The events of September 11, 2001 changed the world. Julian reflects on several interpretations of what they meant, proposing that each is a kind of Rorschach-test result based on our own religious and political beliefs, backgrounds, and social conditioning.
The conspiracy theorist simply can’t believe something like that could happen to America, going in search of complicated alternative explanations that exist outside of the “official narrative,” even of reality itself.
Where the Christian conservative might see a call to Holy War signaling that the End Times is near, Neocon warhawks surrounding Bush observe an opportunity to enact plans for maintaining economic and political power and security.
Meanwhile, many on the left see the attack as justifiable “blowback” against American imperialism, Cold War atrocities, and Western colonialism. Religion is merely an inflaming of a fundamentalist minority based on political injustices.
What about the Soviet Union? The history of political Islam and massive Muslim caliphates that ruled for nearly 1,300 years? The intractable sectarian conflicts and the multiple internal ideologies vying for control over the Middle East?
There may be no easy answers, but perhaps engaging with these different perspectives can allow us to name some of the many factors that got us to 9/11 and the seemingly unsolvable dilemmas of our world today.
Show Notes
Popular Mechanics on 911 conspiracies
Noam Chomsky on 911 conspiracies
Pilger on Project for A New American Century
NYT 2023 Piece on the Reasons for Iraq War
Saddam’s Ruthless Purge
CNN on Kabul attitudes after US Invasion
Polling of Iraqis
Mahmood Mamdani Good Muslim, Bad Muslim Interview
Human Rights Watch on Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Taimur Rahman’s Red Star History of Political Islam Lectures
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Trigger warning here, I'll mention the events of September 11th, 2001 for the next two minutes, so skip ahead, if you'd prefer.
When United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9.03 a.m., it was traveling at around 590 miles per hour.
That's twice as fast as the recommended cruising speed for passenger liners below 10,000 feet.
It's surreal to go back and watch that plane slip like a sword into the midsection of that building and then just disappear as the fireball emerges.
That's when the first stages of the chaos on 9 11 started to really take shape on TV news and in our psyches.
The first crash, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower 17 minutes previous, could plausibly have been a tragic freak accident.
But two planes, two towers within the same 20 minute period?
Reality was sinking in, and the deadliest terror attack in history was still unfolding with two more hijacked planes still in the air.
Within the next hour, one would hit the west wall of the Pentagon, while the other crashed in a Pennsylvania field due to passenger rebellion.
Because of flight delays, they'd been able to figure out that they were on a plane that was part of the coordinated attacks, and their heroic uprising against the hijackers caused the crash landing that fell short of the DC target, believed to have either been the Capitol building or the White House.
I must apologize here for resurrecting your memories of these events.
Like me, you probably know exactly where you were when you first realized what was going down.
You likely remember the room you were in and who you were with when you watched the terrifying and tragic footage over the next hours and days.
Just revisiting it myself right now to gather these details gives me that tight stomach and jaw and the characteristic itchy tingling of adrenaline on the skin of my arms and legs.
So let's not spend too much time here.
Let's notice our present time surroundings and remember we're safe in this moment together, in the gratitude of family and friends and all that makes life nourishing and beautiful.
And for those who are thinking it, let's also be mindful that so many around the world experience violence and suffering as a norm, not a safety rupturing anomaly.
I wish this wasn't true.
We'll move on from these memories in a moment.
But to get into today's episode, I want to reference a famous photo captured during those events, in which the smoke cloud created by one of the explosive impacts looks like a devilish face.
There are actually at least two images like this, but the best known was taken by AP photojournalist Mark Phillips and dubbed Satan in the Smoke by the public as it circulated widely.
Other photos and video stills have picked out what seemed like grinning or grimacing faces, or even more elaborately, winged demonic figures in the smoke and debris of that day.
These are, of course, classic examples of apaphenia, perceiving meaningful patterns in random places, or more correctly, paradoilia, which is specific to visual patterns.
We are hardwired to look for faces and to see them very easily in clouds or on trees or something like the headlights and the radiator grill of a car.
Humans often see mysterious religious iconography or supernatural figures in random patterns like the burned part of a piece of toast or the color splotches on the side of a cow, or the way the paint has peeled on that wall over there.
Usually our wishful thinking is seeking confirming evidence of divinity, compassion, blessing, protection, but our paradolia is also attuned to images that may convey danger, rage, and evil.
