Osama's Reasoning

A friend of mine has recently been trying to convince me that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were justified because America has been "meddling with middle easterner's affairs." My friend's opinion is that Osama bin Laden's reason for attacking us was, "he wants his people's freedom back." From what I saw, Ron Paul's stance was similar to this. Today, my friend recommended I read the book where he got this idea: "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror," by Mahmood Mamdani. While formulating a response, a point occurred to me which proves that my friend's position is actually quite wrong -- Osama doesn't really want freedom for his people. Here is the email I wrote:



"Regarding that book, I suspect it will only reinforce the stance I already took... We've no right to permit our government to interfere with the lives and governments of foreigners unless we've been harmed by them in some way. This is a rational foreign policy, and it's not the foreign policy that America has been practicing. Regardless of our errors, we DO have a moral right to the defense of our own lives, and a military response to 9/11 was entirely justifiable.

I did do some brief reading up on Osama's convictions, via transcripts of his media statements. Osama is a theocratic thug who dreams of a world ruled by sharia law. He also believes that those who don't comply with Allah's will should be killed. Osama does not fundamentally want us out of the middle east because we are "violating his rights." That assumption is committing two errors. 1) It ignores his militantly theocratic ideology and 2) It is an attempt to mask his ideology by believing that he's promoting OUR belief in an individual's right to freedom.

He does not want us out of the middle east so he can "have his freedom back." He wants us out of the middle east so that he can force sharia law on the Muslims of that region -- and he is willing to declare jihad on the Muslims who deny him this goal. It's really this absurd: he wants the "arrogant, imperialistic Americans" out of the lives of middle easterners.... so that he can move in and force sharia on them. His mentality is straight out of the dark ages, when people were slaughtered for being heretics while monarchs clashed for territory in order to subjugate more poor human beings. So: even if Osama has a case for criticizing our foreign policy, he is NOT doing so on correct moral grounds. In this scenario, I'll even make this qualified statement: I can't imagine how any support we have provided in the past to any democratic, rights respecting nations in that region could have been worse for the people there than what Osama is offering. The qualification for that statement is my foreign policy stance: we shouldn't even be there, unless they attacked us. (And I'm aware that we've supported theocracies in the past; remember I'm not trying to justify our policy, I'm trying to suggest a correct policy).

Socialism died when the Soviet Union collapsed. Multiculturalism died when The World Trade Center collapsed. In our era, I sincerely hope that there won't be a more violently concrete reminder of how necessary it is to recognize that some cultures respect human life more than others. My idea of a rational foreign policy relies on the necessity of protecting people's right to live their lives freely... More innocent people will die if we rationalize the behavior of those who value Allah's will over the lives of humans. The author of that book is distracting us from these crucially important points."

- deexma