On September 11, 200l, few who were caught up in the chaos of that day would have been able to fathom the amount of death and destruction that the US government would inflict in its wake. Ostensibly this was retribution for the horror of the planes crashing into the buildings, the murder of thousands of innocents and the fear and terror unleashed on a grand scale. Yet in the five years since the infamous 9-11, the US government has bombed innocents, killed thousands, and unleashed terror upon civilian populations, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. The latest uncritical US backing for the slaughter of thousands of Lebanese at the hands of the Israeli army is but one more atrocity in this misguided, ill-conceived and murderous campaign dubbed, in the most Orwellian fashion, the "War on Terror". Tami Peterson reports. AFTER the US government, accompanied loyally by Blair, decided to begin bombing Afghanistan, it took them a mere four months of war to kill as many civilians there as had died only a short while earlier in the New York attacks.
Yet despite this comparison, US support for the Afghan campaign was at an all time high and the popularity and approval Lalilles for George W. Bush soared.
Standing on the smouldering rulns of nose slaugntered in NY, Bush yelled through a megaphone to cheering firefighters, "The people who did this will hear all of us soon!"
Five years on, the alleged "mastermind", Osama Bin Laden has yet to be captured, the war in Afghanistan rages on, and despite repeated claims of victory, including the now infamous photo-op of Bush in fighter pilot jacket with the sign "Mission accomplished" in the background, the stated aim of toppling the Taliban has failed miserably.
The British government continues to help the US occupy the country, and loses the war daily on the streets of Kabul.
After this disaster, the US government needed a quick victory. A number of the neoconservatives in the Bush aaministranon, members ol Project for a New American Century (PNAC), saw their opportunity to pounce and had no qualms about using the remains and memories of the 9-11 dead as their launch pad.
Those who had participated in the first Gulf War were never fully satistied the Saddam Hussein remained in power. On the PNAC website, a plethora of documents date back to the Clinton years with titles such as "A Way to Oust Saddam" (Sept. '98) and "How (Nov. '98).
Armed with innuendos and the assistance of various rightwing media outlets, stories began to appear throughout 2002 claiming a connection between Qaida and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
First were the stories that one of those flying a plane into the towers, Mohammed Atta, had secretly met with Iraqi officials. This quickly disappeared from the papers but the innuendo that Iraq was somehow involved stuck.
It was around Iraq that the US government was finally able to make its claims about the "War on Terror" start to take hold.
The conspiracy of Al Qaida (even though this organisation does exist, the Bush administration's attempt to connect every organisation in The "shock and awe" campaign, as it was sickeningly named by the US administration, blew Baghdad to bits, destroyed the existing government structures and led to widespread looting and violence. the Arab world to Al Qaida across the whole Arab world, largely made up of "bad" and "evil" terrorists.
The underlying implied racism was that if you're Arab, you're a terrorist. This blatant dumbing-down of information and denial of the obvious tacts - that tor example, majority of the hijackers were actually from Saudi Arabia, a close US ally - led to a black and white, non-political hysteria of the "You're with us, or you're with the terrorist" variety.
In this atmosphere, calls to the police and random reports of "suspicious activity" led to 1200 mostly Middle Eastern immigrants being picked up across the US and detained without charge. Around 84 of these were held in a Brooklyn detention centre, the last of Whom was released last month. Most were deported without charge or trial. Allegations of abuse and mistreatment led to it being dubbed "Brooklyn's Abu Ghraib".
The real Abu Ghraib and treatment of prisoners there as well as the continuing revelations out of Guantanamo. including the recent "suicides" (the families still dispute the suicide claim) are perhaps the inevitable result of a campaign so violent and so brutal as the supposed "War on Terror".
Not long after the original claims, the issue changed from an Al Qaida connection to one of the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" supposedly being held by Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The political fallout would be enormous from the socalled evidence provided on both sides of the Atlantic when it became abundantly clear that there were WMDs, but not before the bombs fell on Baghdad in March of 2003 and in spite of mass anti-war protests.
The "shock and awe" campaign, as it was sickeningly named by the US administration, blew Baghdad to bits, destroyed the existing government structures and led to widespread looting and violence. Donald Rumsfeld's response - "stuff happens" made it clear that the US government cared little about the Iraqi people, but quite a bit about winning a quick war.
The idea of a "quick victory" changed after it became clear that the resistance in Irag, in its variety of forms, and impending civil war meant the US would not be able to accomplish its goals and instead increasingly began to hear comparisons to Vietnam. One US government backed bureaucrat after another fell out of favour in Iraq and so-called elections have failed to provide stability as daily casualty numbers increase.
One can see how the initial aim - retribution for the 9-11 attacks - has morphed from supposedly trying to find a group of individuals, into an international conspiracy of all Arab or Muslim groups being connected in some way to A. Qaida, to the hunt for deadly weapons, to the need for Iraq to have a "democracy", to the most recent terminology of Bush and Blair where new issues include the need for a "change in values" (Blair) and a World War Two style campaign against "Islamic fascists" (Bush).
In the past five years, the "War on Terror" has sowed the seeds of violence and destruction that will continue to be reaped for years to come. It pervades everyone and everything. It is "total war" that many in the US administration sav mav have to be fought for 50 years or more.
Its results have helped to foster a rise in Islamophobia, racism and bigotry, as well as increased Islamist fundamentalist groups and it has inspired new acts of terror on the scale of 9-11, thereby defeating its supposed original aim. It has propped up the false idea that there is a "clash of civilizations" where people of all Hallons. faiths and backgrounds must be at odds with one another because of fundamental cultural and religious differences.
This lie is peddled by fundamentalists of all stripes, whether they be George W. Bush or those seeking to blow airliners out of the sky. We must oppose their attempts to draw us into their support for war and terror and instead
fight for a world based on
peace and justice.
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This is an edited version of an interview that Gilbert Achcar did for "Beneath the Surface" on KPFK radio in Los Angeles, with Suzi Weissman professor of Politics at St Mary's College California on August 14. The editing is by Socialist Resistance, but the original was transcribed by Meleiza Figueroa for Against the Current, who have also published a version of the interview. Suzi Weissman: The war has officially ended as of midnight. Do you believe that it's over? Can we say that this has been a huge defeat for both the United States and Israel? Gilbert Achcar: What is over for the time being - what they call the hostilities - doesn't mean that the war is over.
This remains to be seen and depends on several factors; not the least of them is the part of the UN Security United States government's interests. Israel had an interest in gelling Dack Ils lOsu credibility, crushing Hezbollah, and taming Lebanon.
And the United States had the same interesu - Ol because of Lebanon per se, which is not an important piece of real estate for Washington - but because of what Lebanon means in the regional confrontation going on between the United States imperial drive and Iran.
Faced with this accumulation of disasters, the present US administration - which is anything but what you would call rational - could react like a wounded beast and try to achieve SULLIC impossible change of its own fate by attacking Iran. This is a real Suzi Weissman: In your (Znet) article you refer to "The Sinking