If they hated freedom, Bin Laden asked, why didn’t they attack Sweden?
Why did al-Qaeda attack America? Within days the official answer was settled: they hate our freedom. The answer was convenient: if the enemy is simply irrational, there is nothing in your own conduct to examine.
The man who planned it disagreed, on tape, more than once. Bin Laden’s stated goal was to force the American people to ask “why me?” and discover their government’s foreign policy in the Middle East: remove American military bases from Saudi Arabia, cut off support to Israel, and make Americans hold their own government accountable. His 2004 address, rarely presented in full by American media, answered the freedom story directly:
Security is an indispensable pillar of human life and free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike — for example — Sweden?
He traced his own turn to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, backed, as he put it, by the American Sixth Fleet, and to the image of “a crocodile meeting a helpless child.” “Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon?” In Hirschman’s terms, he framed 9/11 as voice: a message that could not be delivered through any channel he had.
Who won
He meant the attack as a message to citizens, delivered through their fear, and expected thinking people to look for its causes. The goal was not airport pat-downs or surveillance, and not even terror for its own sake. The goal was to get Americans to rise up against their own government to make sure this never happened again. By that measure the terrorists lost, and so did the American people, who got more of the policy that preceded the attack. The only winner was the US government, which gained control over its own people and the people of the Middle East.
Nobody hid the motive. The media aired the lines that promised future attacks and dropped the explanations of why, because admitting blowback would have indicted the apparatus that produced it. The prevailing paradigm, America as a force for good facing irrational enemies, had no slot for an enemy’s grievance, so the evidence sat in plain view, unregistered, the way paradigm lock-in always leaves it.
The obvious objection is that understanding his motives means sympathizing with terrorism. It doesn’t, and the confusion is costly: refusing to understand the stated motives of your enemies is not strength — it is the context vortex in its most dangerous form. Understanding cause is not justification. It is the minimum requirement for prevention.
Whenever the government crosses another line, someone says “the terrorists won.” By Bin Laden’s own measure they didn’t. He closed the address with a line the slogan forgets: “Your security is in your own hands.” Whether that reads as a threat or as advice depends on whether you heard the rest of the speech.
References:
- Osama Bin Laden, Full transcript of 2004 address, Al Jazeera