What few people in Europe and the USA seem to be aware of are the actual future war projections by Islamists and Jihadists, see map underneath. A first question to ask here then is of course also, what will be their future alliances?

In fact one can see hints of possible future alliances forming among the Islamists/ jihadists by looking at the complex alliances of the past. After most of the Arab Middle East fell under European rule as a result of the Ottoman collapse, the Islamic fundamentalist movement began to look worldwide to find potential allies against the Franco-British occupation. The Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahabis, and even the Pan Arab nationalists viewed the rise of radical nationalism in Europe as a historic opportunity. The convergence between the two currents across the Mediterranean, although ultimately fruitless, had grounds in pure geopolitics. From various quarters of the region, including Cairo, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, leading figures of the transnational Salafi movement opted for a rapprochement with the emerging Nazi and fascist regimes in Berlin and Rome. The jihadi movement operated through the ancient geopolitical logic that the enemy of one's enemy could be a potential ally. Thus arose the Islamist-Ji­hadic-Nazi-fascist axis.

Ideologically, the equation had no philosophical pillars. The National Socialists of Germany promoted German racial superiority. Arabs and other Mideastern Semites were at the bottom of the ladder, lower even than the Slavs and Turks. The racist ideology of nazism was thus inherently incompatible and could not be adopted by the Islamic fundamentalists because of their own ethnicities. In a global society ruled by the Third Reich, by "Aryan standards" Arab Muslims would be one level above the Jews. In Nazi thinking, a universal Germanic empire would not be co ruled with southern Mediterranean "races" who were considered inferior, and a longterm joint venture between Hitler and potential allies in the Arab world was impossible.

For the Italian fascists, with their idea of the Roman "Mare nostra," the Mediterranean could accommodate neither Arab nationalism nor Islamic fun damentalism. On the Arab Islamic end, cooperation also was not possible, for the simple reason that the agenda of the jihadic forces called for the removal of all infidel presence from Arab and Muslim lands. Mussolini had been engaged in the opposite activity, having invaded Ethiopia and dreamed of a new Italian empire. Italians would have had to evacuate Libya and the Germans (if successful) would have to surrender British and French colonies and mandates back to a caliphate. Further down the doctrinal and geopolitical road, the sup­porters of the Islamic conquest-or el Fatah-were dedicated to resuming it beyond the borders of the old Ottoman empire. Thus, after the Axis victory over the Allies, another round of jihad would take place against the German Nazis and the Italian fascists. An ultimate confrontation along the lines of the clash of civilizations, regardless of who was on the other side, was ineluctable. The logic ofjihad is not flexible, but can absorb a time factor. In sum, Salafi po­litical thought throughout the late 1930s and at the onset of World War II sought an alliance with the German-Italian kuffar against the Franco-British kuffar, even though, on doctrinal grounds, a universal project with Nazis and facsists was not possible. But the calculation was rational, even within the Islamic fundamentalist ideology, insofar as the ultimate goal for the jihadists was to reemerge as a force capable of restoring the caliphate. What superseded in the jihadist agenda was the return of the global institution inside the Muslim lands. Reestablishing the caliphate was equated with satisfYing Allah, and therefore benefited from divine support. Striking deals with some kuffar against other kuffar was in line with Salafi thinking; they often referred to ex­amples from the preceding founders and even from previous caliphs. According to these references, in the early days of Islam, Prophet Mohammed had concluded agreements with non-Muslims as a way to concentrate on other enemies (also non-Muslims). Also, Abbasid Caliph Harun el Rashid signed treaties with the "infidel" emperor Charlemagne to balance power with the other "infidel" emperors of Constantinople. Islamic history abounds with these examples, and the twentieth-century Salafis used all of them to show theologi­callegitimacy for their strategic choices.

