Why did Al-Qaeda attack the US ?

pubjohn47

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This is what a terrorist on death row wrote in his blog :

Writing on his blog, he said, "This was not a crime of hate but an act of Passion and Patriotism, an act of country and commitment, an act of retribution and recompense. This was not done during Peace time but at War time.

I, ......... felt a need to exact some measure of equality and fairness for the thousands of victims " "

http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/07/20/texas.execution/


3 Questions :

(1) Do you think this terrorist experienced the same things as other terrorists do, who are vulnerable to recruiting propaganda, especially when they see their fellow citizens as victims of terrorism and so out of duty, they feel deaths need to be avenged and they do not see their victims as innocent but rather "guilty by association" ?

(2) Would he have become a terrorist if his fellow citizens were not terrorized and killed ?

(3) This guy became a terrorist by just watching one day of victims being killed, so can you imagine what happens in a situation where the killing goes on for days or months, how many terrorists could be recruited in such a situation ?

If a Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik,

in peaceful Norway goes on a terrorizing killing spree targeting children and setting off a deadly bomb in Oslo due to his anti-left wing views,

is it surprising that some muslims in the middle east, Pakistan and Afghanistan might be vulnerable to being recruited as terrorists when western countries are raining down bombs on them, collaterally killing their loved ones ?


http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15260377,00.html




The US government in the past has gone to war due to perceived injustice even though no Americans were the victims of the perceived injustice as in the war between Iraq and Kuwait,


so is it surprising that Osama Bin Laden would want to go to "war" with the US government over perceived injustice due to the US government committing "atrocities" against fleeing Iraqi soldiers and the collateral killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children ?


ref : http://www.post-gazette.com/nation/20030216casualty0216p5.asp

If a tiny, insignificant, minuscule british tea tax that only affected rich Americans who drank british tea and which led to cries of "taxation without representation" resulted in terrorizing and disfiguring innocent British civilians and American loyalists by American "patriot" mobs,

so is it surprising that some muslims might be adversely affected by US bombs raining down on them during the gulf war in 1990, which in turn resulted in Bin Laden starting a 10 year terror campaign to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia

as a result of Saudi dissidents being tortured for opposing the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia following the carnage of the gulf war in which the US government was accused of not only massacring fleeing Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait but also air strikes that collaterally killed tens of thousands of Iraqi women, children and babies.

The US government's war against iraq in the 90s killed 86,194 men, 39,612 women and 32,195 children and destroyed 20,000 Iraqi homes, leveled schools and hospitals.


This is what Bin Laden saw; which he described in his numerous fatwas :

Iraqis, before the gulf war, had not killed any American intentionally and had not taken any military action against the US anywhere in the world and yet the US government decided to launch a war that collaterally killed tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children and massacre fleeing Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait

for the purposes of installing a hedonistic and cruel Kuwaiti dictatorship

In one US air strike : three hundred Iraqi children were killed by "smart" bombs in a Baghdad bomb shelter on February 16, 1991.

The blast caused a fire so intense that it flash-burned outlines of those children and their mothers on the walls; you can still peel strips of blackened skin-from the stones.

And in 1994, religious scholars safar al-hawali and salman al-awdah were tortured by the Saudi government which escalated the conflict between Osama
bin laden and the US government.

Osama's friends were tortured due to them being against the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.


Some of the conclusions reached from reading Osama Bin Laden's fatwas and from the first-ever television interview with Osama Bin Ladin which was conducted by Peter Arnett in eastern Afghanistan in late March 1997 :


(1) Osama Bin Laden read about the US govt. fire and atom bombing Japan in 1945 when Japan was already defeated as early as July of 1944 when Tojo resigned and Japan was negotiating concessions to the communists but FDR did not care about communists either killing tens of millions of civilians or that the crushing of Japan enabled communism to expand in Asia resulting in hundreds of thousands of US soldiers either dying horrifying deaths or being maimed, disfigured, deformed, blinded or paralyzed for life during the cold war.

(2) Osama Bin Laden read about US/Allied POWs in Japan and hundreds of thousands of Japanese children being terrorized, tortured and burned alive in the US government's fire and atom bombings of Japan and must have concluded that if FDR/Truman did not care about the plight of their own US soldiers captive in Japan who were being killed by the US government's atom and fire bombings of Japan and since FDR/Truman did not care about the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese children and babies, why should Osama bin Laden care about lives when strategic goals were more important


( this is how both state and non-state terrorists think and I do not agree with the way they think ).