Our psyches imagine invisible forces animating our deepest longings and darkest fears, and then personify these as angels and demons, ghosts and saviors, archetypes of salvation and horror.
It's fitting then that an event like 9-11 carries within it the paradoilia or apaphenia that underlies both conspiracism and religiosity as ways of making sense of the world.
But there's more.
I'm going to propose to you today that how we react to 9-11 is also a kind of Rorschach test.
You know, what you see in the ink-blot image tells the psychologist about your hidden depths, fears, desires, preoccupations, traumas.
But I'm not getting psychological today.
It's more of a political Rorschach test.
Welcome to Conspirituality.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Today, I want to sketch some contrasting ways of interpreting 9 11 and perhaps suggest a way to come close to a more accurate understanding by noting what differing perspectives tend to leave out.
Thank you.
I said I wasn't going to get psychological, but I do want to say here that there is a case to be made that political orientations derive from psychological temperament, which may even ride on genetic predispositions.
Certainly, though, intelligence, family of origin, cultural conditioning, and education play huge roles in how we see the world politically, how we then make sense of massive historical moments like 9-11.
To go back to the Paridolia concept for a moment, yes, we sometimes see religious iconography in the strangest places by filling in the gaps visually and then being captivated by the emotional significance of what it seems to mean.
But here, as with even more pronounced visionary experiences, it's highly unlikely that we will see the Virgin Mary or Jesus if we grew up in a Hindu culture, or that the evangelical kid will detect an outline of the Buddha in a puddle after the rain on the way home from school.
We are primed by our conditioning.
The devout Muslim on their deathbed likely won't have a vision of Krishna.
When this tragic and spectacular attack happened, one of my first thoughts was things like this happen every day in some part of the world.
It was devastating, traumatic, preoccupying.
That's the nature of terror.
It is disruptive, designed to induce a sense of helplessness and intense vulnerability, calculated to force attention and perhaps capitulation to demands.
Hitting the tallest buildings in the U.S., symbols of capitalist wealth, as well as the headquarters of the Department of Defense, and then also, though they failed, targeting another major symbol of legislative or executive power, sent a potent message.
Not having grown up in the US, I had a slightly different response to the shock that something like this could happen on American soil.
My mother's office in Johannesburg was across the street from a fast food restaurant bombing, one of the small number of civilian targets during the South African armed struggle, although Nelson Randela's ANC denied involvement, endorsing only sabotage of government infrastructure and attacks on military targets.
I lived for a few years with a strong militarized presence in the downtown area of my home city.
I remember hearing a bomb go off in the distance when I was at school and living under the additional threat of aggressive policing and irate racist neighbors, especially as an opponent of the system who had black friends visit frequently in a whites-only suburb.
And then after that, I spent a year in England with the heightened threat levels in London from IRA bombings.
Now, none of this makes me any kind of war zone survivor or refugee of dehumanizing oppression.
I was still a protected benefactor of ideas and power structures I opposed.
But it did mean that my privileged bubble may not have been as completely ruptured in a brand new way as it was for many Americans on September 11th.
The events of that day in 2001 are the subject of much conspiracy theorizing.
Multiple agit prop films claim that the official story just doesn't add up.
A stack of books do the same.
The nonprofit architects and engineers for 9-11 Truth was started in 2006 and claimed to have over 3,000 experts in those fields who believed there was no way planes and fires could bring down buildings like that.
And that Building 7 was clearly a controlled demolition, and overall, there was just something downright fishy about the whole thing, as well as the official investigations.
Now I'm not gonna relitigate all of that here, so stay with me.
One of my closest friends was deeply obsessed with the various threads of the conspiracy claims, so I've seen it all multiple times, and I have become satisfied myself that Occam's razor applies here, meaning the alternative explanations are simply much less plausible than the official narrative.
The definitive article in Popular Mechanics that comprehensively addresses the objections of the truthers, put their main objections To bed for me.
And yeah, I'll expect some comments on this, so there'll be a link in the show notes to that popular mechanics article if you're interested.
One of the simplest refutations came from Noam Chomsky, who, when asked at the University of Florida what he thought about the consensus amongst the architects and engineers truther group, he pointed out that engaging in scientific method would be the requirement for the claims of a proportionally small fringe group to gain wide recognition, but that they simply have not done so.
He also points out when he's asked about this that it's clear the Bush administration was not involved with 9-11 based on the clumsy and loose-ended way they then approached the first phase of their so-called war on terror, especially the fact that they correctly blamed the attacks on Saudi nationals who are allies of the U.S. instead of pinning it on Iraq, even as they fumbled their way into a pretext for that invasion.
