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The Politics of 9-11

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The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were a huge blow to us. 2,998 people who were just going about their everyday lives were killed when four planes were hijacked by 19 radical Islamic terrorists and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania or in the subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center and one side of the Pentagon. It’s the modern day equivalent of Pearl Harbor, “a day that will live forever in infamy” to quote former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Pearl Harbor in 1941, 9/11 was the catalyst that brought the United States into war. But rather than team up with our European companions to kick Nazi and imperialist butt, we’re leading the fight against radical Islamic terrorism and our European friends are coming aboard, although most have withdrawn. I agree with the Bush administration that something has to be done to prevent this kind of attack from happening again, but I feel that invading Iraq and toppling a dictator on the premise of him claiming he has chemical weapons and that he may be aiding the guy who planned the 9/11 attacks without any facts to back any of those claims up was preemptive and stupid. The war in Iraq is a waste of time, money, and lives. We’ve been fighting the insurgency in Iraq for five years without any sort of end in sight. Whoever our next president is may determine how long we’ll be in the quagmire of Iraq. The war in Iraq is costing $400 billion dollars, most of which is coming out of the pockets of the taxpayers. That takes money away from education, health care, and other places money is sourly needed more than in a perpetual war where our men and women are dying in great numbers for no good reason. As of right now, there have been 4,540 American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those were people whose lives were cut short in order to fight a war that isn’t too popular anymore.

Some of the ways we can tease out relevant facts for our understanding of 9/11 would be to talk to people who were there on that day and who saw the planes hit the buildings. If you asked most people about what happened on September 11, 2001, they'd all agree that four planes were hijacked by Middle Eastern terrorists and crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and almost 3,000 people died. What changes between people are details like what was the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania's original target before the passengers rose against the hijackers? No one really knows for sure since all 44 people aboard American Airlines Flight 93 perished when the plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It wasn't until al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured and interviewed before it was discovered that the intended target was the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

One of the most hotly debated points about 9/11 is why it happened in the first place. The Bush administration focuses on the fact that some countries provide terrorists with a safe haven for training facilities and bases, the leadership of these terrorist groups, money for operations, and so on. These are the means that enable terrorist attacks to be carried out. The theory goes is that if you eliminate the enabling conditions that allow attacks to be carried out, bam no more terrorism. But there's more to it than just the things terrorists need to commit acts of terrorism.

According to George Lakoff in his article "Metaphors of Terror", "there are (at least) three kinds of causes of radical Islamic terrorism: their worldview, their social and political conditions, and the means/enabling conditions that allow terrorism to take place" (Lakoff, page 5).  Notice how I differentiate between radical Muslims and non-radical Muslims. One mistake most people make when they talk about 9/11 and the War in Iraq is they think that all Muslims are radical fundamentalists that hate us because of our freedoms. Lakoff does the same thing in his article because he wants the reader to know that he doesn't believe that all Muslims are terrorists.
In Lakoff's article, he talks about the worldview that Islamic fundamentalists have where they believe that we're being too pushy by trying to press our beliefs on them. Not only are we trying to push our Western worldview on them, but we're also taking what was theirs. Most people believe that the real reason we're in Iraq is because of oil, not because Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden or because Saddam had WMDs. I don't know how accurate that is, but one aspect of war involves gaining spoils of war and what could be a better spoil of war in these times of sky-high gas prices than oil. Oil is a pretty big reason for us to be over there, despite it not being one of our objectives for peace in the Middle East. Did you know that when we invaded Iraq the only ministry we didn’t destroy was Iraq’s oil ministry? I wonder why we left it standing.

Lakoff says that most Islamic martyrs-to-be live in "cultures of despair": they choose to be martyrs because there is nothing really to lose. Most terrorists that are recruited come from areas of the Middle East where they live in poverty and under oppressive governments. If they become a martyr, they are promised an eternity in heaven surrounded by many young virgins and are promised that their family will be taken care of by the community. If I were living in the Middle East and I wasn’t blessed to be born into a rich Saudi family like Osama bin Laden and I was allowed to do certain things that I’d be allowed to do if I lived in the West, I would definitely be looking for the nearest al-Qaeda or Taliban training camp and ask to join up. Besides, if I become a martyr, I’ll spend eternity in heaven with young virgins while my family will be taken care of. It’s a win-win situation. As long as the oppression and cultures of despair continue, there will be no end to terrorism.