(3) Osama Bin Laden read about the US government in the 50s overthrowing a democratically elected Mossadegh of Iran and eventually the Shah terrorized his own people in Iran, thanks to the military support given by the US government

(4) He read about the US government in the 60s, arming the Israeli government that used those very US weapons to collaterally kill Palestinian children and babies

(5) He saw the US government in the 70s using napalm, agent orange and carpet bombing Vietnam and Cambodia, collaterally killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of civilians

(6) He saw the US government in the 70s supporting cruel, murderous dictators like the Shah of Iran who used US government weapons to cruelly suppress and torture the Iranian people

(7) He saw the US government in the 80s siding with the "christian" militias in Lebanon, the very christian militias that massacred Muslims

Another example Osama Bin Laden gives is the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports in 1996 that blamed the Israeli government using US government weapons to deliberately or carelessly kill women and children in the UN compound near Qana, a village in Southern Lebanon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_shelling_of_Qana

(8) He saw the US government in the 80s supporting cruel dictators like Saddam Hussein

(9) He saw the US government in the 90s imposing cruel sanctions on Iraq resulting in UN reports stating that half a million Iraqi children died prematurely due to the sanctions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions#Infant_and_child_death_rates

(10) He saw that the cruel Saudi dictatorship was being supported by the US government , the very dictatorship that tortured dissidents who opposed the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia

(11) He saw that the US government never left any country in which it had troops in ( example; US troops still present in Germany and Japan, even after the war had ended decades ago)

(12) He saw that warnings to the US government to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia were ignored

(13) He saw that the only way to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia was to launch a terror campaign

(14) He saw that his terror campaign against the US had failed and US troops still remained, in Saudi Arabia, 9 years after the gulf war had ended

(15) He saw that the only way to get the US government to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia was to launch an attack on the US homeland on 9/11/01

(16) He saw that the US government finally gave into his demands to withdraw troops, only after the 9/11 attacks, and US troops finally left Saudi Arabia in 2003, almost 13 years after the gulf war had ended


Placing US government troops in Saudi Arabia deeply affected Osama Bin Laden and the Saudi religious leadership because of the historical record of the US govt. in its dealings in the middle east and elsewhere.


An analogous way of looking at it would be the US government's involvement in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan because the Soviets had their "presence" in those countries and the US govt. was "afraid" communism would spread if the Soviets were allowed to have their presence in Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan


and thinking along the same lines, Al-Qaeda does not want the US government's military presence in any Muslim country, especially "holy" Saudi Arabia because Osama was afraid the US govt would continue supporting the cruel Saudi dictatorship's crack down on dissidents.


So just as the US government was trying to prevent communism from spreading by being militarily involved in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan; Al-Qaeda wants to get "militarily" involved in preventing the US government's support of cruel dictators in the middle east.


THIS IS THE MAIN MOTIVATION FOR THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS : US GOVERNMENT'S MILITARY PRESENCE IN SAUDI ARABIA


and the subsequent imprisonment and torture of Saudi dissidents by the cruel Saudi dictatorship that provoked Osama Bin Laden to act.



In Closing :

Mar 24,1991 : US General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander of Operation Desert Storm, told reporters in Saudi Arabia the United States was closer to establishing a permanent military headquarters on Arab soil.
(AP, 3/24/01)

What eventually motivated Bin Laden ( I suspect ) to launch a terror campaign against US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia was for personal reasons :

one of the dissidents tortured by the Saudi dictatorship might have been a close friend of Bin Laden and that must have been the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" and that torture was directly related to dissidence against the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

If your close friends were tortured, what would you do if the torturers were not brought to justice and you had the resources to retaliate

or if your loved ones were killed and the perpetrators were not brought to justice ( I personally would forgive the torturers or killers since Jesus said to forgive but most people do not follow Jesus and that includes the US government ).

"Collective punishment" is the mark of terrorism.

Perceived injustice done by a small number of cops is what caused the LA riots in 1992 in which a mob took out their anger on the cops by killing 53 innocent people during the riots and thousands more were injured.

The American "patriot" mob took out their anger on innocent British civilians and American loyalists by terrorizing and torturing the British/American loyalist civilians for the wrong doings over insignificant and minuscule taxation on tea by the British Monarch. The tiny tea tax only affected rich Americans who drank British tea.

Its human nature to collectively punish those who have some kind of ties to the perpetrator; just as today in America, the Texas government punished the entire YFZ commune for the alleged crimes of a few individuals.