Elsewhere, he also says that events of that scale are so chaotic and so complex that there always seem to be details that don't add up.
But the conspiracy theories are not well evidenced and may in fact serve as a distraction from well-documented American atrocities and real conspiracies.
He also points out the unprecedented and highly unlikely level of coordination and successful secrecy that would have needed to be in place to pull something like that off.
So I'll include a link to the first moment I mentioned where he answers that question in the show notes.
One thing I noticed about my friend is that the moment I effectively debunked something about 9-11 that he was compelled by in a conspiratorial way, he would quickly default to turning to the JFK assassination.
He also would insist on the undeniable details of some aspect of the conspiracy narrative, like fire can't melt steel, in the face of any of my attempts to get into the meta conversation about who and why, and how complicated it would be to pack the towers with explosives in the days and weeks before the event so that they could be brought down after massive jetliners had hit them.
Like, why go to that extra trouble?
Wouldn't Bush find his way into arguing for the invasion of Iraq without the full-scale collapse of the Twin Towers along with Building 7?
But to him, I came to see that this was probably a distraction from what I deduced later was likely just this uncanny sense that really the actual events of that terrible day just couldn't have happened the way they did.
America could not be that vulnerable.
It must have been an inside job.
The biggest buildings in New York City couldn't be reduced to rubble like that without the president knowing in advance and choosing to be in a classroom, finishing reading the pet goat to second graders while the plan unfolded.
The jets couldn't have taken so long to be scrambled, the planes themselves must have been drones, the buildings pre-wired with explosives, the hole in the Pentagon just wasn't big enough.
So that's my first Rorschach result.
It cannot be as it seems.
It must have happened for other reasons.
There are too many coincidences for them not to be pulling the wool over our eyes, man.
Ever since JFK, I've been determined not to be fooled again.
It just feels off.
This mentality also dominated a much more sizable slice of the population during COVID, with the results that we see now, five years later, as the most paranoid, anti-science, unqualified, and conspiratorial figures have found their way into some of the most consequential roles in our government.
Now let's turn to conspiracies of a more real-world nature.
Even if George W. Bush and the neocons advising him didn't engineer 9-11, they certainly exploited it as a justification for the new world architecture they wanted to establish.
And for the unfinished business Georgie II wanted to show his daddy he could pull off.
Conservative think tank Project for a New American Century published a 1997 report that advocated for aggressive foreign policy, regime change in Iraq, and imagined what they called a new Pearl Harbor as the kind of catastrophic event that might accelerate an otherwise drawn-out process of accomplishing its goals.
In a section titled Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force, the document also advocated the U.S. Fighting multiple simultaneous major theater wars, that's a quote, and thereby massively increasing the military budget.
So I'll link here to John Pilger's excellent reporting on Project for a New American Century for the New Statesman.
As we know, the Bush administration got the U.S. into the war via manufactured claims of weapons of mass destruction, most notably the supposed yellow cake uranium from Niger that Ambassador Joe Wilson was pressured to lie about in an official report.
When he refused, aid to the vice president Scooter Libby accidentally let it slip in a conversation with Washington Post reporter Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, whose name is Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent.
And that's a crime.
So Libby ended up taking the fall for endangering national security.
He paid the quarter million dollar fine and then got his 30-month jail sentence wiped away by a George W. Bush pardon before he served any of it.
His boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, just so happened to be the former CEO of Halliburton, who were awarded over 39 billion dollars in no-bid government contracts during the second Gulf War, exploiting a trend which had been growing over the previous decades of privatizing aspects of American military operations, which was added to then by private military contractor Blackwater's presence in the region.
The hard push toward toppling Saddam Hussein seems, in hindsight, to have been the by any means necessary agenda of the power circle around Dubia, with weapons of mass destruction being the path of least resistance they all could agree on as the rationale.
Paul Wolfowitz said as much to Vanity Fair in 2003.
I'll link to a great New York Times summary of the various theories about why the invasion happened.
It's from a couple years ago.
The explanation that makes the most sense to me for why the U.S. went into Iraq goes like this.
Hussein established himself as an aggressive strongman dictator.
For evidence of this, you can see a link that I'll include on the purge he enacted just six days after coming to power in 1979.
It's scary stuff.
He brutalized his own people, he attacked Iran, he invaded Kuwait.
