The War on Terror: 20 Years of Bloodshed and Delusion

 

"Twenty-four hours after that blowback stunned the planet on 9/11, with sympathy messages pouring in from every capital—including Havana—the recently deceased war criminal Donald Rumsfeld declared at a meeting of the National Security Council that recalcitrant states, regardless of their involvement in 9/11, should pay the price. Accordingly, he suggested, “Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just Al Qaeda?” The next day, Paul Wolfowitz, the No. 2 at the Department of Defense, amplified this message by urging a “broad and sustained campaign” that would include “ending states who sponsor terrorism.” Within a week, the Great Decider himself, George W. Bush, had greenlighted an all-out war: “Let’s hit them hard. We want to signal this is a change from the past. We want to cause other countries like Syria and Iran to change their view.”4

Then the usual minions stepped in. Interviewed by David Remnick for The New Yorker, Dennis Ross, the US director of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” was insistent: “We can’t just do the usual thing—bomb a few targets, if it turns out to be Osama Bin Laden. If we respond the same old way, nothing will change.” Not to be outdone, the neocon Charles Krauthammer defended the invasion of Afghanistan two weeks later in his Washington Post column: “We are fighting because the bastards killed 5,000 [sic] of our people, and if we do not kill them, they are going to kill us again. This is a war of revenge and deterrence…. The liberationist talk must therefore be for foreign consumption.”5

Notably, these “bastards” and “enemies” did not include Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the two countries from which most of the 9/11 terrorists hailed."

READ ARTICLE BY TARIQ ALI