Did you read Pericles' diary? Good.
If you haven't, the short version is that Al-Qaeda wants a return of "The Caliphate" -- the Islamic empire of over half a millenium ago, ruled by a God-fearing caliph with its capital in Baghdad. (That's why Saddam and the other secularist Arab leaders were against AQ from the start: They weren't exactly the "caliphs" that AQ wanted.) To get that empire, the mass of the Muslim world (the Dar al-Islam) had to be roused to action, and the best way to do that would be to do something that would provide a heavy-handed military response from the US against a Muslim nation -- a response Bush provided.
Here's a key excerpt:
Question 5: What was the purpose of 9/11?
No points for "To intimidate the United States into retreating from the Middle East." If the US had immediately decided to wash its hands of the Middle East, a variety of secular gangsters like Mubarak and Musharraf and Hussein would have started fighting it out amongst themselves. The odds were small that an Allah-fearing Caliph would arise from such a struggle. Whether the eventual outcome would have been good or bad for the United States is debatable, but it would have been terrible for Bin Laden.
Like all attacks in the bell-curve-inverting stage, the purpose of 9/11 was to provoke a military response. Prior to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, most Muslims had never seen a direct victim of the United States. Many have claimed that the Israelis are really American proxies, and so the Palestinians are victims of America. (Some have gone so far as to claim that the Serbians were American proxies, but that was always far-fetched.) Proxies, however, can never compete with real live American soldiers. And despite the occasional bombing of Lebanon or Syria or even Iraq, it is hard to paint the Israelis as anything more than a regional threat. Pakistanis and Indonesians may sympathize with the Palestinians in a distant sort of way, but they can't raise a credible fear of Jewish tanks rolling down the streets of Islamabad or Jakarta.
Now, thanks to President Bush and the magic of al-Jazeera, every Muslim with working eyesight has seen Muslim women and children killed or horribly disfigured by Americans. And Americans are everywhere; any one of them might be working for the CIA. American troops and ships and aircraft have a global reach. No matter where in the Dar al-Islam you may be, you could be under American attack in a matter of hours. Those screaming people on TV could be you and your family.
If you're wondering why Bush has been called Osama bin Laden's best recruiter, now you know.
This is precisely why the Crazy Petes, King and Hoekstra, need to stop being Osama's press agents.
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