But in view of the situation prevailing in the Middle East since the 1920s, the jihadic rationale in the 1930s was first and foremost geopolitical. Hitler's and Mussolini's armies were the rivals of French and British powers. Most Muslim lands were occupied by the latter colonial powers. The resources of in­dustrial Germany and agricultural Italy were being massed against the interests of the Allies, and therefore were beneficial for jihad and fatah. The Ottoman Empire adopted a similar strategy at the beginning of the century. Istanbul perceived Britain, France, and Russia as its greater threats; hence the Turks sided with Berlin and Vienna against London and Paris, forming the Central Powers alliance. Although the move was clearly based on geopolitical equations, it was perceived by the post-Ottoman Islamic fundamentalists as a deliberate choice by the ruler ofIslam-the sultan-to use the forces of two kuffar powers against even more threatening infidel powers. But after the abolition of the caliphate and the sultanate in 1923 at the hands of Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, the central decision-making authority in the Muslim world vanished. The Wahabis and Muslim Brotherhood took it upon themselves to embody the international de­cisions of the caliphate. They felt, like all Salafis, that the jihadic strategic decisions were to be decided and developed by them until the return of the khilafa (succession). Hence, as the collision between the Berlin-Rome axis with the London-Paris axis was projected, Islamists (but also many Pan Arabists) saw the strategic convergence of interest (Taqatuh al Masalih). Germany had developed enough military power to confront France and England in Europe, po­tentially weakening them in the Middle East and North Africa. At the same time, fascist Italy would disrupt British and French maritime power in the Mediterranean. Although all these considerations favored siding with the Axis against the Allies, perhaps the most inflammatory argument in favor of an alliance with the Nazis was the Jewish question.

The Jewish question in the Salafi doctrine is threefold: theological, histor­ical, and geopolitical. It is obviously a major feature of the current jihadist-J ew­ish conflict (to be discussed in due course), but already in the 1930s both Arab nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists had perceived the growth of Jewish settlement in British-mandated Palestine as a "dagger planted in the midst of the umma (nation)." Arabs in Palestine had launched an insurrection against British rule and aimed at uprooting the developing Yishuv (the term for the localJewish community prior to 1947). The Salafi-jihadic movement intended to reverse the process of infidel settlement on that very strategic area of Muslim land known to the West as the Holy Land. Their vision of events in Palestine was as follows: The British invaded the Arab Middle East, including Palestine, in 1919. The Jews had concluded a treaty with the British in 1917, embodied in the Balfour declaration. British infidels had since allowed Jewish infidels to immigrate onto the Muslim land of Palestine. Hence, by the same logic, the growth of the Jewish community in that area was not the result of natural de­mography under Muslim sovereignty but a consequence of a strategy designed jointly by two kuffar powers: the British and the Jews. The conclusion to this jihadic logic was simple:

The Islamic fundamentalists had to shop for an ally with an ideology that sought to destroy the Jewish community universally and that had enough military strength and intent to clash with the other infidel power protecting the Jewish entity in Palestine. In the 1930s, such an ally was not difficult to identify: Nazi Germany. Thus, the jihadist solution to the mounting threat of Zionism in Palestine was to develop an alliance across the Mediterranean with Hitler's regime. A Nazi higher technology that would confront Jewish tech­nological superiority and its British protection in Palestine, coupled with the Nazi's intention to destroy Jewish communities wherever they encountered them and their imminent confrontation with and likely defeat of the British empire, made the Nazi option too attractive in realistic political terms to be analyzed in strictly theological terms (under which, of course, it would have to be rejected). While Nazi infidels were ultimately anathema to jihadists, the alliance answered all their practical needs at the moment.

By the end of the 1930s, Islamic fundamentalist networks, often under the auspices of traditional leadership and sometimes within the wider context of radical Arab nationalists, sought rapprochement and alliance with Berlin. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood hoped a war with the Axis would bring in the German-Italian forces from Libya across the border to seize the Suez Canal, ejecting the British from the region. In Syria and Lebanon, fundamentalist leaders envisioned that a defeat at the hands of the Germans would evacuate the French from the area. In Palestine and Iraq, revolts were brewing, waiting to be triggered by the advance of Nazi forces across Europe.

