lost on that score. But if we continue to remain there spending money as we go broke back home, our credit rating goes downhill, our children's educational future slips and Americans can no longer afford to keep roofs over their heads to satisfy the goals of some misguided advisors, he starts winning as if he rose from the dead. We are falling farther and farther behind the rest of the modern world on things like infant mortality rates and we want to spend the next two years stabilizing Afghanistan beyond what we've done over the last ten years? (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html#top)
We don't need tax dollars in Afghanistan any longer. We need to bring the troops home and let Afghanistan write the prelude to their own future. The majority of Americans are footing the billions of dollars a year price tag. (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fas.org%2Fsgp%2Fcrs%2Fnatsec%2FRL33110.pdf&rct=j&q=cost%20of%20global%20war%20on%20terror&ei=3ItlTqmHIMa_gQf3u8WYCg&usg=AFQjCNHjBPsvESRejCx5jQYT4wnzgrFYTw&sig2=RB5SFSCombadZjD98FzUiA&cad=rja)
That does not spell profit for the percentage of the population paying most of the taxes. The lives and the money lost won't help us any more than the hundreds of billions spent there already. Spending it there to help behind the scenes strategists afraid of reading anywhere someone said they lost like they lost cover over their insecurities only follows Osama Bin Laden down the path he wished us to go, and spells, for him, a post mortem win. Is that what we want? America knows he lost. Let's find out how to spell putting those resources to use here and spend the money in the one place they've been forgetting about – back home.
To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.
Original: What Spells A Win?