Initially, figures in the Iranian government blamed Israel, and threatened retaliation. Iran opposes the Israeli total war on the civilians of Gaza, and leads a loosely organized Alliance of Resistance (against Israeli militarism) comprising Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and Yemen’s Houthis. The modus operandi of the Kerman bombing, however, with its targeting of civilian crowds in the service of inflaming conflict, better suits ISIL. The ISIL leadership had taken over northern Iraq and eastern Syria 2014-2018 by fomenting Sunni-Shiite civil war.

Although the bombing turns out not to implicate Israel, it certainly has a context in Tel Aviv’s reduction of Gaza to rubble and its murder of over 20,000 civilian noncombatants.

Osamah Bin Laden gave three reasons for undertaking the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. — the US military presence in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia, the excess civilian deaths caused by the US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, and the Israel occupation of Jerusalem and the threat it posed to the al-Aqsa Mosque complex (Islam’s third holiest shrine).

The Palestine piece is crucial. I wrote in 2010, “Last winter during the Gaza War, an audio tape attributed to Bin Laden did not neglect to mention the need to recover al-Aqsa Mosque (the Muslim holy site in Jerusalem) for Islam. Before 9/11, in early 2001, Bin Laden was penning odes to the liberation of Jerusalem and reading them at his son’s wedding.”

The US and European press never gave the Palestine issue its due in explaining Muslim radicalism twenty years ago, because facing the truth was too painful.

If ISIL did strike Iran, it may well have done so to take the shine off Iran’s current street cred in the Muslim world over Gaza. As the major Sunni Muslim countries have fallen silent or secretly cooperated with the Israeli onslaught, Iran has vigorously denounced the Israeli campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Its proxy militias in Iraq and Syria have repeatedly attacked US military personnel at Tanf in Syria and at Ain al-Asad base in Iraq. The Houthis have closed the Red Sea to traffic by international container ship companies.

Aljazeera English: “ISIL claims responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly attack on Iranian city of Kerman that killed dozen”

ISIl hates Shiites and sees them as wretched heretics, and has made attempts to establish itself among Palestinians. It would want credit for resistance to the Israeli campaign to go to Sunni radicals. This strike at Kerman was revenge for the Iranian role in defeating ISIL in Syria, an effort directed by Soleimani.

Indirectly, then, the Gaza conflict is having the effect of strengthening Iran’s Alliance of Resistance on the one hand, and of raising jealousies among and galvanizing Sunni radicals.

The longer the Biden administration allows this savage carnage on the part of Israel to continue before the eyes of the world, the more likely it is that the whole Middle East and perhaps the Muslim world more widely will be destabilized. The US and its allies will not be left untouched by such a development, as the Red Sea debacle already demonstrates. But that interruption of container ship traffic could be a minor consequence of the Israeli genocide against Gaza compared to what is coming.

The country has been engaged in numerous foreign direct and indirect conflicts and wars since the end of WWII, and especially since the end of the cold war. Yet, the United States’ democratic political system and the guaranteed constitutional rights of the people have not translated into engaging the public in a constructive debate over and the conduct of US military interventions abroad.  The First Amendment to the US Constitution partly proclaims that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. The U.S. Supreme Court further ruled on March 3, 1919, that the freedom of speech protection afforded in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment could be restricted if the words spoken or printed represented to society a clear and present danger. Despite this supposed protection, dissident narratives are often sidelined by government spokespersons and a sycophantic corporate news establishment. Public opinion seems unable to have a serious impact on foreign policy in either opposition to or in support of peaceful settlement of conflict with other states.  

Academic research findings demonstrate the American public is overall less interested in foreign policy unless it has an immediate impact on people’s livelihoods. The United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars in its annual national defense budgets, and its military interventions abroad have a drastic impact on people’s lives both here in the homeland and in the targeted countries. Public opinion changes as the extent and the duration of US involvement and the home-front political climate change. Public opinion surveys show support for continued engagement after the initial support, but it declines as military intervention drags on. A decline in public opinion support occurs as the public comes to question the human and financial cost and wisdom of military operations abroad. A ‘Democratic-Republican’ divide over US involvement in Ukraine after prolonged failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria reflects the current political divide in America. 

A 2017 CATO study classifies American public opinion on foreign intervention into ‘restraint, ‘interventionist,’ and ‘in-between’ categories. The “restraint constituency” which cuts across party lines and represents roughly 37 percent of the public stands in contrast with an “interventionist constituency,” which only represents about a quarter of the public and supports much more aggressive efforts to promote American interests abroad. Since neither constituency’s core followers represent a majority, the deciding voice between intervention and restraint in foreign policy debates belongs to the 40 percent of the public that falls somewhere between the two camps. Public opinion can shift in either direction, depending on the extent of public awareness and engagement.  

This article contends that a contributing factor in the United States’ bellicose foreign policy is the absence of input into the foreign policy decision-making process by an informed public opinion. The public’s sentiments on war and peace remain vastly reactive and susceptible to opinion shapers and influencers. In 2010, a poll found that 70 percent of Americans believed Iran already had nukes (the CIA assesses that it does not even have a nuclear weapons program, only a civilian enrichment capability). In 2021, 60 percent still believed in the existence of Iranian nukes, with another 23 percent of Americans claiming that they did not know. Only about half of the respondents in the 2021 poll even knew that Israel had nuclear weapons. “In other words, more than four-fifths of the public [did] not know the correct answer to a simple question about a matter of fact on one of the most high-profile foreign policy issues of the last 15 years.” Foreign policy commentator Daniel Larison wrote in 2021, “That is what decades of misinformation and propaganda will get you.”

The demonization of the enemy is a proven strategy used to galvanize public opinion in support of policy. British journalist Louis Allday (Ebb Magazine, 3/15/22), compiled a list of instances where Western journalists and officials have compared foreign leaders to Hitler—with Hitler sometimes coming off better in the comparison. Hitler-like leaders include Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and even Cuba’s Fidel Castro. As Farhang Jahanpour argues, there is indeed a long history of demonization of Middle Eastern leaders, before invasion and regime change.

The George H. W. Bush administration claimed its 1991 military campaign against Iraq was in place to protect Saudi Arabia, and not attack Iraq. The administration claimed that Iraq had over 250,000 troops in Kuwait ready to attack the Saudis. The reporting by the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, however, showed there was only a force of about 20% that size in the country. The US-led, UNSC-sanctioned military operation to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait instead involved the extensive bombing of Iraq itself, destroying key public health infrastructure, the and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians. The crippling of water purification plants led to excess infant mortality. Little thought was apparently given by Washington to how it would extricate itself from the turbulent Gulf in the aftermath. The subsequent twelve years of UN and US sanctions had disastrous consequences for the Iraqi civilian population.  Having been drawn into a prolonged military presence in Saudi Arabia, the site of the two holiest Islamic shrines, the United States became a target of increased acts of terrorism on the part of Muslim radicals.

The US public was not informed that the US campaign in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks would result in a twenty-year occupation of that country that would leave thousands of innocent civilians dead and hundreds of billions spent on high-powered bombing runs that proved impotent in defeating the Taliban. Would a reasoned public debate on ways of responding to the small terrorist group, al-Qaeda, that did not involve attempting to rule a country of 34 million for two decades have forestalled the hasty errors of the Bush administration?

The invasion of Iraq came in 2003, resulting in more than 210,000 Iraqi civilians and 4,500 US soldiers killed, and chaos and instability gripping the whole region. The claim that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction or had ties with al-Qaeda proved baseless propaganda. American public was misled throughout the campaign to legitimize the invasion. The security concerns engendered by the 9/11 attacks in 2001 contributed to decision to go to war, though in later years the Bush administration attempted to cover up this exercise in naked aggression as a project of democratization.  The project failed.