Targeting civilians and collective punishment can also been seen in the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombings of scores of Japanese cities where hundreds of thousands of women, children and babies were deliberately burned alive for the wrongs done by a few in the Japanese government



I do not think the US government was wanting to deliberately burn alive Japanese children for the sake of killing children


but rather, "state terrorism" is used to achieve political goals, in this case the unconditional surrender of the Japanese government.


The difference between what non-state terrorists are doing today and the terrorism engaged by the US government in destroying Japan is in the numbers.

Non-state terrorists kill in the thousands whereas state terrorists like the US government (has been periodically in the past) kill in the hundreds of thousands.




The US government is not willing to abandon state terrorism as can be seen in the immense stockpile of nuclear "terror" weapons today.

Just as non-state terrorists say, the US government is saying the same thing :

by telling other countries that if they kill our children with a nuclear weapon, the US government has the right to kill all their children with the US government's nuclear weapons



which is the very definition of terrorism


with the only difference that terrorists kill by the hundreds or even thousands but state terrorism by the US government ( at least in the past ) has killed by the hundreds of thousands.



Another indication that the US government, just as terrorists, does not care about civilian populations in war zones can be seen by the extensive use of nuclear materials in ammunition.

During the gulf war , extensive use of depleted uranium resulted in a sharp increase in the incidence of child leukemia and genetic malformation among babies born in the decade following the Gulf War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Iraqi_population


In a three week period of conflict in Iraq during 2003, it was estimated over 1000 tons of depleted uranium munitions were used mostly in cities.

The U.S. Department of Defense studies using cultured cells and laboratory rodents continue to suggest the possibility of leukemogenic, genetic, reproductive, and neurological effects from chronic exposure to depleted uranium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_with_war#Depleted_uranium_munitions


The fact that Belgium has banned the use of depleted uranium shows that at least one country has the conscience to care about children and babies in war zones where radioactivity from ammunition is clearly present


while countries such as the US, Israel, Britain and France (who do not care about the well being of children and babies in war zones ) have voted against restricting the use of depleted uranium :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium


In this video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klEnAzSMF0M


the narrator says that just one depleted uranium shell emits 1,000 times the normal radiation in the atmosphere

and knowing this, the US government still keeps using depleted uranium shells, not caring about the long term health risks posed to children and babies in war zones


and just as terrorists think, the US government is more concerned about its strategic goals than the long term health and well being of children and babies in war zones


Reiterating :

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Tempe


Before the American revolution , the presence of a tiny tea tax resulted in terrorism and torture which created burns that resulted in infection and a slow death.

A tiny minuscule british tax on tea that only affected rich Americans resulted in American mobs terrorizing and torturing their innocent fellow loyalist Americans and British citizens.


So if a tiny tea tax that only affected rich Americans can cause terrorism,

is it surprising that the collateral deaths of loved ones, children and babies due to bombings by western colonial powers could result in terrorists exploiting the situation in recruiting the loved ones of the victims of those bombings ?



Terrorism arising from foreign forces occupying or taking native lands can also be seen here in America where Native Americans resorted to terrorism when massacres against Native Americans occurred while their lands were taken or occupied by the American colonists.




I am not justifying anything done due to human nature; I am just explaining that it happens and the only way to mitigate or prevent it from happening is to avoid or prevent the casualties in the first place so as it prevent the cycle of violence
 
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Too bad the author emphasizes the "tea tax" as a cause of the rebellion against British rule. Much more to it than that.
 
Taliban gave Osama Bin Laden permission to stay in Afghanistan but not permission to attack other countries :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-GUQr4u8Q

So instead of mounting a war costing trillions of dollars and the lives of our beloved soldiers and tens of thousands of civilian lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US government should have covertly negotiated with the Taliban after the 9/11/01 attacks to apprehend Bin Laden

instead of supporting the corporate welfare system of the warfare corporations and institutions in launching a extremely costly "war on terror"
 
Why did Al-Qaeda attack the US ?

You really believe El-CIAda exists outside of Propaganda?

I believe there are people all over the world in various countries that are pissed off at the US for murdering friends and family for decades.
And some of them retaliate from time to time.

I do not believe there is an "organization" that is remotely relevant.
 
Why did Al-Qaeda attack the US?
Don't ask me how I know this because it's a long story.

Alqaeda attacked the USA in order to draw it to a fight on Muslim land, seeking to sap its energy over years and years. In their analysis, that was the only way to weaken US military & financial support of its Arab tyrant allies in the region.

The idea first appeared in 1996 in the works of Abu Musab al-Soori, and became a "plan" in 1998.

