Category: News and Views
just a quick essay on my thaughts, again quite long, so wwill take up a few posts. sorry, bare with me, i'm editting as i go a long, will start in post 2.
introduction
Suppression of one's own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful
states, at least those that are not defeated.
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.
A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the US. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the US from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them," Eric Margolis writes. "'Bleeding the US,' in his words. The United States, first under George W Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap ... Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction ... may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” - particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.
That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at once.As discussed in the book 9-11, written shortly after those attacks occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognise “that a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the US and its allies into a ‘diabolical trap’, as the French foreign minister put it”.
The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter US and Western policies toward the Islamic world”, and largely succeeded: “US forces and policies are completing the radicalisation of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.
The first 9/11
Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity”, as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognised at the time, but no such idea was even considered.
In 9-11, the author quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”, an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror centre that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists - call them “the Kandahar boys” - who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the US succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. The goal, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us” to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the National Security Council that, if the US could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world”.
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence”, as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.
These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” - an anachronistic holdover from World War II - to “internal security”, a concept with a chilling interpretation in US-dominated Latin American circles.
In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites”, including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the US client state.
The consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course, reverberate.
From kidnapping and torture to assassination
All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The lead article discusses “the visionary international order” of the “second half of the twentieth century” marked by “the universalisation of an American vision of commercial prosperity”. There is something to that account, but it does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.
The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an end at least a phase in the “war on terror” re-declared by President George W Bush on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its significance.
On May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law, beginning with the invasion itself.
There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition - except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they shot in self-defense when she “lunged” at them, according to the White House.
A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have considered the option of capturing bin Laden alive: “The administration had made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior US official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.”
The authors add: “For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance.” Furthermore, “capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges”. Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing - an act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.
As the Atlantic inquiry observes, “The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration's counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.” That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who “told German TV that the US raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial”, contrasting Schmidt with US Attorney General Eric Holder, who “defended the decision to kill bin Laden although he didn't pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House panel ... that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way’".
The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticised by allies. The highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that “justice was done” as an “absurdity” that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law. Pakistan law “requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international human rights law insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever violent death occurs from government or police action. The US is therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true circumstances of this killing.”
Robertson usefully reminds us that:
Quote:“It was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden - the Nazi leadership - the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution 'would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride ... the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.’”
Eric Margolis comments that “Washington has never made public the evidence of its claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks”, presumably one reason why “polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that the US government and/or Israel were behind 9/11”, while in the Muslim world skepticism is much higher. “An open trial in the US or at the Hague would have exposed these claims to the light of day,” he continues, a practical reason why Washington should have followed the law.
In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects”. In June 2002, FBI head Robert Mueller, in what the Washington Post described as “among his most detailed public comments on the origins of the attacks”, could say only that “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany, and the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources in Afghanistan”.
What the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to permit a trial of bin Laden if they were presented with evidence. Thus, it is not true, as President Obama claimed in his White House statement after bin Laden’s death, that “[w]e quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda”.
There has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in mid-2002, but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in civilised societies - and whatever the evidence might be, it does not warrant murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily apprehended and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided since. Thus, the 9/11 Commission provided extensive circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It is doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent court, considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any event, the conclusions of a congressionally authorised investigation, however convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused from suspect to convicted.
There is much talk of bin Laden's “confession”, but that was a boast, not a confession, with as much credibility as my “confession” that I won the London marathon.
Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, and still does.
Crimes of aggression
It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognised in much of the Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well. He had some experience with assassinations. He had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a CIA-organised operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly women and girls as they left the mosque - one of those innumerable crimes that do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of “wrong agency”. Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks.
One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests that the movement might have been split at that time had the US exploited the opportunity instead of mobilising the movement, particularly by the attack on Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as intelligence agencies had anticipated. At the Chilcot hearings investigating the background to the invasion of Iraq, for example, the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 testified that both British and US intelligence were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat, that the invasion was likely to increase terror, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalised parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an “attack on Islam”. As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.
It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos had landed at George W Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he was not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq - that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and its national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.
To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.
Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime” - the crime of aggression. That crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “[i]nvasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State ...” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.
We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
It is also clear that announced intentions are irrelevant, even if they are truly believed. Internal records reveal that Japanese fascists apparently did believe that, by ravaging China, they were labouring to turn it into an “earthly paradise”. And although it may be difficult to imagine, it is conceivable that Bush and company believed they were protecting the world from destruction by Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides may try to convince themselves otherwise.
We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that follow, or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and the allies were guilty of judicial murder.
last part comeing up sorry.
The imperial mentality and 9/11
A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carriles and many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch”. The coincidence of these deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine - “already … a de facto rule of international relations”, according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison - which revokes “the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists”.
