It's the foreign policy, stupid

Monday 11^th September

Let me be the first to tell you: today is the 5^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. which killed five times fewer than the war in Afghanistan and about, what?, fifty? a hundred? times fewer than in Iraq so far. There is this emphasis on knowing exactly where you were when you heard the planes hit. Why? Does it matter where the TV you saw it on was unless it was in one of the WTC towers? September 12^th at my school there were still students who hadn’t heard. I know where they were when I told them but who cares, really?

I enjoy the conspiracy theories around the events that killed nearly 3,000. Obviously I don’t believe that we have been told the whole truth about those events. On the 12^th, five years ago, I even proffered the opinion that there may have been spooks on the planes waiting for the right moment to take the terrorists out but not realising that the planes were going to become bombs. However, such a view now is at the very mildest end of those that believe something is being hidden. New Statesman this week published an article in which the MI5 whistle-blower David Shayler opines that there were NO PLANES on September 11 2001…

Now, the argument that a missile hit the Pentagon has been out there for a few years though there is photographic evidence (www.rense.com/general32/phot.htm) of plane parts at the site. Given the size of the hole in the wall, the lack of damage inside the offices and the lack of any video of the plane, that argument is at least understandable though I have met a handful of people who consider it fact to the extent that they look at me like a poor deluded fool for thinking otherwise. However, Shayler argues that what hit the twin towers “were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes”. I am sorry, mate, but you have lost it. The events of that day were enough to make all of us a little unsound in judgement (and did your sex drive go up too for a while? I know I was fucking for England) but puh-lease...

The war-mongering liars in the US administration and the UK government used the events to attack our liberties and go after long-desired targets. Illegal weapons have been used in Iraq, thousands massacred in Fallujah and detention without trial and torture have become acceptable practice. In the light of these disgusting facts, it is perhaps understandable that there is some belief that the terrorist attacks may have been orchestrated by US neo-conservatives (no love lost for liberal New York…). This is often backed up by the line from the Project for the New American Century’s report Rebuilding America’s Defenses: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

To dismiss such theories with the epithet “conspiracy” is lazy. Shayler’s argument may be laugh-out-loud ridiculous but it is self-evidently true that there are powerful people conspiring to shape events so that they best may profit. Put these words in order: always there been have and always be will there. However, to draw lines backwards through time in order to make sense of events, make them fit a neat explanation (though in the face of so much scientific and eyewitness evidence, controlled demolition and holograms aren’t that neat an explanation), is merely the attempt of the human mind to impose order on the unrelated, much in the same way that we talk about a life story as though one event led inevitably to another.

About ten times, I joined the trudges through grey central London streets that we called “marches” against the Iraq war though we all knew it was a done deal even if there was no agreement on what the motive was supposed to be. While Blair was talking about WMD here, Bush was playing on the ridiculous idea of a Saddam connection with the events of five years ago (oh, and the fact that a couple of Iraqi agents were sent to assassinate his daddy in Kuwait). The war was obviously immoral and against the spirit of Resolution 1441, but I’d have to disagree with Kofi Annan and say that it wasn’t indisputably illegal. Although I hated the smug apologist for tens of thousands of deaths, Christopher Greenwood QC’s ‘golden thread’ argument linking the resolution back to Resolutions 678 and 687 is convincing enough in legal terms. No wonder lawyers are so widely despised.

Perhaps it is not incontrovertibly illegal but the Iraq war is certainly directly related to the attacks on London of 14 months ago. Blair trying to claim the carnage on the London Underground had nothing to do with the invasion and subsequent bloodbath there is as ridiculous as Bush’s explanations for 11/9/01 (that “they” hate the freedom the US has). The actions abroad of these Security Council members and their unrelenting support of dodgy Middle Eastern regimes and Israel despite its criminal occupation of Palestine and ongoing Apartheid policies are what it’s all about. It’s true that Bin Laden and his henchmen hate Western society and that they would never allow people the freedom we still have here despite the best attempts of our own governments to curtail elements of it. However, the chestnut question is: why didn’t they attack Switzerland, South Africa or Costa Rica if it is freedom they hate so much? It’s the foreign policy, stupid.