Excerpts From Various 9/11 Writers and Speakers, with Coda by Codevilla:
Everything I needed to know about Islam came from watching Barack Hussein Obama and Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates | U.S. First Islamic Confrontation (city-journal.org)--Christopher Hitchins
"My quest sent me to some less obvious secondary sources, in particular to Linda Colley’s excellent book Captives, which shows the reaction of the English and American publics to a slave trade of which they were victims rather than perpetrators. How many know that perhaps 1.5 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic North Africa between 1530 and 1780? We dimly recall that Miguel de Cervantes was briefly in the galleys. But what of the people of the town of Baltimore in Ireland, all carried off by “corsair” raiders in a single night?
Some of this activity was hostage trading and ransom farming rather than the more labor-intensive horror of the Atlantic trade and the Middle Passage, but it exerted a huge effect on the imagination of the time—and probably on no one more than on Thomas Jefferson. Peering at the paragraph denouncing the American slave trade in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, later excised, I noticed for the first time that it sarcastically condemned “the Christian King of Great Britain” for engaging in “this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers.” The allusion to Barbary practice seemed inescapable.One immediate effect of the American Revolution, however, was to strengthen the hand of those very same North African potentates: roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. The infant United States had therefore to decide not just upon a question of national honor but upon whether it would stand or fall by free navigation of the seas.
One of the historians of the Barbary conflict, Frank Lambert, argues that the imperative of free trade drove America much more than did any quarrel with Islam or “tyranny,” let alone “terrorism.” He resists any comparison with today’s tormenting confrontations. “The Barbary Wars were primarily about trade, not theology,” he writes. “Rather than being holy wars, they were an extension of America’s War of Independence.”
Let us not call this view reductionist. Jefferson would perhaps have been just as eager to send a squadron to put down any Christian piracy that was restraining commerce. But one cannot get around what Jefferson heard when he went with John Adams to wait upon Tripoli’s ambassador to London in March 1785. When they inquired by what right the Barbary states preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America’s two foremost envoys were informed that “it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” (It is worth noting that the United States played no part in the Crusades, or in the Catholic reconquista of Andalusia.)
Ambassador Abd Al-Rahman did not fail to mention the size of his own commission, if America chose to pay the protection money demanded as an alternative to piracy. So here was an early instance of the “heads I win, tails you lose” dilemma, in which the United States is faced with corrupt regimes, on the one hand, and Islamic militants, on the other—or indeed a collusion between them.
It seems likely that Jefferson decided from that moment on that he would make war upon the Barbary kingdoms as soon as he commanded American forces. His two least favorite institutions—enthroned monarchy and state-sponsored religion—were embodied in one target, and it may even be that his famous ambivalences about slavery were resolved somewhat when he saw it practiced by the Muslims.
However that may be, it is certain that the Barbary question had considerable influence on the debate that ratified the United States Constitution in the succeeding years. Many a delegate, urging his home state to endorse the new document, argued that only a strong federal union could repel the Algerian threat. In The Federalist No. 24, Alexander Hamilton argued that without a “federal navy . . . of respectable weight . . . the genius of American Merchants and Navigators would be stifled and lost.” In No. 41, James Madison insisted that only union could guard America’s maritime capacity from “the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians.” John Jay, in his letters, took a “bring-it-on” approach; he believed that “Algerian Corsairs and the Pirates of Tunis and Tripoli” would compel the feeble American states to unite, since “the more we are ill-treated abroad the more we shall unite and consolidate at home.” The eventual Constitution, which provides for an army only at two-year renewable intervals, imposes no such limitation on the navy.
Thus, Lambert may be limiting himself in viewing the Barbary conflict primarily through the lens of free trade. Questions of nation-building, of regime change, of “mission creep,” of congressional versus presidential authority to make war, of negotiation versus confrontation, of “entangling alliances,” and of the “clash of civilizations”—all arose in the first overseas war that the United States ever fought. The “nation-building” that occurred, however, took place not overseas but in the 13 colonies, welded by warfare into something more like a republic. ...