The strategic mistake of going to war with Iraq resulted from President George W. Bush’s miscalculation that the transition to a US-dominated stability in the aftermath of the invasion would be relatively easy. The neoconservative vision failed to take account of Iraqi culture and society and underestimated the influence of Iran. The war in Iraq drew resources away from the US attempt to repress radical Sunni fundamentalism. Iraq’s Shi’a domination and Iran’s rising power have given Iran an edge in Iraq. On the 20th anniversary of the US- and British-led invasion of Iraq, the New York Times continued to dedicate itself to a waffling narrative, one that writes out most of history and opts for a message of “it’s complicated” to discuss the disaster it can’t admit that it helped create.

In 2023, the public has come weary of American adventurism abroad in the name of democracy promotion and/or humanitarianism. 2023 survey results defy the liberal, neoconservative narratives in justification of US military interventionism in the name of American unilateralism and “democracy promotion.” The survey shows the public’s strong desire to avoid military intervention in the name of democracy.  When asked to name the top five most important foreign policy issues facing the United States, terrorism was first with 49% mentioning the issue. (This was despite no serious attacks on the homeland since September 2001!) The same survey finds upholding democracy globally was mentioned only 14% of the time in prioritizing public opinion interest in intervention, favoring multilateralism and less US intervention. On the question of multilateralism or stability versus unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy, almost 70% favor multilateralism or stability. Very few, only 17% wanted a unilateral approach.  

Why does the American public continuously support US foreign military interventions while remaining ignorant of or disinterested in foreign relations, and despite the values and principles enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution? Freedom of speech and expression implies access to facts and awareness in making sound judgments. Conversely, constructed narratives based on selective, half-truths and partisan journalism mean narrow views and self-censorship, resulting in false conclusions. The American public is being failed by its smug and manipulative foreign policy elites and by news corporations that act as their echo chamber.

One survey finds that Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are more knowledgeable than others. We recognize that public interest in and knowledge of foreign affairs varies according to the level of education, gender, age, party affiliation, and ideology. Still, viewed in its entirety, American public opinion matters and helps justify continuous US military intervention abroad. The role of public opinion makers, including the media, in the formation of public opinion is antithetical to democracy and the 1st amendment rights of informed citizenry enshrined in the US Constitution.    

Ali Abootalebi is Professor of Middle Eastern and Global Politics in the Department of Political Science, the University of Wisconsin, UWEC. He is the author of Islam and democracy: State-Society Relations in Developing Countries, 1980-1994 (Garland, 2000), coauthored with Stephen Hill, Introduction to World Politics: Prospects and Challenges for the United States, 2nd ed. (Kendall Hunt, 2018), edited, Global Politics Reader: Themes, Actors, and Issues (Cognella Publishing, 2019), and numerous articles on Iran, Arab Politics, Civil Society and Democracy and U.S. foreign policy.

Ayman al-Zawahiri was from a prominent, elite Egyptian family. His relatives were Arab nationalists in that most nationalist of eras, the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Egypt 1954-1970 after a young officers coup in 1952. Some teenagers act out by becoming delinquents. Al-Zawahiri defied the rest of his relatively secular family by becoming a devotee of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood theorist of Islamic revolution. Qutb and the Brotherhood had been involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Col. Abdel Nasser in Alexandria in 1954. A thousand or so members were rounded up and tried, some of them tortured. Qutb was jailed as a conspirator. Qutb argued that the secular, nationalist Egyptian government was full of people who only looked and spoke like Muslims but that they had actually gone over to the evil Pharaoh. They were no longer really Muslims, but godless tyrants, apostates. And, he implied, apostates deserve to be killed. Qutb was accused of conspiring again to assassinate Abdul Nasser from prison in 1965 and was executed in 1966. Al-Zawahiri, age 15, was crushed.

In 1967 when Abdel Nasser lost the 6-Day War with Israel, al-Zawahiri rejoiced. He was maybe the only Egyptian not in mourning. He was glad to see Pharaoh taken down a notch.

Al-Zawahiri yielded to his family demands that he go to medical school. By the late 1970s he had a fancy practice in the shishy Ma’adi district of Cairo. I was at the American University in Cairo then, and some of my professors lived in Ma’adi, and invited us over for pot luck. We were around the corner from al-Zawahiri’s clinic. Who knows, maybe I saw him on the street. He had taken the Hippocratic Oath to protect human life, but would become one of history’s most notorious mass murderers.

Behind the scenes, al-Zawahiri formed one of the two branches of the youth terrorist organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). They had no use for the Muslim Brotherhood, the leadership of which made a pact with President Anwar El Sadat to give up political violence if he would let them organize. Sadat was a rightwinger who took over Abdel Nasser’s leftwing government, and he thought he needed a counterweight to the leftists, so he did a deal with the right wing Muslim Brotherhood. They disapproved of land reform and nationalization of industries, so they were perfect for Sadat’s purposes even if they were a little nutty about religion. Sadat encouraged the young Muslim Brotherhood types on college campuses to organize into “Islamic Groupings” to offset the Nasserists and Communists. The Islamic Grouping formed a national organization, advised by Sheikh Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh.

I remember in 1978 when a gaggle of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members were arrested by the Egyptian police, having been caught with bomb-making materials and bombs. It was the headline of the government-owned newspaper, al-Ahram [The Pyramids] . Al-Zawahiri still had the cover of practicing medicine in Ma’adi, but the Egyptian secret police were beginning to realize that he was dangerous.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran gave hope to religious radicals in Egypt that they could overthrow Sadat and make a Sunni version of that revolution in Egypt.

The EIJ found ways of getting in touch with cadets at the most prominent Egyptian military academy, and some secretly joined them, including one Lt. Khalid al-Islambouli. In 1981, both branches of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad made a 12-man council with the Islamic Grouping, and the ensemble decided to take out Sadat. It was decided that al-Islambouli and other recruits in the military would jump out of their troop transport vehicle during a military parade while Sadat was in the reviewing stand.

They pulled it off, and in 1981 Sadat was assassinated. However, the Egyptian masses weren’t interested in being ruled by religious zealots, and Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, an air force officer who planned out Egypt’s campaign in the 1973 war, became president-for-life.

Egyptian religious radicals were at that point rounded up, including al-Zawahiri. In the meantime, Ronald Reagan had come to power in the US, and he and some congressional Cold Warriors wanted to respond to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by backing Afghan jihadis. Some of the seven main such groups were tribal and relatively secular. Several were religious extremists, such as the Hizb-i Islami of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar. Hikmatyar became the CIA favorite and got the lion’s share of the billions the US sent in via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Egyptian government wanted to get the radicals off its hands. Instead of executing those implicated in Sadat’s killing or keeping them in prison, both steps sure to make further trouble, they offered them a deal. Leave Egypt and go do your jihad against the Soviets, or else. Most of them took the deal, including al-Zawahiri. It may be that the Reagan administration pressured Mubarak to send them off. We may never know. Al-Zawahiri set up a clinic on the Pakistan side, in Peshawar, to treat the jihadis wounded in firefights with the Red Army.

Meantime, I went off to Pakistan for my Ph.D. research and studied Urdu in Lahore. It was in late 1981 that I went up with a friend to Peshawar. Al-Zawahiri wasn’t there yet– he didn’t get out of prison until 1984– but the place was like Berlin in the Cold War, a hotbed of plotting, with many Afghan refugees around. I spoke Dari Persian with them and heard about their ordeals. My time in South Asia in the 80s and early 90s gave me insights into religious politics in Pakistan and Afghanistan that would later help me interpret al-Qaeda.

In 1989, the Soviets completely withdrew from Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden, who had been a fundraiser for the Mojahedin, based in Peshawar and Saudi Arabia, went back to Jedda. He immediately gave a sermon in Jedda about the need to take down the other superpower, the US, (with which he had been implicitly allied only a few months before). He complained bitterly about US backing for Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians during the first Intifada.

By 1996, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had gathered again in Afghanistan, as the Taliban were taking over the country. They merged their two organizations, EIJ and al-Qaeda, and became Qaedat al-Jihad. They declared holy war on the US and al-Zawahiri developed a new approach. He came to believe that he hadn’t been successful in overthrowing Arab governments because the US propped them up. So, first, he’d have to find a way to get them out of the Middle East and make it clear that dominating it came with a high price. After the US withdrew, then its puppets in the region (as he thought of them) would be easily overthrown.