When I first read Ward Churchill's article "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens", I thought he was writing a satire of the liberal perspective on the war and that Churchill was a conservative trying to paint American liberals as radicals. Then I read the footnote at the end of the article that tells the reader just who Ward Churchill really is. It turns out that Churchill is a Cherokee Indian and an outspoken Native American activist who "explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo" (Churchill, page 12). He’s got quite a lot of background to back him up on that. When Europeans were colonizing the United States under the idea of “manifest destiny”, they built an east-west rail system and people traveling in the trains would often take shots at the buffalo as the train passed them. Whereas the Indians would use every part of the buffalo for some purpose, riders on the train did nothing with the buffalo they shot. The corpses just rotted in the plains, so the Indians lost out on food and other materials necessary for their survival. The forced march of Indians further west as we colonized America, the Trail of Tears, also caused the death of many Indians. Now that I know of his background and the atrocities our European ancestors put his ancestors through, his article doesn't appear to be satire at all. He claims that 9/11 was committed in vengeance for the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by U.S. "surgical" bombing strikes designed to take out infrastructure necessary for the survival of the Iraqi people. This strategy has been utilized throughout history; take out the infrastructure in order to cripple the enemy economy and starve the enemy into submission. In a way, the terrorists have used the exact same tactic against us: they targeted infrastructure necessary to the survival of Americans. But wait, what does the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have to do with food and water purification systems? Just because the World Trade Center went down doesn't mean that we're starving in the streets or resorting to civil war and guerilla tactics to gain control of the country (maybe we are, but we're not using guns, just politicians...). The thing is American values seem to accentuate how much money you have and the idea that we can be friends with people easier if they accept the way we do things. You know that consumerism runs our lives; we just did an entire unit in English class about consumerism and its effects on us. Perhaps that should be telling us something.

I find myself agreeing with almost everything Churchill says. I liked the statement he made in the section titled "Meet the Terrorists" where he says, "They [the terrorists] did not, for starters, 'initiate' a war with the U.S., much less commit 'the first acts of war of the new millennium'" (Churchill, page 3). He goes on to compare the modern conflict with that of the Crusades that pitted the "Christian West" against the "Islamic East" 1,000 years ago. Replace "Christian West" with the United States and the "Coalition of the Willing" and it sounds almost exactly like what is going on today. But rather than trying to lay claim to the ancient city of Jerusalem, sacred to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, or to recover the Holy Sepulcher, the West's objective is to spread democracy in the Islamic world and to lay claim to these Islamic countries' vast amounts of oil, though this isn't stated outright by the West. President Bush the Second may have alienated Muslims across the globe when he called the retaliation to the September 11th attacks "a crusade", but to me, it sounds like he was right on the money.

What most people don't realize is that the conflict we're having in the Middle East is nothing new and that most of the events that led up the current situation occurred way before Bush the Second took office. Bush II wasn't President during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries when the Crusades took place. They were counter-offensives by Christians against Muslims occupying the Holy Land (what is today Israel) and to stem the tide of Islam from moving into and occupying Europe. According to Arthur Jones' "Memories of Crusades Live on in Today's War" Islam took Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, and Portugal from Christian control and began moving into Europe through Italy into eastern Switzerland and even captured the abbot in Cluny, France. If the Christians hadn’t done something, Islam would have overrun Europe. The pope called for the banding together of European kings and princes in order to take back the Holy Sepulcher from the Muslim Seljuk Turks. Hearing the papal call, French soldiers began to march. When they needed supplies, they sacked Belgrade in what is today Serbia. German peasants financed themselves by attacking Jews, a behavior that will rear its ugly head for a different reason 800 years in the future. By 1272, there were nine Crusades. The Christians won 2, the Muslims won 5, and they negotiated twice. The Muslims remained in control of the Holy Land after all nine Crusades and still do today. Well, kind of. Jerusalem isn’t under control of the Muslims anymore; it is instead under the control of the UN and they don’t keep anyone out.

Arthur Jones goes on to say in his article that Muslim values aren’t so different than the values of Christians. Both religions hinge on the values of shame and honor. However, we abandoned those values in 1914 during World War 1 and ever since, our values are centered on achievement and guilt rather than shame and honor. Islamic countries continue to live around the values of shame and honor. Nothing in the Quran supports the honor killing of women, but in some countries a woman who has been raped is killed. Sounds pretty cruel right? In our country, killing a woman for being the unfortunate victim of a sexual assault would be an outrage. The way that those countries that do this kind of thing see it, killing the woman, especially in a public place where all can see, eliminates the shame from the family and gives them back some of their lost honor. Is it any wonder why we’re over in the Middle East trying to bring them “democracy”? Are we trying to bring “democracy” to Iraq by forcing them to abandon their values on shame and honor as we have? It kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Bush the Second also wasn’t president during the 1990s when we first went to war with Iraq, but Bush the First (George H. W. Bush, George W.’s father) was. In 1990, Saddam claimed that Kuwait was illegally slant-drilling for oil across the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. This justified an invasion of Kuwait by four divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard that easily overran Kuwait. In response, President Bush the First started amassing U.S. and coalition troops in Saudi Arabia and members of the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Despite buying military equipment from almost every major arms dealer in the world, Saddam’s forces could not withstand the superior air advantage that coalition forces had, and by February 26 Iraqi forces were in full retreat from Kuwait. By the time the U.S. mobilized, Saddam and the rest of the Iraqi forces had already left Kuwait. As they left, they set the oil fields on fire, consuming an estimated six million barrels of oil daily until most of the fires were extinguished eight months later on November 6, 1991.

