Get ready to be inundated with the mythology of 9/11. The story we’ve been telling ourselves for 20 years. The lies that allowed us to spend 800 billion a year to line the pockets of the war profiteers.
The first lie was immediate. They hate our freedoms, our way of life. After hiding out for 8 hours while the whole nation was looking for guidance, Bush showed up and fed us the most important piece of bullshit that makes up the war on terror. They hate our freedoms, our way of life. Not many people had heard of Osama Bin Laden, but those who had knew that he had declared war on the U.S. years before and for very specific reasons. None of which was because he hated our freedoms. He was trained and radicalized by our U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He hated our foreign policy, which, in his view, killed hundreds of thousands of people. The reasons he cited for declaring war on us were our involvement with Saudi Arabia, the sanctions on Iraq (which should be considered a war crime), our stance on the Palestinian cause, and, in general, our meddling in the Middle East.
You can’t never forget that because, thanks to Team Bush, you never knew it in the first place.
Many would say who cares what his motivation was, he was a mass murderer. Fine, so why make up a bullshit story then? Oh wait, are you asking? Great! I’m glad you asked.
Because they decided to use 9/11 as a vehicle to drastically increase the military budget to ensure that the profits rendered from the military industrial complex would continue. Because here’s another thing people forget; after the Cold War ended, we were talking about a thing called the peace dividend. We were talking about bringing down the cost of our military expenditures and using the money to pay down the deficit and invest in infrastructure. Well, that wasn’t something that certain people (Ahem, Dick Cheney, the military industrial complex, and a whole host of war profiteers) were going to let happen if they could help it.
So instead of saying we were attacked by Al Qaeda. That they were likely financed by the Saudis. That they were motivated by our current and past foreign policy decisions. We were told that we were attacked by an ideology held by shadowy figures, part of a vast network that could include anybody, anywhere, at any time.
We could have instead pressured the known terrorism financiers, captured bin Laden, put all of them on trial, and then focused on the real terrorism threat that existed back then. A terror threat that was a fraction of the size it is today.
So why didn’t we do that? I’m glad you asked!
Because they decided to use 9/11 as a vehicle to drastically increase the military budget to ensure that the profits rendered from the military industrial complex would continue.
So they lied to us. And if creating an ambiguous, never-ending enemy to get us into never-ending war wasn’t the desired outcome, then man, did they just screw up every step of the way.
Since we’re never forgetting, let’s recap a bit. We failed to capture Osama Bin Laden before he escaped to Pakistan. We let Pakistan tell us to screw off, and they didn’t help us find him. Bush managed to convince 60% of Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and that he had WMD. We sent the Iraqi army home without pay but let them keep their guns. We opened Guantanamo Bay, we tortured people, we took happy smiling pictures while torturing people at Abu Ghraib. We created a surveillance apparatus that terrified the whole world.
If Lex Luther were designing a system to create anti-U.S. freedom fighters, aka terrorists, he couldn’t have done half as well. That’d be a great What If. What if Lex Luther was President during 9/11? Or better, what if Al Gore were President, you know, since he actually won and all. Well, if Gore were president, I think it’s safe to say that we would never have gone into Iraq. I can’t say he wouldn’t have succumbed to feeding the industrial military complex, but we wouldn’t have taken us into Iraq.
So this 9/11, for the nineteenth time, we’re going to hear the same bullshit. Well, it’s actually mutated over the years. How did we miss it? Why the intelligence failures? It was the biggest foreign policy blunder of all time. Oh, but the heroes, so many heroes. And there were, there really were people who stood up to the moment. That’s in many ways what makes the lies so tragic.
And then the inevitable, we were all together as a nation, so what happened? Wait, are you asking? Thank you, I’m glad you asked.
First of all, we weren’t. If you were Muslim or looked Arab, you were terrified and vilified. And sure, maybe for a minute we were somewhat together. But pretty quickly, Bush said you were either with us or you were with the terrorists, and the terrorists were hard to define. Actually, over time, they just became the classic American other. Basically, the non-white non-Christian, or both, classic American Bogeyman.
So what happened? Bush and company created an amorphous enemy to drastically increase the military budget to ensure the profits of the military-industrial complex. And that enemy, that amorphous enemy, morphed in the minds of the American populace.
Many of us ceased to trust a government that lied us into forever wars and didn’t seem to care about the middle class. And the bogeyman became whoever we needed it to be. It was harnessed for new reasons and took on new identities. It was foreigners when we needed to demonize the first Black President. Immigrants when we needed a distraction from the effects of globalization. People of color when our white population felt threatened by our changing demographics.
They say that when you lie so much, you eventually lose track of the lies and can’t tell what’s real anymore. Maybe that explains Trump. Or maybe it explains America in 2021.
#neverforget