Hence the attacks on the East Africa US embassies, the attack on the USS Cole, and the 9/11 attacks.

Those attacks failed, despite their gut-wrenching death toll and all the noise they made. They did encourage copy-cat attacks on a much smaller scale– Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003-2006. Because I knew that terrain, I got called to Washington by think tanks a lot in the first decade of the last century, giving talks and presentations to the US government personnel who got time off to come to the panels, on what al-Qaeda was and how it operated and how I thought it could be defeated. I hope I helped.

The Bush administration took cynical advantage of 9/11 to launch a war of conquest in Iraq and to begin a 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. Neither of the latter were useful for counter-terrorism, and indeed, were always likely to proliferate terrorism. The US was not dissuaded from playing its superpower role in the region and propping up governments it found useful. Indeed, Washington doubled down on that role, most unwisely. The Bush administration made an opening for al-Qaeda and its offshoot, ISIL in Iraq, and the US government over two decades failed to convince rural Afghans, whom they bombed assiduously all that time, to choose it over the Taliban.

The US squandered 20 years of sole superpower status and some $7 trillion on its fruitless “war on terror,” which had no benefit at all for the United States. If counter-terrorism were desirable, it could have been done with a light, rapid-response force, not with massive land campaigns in Central and West Asia.

Al-Zawahiri gradually lost any relevance. He was viewed as a joke in Egypt, and he opposed the 2011 youth revolts because they were primarily secular in character. He was backed for a while by some of the Syrian Jihadis who from 2011 tried to overthrow the Syrian government with a guerrilla war. But they faced pressure from Gulf patrons to dissociate themselves from al-Zawahiri. A section of them split off into ISIL, who thought that al-Zawahiri was old hat.

Ironically, during the Syrian civil war, until Russian and Iranian intervention ended it, the US CIA was supporting religious radical groups trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad who at least were battlefield allies of al-Qaeda. We were back to the 1980s in some ways.

As al-Zawahiri died, the Egyptian military was still ruling Egypt and the Saudi, Jordanian and other royal families al-Qaeda saw as Quislings were all still in power and benefiting from high oil prices. The US was still the predominant superpower, and a rising China likes Muslim radicalism even less than Washington does.

Al-Zawahiri goes down in the forgotten annals of failed, minor revolutionaries, distinctive only for the number of innocent civilians he murdered. His was a dead end for the Muslim world, and the vast majority of Muslims saw al-Qaeda for what it was.

An unprecedented 18% of Arab youth now are “not religious,” and many youth and others in the Arab world give as a reason for their cooling to religion the long decades of religious radicalism that have roiled the region. Al-Zawahiri dreamed of an Islamic state — though the rigidity and harshness of his vision was more a nightmare — but his crude, Nazi-like methods undermined the very basis for any such thing.

As for the US, almost no one will care that al-Zawahiri was finally brought to justice. People younger than 33 probably mostly don’t know who he was. Americans had moved on, turning inward. This generation faces the climate emergency, economic challenges, a rising American far right that threatens the foundations of democracy in a way al-Zawahiri never did, and renewed Washington-Moscow tensions. Most Americans regret that they allowed Washington to spend trillions on its murky and self-contradictory “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda can now be seen for what it was — a small, opportunistic and destructive terrorist organization that leaves virtually no legacy, and certainly no positive one.

What we can learn from the 20 years between the 9/11 attacks and the January 6 coup attempt.

By Walden Bello | –

The end of 2021 and the beginning of a new year is a convenient time to take stock of the causes of America’s decline.

This past year saw both Washington’s inglorious exit from Afghanistan after 20 years in the country that had served as the launching pad for its direct military intervention in the Middle East and an historic insurrection at the very heart of the empire. Add to this the absolute lack of traction for President Biden’s recent “Democracy Summit” in contrast to Beijing’s surefooted diplomacy, the erosion of an already weak U.S. economy by COVID-19 followed by uncontrolled inflation, and the deepening of the country’s informal but very real civil war — and it is hard to avoid the sense that we are indeed at the end of an era.

Serving as the bookends of this era were two individuals that stamped their personalities on it: Osama bin Laden at the beginning and Donald Trump at the end.

Varieties of Imperial Decline

Ever since Paul Kennedy wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historians and others have tried to discover the universal elements of the phenomenon he called “imperial overstretch.”

This might, however, be a futile enterprise. Tolstoy said that all families are unhappy but each of them is unhappy in its own way. The same thing might be said of the end of empires. All empires end, but each exits in its own distinct unhappy fashion.

Bankrupt at the end of the Second World War and facing spiraling financial and political costs as independence movements challenged their hegemony from East Asia to Africa, the British chose to cut their losses and liquidate most of their holdings, passed the task of ruling to indigenous elites, and largely left the defense of global capitalism to the Americans.

The French chose to hang on despite defeat in Indochina and a bloody stalemate in Algeria and could only be persuaded to give the latter independence when renegade military men threatened to take over the government itself to continue the empire. The Soviet Union was largely dissolved by a domestic reform effort that ran out of control, though defeat in Afghanistan made a not insignificant contribution.

Like the ascent to the zenith of empire, the descent from it does not follow a predetermined path but one that is shaped by contingencies, many of them surprising and unexpected.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the U.S. had staved off the economic challenge of Japan and seen the political and military challenge posed by the Soviets dissipate. Moreover, it seemed to have thrown off the “Vietnam Syndrome” with its victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. The American Empire appeared to be experiencing a second wind.

At this juncture, the choices for maintaining the empire boiled down to two. One, identified with the Democrats, favored the U.S. ruling via a multilateral economic order undergirded by the supremacy of its corporations and a liberal global political order propped up by unchallenged American military power and promoted by the “soft power” of liberal democracy. The other was championed by neoconservatives largely ensconced in the Republican Party who claimed the “unipolar” status of the United States provided a unique opportunity for reordering the world to the lasting advantage of the United States both strategically and economically — and demanded unilateral action to bring that about.

The debate between these two visions of the imperial future dominated American politics during the eight-year reign of the Democrats presided over by Bill Clinton.

Under the succeeding Republican administration of George W. Bush, US power was primed to do just what the neoconservatives wanted. It was, however, not predetermined that the Middle East would be the prime target of their global push to reorder the world. Tension with China was high in the first months of the new administration, with the Pentagon, in fact, identifying Beijing no longer as a strategic partner, as the Clinton administration did, but as a strategic rival. A new Cold War could have been launched at that juncture, with a China that was much, much weaker militarily and economically relative to the U.S. than it is now.

What made the difference in the fateful calculations of the neocons was one man: Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden’s Historic Role

Bin Laden puts paid to those historians who belittle the role of personality in history. For what he did, probably without intending it, was direct U.S. military power to Afghanistan and the broader Middle East with his attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Bin Laden hoped to create a hundred Islamic insurgencies by boldly baiting the Great Satan, much like Che Guevara hoped to create more Cubas in Latin America with his guerrilla experiment in Bolivia. Bin Laden failed in bringing about the purifying Islamic revolutions he sought, but he was wildly successful in a way he had not intended. For his move gave the American neocons the opportunity for the military action they had devoutly wished for to enable them to consolidate their new unipolar order.

Desire did not, however, end up with the object of desire, for the terrain in which the U.S. chose to wage an “exemplary war” to teach the rest of the world to get out of the way of America’s hegemonic mission turned out to be populated by people, Afghans and Iraqis, who were no pushovers.

Bush II got the war he wanted but not the outcome he sought. Instead of his legions coming back home in triumph, they were plunged into what quickly became a quicksand from which they could not be extricated for two decades, and then only in shame and defeat under a Democratic administration in 2021.

The Economic Consequences of the Forever Wars

Being pinned down in what critics called the “forever wars” in the Middle East had momentous political and economic consequences for the United States. Washington set aside its definition of China as a strategic rival and sought instead to enlist Beijing as an ally in its “war on terror.” China obliged, but devoted most of its efforts to economic diplomacy to gain markets and cultivate good relations with countries in the Global South, a contrast with Washington’s bellicose behavior that did not go unnoticed.

