Al Qaeda’s statements, from 1996 to 2004, return to the same list: American forces in Saudi Arabia after 1991, the sanctions and bombing of Iraq in the 1990s, American support for Israel, and support for rulers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. [1][2]
The Commission accepted that these grievances were widely felt in the Muslim world and argued that the United States should take them seriously in its foreign policy. It did not accept them as justification: al Qaeda’s vision, it wrote, was of a war against the West and against Muslims who did not share it, and its targets were civilians. [3]
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