re: #34 MandyManners

Clipped quote, surpise surprise.

In 2001, administration stalwarts suggested that Osama bin Laden rivaled Hitler in the danger he posed to U.S. security and insisted that Al Qaeda’s power was so great that nothing short of a “global war on terror” was required.

At that time, most experts say, this description of Al Qaeda simply wasn’t true. It was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky — but despite the unexpected success of their attack on the U.S., they did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation.

Al-Qaeda as a group were “relatively limited” in their political pull, outside of Afghanistan - they were not pulling the strings on a national level behind the curtains anywhere else.

a “mortal threat to the nation” - is a threat so great as the nation state will collapse, not an abillity to strike intermittently - although fatally to civillians.

“Intermittently lethal” to the US - well, thats true, before the Afghanistan war attacks by Al-Qaeda were intermittent against US targets.