Well, first I didn’t say “heathen religion”. I don’t think 9-11 was about attacking christianity.
What I was saying was that america was perceived as a particularly sick culture in a world full of them. And yet it’s the most powerful nation too.
The airfields in the holy lands, first gulf war etc were certainly motivations for al qaeda. But I think the fact that they viewed the US as virtually mordor made them choose the particularly spectacular and cold-blooded response that they did.
For your question, most americans were/are fairly ignorant of muslims and islamic culture, so it was never going to be about fighting their culture per se.
But certainly there are some that see Islam simply as an evil force in the world the way that I think al-qaeda and other groups perceive(d) american culture.
You certainly have a good point, but I was kind of couching it in the prevailing level of brutality of the day, plus those things occurred during a terrible war and its aftermath, not quite as out of the blue as 9/11, IMHO.
Qutb visited America in 1949 and was shocked by the depravity he saw (Coed dances!) He sought to keep this depravity from infecting Muslim lands by overthrowing the secular governments and installing Sharia. He failed at this and was locked up and tortured into betraying his cohorts. When he was released, he hated the governments more than ever but knew they were much harder to bring down than he first thought. The reason he thought it was proving so difficult was that the regimes were being propped up by western governments. Thus, in order to install sharia in the middle east the west would have to be attacked and frightened into leaving. Vietnam proved that the US had no stomach for war and could be easily frightened into leaving. After the US left Lebanon after a terrorist attack, this view was proven correct.
Bin Laden went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and had the good luck of entering the fighting just as the Soviets were leaving. This convinced him that he had played a decisive role in their defeat. Just a couple years after leaving Afghanistan the USSR broke up. This showed Bin Laden how fragile the seemingly powerful could be and convinced his he could defeat the US as easily as he had destroyed the Soviet Union. During the first gulf war he was outraged that the Saudi royal family spurned his offer to fight Saddam Hussein and instead invited the infidel Americans to the land of Mecca and Medinah. It showed him he was correct in his view that the west was propping up the secular governments and without the US involvement they would fail. He knew that most of the Arab world was humiliated by the fact that the West was so rich and powerful and the Middle East was so poor and inconsequential. The feeling around the middle east was that reason for this was the west purposely keeping the arab people down. Bin Laden wanted to use this hatred of the west for his own purposes.
Bin Laden hoped that he could accomplish two things with a spectactular strike against the US. First, the US would cowardly run away and desert the secular governments. Next the attacks would show the average Muslim that the radical Islamists were the ones willing to stand up to the West while the secular leaders were kissing up to the West. This would cause secular governments to lose legitimacy and position the Islamists to take control. They would then install Sharia, cleanse the muslim lands of all the decadent things the west had imposed and unite the entire muslim world. This caliphate would be governed by Sharia and it would quickly become the foremost power on earth. The stage would then be set to install Sharia in every country in the world.
This was his goal. He has only accomplished one part of it. The US no longer has as large a presence in Saudi Arabia. However, Islamists are not in power in any country that was previously secular and the country, Afghanistan, that was most like his ideal has had the Islamists kicked out of power. Moreover, the rest of the Arab world is infatuated with Western ideas like governments that answer to the people and free speech. It seems like narcissism to believe that Bin Laden cared at all about small changes in detention policy or further inconveniencing people at airports.
This was always curious to me - my understanding was the Bin Laden wanted the US military out of Saudi Arabia. Under Bush’s watch, that is exactly what occurred - the US military moved out of Saudi Arabia, closing down it’s bases. Check that one off your list Osama! To me there was very little discussion in the media or politics about this…
Forgive me that I have not read the entire thread.
OK, for The West the last couple of centuries have been pretty darn good. For the Arabs (and some other groups) this period has been pretty bad. That is (in the biggest marco sense) why The West has wanted stability. They wanted to keep playing the same game, as they got richer, happier and better-looking with every passing day.
The reverse is true amongst people who think they are being cheated by history. (Don’t argue with me; they think they have been cheated and that is what counts.)
So they want to kick over the table and cause the game to end. There would then be a period of chaos until some sort of new order could be established. The Oppressed People of the World ™ would then have a chance to gain a superior position.
One side wants “stability;” the other wants “revolution.”
Or to say it another way, there was a cartoon many years ago in the political journal Mad magazine. A kid walks into a fireworks store. He wants a huge firework display but has only a quarter. The man sells the kid one firecracker. The kid walks outside, lights his firecracker, tosses it in the shop and enjoys the show.
The Oppressed People of the World ™ want to use a small “spark” (as Marx called it) to ignite a general conflagration that would destroy the existing unfair world to allow a new fairer world to be born in its place.
This is my understanding of Bin Laden and his motives:
Motives: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are to Islam what the KKK are to Christianity. A reactionary, quasi-fascist organization that is always afraid that their pure, superior society is being invaded by impure inferiors and that they must stay vigilant to keep the inferiors in their place. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan Bin Laden went to fight them since they were non-muslim atheists. Then when the US stationed troops in Saudi Arabia to protect Kuwaiti oil fields Bin Laden was pissed about that. What also really pissed him off according to the book ‘growing up bin laden’ (written by his first wife and one of his children) was having female NATO and US soldiers protecting Arab men in Saudi Arabia when the invasion happened. In a way it would be like if the KKK woke up one morning and found out that all the police officers, judges and politicians were black and jewish. They’d be pretty pissed off.
