Some telling points are made in this Christian Science Monitor piece, which characterizes those Al-Qaeda goals thusly:
1. Remove US forces from Saudi Arabia. (In 2001, there were about 4,500 US troops there. Today, about 500 remain.)
2. Remove all foreign armies from all Muslim countries.
3. Destroy Israel and control Jerusalem.
4. Overthrow Arab regimes.
5. Establish a caliphate (a spiritual and secular ruler of the Islamic state.)
Hani Shukrallah, an “analyst for the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic studies in Cairo, and a newspaper columnist,” plays the Blame-the-West game, claiming that by responding to jihad terrorism, the U.S. has created jihad terrorism:
“By framing it from the start as a clash of civilizations, starting with the ‘Why do they hate us’ speech by President Bush, [the US has] played into the radicals’ hands. And then the US had the wars, and wars create anger. Instead of isolating what was a small, very fringe group, [the US] targeted a whole people and made them feel that there is a war against Islam and Muslims. This framing… strengthens all Islamist movements. It’s redefining our identities. We’re not Egyptians or Arabs, we’re Muslims.
Sure, Hani, nobody had that idea before Bush’s “Why do they hate us” speech. It isn’t as if the supranational character of the Islamic identity hasn’t been a core element of the idea of the caliphate from the beginning, and particularly a part of the movement for its restoration which began with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. No, it all began with a speech by Bush. Thanks for clearing that up.
“And then the US had the wars, and wars create anger.” Oh heavens to betsy, we can’t have that. Better we should have submitted to Nazism and Japanese imperial aggression rather than create anger by resisting them.
Brian M. Jenkins of the “RAND Corp. in Washington, a former US Army captain, and author of ‘Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves,'” points out something we have noted here many times: that “everything is used to try to show an implacable, relentless crusade against Muslims,” including any action by Israel or by Americans in Iraq. He doesn’t go on to note, as we have here, that these pretexts and grievances always shift, but the jihad imperative remains constant — and therefore that any belief that redressing any of the grievances du jour will make the jihad disappear is naive, and will meet only with disappointment.
Arab and Muslim anger over the conflict among the Israelis and Palestinians has grown. “Their narrative portrays us, the West, as the aggressors, and sometimes we give them the recruiting posters with incidents like Abu Ghraib. Now, they are using recent events in Lebanon. Everything is used to try to show an implacable, relentless crusade against Muslims. Acceptance of that view has spread.”
M.J. Gohel, “CEO of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a counterterrorism and intelligence think-tank in London,” makes the most important observations:
“…there is unfortunately a very large pool of sympathizers. They may not be terrorists, but a large pool of people are being drawn into the Al Qaeda ideology of perceived grievances….”
2. Osama bin Laden’s “ideology was out there before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars took place, so it’s nonsense to suggest these wars have created the problem. But, yes, it’s true that the Iraq war has not progressed as hoped for… and it’s true that any kind of failure in foreign policy will be used to their benefit….”
3. Mr. Gohel doubts that this conflict is important, “because their ultimate goal is the overthrow of the entire secular and Western world. This is not just a military battle, it’s a battle of ideologies…. We need figures within the Islamic world, who are both respected within the Islamic world and outside. We need somebody like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. who can counter Al Qaeda.”
[…]
5. “They’re happy to wait 100 years. They see it as a war of attrition, to wear down our resistance. Too many people are buying into the fiction that the West is against Islam…. This is a battle of ideologies and the West can’t win this battle on its own. The Islamic countries have to come on board wholeheartedly…. Until they do, it will be impossible for this message of global jihad and caliphates to be countered, because it isn’t being attacked by moderates.”