As the Wehrmacht marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland, and as the Luft­waffe bombarded the British Isles after the invasion of France, the Islamic fun­damentalist and Pan Arabist movements of the Middle East rose up at different times, in different areas, and in different circumstances. In Cairo, according to Anwar Sadat's memoirs, the Muslim Brotherhood and a number of officers in the military were preparing to revolt had Bernard Montgomery's 8th Army not been able to stop Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. The plan was to inflame Egypt from the inside and explode an intifada along the valley of the Nile all the way to Ethiopia. In Palestine, the clearest pro-Nazi move was embodied by the mufti of Jerusalem, al Husseini.

Descending from a prominent Qudsi (Jerusalemite) family, which claimed its own descent from the Prophet, the Husseini were the most visible leaders of the city and of tlle Arab population. But the religious cleric H'!ij Ali al Amin al Hus­seini jumped from anti-British colonialism to radical anti-Semitism, becoming Hitler's closest ally in the Arab-Muslim world. Traveling to Berlin, Mufti Hus­seini met with the Fuhrer, established an alliance, and projected himself not only as the Arab leader of Palestine but as the Third Reich's leading Muslim ally. The Nazi strategists wanted to see him play a role beyond Palestine; with a special pro­gram in Arabic broadcasting on Radio Berlin, the pro-German cleric mobilized Muslims in the Balkans against the Serbs and called on Muslim soldiers serving with the Allies to desert or rise up. Husseini was the highest hope Berlin had for an offensive south and east of the Mediterranean behind enemy lines.

In Iraq, Mohammed Rashid al Kailani led a military uprising against British rule in 1941 centered in what is today the Sunni triangle. In Syria and the Mus­lim areas of Leba~n, similar groups readied themselves for an eventual German landing as Nazi forces reached the Greek island of Rhodes. Had the Axis forces been successful at El Alamein, jihadic insurgencies would have met up with them in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. But the British were fast on all fronts:

They eliminated Kailani's militias in Iraq and invaded Lebanon and Syria with de Gaulle's French forces to remove the Vichy France representatives. More im­portant, they destroyed Rommel's Panzers in the Egyptian desert and in 1942 went on the offensive in Libya, rolling back the Axis and severing the strategic bridge between Nazism and jihadism. The attempt to defeat the infidel allies using the fascist infidels was over by 1943; with the fall of Berlin two years later, a new era started and the forces ofjihad had to consider new strategies.

World War II was a major subject of contemplation for the Sunni Wahabi and Muslim Brotherhood and, later, for the Shi'a Khumeinists. Throughout the decades, jihadi intellectuals would rethink their strategies based on what their contemporaries had witnessed and the accounts by historians. In the years after September 11, 2001, bold extrapolations would be made public by Islamist thinkers. On al Jazeera TV, leading Ikhwan scholar Sheikh Yussef al Qardawi often cited World War II as a "war to learn from" and repetitively went over its imthula, or lessons. Similar conclusions were found on the web, par­ticularly on al Muhajirun, al Khilafa, and al Ansar.

Al Qardawi spoke of the huge military machinery that "consumed millions of humans and an incredible amount of material within the world of kujJar." He drew the viewers' attention to the fact that the infidels had destroyed each other's powers in an incredible way in the twentieth century, particularly dur­ing World War II. Asked about the wisdom of his predecessors-meaning the jihadic forces of the 1930s and 1940s-having sided with the Axis, he argued that Muslims should perform their wajib (duty) and Allah would decide the case. The Islamists focused on the fact that the West may well possess huge military power and resources, but Allah has his own way to destroy it. Some Salafi analysts reminded their audience of the mere size of the infidel global force at the eve of the war. 'Just imagine," said a cleric in a chat room:

How gigantic was the combination of all kufr powers in 1939. Just add the military strength of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, America, let alone Japan. By our aqida (doctrine ) they are all Kuffar. Had they united against Muslims in the 1940s, we wouldn't have had any chance. We were oc­cupied, divided, weak, uneducated, and deprived of military power. But Allah subhanahu [religious praise] unleashed them against each other. They de­stroyed their military machines against each other in Europe, Russia, and the Pacific. Every battle they fought was a battle where the infidels were being de­stroyed, whatever was the winning side. That war [World War IIJ was prepar­ing the path for Jihad. It helped us weaken them, then remove many of their armies from our midst. (Paltalk.com in the "al-ansar" discussion room, September 23, 2004.)

