Why did Osama bin Ladin attack the US? Have we learned anything...like the value of prevention.

Why did Osama bin Ladin attack the US?   Few Americans understand or even care about his reasoning.  And now, we are still paying the price in blood and treasure in the Middle East- and at home - for ignoring his logic and rational. 

The greatest foreign war blunder of the US government since Vietnam was its reaction to the horrendous attacks on Sept, 11, 2001.  We chose to wage a Global Warm Against Terrorism (GWAT) that only validated the attacker’s self-image as warriors – instead of identifying them as mass murdering criminals and rallying the world to go after them as such - adhering to the force of law…instead of the law of force …for which we are still prioritizing.  And now there are many more mass murdering violent extremists in the world.  With many willing to sacrifice their own lives to try and kill any number of Americans.  And every day they gain more powerful, affordable, tiny, ubiquitous, and even anonymous technologies capable of killing millions or disrupting ever aspect of our comfortable lives.

After 9-11 only the Americans and US policy makers who didn’t care or were unaware of the horrendous death tolls record innocent people in post-World War II wars, minor conflicts or US military actions, and covert ‘activities’ globally - were truly shocked by the 9-11 ‘surprise attack’. 

When I first came to Washington to work on global hunger issues in 1988, I was fearful being employed directly across the street from the Hart Senate office building.  My desk was on the second floor of the American Friends Service Committee building looking out a window at that building – and remembering the 1983 Beirut bombing of the US Marine Barracks that killed 241 soldiers.   I actually practiced diving below my desk to avoid the flying glass and debris from a truck bomb that was too easy to imagine knowing US history.    

In 1980 with approximately 42,000 children dying every day from easily preventable malnutrition and infectious diseases Jimmy Carter’s bipartisan Presidential Commission on World Hunger concluded that if we failed end the worst aspects of this hidden holocaust its commissioners specifically warned, “The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair, and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order… Neither the cost to national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical global threats… Calculable or not, however, this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”

In my view, the only legitimate use of the word “Terrorism” is what parent’s feel if their child’s very life is in danger.  And when a child dies, it is the worst of all human experiences. And avoiding that horror should be made easy today.  But, instead it’s easier to ignore and allow to continue, ignoring the cuts that are now being made to proven measures to reduce maternal and child mortality rates that are now climbing again.   

Carter’s commission also stated “that promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.”

Thus, today’s world is experiencing the consequences of ignoring this commission’s warnings of increases in “diseases”, “international terrorism”, “war”, “environmental problems” and “other human rights problems” (refugees, genocide, human trafficking…). 

Shockingly in 2001, seven months earlier than the 9-11 attacks, the 3^rd and final annual report of President Clinton’s bipartisan Commission on National Security in the 21^st Century (also known as the ‘Hart-Rudman’ Commission) was released.  It clearly warned that terrorism was our nation’s greatest threat.  We and US leaders were warned that ‘Americans should prepare to die in large numbers on American soil’.   

And on September 10, 2001—the day before the attacks—Senator Joe Biden, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee spoke at the National Press Club about the growing terrorist threat to the United States. The following morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists turned four commercial airliners into weapons, killing nearly 3,000 people.

With the earlier warnings this combination is historically shameful.   Multiple senior national-security warnings existed before the attack, but the country had failed to take seriously or enacted any of its recommendations offered to patch up the obvious gaps in our national security.   Factually, our government’s independent agencies simply couldn’t imagine our nation’s inevitable vulnerabilities to the inevitable interdependent forces of technology empowered by understandable human passions.  Powerful feelings due to decades of murderous US foreign policy that termed the mass killings of millions of innocent people in other nations as “collateral damage”. 

Combined with our nations new leaders after the year 2000 unwilling to sustain support the global creation of the International Criminal Court - due to fears that a few US policy makers, military leaders, or US troops would be held accountable by a foreign institution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.  As a Pope once said “No justice. No peace”

Before 9-11 US law forbid the CIA and the FBI to work together to protect US National security.  This still makes our US Constitution’s 4^th Amendment a national suicide clause.  Economic privacy is a freedom that comes with growing security costs.   Laws or beliefs that Americans are ‘independent’ from our government’s freedoms of action are insane.  And “We the people” largely accept that our comforts, carelessness, lack of compassion, and cluelessness are freedoms without consequences -- when they impact the health and lives of billions of people and nature beyond our shores.  This will not end well.

Worse yet, our government already knew that information-sharing was a serious problem before 9/11. The 9/11 Commission later found that separate reviews in 1999, 2000 and 2001 had concluded that information sharing wasn’t occurring adequately. 