Allison refers to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed at the Taliban, that “those who harbour terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves”. Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror - for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate. When Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations”, no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the US and the murder of its criminal presidents.
None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the US is self-immunised against international law and conventions - as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear.
It is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him “Geronimo” - the Apache Indian chief who led the courageous resistance to the invaders of Apache lands.
The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk … We might react differently if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”.
The examples mentioned would fall under the category of “American exceptionalism”, were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality.
Perhaps the assassination was perceived by the administration as an “act of vengeance,” as Robertson concludes. And perhaps the rejection of the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the moral culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the “supreme international crime” in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination is another illustration of the important fact that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine
This is interesting. I read something very similar a couple of days ago.
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2011/09/what-have-we-learned-from-911-how-to-cheer-the-us-killing-anyone-it-wants-must-read/
I cannot respond to every claim in this essay.
I will not defend the actions of the 1970s in the U.S., of which you speak, and it is certainly quite possible that Bin Laden was hoping we would respond with small wars: hope or not, we did, and the economic reality is there
However, in cases such as 9/11, hindsight is always 20/20.
So, let's look at parts of this that nobody, and I mean not even conservatives, talk about:
The terrorists who came over and learned to fly planes at our schools did in fact slip through a lot of loopholed. Can that really be said to be carelessness on the part of officials? I'm not buying it, even though some of the officials themselves took responsibility for parts of it.
In a pre-9/11 world all systems of government were separate. So if a local policeman wanted to communicate with an FBI man and transfer data and information it was virtually impossible. You read about all the so-called horrors of the Department of Homeland Security? The Department of Homeland Security is a cluster, or umbrella, under which local, state and federal authorities may now operate, co-operate and share information. If you were 6 years old or thereabout during 9/11, I understand: you wouldn't have known about the incompatible systems, red tape, turf wars, and all the rest that individual officials dealt with.
Since 9/11, many people have worked behind the scenes to create the proper bridging scheme by which this communication and co-operation can happen. For those of you non-U.S. folks, the U.S. is provincial by nature. We call ourselves a union, but function much more like a confederacy. Even a town's sovereignty is upheld, let alone a county or a state. That means different systems evolved differently, even in terms of meanings and communications, to say nothing of the politics. Certainly, we saw some of this during Katrina and again learned from it. If you are not from the U.S., or if you have not done paperwork in several states in the U.S., I don't think you can fully appreciate what all of this is like.
And if you think it's hard for us as citizens, it was ten times harder for law enforcement, emergency personnel and others to share information between jurisdictions. These alternate theories are all well and interesting, but the real problem was the lack of cohesion of systems. And although we have the Department of Homeland Security, it's up to any one of us serving in any capacity to ensure we perpetuate that cohesion. Whether Bin Laden knew it or not, I don't know. But his followers, whatever their ideals, used loopholes created by that lack of cohesion. And there are a great many Americans who have assisted in making this cohesion possible. Their work doesn't make the news, it's not got the sparkle and splash of the movie the guardian, but it quite literally saves lives.
one perhaps unrelated misconception: The Navy SEALS didn't capture Bin Laden, then disarm him, then kill him. He died in a firefight. If he died unarmed, aka his firearm was at that point out of ammunition, that is a very distinct difference. He was offered the opportunity to surrender, and I think many people could understand how he refused. But once a firefight is engaged, it is not digital. You can't just turn it off: Others were shooting, and they had no way of knowing in that moment that his firearm was empty. For all intents and purposes, he was still fighting.
My response is no jingoistic defense of my country's actions: in fact you will find the jingoists never mention the accomplishments I mentioned here.
Were there a lot of mistakes made? Absolutely. Have we learned from many of these mistakes. Absolutely, many of them, yes. Others still remain to be learned.
Much of what went wrong is in the "What-not-to-do" parts of the course curricula some of us take now as parts of our training. Unlike what many imagine, the U.S. military - I'm not talking the politicians here but servicepeople - is unflinchingly honest with itself on its faults, and where we must improve. Debrief is not just let down after the fact: it is take apart what happened, figure out how we can do better next time.
I've noticed tat. The individual members of a big, faceless corporation generally are sensible individuals who can admit their mistakes. It's the higher-ups who try to cover their asses. I imagine that's been the case here. While I'll admit I don't have much faith in the government and nor have I ever, one thing I don't buy into and never have is the belief some have that Dubya Bush orchestrated or at least allowed the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a means of gaining support. I've heard people talk about documents that seem to support that viewpoint but I don't know how much truth there is to that. I no more believe that than I believe we never went to the moon.
I think ultimately, when we inspect the American reactions to 9/11, was to ask if they were proportionate to the crime, and if they brought about a better/more secure world for all involed.