The struggle against Barbary may have helped to force some of the early shoots of abolitionism. Perhaps above all, though, the Barbary Wars gave Americans an inkling of the fact that they were, and always would be, bound up with global affairs. Providence might have seemed to grant them a haven guarded by two oceans, but if they wanted to be anything more than the Chile of North America—a long littoral ribbon caught between the mountains and the sea—they would have to prepare for a maritime struggle as well as a campaign to redeem the unexplored landmass to their west. The U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean squadron has, in one form or another, been on patrol ever since.
And then, finally, there is principle. It would be simplistic to say that something innate in America made it incompatible with slavery and tyranny. But would it be too much to claim that many Americans saw a radical incompatibility between the Barbary system and their own? And is it not pleasant when the interests of free trade and human emancipation can coincide? I would close with a few staves of Kipling, whose poem “Dane-Geld” is a finer effort than anything managed by Francis Scott Key:
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nationKipling runs briskly through the stages of humiliation undergone by any power that falls for this appeasement, and concludes:
To call upon a neighbor and to say:—
“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,It may be fortunate that the United States had to pass this test, and imbibe this lesson, so early in its life as a nation.".......
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:—
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
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| "Money is their God and Mahomet is their prophet."--Capt. Richard O'Brian, USS Dauphin |
It’s been over 20 years since Lee Harris wrote his brilliant essay Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology | Hoover Institution.
I’ve been re-reading it because our Deep State Syndicate has swallowed the Kool-Aid. Mr. Harris could just as easily rewrite it today as “The FBI’s QAnon/White Supremacist Fantasy Ideology”. Our own Occupation Government has assumed Al Qaeda’s role and goal of destroying America.
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"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. No, not you--the Mullahs of Iran. They wanted $5 Billion, but I held out for six." |
“My first encounter with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.
My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.
What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.”
A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini’s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler’s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.
In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.
But the concept of belief, as it is used in this context, must be carefully understood in order to avoid ambiguity. For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us — I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief — the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive, but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, but one in which the make-believe is not an end in itself, but rather the means of making the make-believe become real.
Once again, it is a mistake to see in all of this merely a ploy — a cynical device to delude the masses. In all fantasy ideologies, there is a point at which the make-believe becomes an end in itself.”…….
And that’s How You Get Trump. Again. Or something even stronger.
Also Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.
"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. …
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.".......
Rick Rescorla — Badass of the Week
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| "I knew him as a hundred-and-eighty-pound, six-foot-one piece of human machinery that would not quit, that did not know defeat, that would not back off one inch. In the middle of the greatest battle of Vietnam, he was singing to the troops, saying we’re going to rip them a new asshole, when everyone else was worrying about dying."--Hal Moore |
"Hard Corps One-Six left 'Nam with a Silver Star and a Bronze Star, got a law degree in Oklahoma, taught Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina, and retired from the Army reserve in 1990 with the rank of Colonel. He later got a job as director of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, where he was tasked with ensuring employee safety for one of the world's largest financial institutions.
Rick Rescorla died almost exactly 10 years ago today. He was at his post on the 44th floor of World Trade Center Tower 1 on September 11, 2001, when a psychotic madman flew a passenger airliner into the building. When the Port Authority came over the loudspeaker in the building and ordered everyone inside to stay put, Rescorla muttered "Bugger that Blimy Poppycock" (or something equally British) under his breath, and flipped his brain right back into Commanding Officer mode. It wasn't his first time dealing with a terrorist attack on his place of employment – in 1993, when a truck bomb went off in the basement of the Tower, Rescorla had evacuated his offices, helping everyone out until he was the last man to leave the building – and he wasn't taking any chances this time either. He grabbed a bullhorn and personally ran up and down the 22 floors that encompassed Morgan Stanley Dean Witter headquarters, quickly and calmly getting everyone out of their cubes and down the stairs. Rushing up and down the building despite the fact that he was 62 years old and dying from terminal bone marrow cancer, Rescorla didn't even consider slowing down until all 2,700 of his co-workers were safely out of the burning building. When he saw how terrified the men and women he worked with were, he went back to his old standby of singing British folk songs to try and cheer them up.