So what was the goal of 9/11? To destroy the US economy and bankrupt/ruin the US by driving us into perpetual war and perpetual fear which would grind our economy to a halt. Mission Accomplished, in between the economic slowdown caused by 9/11, the damage of 9/11, the extra security and the perpetual wars we’ve slready spent at least 2-3 trillion, and that number keeps growing. Basically, bleed the US dry like they bled the soviet union dry with perpetual war. Also in the book above Bin Laden was talking to his son and claimed that the US and Israel were one nation (in his mind), but that the US was the weaker nation. So he wanted to bring down the US so Israel would be more vulnerable. Bin Laden obviously knew his plans would take longer than his lifetime, but that was also part of his plan. I think he has a multistep plan from what I read in the book.
Overthrow all of Afghanistan with help from the Taliban and create a caliphate
Destroy the US by bleeding it dry with perpetual war and perpetual fear
Destroy Israel when it no longer has US support
Convert the world to his idea of Islam
He barely succeeded in step one. But it is a good book to read. Here is another cool factoid from that book. According to Bin Ladens son when Bin Laden lived in Sudan (after being kicked out of Saudi Arabia the Bin Ladens lived in Sudan for a while, then got kicked out of there and had to go to Afghanistan), jihad was only part of his life. Bin Laden had several businesses, farms etc that he spent most of his time on, his wife said he used to grow amazing flowers when he lived in Sudan. It was only after being kicked out of Sudan that jihad took over all of Bin Ladens life. If he had been left in Sudan maybe he would’ve mellowed out. Who knows.
I get the impression Bin Laden didn’t care about democracy, he wanted an Islamic state with his form of Islam in charge (he didn’t seem to like shi’ite muslims as an example, and nations like Iraq or Iran are shi’ite majority). Does the US support democracy? I think so, at least when our interests do not gain more from supporting dictators. During the cold war or WW2 we support dictatorships. But I get the impression we generally prefer liberal democracy, esp when it coincides with our own national interests.
The idea that the US is being bled dry by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not true. In 2001 miltary spending as a pct of GDP was 3.8%. It is currently at 4.7%. During the Cold War the US spent around double the percentage as we currently do for 40 years. This happened during a period of unprecedented economic growth.
Well, my understanding is that his family made its money in construction. I am not, however, suggesting that he blew up some buildings to drum up more construction work.
Say what? They were fighting for slavery. If anything they were worse than Al Qaeda.
Besides all of this, it also resulted in the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam, and the elimination of Iraqi secularism; all victories for Osama.
I think that his ultimate goal was to get the US involved in ugly, messy wars in the Middle East, the better to fuel propaganda against us. Which is exactly what he got. But of course, he couldn’t just say so, so he came up with the garbage about trying to force us out of Saudi Arabia.
In other words, we Americans fell victim of a Br’er Rabbit bluff.
Note, however, that globally the U.S. tends to be more friendly with more democratic regimes, but in the Middle East–the part of the world Bin Laden cared about–the U.S. is notoriously very cozy with the extremely dark (undemocratic) Saudi regime, and also the (now in transition) authoritarian state in Egypt. We also spent decades with very happy relations with the autocratic Shah of Iran.
Of course Bin Laden didn’t believe in democracy himself, but viewed in a Middle Eastern context (as opposed to a Western European or East Asian one), U.S. support for democracy and freedom is something that would be seen as hollow and hypocritical by Middle Easterners of many different political stripes over the course of decades of U.S. policy.
Conversely, of course, Bin Laden was hardly likely to hate us because we were spreding Evil Western Democracy and Freedom in his homeland, because we weren’t actually doing that.
I read somewhere, I think it was in Richard A. Clarke’s Against All Enemies, that bin Laden’s aim, based on published statements, was to provoke a world war between the Islamic world and the Western world, which would (somehow) cause the Islamic states to unite in a new Caliphate which would be a new world superpower.
Any POTUS dealing with that situation should at least have looked at all the pros and cons of giving your enemy what he thinks he wants, before taking military action in or against any Islamic country.
I can’t imagine they’d ever admit it was a failure.
Anyway, the U.S. could strike a far more effective counterblow just by beaming unscrambled Baywatch episodes, James Bond movies and softcore porn to millions of cheap satellite dishes donated to (or smuggled to, as the case may be) millions of homes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Not for the most part. Instead, he wanted to get the Jews and crusaders out of the lands of Islam.
His most concrete goal was to get the US military out of Saudi Arabia. While the number of US forces there is now less than in 2001, we are still there:
Also contrary to his plan was the overthrow of Mullah Omar. And while he may have had no love for Saddam Hussein, he would not see the current regime as an improvement. Note that:
It’s true that he didn’t personally talk against the Sh’ia nearly as often as he talked against the US and the Jews. But he did prefer Sunni rulers, other factors being equal.
Go to a psych ward in your friendly neighborhood mental hospital. What is the point of the latest disaster a lunatic caused?
There’s no point to lunacy.
A reality based conclusion we can realize out of this tragedy is the massive failure of intelligence to evaluate the existing clues of an impending attack. Blame the Republican administration that shut down all intelligence trying to find its way to the highest levels of Gov for the attention it needed to be dealt with.
If Gore was President, who won the Presidency by the way, we would not have had a 9/11.
That is absurd. While Bill Clinton was not blind to the threat of Al-Qaeda he was in the middle of his laundry list after “domestic terrorists” (see the Ruby Ridge and Waco fiascos), and pardoning more ideologically suitable terrorists. Arguably due to butterflies 9-11 might not have happened or any other terrorist attacks on that scale but its not impossible.