The philosophical conclusion is that jihadism does not have to fight all wars to defeat all enemies. The injunction to the mujahidin is to sacrifice all they can, including themselves when needed. Their contribution is part of a greater plan. A Salafi commentator reminded his audience of the early stages of the latah:

"Remember when our ancestors left Arabia in the first century [seventh A.D./e.E.]. The two superpowers of the time were the Persians and the Byzan­tines. They have been at each other's throats for hundreds of years.” (Paltalk.com in the "ansar al sunna wal Jihad" discussion room, January 20, 2005.)

 When the Muslim armies moved forward, he said the kuffars were weak and exhausted. Islamists have explained World War II in Europe as a sign by Allah, signal­ing the impending decline of the infidels after centuries of military and economic rise. Before the war, most of the Muslim world was under colonial infidel occupation. In the years after the war, one land after another was freed from the British, French, Italians, Dutch, and Portuguese. Hundreds of millions of Mus­lims obtained independence from foreign occupiers. This was seen as stage one of a Muslim "reconquista"-first of the traditional Muslim lands of the caliphate and later of the dar el harb.

By attempting to ally themselves with the Nazis and fascists in midcentury, modern Islamists sent this message: Their strategies for jihad and latah supercede human rights, democracy, and peace. They were able to hold their noses and countenance an alliance with the Nazis. To them, jihad and ultimately latah are all there is in international relations. Their alliances with the antidemocratic forces were not a "balancing act"; there simply was not any­thing else on the other side of the scale. Many westerners still believe that there is some sort of restraint on what the jihadists will do and what their ambitions are. But theoretically there is no limit to the latah until the dar el harb ceases to exist, and there are no limits on the tactics to be used against the infidels.

The trigger of bin Laden's war against America was-as he often charged-the deployment of American forces on Muslim lands, and particularly in 1990 in Saudi Arabia, which he labeled as holy land. Interestingly enough, the actual area forbidden to non-Muslims is only the rectangle of the Hijaz area, covering Mecca and Medina. Non-Muslims, including Americans and others, in fact have been present on the peninsula for decades in great num­bers. The British maintained forces in Oman for ages. But in the Salafi vision of the world, the insult is more about infidel forces crushing an Arab Muslim force: the Iraqi army. Salafi chats and websites blamed both Saddam and the Saudis for allowing the Americans to crush one of the largest and most power­ful armed forces in the Arab world. This ideological vision of international re­lations is at the root of the Salafi anger that triggered attacks against the United States.6 Strangely enough, the Wahabis, the state Salafists, have made the case for not engaging the Americans as long as they are (or were) supporting Mus­lim causes, such as defending the kingdom during the Gulf War and defeating the "Christian" Serbs in the 1990s. On both accounts the radical Salafis re­sponded that "America is an infidel power that cannot be trusted." In the jihadi view, Americans came to help the royal family against Saddam and control oil. And in Bosnia, they allowed the Serbs to massacre the Muslims first, before they came to their rescue. There was no argument to convince Osama and his men that America was not the enemy. It was an ideological decision that trans­formed the ally of the past on the plateau of Afghanistan into the next target.

In fact beginning in 1990, Salafi violence erupted in Algeria, Kashmir, Chechnya, Is­rael, and elsewhere. In each of these battlefields, local conflicts were different:

political, ethnic, religious. But, in addition, they were all fueled by one interna­tional brand of ideology: Wahabism and Ikhwan doctrine. The Salafists moved inside these conflicts and made them into Islamist instead of nationalist ones. For example, Hezbollah in Lebanon asserted itself among Shiites (as opposed to Sunni Salafis) and transformed the secular struggle against Israel into a fun­damentalist one. In a sense, these localjihads married the nationalist conflicts but drove them in one global direction, jihadism, connecting them to the mother ship of al Qaeda.