The U.S. wasted trillions on fruitless military adventures, but the main economic consequence of the Middle East wars was to boost China’s economic ascent at its expense.

With China reaffirmed as a political ally, the U.S. transnational corporations that had promoted the entente with China in their search for cheap labor during the Clinton presidency accelerated the transfer of their manufacturing processes to China, making the 16 years of the Bush II and Obama administrations a period of irreversible deindustrialization. Thousands of factories closed down in the industrial heartland in the Midwest and Northeast and at least 2.5 million high paying manufacturing jobs were lost to what some economists called the “China Shock.”

China’s rise to industrial prominence was not, in other words, predetermined. Bin Laden’s baiting the U.S. — and Washington taking the bait — was a major reason why the China-TNC alliance continued and gathered force during the Bush II presidency instead of being sidelined by strategic concerns about China that were prominent both at the Pentagon and the neocons during Bush’s first months in office.

Alternative Routes from Capitalism’s Crisis of Profitability

If the U.S. being bogged down in the Middle East and China’s benefiting from this were not predetermined, some would claim that the broad contours of economic change, at least in the U.S., were but the unfolding in time of contradictions already present at the heart of the premier capitalist country.

True, already in the 1970s and 1980s, the rate of profit had plunged from its postwar high of 16 percent in the early 1950s to around 6 percent. True, accessing cheap labor in the global South, where wages were a fraction of those in the United States, was certainly seen as a key solution. Still, breaking the social democratic compromise between labor and capital undergirded by Keynesian technocratic economics, where social peace was the quid pro quo for relatively high wages and limited profits, was no easy, largely predetermined process.

Even before China came into the picture in the 1990s, two “superstructural” factors were decisive in conditioning the way capital would respond to the crisis of profitability, one that would clear the way for the massive migration of U.S. jobs there.

The first was political in nature. The showdown between Ronald Reagan and PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, in 1981 became the key battle for U.S. labor’s future, and Reagan’s victory, like Margaret Thatcher’s triumph over the miners in Britain, made the rest of management’s campaign to break unions a mopping up operation. As in Britain, had the AFL-CIO come out in full support of the PATCO strike and had the air controllers won, it is conceivable that the right’s offensive to destroy labor’s power could have been slowed down, if not stopped, and neoliberalism’s triumph could have been averted or, at the least, been much less thorough. The political consequences of concrete class struggles can never be underestimated.

The other critical condition for capital’s triumph in the 1980s and 1990s was ideological in character. With the 1970s U.S. economy stuck in the “stagflation” whose underlying cause was the crisis of profitability, a revived classical market economics centered at the University of Chicago came to the rescue. Neoliberalism faulted state intervention as the central cause of U.S. economic stagnation, and capital, politicians, and academics united in a common cause for sweeping deregulation.

This political and ideological coalition was not, however, inevitable. Had the Democratic Party remained faithful to its New Deal roots and social democratic academics put up more of an intellectual fight, neoliberalism’s rise could have encountered more resistance that, at the least, could have made its hegemony more fragile, a point to which we will return later.

In any event, it was the virtually unopposed neoliberal counterrevolution that made possible the corporate capture of public policy in the 1980s and 1990s, a development that set the stage for the large-scale transfer of American factories and jobs to China over the next two decades. Moreover, with their assertion, more by fiat than by proof, that market forces had “determined” that the U.S. competitive advantage no longer lay in manufacturing, the neoliberals not only promoted deindustrialization but, equally significant, the wholesale “financialization” of the U.S. economy.

Financialization was a process that involved focusing on the financial sector as the cutting edge of the economy owing to the greater returns on investment it offered compared to industry; promoting debt-driven consumption as the engine of growth; and converting workers from wage-earners to “shareholders” in U.S. corporations, thus reconciling labor and capital.

This “new” American economy created by neoliberalism was alleged to have entered a “mature” phase of permanent prosperity known as the “Great Moderation” in the 2000s. It fell apart with a vengeance with the financial crisis of 2008, which ushered in years of stagnation and high unemployment that gutted the economy of what dynamism it had left.

By the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, China, while still just the world’s second biggest economy, had clearly displaced the U.S. as the center of global accumulation, accounting for 28 percent in global growth in 2019, more than twice the share of the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund.

Trump and the Crisis of the Imperial Order

But endless wars and the unraveling of the financialized U.S. economy are insufficient to explain the drastic decline of the empire from “unipolarism” to severe dislocation in less than two decades. One must bring into the equation the unfolding of what I have called the informal civil war in the United States. Central to explaining this cancer eating at the heart of the American political system was the evolution of white supremacy as a political and ideological force.

While the Republican Party had exploited the racial insecurities of the white population successfully since the late 1960s through the so-called “Southern Strategy” and racist dog whistle politics, it was not predetermined that white supremacy would become the dominant stream in conservative, right-wing politics that would subordinate and fuse with other streams such as cultural and religious conservatism, anti-liberalism, and populist disdain for scientific expertise.

Again, this was not inevitable. A key contribution to the expansion and consolidation of white supremacy was the defection from the Democratic Party of large sections of its white working class base — the pillar of the once solid “New Deal Coalition” put together by Franklin Delano Roosevelt — as “Third Way” Democrats from Clinton to Barack Obama legitimized and led in promoting neoliberal policies that had such a damaging consequences on the jobs and income of workers.

The Democratic Party leadership’s surrender to neoliberalism has been well analyzed by Thomas Piketty, who noted that the base of the party from the 1960s on increasingly became composed of people with relatively high levels of education — professionals, academics, intellectuals, and even managers. The relatively well educated leadership of the party increasingly responded to the interests of these like-minded followers, resulting in many in the old union, working class base being steadily alienated from them.

Increasingly, what Piketty terms the “Brahmin Left” in the Democratic Party represented by the Clintons and Obama found a coincidence of intellectual and material interests with conservatives traditionally ensconced in the Republican Party. Their common agenda came to be espousal of neoliberalism, with the difference that the Democrats favored neoliberalism with “safety nets.” This ideological convergence assured that while the independent left would be loud in its denunciation of neoliberalism, the dominant political response to neoliberalism would not come from the left but from another quarter when the right conjuncture emerged.

That conjuncture came with the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008. Its volatile mix of high unemployment and high inequality provided an indispensable context for white supremacy’s breaking out to become the driving force of the politics of the white population, a development that took liberals and others by surprise.

Still, it could not have turned into the virulent, destabilizing movement it became were it not for one man. This brings us again to the role of personality, a factor that at certain historical junctures can become decisive. It was a volatile opportunist with weak ties to either the Republican establishment or Democratic establishment who elevated white supremacy from one of several streams of American right-wing politics to its hegemonic status.

In the 2016 elections, Donald Trump smelled an opportunity that a Democratic leadership tied to Wall Street ignored. By tying the crisis created by deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism to anti-migrant rhetoric and dog whistle anti-black appeals in a boisterous, redneck-captivating style, he was able to break through to the white working class that had already given signals earlier that it was ripe to be mobilized along racial lines.

The culmination of that process was the January 6 insurrection, a battle that Trump lost which may actually serve as a prelude to his winning the war, just as the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 prefigured Hitler’s gaining power in 1933.

A Third Wind?

As the era 2001 to 2021 comes to an end, the American empire continues to be dominant, but its pillars have been severely eroded.

Its ability to discipline the rest of the world has been shattered by its defeat in Afghanistan. Its credibility even among its western allies as a reliable partner is at an all-time low. Its economy may still be the largest in the word, but it is no longer the center of global capital accumulation and confronts the prospect of its unraveling accelerating — especially now that the $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social and climate public spending bill that was supposed to be its program for revitalization faces uncertain approval in a deeply divided Congress. Meanwhile white supremacist politics has become the hegemonic force in the politics of the white population, creating not only deep polarization but an existential threat to the world’s oldest democracy itself.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S. empire seemed to have a second wind, appearing to have put the “Vietnam Syndrome” behind it and its economy apparently gliding into a prosperous maturity. As events proved, that illusory second wind was short lived.

