Since this article is makes so many brilliant and well balanced points I cannot begin to list most of them given the copyright restriction - I would only encourage everyone to read this article by Mahan Abedin in full:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MI13Ak03.htmla few snips:
The so-called jihadis of al-Qaeda who planned and executed the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington DC were probably acting on their own political and strategic volition. But there has been much speculation, misreporting and poor analysis on their origins, the nature of their ideology and their precise relationship with more mainstream political movements in the Arab world.
The confusion has been compounded by the astronomical growth of a "terrorism studies" industry in America, and to a lesser extent in western Europe, an industry which purports to produce independent research, but is in reality beholden to either official American policy or to a myriad of private American political and ideological interests, much of which is unabashedly chauvinistic and in some cases Islamophobic.
The determined effort by some private political-intellectual outfits in the US (with deep tentacles inside the government as well as the major corporations) to directly link the terrorist attacks to political Islam and by extension to Islam itself is not only short-sighted and rides roughshod over a broad spectrum of political, historical and theological issues, but is at heart profoundly dishonest and a potent example of intellectual malice. snip:
The immediate effect of America's vengeful response played to al-Qaeda's agenda, a knee-jerk response that was reinforced by ideologically-driven intellectual support embodied foremost by the declaration of a "war on terror", a stunningly unimaginative and inappropriate rhetorical counter-attack representative of the more superficial aspects of American political culture.
But it is a mistake to imagine that America's mid to long-term response on the ground, specifically deeper military involvement in the Middle East and South Asia as well as a gradual encroachment into Central Asia (long viewed as Russia's back yard), is directly influenced by the experience of 9/11 and the pursuit of the so-called war on terror, later re-branded by Pentagon strategists as the "long war". again this article is too detailed to include all the important points here - I hope everyone reads the article in full:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MI13Ak03.html.
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