What were the causes of 9/11?

[Taxloss]

From Prospect, a British current affairs magazine. It's a long but excellent summary.

Five years on, everyone has a theory about the real causes of 9/11. They range from the nutty (it was the US government) to the plausible but flawed (a response to foreign occupation) to the credible (collateral damage from a clash within Islam)

No event in recent times has produced as many explanations as the 11th September attacks five years ago. Within the space of an hour, al Qaeda inflicted more direct damage on the US than the Soviet Union had done throughout the cold war, a cataclysm seen by more people than any other event in history. Yet it took only 19 men armed with small knives to destroy the World Trade Centre, demolish a wing of the Pentagon and kill 3,000 people. This mismatch has led some—especially in the Muslim world—to seek a deus ex machina to explain what otherwise appears inexplicable. The usual suspects have been assembled on 9/11's grassy knoll: the Jews were behind the attacks; the US government engineered them; the "Cheney-Bush energy junta" planned them so that they could grab the oil fields of central Asia, and so on.

Osama bin Laden himself claims that al Qaeda was solely responsible for 9/11. In 2004, he released a video in which he explained his dealings with lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. After the largest criminal investigation in history, the US government's 9/11 commission also concluded that al Qaeda was solely responsible for the attacks.

Attributing the sole responsibility for 9/11 to al Qaeda then brings us to the larger question: what caused al Qaeda to launch the attacks? Explanations for the attacks can be sorted into two categories—the seemingly plausible but flawed, and the more credible.

Plausible but flawed theories

Poverty. Many politicians and commentators see the poverty of the middle east as a factor. (Some political leaders even argued that the Doha round of trade talks, launched soon after 9/11, were intended partly to quash terrorism.) This claim is not supported by the evidence. Those who attacked on 9/11 were sons of the middle eastern middle and upper class, not the dispossessed. Throughout recent history, from the Russian anarchists to the German Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s, terrorism has largely been a bourgeois endeavour. Al Qaeda is no different.

...

More:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7717

[orpupilofnature57]

1. some people just see hollywood when they look at America, Al qaeda is no

different,

[Porcupine]

2. "A New Pearl Harbor" perhaps? It surely wasn't poverty

because the teams that executed the 9-11 attacks were extremely well financed. It wasn't anybody from Iraq. All of the principals were Saudi or Egyptian with connections to Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia (Bush family clients) has benefitted hugely from the attacks as has Pakistan. Afghanistan is a token battleground there purely for the entertainment of the voting public. We aren't winning on any front.

Look who benefits. The parties present at Dick Cheney's energy task force meeting. The Project For a New American Century was put into place. They refuse to give up on it even though they are losing.

I believe that the 9-11 plot originated on US soil.

[Taxloss]

4. Did you read the article? Did you even read the extract?

Because poverty is the number one cause that Bergen discounts.

And the hijackers were not that well financed. The attacks cost a mere $200,000, as Bergen points out. That's a veritable bargain.

[bhikkhu]

3. Ask Bin Laden

I don't have a ready reference, but he claimed that his eyes were opened as to the nature of the US as he watched the Israelis bomb the Khobar Towers in Lebanon.

[Briar]

5. I can only suppose that people

who write this sort of thing have not an altruistic or idealistic bone in their body. They must assume that people act only out of self interest, not out of outrage at the injustices and hardships of others. It's irrelevant that the terrorists are often members of the middle class (whatever that means). What is relevant is that they perceive injustice and poverty around them.

[Igel]

6. That's covered in 'humiliation'.

Watching those outside your tribe suffer isn't a big deal, if helping them would bring suffering on your tribe. It can even be seen as validation.

Plus killing a few thousand people out of altruism seems a bit far-fetched.

[Igel]

7. Better than most such articles.

Precious little for me to quibble with. I'm rather surprised, actually. It presents what the actors involved most likely find their own reasons to be, not what Westerners assume their reasons would be in bin Laden's shoes. But still, I can find something.

He says bin Laden doesn't rail against Western culture. In fact, Western culture is corrupt, he says, with the assumption being so basic that it barely bears mentioning at length. Else there'd be no call to revert. It's the primary war the West has with Islam--culture, and 'expropriation' of resources by Western puppets. You know, those Sa'udi princes that we rail against.

[yurbud]

8. but our foreign policy is a bigger component than "collateral damage"

we were singled out for a reason, not at random.

Ironically, Bush's rhetoric about spreading democracy is correct, however insincere he is about it. The method is wrong. The correct way is to let the people pick their own governments, and don't undo their choices just because some oil company gets their panties in a knot.

If we had ignored the oil companies in Iran in the 1950s, we would likely have a friendly government their now instead of the religious nuts who gained power as a reaction to our tool the Shah.

[Violet_Crumble]

9. I want to read it again when I have more time, but....

..what I noticed was that he's got some explanations in the 'flawed but plausible' list that I think aren't particularly flawed at all, and a few flawed ones in the 'most credible' list. What struck me was that there isn't any single cause, as a few of those explanations are imo factors. Hope that makes sense :)

[Taxloss]

10. I suppose it comes down to a matter of opinion in that regard.

Bergen acknowledges as much, to an extent:

"None of the following explanations is alone sufficient to explain the attacks, but together they do help us to understand 9/11."

[Jcrowley]

11. No surprise

that Peter Bergen would egest such shoddy analysis. Worse it becomes effective propaganda. Orwell warned us about such things.

To get through the aricle was painstaking, "binladenism"? as if Peter was trying to coin a new catchy term. He should of just stuck to the standard "The Other" for that is what he means in his writings.