As local fires erupted in several countries, the central force ofjihad, particularly after the Khartoum gathering in 1992, targeted the United States head-on, both overseas and at home. By this point al Qaeda was in charge of the world con­flict with America. The "princes" (or emirs) were assigned the various battle­fields, but the "Lord" assumed the task of destroying the "greater Satan," America.

The first wave started in 1993 on two axes: One was in Somalia, where ji­hadists met U.S. Marines in Mogadishu in bloodshed. The United States with­drew. The same year, the blind sheikh Abdul Rahman and Ramzi Yusuf conspired to blow up the Twin Towers in New York. Washington sent in the FBI and treated it as a criminal case, not as a war on terror. This was another form of withdrawal, and bin Laden and his brigades got the message. The test was clear: The United States will not fight the jihadists as a global threat. Some­thing inside America was "paralyzing" it from even consideringjihad a threat.

Ironically, the first ones to understand the message were the jihad terrorists. The events of 1993 were a benchmark in the decision that led to September 11 years later. Bin Laden said later that the successful suicide attacks by Hezbol­lah against the Marines in 1983 convinced him that the United States would not retaliate against terror. The jihadists tested the United States twice ten years later, and twice they found the path open.

In 1994, a bomb destroyed a U.S. facility of Khubar in Saudi Arabia, killing American military personnel. The "tower" was blown up by jihadists, but the investigation was not able to determine which group. The Saudis did not crack down on their radicals and the U.S. administration absorbed the strike. This was a third test, well appreciated by the jihadists. Meanwhile, three "wars" erupted worldwide with Salafists either leading or participating. In Algeria, the fundamentalists have been involved in tens of thousands of murders against secular, mostly Muslim civilians. The Algerian regime was responding harshly too. But the United States and France did not focus on Salafi ideology and organizations. This was a fourth test that America and the West failed. In Chechnya, the Russians were fighting with the separatists, whom the Wahabis infiltrated. Some among them would become part of al Qaeda. Washington ad­dressed veiled criticism to Moscow but kept silent on the jihadist infiltration of the Chechens. This was the fifth test.

By the early 1990s, the Bosnian conflict had exploded with its bloody eth­nic cleansing. The United States was first to call for intervention, while the Europeans hesitated. Washington stood by the besieged Muslims against Serbs and Croats and mounted a military expedition to help them maintain their government. The jihadists formed a brigade and fought the Serbs fiercely, expend­ing efforts to recruit elements for a local jihad-and eventually ship them to other battlefields. Not only did the United States tolerate the jihadists on the ground, but it even allowed Wahabi fundraisers in America to support their networks in the Balkans; that was the sixth test.

In 1996 the Taliban, one of the most radical Islamist militias on Earth, took over in Kabul. The old anti-Soviet Afghan allies were pushed all the way north to a precarious position. The ideology of the Taliban did not seem to impress or worry the foreign policy decision makers in Washington. The group's ruth­less treatment of women, minorities, and other religious groups went unchecked. Its hosting of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda was not dealt with. Worse, businessmen were interested in contracts under the new "stable" regime, and some American scholars were impressed with the Taliban's "achievements." This was the seventh instance of American failure to take any significant stand against the jihadists anywhere on any issue. It became almost certain that some "power" inside the United States was moding America's response and blurring its vision. That year, 1996, bin Laden issued his first in­ternational fatwa against the infidels. (http://www.defenddemocracy.org/research_topics/ research_topics_show.htm?doc_id= 18567 3 &attrib_id= 7 580.)

Encouraged by the passivity of the U.S. executive branch toward the escalating jihadi assault worldwide and against American targets and interests, the "cen­tral computer" launched the second wave. This one was explicit, direct, and daring, targeting the infidel's diplomatic and military hardware.

