by Raffi Ismail

Created on: January 16, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

To be able to deduce the psychological behavior of "terrorists", one has to take into account the three MMO that at commonly applied in trials of persons charged with premeditated homicide - Motive, Means and Opportunity.

To brush off the behavior of people like Osama Bin Laden as being purely driven by the destruction of the United States would be like saying Bush is determined to drive the American Economy on purely the war in Iraq. The obvious observation to both would be that they are true only to a limited extent.

In an era that has since Middle Eastern conflicts since the early 70's, with the Palestinian struggle for independence after the Six Day War, where the Golan Heights and West Bank were subsequently occupied by Israeli forces, most people whom we call Palestinians struggle to regain plots of land thought of to be rightfully theirs.

Their claims stemmed from an age old belief of Palestinian tribalism. Geographically and politically, however, the place that we call Palestine seems to be an amalgamation of parts of Syria, Jordan and Egypt - countries that participated in the Six Day War against Israel.

This tribal, feudal and some may think archaic mindset, coupled with religious fervor in a time where tense Jewish - Muslim relations were exacerbated by an outright clash between Jewish and Muslim countries.

It was this fundamental clash of ideologies that caused much of the rift that we see today.

During the period of the Afghan crisis, where the Soviets were battling the old, scruffy, horse-riding soldiers of the Mujahiddeen, American seemed to have a positive view of Osama bin Laden. He was as extreme in his ideologies during the liberation of Afghanistan (sic) as he was thirty years ago when he initially helped reconstruct the war torn country nestled among the Himalayas with equipment and funds from his family's construction business, and later when he openly fought the Russians when he joined the Mujahiddeen in battle.

Of course, during that period, it was the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism; and religious ideologies were no where in sight. The Arabic idiom "An enemy of my enemy is my friend" was modus vivendi throughout the entire capitalist-communist conflict in Afghanistan.

It was however, during the later Iraqi crises that Osama epitomised the same idiom - this time agaist the same Americans who had funded and provided weapons for the Afghanis' war against the Soviets - America became his enemy.

It was not without any cause,

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