Yes, let's not fool ourselves that bin Laden is in any way interested in what happens to America. What he wants/wanted was to be the one to bring it down himself.

For about the same reason, Sarkozy must be seething that Ingrid Betancourt was freed and that he can't claim credit for it.

I suspect that the most basic reason Bin Laden preferred destroying the Twin Towers and much of what followed had to do with the needs of his psyche and those of his followers.  A spectacular attack such as that feeds his and his follower's sense of "inner omnipotence," much as Bush's response fed his and those of his supporters.  A truly ugly symbiosis and a classic example of  Hegelian "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" sequences.  Just too bad about everyone else.  Socio-political psychopathology in action.

Eli Sagan, in his excellent book THE HONEY AND THE HEMLOCK-Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America, notes that we, as a species, have so many psychological debilities that it is a wonder we can even live together in complex societies as well as we can.  Especially true in the USA.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Does seem that way, doesn't it.  Sweets to the sweet, sort of. :-/

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.