A long essay, with some informative images: read the whole thing, as some have been known to say:
Informed Comment : 09/01/2004 – 09/30/2004:
For al-Qaeda to succeed, it must overthrow the individual nation-states in the Middle East, most of them colonial creations, and unite them into a single, pan-Islamic state. But Ayman al-Zawahiri’s organization, al-Jihad al-Islami, had tried very hard to overthrow the Egyptian state, and was always checked. Al-Zawahiri thought it was because of US backing for Egypt. They believed that the US also keeps Israel dominant in the Levant, and backs Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the “far enemy” first. That is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first.
The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the US fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum. The US was going to cut off imperial Japan from petroleum, and without fuel the Japanese could not maintain their empire in China and Korea. So they pushed the US out of the way and took an alternative source of petroleum away from the Dutch (which then ruled what later became Indonesia).
[ . . . ]
Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri’s recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.
The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.
Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.
This analysis is interesting, (shades of The March of Folly) and the excerpts above deserve a wider audience: bin Laden misunderstood how well the Taliban could protect him and his presence in Afghanistan led to their demise, but the administration lost interest in him (Osama been forgotten) and got tangled up in Iraq. The rumor is that bin Laden is dead, since he failed to make an appearance for this Sept 11: if true, we still allowed him the better part of three years to inspire and indoctrinate the recruits created by the Iraq invasion. And while it’s not assured, if the remnants of bin Laden’s entourage had been aggressively pursued, Al-Zawahiri might have been taken out of the picture as well. If the WTC attacks were his idea with bin Laden’s contribution being charismatic leadership, I don’t know that we can consider Al Queda weakened all that much.