Then, Hussein postured as being militarily stronger than he was to avoid another war with the U.S., which backfired.
By 2003, he'd been in power for 24 years, arrested, tortured, and executed his political opposition, engaged in forms of ethnic cleansing, and used chemical weapons against his own people, as well as against the Iranians.
Some of this domestic activity shamefully happened during the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam was treated as a U.S. ally due to the recent revolution in Iran, because this is the most complicated region in the world.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and other Western powers were reeling from the impact of 9-11 and trying to regain some sense of control.
The neocon agenda, as embodied by Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, and others, was seized upon.
It was ready and waiting, both as an explanation for what had happened and as a path forward to prevent it from happening again.
Saddam may have a nuke, they said.
He may provide Al-Qaeda with a nuke or with chemical weapons, US and UK and others may be in imminent danger of similar attacks or worse.
Much has been made about the massive oil reserves in Iraq as being a potential motivation, and indeed, stabilizing the country and maintaining access to that oil cannot have been at the bottom of the list.
But the consensus is that the U.S. did not seize those resources during the war for their own benefit.
So there you have it.
That's another angle on the 9-11 war shack.
The attack may have been exactly what it seemed, but it was then manipulated and used as a propaganda tool either to advance the regime change agenda of the neocons in Iraq so as to ensure American dominance or to overcome perceived vulnerability and disable future attacks.
Some speculate that it was Bush Jr.'s chance to one-up the old man to finish the job because in the first Gulf War, Bush Sr.'s administration stopped short of removing Hussein after leading a 42-country coalition, which included the Saudis, Egypt, Bahrain, Oman, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, and the UAE to kick Him out of Kuwait.
None of those regional powers were in the much smaller so-called coalition of the willing that fought Bush Jr.'s war, which did depose Saddam, but fomented participation from Islamist and Ba'ist insurgent groups, including the jihadi group that became known as Al Qaeda in Iraq and then morphed into Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or ISIS.
In a way, the neocon lie about 9-11 and Al-Qaeda having anything to do with Iraq became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the war in Iraq, it inspired led to conservative estimates of 200,000 civilian deaths and 50,000 military and police deaths.
Some organizations estimate a much higher total Iraqi death toll, but their methodology is considered hard to confirm.
What complicates these numbers is that the US-led coalition overcame the Iraqi military quite quickly, hence W's ill-fated mission accomplished speech from the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which declared victory after just six weeks in March of 2003.
But it was the ensuing losing battle against the insurgency that dragged on for another eight years.
In addition to targeting U.S.-led coalition forces, the insurgency was characterized by plenty of sectarian violence and terrorism against the Iraqi people themselves.
That fact also gets easily understandably overshadowed by the exposure of despicable American atrocities in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, as well as at other detention camps and the kinds of attacks on civilians exposed by whistleblower Chelsea Manning via WikiLeaks.
One small but important detail here is the American soldiers charged and tried in the US for those atrocities and then imprisoned for some of those war crimes.
It's not enough, but it's a start.
An investigation by the Pulitzer Center identified 572 perpetrators across Iraq and Afghanistan, of which just 130 were convicted.
*music*
Now I just did a much too short summary of the Iraq war and only mentioned Afghanistan in the last sentence.
The death tolls in these invasions and wars are unfathomable and unconscionable, and the huge American role was enabled and justified by the 9-11 attacks.
Those events had nothing to do with Iraq, but Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan, which was ruled by the Taliban at that time.
After 20 years of U.S. occupation, it's ruled by the Taliban again.
Most estimates hover at around 200,000 killed, with some going as high as 500,000 as a direct or indirect result of that war and occupation.
The UN says that depending on the year, between 60 and 80% of the civilian casualties, though, each year were caused by the Taliban and other insurgent groups.
In both cases, the longer the war and the occupation dragged on, the less support it had.
Early polling data showed significant support from American and U.S. citizens, but much more importantly from the local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Large majorities wanted to be free of Saddam and of the Taliban.
In Kabul, according to CNN, I'll link to this, many men shaved their mandatory beards off and women shed their burkers.
There were joyous outbreaks of forbidden vices like listening to music and flying kites.
Reputable polling all the way through 2015 showed between 80% and 90% had disapproval for the Taliban, with similar numbers in favor of the U.S.-led ousting of that group, as well as blaming Al Qaeda for the continuing violence.
In 2004, over 60% of Iraqis surveyed by Gallup said they believed the hardships created by the invasion were worth it to be rid of Hussein's regime.