October 26, 2001 — USA PATRIOT Act - was one of the first major post-9/11 legislative responses. It substantially broke down the legal barriers that had become known as “the wall” between intelligence and law-enforcement investigations. The 9/11 Commission later concluded that the wall had seriously impeded the investigation of Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Zacarias Moussaoui. 

Then, about 45 days after 9/11, a major part of the information-sharing problem was addressed legislatively.  November 25, 2002 — Homeland Security Act.

Roughly 14½ months after 9/11, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This was substantially along the lines of Hart-Rudman’s recommendation for a centralized homeland-security organization.  The Hart-Rudman idea had already been introduced in Congress before 9/11 but had stalled. 

In 2004 came the 9/11 Commission recommendations.   It concluded that the US needed to go much further. It recommended:

• a National Counterterrorism Center
• a Director of National Intelligence
• a government-wide information-sharing network
• stronger congressional oversight
• better organization of homeland defenses. 

December 17, 2004 — Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act

Congress finally enacted the legislation creating the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and substantially restructuring the intelligence community.

But there is a difference between recognizing a problem and actually changing the system.  In early 2001 Hart-Rudman essentially said ‘The homeland is vulnerable, the government is poorly organized, and we need a fundamentally different national-security structure’ but  was largely ignored or stalled before 9/11. The Washington Post reported just 10 days after the attacks that Hart and Rudman had briefed senior officials and Congress, but their recommendations had received little momentum; the proposed legislation had received only one hearing and then stalled.   Who is to blame.  Who will be held accountable.  Ignorant and comfortable Americans are to blame.  And we are now still avoiding accountability by ignoring why OBL decide to attack us.   

His grievances were not invented out of thin air.  From his point of view and experiences witnessing the abuse of US military power and the impact on the lives of Arabs he made his decision to justify the murder civilians, as the US has done too many times – and continues to this day as justifiable.

In bin Laden’s October 29, 2004 videotaped message, he explicitly connected his decision to attack the US with what he had witnessed during the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Lebanon. He said that when he saw the destruction of the towers in Beirut, he thought about destroying towers in America so that Americans would “taste some of what we are tasting.” 

More specifically, he said that the events that affected him directly began in 1982, when America permitted the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and supported it with the U.S. Sixth Fleet. He described seeing destroyed buildings, people killed and injured, and children and women suffering. He then said that the experience produced a determination to “punish the unjust” and that the destruction of the Lebanese towers led him to think about destroying towers in America. 

There’s a connection here that’s easy for many Americans who ignore the news to miss.

1982: Israel invades Lebanon; Beirut is heavily bombarded.

1983: A suicide truck bomber destroys the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans.

1996: Bin Laden explicitly referred to the Beirut attack as an example of American military defeat.

1998: He told an interviewer that the Nairobi embassy bombing was significant because Americans had not experienced such a blow since the bombing of the Marines in Lebanon. 

Then there’s an especially revealing statement from his 1998 interview with ABC’s John Miller, preserved by PBS. When asked whether his jihad applied to American civilians as well as soldiers, bin Laden said he did not distinguish between military and civilian Americans and explicitly defended retaliation against civilians. 

Current US military actions don’t often make that moral mistake.  But sanctions can be more deadly than war. And they are directly targeted to force a population to pressure their leaders.  Including sanctions and even some unintended by deadly military actions on Iraq during the fist Gulf War in 1991.

OBL’s three most commonly cited grievances were:

1. U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia  After the 1991 Gulf War, thousands of U.S. troops remained in Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina.  He considered this an occupation of Islamic holy land and made withdrawal of U.S. forces a central demand.  The U.S. military presence was real and politically controversial in Saudi Arabia, including among some Saudis.  But using it to justify mass murder was an extremist interpretation. The Saudi government itself had invited U.S. forces.

2.      U.S. support for Israel and the treatment of Palestinians. Bin Laden repeatedly condemned American political, military and financial support for Israel, particularly regarding Palestinians and Israeli control of territories.  The 9/11 Commission explicitly identified U.S. Middle East policies, including support for Israel, as grievances that bin Laden exploited.  It’s true that Palestinians genuinely experienced displacement, occupation, violence, murder, and denial of political rights, and U.S. policy strongly supported Israel.  For him it was a legitimate justification for attacking Americans randomly given his lack of sophisticate military hardware.  While Americans believe they have no control over US policies, what other options would OBL have? 

3.      U.S. policy toward Iraq:  Bin Laden condemned the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War and repeatedly cited the suffering of Iraqi civilians.  The sanctions did cause enormous hardship and a serious humanitarian crisis. The United States was a principal participant in maintaining them.  And there was a substantial humanitarian problem. This was not something bin Laden fabricated.  His logic, “U.S. policy is causing deaths and suffering” thus, “Americans may be murdered”.