They started by hitting the embassies in East Africa. The US didn't bite. Then they hit USS Cole in 2000. Again the US didn't bite.

Finally they pulled the big one. And the rest is history.
 
Don't ask me how I know this because it's a long story.

Alqaeda attacked the USA in order to draw it to a fight on Muslim land, seeking to sap its energy over years and years. In their analysis, that was the only way to weaken US military & financial support of its Arab tyrant allies in the region.

The idea first appeared in 1996 in the works of Abu Musab al-Soori, and became a "plan" in 1998.

They started by hitting the embassies in East Africa. The US didn't bite. Then they hit USS Cole in 2000. Again the US didn't bite.

Finally they pulled the big one. And the rest is history.

All the attacks you mentioned, came right after the stationing of US government troops in Saudi Arabia.

Bankrupting the US government was a secondary goal compared to the primary goal of trying to get the US government out of the muslim world and trying to get the US government to stop supporting dictators in the muslim world and supplying weapons to Israel
 
Why did Al-Qaeda attack the US ?

I have yet to see any convincing evidence that indicates:

1 - Al-Qaeda had anything to do with 9/11 or

2 - That Usama bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11 or

3 - That UBL was in fact killed in Pakistan earlier this year.

UBL denied any involvement and was not wanted by the FBI for any involvement.
 
I have reasons to believe that obl died sometime in 03. Trusted source for me, but i cant bring anything to the table.... unfortunately
 
Don't ask me how I know this because it's a long story.

Alqaeda attacked the USA in order to draw it to a fight on Muslim land, seeking to sap its energy over years and years. In their analysis, that was the only way to weaken US military & financial support of its Arab tyrant allies in the region.

The idea first appeared in 1996 in the works of Abu Musab al-Soori, and became a "plan" in 1998.

They started by hitting the embassies in East Africa. The US didn't bite. Then they hit USS Cole in 2000. Again the US didn't bite.

Finally they pulled the big one. And the rest is history.


That's HOW, not WHY.......
 
What Causes Terrorism?

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/jul/18/00017/

Last month, Scott McConnell caught up with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is beginning to receive wide notice. Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration’s current strategy. Below are excerpts from a conversation with the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American.

The American Conservative: Your new book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research went into it, and what your findings were?

Robert Pape: Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others—so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community. The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks.



This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.

TAC: If we were to back up a little bit before the invasion of Iraq to what happened before 9/11, what was the nature of the agitprop that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were putting out to attract people?

RP: Osama bin Laden’s speeches and sermons run 40 and 50 pages long. They begin by calling tremendous attention to the presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.

In 1996, he went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States—that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

TAC: The fact that we had troops stationed on the Arabian Peninsula was not a very live issue in American debate at all. How many Saudis and other people in the Gulf were conscious of it?

RP: We would like to think that if we could keep a low profile with our troops that it would be okay to station them in foreign countries. The truth is, we did keep a fairly low profile. We did try to keep them away from Saudi society in general, but the key issue with American troops is their actual combat power. Tens of thousands of American combat troops, married with air power, is a tremendously powerful tool.

Now, of course, today we have 150,000 troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and we are more in control of the Arabian Peninsula than ever before.



TAC: If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?

RP: The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.

If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.

Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.

I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.

Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.

TAC: So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?

RP: I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.

There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.

TAC: Do we know who is committing suicide terrorism in Iraq? Are they primarily Iraqis or walk-ins from other countries in the region?

RP: Our best information at the moment is that the Iraqi suicide terrorists are coming from two groups—Iraqi Sunnis and Saudis—the two populations most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of large American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula. This is perfectly consistent with the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.

TAC: Does al-Qaeda have the capacity to launch attacks on the United States, or are they too tied down in Iraq? Or have they made a strategic decision not to attack the United States, and if so, why?

RP: Al-Qaeda appears to have made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term. We know this not only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence. The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s allies in order to try to split the coalition.

What the document then goes on to do is analyze whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain. It concludes that they should hit Spain just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim: Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.

That is exactly what happened. Six months after the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid. That caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition. Others have followed. So al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before 9/11 combined. Al-Qaeda is not weaker now. Al-Qaeda is stronger.

TAC: What would constitute a victory in the War on Terror or at least an improvement in the American situation?

RP: For us, victory means not sacrificing any of our vital interests while also not having Americans vulnerable to suicide-terrorist attacks. In the case of the Persian Gulf, that means we should pursue a strategy that secures our interest in oil but does not encourage the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier on the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we can now do again. We relied on numerous aircraft carriers off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not less. We also built numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers of ground forces to the region quickly if a crisis emerged.