He was last seen on the tenth floor of the World Trade Center, headed up. Of the 2,700 people he had been charged with protecting, all but 6 survived the terrorist attack.
“This is a day to be proud to be an American," he said."Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;
Can't you see their spearpoints gleaming?
See their warriors' pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield!"
Rest in the Vine: "Evil's Advantage Over Conscience" by Dr. Norman Doidge:
"THE STUDENT of human nature who seems best to have recognized the importance of this bizarre dynamic, in which a conscientious hero proves unable to finish off a foe he knows to be evil, was none other than Shakespeare. Indeed, the Bard was obsessed with understanding the phenomenon. Hamlet hesitated to bring Claudius to justice, and he paid with his life and the lives of those he loved. But it is in "Richard III" that one can learn most from characters who see evil, yet freeze at the key moment. The principal characters are fully aware of Richard's undeniable evil, yet they let him have his way despite themselves. Richard is the most systematically evil character in all of Shakespeare's plays. "I can smile, and murder while I smile," he says, swearing that he will outdo all the villains of history "and set the murderous Machiavel to school." The most important thing Richard knows is that while conscience allows us to understand ordinary crimes, it actually blinds us before the most extraordinary ones. The idea that conscience blinds us, making us less able to oppose evil's most brazen forms, is deeply disturbing, for conscience is the sine qua non of civil society.
Mark Steyn, excerpts from 2002:
"The other day, Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gave an interview to ABC News in which she revealed that Mohammed Atta and three other September 11th terrorists had visited her Florida office seeking government loans.
At first," she says, "he refused to speak with me," on the grounds that she was, in his words, "but a female."Mark Steyn, excerpts from 2005:
Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the seats. "He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."
"He asked me," recalls Ms. Bryant, "what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe."
...Mr. Atta then spotted an aerial view of Washington hanging on the wall behind her. He told her he particularly liked the way it got all the famous landmarks of the city in one convenient picture, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House. "He wanted that picture really bad."
"He said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it,' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?"
Mr. Atta then moved on to other prominent landmarks in other American cities, and enquired about security at the World Trade Center. Ms. Bryant had a Dallas Cowboys souvenir on her desk, and he asked her about their spectacular stadium and, specifically, the "hole in the roof."
At that point, the chit-chat turned to Mr. Atta's own country, which he claimed was Afghanistan. "He mentioned Osama bin Laden," she says. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from. I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."
There'll be more of these stories, tales of men virtually screaming their intentions but up against a culture sensitivity-trained into a coma." ..............
"With hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.Mark Steyn, excerpts from 2009:
For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the “root causes” (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that “Islam is a religion of peace”. Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can’t wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the “vast majority” of Muslims “jihad” is a harmless concept meaning “decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles”.
[M]ulticulturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta’s meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn’t a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds – but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.
[T]he more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. [A]nyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia’s old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.
Like Doc Hasan, Atta wasn't even trying to hide it anymore. Like the last kid playing Hide-n-Seek after his playmates were called home, we were the only ones hiding."........
"Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests”, so there was no need to worry. That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.
On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Major Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: “SOA.” As in “Soldier of Allah” – which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam. In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then Captain Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents”. So he got promoted to Major and shipped to Fort Hood.
And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.
Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently he tried to contact al Qaeda,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?
The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder.
Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a “tragedy” but a national scandal, already fading from view." ..............