After the Gulf War ended in 1991, U.N. weapons inspectors were shocked to discover the existence of a relatively advanced nuclear weapons program. It shouldn’t have been much of a shock since Iraq used chemical weapons in the war it had with Iran in the 1980s. As if that wasn’t enough, Saddam freely admitted that his regime had thousands of chemical weapons and tons of chemical weapons agents. We didn’t know how much of Saddam’s statement was truth or how much was fiction until 1995 when several senior Iraqi officials defected and revealed that not only was Saddam concealing these weapons from the U.N. but that several of them had been made with the deadly nerve agent VX. In 1998, Hussein Kamal defected to Jordan and told us that Iraq had 3.9 tons of VX, plus 805 tons of precursor ingredients to make more VX; 4,000 tons of ingredients to make other kinds of poisonous gas; 8,500 liters of anthrax; 500 bombs fitted with parachutes to deliver poison gas or germ payloads; 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas; 107,500 casings for chemical weapons; at least 157 aerial bombs filled with germ agents; and 25 missile warheads containing the germ agents anthrax, aflatoxin, and botulinum (Kagan and Kristol, page 1). As a result of this major revelation, the Clinton administration launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing run of suspected chemical weapon depots and manufacturing plants to cripple Iraq’s weapons program. After Desert Fox though, no weapons inspectors entered Iraq until 2002. What could Saddam have been up to for those four years when the U.N. wasn’t breathing down his neck? According to the Bush II administration, he was protecting and training al Qaeda operatives and producing more weapons of mass destruction. These two reasons alone gave Bush ample cause to go to war with Iraq even though they never attacked us or provide hijackers for the attack on 9/11. Years later, we still can’t prove there was ever a link between Saddam’s regime and Osama bin Laden. But keep in mind that Saddam wasn’t considered to be a model Muslim in the Middle East.

He was considered an enemy to the Muslim world because he was attempting to “westernize” Iraq and used to be an ally of ours during the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s. Radical Islamic fundamentalists want nothing at all to do with the Western world; they would like us to leave them alone and for us to stop trying to push our way of life down their throats. Saddam also made waves in the Middle East by giving women more rights than most Islamic countries would allow. Iraqi women were encouraged to get an education and were allowed to become doctors or whatever they liked. It could be argued that Iraqi women made more headway in those professions than American women. The last thing that Saddam did that angered other Muslims was drink alcohol. Like Jews, Muslims are also restricted in their diets and are not allowed to eat pig products, blood, carrion, or alcohol. All meat must be from a herbivorous animal slaughtered in the name of God by a Muslim, a Jew, or a Christian, with the exception of wild game you got from hunting or fishing yourself (Wikipedia article on Islam, Etiquette and Diet). Because he drank alcohol which he isn’t supposed to since he’s supposed to be Muslim, Saddam seemed to be claiming he was a Muslim even though he wasn’t as devoted to his faith as most Muslims would be.

As you can see, it is very important to know the pertinent history of this conflict. It allows us to see how the current situation evolved from events in the past. Who knew that when we gave aid to Iraq in the 1980s that we'd eventually turn on them 20 years later and oust and execute their president, violating international law in the process? Who knew that those Afghan freedom fighters, the Mujahideen, we trained and gave weapons to so they could fight off the Soviet Union would turn on us 10 years later and crash four planes into buildings in the U.S.? Nobody saw these events coming, not even Bush the Second. It's useful to know about the history of this conflict so that we can understand what drives these fundamentalists into wanting to kill us all, even if we aren't part of the U.S. military, and also so we can learn how to do foreign policy better without breaking the law or endangering the lives of our servicemen and women.

But what can I do about this situation? While I was able to illustrate my reasoning behind my point of view in previous papers through the use of a funny little anecdote from my life, I can’t do that in this paper. I’ve never been to Iraq, although I would like to visit it someday but not in the combat boots of a soldier. Instead, I shall dispense advice on how we should handle the next conflict we find ourselves in. First of all, take a deep breath. What happened after 9/11 is that instead of taking a moment to get our feelings straight and mourn the dead, we immediately cried out for vengeance. We wanted somebody to pay! Since bin Laden and his merry men are very hard to pinpoint on a map, we had to find someone else to take out our anger on. Enter Saddam Hussein. We knew where he’d be; now all we needed was a reason to go in there. Oh good, he has weapons of mass destruction that he could use against us or Israel or another of our allies. Oh, and he and Osama are good friends, despite one being a Sunni Muslim and the other being a Vahabi. Very good, now we have two “good” reasons to go into Iraq.

