AL-QAEDA AND THE CHANGING FACE OF TERRORISM

On a Monday morning in the late summer of 2001, this writer got a phone call from a friend, telling him to turn on CNN. "Buddy, we're under attack," the friend said. What the writer and millions of other Americans saw in the following hours was for our generation what the Kennedy assassination and the attack on Pearl Harbor were for earlier generations: an uneraseable shock that would permanently change our understanding of the world.

Terrorism, once abstract and remote to most Americans, had suddenly become real and immediate. Understanding the full implications, however, has been an ongoing process, since the nature of the threat is itself evolving. As will be shown below, al-Queda no longer exists in the form it did on the morning of September 11, 2001. It has become not a "terrorist organization" but a terrorist idea, presenting no single target or even group of targets that can be attacked by conventional military means.

Al-Qaeda, so far as Western intelligence organizations can determine, was never a traditional, top-down terrorist political organization in the mold of militant Palestinian groups, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or the Tamil Tigers. All of those latter groups have a specific and limited political agenda. Their actions, as the great 19th century German strategic thinker Clausewitz said of war, are politics by other means." Often, in fact, they are associated with political wings that oper

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rom his perspective û that these events were related: that determined Muslim resistance to the Soviet intrusion into the Islamic world had not only driven out the invaders but triggered their general collapse. Bin Laden is a Wahhabi, belonging to a distinctly Saudi Arabian interpretation of Islam. The name (which Wahhabis themselves do not use) derives from Muhammad Wahhab, an 18th century religious reformer who was outraged by the elements of idolatry which he felt had crept into the practice of the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. He formed a marriage alliance with al-Saud, a tribal leader in the interior of the Arabian peninsula, and in the late 18th century they conquered Mecca and Medina, and briefly formed the first Saudi kingdom. This was defeated and broken up by the Ottoman Turks, but a second Saudi kingdom was established in the early 20th century by Muhammad ibn-Saud al-Aziz, a descendent of al-Saud. The current Saudi royal family derives in turn from al-Aziz, and has continued its association with the Wahhabi movement. Indeed, Saudi funding has encouraged the spread of puritanical Wahhabi ideas throughout the Sunni or orthodox Muslim world. (Shia Islam, followed by Iranians, a majority of Iraqis, and minoritie
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Approximate Word count = 1528
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)