I had dropped in to see my Turkish friend Ayhan at the ACME Nuts & More Nuts Company the other day. It had been a while since I had last seen him, and I usually take the opportunity of our get-togethers to use him as a sounding board for some of my zany theories on mankind. Lately however, Ayhan has been coming up with some beauties of his own.
We were soon fluttering between discussions on the present situation on Iraq, the different religious and ideological beliefs and so on, when Nick, another employee of the company dropped in. An American from the west coast who has spent the better part of two decades here, Nick offered to counter with some of his own theories on politics and Zen.
Ayhan remained unconvinced that the facts behind Sept. 11 bombings were cut and dry as had been reported in the media. There must have been some reason why the Twin Towers, which normally house 20,000 people, had far less casualties. Could some have been forewarned to stay away prior to the aircraft smashing into the buildings? Why couldn’t the hijackers plan a later flight to ensure maximum building occupancy? And how come there were such a small number of Jews among the casualties, New York being full of them?
My take on this was that I failed to see how all the federal defense agencies and spy gurus had failed to see this coming. If this was planned, it was obviously done over a considerable period of time and with lots of detail. One doesn’t simply walk onto an aircraft and with a knife bring down thousands of lives and millions of tons of steel and concrete on the spur of the moment. And where was the Northeast Air Traffic Control or NORAD during those long agonizing minutes when the planes were obviously diverting dramatically from their flight path?
With Ayhan puffing away silently at his pipe, Nick retorted that this was indeed planned by Osama Bin Laden and kept under wraps very successfully until execution day. The primary intent was to rupture the alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia. And from the way things have been playing out recently, Bin Laden may have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Nick felt that our skepticism matched that of Israelis today who do not believe that it was their own who instigated the war in 1967, in their first bid for illegal land occupation. And when aware that the US spy ship USS Liberty was monitoring their moves, the Israelis sent their aircraft and mercilessly sunk it murdering everyone on board. For some unexplained reason, President Johnson at the time chose to withhold this piece of news from the general public.
But why now Iraq, I wanted to know. What had that to do with Sept. 11? “As an American, do you really know all the facts behind the bombings? Don’t you have a right to? As great a crime has been committed against your country, don’t you think some commission or hearing along the lines of the Warren Commission, Watergate or the Contra hearings is long overdue? Or have you been swept away like so many others in the frenzy of Afghanistan, the panic of the anthrax scare, the terror of bridges being blown up or domestic water reservoirs being contaminated? And now Iraq?” I asked.
“As far as I know, Saddam is on even par with dislike of the US or Islamic extremists. Isn’t the American public being denied a detailed and official investigation into Sept. 11? All these diversions, and for what?” I continued.
“Look, the anthrax thing was strange,” Nick replied. “And suddenly it died out with no real answers. It must have been a local thing. Weapons of mass destruction aside, Iraq is about personal agendas. Bush has one, Rumsfeld has one, Powell has one, the Israelis have one and so on. What Bush should be doing is imposing peace on the region by forcing the Israelis and Palestinians into a full peace agreement, but he won’t do it.”
“And you know why? His father tried, and look where it got him. He LOST the election. And this coming on the tail of the highest popularity rating a president had ever achieved. Oh sure, the media said he lost the election because of the sorry state of the economy at the time. But that wasn’t the real reason. His withholding of billions of dollars of aid to the Israelis is what did him in. Sharon now, and Netanyahu before him have had one purpose in mind and that was land expansion, and they have forced the US to turn a blind eye to this land grab.”
Ayhan interjected as he refreshed the tobacco in his now dying out pipe. “Look, the bombing of Iraq is America’s way of forcing their brand of democracy into the region thereby punishing and destabilizing this area for the next 60 years while Israel continues its daily illegitimate expansion of land at the expense of the Palestinians.”
I had to concede that this was indeed a war of agendas in the making, and the continued promotion of this war mattered to all and it was it not in Israel’s interest for anything but. Why else would they not have accepted Prince Abdullah’s offer of a full recognition and a normalization of diplomatic relations, an offer that was ratified by all the other Arab states in the region? They chose instead from that point onwards to increase the intensity of violence directed against the Palestinian masses, and in the process declare more occupied land under their security buffer zones.
Directed by the US against innocent civilians, this war in the making is an immoral war, an illegal war. It is not about the security of the United States but one full of hidden agendas. There have been no discoveries of weapons of mass destruction threatening the US so far, and given time, Saddam can be removed by far less destructive means.
Saddam is not all of Iraq. There are innocent people living there whose flesh and blood will be spilled when the US drops its payloads of destruction. And all those that support this form of terrorism against the innocent are no less guilty than the perpetrators of Sept. 11 themselves.
— Tariq A. Al-Maeena, [email protected]
Arab News Features 25 January 2003