In both countries, polling right before U.S. withdrawal showed majorities sick and tired and wanting the U.S. out, having lost confidence in their leadership, but also disappointment about progress towards stability and peace and a sense that it might not be a good time to withdraw just yet because of what might happen next, which has all been Really bad.
I'll include links to some of that data, but I can of course anticipate objections here about the bias, the methodology, how does one even do that kind of research.
So I acknowledge it's probably hard to know for sure.
And I'm far from any kind of social science researcher.
I know polling can be used dishonestly, but I do rely on reputable research organizations when possible to get a sense of the center of gravity within specific populations on certain topics.
One thing I know for sure is that it is all one big complicated mess, and I abhor war in all its forms.
I'm also not whitewashing American imperialism or attempts under the Bush doctrine to strong arm the region so as to maintain power, influence, and access to resources, or the war crimes that were never adequately prosecuted.
So this brings me to the next Rorschach result, which will entail backing up a little at first, and then backing up a whole lot thereafter.
So let's go back to 9-11, not to re-engage with the details of that day, but to consider an explanation about what caused it or what it represents historically.
The 2004 book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by widely acclaimed political scientist Mahmoud Mamdani, who happens to be the father of the young man who looks like he will be the next mayor of New York City, takes 9-11 as a starting point to unpack its subtitle, which is America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.
The book is in large part a devastating account of U.S. Cold War crimes and covert operations.
It's well worth reading for its comprehensive and coherent account.
These include adjusting to the hugely unpopular and failed Vietnam War by America partnering with drug lords in order to fund covert military operations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
It's staggering.
This funding strategy sidesteps congressional buy-in while relying on covert operations as well as arming, training, and backing local insurgent groups to avoid the quagmire of drafting American kids to fight and die around the world.
This low intensity conflict represents a kind of proxy warfare designed to achieve geopolitical goals by having someone else do the fighting.
The approach paired then with supporting right-wing dictators based on the infamous Kirkpatrick doctrine, which asserted that right-wing regimes could be reformed over time, unlike left-wing dictatorships, which could not.
And so it makes it okay to support the right-wingers.
Although global in its scope, Mamdani's analysis in this book homes in on Afghanistan eventually as a climactic exemplar of how this Cold War strategy unfolded, leading ultimately, says he, to the blowback event of 9-11 and the spread of jihadism across the Middle East.
He points out that the U.S. recruiting, funding, arming, and training, somewhere between 8,000 and 35,000 Mujahideen fighters from across the Arab world to fight in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, alongside the much larger force of existing rebels with whom they had common cause, became an incubator for what we recognize today as jihadist terror.
Ronald Reagan famously shared a photo op with some of the leaders of the Afghan Mujahideen during a meeting at the White House, who he described as freedom fighters.
At this time, it was politically expedient to legitimize and justify, even if indirectly, jihadist tactics and Islamist ideology, and in the process, normalize extreme violence and train a generation in guerrilla warfare and terrorism.
Mamdani therefore characterizes terrorism itself as a strategy the U.S. employed, encouraged, and optimized during these years, and then experienced as spectacular blowback when the towers fell.
After all, a Saudi billionaire's son named Osama bin Laden famously joined the Mujahideen himself, telling a journalist, I felt outraged that an injustice had been done against the people of Afghanistan.
He started off in Pakistan, funneling his own money to the rebel forces before becoming a liaison between Saudi intelligence and the Afghan warlords.
From Pakistan, He set up bases to train militants from around the world, using his own inherited fortune to fund these operations and then send them into Afghanistan.
He even set up a base inside the country and engaged peripherally in some fighting there, which gained him massive coverage and heroic status in the Arab media.
He may have also participated in a massacre against a Shia uprising within Pakistan at the behest of local authorities there.
It's important to note that funding for the Mujahideen was also coming from Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia, and that the CIA actually kept themselves cloaked in terms of U.S. involvement.
Note too here that the US, Bin Laden, and the Afghan resistance were all on the same side.
We've glossed over why.
And that should be something we wonder about, right?
Well, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 after the violent coup in 1978 by the Afghan Communist Party, which itself supplanted a previous coup enacted in 1973 against the Afghan monarchy.
As it turned out, that chain of events traces an arc common to a few countries in the region during the post-World War II period.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
When the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan took over in 1978, they executed the former anti-communist autocrat and most of his family at their palatial residence, and then began imprisoning, torturing, and murdering by some estimates over 50,000 of his supporters in less than a year.
