Panama Red said:
Was he just not very bright?
I don't know how anyone would possibly think the US would just do some limited air strikes in the face of something so far beyond any previous terror attack.
Did you not live through the Clinton years? We did almost nothing foreign policy wise unless it was focused on getting Clinton's woes off the news. We cut and run in Somlia. We did nothing in response to Embassy bombings in Africa in 1998. We hadn't really done anything in response to the Cole attack. The only response we made was when Clinton ordered an air strike based on bad intel and the strike didn't do much other than destroy factories. During this period the idiots in charge felt the way to deal with terrorists was by criminal sanctions rather than a war-based mindset. Everyone knows the latter is the only one that works.
Then Clinton's VP Gore won the popular vote against Bush in 2000, so OBL probably thought it things weren't going to change much. He was wrong but his thinking, at the time, wasn't totally irrational.