September 11: One Year After

By

Bashir A. Muzakkari

bashir@weeklytrust.com

One year after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, only the hopelessly naïve or wilfully ignorant could continue to seriously maintain that the military response of the United States has been aimed at wiping out terrorism. The "war on terrorism" (as they call it) has been revealed as the political banner under which US is undertaking a military power to assert its interests in the world.

Given the fact that the US is in possession of the greatest amount of weapons of mass destruction ever assembled in history, since September 11, the US has established a network of military bases and access rights. US forces are present in most part of Asia; Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Pakistan and India.

The suicide attacks that killed almost 5,000 people at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon are a monstrous crime, although the US government has failed to provide any significant evidence of the direct responsibility of Osama bin Laden, let alone the Taliban regime. The September 11 attacks, however, in no way justify the crimes being committed by US against the people of Afghanistan, and the new crimes already being planned in the Pentagon against other nations in the Middle East, Central Asia.

Every war waged by the US over the past century has been accompanied by provocations orchesterated by the US government to stampede public opinion and give a defensive cover to military agression. The pattern is well established, from the campaign over the explosion of the battleship "Maine" which ushered in the US war against Spain in 1898 to the Tokin and Persian Gulfs in Vietenam and Iraq respectively and the Racak massacre, the pretext for US intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

The target of the latest US millitary bully in Afghanistan is the Taliban. However, one searches in vain in the extensive media coverage of the said "war on terrorism" for any coherent explanation of the origin of this Islamic organisation, its social and ideological base and its rise to power.

The omission is no accident, any serious examination of the Taliban will certainly reveal the culpability of US in fostering the current theocratic regime in Kabul. The Bush administration rails against the Taliban for harbouring the Islamic Jihadist ‘Osama Bin Laden’ and his Al-Qa’ida organisation.

In the 80s, successive US government spent billion of dollars in funding the Islamic Jihad against the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul in order to undermine the Soviet Union.

Mujahidins from the Middle-East, Central Asia, Africa and Phillipines were trained and armed to fight in Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden was the man in-charge of the training before he went ahead and built his own camp and in 1989 established Al-Qa’ida for Arab Afghans.

In the late 90s, the US turned a blind eye to the Islamic fundamentalism and regressive financial situation of the Taliban, which was funded by Osama Bin Laden.

The primary factors in determining the twist and turns of the US orientation in Afghanistan is the threat of Islamic fundamentalists and how best to exploit the opportunities that opens in the Central Asia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since the last decade, the US has been eyeing Russia, China, the European powers and Japan for political influence in this strategic region and for the right to exploit the world’s largest untapped reserves of oil and gas in Turkmenistan, Kazakstan, Uzebekistan and Tajikistan.

Anyone who considers it unthinktable that the US government would condone the slaughter of its own citizens, underestimates both the ruthlessness of the US and criminality of the Bush administration. It would not be the first time a bourgeois government bedevilled by contradictions and crisis at home and abroad, sought to extradict itself by creating a pretext for military action, hoping to grab resources and strategic advantage overseas and whip up a patriotic consensus domestically. Certainly the Bush administration is a government in crisis.

If the war against terrorism was fought with rhetoric, US may have won it by now.

Recently, leaked Pentagon documents as well as reports on preparations by the US military indicated that the US is preparing a massive invasion of Iraq.

Such a war would rank as one of the greatest crimes of the century, an unprovoked attack by the world’s super power against a nation that has been ravaged by more than a decade of sanction and subjected to unceasing military political provocations.

For more than a decade, the US has used the weapons inspection issue as a means of launching provocations and espionage against Iraq. At the same time it has seized on Iraq’s inability to prove the unprovable, that there exist no weapons of mass destruction or the means to produce them.

The war launched by Bush Snr. claimed the lives of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, most of them were incinerated and killed in their bunkers. Thousands of civilians died in cruise missile attacks and bombing raids.

The US bombardment effectively destroyed Iraqi’s industrial and social infrastructures, leaving the masses homeless and unemployed and depriving them the most essential medical and social services. The result was unprecedented poverty, hunger and diseases.

These wars are not aimed at eliminating terrorism, rather, the US is defending its own personal interest in the regions affected. The US wants to seize the control of Iraq’s oilfields and turn the country into an American protectorate.

Pinochet, Noriega, Torrijos, Velasco and others are some of the US backed dictators. I don’t understand why more Americans do not question the schizophrenic nature of US foreign policy. War with Iraq is not about bringing peace and democracy to the world - it is about oil, money and power. But the main denominator that runs through international or diplomatic theory that I know is, you don’t invade Iraq to bear the palm of its oil or crude alone, but to change its policies and that is if they were porous in the first place. The US pursuit is criminally motivated.

Why burn down the whole house over one bug? If US really wants Saddam and Saddam only, why not send in her Special Forces to take him out? I see no reasoon to risk the lives of innocent Iraqis. The only reason US is talking of war with Iraq is to boost her economy with a bonus via her defense industry, a bonanza that comes from a full scale war.

The world must therefore unite under one voice to stop the treacherous plot by the US. In this regard the United Nations must be at the forefront of this effort before we all become enslaved to the evil machinations of the so-called super power.