That party also instituted new levels of empowerment and equality for women and introduced a prominent female politician into their government.
At the same time, their militant wing began enacting crackdowns inspired by the Russian Bolsheviks' Red Terror.
Though closely aligned with the USSR, even they tried to moderate the actions of this new regime, but were rebuffed by idealized appeals to Lenin and Stalin's ruthless example from the past.
Along with the repression of any perceived opposition, land confiscation, and disruption of economic systems that enabled rural farming, along with changing the country's traditional flag to one that looked a lot like the Soviet flag, all of this created great resentment.
The program was also one of aggressive secularization and modernization, including some of this stuff around women's rights, and swept up amongst those being imprisoned or killed were religious clerics and those sympathetic to the Ichwan el-Muslimi or the Muslim Brotherhood.
All of this is what gave rise to the rural bands of fighters who came to be called the Mujahideen.
Meanwhile, two of the most important figures in the new government, head of state Nur Muhammad Taraki and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hafizullah Amin, once firm friends and allies, got into a power struggle, with Amin eventually having Taraki killed and taking over as leader.
Though Amin requested and received military support from the USSR to fight against the resistance, Moscow increasingly came to believe he may not be loyal enough and he may be too radical.
At the same time, they were concerned over potential US or Chinese involvement, and the Iranian revolution raised the specter that other Muslim countries under Soviet control might follow suit and shake off the red handcuffs.
So they tried and failed to poison Amin, and then invaded the country, stormed his palace, and killed the new Afghan leader in his underpants, still recovering from having recently been poisoned, and convinced, as he said to his aides, that the Soviets who were there to kill him would actually save him from what he thought was a Mujahideen attack.
The storming of the palace killed 300 Afghan soldiers, and then the Soviets arrested another 1700 of them and installed their own hand-picked leader.
So I mentioned earlier the American Kirkpatrick doctrine.
It's based on a thinker called Jean Kirkpatrick.
Well, there was a mirror version of this called the Brezhnev Doctrine.
The Brezhnev Doctrine justified both political and military intervention in countries with socialist governments that were under threat.
Those two doctrines are a good thumbnail sketch of the Jainus headed rationale for the Cold War from the two sides.
Often in discussion of the Afghan war Or of the Cold War period in general, the U.S. is painted as this imperialist power, violently imposing its will against oppressed people who are just rising up to secure democratic freedoms.
I have no doubt that there were situations in which this was shamefully true.
But what gets left out sometimes of this Rorschach reading is that the Soviet Union was a massive expansionist empire at this time, and nothing really went well for anyone anywhere that it took control.
Now, does that mean it was 100% good for the U.S. to support brutal right-wing dictatorships as a way to quell Soviet expansion?
No.
But geopolitically, at that time, I'm gonna say it was understandable, and it's hard to see what the other options were.
There's no doubt a bullying quality to the U.S. presuming to interfere with the full weight of their wealth and might in other sovereign nations.
Like, why not just let those countries make up their own minds?
On principle, I agree with this, it resonates the most with democratic ideals, and I loathe the fact that the U.S. propped up right-wing despots, and yes, did all of the things that Mamdani lays out in lucid detail, it's awful.
Yet when I consider the counterfactual thought experiment, like what would the world look like now if the U.S. had stepped back and the Soviet Union had expanded its already huge empire that covered 8.6 million square miles and spanned 11 time zones to create similarly repressive one-party regimes across all of the regions where the Cold War was waged.
The real world empire collapsed due to complete economic failure and widespread poverty with a completely corrupted organized crime-style government structure and no democratic freedoms.
As distasteful as it is for me to ask, a real world question is also this.
What would the world look like today?
And believe me, I know it's pretty fucking calamitous as it is already, but what would it look like today if the Soviets had gained control of most of the oil?
Also, as these hypothetical communist Middle Eastern states ended up collapsing along with the doomed USSR or succeeded at some point in overthrowing the empire, which the Islamists would have been actively trying to do.
Now we'd have the same kind of Mujahideen renaissance, but with nuclear stockpiles from the arms race with the US.
That's not a cheery thought.
Now, as it turned out in reality, Soviet failure in Afghanistan led in part to the collapse of the USSR after they signed the Geneva Accords and withdrew their troops from that country.
