Lawrence Wright authored ‘The Looming Tower,’ which is widely regarded as the definitive account of al-Qaeda. The book is called the ‘bible’ by intelligence operatives. Now what does this text say of the fateful triangle (Israel, Palestine and Islamic militancy). Page 151:
Bin Laden would later say that the United States had always been his enemy. He dated his hatred for America to 1982, when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them. He recalled the carnage: "blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demlished over their residents…The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams." This scene provoked an intense desire to fight tryanny, he said, and a longing for revenge. "As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon , it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted."
Though a sentence later Wright says that privately OBL approached members of the Saudi royal family to express his gratitude towards the Yanks, Wright more or less corroborates what American senior military officers now publicly argue. They argue for linkage but not the way neoconservatives once envisioned it: Israel is now a strategic albatross.
