Read Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East for Free Online

context.
    Subsequent decades showed that when later generations of “Third World” revolutionaries tried to use the sametechniques against local regimes that had failed to produce either prosperity or democracy in the newly independent countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, they generally failed. The enemy in power now consisted of fellow-countrymen, military or civilian, who had wide networks of allies and supporters in the population, making it much harder to organize a mass mobilization against them. Moreover, most of the regime’s supporters would stay and fight rather than cut and run, because—except for the very rich with foreign bank accounts—they had no other home to go to. So the success rate in these post-colonial revolutionary wars was very low.
    Algeria, which had been ruled by the army since shortly after independence from France, had mass anti-regime protests in 1988 that resulted in a number of political reforms, including the legalization of opposition parties. The army assumed that the public would be so grateful for these reforms that they would vote for its own party, the National Liberation Front. But in the first vote under the new dispensation in 1990, a new Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), won control of about half of the municipal and provincial assemblies in local elections. It also won a large majority of seats in the first round of voting for a new national parliament in 1991—but that development panicked the military into cancelling the second round of the elections and aborting the democratic process. The army also arrested the main FIS leaders and banned the party.
    Algerian Islamists responded with an armed struggle that lasted more than a decade. The FIS rapidly spun off two other Islamist groups that competed with each other in their religious radicalism: the Islamic Salvation Army (which operated mainly in rural areas making guerrilla attacks against government forces) and the Islamic Armed Group (which was primarily city-based and specialized in urban terrorism). Neither of them succeeded, although it took the regime ten years and up to 150,000 deaths to quell the revolt. As the struggle proceeded, relatively mature revolutionary leaders were killed or jailed, and replaced by younger leaders who were more extreme in their ideology and less discriminate in their killing. By 1997 entire villages were being massacred for collaborating with the regime—“Except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death”—and the bulk of the population came to the conclusion that the regime, however cruel and corrupt, was more acceptable than the revolutionaries.
    By 2005 the war had effectively come to an end in Algeria, and the regime had won. Even before that, various Islamist leaders had concluded that their whole strategy for stimulating revolutions in the Arab world was missing some vital element. Two decades of terrorist attacks in the Middle East, which killed many thousands of people, the vast majority of them Muslim Arabs, had still not created a critical mass of popular support for the Islamist revolutionaries in any Arab country. It is not clearwhether the Islamists consciously contrasted this failure of terrorism against domestically based regimes with the earlier successes in comparable struggles against foreign imperialists, but some of them did get to the obvious conclusion. It was high time for a better strategy: what they needed was a foreign —preferably infidel—enemy.

The nations of the infidels have all united against the Muslims.… This is a new battle, a great battle, similar to the great battles of Islam like the conquest of Jerusalem.… The Crusaders [i.e., the Americans] come out to fight Islam in the name of fighting terrorism .
    Osama bin Laden, October 2002 5
    By the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden was a man on the run. Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957 into a family that had become immensely wealthy in the