The following are two opinions concerning the possible roots of the terrorism.   inflicted on September 11 2001.  They are just opinions.  Please take them with a grain of salt.

The Guardian

Commentary > Opinion

Saddam Hussein is right again. The US was "reaping the fruits of its crimes against humanity," the Butcher of Baghdad muttered darkly after hearing about the horrific destruction of the World Trade Centre. And it's true.

Difficult though it may be for the Americans to admit, they seem now to be suffering the consequences of nearly fifty years of neo-colonialist dominance in the Middle East. There is a way out of this mess, but it means that we in the rich world - and the United States in particular - need to face up to some uncomfortable realities.

As Said K Aburish shows in his groundbreaking 1997 book A Brutal Friendship, first the British and later the US secured control of the Middle East by supporting dictatorial client regimes against the wishes of their Arab peoples.

It was the British who gave a country to the obscure House of Saud, and established equally illegitimate monarchies in Jordan and Iraq - ironically with the justification that the new Hashemite kings were direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed.

The policy of fostering friendly rulers was continued by the US after 1945, when it took over Britain's repressive role. The CIA helped to overthrow a populist and anti-western Iraqi government led by General Abden Karim Kassem in 1968. The agency even prepared lists for the coup leaders of people it thought should be butchered. One of the most enthusiastic killers, of course, was a young man called Saddam Hussein. Several thousand are thought to have died in the massacre.

Throughout the century, grassroots movements - occasionally flaring into open rebellion - challenged western supremacy from below. What is now described as "Islamic fundamentalism" is only the latest of these challenges, but it has become a serious threat to pro-US rulers in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yasser Arafat's Palestine authority.

As Aburish puts it: "Because the west and its clients have succeeded in destroying all the secular movements in the Arab Middle East without making any attempts to solve the real problems of the region, Islam has emerged as the only force opposed to the western-Arab establishment hegemony."

And the results of this hegemony are plain - a total lack of democracy, massive corruption, and widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots. In Saudi Arabia, a steadfast US ally with over fifty billionaire princes, per capita income actually declined by half between 1982 and 1993. Is it any surprise therefore that the backstreets of Riyadh provide a fertile recruitment-ground for a new generation of activists against the west?

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organisation is only one of a plethora of Islamist groups opposed to US power in the Middle East, and his key aim of "pushing the American enemy out of the Holy Land" encapsulates the fusion of religious and anti-western sentiment.

As long as American troops continue to be stationed within spitting distance of the holiest Muslim sites of Mecca and Medina, potential suicide bombers from Hamas, al-Qaida and other extremist groups will remain convinced that their fast-track route to paradise is assured.

So why has the west spent a century subverting the legitimate aspirations of an entire people? The answer can be summed up in a single word: oil. The US imports nearly 9m barrels of crude oil per day, over 20% of it from the Persian Gulf states.

After Canada, Saudi Arabia is US's largest oil supplier, providing over 1.5m barrels a day to keep America's thirsty economy moving. US military might is the guarantor of steady oil supplies, and when this monopoly was threatened by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991, the renegade Saddam was quickly stamped on.

Now talk of war is again in the air, and the Middle East region (including the long-suffering Afghanistan) seems likely once more to be the main theatre of conflict. This time the fighting could be ugly and drawn-out, quite unlike the blitzkrieg against Saddam in the 1991 Gulf war.

In almost every oil-producing state, Islamist opposition movements are challenging US control in increasingly aggressive ways, and defeating them will require slaughter and repression on a massive scale.

Continued dependence on oil not only threatens the future of humanity through prolonged and bloody conflict, but through another even more insidious threat - climate change and ecological collapse. Already it has cost us the world's coral reefs, now thought to be unsaveable because of global warming, according to a Glasgow University marine biologist speaking only last week.

Predicted rates of climate change over the coming century mean that every plant, animal and insect will have to migrate tens or even hundreds of miles towards the poles to keep up with rising temperatures. The "required migration rates" for plant species are 10 times greater than at the end of the last Ice Age, according to a recent study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

Many species, finding themselves blocked by seas, human development or simply unable to keep up with the pace of change, will simply go extinct.

The result will be a series of mass extinctions and a dramatic fall in the planet's biodiversity, as well as its ability to support humankind. In short, global warming - caused largely by industrial society's addiction to oil - will destroy the capacity of the Earth's atmosphere to support life as we know it.