Sadly, I think we can agree that the answer to that is a resounding no on both points.
Invations have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, even thousands of U.S. lives (which, as we all know, are infinitely more imporant than the lives of others, especially you know, muslims and such *insert sarcasm*). If somehow these invasions had led to peace and haromhy, there might have been something to them. Sadly this is not the case. Universally people agree the risk of a terrorist attack is no less now than it was 10 years aago. as was pointd out, we have better means of sharing information and dealing with it, and that is a large accomplishment. As someone who both has lived in various states, and also been a data programming analyst for a large software corporation, I understand the size of the task, and those operations have increased our security, or at least our ability to deal with threats.
I wish the same will be done for our health care systems, preventing patients with drug addiction to go to 30 different doctors andhave them all prescribe expensive drugs that kill the individual at a large expense for insurance copanies and tax payers, but that's a different story.
Recently I read that 60 billion dollars (60 billion!) have been lost or wasted on fraud (i.e.not ccounted for, or the expenses considered to be unrealistic), clearly benefitting a few individuals and companies, Haliburton clearly is a big winner, (though I am not equating that to saying 9/11 was orchestrated by corporations).
So, billions and billions of dollars later, two wars that ultimately have failed to bring any sort of peace to the world, rather have succeeded in creting a larer divide between the east and the west and completely ruining multiple countries, it seems like the Al Qaeda philosophy is working extremely well, and the U.S. is ruining itself slowly.
A friend of ours from Pakistan, who grew up there, and went to university here, has described in detail how his country has gone from a fairly peaceful and democratic contry to a place that is so bad that women cannot walk the streets, kid naps are an every day affair, and people with any money are forced to live in guarded compounds, mostly bcause the government sited with U.S., which enabled the fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere tomove in, take over, and get the sympathy of a large part of the population.
It's interesting to compare 9/11 to the violent acts that hav gone on in Norway, the public discussion of the need for understanding and forgiveness, and how they must not let the excesses and violence of one man influence the policies of equality that Norway stands for, and this hasproved very successful to-date. I do not live there, so I cannot say for sure, but I follow their media, and htere have been no reports of invation of any countries or multiple revenge murders (of course the lone gunman was Norwegian, but he represented theneo Nazi idiology, but still there have been no attacks on neo nazi followers).
I believe Bin Laden got exactly what he deserved, but I believe that this could've been done 10 years ago with a small commando squad with insier information, without invading the country, and Iraq is a whole other can of worms.
I think the most shocking thing, to the U.S. as well as anywhere else, is the realization that technical superiority does not translate easily to victory,not when the enemy simply hides and strikes smartly. The Japanese were famous for their tactics of targetting civilian ships durind World War II, and after much condemnation from the U.S. they finally replicated the strategy, which did a lot towards defeating the Japaanese in the end.
So, I think the real change that needs to be brought about is to understand and realize there is a new type of warfare, that requires fewer people but more technology, more collaboration, more understanding of people, and more diplomacy.
The ultimate goal of any army, or any country, must be to protect its citizens and interests, and in this case this is better done by smart politics rather than brute force.
Now we just gotta convince the big bugs of this.
There is no evidence that treating the terrorist attacks as a crime instead of an act of war would have had a more positive impact. Were Bin Laden still able to use Afghanistan to plan and prepare terrorist attacks, he probably would have done. Look at the recent war in Libya. The threat posed by Gaddafi’s forces only significantly decreased once Tripoli had been captured. War is the correct response to acts of war. At the time, there was a lot of support for going into Afghanistan. Obviously Islamic extremists didn’t support it, but we should never give into them by only doing what they would like us to do.
I think it’s about time we did the opposite. All these 9/11 deniers, all these people who try to justify it (I’m sure they’d say explain or understand), by comparing it to other things that have happened as if two wrongs make a right, should be treated as if they were Bin Laden. Either they’re with us or against us.
9/11 was done in support of an ideology. The ideology is a distorted version of Islam. The ultimate aim of people who believe in this ideology is a global “Islamic” state. I put Islamic in quotes because by Islamic, they mean their interpretation of Islam. There would be no room for true Muslims, i.e. Muslims who wouldn’t be so sick as to try to explain, justify, excuse, understand, call it what you will the terrorists who carried out or planned 9/11, or divert any of the blame away from the culprit. Real Muslims would be killed if the terrorists won, as would people of other religions.
One mistake, which has led to the suffering of many Muslims, is that countries have allowed anybody to call themselves a Muslim. This has meant that false Muslims (as defined above) are still able to associate themselves with Islam, and has led to innocent Muslims being mistaken for these evil extremists. Closing Guantanamo Bay is a mistake. It should remain open, and all false Muslims should be sent there, so they can’t cause more harm to perceptions of Islam. These people have done more to damage Islam than the guys who created the Mohammad cartoons, a fact only a false Muslim would dispute.