A third wind is, of course, a theoretical possibility. But while we should be wary of deterministic projections, how such a rejuvenation can take place is much, much less evident today. Each empire descends from the zenith in its own unique way, but if there is one path that is broadly similar to that being trodden by the United States, it is that of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Like the Ottomans then, the United States now is a very sick empire, faced abroad by powerful challenges to its hegemony, eroded by economic stagnation, shorn of ideological legitimacy, and torn apart internally by a civil war in all but name.

FPIF commentator Walden Bello is adjunct professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and co-founder of the Bangkok-based research institute Focus on the Global South.

Featured image: Stockvault.net

The group was founded in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency and comprises far right wing conspiracy theorists. It is led by the terrifyingly looney Rhodes. The Southern Poverty Law Center writes, “In 2014, Rhodes claimed the group had an unlikely 35,000 dues-paying members who are said to be mostly, although not exclusively, current and former military, law enforcement and emergency first responders.” Some Oath Keepers hold, or are running for, elective office.

Leader Rhodes said things after Biden’s win like ““This is a military invasion by the cartels and a political coup by the domestic Marxist controlled left, which sees open borders and mass-illegal invasion as their ticket to permanent illegitimate political power.”

Note how corporate Democrats like Joe Biden are misidentified as Marxists (!) and this left wing conspiracy is connected to immigration law. Note that Trump did not change immigration law one iota and millions of people immigrated into the US on his watch. This is just white supremacy dressed up as right wing outrage. In 2016, Rhodes had added to his heady mix of imaginary Marxists and menacing immigrant hordes a putative “Islamic” threat of terrorism that would collaborate with the Latino organization La Raza and with the Black Lives Matter movement. Somehow he held that the late Republican Sen. John McCain was orchestrating these sinister forces, and in 2015 Rhodes advocated hanging him.

Despite the group’s pose as a defender of the constitution against what they call “Islamic terrorism,” they are just a homegrown American version of al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda hijacked planes with which to attack government buildings in Washington, D.C.

The Oath Keepers planned to use boats on the Potomac to ferry over heavy weaponry with which to do the same thing.

Al-Qaeda saw the US government as a conspiracy to impose a left-liberal democratic order on people, whereas they wanted a government reflective of their ethnic and religious nativism.

The Oath Keepers agree after their own manner.

Al-Qaeda was xenophobic and did not want American Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

The Oath Keepers are xenophobic and don’t want immigrants in the U.S.

Al-Qaeda was fascinated with military training and with weaponry, and were willing to use these against innocent civilians.

The Oath Keepers also armed and trained themselves and were planning attacks on civilian lawmakers.

Al-Qaeda killed twenty-nine people inside the Pentagon with Flight 77 (plus 64 passengers) on 9/11.

The Capitol insurrectionists were responsible for the death of Iraq War vet and Capitol policeman Brian Sicknick, whom they assaulted and sprayed with bear spray, and who died of stroke. They were also responsible for driving 4 members of the Capitol police to suicide.

In fact, the Oath Keepers came much closer to disrupting the workings of the US government than al-Qaeda did.

By the way, the al-Qaeda cell around the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar `Abdel Rahman, who plotted and carried out the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, were also charged with seditious conspiracy, and the government won its case.

The DOJ Indictment alleged that

“Rhodes and certain co-conspirators, to include selected regional leaders, planned to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power by January 20, 2021, which included multiple ways to deploy force. They coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington, D.C., equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical ger, and were prepared to answer Rhodes’s call to take up arms at Rhodes’s direction. Som co-conspirators also amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., distributed them among “quick reaction force (“QRF”) teams, and planned to use firerms in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

Although CBS News editors circulated a memo instructing their reporters not to call January 6 an “insurrection,” it seems clear that that is exactly what it was. Why is CBS running interference for these terrorists?

The DOJ complaint says that the insurrectionists invaded the outer part of the Capitol at 2 pm on Jan. 6, and that “at that time, Rhodes entered the restricted area of the Capitol grounds and directed his followers to meet him at the Capitol.”

Then Oath Keeper fascist brown shirts marched up the east steps of the Capitol in “stack” formation. Stack One joined an angry mob, some of whom assaulted police officers shouting “take their shields” and “Our house!” At 2:38, the indictment says, the doors were breached and Stack One advanced into the Capitol with the crowd. Stack One then split up, one group heading for the Senate Chamber, where they ran up against stiff resistance from the Capitol police. Unable to break into the Senate, they regrouped and left the building. The other half of Stack One attempted to find Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, but failed to do so and left.

Another formation of Oath Keepers constituted Stack Two and forced their way into the Rotunda. They again ran into a forceful response from the police.

Still others were waiting outside Washington, DC, having formed Quick Reaction Force teams.

After Joe Biden was elected president, Rhodes messaged his group on the Signal app, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.” He later said that they should emulate Serbs who rose up when Slobodan Melosevic “stole their election” [ in October 2000].

As his buddies in Florida were undergoing training in “unconventional warfare,” Rhodes later texted his group that if President Biden took office, “It wil be a bloody and desperate fight. We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”

On Dec. 22, 2020, Rhodes said in an interview with a local Oath Keepers leader that if Biden came to power “We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them. That’s what’s going to have to happen.” He also urged Trump to deploy the US military to halt the transfer of power.

Rhodes said he wanted to “scare the shit out of” congressional representatives and frighten them into decertifying Biden. Rhodes then bought a weapon sight and night-vision goggles for $7,000 and sent them to a contact near Washington, D.C., suggesting he had some night-time sniping in mind.

Some conspirators said they planned to bring weapons (“long rifles, some sidearms”), others said they would depend on the quick reaction teams to bring them in from 10 minutes outside the city at the right time. One of them, Caldwell, proposed using a boat on the Potomac to bring the “heavy weapons” over.

Rhodes seems to have spent $20,000 on weaponry and ammunition for the operation. On the morning of January 6, Oath Keeper leaders spoke of “armed conflict” and “guerrilla war.”

After their plot to find Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and other representatives and Senators failed, the Oath Keepers continued to conspire to return the next morning, or in subsequent weeks. Rhodes bought another $15,000 or so of weaponry and sights. They seem to have wanted to stop the inauguration on January 20, but could not find a way to do so. The inauguration was small and very well guarded, but if it had been a traditional sort of event, it looks as though the Oath Keepers would have tried to shoot it up.

January 6 and its aftermath clearly could have been far more bloody if the Capitol police and then the Secret Service had not done such a good job of protecting elected officials from these heavily armed and militarily trained wack jobs. It should be remembered how the odious Trump cultivated these right-wing militias, and told a similar group to “stand back and stand by” during his debate with Joe Biden. They stood by all right.

Bristol, UK (Special to Informed Comment) –

Ninety days into the Taliban takeover, the situation in the country is worsening by the minute. Since Afghanistan is no longer backed by Western governments, and the Taliban government is heavily sanctioned, the country is on the verge of famine. As hunger rises in prominence and child fatalities sore, the Afghan winter and Taliban will be a deadly combination.

With a lack of competent governance, international hostility and worldwide scrutiny, the situation in Afghanistan is described by the executive director of the World Food Program, David Beasley as “as bad as you possibly can imagine”. As the financial situation in the country deteriorates, Afghanistan is entering into the “worlds worse humanitarian crisis we have ever seen“.

As the Taliban continue to regiment towns and territories, journalists report that children are being sold and human rights are being abused. In Afghanistan right now, law-abiding citizens are being forced to choose between life and death under the new Taliban regime.

Ever been Hungry? Think again!

As the December cold looms close, the first speck of snow is expected to reach Kabul any day now, making acquiring food even more difficult. As the La Niña weather pattern threatens a second drought in the country this year, the harvest of wheat, which accounts for almost 60% of Afghans’ caloric intake will be disappointing. Owing to these circumstances, only “5% of households have enough to eat every day” in Afghanistan.