On February 22, 1998, Osama bin Laden appeared on television for about twenty-seven minutes and issued a full-fledged declaration of war against the kuf far, America, the crusaders, and the Jews. The text was impeccable, with all the needed religious references to validate a legitimate jihad. The declaration was based on a fatwa signed by a number of Salafi clerics. (See The 9/11 Commission Report, op. cit.: "A Declaration of War," p. 47, and "Building an Or­ganization, Declaring War on the United States," p. 59.)

It was the most compre­hensive Sunni Islamist edict of total war with the United States, and it was met with total dismissal by Washington. It evoked a few lines in the New York Times, no significant analysis on National Public Radio, and no debating on C-SPAN. The Middle East Studies Association had no panels on it, and the leading experts who advised the government downplayed it. During the 9/11 Commission hearings, U.S. officials said they noted it and that plans were designed to deal with it. As one commissioner asked, "This was a declaration of war. Why did not the President or anyone declare war or take it to Congress?"

Here was the leader of international jihad serving the United States and the infidels with a formal declaration of war grounded in ideological texts with reli­gious references: Why did no one answer him? "Expert advice" within the Belt­way ruled against it. Obviously, the Wahabis on the inside did not want to awaken the sleepy nation. If the U.S. government were to question the basis of Osama's jihad it would soon recognize the presence of an "internaljihad." For this reason, the debate about the declaration had to be suppressed and with it the warning about its upcoming threat. AI Qaeda must have been stunned. They openly declare war on the infidels, and rather than responding, the Americans are busy ad­dressing political scandals instead. Osama must have thought: "Well, that's what the Byzantines did, when the sultan got to their walls centuries ago. They weren't mobilizing against the fatah, they were busy arguing about the sex of angels. This must be another sign from Allah that America is ripe. Let's hit them directly."

And indeed, in August 1998, Osama hit hard: two U.S. embassies, hun­dreds of victims, and massive humiliation. The retaliation? A missile was launched on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Bin Laden had already left the country two years before. A wave of tomahawk missiles dug up the dirt in Af­ghanistan. Right place, wrong policy. Al Qaeda was indeed based in Afghani­stan at the time, openly protected by the Taliban. According to counterterrorism officials and military experts, a plan was prepared to produce a regime change in Kabul. But again, the "holy whisper" in the U.S. capital ad­vised against intervention. "It will create complications in international rela­tions and will have a negative impact in the Muslim world” Yet the following year, an all-out campaign by al Qaeda destroyed the Serbian army in Kosovo and led to a regime change in Serbia. There were no complications in interna­tional relations in that case. The nonresponse of the United States after a declaration of war and a massive attack against American diplomatic installations was not a mere signal anymore, it was an invitation to attack America.

In 1999, a plot was under way to blow up several targets worldwide. Re­ports circulated about an earlier plot in 1995 to down several airliners. Intense jihadi activity was going on; propaganda was spreading around the world. But in the United States, the elite dismissed any accusation against the Islamists. Worse, the inside jihadists had initiated a defamation campaign against the very few who were trying to warn the public and government. America was driven to the slaughterhouse, politically blindfolded, and intellectually drugged. The fine-tuning between the outside ninjas and the inside cells was peaking. In 2000, al Qaeda crossed the line to test the U.S. military itself. A fishing boat blew up, damaging the USS Cole in Yemen. Back in Afghanistan, bin Laden analyzed the reactions. He did not have much work to do; there was no D.S. reaction. The anti-American forces worldwide escalated their propaganda campaign. One cycle led to another, as the jihadists were emboldened on all battlefields. In Lebanon, Hezbollah overran the South Lebanon Army security zone after the Israelis abandoned the area in May 2000. In September of that year, Hamas and Islamic jihad escalated their suicide attacks. And as Americans were embroiled in counting the Florida votes after the disputed 2000 election, al Qaeda was scouting the East Coast of the United States. The path to Manhattan and Washington was wide open.

