This post -- part of an article on another site -- suggest that Bin Laden's role -- while substantial -- is being greatly inflated. Also let's not forget that he was a CIA creation.
" The failure of U.S. policy in the Middle East
But this policy has now turned into a nightmare for the U.S. and has likely led to the recent attacks against the
U.S. in New York and Washington D.C. After the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan in 1989 the "Afghan"
network became expendable to the U.S. who no longer needed their services. In fact, the U.S. actively turned
against these groups after the Gulf War when a number of these militants returned home and moved into the
violent opposition against U.S. allied regimes and opposed the U.S. war against Iraq in 1991. They were
particularly opposed to the unprecedented positioning of U.S. ground troops in Saudi Arabia on the land of the
Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina. As a result, in the past decade there has been a vicious war of
intelligence services in the region between America and its allies and militant Muslim groups. Many Egyptian
Islamists believe the U.S. trained Egyptian police torture techniques like they did the Shah and his brutal Savak
security police. Moreover, the CIA has sent snatch squads to abduct wanted militants form Muslim countries and
return them to their countries to face almost certain death and imprisonment.
The primary belief of this loose and militant network of veterans of the Afghanistan war is that the West, led by the
United States, is now waging war against Muslims around the world and that they have to defend themselves by
any means necessary, including violence and terrorism. They point to a number of cases where Muslims have born
the brunt of violence as evidence of this war: the Serbian and Croation genocide against Bosnian Muslims, the
Russian war in Chechnya, the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the UN
sanctions against Iraq and the U.S. backing of dictatorships in Algeria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, for example. They
claim that the US either supported the violence or failed to prevent it in all of these cases. It is these beliefs that
enable them to justify not only targeting U.S. military facilities but also its civilians.
It should be clear that this network is only a very radical fringe of militants who have decided that they must use
armed tactics to get their message out to the U.S. and others. They differ in important ways with the wider current
of Islamic activism in Arab world and more globally which in addition to its Islamic orientation has an agenda about
social justice and social change against the dictatorships and corruption in many of the pro-Western countries in
the region. They are anti-Iranian. They are now anti-Saudi. Their actions have sometimes even been condemned
by militant Muslim organizations ranging from the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt to the FIS in Algeria to HAMAS in
Palestine. They are somewhat disconnected from these movements in that they do not locate their struggle in a
national context, but rather in a global war on behalf of Muslims. Nevertheless, they certainly share many common
sentiments with this wider current of Islamic activism. There is no question that the one-sided U.S. support for
Israel, the U.S. sponsorship of sanctions against Iraq as well as U.S. support for dictatorships across the region
have created a fertile ground for some sympathy with such militancy.
Osama bin Laden is not the mastermind of these attacks as is often claimed in the media; he just facilitates these
groups and sentiments with logistics and finances, as do others. He is simply a very visible symbol of this loose
network and the U.S. obsession with him most likely works to increase his standing as an icon of resistance to the
U.S. The network with which he is linked has no geographical location or fixed center; it appears to be a
kaleidoscopic overlay of cells and interlinkages that span the globe from camps on the Afghan-Pakistan
borderlands to immigrant communities in Europe and the U.S.
The rise of this militant network and their adoption of violence against the United States represents a clear failure
of U.S. strategy in the region, especially the U.S./Saudi/Pakistani model of alliance between conservative Sunni
Islamic activism and the West. The problem is that US has no alternative political strategy because they see all
Islamic activists as their enemy and refuse to address the root causes of anti-American sentiments in the region.
Moreover, the U.S appears to have no long-term strategy to address the sources of grievances that the radical
groups share with vast majority of Muslim activists who abhor using violent methods that would include, for starters,
a more balanced approach to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, ending the sanctions on Iraq, moving U.S. military
bases out of Saudi Arabia, and supporting the legitimate aspirations of regional peoples for democracy and
human rights. " |
