BUT THE WORLD ASKED WHY?
When the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City occurred on 9/11/2001, no one asked – Why? Surely not the Bush Administration and surely not US establishment print and broadcast media. Of course, President George W. Bush did give us an answer:
We’re good – they’re bad. We’re moral – they’re evil. We’re a peace loving, freedom loving people – they hate peace and freedom. Evil people attack good people just for fun. That’s what an evil axis does. Simple. No further inquiry required. The only solution? War.
It was well known that of the 19 individuals involved in the attacks, 15 were from Saudi Arabia, 2 were from the United Arab Emirates, 1 was from Egypt, and 1 was from Lebanon. None were from Iraq or Afghanistan. It was also well known that these men were members of the jihadist organization, al-Qaeda, that maintained a training camp in Afghanistan led by Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family.
It is was known that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan had anything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center. It has also been shown that the Taliban leadership of Afghanistan had offered to turn Osama bin Laden over, before and after the attacks. Information on this can be found here, here, and here. But capturing bin Laden was never the goal. Imposing US dominance in the oil rich Middle East was the goal – as it had been for decades. The attacks on the World Trade Center opened the door.
Quoting Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson in “Current Affairs:”
“The 9/11 attacks could have been dealt with as a crime. This would have been sane and consistent with precedent. When lawbreaking occurs, we seek the perpetrators, rather than starting wars with unrelated parties. When the IRA set off bombs in London, nobody called for air strikes on West Belfast (or on Boston, where a great deal of IRA funding came from). When the Oklahoma City bombing was found to have been perpetrated by a white supremacist associated with ultra-right militias, there was no call to obliterate Idaho or Montana. Instead, the attacker was searched for, found, apprehended, brought to court, found guilty, and sentenced.
This was not the approach taken by the Bush administration. Rather than seek out and punish the guilty—and only the guilty—it swiftly launched a “global war on terror” that led to the deaths of millions.1”
Led to the death of millions. Millions of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan, millions who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, were slaughtered by the United States in its global and utterly failed “war on terror.” One must surely ask – who is the real terrorist?
What is the point of bringing all this up over two decades later? The point goes back to the opening paragraph of this article: No one in the US asked “Why?” “Why did the 9/11 attacks on America happen?”
The question was never asked because US “leadership” and corporately owned media didn’t want the answer. They didn’t want the public to hear about the coups, the human suffering, the wars, the installation of vicious dictators like Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran, the original creation and financial support of Al Qaeda against Russia, the support of Israeli apartheid and its decades long brutality towards the Palestinians, all of which the US was responsible for or had been fomenting in the Middle East for years. They didn’t want them to hear about the deep and understandable hatred the US had engendered in the people of the Middle East that led to the 9/11 attacks.
The US never asked why? But the World asked why? And the World knew why.
Now we witness a terrible repeat. The World watches the pre-meditated murder of children in Gaza. We are told by Israeli and US “leaders” it is Israel’s justifiable response to the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas. But in a hideous mirror image of 9/11, no one, no one in Israeli or US “leadership” or in western corporate media will ask “why?” Why did Hamas attack? As with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, they do not want the answer.
But the World is asking why? And the World knows why.
The United States is in the process of losing any moral standing it has left in the world. It has become Nero – fiddling while the empire burns.