In a videotape released around September of 2007, Osama bin Laden said, “If you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing of your war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer.”
Michael F. Scheuer is the former Chief of the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center with the CIA. He had a 22 year career with the CIA and served in this position in the latter half of the nineties. In the wake of the WTC bombing he reenlisted his expertise with the bin Laden unit as a Special Advisor to the Chief. He held this position from September 2001 to November 2004. In 2004, Scheuer resigned his position with the CIA and released his New York Times bestselling book Imperial Hubris. It criticizes the western worlds tunnel visioned assumptions about the motivating factors for Islamic terrorism. According to Scheuer, “the greatest danger for Americans confronting the Islamist threat is to believe-at the urging of U.S. leaders-that Muslims attack us for what we are and what we think rather than for what we do.”
As far as conventional warfare is concerned, we have won every battle of our war with “terror.” We have the training, equipment, and production capacity to fight a multi-front war against the toughest of enemies. We have a volunteer force of both fulltime and reserve service personnel. The idea that we are losing this war is very peculiar to many of us, especially those that are part of the establishment. But how can we use military might to defeat an idea? The truth is that we are not fighting a sovereign body in this conflict. Although there are plenty of sovereign nations in this world that are just as jilted by our world affairs as the extremist that attack us, there has been no formal declarations against us by any of them. We are not being attacked by Islam, any particular ethnicity, because of our acceptance of different belief structures, or because of our varied ethnicities. We are being attacked because of our federal government’s aggressive foreign policy.
All that has been asked of us by our enemy is to stop meddling in their affairs. It is as simple as that.
In October of 2001 in an interview with Tayseer Allouni, a Kabul correspondent of Al-Jazeera, Tayseer asked bin Laden about the killing of innocent civilians. He responded by saying,
“Killing innocent civilians like Americans and other educated people say, is something very weird to be said. I mean, who is the one that said that our children and our civilians are not innocents, and that their blood is permissible [mubaah] ? In the case we kill their civilians, the whole world yells at us from east to west, and America would start pushing its allies and puppets. Who is the one that said that our blood isn’t blood and their blood is blood? Who is the one that declared this? What about the people that have been killed in our lands for decades? More than 1,000,000 children died in Iraq and are still dying, so why don’t we hear people that cry or protest or anyone who reassures or anyone who gives condolences??!?”
In March of 1997 in an interview with Peter Arnett, a 1966 Pulitzer Prize winning Reporter, bin Laden was asked about what it would require to end his jihad against us.
ARNETT: Mr. Bin Ladin, will the end of the United States’ presence in Saudi Arabia, their withdrawal, will that end your call for jihad against the United States and against the US?
BIN LADIN: The cause of the reaction must be sought and the act that has triggered this reaction must be eliminated. The reaction came as a result of the US aggressive policy towards the entire Muslim world and not just towards the Arabian Peninsula. So if the cause that has called for this act comes to an end, this act, in turn, will come to an end. So, the driving-away jihad against the US does not stop with its withdrawal from the Arabian Peninsula, but rather it must desist from aggressive intervention against Muslims in the whole world.
There is nothing that can be said to justify the terrorist attacks being committed by these extremist groups. They are murdering innocent civilians all across the globe and will be brought to justice. However, despite the fact that they are wrong to commit such acts, that doesn’t change the fact that we have been committing atrocities against them for decades. We should not change our aggressive foreign policy out of fear; we should change our foreign policy because it is the right thing to do. When we fund the aggressions of one nation against another we are essentially acting as the aggressor. When we impose naval blockades on trade we are committing acts of war. We have bombed, starved, and politicized the people of the Middle East for too long. Our government may not want to admit it because of pride, but I will proudly say that it is time to see some real change from the establishment!
It is time to return to our roots and start respecting the constitution.