Civic Literacy Curriculum

Background

With the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy turned toward the Middle East, and the United States ended up fighting several wars in that region at the turn of the 21st century.

After Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of his neighbor, the similarly bellicose Iran, turned to a bloody, almost decade-long stalemate, Hussein invaded another neighboring country, the much smaller Kuwait, in 1990. President George H.W. Bush assembled a massive coalition to expel the Iraqi army and restore the sovereignty of Kuwait, in what was called the Persian Gulf War.  The decade that followed proved one of the most peaceful in American history. 

That ended with the September 11, 2001 attacks. These were the most destructive attacks waged by the Al-Qaeda terrorist group against America, but far from the first.

The group, whose name means “the base” in Arabic, was led by the Saudi-born Osama Bin Laden, a wealthy heir, and Ayman al Zawahiri, an Egyptian cleric. Backed by Bin Laden’s money, Al Qaeda engaged in terrorist attacks designed to advance their understanding of Islam, particularly a variant of Sunni Islam. Bin Laden viewed the Saudi government as insufficiently committed to that proper understanding of Islam, with the United States as their wicked enablers and Israel an oppressor of Muslim peoples, and thus they sought the withdrawal of American armed forces from the Middle East. 

The Al-Qaeda network had undertaken several attacks on American targets in the preceding years, most notably in bombing U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, as well as the suicide bombing on the USS Cole in 2000.
Although Bin Laden and much of his network, including most of the September 11th hijackers, were Saudi, Al-Qaeda had established itself in Afghanistan, most of which had fallen under the control of the Taliban, a group of Islamic extremists led by Mullah Omar.

On September 11, 2001, the Al-Qaeda operatives who had been living in the United States hijacked several airplanes to attack political or culturally significant targets, killing over 3,000 Americans. These Islamist terrorists crashed two of them into the World Trade Center in New York and a third into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth aircraft crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the American passengers fought back and attempted to recapture the plane from the hijackers. 

These attacks led to the war in Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda more broadly (often called the war on terror), in which the United States and its allies sought to prevent further terrorism by destroying the Al-Qaeda network and its supporters. The possibility of ties between this network and Saddam Hussein, who American intelligence reported was possibly sharing weapons of mass destruction with terrorists, soon led to the War in Iraq, sometimes called the Second Gulf War. Hussein was quickly deposed by America and its allies. However, the large caches of weapons of mass destruction were never found, and the country quickly descended into chaos, especially as Al-Qaeda affiliates and allies launched a bloody insurrection to seize control of the country.

Bin Laden himself had escaped from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where almost ten years later, in May 2011, Navy SEALs raided his compound and killed him. Al-Qaeda has been weakened since then, but it has continued to inspire splinter and successor groups, such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which eventually developed into the Islamic State (often called ISIS).