Peter Bergen: What Were The Causes of 9/11?

[Taxloss]

From Prospect, a British current affairs magazine. It's a long but excellent summary.

Five years on, everyone has a theory about the real causes of 9/11. They range from the nutty (it was the US government) to the plausible but flawed (a response to foreign occupation) to the credible (collateral damage from a clash within Islam)

No event in recent times has produced as many explanations as the 11th September attacks five years ago. Within the space of an hour, al Qaeda inflicted more direct damage on the US than the Soviet Union had done throughout the cold war, a cataclysm seen by more people than any other event in history. Yet it took only 19 men armed with small knives to destroy the World Trade Centre, demolish a wing of the Pentagon and kill 3,000 people. This mismatch has led some—especially in the Muslim world—to seek a deus ex machina to explain what otherwise appears inexplicable. The usual suspects have been assembled on 9/11's grassy knoll: the Jews were behind the attacks; the US government engineered them; the "Cheney-Bush energy junta" planned them so that they could grab the oil fields of central Asia, and so on.

Osama bin Laden himself claims that al Qaeda was solely responsible for 9/11. In 2004, he released a video in which he explained his dealings with lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. After the largest criminal investigation in history, the US government's 9/11 commission also concluded that al Qaeda was solely responsible for the attacks.

Attributing the sole responsibility for 9/11 to al Qaeda then brings us to the larger question: what caused al Qaeda to launch the attacks? Explanations for the attacks can be sorted into two categories—the seemingly plausible but flawed, and the more credible.

Plausible but flawed theories

Poverty. Many politicians and commentators see the poverty of the middle east as a factor. (Some political leaders even argued that the Doha round of trade talks, launched soon after 9/11, were intended partly to quash terrorism.) This claim is not supported by the evidence. Those who attacked on 9/11 were sons of the middle eastern middle and upper class, not the dispossessed. Throughout recent history, from the Russian anarchists to the German Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s, terrorism has largely been a bourgeois endeavour. Al Qaeda is no different.

...

More:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7717

Also posted in E&OA.

[Nevernose]

1. Should be mandatory reading. Truly excellent. n/t

[H2O Man]

2. Peter Bergen

is a smart man.

[Taxloss]

11. He is indeed. n/t

[sweetheart]

3. That magazine has some real gems, good toilet reading

To conclude, 9/11 was collateral damage in a civil war within the world of political Islam. On one side there are those, like Bin Laden, who want to install Taliban-style theocracies from Indonesia to Morocco. On the other side there is a silent majority of Muslims who are prepared to deal with the west, who do not see the Taliban as a workable model for modern Islamic states, and who reject violence. Bin Laden adopted a war against "the far enemy" in order to hasten the demise of the "near enemy" regimes in the middle east. And he used 9/11 to advance that cause. That effort has, so far, largely failed.

Yet Bin Laden and his attacks on the US have shaped an ideological movement that will outlive him. Binladenism has drawn tremendous energy from the war in Iraq, and will probably gain further adherents from the conflict in Lebanon. Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was prescient when he warned in 2003 that the Iraq war would spawn "100 new Bin Ladens." It is that new generation of militants that is Bin Laden's legacy.

wonder how many american history books will have *that* printed in them.

[Taxloss]

4. Heh - that's where I keep it at home.

The smallest room. Along with the LRB and Private Eye.

[sweetheart]

6. piled up with the economistsss..

This article on lebannon i found especially informative:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7736

Truth be told, half my prospect issues are wrinkled from wet hands
in the bathtub turning the pages. My circulation would be
cut off if i had to read a whole article on the toilet! :-)

[Taxloss]

7. Yes, that was a good one. Good issue this month, I thought.

BTW, whatever happened to the "this thread will be published as a book" idea in the Writing Group? I thought it was a good idea; did it just fizzle, or were you unhappy with the response?

[sweetheart]

8. i've just got a new computer

As life would have it, a whole lotta things converged on my time right when i thought i'd have it.
And just this week, i've got a new computer installed on the internet connection with a printer
that works, so i can actually edit it... its 178 pages including the contributions from PI, before
the additional contributions of 'take from my journal'.

I apologize for not being more prompt with it. I hope to have it at the printers by the end
of this month.

[Taxloss]

9. No apology necessary, I was just curious. n/t

[TahitiNut]

5. Next to the Nation and Harpers?

:rofl: I'll need a bigger reading rack.

[Hamlette]

10. k&r n/t