Terrorism Around the World

History Term Paper Outline

World Civilizations

Thesis: The United States government chose not to fully investigate the known increase in terrorist activity prior to 9/11/01.

I. Introduction

A. The United States government chose not to fully investigate the known increase in terrorist activity prior to 9/11/01. There were many instances of terrorism that were directly related to larger terrorist cell organizations but these organizations were not held responsible for the atrocities done in their terrorist cell names. From as early as the 1970’s till now there has been hundreds and hundreds of terrorists attack around the world. Many of the more detrimental attacks have been against American embassies across the world and against American civilians, such as kidnappings and murders. The few things that all of these incidents have in common is that they are done for there religious beliefs bestowed upon them by terrorist organizations such as Alkida and Taliban.

B. After world war one the division of holly land such as Jerusalem and the argument of who the land actually belonged to cause the development of terrorist organizations that were willing to use new tactics of suicide bombing on civilian places to force governments to listen to what they had to say. These terrorist cells starting developing in Middle Eastern countries recruiting followers by twisting their own religion. The fact that these terrorists don’t fight for a government and don’t fight for a person but fight for god is very dangerous. This explains the willingness to go to such extremes as strapping a bomb to ones selves and blowing themselves up to kill innocent people. The organizations only grew over time and slowly became networked all over the world with coordinated attacks against what they believed to be there enemies; examples would be the Untied States and Pakistan. Both countries have been victims of terrorism by terrorist cells. Our government was well aware of the rising threat terrorist cells posed to our country. The CIA and the NSA had the possible resources needed to hunt down and pursue dealing with the threat terrorist cells had towards our country but did not fully use the resources they had.

C. We knew about the large network of terrorist cells, we knew about the threat that Osama bin Laden posed to this country, and rather then dealing with the constant small-scale terrorist attacks by preventing them or completely investigating them. In fact during the 1970’s the United States knew there was a immediate threat to our country and had a very high number of CIA and NSA operatives in Middle Eastern countries, but over time this number was slowly reduced even when terrorist attacks were taking place with direct relation to terrorist cells.

II. Background

A. International security cut backs

1. During 1980’s our presence in the Middle East was lowered until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1988. We reacted immediately and sided with the rest of the world demanding the Saddam withdrawal or are prepared to surrender by force. Over the following year we increased our number of soldier in the Middle East to over half a million and soon after invaded Iraq to free Kuwaiti. We had went to war with a country we had given weapon arms to defend itself during the cold war and the Russian invasion of the Middle East.

2. This is a prime example of why Middle Eastern countries have such a hatred for America; their dictators their policies stay in places for decades run countries. In our country our stance on foreign policies changes with every president. This confuses the people of these countries causing them to believe we are only concerned with greed and expanding our own power. One decade before we could be giving them weapons and then next going to war with them only to go to war with them again because they still have weapons.

3. These new forms of terrorist tactics are forcing our nation to fight an enemy with no nation. The one agreed upon fact is that all of the terrorist organizations do not have their own nation or country they base their terrorist cells out of new other nations. Some of these nations know that they are there and harbor these terrorists like in Afghanistan and Iraq. Other nations could have what is called a sleeper cell operating within there own country. America and European countries have had this problem, for which only recently they have upgraded the security within there own country to make sure no sleeper cells form.

III. Supporting Evidence

A. Over the last 30 years there have been terrorist attacks against