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Motives

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See also: Motives for the September 11 attacks
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Osama bin Laden's declaration of a holy war against the United States, and a fatwā signed by bin Laden and others calling for the killing of American civilians in 1998, are seen by investigators as evidence of his motivation.[1] In various pronouncements before and after the attacks,[2][3] al-Qaeda explicitly cited three motives for its activities against Western countries: the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia,[3][4][5] U.S. support of Israel,[6][7] and sanctions against Iraq.[8] After the attacks, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri released additional video tapes and audio tapes, some of which repeated those reasons for the attacks. Two particularly important publications were bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America",[9] and a 2004 video tape by bin Laden.[10]

Bin Laden interpreted the Prophet Muhammad as having banned the "permanent presence of infidels in Arabia".[11] In 1996, bin Laden issued a fatwā calling for American troops to leave Saudi Arabia. In 1998, al-Qaeda wrote, "for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples."[12] In a December 1999, interview, bin Laden said he felt that Americans were "too near to Mecca", and considered this a provocation to the entire Muslim world.[13] One analysis of suicide terrorism suggested that without U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda likely would not have been able to get people to commit suicide in this way.[14]

In his November 2002 "Letter to America", bin Laden cited the United States' support of Israel as a motivation: "The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily."[9] In 2004 and 2010, bin Laden again connected the September 11 attacks with U.S. support of Israel.[15][16][17] Bin Laden claimed in 2004 that the idea of destroying the towers had first occurred to him in 1982, when he witnessed Israel's bombardment of high-rise apartment buildings during the invasion of Lebanon.[18][19] Several analysts, including Mearsheimer and Walt, also say one motivation for the attacks was U.S. support of Israel.[7][13] In the 1998 fatwā, al-Qaeda identified the Iraq sanctions as a reason to kill Americans, condemning the "protracted blockade"[12] among other actions constituting a declaration of war against "Allah, his messenger, and Muslims."[12]

In addition to those cited by bin Laden and al-Qaeda, analysts have suggested other motives, including western support of non-Islamist authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and northern Africa, and western troops in some of these countries.[20] Other authors suggest that humiliation resulting from the Islamic world falling behind the Western world – this discrepancy made especially visible by recent globalization[21][22] - and a desire to provoke the U.S. into a broader war against the Islamic world, in the hope of motivating more allies to support al-Qaeda. Others have argued that 9/11 was a strategic way to provoke America into a war that incites a pan-Islamic revolution.[23][24]

References

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  1. ^ Gunarathna, pp. 61–62.
  2. ^ bin Laden, Osama (August 1996). "Bin Laden's Fatwa". PBS NewsHour. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  3. ^ a b bin Laden, Osama (February 1998). "Bin Laden's Fatwa". PBS NewsHour. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  4. ^ Plotz, David (2001) What Does Osama Bin Laden Want?, Slate
  5. ^
  6. ^ bin Laden, Osama (November 24, 2002). "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'". The Observer. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  7. ^ a b
    • Mearsheimer (2007), p. 67.
    • Kushner (2003), p. 389.
    • Murdico (2003), p. 64.
    • Kelley (2006), p. 207.
    • Ibrahim (2007), p. 276.
    • Berner (2007), p. 80.
  8. ^
  9. ^ a b "Full transcript of bin Laden's "Letter to America"". Guardian. November 24, 2002. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  10. ^ bin Laden, Osama. "Full transcript of bin Ladin's speech". Al Jazeera. Retrieved 2012-04-10. So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider
  11. ^ Bergen (2001), p. 3.
  12. ^ a b c "1998 Al Qaeda fatwā". Fas.org. February 23, 1998. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  13. ^ a b Yusufzai, Rahimullah (September 26, 2001). "Face to face with Osama". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  14. ^ Pape, Robert A. (2005). Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-8129-7338-0.
  15. ^ Bin Laden's 2004 taped broadcast on the attacks, in which he explains the motives for the attacks and says "The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced. " (Quoted from Al Jazeera online here)
  16. ^ Bin Laden's taped broadcast from January 2010, where he said "Our attacks against you [the United States] will continue as long as U.S. support for Israel continues.... The message sent to you with the attempt by the hero Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is a confirmation of our previous message conveyed by the heroes of Sept. 11". (Quoted from "Bin Laden: Attacks on U.S. to go on as long as it supports Israel", in Haaretz.com, online here)
  17. ^ See also the 1998 Al-Qaeda fatwā: "[T]he aim [of the United States] is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula." quoted from Text of the 1998 fatwā translation by PBS
  18. ^ Summers and Swan (2011), pp. 211, 506n.
  19. ^ Lawrence (2005), p. 239.
  20. ^ Rockmore, Tom (2011-04-21). Before and After 9/11: A Philosophical Examination of Globalization, Terror. ISBN 978-1-4411-1892-9. Retrieved 2011-09-11.
  21. ^ In Bernard Lewis's 2004 book The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, he argues animosity toward the west is best understood with the decline of the once powerful Ottoman empire, compounded by the import of western ideas— Arab socialism, Arab liberalism and Arab secularism. During the past three centuries, the Islamic world has lost its dominance and its leadership, and has fallen behind both the modern West and the rapidly modernizing Orient. This widening gap poses increasingly acute problems, both practical and emotional, for which the rulers, thinkers, and rebels of Islam have not yet found effective answers. From The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Bernard Lewis, 2004.
  22. ^ In an essay titled The spirit of terrorism, Jean Baudrillard described 9/11 as the first global event that "questions the very process of globalization". Baudrillard. "The spirit of terrorism". Retrieved June 26, 2011.
  23. ^ In an essay entitled "Somebody Else's Civil War", Michael Scott Doran argues the attacks are best understood as part of a religious conflict within the Muslim world and that Bin Laden's followers: "consider themselves an island of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity". Hoping that U.S. retaliation would unite the faithful against the West, bin Laden sought to spark revolutions in Arab nations and elsewhere. Doran argues the Osama bin Laden videos were attempting to provoke a visceral reaction in the Middle East and ensure that Muslim citizens would react as violently as possible to an increase in U.S. involvement in their region. ("Somebody Else's Civil War". Foreign Affairs. Retrieved December 5, 2009. Reprinted in Hoge, James F.; Rose, Gideon (2005). Understanding the War on Terror. New York: Norton. pp. 72–75. ISBN 978-0-87609-347-4.)
  24. ^ In The Osama bin Laden I Know, Peter Bergen argues the attacks were part of a plan to cause the United States to increase its military and cultural presence in the Middle East, thereby forcing Muslims to confront the idea of a non-Muslim government and establish conservative Islamic governments in the region.(Bergen (2006), p. 229.)
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