Since 2001, world leaders and international public opinion has concluded that the jihadists have no international law and relations. The Salafi ideological teachings do not recognize the United Nations, the principles of international law as we know it, other treaties, conventions, and codes, unless under their doctrinal norms. In contrast with the communists, who ideologically rejected the capitalist world but nevertheless recognized international laws and treaties (even though they often breached them), the jihadists simply do not recognize any system the international community has reached since the Peace of West­phalia; no conception of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarian rights, the Geneva Convention, or even Red Cross agreements. This may seem hard to be­lieve, especially if you absorb the analysis of the apologists, particularly the Wa­habi lobbies. (See Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, 2003: "The Honeymoon," p. 91.)

But the easiest way to learn about it is to read the jihadist literature, study their principles of action, and listen to their spokespersons and activists. They all confirm with clarity that the League of Nations, United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, democracy, secularism, freedom of religions, freedom of speech (when not applied in their interest) are to them all "products of the infidels." Hence, there are no boundaries to jihadist actions. Therefore, the understanding of their strategies and future plans cannot be predicted based on expectations of the international community and accepted norms. With this in mind, we can begin to understand the objectives of September 11 and the shadow of future jihads.

Of course, the jihadists, including bin Laden's al Qaeda and the myriad of other radical Islamist warriors, have a system of reference for their actions. Their clerics and "legislators" have an entire system oflaws and regulations, including war codes and traditions (see the 6e pillar of Islam described earlier in this article series). They, the Islamic fundamentalists, claim it is the "true Islamic code"; Muslim reformers negate this claim. This debate existed in the past, continues to exist, and will be much wider in the future. But the bottom line is that the jihad terror networks abide by their own vision of international relations: It is the web of relationship between dar el harb and dar el Islam. The latter must defeat the former; the rest is details. But even in the details there are nuances, differences, and multiple subdoctrines. For example, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayid Qutb of Egypt, developed his own vision of warfare and jihad against the infidels.4 He centered his doctrine almost entirely on constant violence again the "enemies of religion" until they submit. He did not spare Muslims of Shiite background or Sunnis of non-Salafi background. Qutb may be one of the most radical fathers of modernjihadism, a logical inspiration to al Qaeda, Zarqawi, and future extremists.

When mounting operations in the 1990s, Osama bin Laden and his men had no limits with regard to international relations and did not take world opinion into consideration. In contrast, the state Wahabis were very concerned about al Qaeda's tactics, fearing they would destroy the credibility of Islamic fundamentalism worldwide. In the United States and to a certain degree in Europe and elsewhere in the West, the oil-financed apologists had the choice between condemning the jihadists and covering up for them. One of their major mistakes was to attack the target-the United States-instead ofthejihadists. In fact, the apologists were forced by their ties to the Wahabis to cover up for the political objectives of the terrorists, and for a simple reason: in the long term, both the Wahabis and the terrorists have the same objectives. If the terrorists are exposed, so too will their ideology be exposed. If that happens, the long-term objectives of the lobbies that are working within the law internationally and in the United States will be exposed; and just as much as al Qaeda, the lob­bies too believe that the dar el Islam is destined, and in fact, obligated to ove­whelm and absorb the dar el harb. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the various parties who debated the September 11 attacks on al Jazeera television were not arguing about whether the attacks were wrong or right; they were arguing about whether they'd been mounted at the right time.

It remains to explain why the American public and the international com­munity were not informed or educated as to the jihadists' real attitude regard­ing world affairs. Why were the terrorists presented either positively, as "freedom fighters," or negatively, as "mere gangs," and never realistically, as an ideological network with a worldview rooted in hundreds of years of tradition and example (the caliphate), and now aiming at the destruction of the world in­ternational structure and the United States in particular? The fundamentalists realized that they were operating in an ideal context: Not only were they not on their enemies' radar, but someone on the "inside" was blurring the enemy's understanding of the networks.

