Al Qaeda is more of an idea than an organization, and this has been increasingly the case since September 11, 2001. Efforts to find al Qaeda connections to the Islamic terrorist violence in the last few years has been difficult, and often impossible. That's because many separate groups of terrorists are driven by the idea of Islamic conquest, not an organization like al Qaeda. While the people behind many recent terror attacks got their start during the 1980s fighting Russians in Afghanistan, that?s not where the terrorism comes from. Few Arabs actually fought in Afghanistan, and only about 40 were actually killed. The Afghans did most of the fighting, and the Arabs came in with money, guns and eagerness to get involved. But the Afghans were not interested in taking these eager amateurs into action with them. So Arab volunteers in Afghanistan spent most of their time in Pakistan, posing for pictures and discussing world Islamic conquest. 

More Arabs died in Afghanistan in the year before September 11, 2001, than during the 1980s. Al Qaeda was a real organization in Afghanistan for a few years, until is was tossed out in late 2001. During that Golden Age, al Qaeda trained thousands of eager Islamic radicals, and got hundreds of them killed trying to keep the Taliban government in power. The Taliban never conquered all of Afghanistan, and in the last few years, their most reliable troops were a brigade of Arab (and other foreigners). These young men were trained, by al Qaeda, in the techniques of terrorism, and then asked to volunteer for a year or so of service in the 55th Infantry Brigade. Many did so, got some combat experience, and then went home to get the Islamic revolution going. But others were killed, or disillusioned at being asked to fight fellow Moslems. It was fairly obvious that the 55th Brigade existed to force other Afghans to submit to Taliban rule. And those other Afghans were all Moslems. The Taliban and al Qaeda insisted that these hostile Afghans were ?bad Moslems,? but many of the al Qaeda recruits saw through this.

Since September 11, 2001, the main recruiter for Islamic terrorism has been conservative Islamic clerics, especially in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Saudi brand of Islam, Wahhabism, has always stressed hatred for infidels (non-Moslems) and forcible conversion of everyone, everywhere, to Islam. Religious hatred is nothing new, but Wahhabism is practiced by many Saudis made rich by half a century of increasing oil wealth. Osama bin Laden?s father made a fortune as a building contractor for Saudi royalty. But bin Laden, like many young Saudis, became more interested in Wahhabism than in commerce and getting rich. 

Dreams of world conquest are also nothing new. Wahhabism demanded it, and pronounced the mission an order from God. Wahhabism also encouraged suicide missions, by assuring those who did a wonderful time in the afterlife. While Wahhabism (subsidized by the Saudi royal family, as a form of extortion) controlled the education of most young Saudis, what really got the Islamic revolution going was al Jazeera and the general failure of Arab society during the last half century. This combination of mass media and social failure is how religious hatred and terrorism became hugely popular throughout the Moslem world.

The basis of Islamic terrorism is the failure of Arab, and to a lesser extent Moslem, society in the last half century. Actually, Islam has been an economic and political disaster for centuries. But for a long time colonialism and the Ottoman empire gave the Islamic world a comfortable excuse for their problems. But the Ottoman empire has been gone since 1918, and colonialism completely disappeared by the 1960s. Despite over a trillion dollars in oil wealth, and proximity to large markets for products, the Arab economies have gone downhill over the last half century. Political progress has been similarly retrograde, with tyrants and dictators being the most common form of government. Same with education, science and just about everything else. No progress. Except terrorism. Arab and Moslem terror is nothing new, it?s just gotten more press exposure in the last decade. 

Arab nations have tried democracy, monarchy and socialism, but none of these has been able to cure the curse of corruption, tyranny and lack of economic progress. The Wahabi zealots of Saudi Arabia always held out another possibility; Islam. Not just prayer and a virtuous lifestyle, but forcing other Moslems, and non-Moslems, to practice Wahhabism as well. This religious solution only worked if everyone was converted. That would end the oppression of Moslems, as true Moslems do not oppress other Moslems. Wahhabism saw the non-Moslem world as inherently evil, and the Saudi kings always had a hard time introducing new technologies (like radio, TV and modern medicine) into the kingdom because of the opposition from Wahabi zealots who saw t