If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Since September 11, 2001 George W. Bush along with politicians all over the United States have been playing a dangerous game with the American people. They have consistently lied about the motivations of our terrorist enemies for the sake of rallying the people behind a sense of nationalism. Day after day we have been told that al Qaida hates our freedom or that they simply enjoy killing people for the sheer sake of doing it. Not only is this rhetoric deceptive, but it is also very dangerous. Al Qaida’s intentions may be destructive, but they are by no means mindless. As long as we refuse to look at the terrorists for who they really are instead of two dimensional cardboard cutouts we will never be able to defeat them.

The morning of September 11 when I first learned of the attacks in New York I automatically knew it was al Qaida. It just had bin Laden written all over it. His modus operandi if you will. Thinking back on it now, it almost seems like a detective story. Like any mystery, you need to know three things–motive, means, and opportunity. Since most of the players in this game have the means and the opportunity to carry out such attacks that leaves motive as the most important of the three. And since September 11 I have found that I have been able to accurately predict the actions of many of those players by knowing little more than their motivations.

Therefore, let us drop this notion that al Qaida attacked the World Trade Center just to attack it and honk off America. Let us assume that bin Laden knew exactly what he was doing and what the consequences would be. The question then is why would he carry out such a plan? What does he stand to gain by angering the United States into launching an all-out war in the Middle East?

First one must understand al Qaida’s main objective. It is not the destruction of the West, as many U.S. politicians would have us believe. Rather, it is to unite the Arab world under a new caliphate. Even the U.S. Defense Department states, “The avowed goal of Al Qaeda (often spelled Al-Qa’ida) is to ‘unite all Muslims and establish a government which follows the rule of the Caliphs,’ according to a U.S. government fact sheet on the organization. ‘Caliphate’ refers to the immediate successors of Mohammed. Under the caliphs, Islam expanded from the Arabian Peninsula through Persia, the Middle East and North Africa. Al Qaeda seeks to overthrow nearly all Muslim governments, because bin Laden regards most of them as corrupted by Western influences.” This puts al Qaida at odds with Western style democracies like Israel as well as countries like pre-invasion Iraq, which under the rule of Saddam Hussein was a secular dictatorship. In fact, Hussein was a far more immediate threat to al Qaida’s goals than the United States. According to Daniel Benjamin in the New York Times, “Iraq and Al Qaeda are not obvious allies. In fact, they are natural enemies. A central tenet of Al Qaeda’s jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and plunged Islam into a historic crisis.”

In March 2003, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute wrote, “Al Qaeda wants the Hussein regime overthrown. There’s also good reason to believe they want to incite a U.S. invasion of Iraq to draw new recruits into the Al Qaeda campaign against a so-called ‘Crusader’-Israeli alliance aimed at conquering the Middle East. Provoking a crackdown by the enemy has been a key terrorist strategy for as long as there have been terrorists. Getting Iraqi WMD would allow Al Qaeda to kill two birds with one stone.”

So al Qaida has wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein for a long time. And they were more than willing to have the United States military do the work for them. But this still does not explain how the 9/11 attacks would accomplish that goal without one other vital piece of information–the motivations of the other side.

A quick comparison of the Bush administration to other Republicans will show significant differences. These neoconservatives are marked most notably by their hawkish imperialist attitude. Prominent neoconservative thinkers include Richard Perle and William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. And while previous presidents have managed to keep the neoconservatives on a shorter leash, they have found new power with the presidency of George W. Bush. Bush himself is mostly a typical right-wing Christian conservative. But many of his highest advisors in charge of creating U.S. policy include powerful neoconservatives such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

So the question is what do the neoconservatives want? In September 2000, one year before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the neoconservative think tank known as the Project for the New American Century released a report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The report focuses mainly on the need for increased military spending, but there are several points that betray the true intentions of the writers. On page 14 of the document the writers state, “In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semi-permanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” However, they admit that, “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.”

And so Osama bin Laden, knowing that the Bush administration needs only such an event to rally the American people behind an invasion of Iraq, sends 19 terrorists to hijack airplanes and fly them into the military and economic centers of the United States.

Since America’s “victory” in Iraq, al Qaida’s membership has gone up. With Saddam Hussein’s secret police no longer able to stop them, a whole country full of people whose hatred of America has been shaped by two wars and countless bombings has been opened up to al Qaida. And with U.S. forces now based in Iraq and Afghanistan, the once untouchable America has been brought into firing range.

The neoconservatives who now control America were arrogant. They were arrogant enough to believe that they could play al Qaida better than al Qaida could play them. And because of that arrogance George W. Bush has walked the men and women of the United States military right into a trap.

Now the ball is back in bin Laden’s court. So the question is, where does he move from here?