To know what was in the mind of Osama when he engineered what he called "blessed strikes" (al-darabat al mubaraka), short of interviewing him directly or reading his memoirs, requires us to connect the dots from a combination of statements, over a span of a decade at least, and to read that material with the deepest possible knowledge of the movement that produced bin Laden.

It is a certainty that the man who ordered the destruction of the American centers of finance and of military and political power aimed to create chaos in the United States. The mass killing of civilians and persons in the military bureau­cracy does not produce a battlefield defeat, as Pearl Harbor did. Although the element of strategic surprise was the most common characteristic of the two acts, Japan's ultimate goal was to break down U.S. military power in the Pacific, hence removing American deterrence from Japanese calculations in Asia. The direct outcome the jihad war room sought from the events of September 11 was to bring chaos to the American mainland, leaving U.S. forces around the world untouched. The real and first objective of the Ghazwa (jihad raid, as Osama called it) was to trigger a chain of reactions, on both the popular and po­litical levels. Osama expected up to a million Americans to demonstrate in the streets against their government, as Israelis had done against their cabinets in the 1980s. He hoped that Congress would split in two and become paralyzed, campuses would rebel, and companies would collapse. He wanted chaos and a divided nation, scared and turning upon itself. He believed, for many reasons, that the time was ripe for the fall of the giant. (See "Warning to the United States," October 7, 2001, http://news. bbc.co.uk/l fhi/world/south_asiaJ1585636.stm.)

Based on how things are dealt with in his part of the world, Osama probably was expect­ing Americans to attack Arabs and Muslims in some sort of  ethnic strife model, in which thousands of armed civilians wreak havoc on entire neighborhoods. He fantasized about Arab and Muslim blood spilled in the streets of American cities. AI Qaeda projected mass retaliations similar to sectarian backlashes in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Ironically, in the first days after September 11 some jihadist callers were reporting alleged backlashes live to alJazeera. Had such a nightmare occurred in America, al Qaeda would have ruled in Muslim lands and recruited hundreds of thousands of new members.

With chaos and ethnic wounds raging inside the country, the engineer of mass death projected that America would sow grapes of wrath abroad. Had he had such military power, and had his "caliphate" been attacked in similar ways, he would have unleashed Armageddon against the infidel world. Reversing the psychology, bin Laden expected the U.S. military to carpet bomb Afghanistan and elsewhere. He thought he would draw the Yankees' raw power into the entire Muslim world and expected a global intifada to ensue. Interestingly enough, the jihadists anticipated millions of deaths in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Some indications lead me to guess that the sultan of the mujahedin wanted the "great Satan" to do the unthinkable and resort to doomsday devices. (See for example Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, official spokesperson of the organization in a message aired on alJazeera, October 14,2001, "Retaliation for Air Strikes on Afghanistan," http://news.bbc.co.uk/lfhi/world/middle_east/ 1598146.stm.)

In the web site and alJazeera debates that followed and continue to this day, we can see the emergence of three remarkably strategic consequences that al Qaeda hopes for. A long-term "internal" tension in the United States, one fed by actions such as sniper activities, dirty bombs, and govern­ment reactions, will lead to what they hope will become an "ethnic crumbling." Once that stage is reached, an irreversible mechanism will take over. In parallel, a world intifada will explode in several spots fueled by the jihadists around the world. With these two cataclysmic developments taking place simultaneously, bin Laden or his successors will hope to witness the withdrawal of U.S. forces deployed worldwide and the general collapse of that nation. These end ­of-times projections were made before September 11 and resumed afterward, and in fact continue today. They explain clearly the reasoning behind the attacks on September 11, and subsequent strikes elsewhere such as the March 11, 2004, bombing in Madrid, the Saudi attacks, as well as strikes in Turkey, Tunisia, Kashmir, Chechnya, Moscow, London, and the ongoing bursts in Iraq's Sunni triangle.

However, and as we will discuss later, what was not on the jihadist map of operations was the unexpected U.S. reaction and how the American public backed the government's counteroffensives, as well as the international solidarity with the war on terror.

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