I have not seen a good explanation on this from Americans, who usually peddle the brainless “they hate our freedom” line. Lemmygrad is also sorely lacking any good discussions on this topic.
The U.S. funded the mujahideen to drain Soviet resources in Afghanistan. This makes it rather strange that after the Soviet Union collapsed, Al-Qaeda (one of the factions in the mujahideen) would turn around and bite the hand that fed them.
Was Al-Qaeda dissatisfied with some aspect of U.S. treatment toward them and expected the 9/11 attacks to change that? Or did the U.S. and Israel tacitly allow or even encourage the attacks to provide an excuse to dominate the Middle East?
I would love more sources and reading on this that aren’t just pro-US-empire propaganda!
Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America: Transcript in Full
I don’t know how truthful bin Laden is being in this letter, but the letter implies that he is an Islamic nationalist who presumably expected the U.S. to fund his own Islamic nation-building project (which happened to oppose the Soviet Union at the time), and was very pissed when they pulled funding and continued interfering after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Are you fucking serious? He literally answers your exact question in his letter, “ Why are we fighting and opposing you?”
Bin Laden was fine taking funding from the Americans to fight the Soviets, so he had no immediate problems with the Americans before. Most likely he viewed communism as a more immediate threat to his Islamic goals than the Americans. But then after the USSR collapsed, he turns around and fights the Americans.
If what he says in the letter is truthful, then I can only say that his principles are remarkably consistent as he is quite willing to fight the people previously bankrolling him.
Do you not know what pan-Arabism is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Arabism
The US and the West systematically destroyed pan-Arabism for its anticolonial and socialist leanings. If bin Laden was truly pan-Arabist, he wouldn’t have taken money from the USA to destroy socialist Afghanistan and fund Salafi jihadists to destroy Ba’athist Syria.
Bin Laden was maybe pan-Islamist, but pan-Islamism was explicitly anti-socialist, was even less popular than pan-Arabism, and was never seriously considered by country leaders to unite the Middle East.
Pan-Arabism is not a left wing ideology. That’s like saying Zionism is a left wing ideology.
Pan Arabism is a nationalist ideology. Its goal is the formation and supremacy of one Arab nation. And like Zionism, this excludes anything other nations that live on the same land and within the same economic system.
Socialism must necessarily be internationalist.
Pan-Islamism is similarly also a right wing ideology, because it calls for cultural hegemony of all muslims under Islam.
The west destroyed pan-Arabism because it stands in opposition to western imperialism via Israel. (And to a lesser degree through the gulf states) Literally in the letter.
It’s not uncommon for right wing ideologies to fight, especially given the nature of right wing ideologies.
Gotcha, thanks for the heads up. I didn’t know most pan-Arabists weren’t based like Nasser and Gaddafi.
In other words, the US backed bin Laden because his pan-Islamist beliefs were useful to fight against the USSR and Arab socialist-ish countries, but didn’t expect him to stick to his beliefs after the collapse of the USSR. Bin Laden felt that the US replaced the USSR as the colonizer stonewalling his Pan-Islamist vision, so attacked the US like he did the USSR.
Nasser and Gaddafi were based because their fight was primarily for the self determination of their own countries.
The US backed bin laden because the US typically backs right wing movements against left wing ones. Not just in the Middle East, but throughout the world. Because right wing movements have a tendency to fracture the local populace and weaken it for imperialism.
I think the gulf war really opened his eyes about how imperialism is way worse than socialism.