As worldwide leaders ponder how to deal with the new Taliban regime, they have ceased their humanitarian and other aid. Forty percent of the country’s GDP has evaporatedand the US has frozen $9.5 billion of Afghanistan government reserves. A contributing factor to this is that Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is a significant Taliban government member is currently on the ‘Global Wanted Terrorist’ and the FBI’s most-wanted list. Owing to Haqqani’s notoriety and the fact that the Taliban are an internationally recognised terrorist organisation, Western governments are declining to release billions of dollars in foreign aid to help Afghanistan. Thus, the $220 million a month needed to moderately feed the 22.8 million hungry mouths won’t be available this year.

With economic implosion and the blockage of foreign aid, Afghanistan this winter is preparing for a catastrophe. This is because “the cold will only finish the work that malnutrition began months or years ago”

According to the UNOCHA, it is estimated that more than half of the 39 million Afghan population needs humanitarian assistance in 2021. One in two Afghans face emergency levels of acute food insecurity.

A new deadly voyage?

Desperate Afghans are looking to escape Taliban control. Some 122,000 Afghans were safely evacuated from Kabul back in August. Many more seek to depart now.

David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Programme has stated that:

“This winter, millions of Afghans will be forced to choose between migration and starvation unless we can step up our life-saving assistance, and unless the economy can be resuscitated”.

The reason being is that for Afghan citizens who are unwilling to bandwagon the extremist ideologies of the Taliban, the threat of food insecurity, human rights abuses, and economic and violent pressures are pushing more Afghans to flee the border to safety

The International Organization for Migration has indicated that the Turkish authorities have returned more than one million Afghans to their native country in the last 6 months. This is because Turkey is unwilling to host another country’s population in addition to existing Syrian refugees. Yet, with no money or food and increasingly poor health, Afghans are being deported back to Afghanistan, broke and broken.

The UN High Commission on Refugees has warned that by the end of 2021, the humanitarian crisis will displace half a million more Afghans. However, with little recognition from neighbouring countries, Afghans will be forced to seek refuge further afield, with many experts believing that they will head for Europe. This prospect has triggered a wave of anxiety for European countries as the nightmares of the 2015 migration crisis is still a vivid memory. In addition to this, with the unfolding border crisis between Belarus and EU member Poland, the potential influx of Afghan migrants ending up on European shores could unravel years of border developments that have been implemented to manage illegal border crossings into Europe.

Afghan families are being forced to do the unthinkable to survive. Afghanistan parents have begun selling their own children as food poverty and malnutrition spiral, according to the BBC, The Telegraph, NBC and the Insider. Reports suggest that children as young as 9 years old are being sold as wives to men for as little as $500.

This misery among young men is a recruiting opportunity for the so-called Islamic State group, the Afghan affiliate of which is known as “Khurasan,” the medieval Muslim name for eastern Iran and the parts of Afghanistan and Central Asia that abut it. lS-K, also known as ISIS-K and ISKP, is the most extreme and violent of all Jihadist militant groups operating out of Afghanistan. IS-K pays their soldiers salaries, and is one of the few prospective employers in some areas, given that the “situation inside the country remains dire.”

One Afghan told Human Rights Watch:

“We don’t have enough food … we only eat once a day. With the winter approaching, the situation can get even worse than this. The Afghan [Taliban] government doesn’t have any clear plan to fix the hunger issue, and I doubt if the international community has one. What I clearly see is that soon most Afghans will die just for not having food, and as always, no one will care.”

In addition to this, a woman in Southeast Afghanistan, when asked about the situation in Afghanistan, stated that the problem is “Worse than what appears in the media.”

Liam Felloni holds an MSc. in International Security from Bristol University in the UK.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

MSNBC: “Afghanistan On Verge Of Famine And Economic Collapse Amid Humanitarian Crisis

For some, the memory of that horrific day included headshaking over the mistakes this country made in responding to it, mistakes we live with to this moment.

Among the more prominent heads being shaken over the wrongdoing that followed 9/11, and the failure to correct any of it, was that of Jane Harman, a Democrat from California, who was then in the House of Representatives. She would join all but one member of Congress — fellow California representative Barbara Lee — in voting for the remarkably vague Authorization for the Use of Force, or AUMF, which paved the way for the invasion of Afghanistan and so much else. It would, in fact, put Congress in cold storage from then on, allowing the president to bypass it in deciding for years to come whom to attack and where, as long as he justified whatever he did by alluding to a distinctly imprecise term: terrorism. So, too, Harman would vote for the Patriot Act, which would later be used to put in place massive warrantless surveillance policies, and then, a year later, for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq (based on the lie that Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction).

But on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the attacks, Harman offered a different message, one that couldn’t have been more appropriate or, generally speaking, rarer in this country — a message laced through and through with regret. “[W]e went beyond the carefully tailored use of military force authorized by Congress,” she wrote remorsefully, referring to that 2001 authorization to use force against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. So, too, Harman railed against the decision, based on “cherry-picked intelligence,” to go to war in Iraq; the eternal use of drone strikes in the forever wars; as well as the creation of an offshore prison of injustice at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and of CIA black sites around the world meant for the torture of prisoners from the war on terror. The upshot, she concluded, was to create “more enemies than we destroyed.”

Such regrets and even apologies, while scarce, have not been utterly unknown in post-9/11-era Washington. In March 2004, for example, Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief for the Bush White House, would publicly apologize to the American people for the administration’s failure to stop the 9/11 attacks. “Your government failed you,” the former official told Congress and then proceeded to criticize the decision to go to war in Iraq as well. Similarly, after years of staunchly defending the Iraq War, Senator John McCain would, in 2018, finally term it “a mistake, a very serious one,” adding, “I have to accept my share of the blame for it.” A year later, a PEW poll would find that a majority of veterans regretted their service in Afghanistan and Iraq, feeling that both wars were “not worth fighting.”

Recently, some more minor players in the post-9/11 era have apologized in unique ways for the roles they played. For instance, Terry Albury, an FBI agent, would be convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking documents to the media, exposing the bureau’s policies of racial and religious profiling, as well as the staggering range of surveillance measures it conducted in the name of the war on terror. Sent to prison for four years, Albury recently completed his sentence. As Janet Reitman reported in the New York Times Magazine, feelings of guilt over the “human cost” of what he was involved in led to his act of revelation. It was, in other words, an apology in action.

As was the similar act of Daniel Hale, a former National Security Agency analyst who had worked at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan helping to identify human targets for drone attacks. He would receive a 45-month sentence under the Espionage Act for his leaks— documents he had obtained on such strikes while working as a private contractor after his government service.

As Hale would explain, he acted out of a feeling of intense remorse. In his sentencing statement, he described watching “through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts.” His version of an apology-in-action came from his regret that he had continued on at his post even after witnessing the horrors of those endless killings, often of civilians. “Nevertheless, in spite of my better instinct, I continued to follow orders.” Eventually, a drone attack on a woman and her two daughters led him over the brink. “How could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness” was the way he put it and so he leaked his apology and is now serving his time.

“We Were Wrong, Plain and Simple”

Outside of government and the national security state, there have been others who struck a chord of atonement as well. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, for instance, Jameel Jaffer, once Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU and now head of the Knight First Amendment Institute, took “the opportunity to look inward.” With some remorse, he reflected on the choices human-rights organizations had made in campaigning against the abuse and torture of war-on-terror prisoners.

Jaffer argued that their emphasis should have been less on the degradation of American “traditions and values” and more on the costs in terms of human suffering, on the “experience of the individuals harmed.” In taking up the cases of individuals whose civil liberties had often been egregiously violated in the name of the war on terror, the ACLU revealed much about the damage to their clients. Still, the desire to have done even more clearly haunts Jaffer. Concluding that we “substituted a debate about abstractions for a debate about prisoners’ specific experiences,” Jaffer asks, “[I]s it possible” that the chosen course of the NGOs “did something more than just bracket prisoners’ human rights — that it might have, even if only in a small way, contributed to their dehumanization as well?”

