In a statement issued on February 23, 1998, and titled Al-Qaeda’s Declaration of War Against Americans, Osama bin Laden wrote: ” ‘Never since Allah made the Arabian peninsula flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas has it been stormed by any force like the Crusader hordes that have spread in it like locusts, consuming its wealth and polluting its fertility. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims in unison–as if fighting over a plate of food! In face of this critical situation and lack of support, we are all obliged to discuss current events, as well as reach an agreement on how [best] to settle the matter. No one argues today about three well-established facts, known to everyone; we enumerate them as a reminder, so that the one remembering may remember.
1. For over seven years America has been occupying the lands of Islam in its holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula–plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead with which it fights the neighboring Muslim peoples. While some people may have argued in the past over the realities of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula now acknowledge it. There is no clearer evidence than America’s ceaseless aggression against the Iraqi people–all launched right from the Peninsula, though its rulers collectively refuse having their land used for this end. But they have been subdued.
2. Despite the awful devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people at the hands of the Crusader-Jewish alliance, and despite the astronomical number of deaths–which has exceeded 1 million–despite all this, the Americans attempt once again to repeat the horrific massacres, as if the protracted sanctions imposed after the brutal war, or the fragmentation and devastation, was not enough for them. So now here they come [again] to annihilate what is left of this people and humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
3. Now if the Americans’ purposes behind these wars are religious and economic, so too are they also to serve the Jews’ petty state [Israel], diverting attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and the murder of Muslims there. There is no better evidence of this than their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region–such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan–into mini-paper states, whose disunion and weakness will guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal Crusader occupation of the Peninsula.’ ”
– Raymond Ibrahim, ed./trans., The Al Qaeda Reader, Page 11-13