The Cause of Sept 11 - Research Paper Example

On September 11, 2001, two planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center building in New York City while another plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The iconic building collapsed in less than two hours causing a fatality of nearly 3,000 people. This tragedy is the most lethal form of terrorism to have been carried out in modern times and will probably never be forgotten in American history. Government agencies and security experts have immediately assessed the rationale for the attack.

In this regard, the essay aims to proffer the causes of the September 11, 2011 incident that shocked the world and millions of Americans whose lives have been drastically changed by it. Causes of the 9/11 Attack In retrospect, contemporary generation asks the relevant question: what led to 9/11 in the first place? There have been diverse theories on the rationale for the attack. One traced the root cause from America being a superpower and the icon of Western world and was therefore the best target for the Islamists to carry out their attack.

Head (2011) agrees that probably America lacked a strong representative of Islam – of the order of say Malcolm X – who would have given the US a human face, making the American people much harder to be demonized by the likes of al-Qaeda. Auster (2003) cited various explanations, to wit: “some blamed America's rejection of the Kyoto accords (a favorite charge among globalists), some blamed our failure to help alleviate Third-World hunger (a favorite among Episcopalians), some blamed our friendship with Israel (a favorite in some precincts of the right as well as the left).

The real explanation had been lurking in the background all this while, but had never, to my knowledge, been proffered before now: America was attacked because of its racism” (Auster, 2003, par. 1). On the contrary, Levingston (2010) disagrees with the common notion that Western interference was the cause of 9/11. He argues that 9/11 was the result of a clash of Arab civilizations that simply used America as one of its venues. Levingston (2010) argues that the Arab world’s political culture has no mechanism for either sharing power or transmitting political authority from one governing body to another except through inheritance, coup or conquest and that we just happened to be at that stage that different groups are fighting to take over the leadership in the Middle East.

The official comprehensive report compiled and published by the National Commission on Terrorist Attack Upon the United States entitled The 9/11 Commission Report under the section The Foundation of the New Terrorism indicated that Usama Bin Laden, together with a fugitive Egyptian physician, Ayman al Zawahiri, proposed a Declaration of War against the United States: “claiming that America had declared war against God and his messenger, they called for the murder of any American, anywhere on earth, as the ‘individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it’” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004, p.47). There were even conspiracy theories that emerged stating that the cause of the 9/11 attack was actually “planned and executed by federal officials in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of