If 9/11 had been about a political stance and not a religious one....

...do you think it the way it is perceived would change greatly?

Now by this question I am not asking would it make you think it was justified or morally right, or even a good thing. What I mean is, if you look at the action of the people who did it, and they had said it was against American aggression against their people and lands from a political perspective rather than a religious one, would it be more understandable?

Think about it this way:
1. America used the middle east for its proxy wars with Russia.
2. Most of these countries at the time of the cold war had done nothing wrong to America. They just got caught up in the mess.
3. America bombed a lot of them into rubble, killing thousands of civilians.

Their is sufficient grounds here to at least form a basis of a natural understanding as to why someone would want to attack America in return.

Now, imagine if someone came to the UK, for no reason other than political reasons, and bombed it to hell. Wouldn't you want to get revenge? Wouldn't you want that nation's people to feel the pain and despair that you had witnessed.

However, by using Islam as the reason for wanting to attack America, the political message is lost, at least on the American side. By making it focus on the attack being driven by religion, the political narrative is drowned out by conservatism talking points such as Islam vs the Christian world. America doesn't need to reflect on its actions because it is being attacked in the name of religion, not for the atrocities it has committed which would more likely come to discussion had the attacks been politically motivated.

So, I put this to the forum members. Had the people who did 9/11 openly argued this was a politically driven action based on the atrocities done by the Americans, and not from a religious view point, do you think the views of towards the actions of the attackers would change. And if so, how?

I for one think had it been more of a political action, a grater discussion of American actions in the middle east could have occurred. This might have at least encouraged a period of self reflection by the US, and perhaps alter some of its foreign policy.

I don't think the views of the actions would change, because most of the anti-war left acted as apologists for the attacks as though their motivations had been legitimate political grievances anyway.

I think I would've still found the apologetics chilling because the fact is, whatever crimes America committed against the world, they never stooped so low as to trap innocent civilians in the missiles they were dropping.

I think even if it had been a political action, the argument that it was retaliation against Western war crimes would unfortunately still end up going both ways. If it's legitimate for the terrorists to kill innocent civilians in retaliation for say the Gulf War, then unfortunately it grants a similar get-out excuse for Bush and Blair to bomb innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq in retaliation for 9/11 (and makes the refusal of the anti-war camps to extend that same excuse to Bush and Blair look like the rhetoric of hypocrites who just want an excuse to hate the West more than its most despicable enemies).

Indeed if it was to do with what happened in Afghanistan, why are they targeting the West, when it was Russia that committed the main atrocities against that country pre-9/11.

Maybe the argument that if you bomb these countries you create more terrorists hungry for revenge would hold up. Whereas in this reality that argument seems suspect, given that the terrorists themselves are the ones massacring Iraqis and Syrians. But it's still blindly made (even though what the Hell is ISIS' genocide against the Yazidis meant to have to do with them 'responding to Western foreign policy'?).

Sadly I've come to the conclusion that the anti-war camp will argue such apologetic propaganda whether it has a basis in reality or not. If 9/11 was a different act, it wouldn't change what those respective camps thought about it or had a pre-existing agenda to believe anyway.

Another point is, the very nature of 9/11 as the ultimate nightmare hostage/hijacking scenario that overturned all previous hijackings of its kind, would've always changed the way war was seen, even if the motives had been different.

Back in the Entebbe hijacking, you could certainly make that case that the best way to save the maximum lives of passengers was through negotiation rather than sending the soldiers in to inflame an already tense situation.

After 9/11 it seemed to become imperative instead to go straight for the kill-shot if you wanted any chance to save the victims. In a sense the Afghanistan and (to a flawed, lesser extent, hence the bigger public backlash) the Iraq war became easy to perceive or frame in the light of 9/11 as heroic missions to liberate the hostages of those countries that their evil dictators were also using as human shields, just like the 9/11 hijackers used their passengers as. And like that day there was always the risk of having to risk accidentally killing some of those civilians in order to save them in a way we didn't and couldn't that day.

However, had more people understood Afghanistan, they would've known that the war to root out the Taliban was always doomed to fail, because after all the infighting between rival warlords, Afghanistan's entire economic system had become dependent on an Islamist system, and so it was always going to come back.

9/11 had a way of justifying the terrible, ruthless things America went on to do, and indeed forced the people to have to think more ruthlessly. If we were told the hijackers' grievances were political, I think it would've still left a bad taste in many people's mouths to not hunt them down.

And as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, if the 9/11 hijackers had been doing it on the behalf of the war-torn and impoverished, then how was destroying the World Trade Center going to do anything but have worse, devastating economic impacts on the third world?

Sure, but the major distinctions between a political and a religious ideology are likely the reasons why.

A religion is indoctrinating, any code and morals involved are instilled from birth and it becomes a fundamental part of thought and identity.

The idea of a religion that would encourage these actions is far scarier than a political belief. Religion is much more effective and much harder to remove.