Iraq and 9/11 -- A Voice from the Middle

What Happened on 9/11 and Why Did the United States Start the War in Iraq?

One might find it difficult to believe, but this is a surprisingly easy question to answer. The problem is that the answer, in truth, is too dull for most people to accept. No one’s going to scream about it on Fox News. But it’s the true answer, nonetheless.

(Stand by and I’ll give it to you…)

A lot of people it seems, especially since the late nineties aren’t happy unless a story is nothing short of electrifying and nefarious; it seems we need something in which to sink our collective teeth, or it’s back to a Seinfeld rerun, or shopping online. I suppose to some degree it’s understandable. The events of 9/11 were large – the explanations, one might think, must be commensurately large.

We, as a nation, can’t stand the thought that what happened on 9/11 was simply that a couple of dozen Islamic fundamentalists, on a mission for martyrdom, high-jacked some planes with box cutters and other such pen knives, and blew up two large, symbolic buildings. Simple as that. They weren’t particularly brilliant, or devious, or even evil – lots of history’s infamous characters would have to be considered far more evil than these guys. These guys were just religious fanatics who believed in their hearts and minds that America is decadent, amoral, and spreading fast. In other words, they have similar views to many of today’s conservative talk show hosts.

How did they do it? Simple… they accomplished their mission precisely because it wasn’t that hard. No one was looking for it, that’s for sure. At least one of the guys that high-jacked the plane got on without a valid passport. Other guys brought on board enough dangerous shit to make your head spin. They were able to it because there was virtually no one even remotely trying to stop them.

Now look, if a handful of young adults with Swiss Army knives manages to rob a bank, we’d say: “Wow, that’s amazing and how did they do that? They must be really good.” But if that same group robbed that bank on a day when the doors and the safe have been left open and no one is around for blocks… well then, not so impressive.

In hindsight, we had plenty of chances to stumble onto their plans. Our FBI had memos running around about middle-eastern men learning to fly, but not interested in landing. Other intelligence (and I use that term lightly) said that someone might be plotting to crash planes into the World Trade Center – that certainly seems pretty specific, but it, like all the others were resoundingly ignored.

We just didn’t think it would happen and no one was watching the store. The guys that flew the planes are not Bond Villains with immense power and resources focused on global domination or destruction. They are simply desperate and angry people who have let religion destroy their ability to function as rational human beings. And because we, as a nation, left the bank’s doors wide open, they happened to stroll in and unload the vault. OK, they got their reward when the towers collapsed, but that doesn’t make them criminal masterminds by any stretch of the imagination.

Of course, that’s not what we were told by our leaders and experts. We were told a far more exciting story about a global network of cells put in place by an evil zillionaire named Usama Bin Laden; Mr. Rumsfeld even gave him his own acronym: UBL. We were given the impression that his Al Qaeda organization was sophisticated and powerful, and it made sense… otherwise how could they have beaten the all-powerful US of A? These guys, the media reported, were operating terrorist training camps in exotic locales. They even showed us footage of “terrorists in training” and it looked like they were the evil degenerate version of the Green Berets.

It all made sense to people because surely, what we all watched on 9/11 could not have been the result of anything simple, like twelve angry young men with pen knives. We like conspiracies; they make us feel better. If the deeds of 9/11 were perpetrated by a small group of zealots that only succeeded because no one was trying to stop them, then the world seems just too dangerous to imagine. An evil empire we can deal with; we’ll just send in the same guys who saved the world on D-Day in World War II, and soon the world would be safe again.

What to do, what to do? Very soon after 9/11 we were told that we found the evil empire and it lived in Afghanistan. We were shown tapes of UBL broadcasting from his bat cave. We were shown people in black, with black beards and dark skin – bad guys on a scale that even George Lucas couldn’t have better imagined. To look at them, these were clearly the best “bad guys” since the Nazis themselves. They even had long curved knives, like Ali Babba’s forty thieves of the Arabian Nights.

These guys weren’t Al Qaeda or anything, they were called “The Taliban”. The word “Taliban” means “religious students” but that just doesn’t sound evil enough. In reality, the Taliban of 2001 was actually the “mujahideen” that we heard about when they were fighting against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Then they were the good guys – mujahideen means “freedom fighters” after all. But, in late 2001, all we heard was that the Taliban was the evil empire, they lived in Afghanistan, and we were going to go over there and give them a good old American ass-whipping. Then we sang the National Anthem and started plastering our flag all over the place, so “they” wouldn’t win.

