Yesterday Al Qaeda made another attempt to attack the American mainland, the third in almost twelve months. What this illustrates is that America's supposed 'War On Terror' continues to have its downsides.
The number one downside is that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have failed to deal with the threat posed by Osama Bin Laden's network. Al Qaeda may have left the building in Afghanistan (for the time being) and they were drawn like a moth to a flame by the US invasion of Iraq. The fact that yesterday's series of un-detonated bombs originated in Yemen clearly illustrates one thing - that when you chase Al Qaeda from one location, they just set up shop in another.
Already, Al Qaeda has reportedly done so in not just Yemen but also Somalia (a so-called "failed state") and Pakistan. As I have argued in many previous blogs on this issue, the Americans chose to deal with 9/11 through taking a sledgehammer approach to matters. Consequently, this has backfired big time with a series of terrorist incidents being perpetrated against Western targets since 2001 with London, Madrid and Bali being the most significant of these. Through a combination of good intelligence/policing work and just dumb luck, America has escaped yet again (and by the skin of its teeth).
Unfortunately, Al Qaeda will probably succeed in attacking the American mainland - and soon. Al Qaeda has the tenacity to keep coming up with plots in an attempt to keep Western governments on their toes. It has been reported as well that Bin Laden, in planning 9/11, was hoping that the Americans would over-react and turn up in Afghanistan - which they did. Perhaps when historians are looking back on this war in 100 years, they will argue that this response, conditioned by decades of American neo-imperialism, was not the best option.
Instead, America should have looked inside itself. While it was hurt on 9/11, the American nation should have taken that time to look at its past history of waging aggressive wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. Specifically, the American leadership should have ideally asked as to how these wars and other interventions had sown resentment amongst the Muslim peoples of the region. This has been the case due to the US alliance with Israel and its other misguided historical entanglements in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia. While Al Qaeda's tactics and strategy are largely shunned by the vast majority of Middle Eastern people, Bin Laden has still been perceived by some Muslims as the man who is standing up to the might of America. In fact, Bin Laden has portrayed himself along these lines in that he helped to crush one superpower (the former USSR) and now wants to single-handedly do the same to the remaining superpower (the USA).
So, despite President Barack Obama's visit to the region last year, popular emnity towards America remains a fact of life throughout the Muslim world. And if America wants to think about how it can best secure itself against any further terrorist atrocities from Al Qaeda, then it might want to think about ending its role as a global bully boy. However, the reality is that this won't happen anytime soon. For the time being, Al Qaeda will just continue to play pass the parcel bomb and in doing so target innocent Americans who, at the end of the day, will have had nothing to do with their country's past aggressive actions.
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