Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Osama bin Laden and the other radical militants of jihad, Sept. 11, 2001, was a gigantic provocation, a great blast meant to free their movement from the spiral of political decline that had ensnared it since the early 1990s. But if the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon demonstrated remarkable technological, financial and practical agility, they did not achieve the political expansion the militants had sought--quite the contrary. The extremist supporters of the U.S. attacks have posted a disastrous record during the past year. In their principal objective--to mobilize the Muslim masses behind a victorious jihad...
...they have failed seems particularly contrarian when so much attention on bin Laden and his followers in the past year has finally granted them the stature they crave. And their failure was by no means a given. Not so long ago, the jihadists appeared to be moving from one success to another: first the Iranian revolution in 1979, then the successful guerrilla war that forced the Soviet army from Afghanistan in 1989. But in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War, for example, a rupture appeared between moderate Islamists--those of the pious middle classes imbued with conservatism--and the more...
...within this context of failure that the networks to which bin Laden had lent his name and image began a strategy of substitution. The strategy involved focusing on purely terrorist activities by small groups and striking highly symbolic targets, especially American interests in the Arabian peninsula: the 1995 car bombing of a U.S.-run training facility for the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, which killed five Americans; the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. The enormous media impact of these operations was designed to demonstrate...
From his refuge in Afghanistan, bin Laden began issuing "declarations of jihad" against America for "occupying" the holy land of Saudi Arabia. In 1998 he ordered followers to "kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and military...in any country in which it is possible." The principal target was the U.S. and its relationship with Saudi Arabia. But the Americans weren't disposed to negotiate or yield to terrorist blackmail. Then came 9/11...
...ratcheting up the scale of terror, the jihadist authors of 9/11 sought to embody a Muslim "vanguard" (as bin Laden himself said in his videotape declaration, broadcast Oct. 7) capable of mobilizing the Islamic masses once and for all. The murderous operation had a double goal: to claim American lives on American soil, and to trigger a U.S. retaliation against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that would turn the country into a massive cemetery for U.S. troops and precipitate the fall of America. The terrorists had in mind the Afghan rout of the Soviet army, which helped provoke the implosion...