That strategy, called “offshore balancing,” worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy to secure our interest in oil while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists.

TAC: Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders also talked about the “Crusaders-Zionist alliance,” and I wonder if that, even if we weren’t in Iraq, would not foster suicide terrorism. Even if the policy had helped bring about a Palestinian state, I don’t think that would appease the more hardcore opponents of Israel.

RP: I not only study the patterns of where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn’t occurred. Not every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism. Why do some and not others? Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people think. In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community. That is true not only in places such as Lebanon and in Iraq today but also in Sri Lanka, where it is the Sinhala Buddhists who are having a dispute with the Hindu Tamils.

When there is a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in especially vicious ways. Now, that still requires the occupier to be there. Absent the presence of foreign troops, Osama bin Laden could make his arguments but there wouldn’t be much reality behind them. The reason that it is so difficult for us to dispute those arguments is because we really do have tens of thousands of combat soldiers sitting on the Arabian Peninsula.

TAC: Has the next generation of anti-American suicide terrorists already been created? Is it too late to wind this down, even assuming your analysis is correct and we could de-occupy Iraq?

RP: Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop—and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn’t completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.

That doesn’t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

TAC: There have been many kinds of non-Islamic suicide terrorists, but have there been Christian suicide terrorists?

RP: Not from Christian groups per se, but in Lebanon in the 1980s, of those suicide attackers, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were Communists and Socialists. Three were Christians.

TAC: Has the IRA used suicide terrorism?

RP: The IRA did not. There were IRA members willing to commit suicide—the famous hunger strike was in 1981. What is missing in the IRA case is not the willingness to commit suicide, to kill themselves, but the lack of a suicide-terrorist attack where they try to kill others.

If you look at the pattern of violence in the IRA, almost all of the killing is front-loaded to the 1970s and then trails off rather dramatically as you get through the mid-1980s through the 1990s. There is a good reason for that, which is that the British government, starting in the mid-1980s, began to make numerous concessions to the IRA on the basis of its ordinary violence. In fact, there were secret negotiations in the 1980s, which then led to public negotiations, which then led to the Good Friday Accords. If you look at the pattern of the IRA, this is a case where they actually got virtually everything that they wanted through ordinary violence.

The purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is not to die. It is the kill, to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society in order to compel that target society to put pressure on its government to change policy. If the government is already changing policy, then the whole point of suicide terrorism, at least the way it has been used for the last 25 years, doesn’t come up.

TAC: Are you aware of any different strategic decision made by al-Qaeda to change from attacking American troops or ships stationed at or near the Gulf to attacking American civilians in the United States?

RP: I wish I could say yes because that would then make the people reading this a lot more comfortable.

The fact is not only in the case of al-Qaeda, but in suicide-terrorist campaigns in general, we don’t see much evidence that suicide-terrorist groups adhere to a norm of attacking military targets in some circumstances and civilians in others.

In fact, we often see that suicide-terrorist groups routinely attack both civilian and military targets, and often the military targets are off-duty policemen who are unsuspecting. They are not really prepared for battle.

The reasons for the target selection of suicide terrorists appear to be much more based on operational rather than normative criteria. They appear to be looking for the targets where they can maximize the number of casualties.

In the case of the West Bank, for instance, there is a pattern where Hamas and Islamic Jihad use ordinary guerrilla attacks, not suicide attacks, mainly to attack settlers. They use suicide attacks to penetrate into Israel proper. Over 75 percent of all the suicide attacks in the second Intifada were against Israel proper and only 25 percent on the West Bank itself.

TAC: What do you think the chances are of a weapon of mass destruction being used in an American city?

RP: I think it depends not exclusively, but heavily, on how long our combat forces remain in the Persian Gulf. The central motive for anti-American terrorism, suicide terrorism, and catastrophic terrorism is response to foreign occupation, the presence of our troops. The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether that is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack, or a biological attack.
 
All the attacks you mentioned, came right after the stationing of US government troops in Saudi Arabia. Bankrupting the US government was a secondary goal compared to the primary goal of trying to get the US government out of the muslim world and trying to get the US government to stop supporting dictators in the muslim world and supplying weapons to Israel

You're right about that, but Alqaeda already had a case for a war against America even if it didn't station troops in Saudi Arabia. The US was supporting tyrants and supporting Israel. US presence in Saudi Arabia made Alqaeda more popular and perhaps made its "war" a more pressing matter, but the case for a war was already there even before that.
 
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