Extreme Prejudice - CIA Whistle Blower Susan Lindauer PDX 911Truth - YouTube
I used to dismiss claims of Government Involvement in the 9/11 Attack as pure fantasy. But after
The Government-Involved Riot Attacks
The Government-Involved Mass Shooting Attacks
The Government-Involved Donald Trump Attacks
The Government-Involved Election Coup Attacks
The Government-Involved Free Speech Attacks
The Government-Involved Plandemic Virus Attack
The Government-Involved m-RNA Vaxx Attack
The Government-Involved Jan. 6th Attack
The Government-Involved Economic Attack
The Government-Involved Energy Attack
The Government-Involved Border Attack
The Government-Involved Climate Attack
The Government-Involved Endless War Attack
The Government-Involved Endless Surrender Attack
The Government-Involved "semi-Fascist" Big Lie Attack
and now the Government-Involved Mar-a-Lago Attack, I simply assume the Deep State Occupation Government attacked us on 9/11 and pretty much every day ever since.
I'm a slow learner, but not that slow.
My word as a Biden.
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| “Children of the same foul spirit” |
Rest in the Vine: Giving Marines Their Props vs. Using Marines as Props:
“The Democratic Party doesn’t have foreign enemies. They have foreigners who remind them of domestic enemies.”--David Reaboi riffing on Lee Smith quoted by Samuel Finlay
"Epitaph for the ‘War on Terror’" by Prof. Angelo Codevilla
Avenging 9/11 and preventing its recurrence was justification for putting enormous effort and money into unrelated or even counterproductive activities the ruling class sold to us as antiterrorism.
"Twenty years after the U.S. government declared war on terrorism, it consummated its own defeat in Kabul and Washington, in a manner foreseeable, foreseen, and foreshadowed in 9/11’s immediate aftermath. Fixation on itself and unseriousness about war are the twin habits of heart and mind that disposed the ruling class to defeat. The practical explanation for why and how it accepted defeat is found in the overriding interest each part of the ruling class has in doing what it wants to do.
On the night of September 11, 2001, Muslim governments strictly forbade public celebrations of the carnage. The Palestinian Authority, anticipating that outraged Americans would destroy them to avenge the day’s events, even called the attacks al nachba—“the disaster.” But as the U.S. ruling class made clear that it was accepting defeat, the Muslim world’s media and streets celebrated.
Two decades later, after that defeat’s logic had worked its way through and transformed American life, and as the government’s self-humiliating exit from Afghanistan consummated it, much of mankind followed Muslim crowds in celebrating—including prominent Americans.
At the “War On Terror’s” end as at its beginning, the same authoritative Americans—including Republican President George W. Bush as well as leading Democrats—blamed fellow Americans at least as much as foreign powers for it.
Bush’s first post 9/11 act (other than to sequester information about Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s role in terrorism) was to declare Islam the “religion of peace” and to declare illegitimate any American who thought otherwise. Fast forward to September 11, 2021 and Bush said that these Americans, many of whom had gone to war for him, losing life or limb, are “children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Similarly, in Joe Biden’s view the American people had shown “Fear and resentment of . . . true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion.” He called them “the dark forces of human nature.”
Shirking the Reality of War To Promote Ruling Class Interests
Progressive thought had always looked away from the reality of war as the midwife of nations and the gravedigger of decadences. Kissinger wrote that America should only fight “wars that it could afford to lose”—as if there were such things. Thus it blurred distinctions between war and peace. Intellectually crippled in this way, U.S. military forces therefore have not aimed for victory.
Instead and because of this, military operations have been planned and executed on the basis of what will fulfill our foreign policy establishment’s personal and institutional interests, as well as its evolving ideological criteria. Contact with reality, having produced results very different from those the ruling class envisions, that class explains defeat in terms of its most fundamental animosities—toward its domestic competitors.
Thus as the Afghan Taliban celebrated with the armament the ruling class left behind for them, making them the world’s fourth best armed force, our ruling class turned to its next primary objective.
