There is one story that everyone has been led to believe. Sitting in Afghanistan, Osama bin-Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. His al-Qaeda terrorists, 19 in all, had hijacked four passenger aircrafts flying regular flights between US cities, rammed two into the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings, the third into the Pentagon and the fourth meant for the White House into the fields in Pennsylvania. Passengers in the fourth plane, aware through cell phone communication with the ground about the WTC crashes, had overpowered the hijackers and forced it to crash there.
Otherwise, those 19 terrorists would have committed, if we agree to give them the full credit, that even the greatest of crime and mystery authors in history would not have been able to conjure were they to attempt to write something like what happened on 9/11. In fact, even with the 4th aircraft going down in Pennsylvania, never has a crime thriller ever been written to match what actually happened on 9/11. The chances of something like that ever happening again are almost next to nothing. That 19 individuals whose flying experience was only what they gained by simulation inside four walls would be able to fly those big aircrafts and hit bulls eye without any assistance from the ground is extremely difficult to believe.
This and many other unexplained aspects of 9/11 have become the substance of many conspiracy theories about 9/11. Nevertheless, President Bush and his administration used their story that 9/11 was the work of Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda to invade Afghanistan where they were located and started the war on terror. They turned the country on its head and only recently left it after 13 years of occupation that killed thousands of innocent Afghan men, women and children and also cost the US and its allies heavily in terms of human lives lost and money spent. Osama bin-Laden has been killed in the meantime but not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan close to its elite military academy in Kakul and his closest comrades have been taken out. However, the Taliban that had given him and al-Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan are far from being defeated and are back in business. In fact, the Afghan government and the Taliban are now in discussion over the future role of the latter in Afghan politics!
The complicity of al-Qaeda with 9/11 would continue to be discussed for a long time because many minds have not yet been satisfied by the US explanations. One of the many developments that have resulted from 9/11 that the United States had covered so long with untruth is beginning to break at the seams, namely the US invasion of Iraq. In 2003 while in Afghanistan pursuing the war on terror, the US invaded Iraq. It did not explain the reasons for invading Iraq but a number of unconvincing objectives were mentioned by the Bush administration that were considered as explanations. At first, the Bush administration had said that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and therefore those had to be taken out. It later stated that the objectives were to force a regime change and establish democracy after the WMD excuse was exposed, as a pack of lies created by US intelligence.
The regime change was achieved easily. Saddam Hussein was caught, tried and hanged. The US did that with great pomp. President Bush took great credit for ending the dictator's life. No one asked some important questions over his hanging or if asked, those were dismissed as were questions surrounding 9/11. Was Saddam Hussein not the leader of US' choice in the region in the 1980s when he was fighting the war it was interested in, namely destroying Iran, its arch enemy in the region? Did not the US turn a blind eye when the dictator used chemical gas in Halabja in 1988 that killed between 3200-5000 Kurds? And what about Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush's Secretary of Defence during the invasion of Iraq, who as President Reagan's Special Envoy was pictured with a huge grin on his face shaking Saddam Hussein's hands in Baghdad in December 1983 as the best of buddies?
The Republicans conveniently forgot to answer any of these questions with the "ostrich mentality". The Republicans were emboldened when the Democrats failed to force answers. They, led by President Bush, instead blamed President Obama not just for the failure to help establish democracy in Iraq but also for the emergence of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria )in the territory that was Saddam Hussein's base of power, Sunni Iraq in north and west. The Republican line has been that, had President Obama not withdrawn combat troops in 2011, ISIS would not have emerged and democracy would have been established in Iraq. The White House attacked this line after President Bush not too long ago had blamed President Obama in a closed-door fundraiser in Las Vegas.
The issue, nevertheless, came up at the national level in a dramatic fashion. It happened after Jeb Bush, in pursuit of his presidential ambition in 2016, had spoken at a Town Hall event in Rio, Nevada where he argued in the same line as his elder brother that President Obama's decision to withdraw combat troops from Iraq in 2011 was responsible for, first, the rise of ISIS and second, for democracy defaulting in Iraq. A college student demanded to know from the former Governor why he was "spouting nationalistic rhetoric to get us involved in more wars" and pointedly stated that his "brother created ISIS." The college student rattled Jeff Bush who fumbled as she went on to tell him that ISIS emerged because "30,000 individuals who were part of the Iraqi military were forced out - they had no employment, they had no income, and they were left with access to all of the same arms and weapons."
New York Times nailed the Republican lie about responsibility for rise of ISIS while reporting the dramatic exchange in Reno, Nevada. The paper linked the rise of ISIS directly to "de-baathification" of Iraq after USA occupation that made it ineligible for members of the armed force as well as even "low level bureaucrats of the regime of the former dictator from employment under the new government." These laid-off military/intelligence personnel and government officials, all able men but with their lives and livelihood taken away, created ISIS as a natural consequence. The NYT referred to a story that was carried a month before the Reno encounter by the German weekly Der Spiegel. The weekly named the former intelligence officer of the Saddam regime Haji Bakr, whom it described as a "nationalist, not an Islamist", for creating the ISIS infrastructure together with fellow intelligence officers in 2010. They chose the educated cleric Baghdadi as the Caliph of ISIS to give it a "religious face" and acceptability.
In fact, New York Times and Der Spiegel convincingly put the responsibility for emergence of ISIS upon President Bush. The two papers also underlined the fact that was almost forgotten, that before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was not a single Islamic terrorist let alone any Islamic terrorist group in Iraq because President Saddam Hussein and his regime were more deadly opposed to them than the US ever was or has been. In fact, a serious look into US' role in Afghanistan would reveal that it was CIA that had backed Osama bin-Laden and Taliban in the 1980s to fight with the Mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton in a TV interview last year had underlined this truth.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
serajul7@gmail.com
Genesis of ISIS
M. Serajul Islam | Published: May 23, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
Share if you like