9/11 And What We Have Done To US
By Jeff Berg
04 December, 2007
Countercurrents.orgThe 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.
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