The choices are stark. On one side lies war, insecurity and eventual ecological collapse. On the other lies a brighter future involving a reduction of poverty and global inequalities, ending western military dominance and achieving ecological sustainability.

For other countries to follow the lead of the Bush administration, wedded as it is to both the oil industry and the American military-industrial complex, would set the scene for total disaster. But choosing the latter course would mean calling an end to the Oil Age. How many of us really have the courage to face up to this reality?

_ Mark Lynas is currently writing a book for HarperCollins on the human effects of climate change around the world.

Email marklynas@zetnet.co.uk

Christian Science Monitor
Commentary > Opinion
from the October 12, 2001 edition http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1012/p11s1-coop.html

By Geneive Abdo

Since the attacks, press coverage has focused on the anti-American sentiment driving Islamic extremism. But at least as much of this hostility stems from the extremists' frustration with their respective governments in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Across the Arab world, religious activists have been deprived of any forum allowing them to influence domestic politics. The lack of a free press and pluralistic political system leaves no room for Islamic expression inside the state. Compounding this anxiety is the United States' financial and political support for authoritarian governments as rewards for stifling political participation.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has ruled for some 20 years under emergency law. Suspected militants are tried before military judges, where they have little chance of receiving justice; public demonstrations are banned; and it is illegal to criticize the president in published statements. Add to the list the routine torture of perceived political dissidents; a shoot-to-kill policy against the extremist strand of the Islamic movement; state control of a majority of 60,000 mosques in order to censor sermons; and a lack of free elections.

It should come as no surprise that when Mohammad Atta and all those before him found no voice at home, they roamed the mountains of Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden provides political power and an agenda addressing their grievances. It is no accident that Mr. bin Laden's closest lieutenants are from Egypt's Islamic Jihad organization, which wants to create an Islamic state and has been battling Mubarak's government for 20 years.

The views of the disfranchised are now heard on the Arab world's CNN, the al-Jazeera satellite network. US attempts in recent days to pressure the Qatari government, the owner of al-Jazeera, is more evidence supporting the double standard that Muslims in the Arab world have endured for decades. Since its inception five years ago, al-Jazeera has provided free expression to dissidents of all stripes. A few days ago, the network ran footage of bin Laden's response to the Sept. 11 attacks. But even before his statement was aired, Secretary of State Colin Powell last week had asked Qatar to pull the plug on al-Jazeera, which the US says fuels anti-American sentiment.

Dissatisfied with the progress Arab regimes have made in quashing dissent, the US has gone a step further in trying to ban free expression, which is assumed as a civic right in the West, but deemed too dangerous for the Arab world. Again, the US is providing a service to authoritarian rule: Many Arab governments, too, want al-Jazeera shut down because it routinely airs the views of their political foes. For many in the Arab middle class, the US pressure on al-Jazeera is part of a wider pattern of behavior that has left America alienated from what could be a core constituency in the Muslim world. One-sided support for Israel against the aspirations of the Palestinian people, the continued bombing and sanctions against fellow Arabs in Iraq, backing for corrupt and unpopular Arab regimes, and a general unease as America pursues its economic and cultural globalization drive, have undermined US prestige across the region.

Yasser Arafat's unprecedented decision this week to instruct his police force to fire on Palestinian demonstrators cheering bin Laden and denouncing the US certainly adds a new and dangerous element to Arab public opinion.

In taking such a decision, Arafat has clearly sent a signal that he is with Washington and against the sentiments of his own people. He apparently believes he has little choice. The result of a lack of expression demonstrated this week in the Gaza Strip and the history of authoritarian rule in the Arab world has left many Muslims prepared to view the deadly attacks of Sept. 11 with understanding, if not sympathy, for the hijackers. This, in turn, creates an atmosphere in which a radical fringe can recruit and operate in the margins of society.

It must be made clear that the vast majority of Muslims in no way condone the Sept. 11 attacks or any violence in the name of Islam. This is precisely the reason militant Islamic movements from Egypt to Algeria have found little support from ordinary citizens. Moderate Islamic activists fighting for political pluralism in Egypt for decades have condemned the violence launched by Islamic Jihad and other groups against government officials, policemen, and foreigners.

Yet the leap from the moderate Islamist fighting for a free press to the militant jet-setter with safe houses stretching from Pakistan to Germany and Florida is not great. The lack of democracy in the Arab world, openly encouraged by the US, will only breed more militants and deter those who would seek compromise rather than violence if given a voice in determining their destinies.