Treating the American people, especially conservatives, as the main threat results from the growth and clarification of attitudes endemic to Progressivism and already translated into policy and lack thereof by such luminaries as Dean Acheson, William Fulbright, Robert McNamara, Jimmy Carter, Anthony Lake, (Obama’s original mentor on national security,) and even by Henry Kissinger. Many among them identified with William Appleman Williams’s thesis (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959) that America was on the wrong side of the Cold War. America’s defeat by foreigners does not threaten these progressives’ prerogatives and identities as do their domestic rivals.
Blaming domestic rivals to deflect defeat’s consequences in foreign wars is all too usual. Nevertheless, statements by Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley that “domestic extremists,” whom they functionally define as whomever opposes the ruling class, pose the greatest danger of terrorism—especially if they are white—is egregious in history. The official reorientation of the U.S. armed forces’ focus on fighting what is arguably the American people’s majority, is even more so. A grassroots progressive group called the Democratic Coalition leaves no doubt about the ruling class’s 2021 practical agenda: “we cannot rest until all of Trump’s traitorous, insurrectionist foot soldiers face justice.” Insofar as they are serious, and even if they are not, this augurs civil war.
How did this happen?
Having blurred the distinction between peace and war ab initio, and caring less than they should about national integrity, the ruling class never saw terrorism as war—as anything that should interfere with their agendas. But there is no such thing as a small war, any more than a small pregnancy. All war, all political violence, is about whether a body politic lives or dies. No post-9/11 statement is more mistaken than that these attacks “changed everything” in America. On the contrary. They accelerated the growth of trends deeply rooted in the ruling class.
The ruling class’ blurring of distinction between peace and war had already disposed it to tolerate what Kamal Nasser and the PLO were doing to Israel and what the Soviet Union was doing all over the world. Were we not doing similar things in the Cold War world? Well, not really. Our national security establishment relished the game, but was neither authorized nor ready to play the indirect-warfare game for blood. They had few if any independently recruited foreign sources. The closest they came to the game was in supporting the likes of Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, neglecting that these had their own agendas.
Besides, in the 1960s it was all too easy to turn a blind eye to the airplane hijackings, bombings, and bank robberies that Americans in league with Castro and the Soviets were perpetrating in the United States. But as America’s acceptance of defeat in Vietnam loomed, the terrorist threat increased. By the mid-1990s, after the U.S. government had misfired in Iraq, it was becoming hard to ignore.
Why Should a Little War Interrupt Their Good Time?
The ruling class’ first and enduring reaction to 9/11 was to safeguard its relationships with the “Third World” operatives in whom it had invested so many hopes, and in whose support and management its members were spending billions of dollars and and reaping millions. That is why when the American people demanded the heads of everybody and anybody who had a hand in terrorism, it was essential for CIA director George Tenet officially to identify the terrorist problem with one man, one organization, and with non-political religious zeal. The point was: don’t even think of fighting against anyone else.
And, within the ruling class, all rejected even considering “Why have we Americans been targeted more and more by all manner of terrorists? What must we do to put a stop to that?” “Whoever suggests that we hold foreign governments responsible for inciting violence against Americans wants war with the world. Can’t have that.” That is why, in the aftermath of a defeat that indicts the whole class’ conception and execution of policy for two decades, the lead editorials of the leading establishment publications, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal pleaded: “We don’t recall good alternatives being offered over the last 20 years.” Correct! Groupthink stood guard lest reality intrude.
Calling what happened next “strategy” does violence to the English language and to whomever cares to peruse the newspapers circa 2001-3, which reported who in the government’s various parts and among their supporters wanted to do or not to do, plus what labels they might use and what information should be withheld to manage public opinion. But you will search in vain for any discussion of why so many people in so many places were finding it attractive to kill Americans, and how we might make it unattractive.
