Israel, the United States, and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror - TomDispatch.com

Israel, the United States, and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror - TomDispatch.com Maha Hilal, Cheerleading the War on Terror January 25, 2024 I was uptown in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I still remember the distant smoke that you could see over the Hudson River. If you had told me then that, thanks to those four hijacked planes and a tiny group of al-Qaeda operatives, my country would launch a 20-plus-year "Global War on Terror" -- with two full-scale disastrous invasions of distant lands -- and that, even today, it's never quite ended, I would have thought you mad. Yes, I remember the shock of seeing a plane plow into the World Trade Center tower on television and how it felt as if it were all too literally happening out of the blue. As TomDispatch regular Maha Hilal makes clear today, 9/11 has unfortunately remained an out-of-the-blue event for most Americans (justifying so much). Who even remembers how the CIA, while pouring money into the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, would indirectly support a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden? Chalmers Johnson would later call him “a former protege of the United States” in his classic book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (published before 9/11). Who remembers how bin Laden had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group he would call al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army? Who even remembers that, as Johnson wrote so long ago, this country played a significant role in luring the Soviet Union into that very war, in the end sending the Red Army home in defeat and leaving the Soviet Union at the edge of dissolution? As President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly put it so long ago, “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the [Afghan] mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.” So, yes, there was a long history leading up to 9/11 (of which I've only mentioned a part) that was conveniently forgotten or ignored after al-Qaeda struck so devastatingly. Today, Hilal, author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim, reminds us of the ways Israel has used 9/11, when it came to launching devastating wars, and of the similarities between that country's response to its own 9/11, the Hamas attacks of October 7th, and the earlier American one. Tom