why do they hate the US?:
If he only read Time magazine, he would know that bin Laden, who had just finished fighting a successful, U.S.-backed holy war against the Russians, was enraged by the Saudi king's decision to allow American forces onto the Arabian Peninsula in 1990 – he wanted to expel Saddam from Kuwait. And if Matthews were to quickly peruse the Jim Leher Newshour Website, it would reveal bin Laden's "fatwa" of 1996, which is titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." Pretty subtle, huh?
(...) The only reason anyone listens to or follows bin Laden is because he points at specific foreign policies of the U.S. in order to maintain that he is the one fighting on the defensive. Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, and author of Imperial Hubris, told me this himself. He said that the Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980's railing against American culture and the entire region yawned. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, kept his pitch straight and to the point – and it worked. He told them that America was the aggressor, and sited 6 specific policies as evidence:
1: The bases in Saudi Arabia
2: Unquestioning support for Israel (The 1996 Fatwa came on the heels of the first Qana massacre in Lebanon)
3: The no-fly zone bombings and blockade of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people (now replaced on the jihadist sales pitch list by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan which have killed hundreds of thousands more)
4: Support for dictators across the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.)
5: Pressure on the oil producing states to keep their prices set where America wants them
6: Support for Russia, China and India in their wars against Muslims
(...) They have a following because they point at concrete examples of how the U.S. government makes life worse for the average guy in the Islamic World – when it's not taking it from him outright.
(...) As Professor Robert A. Pape proved in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism – by studying every single individual suicide bomber on Earth between 1980 and 2004 – the one characteristic that all suicide bombers have in common is the presence of foreign combat forces in their country – not Islam. Whether it's is Sikhs in India, the Communist and atheist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Hamas in Palestine, al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia and Egypt crashing planes in the United States or Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
(...) here's veteran intelligence beat reporter James Bamford, (By no means whatsoever is this man a blame-America-first political radical of any description. He's simply a journalist): "Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al-Qaeda should bring the war to 'the distant enemy' in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and 'personally wage the battle against Muslims.' It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear in their declaration of war 'against Jews and Crusaders,' they believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh." It is very important to emphasize: They want to suck us in so they can bleed us dry and then push us out for good – while empowering themselves in the process.
(...) Bin Laden couldn't have laid out his strategy more clearly than in his speech of October 2004: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. ... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
(...) Overthrowing the tyrant Saddam Hussein, who bin Laden reviled as an "infidel" and a "socialist," however, was an additional "gift" to the al-Qaeda movement in the words of former CIA-man Scheuer. The Bush team's invasion killed a few birds with one stone for bin Laden: It got rid of the Ba'athists, put tens of thousands of Americans within rifle range and it created a training ground and propaganda tool for new recruits.
(...) Also in 2005, the Saudi government and an Israeli think tank did studies tracking the individual jihadists traveling to Iraq to be trained in fighting Americans. They both found that virtually all of them were youngsters who had been radicalized by the invasion of Iraq – that the only thing older jihadists had to do with it was in sending them off.
(...) So you see, foreign occupation – American foreign policy – is a "major contributing factor" in creating terrorism today, just as it was in the years before September 11th.