Predictably, we won the war against Afghanistan. Apparently, the Taliban’s evil outfits and curved knives were no match for our laser guided missiles. Good had prevailed over evil once again. Let’s hit the mall and get back to Disneyland… so “they” don’t win. We were so happy when we won. Woopie! The United States of America can kick Afghanistan’s butt any day of the week, so there. Who would have ever thought? Never mind that we didn’t find UBL. That wasn’t the important thing.

The war in Afghanistan quickly became boring, like watching Joe Frazier fight Al Franken, and just after the one-year anniversary of 9/11 our President told us that he had found another evil empire, even more powerful than the Taliban, in Iraq. Ah ha! It wasn’t just those guys in the black robes, it was Saddam Hussein, whom we all knew from his hit television show of the early 1990s called The Gulf War.

Saddam was the guy behind the curtain and he had a death ray. He must be stopped at all costs. You could almost hear the bugle call and sounds of horses charging over the plains. The US Calvary would soon be on its way.

A lot of people were surprised when the bad guy turned out to be a sequel character, not Rocky, but Rocky II. Was Saddam somehow behind the events of 9/11? Was Saddam in cahoots with UBL? No one was sure, but we were sure that he had a death ray weapon of mass destruction, and would have to be stopped if we were to win our “War on Terror”. Colin Powell had pictures, for God’s sake.

When some in the United Nations disagreed with our view of Saddam, we started calling the organization “irrelevant” and useless. What good had the UN ever done, really? Bosnia maybe, but who could remember back to 1998? It was 2002 and you were either with us or against us. There were only two sides in this war and you better line up behind us, the good guys, or you’d be one of the bad guys. The French thought it a better idea to work through the UN, and within days we were ordering Freedom Fries at the US Capitol. To be against this war against Iraq and Saddam’s death ray, was dangerous business, just ask the Dixie Chicks.

So, we went marching into Iraq and proclaimed victory within a few weeks, a long time when you consider that we won the Gulf War in four days. Saddam was on the run and we would soon smoke him out and round him up. Good would soon triumph once again over evil… let’s get back to planning a vacation or refinancing a home at four percent fixed. Saddam, shaddam… interest rates hadn’t been this low in fifty years.

Oh sure, there was this little nagging problem of finding the WMD that we had told the world was the reason behind the war. Surely our President hadn’t been crying wolf, right? Was Saddam’s death ray just another version of Y2K? No way, he was the key member of The Axis of Evil, just like he was during his last fifteen minutes of fame.

When U.S. soldiers pulled Saddam out of his ultra-sophisticated secret hiding hole he looked like someone’s alcoholic grandfather after a three-day bender. There were no WMDs after all, but that didn’t matter because the real reason we had gone into Iraq was to bring freedom to oppressed people and make sure the women over there could learn to read and shop at the mall. Or was that in Afghanistan? No matter, they were all the same at this point, weren’t they?

What had started with a dozen or so young fanatical religious men and their box cutters, had now gone from being a global network of terrorist cells, to being the Taliban, to being Saddam’s Iraq, and still UBL was no where to be found. Even some of the folks firmly in the Bush fan club started to wonder what the hell was going on.

The left, as led by film maker Michael Moore, was sure that the whole thing was a calculated, premeditated plot by the Bush administration to control Iraq’s oil supply… or finish what W’s father had started… or something else, but whatever it was, it was certainly no accident.

On the right, Bush’s defenders pointed to intelligence flaws, and held onto the belief that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq simply had to be involved in 9/11 somehow, or could have been… or might have been in the future… or something. Bush hadn’t lied, he was right to do what he did, regardless the outcome. The world was now a safer place, now let’s get back to what we can do with those low interest rates.

One would have to think that if our going into Iraq was a calculated plot perpetrated by the Bush administration, it wasn’t a very good one. Kind of like a teenager telling a lie that is easily and quickly detected.

So, what did happen here? Why did we go into Iraq? We went into Iraq for the same reason we put Japanese Americans into concentration camps after Pearl Harbor. We were scared and didn’t know what else to do. And, when I say “we” I mean everyone, including those in the White House. We went rushing into Iraq because we lost our keys on 9/11 and when we couldn’t find them in Afghanistan, we started looking where the light was better.

