21st Anniversary of 9/11: Lessons Learned

As we all know, 9/11 was the single deadliest attack on American soil. 21 years later, and 11 after the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, the US remains involved in struggles and interventions in the middle east—certainly no accident. Mainstream coverage of 9/11, both then and now, tends to paint a Manichean struggle between the civilized West and barbaric forces of Islamic terrorism. “They simply hate our freedoms,” was a particularly common refrain of the era, accompanied by “those repressed, crazy young men just want to sacrifice themselves to jihad for their 72 virgins.” Such tales of barbarism were useful lies to portray the attack as unjustified and unprovoked, but the truth is that 9/11 was the culmination of decades of Western imperialism in the middle east. Those 3,000 civilian lives were sacrificed at the alter of capitalist profits by those with a vested interest in keeping middle eastern countries under the thumb of Western imperialism, and we are currently recreating the very same mistakes today as our ruling class pumps Ukraine full of weapons to fight against Russia.

War in Afghanistan… No The Other One

Long before he was head of Al Qaeda, Osama had been son of a family of Wealthy Saudi Arabian elites with connections to the Saudi royal family. After studying business and economics in University, Osama went on to use money and machinery from a construction company to assist the Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet Union.

The Mujahideen were a group of Islamist guerilla fighters who had initially fought against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan then later against the invading Soviet Union. The Afghan-Soviet conflict is too out of scope to detail, but suffice to say, the Mujahideen were a group of Western-backed anti-communist militants. Operation Cyclone, for example, was a covert CIA (and MI6) operation to arm and finance the Mujahideen. Besides simply opposing Soviet interests, the CIA had its own particular interests in Afghanistan—namely, it needed heroin to help fund its activities. After the war ended, some of the members of the Mujahideen splintered off and became the Taliban, while others went with Osama to form Al Qaeda—two groups the USA eventually went on to fight against! Here is a clip from a 2010 interview in which Hillary Clinton acknowledges that the groups we funded and allied with eventually became our enemies:

Rise of Al Qaeda

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, Osama returned home to Saudi Arabia to form a new covert guerilla group with a jihadist agenda: Al Qaeda. During the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Saudi government agreed to an alliance with the US to defend against a possible Iraq invasion. For criticizing the alliance, Osama was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991. Then for a handful of years, Al Qaeda carried out assassinations and bombings. By 1996, US forces remained in Saudi Arabia despite assurances by then-president George Bush (senior) that American troops would be withdrawn once Saddam had been defeated. Between this and US support for the Zionist occupation of Palestine, Osama came to believe that America was the greatest source of evil in the middle east. That year, Osama declared war on the United States, stating that:

The people of Islam had suffered … iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn’t respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its’ allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves.

The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about “Human Rights” were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world.

Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places

Far from hating the freedom or immodesty of American women to expose their bodies in public, or other such claims, Osama and others were aggrieved and devastated by consistent acts of imperialism and genocide of Muslim people carried out by the USA in particular. That is why they hated us, and that is why they attacked us. And what became of it? More war!

More War!

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the opportunists in the Bush (jr.) Administration, particularly former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, used the opportunity to declare another war on Iraq, suggesting that they were responsible for harboring Al Qaeda and building “weapons of mass destruction.” Both claims turned out to be false. The subsequent “war on terrorism” simply became a new justification for imperialist interventions: continually destabilizing countries, overthrowing old comprador-turned-nationalists, extracting wealth from the region, and creating an opioid epidemic in the process too. Time and time again, pro-US puppet leaders would be placed into power, those leaders would turn against the US, and then the US would support local militants in taking down the regime—not in the interests of protecting democracy or human rights, as was often claimed, but in the interests of profit. For example, here’s another clip, this one from Joe Biden, explaining how the US and our allies funded Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and ISIS in the fight against Assad in Syria:

Though not in the middle east, a new proxy war resembling the Afghan-Soviet war has emerged: the Ukrainian-Russian war. We have said before that the Russian invasion is unjustified—just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was unjustified too—but the solution to imperialist war is not more imperialist interventions! Two things end imperialist wars: the destruction of one or more belligerents or socialist revolution. We of course advocate for socialist revolution to end not just this particular war but imperialism as a predominating world force. Just as we once funded and armed jihadist militants in Afghanistan, now today we are contributing to the destabilization of Ukraine by funding its far right, neo-Fascist battalions. Not only does ending the war end the ongoing bloodshed, but lest we would like to face a second 9/11, it is our immediate prerogative as anti-imperialists and as workers of the United States to condemn intervention by our ruling class.