What we did wrong was that we assumed that since Iraq had the “means” to commit attacks, which meant that they were going to attack us or somebody we’re friends with someday. We forget that Lakoff said that there were at least three causes of radical Islamic terrorism. We forgot about worldview and the cultural and political conditions in Iraq before we went in there. There isn’t any evidence that says that Iraqis absolutely hated us, Saddam was even trying to “westernize” his country with some success. After all, Saddam used to be a good friend of ours. I think we saw that and said, “Yeah you’re trying to become like us, but we want you to be us.”

Up until we toppled Saddam’s government, there really was only a “culture of despair” in groups such as the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds. The Marsh Arabs were victimized by Saddam’s regime in that the government diverted the flow of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers as punishment for a failed Shia uprising, turning their homeland in southern Iraq into desert. Since the 2003 invasion, the Marsh Arabs have regained some of their water and the marshes are back on the rise, though it will take time. The Kurds, which make up 17% of Iraq’s population, were frequently forced from their homes in northern Iraq for trying to break away from Iraq to form a Kurdish country called Kurdistan with several other Kurdish groups from other neighboring countries in the region. The campaign of the Iraqi government against the Kurds was called Anfal, and it resulted in the death of 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds.

If you thought Iraq’s way of dealing with the Kurdish people was harsh, just look at Turkey. Half of the world’s Kurdish population lives in Turkey, where they make up 20% of Turkey’s 70 million people. Turkish Kurds tried to gain independence from Ottoman rule in the years between 1915 and 1918 and with the encouragement of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson they submitted their claim for independence to the 1919 Paris Peace Accords. The Treaty of Sevres gave them an independent state in 1920, but the Treaty of Lausanne in 1924 made no mention of an independent Kurdistan. Following failed uprisings in 1925 and 1930, Turkey denied the existence of different ethnic groups like the Kurds and their culture was brutally repressed. Up until 1991, the Kurdish language wasn’t even allowed to be spoken in Turkey. In 1994, Layla Zana, the first Kurdish woman representative in Turkey’s parliament, was arrested as soon as she was sworn in to office for making “separatist speeches”: she took the oath of loyalty in Turkish (as required by law) but added a vow in Kurdish to struggle to unify the Turkish people and the Kurds and the rest of Turkey’s parliament called for her arrest.

In conclusion I agree with Lakoff on whom he feels should be responsible for molding young minds in the Middle East. It’s not us. He states pretty clearly that we cannot. If they hate us already then how are we supposed to look good to these people? He says it’s up to the more moderate and liberal Muslims to form a unified voice against hate and terror. I feel that that would’ve worked a whole lot better than throwing $400 billion dollars down the toilet and getting almost 5,000 soldiers killed. Even though the reason isn’t stated outright by the Bush administration, oil is a pretty big reason to keep our foot in the region. It’s kind of hard to get oil in trade from countries that don’t like us, so the only way to get what we want and need is to take it by force. You know you’re reliant on a resource when you have to overthrow an otherwise stable government in a region full of instability to get it. Perhaps whoever takes over after Bush the Second will come up with alternate energy that doesn’t require the overthrow of a government to get. Their best bet would be something we already have in the U.S. This would kill two birds with one stone. This stops us from being the “world police’ and getting involved in places where it’s not our business to be and gives the companies involved in this new venture the pride of producing “American Energy”. Perhaps whoever takes the helm after Bush the Second’s reign is over will do a better job in other areas as well. We can only hope.
This was one of the three papers I had to write for my Advanced College Composition class. We had been studying a unit on war and terrorism and we had to write a paper on our views of the War on Terrorism using several articles we read to back up our viewpoints.

I'll warn you ahead of time that the following piece is extremely wordy and long. The original draft was eight pages long but I had to expand on it when I chose to make my 9/11 paper my "long paper" for my final. Now it's about 10 pages long.

Works Cited
-------------------
Churchill, Ward. “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” September 12, 2001

“Islam – Etiquette and Diet” Wikipedia. April 28, 2008. <[link]

Jones, Arthur. “Memories of Crusades Live on in Today’s War.” National Catholic Reporter Volume 38 issue 1, October 26, 2001

Kagan, Robert, William Kristol. “Why We Went to War” Weekly Standard Volume 9 issue 6, October 20, 2003

“Kurdish people – In Turkey” Wikipedia. May 5, 2008.
< [link]

Lakoff, George. Metaphors of Terror. University of Chicago Press. <[link]
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GreenDazed's avatar
Very nicely written! You backed up all of your information with cold hard facts from different sources with different perspectives, something not enough people do anymore.

Didn't this get published?