How To Destroy A Nation
About ten years ago I was supposed to write a text for my first intermediate diploma when I heard in the radio that an airplane hit the WTC. This day I didn’t work much on the text. Ever since this moment I read what I could get about this. Newsletter reports, journal reportages, and various conspiracy and counter conspiracy argumentation texts.
Even if it’s still not proved that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 terror act, whoever was responsible has had the same objectives: Disclose the weak points of the USA. And I’m sure the objectives did not only include to bring fear and powerlessness feelings to the Americans, but also to pressure the USA to specific counter-reactions: Start wars they can’t win.
I read that Osama Bin Laden aimed — an idea of Ayman al-Zawahiri — to entice the USA to Afghanistan. It was predictable that the USA would react like a cowboy (shoot back) and start a war in Afghanistan. A war they can’t win. In this respect the American were always easy to predict. Revenge is firmly fixed in the American mentality — that’s why they still practice the dead penalty.
I don’t believe in the big conspiracy theories. There are many unaccountable things and open questions so we can’t disprove all of them, but as someone said: The humankind doesn’t like the fact that a few terrorists where capable to shake a whole country or more all western nations. It’s easier if we can incriminate a hidden but powerful force1.
But I’m sure that the Bush government didn’t told the truth either: For once Bush himself was incompetent and his neoconservative advisors where either incompetent, selfish, or short-sighted. If it’s true what the chair of counter-terrorism security group Richard Clarke said, then the Bush government was more interested by the star wars program than by the danger of Al-Qaeda.
It also sounds reasonable that the CIA who know about some of the terrorist are withing the boundaries of the USA didn’t report it to the FBI. And whether it’s possible for an airplane to destroy a tower or not I can’t simply assess as I’m not a structural engineer. I’ll could only ask why not?
I think that the many outrageous conspiracy theories finally helped the government to combat all kind of doubt. It was a climate of “if you don’t believe us your are against us”. But some doubt is healthy: Not because the government secretly planned the 9/11, but because their incompetence and shortsightedness allowed them to happen. If this was going public they’ll lost the confidence. So they sweep unpleasant things under the carpet and removed some evidences. This again caused people to make up new conspiracy theories.
It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that 9/11 allowed the Bush government to do what they want: The president was allowed to make war without the need to ask the congress and spend nearly as much money as he liked to the war. The advertised revenge2 gave him backing from the people.
If you take a look on the timeline and correlate the Homeland Security Advisory System alerts with the real events you don’t find many matches. But if you correlate it with the resolutions of new laws restricting the liberty and empower the government you’ll find much more matches3.
The first election of president Bush was very close4, so we ask what if 9/11 had not happened? Would he be reelected? Could he reduce the taxes the same way? Where are the billions of money he spend on war?
If only a part of the money he spent on war were invested into infrastructure, public education and maybe a bit on welfare, the finance crisis a broad section of the population is suffering from won’t that magnitude. The unrestricted neoconservative thinking destroyed too much. Note that the USA increased the indebtedness about five quadrillion during rule of Georg W. Bush.
So far we can surely declare for the terrorists:
Mission accomplished
——
1 Like the government or an powerful economic privy councillor. Note that is somehow related to religions.
2 Hunting Osama Bin Laden, destroying the Taliban, declaring “War on terror”
3 Das Magazin No. 35/2011, Beilage Tagesanzeiger
4 Some say too close to be true
posted at: 01:41 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry
