Mark Danner, professor of journalism and politics at the University of California at Berkeley and Bard College, wrote an excellent article on the situation in Iraq, Taking Stock of the Forever War. He delves pretty deeply into some history and offers some interesting and realistic possible motivations of Al Qaeda, besides the “nothing but death and destruction” line some claim. He poses that the 9/11 attacks were basically a big recruiting poster, a fairly successful one that continues today.
“In Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the [9/11 attacks] were more than the people who accepted Islam in the last 11 years.”
Another interesting point he makes is that importance of “great spectacle” in their attacks. Their attacks always focus on diminishing American prestige and status with great spectacle rather than simply destroying military assets. They’re fighting the war on a completely different battlefield than we are. He claims their current goal, after successfully baiting the US to invade an Islamic country, is civil war in Iraq. This will show that the US can be defeated and encourage more to fight once again against the Crusaders in their attempt to destroy the Islamic world.
Their current attacks are more focused on removing support for the US and current Iraq government and encouraging the 3 factions to fight against each other. They’ve started dressing up as Iraqi police officers before kill people. Make it so Iraqi’s can’t trust the police or each other and therefor live in terror. Islamic rule would be preferable.
“Thirty-five years of Saddam’s brutal repression did not produce a single suicide bomber,” says a former military officer who is now working as a driver.”
I do think their goal is much more sophisticated than simple “death and destruction” or “evil,” and I think our leaders do everyone a disservice when they try to shroud the terrorist’s motivations in easily digested ugly words. And I do think that the sophistication and complexity of the situation is completely outside the scope of things the Bush administration is capable of comprehending or dealing appropriately with, on a level of subtlety that I don’t think Bush even thinks exists.