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Jonathan Greenblatt, now head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), spoke in a similarly rueful fashion about that organization’s decision to oppose plans for a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, near Ground Zero — a plan that became known popularly as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” As the 20th anniversary approached, he said bluntly, “We owe the Muslim community an apology.” The intended center fell apart under intense public pressure that Greenblatt feels the ADL contributed to. “[T]hrough deep reflection and conversation with many friends within the Muslim community,” he adds, “the real lesson is a simple one: we were wrong, plain and simple.” The ADL had recommended that the center be built in a different location. Now, as Greenblatt sees it, an institution that “could have helped to heal our country as we nursed the wounds from the horror of 9/11” never came into being.

The irony here is that while a number of those Americans least responsible for the horrors of the last two decades have directly or indirectly placed a critical lens on their own actions (or lack thereof), the figures truly responsible said not an apologetic word. Instead, there was what Jaffer has called an utter lack of “critical self-reflection” among those who launched, oversaw, commanded, or supported America’s forever wars.

Just ask yourself: When have any of the public officials who ensured the excesses of the war on terror reflected publicly on their mistakes or expressed the least sense of regret about them (no less offering actual apologies for them)? Where are the generals whose reflections could help forestall future failed attempts at “nation-building” in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia? Where are the military contractors whose remorse led them to forsake profits for humanity? Where are any voices of reflection or apology from the military-industrial complex including from the CEOs of the giant weapons makers who raked in fortunes off those two decades of war? Have any of them joined the small chorus of voices reflecting on the wrongs that we’ve done to ourselves as a nation and to others globally? Not on the recent 9/11 anniversary, that’s for sure.

Looking Over Your Shoulder or Into Your Heart?

What we still normally continue to hear instead is little short of a full-throated defense of their actions in overseeing those disastrous wars and other conflicts. To this day, for instance, former Afghan and Iraq War commander David Petraeus speaks of this country’s “enormous accomplishments” in Afghanistan and continues to double down on the notion of nation-building. He still insists that, globally speaking, Washington “generally has to lead” due to its “enormous preponderance of military capabilities,” including its skill in “advising, assisting, and enabling host nations’ forces with the armada of drones we now have, and an unequal[ed] ability to fuse intelligence.”

Similarly, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, national security advisor to Donald Trump, had a virtual melt down on MSNBC days before the anniversary, railing against what he considered President Biden’s mistaken decision to actually withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan. “After we left Iraq,” he complained, “al-Qaeda morphed into ISIS, and we had to return.” But it didn’t seem to cross his mind to question the initial ill-advised and falsely justified decision to invade and occupy that country in the first place.

And none of this is atypical. We have repeatedly seen those who created the disastrous post-9/11 policies defend them no matter what the facts tell us. As a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo, who wrote the infamous memos authorizing the torture of war-on-terror detainees under interrogation, followed up the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan with a call for President Obama to “restart the interrogation program that helped lead us to bin Laden.” As the Senate Torture Report on Interrogation would conclude several years later, the use of such brutal techniques of torture did not in fact lead the U.S. to bin Laden. On the contrary, as NPR has summed it up, “The Senate Intelligence Committee came to the conclusion that those claims are overblown or downright lies.”

Among the unrepentant, of course, is George W. Bush, the man in the White House on 9/11 and the president who oversaw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the securitization of key American institutions and policies. Bush proved defiant on the 20th anniversary. The optics told it all. Speaking to a crowd at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where that hijacked plane with 40 passengers and four terrorists crashed on 9/11, the former president was flanked by former Vice President Dick Cheney. His Machiavellian oversight of the worst excesses of the war on terror had, in fact, led directly to era-defining abrogations of laws and norms. But no apologies were forthcoming.

Instead, in his speech that day, Bush highlighted in a purely positive fashion the very policies his partnership with Cheney had spawned. “The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability,” he said, giving a quiet nod of approval to policies that, if they were “comforting” in his estimation, also defied the rule of law, constitutional protections, and previously sacrosanct norms limiting presidential power.

Over the course of these 20 years, this country has had to face the hard lesson that accountability for the mistakes, miscalculations, and lawless policies of the war on terror has proven not just elusive, but inconceivable. Typically, for instance, the Senate Torture Report, which documented in 6,000 mostly still-classified pages the brutal treatment of detainees at CIA black sites, did not lead to any officials involved being held accountable. Nor has there been any accountability for going to war based upon that lie about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Instead, for the most part, Washington has decided all these years later to continue in the direction outlined by President Obama during the week leading up to his 2009 inauguration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he said. “On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards… I don’t want [CIA personnel and others to] suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”

Looking over their shoulders is one thing, looking into their own hearts quite another.

The recent deaths of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who, among other horrors, supervised the building of Guantanamo and the use of brutal interrogation techniques there and elsewhere and of former CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, who accepted the reasoning of Department of Justice lawyers when it came to authorizing torture for his agency, should remind us of one thing: America’s leaders, civilian and military, are unlikely to rethink their actions that were so very wrong in the war on terror. Apologies are seemingly out of the question.

So, we should be thankful for the few figures who courageously breached the divide between self-righteous defensiveness when it came to the erosion of once-hallowed laws and norms and the kind of healing that the passage of time and the opportunity to reflect can yield. Perhaps history, through the stories left behind, will prove more competent when it comes to acknowledging wrongdoing as the best way of looking forward.

Copyright 2021 Karen J. Greenberg

The Saudi government was not behind the September 11 attacks, and these documents don’t indicate that it was. The Saudis are heavily invested in the U.S. stock market, and it was predictable that an attack like that on September 11 would cause stock prices to fall. As it was, the attacks caused a $1.4 trillion loss in market value. While the size of Saudi investments in US securities may have been exaggerated, for a small country like Saudi Arabia they were very substantial and the losses hurt a great deal.

The SEC would have known if the Saudis suddenly pulled a lot of money out of the stock market in August, 2001. They didn’t. So why would they want to inflict that kind of harm on their own portfolios?

The Saudi royal family hated Bin Laden. He had dared criticize them for leasing bases to the US during the Gulf War to push Iraq’s Saddam Hussein back out of Kuwait. They stripped him of his Saudi citizenship and he went into exile, first in Sudan and then in Afghanistan.

The Saudi Arabian government decided a long time ago that it needed the U.S.for its security umbrella. It is fabulously wealthy but not a military powerhouse. The quagmire in Yemen since 2015 shows that. In 1991 the US military defended Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf from Saddam’s Iraq. Before that they depended on the US against the Soviets and leftist movements. In the 1990 and zeroes they needed the US against Iran, which is over three times as populous as Saudi Arabia.

So regent Abdullah b. Abdul Aziz, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia in 2001, would have wanted to inflict major damage on Saudi investments in New York and damage the country providing him security, why?

People keep saying that 15 of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. So what? Usamah Bin Laden chose them as muscle precisely in order to sour relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, the government of which he was trying to overthrow. Of the some 5,000 al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan in 2001, very few were Saudis. As for the hijackers, the important ones were the pilots, and they included an Egyptian and a Lebanese. So was Husni Mubarak in Egypt also behind the attacks because one Egyptian national was a leader of them?

This is illogical and guilt by association.

The newly released records cast suspicion on a graduate student who used to hang around the embassy without any obvious role. He met the two hijackers based in San Diego, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar. They told the embassy they were students, and one of the purposes of the Saudi embassy in DC is to take care of the tens of thousands of Saudi students in the US. Bayoumi is reported to have had sympathies with the militants.

But some of that evidence was from an ex-wife who said that Bayoumi was always talking about how Muslims had to do something for their community and that they were at jihad. I know the FBI has made a fetish out of the word jihad, but really. This kind of talk was a dime a dozen among some Muslims in the 1990s and did not indicate they wanted to blow anything up. Bayoumi ran up big bills and seems to have enjoyed American consumerism. And his ex-wife, really? The FBI must really be tired of hearing from Muslim-American spouses about how their ex is al-Qaeda and should be thrown in jail with the key lost.

But it isn’t at all clear that Bayoumi even knew al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar were themselves terrorists. The al-Qaeda cells in the US tried to throw surveillance off track by going to strip clubs and drinking in bars, behavior intelligence agencies would not expect in fundamentalist militants. The evidence against Bayoumi is completely circumstantial and proves nothing.

