...Has Chris Matthews somehow forgotten "Operation Desert Storm," AKA the War in the Persian Gulf, and that the U.S. military began building and occupying bases in the Saudi desert â "Operation Desert Shield" â in 1990 and started bombing Iraq from them in January 1991?
If he only read Time magazine, he would know that bin Laden, who had just finished fighting a successful, U.S.-backed holy war against the Russians, was enraged by the Saudi king's decision to allow American forces onto the Arabian Peninsula in 1990 â he wanted to expel Saddam from Kuwait. And if Matthews were to quickly peruse the Jim Leher Newshour Website, it would reveal bin Laden's "fatwa" of 1996, which is titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." Pretty subtle, huh?
It is apparently necessary to remind those who give us the news that the bases in the Saudi desert were used to launch attacks on Iraq all through the 1990s. Indeed, in the "declaration of war," bin Laden cites the presence of foreign combat forces near Mecca and Medina and "blood spilled in Palestine and Iraq" as his casus belli.
The good thing is that we don't have to believe bin Laden about his motives at all. He is an evil mass murderer of innocent civilians. Why would anybody listen to him?
Why would anybody listen to him?
The only reason anyone listens to or follows bin Laden is because he points at specific foreign policies of the U.S. in order to maintain that he is the one fighting on the defensive. Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, and author of Imperial Hubris, told me this himself. He said that the Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980's railing against American culture and the entire region yawned. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, kept his pitch straight and to the point â and it worked.
He told them that America was the aggressor, and sited 6 specific policies as evidence:
1: The bases in Saudi Arabia
2: Unquestioning support for Israel (The 1996 Fatwa came on the heels of the first Qana massacre in Lebanon)
3: The no-fly zone bombings and blockade of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people (now replaced on the jihadist sales pitch list by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan which have killed hundreds of thousands more)
4: Support for dictators across the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.)
5: Pressure on the oil producing states to keep their prices set where America wants them
6: Support for Russia, China and India in their wars against Muslims
This is why al-Qaeda is not just bin Laden and Zawahiri sitting around hating "the Jews" and American culture from their mother's basement. They have a following because they point at concrete examples of how the U.S. government makes life worse for the average guy in the Islamic World â when it's not taking it from him outright.
As Professor Robert A. Pape proved in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism â by studying every single individual suicide bomber on Earth between 1980 and 2004 â the one characteristic that all suicide bombers have in common is the presence of foreign combat forces in their country â not Islam. Whether it's is Sikhs in India, the Communist and atheist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Hamas in Palestine, al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia and Egypt crashing planes in the United States or Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
None of the September 11th hijackers was from an "axis of evil" state (Iraq, Iran or Syria). They were all from countries whose governments are our government's "allies" â in truth, client dictatorships. Most of them were from Saudi Arabia.......
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=10988