Bin Laden’s grievances were real, his diagnosis was distorted, and his prescription was monstrous.  But from his perspective, what else could he do to.  Nuclear states hold a bit of terror over everyone.  And the most powerful states rationalize this terror as a solution to their fears. 

The 9/11 Commission concluded that bin Laden deliberately exploited grievances that were widely shared in parts of the Muslim world, while combining them with an extremist ideological project aimed at restoring a radically conceived Islamic order.  Our war response to his crimes against humanity was a gift…that keeps on giving his warriors a rational for mass murder and disruption. 

His ideology included the belief that violence could drive the United States out of the Muslim world and demonstrate that a superpower could be defeated, as he did with the Soviets in Afghanistan.  That’s logical…and useful for recruiting and motivating suicide bombers.  

For us to prevent terrorism, we need to understand legitimate grievances and underlying drivers without confusing understanding a perpetrator with agreeing with what a perpetrator does…and apply it to our own policies.

The striking historical lesson here: the 9/11 Commission itself acknowledged that U.S. policies in the Middle East provided grievances that bin Laden exploited.  Is American policy responsible for 9/11?  That depends on which side of the bombs you are on.  Effective prevention requires looking honestly at both the perpetrator and the environment in which his ideology gained traction. 

There ae half a dozen underlying psychological, political, religious and biological/social drivers that can turn grievances into terrorism.  These fit very well with the mental-health prevention session the world needs now.

Grievance does not have to become a cause, and a cause does not have to become a justification. Millions of people can experience the same grievance without becoming violent.  Consider the Vietnam war and the death toll of a few million that our nation caused there.   The prevention question is what turns grievance into a willingness to harm others?  And what can overcome that desire for vengeance?  

Seven interacting drivers of terrorism

1.      Grievance and real or perceived injustice:  Political repression, occupation, discrimination, civilian casualties, humiliation, poverty or exclusion can provide the emotional fuel.  Importantly, the grievance can be real, exaggerated, selectively remembered, or deliberately manufactured.

2.      Identity and belonging: People who feel alienated or powerless may find a powerful identity in a movement that tells them: You belong to us; your suffering has meaning; you have a purpose.  The individual identity becomes fused with the group’s identity.

3. A compelling ideological narrative:  Extremist movements simplify a complicated world into “us versus them.” They provide a villain, an explanation for suffering and a supposedly heroic solution.  This is where bin Laden transformed political grievances into a global religious war.
4. Dehumanization of the perceived enemy:  Violence becomes easier when opponents are no longer viewed as individual human beings but as members of an evil collective. The psychological progression can be roughly:
   “They are hurting us” → “They are our enemies” → “They are evil” → “They deserve what happens to them.”
5. Social reinforcement and group dynamics:  Radicalization rarely occurs entirely inside someone’s head.  Friends, charismatic leaders, online communities and tightly bonded organizations can reinforce increasingly extreme beliefs.  The group can reward sacrifice and punish doubt.
6. Personal vulnerability and a search for significance:  Not every terrorist is mentally ill—and mental illness by itself is not a good predictor of terrorism.  But loneliness, humiliation, trauma, failure, identity crisis, desire for status, anger and a need for meaning can make an extremist narrative particularly attractive.  The organization can turn a person’s private pain into a perceived heroic mission.
7. Opportunity, capability and permission:   Anger alone doesn’t produce terrorism.  There must eventually be some combination of access, skills, recruitment, resources, leadership and opportunity.  The critical psychological threshold is when violence becomes not merely imaginable but morally permissible.

A prevention model?   GRIEVANCE → ANGER → IDENTITY → NARRATIVE → GROUP REINFORCEMENT → DEHUMANIZATION → MORAL PERMISSION → CAPABILITY → VIOLENCE

With many off-ramps along the way.  And ‘prevention’ is particularly powerful:  Don’t wait for the perpetrator. Prevent the pathway to perpetration.

Important: there is no single “terrorist personality.” Most people who experience trauma, injustice, humiliation, ideological exposure or alienation never become violent. Terrorism generally emerges from an interaction among individual vulnerabilities, social relationships, ideology, political circumstances and opportunity.

This makes prevention much broader than simply trying to identify “dangerous people.” It means reducing the conditions that make extremist explanations attractive while simultaneously protecting people from those who choose violence.

Within the SDG framework, this creates connections to education, decent work, reduced inequalities, strong institutions, health, social inclusion and peaceful communities aren’t merely humanitarian goals. These can also reduce some of the conditions that extremist organizations exploit. SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions) and SDG 17 (partnerships) are especially relevant—but prevention work spans most of the 17 goals starting with child survival and mental health education - the twin engines of development.

The humanity has more than enough money, solutions, and resources to make heaven on earth.  We only lack the unity of political will…and will to beat truth decay.