Tony Blair first floated the idea of regime change in Iraq just three months after September 11, 2001. However, the politics of fear- and hate-mongering has impaired a large number of American minds, which only think Islamist terrorists are the sole security threat to their nation. “They represent evil and war”.
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He continued: “Relatively little of this terrorism has involved Americans”. However, a ten-year-old American boy was exceptional. In addition, more than 20,000 U.S. troops were wounded, many of them severely.
France, which has found itself a primary target for ISIS terror attacks, increasingly sees the USA reaction to 9/11 as the instigating cause of that, with several high-profile analysts and top officials saying that the post-9/11 interventions led to an “era of instability” of which much of Europe, including France, has been a victim. And so were Muslims all across the world. But our biggest fear – that terrorists would use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and pose an “existential threat” to the USA – didn’t come true. And who doesn’t know this except the overwhelming majority of Americans? “But we’ve got this new environment and new threat which makes it harder”. Elsewhere, the Al Qaeda may have been weakened only to see the ISIS rise in Iraq and Syria. It’s sad but true; in 2011 America turned a blind eye to Saudi invasion of Bahrain to crush the popular mass upsurge of the Shiite majority against the Sunni rulers of the oil rich sheikhdom; and Saudi Arabia since 2015 has killed thousands of Yemeni rebels, with impunity. We have never gotten the full story about 9/11. “Has it worked?” is the embarrassing question. Even in the beginning when polls told us that the vast majority of the American public supported the Bush Administration’s position on confronting Iraq for matters seemingly entirely unconnected to the attacks in Manhattan and Virginia, there was a sense that this was going to be a bitterly divisive issue in a war that the war in Afghanistan had not become. One’s not sure if America’s Middle Eastern surrogates, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (which was in good terms with Washington until the abortive July coup in 2016) created the anti-Shiite/anti-Iranian ISIS – with tacit U.S. support!
Soon after President Obama took office in 2009, the new administration’s security team began looking for novel approaches to countering radicalization. Hundreds of “unlawful combatants” from Afghanistan were tortured and kept behind bars at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center for years; a couple of hundred detainees are still there without any charges and trials.
Not since Pearl Harbor had the world’s only superpower been attacked within its domestic borders and what was so surprising was that the attack was not carried not by another state but by a then little-known terrorist group – al-Qaeda. The Department of Homeland Security wasted .1 billion on a “virtual fence” of sensors along the Mexican border before scrapping the program. Their sacrifice may have prevented an attack on White House or the U.S. Capitol.
According to the Washington Post, this past labor day saw USA aircraft bomb stretches of Iraq and Syria, large stretches of which have been overrun by al-Qaeda competitor ISIS; Libya’s city of Sirte, another ISIS stronghold; Yemen, where the U.S.is fighting al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula; Somalia, which is facing an insurgency by militant group al-Shabab; and Afghanistan, where both the Taliban and ISIS have continued to fight.
Mann’s son was 3 when 9/11 happened; now he’s in the military himself.
However, democracy and free press create problems, even for the American hawks.
As the threats have grown, Americans have also been forced to grapple with another reality: Terrorism doesn’t just threaten American lives – it threatens our way of life. The US intelligence agencies had ample warning of the impending attacks, had kept numerous perpetrators under active surveillance, and had longstanding ties to Osama bin Laden and his network, which was formed out of the CIA-orchestrated guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan during the 1980s against the Soviet-backed regime then in power in Kabul. It was war, not law-enforcement, we were conducting, and rightly so.
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The al-Qaida organization once led by Osama bin Laden has been decimated and is no longer capable of orchestrating a sophisticated, trans-national plot on its own, terrorism experts say they believe. It’s time to stop demonising Muslims, Arab or non-Arab. Pakistan, for example, is country that has nuclear weapons, a significant terrorist presence, and a weak government. The Iraq and Afghan wars, including the medical costs for veterans, are estimated to end up costing the U.S.at least trillion dollars.