During their existence, the Soviets not only killed their own citizens in murderous purges of anyone not loyal to the party, they also implemented disastrously unscientific farming methods based on Lysenkoism that killed millions at home and even more when those methods were exported to Maoist China.
I think sometimes that these sorts of details get brushed aside in the laudable rush to be open-eyed, to be awake, to come out of denial about American wrongdoing.
The U.S. supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation, then, if you pause for a moment, creates a really weird dissonance because these were the common folk.
These were the ones being brutalized and seeking freedom from a powerful occupying force called the Soviet Union.
They also happened to be ultra-conservative religious extremists, but I don't think anyone in the West was taking that seriously enough yet.
*Musik*
So the Rorschach result that says 9-11 constituted blowback from U.S. Cold War policy around the world may have some truth to it.
But it also has some weaknesses.
When the US, along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China got involved in 1980s Afghanistan, it was on the side of the prototypical jihadis as we come to know them in later decades.
When the US repelled Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, it led a 42-country coalition that included at least 10 Arab nations.
The worst aspects of U.S. action in Iraq and Afghanistan happened afterwards, and maybe to an extent in reaction to 9-11.
So the thesis is a little confusing.
Yes, the U.S. engaged in atrocities during the Cold War in other parts of the world.
I condemn that unreservedly.
Makes me sick.
But the idea that this somehow forms part of the motivation for Osama bin Laden to plan and execute his attack on New York City against his former allies, something about this doesn't quite add up.
It also makes it seem like 9-11 was a kind of rational outcome of a collective revolutionary moral calculus that sought to punish American foreign policy via official channels.
When the truth is that it was just one billionaire Saudi guy and a small circle of recruits, with very specific political and yes, religious motivations.
In the same way that Soviet imperialism is often mysteriously absent from a lot of analysis on all of this, so too is the taboo subject of Islamism, which is usually deemed a largely inconsequential detail, an artifact of Western oppression, only used by bigots who seek to paint all two billion Muslims in the world with an ugly stereotype, which is really gross.
So let's definitely not do that.
Now we do know that bin Laden had criticized the presence of American troops in his country of origin, Saudi Arabia, and that he was opposed to that government and its U.S. support.
I too decry that support.
The Saudi monarchy is one of the most oppressive Islamist regimes in the world.
Life for women and gays there is appalling just for a start.
Human rights abuses are rampant, resistance is squashed, and censorship is in full effect.
They enact detention without trial, torture, and high rates of execution, including of minors.
The conservative Hanbali school of jurisprudence guides the Sharia-based legal system.
But for bin Laden, this wasn't strict enough.
He saw all of the Arab nations the U.S. supported as corrupt and illegitimate.
They were not examples of a pure enough Islamic state.
They weren't moving toward a pan-Islamic caliphate that would join all Muslims under God and eventually rule the whole world.
We also know that Osama objected to the controversial sanctions the U.S. imposed in concert with the UN Security Council on Iraq after the first Gulf War in an attempt to pressure Saddam to relinquish development of weapons of mass destruction.
Now he may not have had them prior to the 2003 invasion, and the extent to which the U.S. administration knew that or didn't know that is somewhat unclear.
But he had set up factories to create the chemical weapons he used in the 80s against both Iran and against his own Kurdish population in what some have called a genocide.
He also, of course, vigorously opposed the U.S. support of the Zionist state, as well as the government of Lebanon that expelled the PLO as part of the civil war there, which included an invasion by Israel.
Now that's a whole story of its own if you don't know it.
It involves the PLO ending up in Jordan after the 1967 war and eventually then being expelled from Jordan after destabilizing that country and enacting a different high-profile simultaneous hijacking of four planes.
So they ended up in Lebanon after the Jordanians said they'd had enough, and then they established a similar, what's often called state within a state situation there, while also looping back to kill the Prime Minister of Jordan and then attempting to assassinate its king.
Then they enacted the massacre at the Munich Olympics.
And yeah, look, I know this is technically all the group called Black September, but the PLO was just an umbrella name for several groups like Black September, who were all affiliated.
Then they contributed toward the chaos of the civil war in Lebanon, aligning with those trying to overthrow the Maronite Christian government, who were heavily supported by Syria, while technically, this is the PLO, ruling over much of the southern region and launching attacks into Israel from there.
The U.S. was involved in a multinational peacekeeping force that sought to stabilize that civil war in 1982, and yeah, they were supporting Israel, and they were supporting the Christian government.
So I get it.