And what’s all this about killing Bin Laden being a violation of international law? Anybody who has a problem with that should experience the same fate. The world will be a better place once we are rid of all the Bin Laden sympathisers. Isn’t there a hotline for us to ring if we suspect people of Bin Laden sympathisers?
What’s the number? I’m out tomorrow, but my wife will be in. Perhaps she could call them on my behalf.
Let us not forget that could the terrorists have killed 30,000 or 300,000 people, or even 3,000,000 people, they would have done. That is why it was and is still necessary to take action against any government which is capable of developing weapons of mass destruction. It is also why, we have to get some nasty evil regimes on side. If they were all against us, we’d all be less safe than we currently are.
A repeat of 9/11 would be a lot more difficult now than ten years ago. Therefore, though we are not completely safe, and though we haven’t won the War on Terror yet, we are safer, and making good progress. The terrorists cannot defeat us; we can only defeat ourselves. A lot of work still needs to be done. The Islamic extremists in Somalia and southern Yemen need to be defeated. Something needs to be done about Pakistan. The war against Iran is inevitable, and the longer we leave that, the more dangerous Iran will be when the time comes, but it will come.
The Arab Spring creates new opportunities. I believe that as democracy spreads, support for Islamic extremists will decline. What people all around the world want, is stable but accountable government, peace, and an amount of freedom that enables people to do what ever they want to as long as it doesn't harm or hurt other people. Gradually, this global ambition will be achieved, but not before all threats to this way of life are eliminated.
Senior. I have to disagree with a lot ofyour points.
1. Al Qaeda could have gone for a lot bigger loss of life, e.g. by hitting nuclear plants. They went for symbolic value more than anything. They could easily have killed a lot ore people (I am not giving them any type of props or saying that deep down they are really great guys or anything of the sort, mrely disagreeing with you on this point).
2. You completely fail to address the fact that the U.S. is practically bankrupt, in large parts due to ill conceived and poorly managed (from a financial perspective at least) wars and invasions. They don't have the manpower or the money to take on Iran, North Korea, Turkmanistan, or whatever other country does not agree with its policies. Also it's lost its credibility as the world's moral police, and lost a huge amount of international respect, due to its rather barbaric policies and disrespect for international law and agreements, something that Mulsim extremists are happy to exploit, and they are backed up by a the U.S. attitude, adding fuel to their fire.
3. Refining a point in the previous comment, a raid that takes someone's life without prior and proper judicial process is simply illegal. If Afganistan decides that Bush is to blame for thousands of lives lost (which he is in a way), are they right to send a comando force here to raid the whit house and shoot the president, or raid Texas or wherever mr Bush is? Given Bin Laden's history I can't say I feel srry for him, and I think the decission was well justified, but it certainly does not do anything to make the U.S. look better financially.
Interestingly, Chinaand Saudi Arabia are the biggest investors in the U.S. owning companies like Fox News and Time Warner cable for instance. If they decided to sell off the U.S. government bonds the country would suffer the most serious crisis in its history, I believe. So by waging wars the U.S. has weakened itself to the point of being owned by the very people they are supposedly fighting.
Outrage and thurst for revenge rae understandable actions. 9/11 was horrible, but unfrotunately, I think the resulting actions have strenghened the Mslim extremists and weakened the U.S. rather than the opposite, though I happily would want to be wrong on this score.
Finally, do we really know what the real musilms want, what government they want, how they choose to live their lives, howthey feel about the U.S? It seems we are always doing things for those people, but it also feels that we don't know them, who they are or what they want. Is democracy the best form of government. We're seeing a lot of its short comings in the budget crisis. Everyone simply thinks of re ellection, politicians are funded by drug companies and other special interest groups. Parties look for contensious and unimportant issues such as religion or gay marriage to gain popularity, rather than tackling the very serious situation the U.S. finds itself in financially. I am not advocating anything else, but I can't see how it is automatically always 100% true that our way of life, our politics and our system works for everyone in the world, all the time.
Last point, if we ban Bin Laden sympathizers, how can we claim to be any better than the very cultures we are fighting, what happened to freedom of speech and opinions. If I wanted to be a Bin Laden sympathizer I have every right of doing so, as long as my views do not harm anyone else. I am *not*, think the man was evil, and I really like living and working in the U.S., and I want to be a part of making it a better country and have a prosperous future, but a lot of things that have hapened since 9/11 makes me think it is fast losing its respect and status as the greatest contry in the world.
We're never going to completely abolish terrorism, just like we're never going to completely abolish drug use. But I can definitely agree that the US is now, thanks to its recent actions, probably the laughingstock of most if not the entire rest of the world.