Hello Sun Tzu,
We've been over this topic several times. I think that most us here believe that OBL's motivations are primarily due to the presence of American troops in the Holy Arabia -- defiling the land.
From Saudi Arabia Text of Fatwa Urging Jihad Against Americans London Al-Quds al-'Arabi -- 23 Feb 98:
"No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone
"First, 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.
"If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it.
The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
"So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
"Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.
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(and other earlier posts and articles...) Doran's, "Somebody Else's Civil War", provides a good overview.
--fl |
