Provisional
Truth |
Essays | March 16, 2007
The Inescapable Irony of 9/11
American essayist Agnes Repplier said humor brings insight
and tolerance but “irony brings a deeper and less friendly
understanding.”
As
our collective grief and anger slowly dissipate in the years
since 9/11, an inescapable irony emerges in the aftermath
which must be confronted, and which, with hope, may bring us understanding
and, more importantly, the courage as a nation and its
leaders and as a people to change.
“How
could they do this to us? How could they hate us this much?”
We rhetorically have asked ourselves these questions
countless times since 2001, but some answers may be
surprising, and will differ from the official, received
opinion dutifully communicated to us by a preponderance of members of a mostly tame, corporate-owned fourth estate.
The tragedy of 9/11 did not happen because Osama bin Laden
and his al-Qaeda terrorists hate democracy, capitalism,
truth, justice or even the Western Hemisphere's mindless
entertainment and rehab-driven popular culture. None of
those were cited as casus belli by the as-yet
uncaptured, cave-dwelling, Saudi native for the attack he
ordered and financed.
No, in several videotaped messages since 9/11 bin Laden gave
very different, specific reasons for the attack, to wit: the
U.S.-led embargo of humanitarian aid to Iraq in the 1990s
following Gulf War I (in hopes that starving, illness-crazed
Iraqis would arise to overthrow Saddam Hussein), later
replaced with a corrupt and equally ineffective U.N.
food-and-medicine-for-oil program, which together were
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi children; America's unwavering
Israel-first Middle-East foreign policy which has so often
ignored the rights of Palestinians and which contributes to
so much instability in the region, and the continued,
growing presence of U.S. military bases in the Middle East,
specifically in Saudi Arabia, the holiest lands in Islam.
Regardless of the reasons for the 2001 attack, the
inescapable irony of 9/11 is this: much of Osama bin Laden's
inherited wealth came from U.S. petro-dollars recycled
through his father's construction company; our CIA trained
bin Laden in guerrilla warfare and armed him and his
mujahideen to be “freedom fighters” in the 1980s Afghan war,
and our “global war on terror” likely will, in fact,
increase – not diminish – the possibility of future
terrorist attacks in the United States.
The first component is that with our own money Osama
bin Laden destroyed our symbols of wealth in New York City
and power in Washington, D.C., killing in the process nearly
3,000 innocents, and drove us lemming-like over a
neo-conservative cliff of hatred and fear to the abyss below
of a liberty-diminishing, civilian-murdering global war on
terror.
The wealth that Osama bin Laden inherited and so cruelly
used against us was accumulated in life by his father,
Muhammad Awad bin Laden, whose construction empire grew fat
on newfound wealth represented by oil, largely from the
flood of U.S. dollars pouring into Saudi Arabia, and made
him one of the wealthiest non-royal Saudis. At the time of
his death the elder bin Laden's wealth was measured in
billions. Osama bin Laden, one of more than 50 children born
of 22 mothers in the house of bin Laden, it is believed,
received an inheritance measured in millions.
The second component is Osama bin Laden received arms and
training from the CIA, and money funneled through Saudi
Arabia, for use in Afghanistan in the 1980s when the United
States supported the Afghan mujahideen fighting government
and Soviet Union troops (the U.S.S.R.'s “Vietnam”).
We
taught
bin Laden how to be a
terrorist, how to use our weapons and how to recruit and
train other like-minded young Arabic men, and, again in a
way, how to use our own money in the form of petro-dollars
recycled through Saudi Arabia to further the jihadist cause.
Lastly, our undeclared global
war on terror, in turn, has led to our current
regime-changing misadventure in Iraq where we yet are to be
greeted as liberators with flowers and candy, and instead
are building at least four major, permanent military bases
and a billion-dollar “embassy” complex.
By all accounts, we have
squandered whatever international sympathy, empathy and
goodwill may have existed immediately after 9/11. Thus
completing this miserable trifecta, our policies and
presence in Iraq have exponentially increased an environment
of Islamic hatred of the United States, which creates a
greater likelihood of future terrorist attacks on our soil -
“here” - no matter how long and how purposefully we fight
them “there.”
Author and professor Chalmers Johnson calls the destructive
result of our actions “blowback,” a term first used by the
CIA in the 1950s to describe the consequences of its (our)
meddling in international affairs. In his 2000
book of the same name, the first of a trilogy
meticulously detailing of the imperial nature of what by all
accounts is now the empire of the United States, Johnson
describes many instances of blowback, of which 9/11 is but
the most recent.
In
Johnson's view we are reaping what 60 years of policies and
actions have sown, and unless we dismantle the U.S. empire,
America inevitably will continue to experience blowback in
the form of future terrorist attacks.
Few of us have spent sufficient time in the last five years
to sort this out, opting instead for government's official
version of 9/11 (they hate our freedom and democracy) duly channeled through our corporate-owned
media – an evil-doing, liberty-hating bin Laden aided and
abetted by a revenge-seeking, terrorist-sponsoring Iraq.
To
those of us who have been able to “connect the dots,” 9/11
was the denouement of a macabre Greek tragedy and we
its audience.
We
realize how bin Laden was unwittingly funded through his
inheritance of petro-dollars, how bin Laden purposefully was
trained to be a terrorist by the CIA and how misguided
Middle-East policies of the last five years in particular
have intensified Islamic hatred, while America, the
unknowing, possibly doomed, hero on the world's stage - is
oblivious to a fate destiny may hold in store for it.
We
can cast aside hubris and make an orderly retreat from
empire before it's too late. As Britain completely shelved
its empire by the mid 1950s and the former Soviet Union
unwound itself fewer than 50 years later, it is possible to
back away from this perceived, likely bankrupting, need to
remain the planet's sole superpower.
Much blood was spilled in September 2001 and thereafter from
the senseless deaths and injuries of thousands Afghans,
Iraqis and Americans caught in the global war on terror.
That so much of it flows upon those faraway sands under
which lies the fix for our oil addiction, demands each of us
gain insight from the inescapable irony of 9/11 for a deeper
and less friendly understanding, and, more importantly, the
courage as a nation and its leaders, and as a people, to
change.
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