Os Limites do Contra-Terrorismo

Artigo de Nathan Field na World Politics Review. Sobre Bin-Laden e a al-Qaida diz: "It is at this point that Osama Bin Laden made his major contribution to the jihadist movement, giving the few who wanted to keep fighting a plausible explanation for their past failures, and a way to overcome them. The problem, declared the Saudi radical, was that the local regimes were unbeatable so long as they were supported by the United States. According to Bin Laden, defeating the "Near Enemy" (national governments), required first removing the support of the "Far Enemy" (the U.S.). Bin Laden advocated the use of dramatic terrorist attacks against American targets. These would either intimidate the U.S. into immediately withdrawing support for national regimes, who would then collapse, or else provoke an American military intervention in the Middle East. Such an intervention would allow the jihadists to reinvent themselves as defenders of the Islamic world against "Infidel" aggression, affording the movement the popular support it had previously failed to achieve, while at the same time bleeding America militarily, financially and morally, into a definitive strategic withdrawal from the region".