Quote:

Al Quaida is not loved, they are feared



Flaw number one in your argument, Moxie. al Qaeda is a construct created by the FBI. During the investigation conducted into the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, a Sudanese militant named Jamal al-Fadl ended up in the US after doing the rounds of various intelligence agences in the Middle East. al-Fadl had been with bin Laden in the early 90s and became a key prosecution witness in the 2001 Embassy bombings trial in Manhattan. He was paid a shitload of taxpayer cash as a result.

al-Fadl's account of his time with bin Laden is used by the FBI to build up a picture of "al Qaeda", but what the FBI most wanted was to create a situation whereby the perpetrators of the bombings could be prosecuted under existing organized crime laws (presumably the RICO Act).

al-Fadl and a number of other sources fed into that and provided evidence which could give the impression of an all-powerful terror network. But nothing could be further from the truth.

(Source: Al Qaeda, written by Jason Burke, just for starters).

Next you have to face up to the fact that before 9/11, the Islamist movement was dead in the water. In the same way that Hamas and Fatah are killing each other off now in Gaza, the various Islamist groups had gone to war with one another. Ayman Zawahiri had failed in his bid to mass Muslims after he took part in the assassination of Sadat in Egypt.

What Zawahiri did realize is that to unite Islamists, he needed to focus them not on their home governments (which had failed dismally), but instead against a great evil. He recruited bin Laden, who was merely the money man in all this (the 'terrorists' in bin Laden's first few videos were all paid extras who had to provide their own fucking guns!).

Zawahiri realized that by attacking a common enemy, he stood a better chance of uniting Islamists of differing beliefs.

But there remains no unified terror organization called al Qaeda. There are many, disparate, well trained and armed groups of Islamist terrorists who all hate the West, but they are not united, nor are they centrally controlled.

al Qaeda is the bogeyman. The monster created by the intelligence agencies and neo-Cons to ensure our compliance and to stop us from asking why so many inherent freedoms are quietly removed while we sit around wondering what color the alert will be tomorrow.

As for the war in Iraq, well, we've replaced a dictator who kept his entire population in check with civil war. Iraq should have been left untouched until the West fully understood the tribal conflicts behind the politics there, so that we could pick a 'winner' the majority of Iraqis could rally around.
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