[Peace-discuss] 9/11 & US policy

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

[A clotted essay that barely manages to let the main point emerge. --CGE]

9/11 did not start or end at midnight
Richard Falk Last Modified: 11 Sep 2011 13:16

...Just as 9/12 places emphasis on the American response - the launching of "the 
global war on terror", 9/10 calls our attention to the mood of imperial 
complacency that preceded the attacks.

This national mood was (and remains) completely oblivious to the legitimate 
grievances that pervaded the Arab world.

These grievances were associated with Western appropriations of the region's 
resources, Western support lent to cruel and oppressive tyrants throughout the 
Middle East, lethal and indiscriminate sanctions imposed for an entire decade on 
the people of Iraq after the first Gulf War, deployment of massive numbers of 
American troops close to Muslim sacred sites in Saudi Arabia, and America's role 
in Israel's oppressive dispossession of Palestinians and subsequent occupation.

 From these perspectives, the crimes of 9/11 were an outgrowth of the wrongs of 
9/10 and unreflectively [?] led to the crimes and strategic mistakes made since 
9/12...

[The USG] will disregard the sovereign rights of others whenever it deems it 
desirable to do so, and will not feel seriously inhibited by international law 
or the duty to gain approval for controversial uses of force from the United 
Nations...

American leaders at the time [of 9/11], with ardent and unified national 
backing, insisted that future domestic security required limiting freedom at 
home, especially for the Muslim minority, while waging a series of wars abroad, 
partly to destroy Al Qaeda but also as a convenient pretext to pursue an earlier 
goal of grand strategy to achieve dominance over the Middle East.

It is this continuing global projection of American power that makes it natural 
for 9/12 to be the day that most stays in the mind of foreigners, probably not 
literally, but through feelings of victimisation resulting from the American 
response.

..."9/11" is a misleading reductive label that is deceptive to the extent that 
it treats the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as anything like 
the totality of "the event"...

In some respects, it was illustrative of the vulnerability of any modern state, 
even the most powerful, but for others it was a new phase in the ongoing 
struggle between West and non-West. For many societies around the world, 9/11 
was less the tragedy than a prelude to their own less noticed tragedy - 
intensified violence and acute insecurity exported to their homelands: drone 
attacks, targeted assassinations, special forces operating covertly within 
national sovereign space, secret sites established within their nation where 
terrorist suspects were 'rendered' to be tortured for the sake of United States 
intelligence services...

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/20119995657198364.html