"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 - 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 - when it's not taking it from him outright." http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=10988 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
