Going to the extreme opposite of strategic thinking. It always surprises me when one motivation is so rarely mentioned with terrorists, including OBL and co.: killing people–for the Islamic ones, infidels–is a positive act in itself, even pleasurable. And it certainly has a far greater number of supporters who as a group take pleasure in that fact.
It is so difficult for Americans to conceive of that for themselves–it happens in individual cases, obviously–it is almost willfully ignored, out of misplaced compassion, in others.
Yep. Hopefully no Islamic terrorists will ever be able to nuke us back to the Stone Age, and/or do something else that would take us back to a much earlier level of technology.
I would bet that this sort of thing is not unheard of on planets with roughly our level of technology, though. I would doubt we are super unique in that regard.
But I assume there were at least a few Muslims killed in the 9/11 attacks. I guess it’s okay for Muslims to kill Muslims as long as they kill more infidels during the same attack.
You can hardly characterize the taliban as “Islam” any more than you can equate fundies with christianity. As for the blind rage part, maybe that was true for Iraq. Who the fuck knows what people in the Anheuser-Busch white house were thinking. But I think the operation in Afghanistan had a legitimate and probably necessary objective.
So you think the US invaded Afghanistan primarily as 21st century version of the crusades and not for the obvious security threats it posed? I mean, given what was done in Iraq, I can’t prevent your making that argument on any presumed logical grounds, but objectively, there were plenty of justifications for Afghanistan as compared to Iraq.
To increase visibility and membership in his organization by demonstrating to anti-American/Israeli Muslims that the US could be hurt and that Al Qaeda were the ones to do it. To this end he somewhat succeeded in that Al Qaeda has certainly gained in stature since the accounts and now has many franchises across the world, but he failed to predict how successful the US would be in targeting the core Al Qaeda organization.
He hoped to instigate a war between the Islamic and Western world (success) which, with god on their side, the Islamists would win (not so much).
Do you watch reality TV?
You know how one (typically) woman will slap another woman and back away. Or even more often will say something and then overtalk the other woman so she can’t get a word in? In either case, the aggressor feels she won since she got her blow in with no retaliation.
I’m sure OBL felt there could be no retaliation against him since
A) We couldn’t find him and
B) The US lacked the balls to do anything serious about him up to that point.
So he kills a bunch of Americans and in doing so makes a few symbolic statements and we’re not going to do anything about it so he wins. Reality TV logic.
I suspect he just began to believe his own hype. Of course, we (Clinton) didn’t respond aggressively to the first attempted bombing, so maybe that gave him some extra confidence.
But, I think most agree that anyone who believes the US is not much of a warring nation probably doesn’t know their world history very well.
Exactly this. His plan was to demonstrate that he and his organization COULD hit America and hurt us. Secondary effects were to terrorize our population and inspire his target audience. In addition, he, like seemingly many others, felt that the US had no real will or stomach to fight. That the thought of causalities would discourage us from getting involved. A LOT of leaders and nations have felt this about the US. His own experience with the US was when we reluctantly gave aide to the folks in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviets. We didn’t want to get our own hands dirty. We were reluctant to assert what he probably saw as our power on the world stage (I’m sure he felt that if HE had the power of the US he wouldn’t hold back as much as we do, and that holding back was an obvious sign of our weakness). In addition, he had first hand experience confronting the Soviets, who he probably thought of as strong and ruthless, and thus respected, and he had been part of the folks who got them to cave. How much easier would it be to make America, the weak, cave in? He probably felt that if his attack worked that the US might do some symbolic strikes like we had done during Clinton’s presidency, at most, and that would further demonstrate our weakness to the rest of the world, most specifically to his target audience, and that by showing our weakness it would give him an even freer hand in the Middle East. We’d be cowed, we’d be scared, and we’d have shown how weak we were.
I’m fairly certain that our invasion of Afghanistan came as a complete shock to him…and he was probably floored by our idiotic invasion of Iraq and our about face and engagement in the region (hitting targets in places like Pakistan, for instance). This is a guy who didn’t ever try to understand the US, and who’s impression of the US was formed mainly from his own cherry picked evidence and prejudices, as well as folks around him telling him what he wanted to hear.
yeah, one of the news sotries about the October Crisis in Quebc quotes FLQ sympathizers as celebrating when the War Measures Act was declared. It gave the police (and army) extraordinary powers and removed basic rights like habeus corpus. One sympathizer at the time, I recall, was quoted saying that the oppressive powers that Trudeau had assumed were simply going to prove to the general public what the FLQ types had been saying all along, that the capitalist pigs and their running dog lakeys were oppressing the working class. Of course, they were home-grown marxists trying to foment the revolution, rather than foreign religious nutbars trying to instill general fear. they wanted to usher in a worker’s paradise, like the ones in Russia, China, and (later) Cambodia.
I’m sure the biggest shock to him was how the USA did in a month or two what the Russians could not do in 10 years. Afghanistan at the start was war done right.
Of course, it’s one thing to win the war, it’s another to successfully occupy hostile country.
Actually, it gets mentioned quite often–typically by people who have no understanding of Islam or Muslims.
Attributing the emotion to terrorists may have a point; certainly there have been terrorists who seemed to take a fair amount of delight in murder and mayhem for their own sake. However, there is no great love for killing–even infidels–in Islam or among Muslims. Had killing been such a serious motivator, Saladin would have treated the citizens of Jerusalem the way that Raymond of Toulouse and his buddies had treated the inhabitants 88 years earlier. Similar events can be cited throughout Muslim history.
Islamists believe they have a near enemy and a far enemy. The near enemy is the secular government of the Muslim lands. The far enemy is the United States. The near enemy must be defeated to bring on a Islamic government. The main thing that is propping up the secular governments is support from the US. By attacking the United States OBL hoped to get the US to stop supporting the secular governments. Once the secular governments ceased to have US support they would crumble and the islamists would take over.
The template was Afghanistan. There was a secular government supported by the Russians. The mujahadeen fought the Soviets until they withdrew from Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawl the Afghan government fell and eventually the Taliban took over and formed an Islamist government.
Al Queda thought the Russians were tougher than the Americans and so it would be easier to get them to capitulate.