It certainly doesn’t show that the Saudi government was behind al-Qaeda, which is just a crazy conspiracy theory. It is exactly like saying that Nancy Pelosi is behind Qanon and that she planned out the January 6, 2021 capitol attack.

Unlike Bayoumi, who seems to have been one of those hangers-on one finds at embassies of the wealthy oil states in Washington, Fahad al-Thumairy was actually a diplomat at the embassy. He was said to have led a radical faction at his mosque in DC and to have had contacts with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar and perhaps with members of the Algerian-based Armed Islamic Group, who sought to blow up LAX.

Again, knowing or helping al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar is not a proof of anything. They were under cover posing as Saudi students. Embassy personnel were supposed to be in touch with and to help such people.

But, as the FBI says, that al-Thumairy was on the phone with people from the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) is concerning. Unlike Bayoumi’s contacts with the San Diego-based hijackers, that is harder to explain. The GIA people were Algerians and it isn’t clear why a Saudi diplomat was talking to them.

But if al-Thumairy were a radical, it would show that a minor diplomat at the Saudi embassy had those sympathies, not that the government of Saudi Arabia did.

A Trump appointee to a position in the State Department took part in the Jan. 6 insurrection. That doesn’t mean that Mike Pompeo planned out the invasion of the Capitol.

A lot of Saudi diplomats get their positions by being friends of friends of the royal family. Although there is an Institute of Diplomatic Studies in Riyadh, my guess is that the Saudi diplomats have a lot of random, untrained people among them. Al-Thumairy was likely one of these.

The eagerness to tag the Saudi government with 9/11 comes from many quarters. The victims want someone rich to sue for damages. Rivals for influence in Washington like the Israelis and the Turks and their lobbies in DC have an interest in taking the Saudis down a peg. The Saudis are widely disliked because of their brand of Wahhabi fundamentalism. Islamophobia plays into it.

That you have someone like Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman at the helm of the kingdom now probably hurts after the CIA leaked their conclusion that he was behind the murder of dissident Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But the case against the Saudi government of being involved in 9/11 is non-existent.

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Bonus Video:

CNBC: “Saudi prince says he hopes the U.S. will release all 9/11 documents”

( The Conversation) – The 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York resulted in the loss of 2,753 people in the Twin Towers and surrounding area. After the attack, more than 100,000 responders and recovery workers from every U.S. state – along with some 400,000 residents and other workers around ground zero – were exposed to a toxic cloud of dust that fell as a ghostly, thick layer of ash and then hung in the air for more than three months.

The World Trade Center dust plume, or WTC dust, consisted of a dangerous mixture of cement dust and particles, asbestos and a class of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants. These include cancer-causing dioxins and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are byproducts of fuel combustion.

The dust also contained heavy metals that are known to be poisonous to the human body and brain, such as lead – used in the manufacturing of flexible electrical cables – and mercury, which is found in float valves, switches and fluorescent lamps. The dust also contained cadmium, a carcinogen toxic to the kidneys that is used in the manufacturing of electric batteries and pigments for paints.

Polychlorinated biphenyls, human-made chemicals used in electrical transformers, were also part of the toxic stew. PCBs are known to be carcinogenic, toxic to the nervous system and disruptive to the reproductive system. But they became even more harmful when incinerated at high heat from the jets’ fuel combustion and then carried by very fine particles.

WTC dust was made up of both “large” particulate matter and very small, fine and ultrafine ones. These particularly small particles are known to be highly toxic, especially to the nervous system since they can travel directly through the nasal cavity to the brain.

Many first responders and others who were directly exposed to the dust developed a severe and persistent cough that lasted for a month, on average. They were treated at Mount Sinai Hospital and received care at the Clinic of Occupational Medicine, a well-known center for work-related diseases.

I am a physician specializing in occupational medicine who began working directly with 9/11 survivors in my role as director of the WTC Health Program Data Center at Mount Sinai beginning in 2012. That program collects data, as well as monitors and oversees the public health of WTC rescue and recovery workers. After eight years in that role, I moved to Florida International University in Miami, where I am planning to continue working with 9/11 responders who are moving to Florida as they reach retirement age.

From acute to chronic conditions

After the initial “acute” health problems that 9/11 responders faced, they soon began experiencing a wave of chronic diseases that continue to affect them 20 years later. The persistent cough gave way to respiratory diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and upper airway diseases such as chronic rhinosinusitis, laryngitis and nasopharyngitis.

The litany of respiratory diseases also put many of them at risk for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), which occurs at a higher rate in WTC survivors than in the general population. This condition occurs when stomach acids reenter the esophagus, or food pipe, that connects the stomach to the throat. As a consequence of either the airway or the digestive disorders, many of these survivors also struggle with sleep apnea, which requires additional treatments.

Further compounding the tragedy, about eight years after the attacks, cancers began to turn up in 9/11 survivors. These include tumors of the blood and lymphoid tissues such as lymphoma, myeloma and leukemia, which are well known to affect workers exposed to carcinogens in the workplace. But survivors also suffer from other cancers, including breast, head and neck, prostate, lung and thyroid cancers.

Some have also developed mesothelioma, an aggressive form of cancer related to exposure to asbestos. Asbestos was used in the early construction of the north tower until public advocacy and broader awareness of its health dangers brought its use to a halt.

And the psychological trauma that 9/11 survivors experienced has left many suffering from persistent mental health challenges. One study published in 2020 found that of more than 16,000 WTC responders for whom data was collected, nearly half reported a need for mental health care, and 20% of those who were directly affected developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

Many have told me that the contact they had with parts of human bodies or with the deadly scene and the tragic days afterward left a permanent mark on their lives. They are unable to forget the images, and many of them suffer from mood disorders as well as cognitive impairments and other behavioral issues, including substance use disorder.

An aging generation of survivors

Now, 20 years on, these survivors face a new challenge as they age and move toward retirement – a difficult life transition that can sometimes lead to mental health decline. Prior to retirement, the daily drumbeat of work activity and a steady schedule often helps keep the mind busy. But retirement can sometimes leave a void – one that for 9/11 survivors is too often filled with unwanted memories of the noises, smells, fear and despair of that terrible day and the days that followed. Many survivors have told me they do not want to return to Manhattan and certainly not to the WTC.

Aging can also bring with it forgetfulness and other cognitive challenges. But studies show that these natural processes are accelerated and more severe in 9/11 survivors, similar to the experience of veterans from war zones. This is a concerning trend, but all the more so because a growing body of research, including our own preliminary study, is finding links between cognitive impairment in 9/11 responders and dementia. A recent Washington Post piece detailed how 9/11 survivors are experiencing these dementia-like conditions in their 50s – far earlier than is typical.

The COVID-19 pandemic, too, has taken a toll on those who have already suffered from 9/11. People with preexisting conditions have been at far higher risk during the pandemic. Not surprisingly, a recent study found a higher incidence of COVID-19 in WTC responders from January through August 2020.

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Honoring the 9/11 survivors

The health risks posed by direct exposure to the acrid dust was underestimated at the time, and poorly understood. Appropriate personal protective equipment, such as P100 half-face respirators, was not available at that time.

But now, 20 years on, we know much more about the risks – and we have much greater access to protective equipment that can keep responders and recovery workers safe following disasters. Yet, too often, I see that we have not learned and applied these lessons.

For instance, in the immediate aftermath of the condominium collapse near Miami Beach in June, it took days before P100 half-face respirators were fully available and made mandatory for the responders. Other examples around the world are even worse: One year after the Beirut explosion in August 2020, very little action has been taken to investigate and manage the physical and mental health consequences among responders and the impacted community.

A similarly dire situation is occurring in the immediate aftermath of a July 2021 chemical fire in Durban, South Africa.

Applying the lessons learned from 9/11 is a critically important way to honor the victims and the brave men and women who took part in the desperate rescue and recovery efforts back on those terrible days.

Roberto Lucchini, Professor of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

ABC News: “First responders struggle with long-term health effects 20 years after 9/11”