Because They Hate Us: In the dark on 9/11

Commentary by Paul M. Troop

One of the most amazing things about watching the television news reports on 9/11 was that no one asked the most obvious question:

Why did they do it?

The reporters were so tied up with the Who and How, they missed the real issue. Without the Why, the whole event doesn’t have any meaning. Worse, it led to what most in the Arab world consider al Qaida’s success.

Oh, within a few days there were right-wing radio talk shows trying to put their spin to it. Their answer was “Because they hate us. They hate our way of life -- our freedoms and material possessions.” Nonsense.

The oil sheiks who paid the reported million dollars for this massive act of terrorism have more money, freedoms, and material possessions than virtually all Americans. While the million dollars for them was pocket change, they weren’t going to take the risk of what they had to know would be the American response for retribution unless they had a deep hatred of something specifically American.

And the truth was al Qaida had been clear, throughout the previous ten years, on what that hatred was. There was no secret about it. Al Qaida had proclaimed it over the internet. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations certainly knew about it. And it had been reported in the press.

They wanted U.S. soldiers out of Saudi Arabia.

We established a military base there in 1991 after the first Gulf War. The explanation of the George H. Bush Administration was that it would be a stabilizing influence in the region, particularly to discourage future attacks by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. More likely they were there to prop up the shaky royal family. And this was not totally unrealistic. As the rulers, the Saud family controls the world’s largest reserve of oil and Americans' largest supplier of crude. And there was the fact that the Bush family had deep personal ties with the Saud family.

In retrospect it might not have been a well thought out idea. It galvanized a large segment of the Arab public against the U.S. Put simply, you cannot put “Christian Crusaders,” which was how the soldiers were portrayed in their press, into Islam’s holiest country. Added to that was their widespread belief that the troops were really there to protect Israel. Nor did we make things better when we insisted that American female personnel could leave the base dressed as they would for the heat, as if they were at home, which meant in sleeveless shirts and shorts —- an insult to the Muslims' religious dictate that women be completely covered so as not to be attractive to Muslim men.

With that backdrop, we see the emergence of al Qaida and its attacks on the USN Cole, the American embassies, and ultimately 9/11.

Nevertheless, the very pressure that Osama bin Laden and al Qaida were putting on us to leave was also the very pressure to stay. What is the first rule in fighting terrorism? Don’t give into the terrorists' demand.

So what happened? In the spring of 2003 there were riots in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, against the royal family and the U.S. base. On April 29, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld present, U.S. troops marched out of Saudi Arabia and relocated to Yemen.

It wasn’t reported in the U.S. press that way, but the U.S. had given in to terrorists. Bin Laden and al Qaida had achieved their objective. The Arab world knows this. They view this as a victory over America. Only the U.S. public is still in the dark.

Because we weren’t told the Why on 9/11, we didn’t even have a debate over the implications of a pull out.

I think of this every time someone says that George W. Bush and the Republicans are tough on terrorism. Hardly.

Paul M. Troop is a retired political and business reporter and editor now living in Johns Creek. In addition to working for such newspapers as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, his articles have been distributed worldwide by such news agencies as Reuters and the NANA syndicate.