Why terrorist attacks are not inevitable, say Saudis

Concern is mounting in Washington that more terrorist attacks on the United States are "inevitable."

But Saudis familiar with the thinking behind the anti-American hatred of groups like Al-Qaeda, say such attacks on the US are not inevitable.

They say that anti-US attacks since the mid-1990s – from bombings in this desert kingdom in the mid-1990s to the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen – were a deliberate chain of events leading up to Sept. 11. They had one message for America, these sources say: Stop your blind support of Israel, and withdraw your forces from Saudi Arabia.

"These attacks are going to continue against the US again and again, until America wakes up to the problem of siding with Israel," says a Saudi veteran of the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, who is familiar with the thinking of militants today, but did not participate in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

"Why must they intervene in every single thing? And when they do, why do they do it so unjustly?" asks the Saudi veteran, a computer specialist.

The linkage between US support for Israel – widely perceived in the Arab world to be at the expense of Palestinians – and the Sept. 11 attack is often rejected in Washington. But here it is considered an article of faith.

Though Saudi Arabia has had tight security and military ties to the US for more than half a century, the country is also the home of 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, and fully more than one-third of the Al Qaeda detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Within this apparent contradiction, somewhere on the convoluted path between Saudi Arabia's branch of puritanical Islam and its embrace of the West, may lie answers to questions about those "inevitable" future attacks.

Violence in Palestinian territories is piped hot and graphic daily into Arab living rooms by satellite television, and it feeds discontent.

Would the anger toward America fade, if the US pressured Israel to withdraw from Palestinian land occupied in the 1967 war, in line with a Saudi-sponsored peace plan?

"Can they [pressure Israel]? I don't think it is possible for them," answers another Saudi who visited Afghanistan in the late 1980s, lost family members in Bosnia, and is now a businessman.

"America does not understand.... We love America," says the Saudi businessman. But he says the US must ask itself: "Why do [Arab] young people want to join the jihad?"

Saudi analysts and Islamists say that the US policies in the Mideast have provided a focal point for militants like Saudi-born Osama bin Laden.

Former President Bill Clinton, who many analysts describe as Israel's most supportive US president until Bush, also drew the link during a Tuesday speech in Tokyo. "The big threat today to the peace of the world that is stoking all this terrorism is this continuous violence in the Middle East," Mr. Clinton said.

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