The fact is that our leaders aren’t of superior intelligence and they’re capable of being scared just like a child bullied on the school ground. And, when they get scared, they tend to do stupid stuff, like putting Japanese Americans behind bars. Or, like fighting a war in Southeast Asia to “stop the spread of communism”. Or, like sending God-knows-who to land at The Bay of Pigs. Or, like blacklisting Hollywood actors because they attended a meeting during the 1930s. Or, like sending people to break in to an office in the Watergate Hotel. Or any other of the famously stupid things we’ve done over the years because we were afraid. It’s just what we, as human beings, do.

We went into the Spanish-American War because we thought our battleship, the Maine, was bombed while in Havana’s harbor. It wasn’t, we later learned, but no matter. We escalated our involvement in Viet Nam because the enemy allegedly fired upon our boats off the coast in the Gulf of Tonkin. They weren’t, but no matter, the end will surely justify the means. And the two times during the last century that we actually should have become militarily involved, WWI and WWII, we didn’t want to. We waited until 1917 to enter the First World War and didn’t get to fighting Germany and Japan until 1942, and only after Pearl Harbor. We’re just stupid when we’re scared, simple as that.

What happened on and since 9/11 is actually a simple, somewhat boring story of a handful of misguided men who found the bank unlocked and unguarded, and then the acts of human beings who had the shit scared out of them. Although nowhere near as photogenic as was the twin towers falling to rubble, it’s a lot like the Y2K scare that scared some people so badly that they stocked up on bottled water and hid under their beds instead of celebrating New Year’s Eve.

Of course, that’s not the sort of story that would fuel a year’s worth of controversial programming on Fox News, or any of the other dramatic media outlets competing for ratings in order to sell television commercials. They need a hook, a conspiracy, and evil empire, a global network of well financed and highly trained villains dressed in black and sporting beards. Just like the promoters of the WWF wrestling shows, they need a good guy and a really bad guy to hold our attention through the commercial break.

Why did we start the war on Iraq? Because we were scared and didn’t know what else to do. What happened on 9/11? A small group of religious fanatics with cutlery high-jacked some planes and crashed them into some buildings killing three thousand innocent people. It’s not the first time such things have transpired and it won’t be the last. It’s simply the story of human beings doing what human beings do when angry, misguided and afraid.

Did our President intentionally lie? Did he perpetrate a grand conspiratorial plan? Don’t be silly. Just look at whom we’re talking about here. It’s George W. Bush, remember?

G.W. -- The same guy that liberals back in 2000, characterized as being far from the shed’s sharpest tool. This is the same guy who, when questioned in 2004, as to the progress being made in Iraq replied by saying that it was “hard work”. The same guy who sat looking dumbfounded as he paused from his reading of “My Pet Goat” to an elementary school class on 9/11. The same guy who, in a speech to the nation and the world, characterized the problems of terrorism and the middle east as having just two components, good and bad. He’s not complex enough to even conceive of such a nefarious plot, much less execute it.

Does that mean he did the right thing in Iraq… who knows? The world is certain to be somewhat better without guys like Saddam running around, at least until another Saddam takes his place somewhere else. Will our brand of democratic government take hold in the Middle East? Again, only time will tell, but regardless it’s time to move on. Fahrenheit 9-11 is now selling for $9.99 on DVD – it’s old news that needs to be put behind us. We’ve got plenty of other big issues for talking heads to fight over, like gay marriage, or prayer in schools, or whether Hillary Clinton was or is a lesbian.

There is a rule in the intelligence community that says that, when analyzing a situation, the simplest answer is usually correct. Many people may not like that answer, it is after all, dull when compared with the grand, master plans of Hollywood movies. But alas, the simplest answer is usually the right answer.

Why did the “plumbers” break into the Watergate Hotel, when their employer was certain to win the next election in a landslide? Because President Nixon and those around him were simply paranoid nut cases that were afraid of losing. Why did we fight the Cold War and the war in Viet Nam? Because we were scared of the “red menace” spreading its Godless, anti-capitalist doctrine to Petute, Indiana. Why did Bill Clinton lie about his affair with Monica Lewinsky? Because he was scared to tell the truth, like any other guy in his position would be. Why, on television, did he answer a question by saying that it depended what the definition of “is” was? Well, because he was being an idiot, that’s why.

And, why did we rush to round up Japanese Americans and imprison them after Pearl Harbor? For the same reason we were in such a hurry to go to war in Iraq.

As to the question of whether Hillary was or is a lesbian… I sure hope so. It certainly would make for some compelling television.