9/11
And What We Have Done To US
By
Jeff Berg
04 December,
2007
Countercurrents.org
The
following 481 word transcription of Gwynne Dyer’s text superbly
encapsulates the “Why” of the “What” that is
going on today in the Middle East and should be read by every person
who thinks that Middle Eastern politics are important.
At the same
time it also does an extremely good job of pointing where we are likely
to be headed in this region in the near to mid-term at least. That it
does so in under five hundred words shows no small amount of pith and
brilliance on the part of the writer. A rather regular occurrence on
his part I might add and why I strongly recommend the book from which
these words were lifted. “THE MESS THEY MADE: THE MIDDLE EAST
AFTER IRAQ."
For you who
are Torontonians you can read his column weekly for free in the NOW
magazine. Where you can and should also read Naomi Klein and Wayne Roberts
as they are equally insightful and even more prescriptive in a time
that is in great need of both.
I must also
add that I will here put his words to a use that the writer surely never
imagined. I.e. Explaining my reasons for not dedicating energy to the
9/11 movement. I will leave it to you dear reader to determine whether
or not I do so to good effect.
Gwynne Dyer,
"The Mess they Made", 2007. Pages 132-134.
"Everybody
knows about "blowback" now, but at the time there was quite
a fashion among governments for using Islamists, who were seen as useful
idiots. The Israeli government subsidized Hamas in the early days, thinking
that it would be a handy counter-balance to the much more powerful secular
wing of the Palestinian resistance movement, the Palestine resistance
movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization. Anwar Sadat was cultivating
Egyptian Islamists as a potential power base separate from the army
until they killed him. And the U.S. had no compunction about supplying
Arab Islamists in Afghanistan with weapons (Saudi Arabia paid most of
the expenses) in the service of defeating the Russians. Which they and
the Afghans duly did after ten years, but the "Arab Afghans"
got something out of the deal too. In fact, they got two things.
First they
got to know one another. Until all the young Arab Islamists went up
to Afghanistan and spent years together fighting the Russians, they
were stuck in their separate national compartments, knowing only the
problems of being a revolutionary in Algeria, or the iniquities of the
regime in Syria. Just being all together, fighting in the same high
cause of liberating Afghanistan from infidel occupation, gave them a
broader perspective on the Arab world that they could never have learned
from a whole lifetime spent dodging the Saudi or Moroccan police back
home.
The other
thing they acquired was a genuinely global perspective on how things
worked. There they were, fighting the Russians, taking arms deliveries
from the Americans, dealing on a regular with the Pakistani intelligence
service, even talking to the Iranians from time to time: it was a crash
course on how the game is played, at the highest level, and they were
good students. And then, after the Russians gave up and retreated from
Afghanistan in 1989 leaving forty thousand dead, they had the time sitting
in their camps and in no hurry to home to the Arab world (where many
were wanted men) to consider how to put all this new knowledge to good
use.
It was by
the accounts of those who were there, a time of intellectual ferment,
with all sorts of strategies for breaking the deadlock that had paralyzed
the Islamist cause in the Arab world being offered, considered, dismissed.
But the one that finally got traction and attracted the support of other
respected leaders among the Arabs who had fought in Afghanistan was
Osama bin Laden's proposal to create an organization that would concentrate
exclusively on attacking the West (the United States in fact) directly.
Al-Qaeda was born from these debates and from the very start it was
a very serious organization, dedicated to attacks that would seriously
hurt the United States in order to provoke American retaliation that
would kill lots of innocent Muslims. (The bit in italics, of course,
was never discussed in public.)"
And what
does this all have to do with 9/11? To put it most simply.
Regardless
of what happened on the day of the American 9/11, what we have done
to them has had very much more to do with where we are today than whatever
it is they may have done to us. A point that I think is not properly
factored by the political calculus of the 9/11 movement. Which is sort
of odd given that what they are trying to prove is "We are responsible".
Another thing that makes me uncomfortable about the 9/11 movement is
that there is no shortage of worse things to do something about. And
that this is true even if one limits oneself only to the very bad things
that the United States is doing. The occupation of Iraq and the use
of Depleted Uranium as a weapon of mass destruction, and the failure
to curb their energy use and emissions creation leaps to mind as “for
examples”.
Now I know
that many of the people in this movement would answer this point by
saying that this is precisely what they are trying to do. That they
believe that they can stop these other horrendous things from happening
by proving that 9/11 was authored or at least allowed to happen by a
U.S. cabal in order to further events that were "....unlikely to
be realized without a catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new
Pearl Harbour." (PNAC document. Authored by Paul Wolfowitz at the
behest of Dick Cheney in advance of the 2000 Presidential elections.)
I disagree
with them on this point. However, for as long as they retain the very
good luck of being more or less free, they may do as they wish with
their choice of strategies and tactics for making the world a better
place. I of course wish them nothing but success in their efforts to
further this universally held goal.
In conclusion.
No matter what happened on that tragic day I think it is safe to say
that "We" (we as in all of we who have been led by our elites)
have had more than a passing hand in where we've ended up. And that
this is equally true
whether we
are talking about geopolitics, resource geology, macroeconomics or ecology.
It also puts
paid to statements like these: "We will beat them when we realise
that it's not our fault that they're doing this. We will win if we don't
apologise for our values." PM Tony Blair, London, February 21,
2007.
A sentiment
that caused Gwynne Dyer, and many others, to wonder whether Blair has
finally become unhinged as a result of his part in where we are today.
I would be if I were he.
www.postcarbontoronto.org
www.pledgeTOgreen.ca
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.