9/11: The debate still rages

DAYS before the 11th anniversary of the Sept.11 attacks on New York, two different events have put the spotlight back on the issue. The call by Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu that both Gorge W. Bush and Tony Blair should be tried for their role in Iraq invasion, which was based on a lie and what was revealed by the US National Security Archives at George Washington University from the CIA declassified information that blamed “analyst liabilities,” for mistakenly calculating that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was in effect possessing weapons of mass destruction.
Tutu’s call to send Bush and Blair to the Hague to be tried before the International Criminal Court (ICC) like their African and Asian peers stands very slim chance, if ever. Late British politician Robin Cook, who was a leading voice against his country’s involvement in the war, would not have approved the move to get his prime minister to The Hague. After all he sent a message, when he was the foreign minister that the ICC was not setup to try the kinds of prime minister of Britain.
But the significance is that 11 years after the event, the moral cause is still vivid, fueled by death of 4,486 Americans, 32,000 wounded, 110,000 Iraqis killed in addition to more than a million displaced.
And all that is because of a deliberate lie.
Also few days ago researchers at the George Washington University managed through a “mandatory declassification review” request to check on internal CIA documents that blamed the failure of the spy agency on “analyst liabilities” such as neglecting examining Iraq’s deceptive attitude. Such negligence led to the disastrous mistake regarding the failure to locate the weapons of mass destruction, the prime cause to launch a war by choice without an international agreement, nor even a domestic support as Cook told Blair in his resignation message.
But now it is simply obvious that it was not only a war by choice, but equally by design. It was the ideology of the neoconservatives pressuring their CIA leadership to come up with the much awaited evidence to justify the intended course, and those leaders on their turn pressured their subordinates to produce the smoking gun.
It is no secret that the then Vice President Dick Cheney had set up a parallel line to collect and disseminate information on Iraq. And when President George W. Bush opted to use his state of the union address to build his case against Iraq, none of the official US agencies was ready to endorse the claim that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger to make a bomb. And the president of the United States found that he has to quote British intelligence as a source for this piece of information.
But for the real push of war against Iraq, the credit should go in the end to Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, who as early as the first war against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait back in 1991 was pushing for regime change in Iraq. It was Bush Sr. who was strict on complying with the UNSC resolution that called for evicting the Iraqi army out of Kuwait only.
In the first meeting after Sept. 11 to discuss how Washington was going to react to the event, Wolfowitz was quick to propose attacking Baghdad, though no connection whatsoever has been established between the Baathist regime in Baghdad and Al-Qaeda.
It was this determination that drove the search for information “make up” to justify a war that had already been decided, and not mistakes committed by the CIA analysts.
Eleven years after Sept. 11, one thing is crystal clear the sympathy that the world has expressed toward the United States has evaporated following the hijack of the event by the neocons to settle imaginary scores. And because it is an ideological war it ended up with two disasters: Washington found itself in an awkward position wherein it had to borrowing to finance its wars. And these wars though ended after paying a hefty price, but it also resulted into giving Iran the strategic advantage after the American troops knocked down its two enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Moreover, President Barack Obama, who inherited the tough job of bringing back American soldiers and reviving the economy, is fighting for his neck in a tight race with the neocons who are grouping around Mitt Romney.

n This article is exclusive to Arab News.