This article ties in with my last post on why they hate us. Consider this quote:

The union of Mosque and State in theocracy is what bin Laden is pointed toward. First, his radical world vision is to unify the Arab World, destroy Israel, expel the United States from the Middle East, then to unify all of Islam, then to unify all of the world that had once been under Islam, such as what they call Andalucia, namely Spain, and then finally the world as a whole.

Now, this may seem like a crazy vision to those of us in the West, who are not part of this tradition. But it’s no crazier than Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich or the dream of world communism. Totalitarian movements have these kinds of heaven-on-earth dreams.

Or this:

I went on the Web the night before and, through the Mideast Media Research Institute Web site, downloaded the main themes that the Saudi Religious Ministry had sent out the previous week, drawn from the Saudi imams’ sermons in the kingdom the Friday before. And the Saudi Religious Ministry, every week, takes these, consolidates, develops the major themes that it likes and wants the Wahhabi mosques, whether in Los Angeles or in Rawalpindi, to emphasize in the following week.

This week these three themes were a) that all Jews are pigs and monkeys, b) that it is the obligation of all true Muslims to hate and, where possible, to kill Christians and Jews, and c) American women routinely sleep with their fathers and brothers. Incest is a common way of life in the United States, and that just shows how rotten the Americans are.

Now, this is not some one military officer or some one minister who has happened here saying something like Christianity is better than Islam, and everybody says oh, no, no, no, you can’t say that. No, no. This is not an individual; this is the Saudi government’s planned dissemination of doctrine for Wahhabi ministers, imams around the world, to emphasize the following week. This garbage has been going on for a quarter of a century.

So, if you wonder why sometimes the young men in the streets of Cairo or Fallujah are particularly angry as the news comes from Al-Jazeera, their imam is saying these sorts of things at the mosque. It’s not too hard to figure out where the money is coming from for that, and why it is happening.

That's a lot different from it being our own fault. So, they hate us. Why attack us?

Well, if that’s who we are at war with, why? Why did they decide to come after us? I think there are two reasons. One is the same reason that Hitler probably would have given in December of ’41, when after Pearl Harbor he declared war on us, even though he really didn’t have to. He knew. He knew that at some point we were going to get into the fight, that we would be his biggest problem, so he might as well come after us while he thought that we were weak

[...] We are hated by the Wahhabis, by the Islamists, for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, open economies, equal treatment of women – well, almost equal treatment of women, better than they do, anyway. That’s why we’re hated, indeed cordially loathed

I wrote something similar just before reading this. And I'm not a consultant to the Pentagon.

It's a long article but I suggest reading it. In the meantime, I'll sum up the rest quickly. Three different groups have been in a low-level war with the US and the west for years. These groups are the Baathists which is an openly fascist group and two militant Islamic groups - bin Laden's and Iran's. They have been striking against us since 1979, attacking embassies and sponsoring terrorists but, until 9/11, our response amounted to minor arrests, cruise missile attacks, and outright surrender.

Bin Laden's October tape was the first one that didn't include a rant about what cowards Americans are. Iraq is the first time since Viet Nam that we have shown resolve. Until then we had a long track record of trying to fight wars with no American casualties and of leaving at any sign of trouble.

They hate us because we are different. They have attacked us because they think that we are weak and will allow it. To insist that it all comes down to American policies (Israel and oil) is stupidly simplistic.