I’m beginning to feel like a bit player in the movie Ground Hog Day, reliving the same day of my life over and over again. Four years have passed since Sept. 11, yet here we are still arguing about methods of waging the so-called “war on terror”, with some bent on dragging a Middle East nation before fat cat nuclear-armed UN disciplinarians over its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions. Worse, between burgers and biking the US president is threatening Iran with military consequences...as a last resort, naturally.
And just like the movie, although superficially events may look similar, this time around their outcomes may take a very different turn.
Firstly, the “war on terror” has generally been acknowledged as a massive failure with far more “evil-doers” (Bush’s label) today than arguably ever before, thanks, in part, to the Iraq misadventure. Moreover, adding to the general public mood of “things are not quite right on the Western front” is the Able Danger revelation.
For those of you who have not been following this shocking revelation, Able Danger was a top secret Pentagon intelligence-mining operation that toward the end of 2000 issued a chart on the whereabouts of several Al-Qaeda suspects, including the Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and three of his accomplices: Khalid Al-Midhar, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Marwan Al-Shehhi.
As all suspects were in New York at the time, those involved in Able Danger took their findings to the team’s superior (on several occasions) and advised that the information be passed on to the FBI along with a recommendation to dismantle the cell. This never happened. Indeed, they were told that Atta and Co. were in the country legally.
Some say this error was due to the firewall that existed between US government agencies in those days deterring the sharing of intelligence. They point out that lessons have since been learned thanks, in part, to recommendations by the respected Sept. 11 commissioners. These recommendations were set out in the giant-sized Sept. 11 report, a volume that omits mention of Able Danger’s pre-Sept. 11 findings.
Rep. Curt Weldon, who highlighted this omission early this year, and has been doing the rounds of the talk-shows ever since, has, at last, managed to bring it under the public spotlight where it fast turning into dynamite.
Initially, members of the commission told Weldon that they had never heard of Able Danger’s findings and certainly had no knowledge of the secret report on the Atta New York cell. Later, though, those same commissioners changed their minds, protesting they had dismissed the report as they not been provided with enough hard information. And in any event, by the time Able Danger had trickled through, their report was already in the printing stage, they said.
Weldon isn’t buying this excuse, however, and believes that someone somewhere deliberately ensured that the findings of Able Danger concerning the New York cell was kept out of the Sept. 11 report, which ultimately let the security agencies off the hook, citing no specific and credible intelligence. This, Americans are being made to realize, just wasn’t true and, further, the credibility of the commissioners themselves has been fatally eroded with loudening voices crying “Whitewash”.
One thing is certain, if the advice from the Able Danger team had been acted upon in 2000, then Sept. 11 might never have happened. In consequence, there would have been little public consensus to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, even though those countries were, indeed, fixtures on the neocon calendar.
It would be nice to have a time machine set at September 2000 enabling us to save over 100,000 lives but we have to accept what’s done is done. However, we do have some control over the future and when it comes to dealings with Iran isn’t it time we learned some lessons?
Let’s first not make the mistake of equating Iran with Iraq. While, in 2003, Iraq had been weakened by the Gulf War and years of disabling sanctions, Iran has had both the time and inclination to rebuild itself, both financially and militarily, while balefully witnessing the misfortunes of its neighbor across the fence.
Furthermore, many Iraqis felt animosity toward their leader for their plight and some initially fell for America’s promise of democracy and freedom.
Add to this the sectarianism stirred up by exiled Iraqis and Saddam Hussein’s international persona non grata status, and you get the picture of why Iraq was an initial walkover.
Iranians, on the other hand, are inherently nationalistic and cohesive and have put aside their disaffection with their hard-line leadership in favor of national unity as we have seen by their recent voting-in of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former enthusiastic revolutionary, who on Sunday announced an ultra-conservative Cabinet determined to hang on to Iran’s uranium-enriching capabilities.
Although the US is alleged to be stirring up dissidence among Iranian Azeri and Kurdish minorities, this is unlikely to be seriously discombobulating, and in any event, most Iranians still harbor a deep mistrust for the “Great Satan”.
Iran, too, has influential friends such as China, which has signed up to a host of bilateral oil and gas agreements with the former, and is, therefore, likely to object to its interests in the region coming under fire. Germany has already warned the US not to count upon its support in any upcoming pre-emptive conflict.
Even more importantly, the public mood in the US has dramatically altered since the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. Bush’s personal approval rating is down in the 30s with support for the war now in the 40s (statistics which mirror the period before the Vietnam War came to its ignominious end, some say).
Cindy Sheehan, who lost her 24-year-old son Casey last year on the killing fields of Iraq, is kicking up an anti-war PR storm from her tent outside the president’s Crawford ranch asking to be invited in. During an earlier meeting with Bush, he told her that her son died for a noble cause. What was that cause, and what was noble about it, Cindy wants to know, as do thousands of army families said to be heading to Texas.
But the mood could alter in the event predictions of terrorist attacks on US cities, using road tankers, transpire. Just as occurred post-Sept. 11 and following the recent London blasts, the public would rally around their leaders and offer up their civil liberties and decision-making capabilities in exchange for “security”.
This time the headlines would read: Iran is developing WMD and is harboring Al-Qaeda. But the question is this: Would we fall for it again? Or would we echo Cindy Sheehan and so many mothers like her in the US, Afghanistan and Iraq, and say “enough is enough!” I pray it’s the latter and that this episode of Ground Hog Day finally has, if not a happy ending, at least a bloodless one. We cannot rewrite history but the future is in our hands.
