The Inescapable Irony of 9/11
Keith Hazelton
March 19, 2007
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 the 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.
