Reflections on 9-11 a Quarter of a Century Later
As we
remember the awful events of September 11, 2001, we are called upon to recall
the suffering of the innocent victims who died that day. This includes both
those who were going about their daily business at the Twin Towers and the
courageous first responders who rushed into the conflagration in the futile
attempt to save them.
Those of
us who are old enough to remember 9-11 clearly remember where we were and what
we were doing that morning. I was in the kitchen making a pot of coffee to
start the day. As was my custom, I turned on NPR Morning Edition to
catch the top stories of the day. The correspondent was reporting some kind of
violent attack that had occurred somewhere. My first groggy thoughts were “Oh!
Another moment of political upheaval, somewhere in the Global South; probably
the Middle East.”
I stepped
outside to fetch the morning paper and returned to the continuing coverage and
now heard that an airliner had struck the World Trade Center in New York City.
I turned on the television to view video footage of the first plane crashing
into one of the towers. “Turn on the TV” I yelled upstairs to my wife. “An
airplane has just crashed into the World Trade Center!”
The second
plane hit the other tower minutes later as I was cleaning up in the kitchen
after a light breakfast. By now they were reporting that the planes had been
hijacked, possibly by Islamic terrorists.
I remember saying to myself, “If
this is true, I wonder if the United States will be able to comprehend what has
happened to it and respond in a way that makes sense.”
That
sentiment came from my perspective as an activist who had been an advocate for
Palestinian statehood since the 1970s. I had watched US politicians and media
demonize the Palestinian movement. I had
followed the US-British aerial assault on Iraq after the first Persian Guld War
that lasted for nearly a decade
long outside of the jurisdiction of the UN and international law.
Yes! Those
who executed the 9-11 attacks were Islamic extremists. For the average American
who knew next to nothing about Middle Eastern history and those countries
relationship with the West the attacks were senseless acts committed by evil
lunatics.
But
knowing something about history is important. People in Middle East see the
history of their relationship with the West through the lens of Western
imperialism. Especially since oil was discovered in great quantities there early
in the 20th century it has been the goal of Western security to
control that resource in its interest and to find rulers compliant to those
interests. Those great power’s interest would often conflict with the goals of
anti-colonial movements across the region after World War II.
Anti-colonial/anti-imperialist
nationalists who sought to control the oil under their ground for interest
defined by locals rather than foreigners were looked upon with suspicion in
Western capitals. The British,
French and more recently Americans have been killing people in the Middle East
since the 1920s as they connived to control the natural resources they resided over.
Winston Churchill was British Colonial Secretary in the
1920s. After British forces used poisoned gas to suppress an uprising in
Somaliland there were concerns over the human consequences of using such
weaponry. Churchill sought to use the gas again in its campaign to put down
insurgents in Iraq. He opined “I don’t understand the squeamishness about the
use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized
tribes.”[1]
Indeed, the West has always seen the natives of what we
now call the Global South as “uncivilized.” This attitude has allowed us to
bomb and pillage as part of the “civilizing mission.” The natives had to be
pacified before they could be civilized.
We do not have statistics for how many Muslims in the
Middle East have died at the hands of Western imperialism since the 1920s. The
Muslims haven’t kept reliable statistics either, but over the eight decades
from the 1920s to 9-11, 2001 it is surely more than the 2,977 people who died on
9-11. Those who died in the Muslims lands, like those who perished, were
frequently innocent victims.
The Muslims do know of the extent of the
atrocities visited upon them, the collusion of puppet leaders with the West,
and the quashing of leaders fighting for national self-determination. But
because we in the West know nothing of that history, we cannot come to
grips with what happened on 9-11.
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The three wars in the Persian Gulf are among
the six colonial-imperial wars the US has fought in the Global South since the
end of World War II. The first in Korea ended in a stalemate, The second in
Vietnam saw the US defeated. The third over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was
waged over the limited goals of liberating Kuwait. Many in the military brass
wished to invade Iraq at that time, because it was believed to be developing
nuclear weapons, and because its leader Saddam Hussein was the latest Arab to
push for Arab unity against Western imperialism. That war ended in US victory.
But then came 9-11 and the “war on terror.” After
appropriately invading Afghanistan to track down the Al Qaeda terrorists who
were domiciled there, the US couldn’t help itself and invaded Iraq now, in
search “weapons of mass destruction” which the Iraqi regime was developing, and
some thought already possessed.
There had been a UN based regime to inspect
Iraqi weapons development since the end of the first Gulf war in 1991.[2]
It had been on again, of again throughout the decade, but was in operation in
2003 when the US invaded. Inspections were continuing at the time of the US
invasion. No evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been found; any
none ever has been since.[3]
The Iraq campaign needlessly diverted
resources away from what might have been an earnest effort at regime change and
nation-building in Afghanistan. But in both countries US inability to
understand the cultures aspiring to national self-determination and to
anticipate where resistance might come from doomed the projects from the start.
These intellectual blind spots mirrored events
in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. There the US failed to comprehend the dogged determination
of Vietnamese revolutionaries and the substantial nation-building they had already
undertaken. In the war on terror the fact that Russian and British imperialists
had failed to colonize Afghanistan in the 19th century and the lessons
that might be learned from those debacles were overlooked.
In Iraq the possibility that Sunni Muslim
nationalists would mount a guerrilla resistance in a dessert country where
there were few forests to hide was not entertained. The US also did not consider
the possibility that a majority Shia Muslim population might be influenced by neighboring
Shia Iran in ways that would thwart US designs at nation-building there.
But here we go again in Iran! Whether it was
emboldened by the ease with which it took down Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela or encouraged
to attack by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the US started its war
against Iran in February. It began with the killing of most of the leadership
of the country who had convened for a meeting. The hope seems to have been that
if the head was cut off the government would be in disarray and a popular
uprising might occur that would topple the regime.
But things didn’t work out that way and the
more radical Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRG) took over the government. The IRG
and its allies in Oman have engineered the closure of the Strat of Hormuz
through which 25% of the world’s oil supply must pass to reach intended
destinations.
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth either
did not listen to the top military brass to game out what the consequences of
an attack Iran could have been; or did not seek their counsel at all. So, we
got this idiotic war in the Persian Gulf.
The answer to the question asked myself a
quarter of a century ago as I stood in my kitchen is a resounding NO! The Aghan
war made some sense though I was among many who doubted that a White
supremacist imperialist foreign policy establishment could orchestrate an Afghan
nation-building project.
Iraq Saddam Hussein, warts and all, was a
secular Iraqi nationalist, who, by the way, was a buttress against Islamic
fundamentalist in his country and a potential ally in the war on terror. Today
Iraq is governed by Shiites, the coreligionists of the Iranian regime and
deeply influenced by it. And in Iran, having withdrawn from the internationally
crafted nuclear deal, Trump has started a war that the US cannot win.
All the nations of the Middle East and across
the Global South have ever wanted was
the breathing room to determine their own destinies in was affirmed in the UN Charter,
the International Declaration of Human Rights and several other treaties and conventions
trotted out since 1945. The United States was ambivalent about those pillars of
international law then and its behavior since then 2001 has blatantly ignored
them.
The US national security apparatus (not the
US people) has learned nothing, since 9-11. And the people of the Middle East
and the former colonial regions have had hell to pay because of it!
