Replies

Actually Bin Laden seems to have been a fringe operator in Afghanistan and elsewhere. One with access to a lot of money but still on the fringes of the real Islamist leadership. Until Ayman al-Zawahiri hooked up with him The good doctor has served as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man since the death of Muhammed Atef in 2001 but they go back much further reportedly meet in Pakistan in the mid-1980s. Zawahiri from a wealthy and established Egyptian family is highly intelligent and a true believer and hater of the ‘infidels’. What is interesting is that he appears to have deep connections with powerful people in Saudi Arabia. Prince Knief (sp) who was the Saudi ‘interior minister’ was reputedly his sponsor within the royal family. The Saudis are playing a very long game (or more correctly a con) whose goal is to see that pro-Saudi Islamists are in power in all the countries of the middle East that are Arab. AQ at least in part is just one of their stable of stalking horses to both keep the US preoccupied with terrorist strikes and recruit true believers for their proxy forces such as those who are now reestablishing Sunni (not Baathist) control in central Iraq and I am sure in the forces that toppled Col K and now in Syria.
The Saudi project will take a good while and in the end there is even some community of interests between the US and this project as long as the Saudis can be muscled to keep their impetuous lads from trying to bomb US targets.
As to Israel as one Arab noted Israel is far to strong for the Arabs to defeat conventionally, but all Arabs are obliged never to accept Israel's existence and try through war or trickery to find some way to damage and possibly destroy the Jewish state.