From the documentary we've been watching in class, it is clear that the 9/11 terrorist attack was premeditated. In other words, it was planned ahead of time. Organizations of extremist Muslims began preaching about a "jihad", which is a fight against people whose religion was something other than Islam. Gradually, terrorist networks began to pop up all over the country, which spread the extreme teachings to miniature terrorist hotspots in the United States.
Osama Bin Laden was one of these extreme Islamists. He began the movement for a jihad in the United States and was backed by all of these terrorist hotspots. The group that he founded was named Al-Qaeda and it still exists today. It wasn't very difficult for him to fund the hotspots and terrorist training camps because he came from a very wealthy family. One of the strategies he used for recruitment was that he made every new terrorist recruit one to two new people to their radical organization; this strategy helped spread Al-Qaeda hotspots to places all over the world, such as Yemen, Germany, Australia, and more. Contrary to popular belief, Al-Qaeda was not just some messily organized group of terrorists; Bin Laden actually required his recruits to complete official paperwork.
The main impetus for Osama Bin Laden's declaring war on the US is that he believed that the US was minding the business of other nations, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, which US troops occupied. Another reason was that the US was made of "godless capitalists" who only cared about doing business for profit.
I agree that it's clear that it was premeditated. While credible historians have all agreed that the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration orchestrated 9/11 are false, do you think there is some truth to assigning blame to the United States? Is it the fault of the US because we stationed troops in places that Bin Laden didn't think we should be in? Or would this tragedy have happened nonetheless?
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the American government wasn't really at fault for allowing 9/11 to occur by getting involved in Saudi Arabia to fight the Gulf War, since Osama Bin Laden and other extreme Islamists already disliked the US for its involvement in Saudi trade, its support for Israel, and obviously its Christian culture. Now, although there definitely were things that the US government could have done to prepare for/prevent the 9/11 attacks (such as increasing collaboration between security agencies and following terrorist leads more thoroughly), I don't think that the nation's decision to put troops in Saudi Arabia made America at fault for 9/11, especially considering that Bin Laden could have found other reasons to declare a jihad against the US regarding religious and cultural differences between America and Saudi Arabia.
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