Causes of the 9/11 Attacks - Essay Example

Yet, it needed only 19 men geared with small daggers to bring down the two largest buildings in the entire world then, the World Trade Centre, destroy a part of the Pentagon, and murder 3,000 innocent souls (Bergen 1). This disparity has caused some to look for a dues ex machina to explicate what otherwise seems unexplainable. This paper will also attempt to resolve the unexplainable by discussing some of the issues that are considered to have caused the 9/11 attacks on America. Some of the issues include radicalization caused by Afghan jihad, the influence of Islamic texts, stagnation and decline in the Middle East, as well as the “humiliation” of the Islamic people and the U.S. international policies in the Middle East and particularly its support of Israel (Bergen 1).

9/11 was the crop of Bin Laden’s blemished strategic thinking. Bin Laden’s full supremacy over al Qaeda meant that the group was loyal to his strategic dream (Bergen 1). His study of the United States foreign policy was rooted in the U.S. pulling out from Lebanon in 1983, following the assault on their barracks, which killed 241 American soldiers, and from Somalia in 1993 following the attacks in Mogadishu, which killed 18 U.S. soldiers (Bergen 1). From these events, Bin Laden found out that the United States was a paper tiger, able to resist just a few strikes before it surrendered, leaving client governments in the Middle East defenseless.

However, the United States' reply to 9/11 was to wipe out the Taliban regime and destroy al Qaeda. Even though, 9/11 was a strategic success for al Qaeda, it, in reality, threatened the group’s future (Bergen 1). Bernard Lewis is the most respected advocate of the notion that the Islamic world is in a calamity mainly attributable to years of decline, signified through the fate of the once commanding Ottoman regime and its disgraceful divide by the French and British after World War I (Bergen 1).

Nearly three weeks following the 9/11 attacks, as the United States started launching air strikes against Taliban regions, a video of Bin Laden lounging on a pebbly outcrop was televised on Al-Jazeera. Bin Laden argued that what the United States tasted then was something irrelevant compared to what they have faced for a couple of years (Bergen 1). According to Bin Laden, the Islamic world experienced such shame and humiliation for over eight decades. He also stated that neither the government of America nor the American citizens will dream of security before Palestine achieves total security and before the American soldiers pull out of Palestine (Bergen 1).

In his initial statement following the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden stressed the “humiliation” of Islamic people and the unhelpful effect of United States endeavors in the Middle East. In this viewpoint, Bin Laden appears to concur with Bernard Lewis. For sure, Bin Laden normally talked about the “disgrace” experienced by Islamic people at the hands of Americans (Bergen 1). For Bin Laden, the 1916 Sykes-Picot treaty, which carved up the Ottoman regime between the British and French, has a similar resonance, to what the 1919 Versailles treaty did for Hitler (Bergen 1).