September 11: An Analysis

Juan Cole's blog is called Informed Comment.

His blog is an oasis in the desert-land of knowledge about the Middle East as reported on by the major media. While surely many of us had heard of Osama bin Laden prior to September 11, 2001, we -- as a country -- knew very little about him until that tragic date.

Informed Comment.

Unfortunately, most of what the majority of Americans "know" about him is that he is a terrorist who hates our freedom; that he is a killer merely for the sake of killing.

Informed Comment.

Please don't understand me... I do not sympathize with or condone his actions as a terrorist. But I do wish to understand his motives; I do hope others somehow come to understand what really belies what happened three years ago in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. I can only hope that we somehow are able to get past the Bush administration's cartoon caricature of bin Laden, and its sketchy characterization of our relationship with the Moslem world.

Informed Comment.

Why does our populace seemingly show little desire to learn about what is possibly the greatest threat this country has ever faced just this side of Cold War destruction?

Thankfully, for those who are looking to learn and understand, there is Juan Cole's informed commentary.

On Saturday, September 11, 2004, Juan posted a piece that gives a bit of a historical perspective on the goals of al Qaeda and the politics of the Middle East.

From al-Qaeda's point of view, the political unity of the Muslim world was deliberately destroyed by a one-two punch. First, Western colonial powers invaded Muslim lands and detached them from the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim states. They ruled them brutally as colonies, reducing the people to little more than slaves serving the economic and political interests of the British, French, Russians, etc. France invaded Algeria in 1830. Great Britain took Egypt in 1882 and Iraq in 1917. Russia took the Emirate of Bukhara and other Central Asian territories in the 1860s and forward. Second, they formed these colonies into Western-style nation-states, often small and weak ones, so that the divisive effects of the colonial conquests have lasted.

Informed Comment.