Instead, the U.S. government/ruling class wanted to get closer to foreign countries to improve them and their attitudes, and it wanted to impose restrictions on Americans. Because that is what it always wanted and did whenever it could. Avenging 9/11 and preventing its recurrence served as justification for putting enormous effort and money into unrelated or even counterproductive activities the ruling class sold to Americans as antiterrorism.
The force behind these absurd-on-their-face, focus-grouped sales pitches came from the unanimity and lack of discussion with which the ruling class media pushed them. Twenty years later, the same media repeated the same tropes as if events had confirmed them. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan had “largely succeeded” in keeping the terrorists “on defense so they found it harder to attack us at home.” A few days earlier Condoleezza Rice, as responsible for these occupations as anyone, had written that “We took the fight to the terrorists so that they could never again bring it home to us.”
On what planet? Afghanistan and Iraq were awash in ethnic militias intent on oppressing or killing one another. Few of the combatants had ever heard of the United States. But our ruling class wants us to believe that hatred for America had so crazed them that, instead of slipping across our porous borders and feasting on undefended civilians, they threw themselves at the U.S armed forces in their country. They really think we are stupid.
Cui Bono?
Estimates of the “War on Terror’s” cost in money start at $8-10 trillion. Cui bono? To whom did that money go? Yes, millions, maybe even billions, went to rent the cooperation of Iraqis, Afghans, etc. But the trillions went chiefly to Americans—to the national security establishment; the armed forces and intelligence community, for enhanced careers and operations, and to their contractors; plus to the horde of civilian specialists employed to improve health, education, welfare, and social practices in foreign lands; our transportation network; and all manner of manufacturing and servicing. The consultant class also took it to the bank, and the people who run the conferences.
Think of all the reputations, careers, retirements on the golf course, second homes, fancy cars and vacations all this made possible.
Think also of how fast and far the “War on Terror” advanced the ruling class’s perennial objective to limit the freedoms of Americans outside its orbit, and perhaps shut down domestic opposition.
When leftist Americans (alumni of Americans for a Democratic Society, a covert CIA subsidiary) hijacked airliners to Cuba, the ruling class would not hear of ending the problem by forcing Castro to give them up. Instead, they made it a crime for ordinary air travelers to defend themselves. After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security set about establishing a new way of life in America, based on badges and regulations about what clearance would be needed to go where. The ruling class cares nothing of their effect (or, overwhelmingly, the lack thereof) on terrorism, just as it does not care what effect its shifting, contradictory mandates concerning COVID have on public health. And it does not even try to explain how adding minuscule amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere adversely affects the planet’s climate. No. The ruling class takes any and all occasions to advance its overriding objective in its own domination.
Terrorism, however, is especially useful. The premise that since we cannot know who is most likely to pose threats, that hence we must refrain from focusing on (profiling) Muslims and assume that the folks next door are as capable of mayhem as anyone shouting Allahu Akbar, has done much to make America what it is today. Especially because it is an in-your-face lie. The lie serves to free the ruling class to absolve or indict for terrorism whomever it chooses.
Surprise, surprise! Turns out that not everyone is as likely a source of terrorism as anyone else. The real, congenital, terrorists are conservative white folks. U.S intelligence properly profiles them to prevent the worst of them from taking part in society. And if anyone suggests that this relates to the fact that these white folks don’t vote for the Democratic Party, the Wall Street Journal tells us that the U.S. justice system is fair and competent: “The privacy of Americans hasn’t been threatened, while the Patriot Act has provided the feds with tools to break up domestic terror cells.” You must believe that, or else!
That is why the New York Times formulated the “War on Terror’s” official epitaph: “A War on Terror Accounting Since 9/11. The fall of Kabul shouldn’t obscure the successes over 20 years. Experts say it is the success of a multilateral effort that extends to as many as 85 countries.”
Who are you to disagree, white man?".................
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Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive our those who trespass against us. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. Matthew 6:9-13 |
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