Probably the worst thing the US did in the region before 9-11 was the CIA and MI-6 coup against socialist Prime Minister Mossade, so as to prevent the nationalization of Iran's oil industry and so as to reinstall the Shah, who they had control over.
But I find no record of bin Laden citing this imperialist skullduggery as one of his justifications for 9-11.
This is likely for two reasons.
The current regime under the Ayatollahs in Iran is Shia, and bin Laden is Sunni.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have been embroiled in a power struggle via their own proxy wars that goes back at least 46 years in its current form.
It represents the central sectarian schism in Islam, which is 1400 years old, but only technically really gets going with the killing of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680.
Hussein was the son of Ali, who's recognized as the first Imam of Shia Muslim.
The proxy war, sometimes referred to as a new cold war, has been at its worst in Syria and Yemen, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have died since the events referred to as the Arab Spring in the early 2010s.
But the power struggle extends to Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Albania, and Bosnia Herzegovina, and draws involvement from Russia, China, the US, the UK, and Israel.
It's terrible.
But back to Osama.
Another reason he may not cite the coup against Mossade as justification for his hatred of America is that the movement of what comes to be called Salafi jihadism is not only anti-democracy, but also anti-communist and opposed to the idea of secular government.
Mossadeh was pro-democracy, secular, and a socialist.
Now, despite being labeled a communist by the US to justify getting rid of him, he was actually more aligned with Western ideas than the Soviets.
He just wanted the Iranian people to benefit from their oil wealth, and that was his real crime.
There's more to say here.
Because the oft-invoked idea, sometimes advanced, that jihadism is less a product of religion than a reaction against political oppression and colonialism, leaves out some things.
As you already know, I'm not an expert on any of this.
I'm just very interested.
I put a lot of time into reading about it and consuming lectures on the history.
If you're interested, I will link to one of my favorite YouTube channels.
It belongs to a brilliant Pakistani university professor named Taimur Rahman, who was formerly a professional musician and is currently Secretary General of a minor communist political party in that country, but he's a professor of political science.
So here's my Rorschach test result after digging into this stuff based on what I've learned.
It's too much to go into all of the historical detail here.
But essentially, after Muhammad's death, the Arab conquest led to Muslim rule over an enormous empire for 600 years, and they conquered that empire within 120 years.
How big was it?
It was larger than the Roman Empire or the Tang dynasty of China.
At its peak, it spanned five million square miles and stretched from Spain, Portugal, and Sicily and parts of France through most of the Middle East and North Africa across the Caucasus and Central Asia and into parts of India.
Over three successive caliphates that lasted a combined 600 years, minority rule under which non-Muslims like Jews, Christians, Oastrians, and Hindus were allowed to practice their religion within their communities as long as they submitted to Muslim dominance, accepting legal status as second-class citizens, referred to as Dhimmi, and paying a special tax called the jizya.
This is sometimes referred to as the Islamic Golden Age because of its extraordinary intellectual and scientific advances.
But those all happened under this power structure, which included religiously justified enslavement of non-Muslims, including creating eunuchs and sex slaves from multiple territories.
Significantly more Africans were taken into slavery during this time than during what would later unfold as the awful transatlantic slave trade.
The Abbasid Caliphate eventually fell to the Mongol invaders, and then after the Mamluks, who were former slave soldiers, ironically defeated them, we eventually got the 700 years of the Ottoman Empire, which utilizes Sunni Sharia law in a Turkic but nonetheless Islamic system.
Before and then after World War I, some European powers got involved in a colonial way, especially with the mandates and the protectorates established by the League of Nations.
These set about trying to create nation states where before there had been none, and were intended as temporary occupations that would lead to eventually handing over power.
I know that sounds like I'm apologizing for them.
It's very paternalistic, it's white supremacist.
I'm not cool with it.
But as all of this shakes out in the interwar period and then after World War II, there's a power struggle in the region between old school monarchies, often propped up by Western powers, and then emergent Arab nationalists who seek to be rid of both colonialists and monarchies,
and to establish modernized secular rule in a kind of pan-Arabist utopian vision, like uh espoused by Gamal Abdel Nasser, espousing a belief that all Arab nations, regardless of religion, should join together in this powerful state.
Communist groups also emerge during this time, and then the Islamists who oppose everyone else that I just mentioned.
What gets referred to today as political Islam rises not only as an objection to Western and Soviet colonialism, Western and Soviet colonialism, but also to any kind of secularizing government, including communism, and in principled objection to democracy as any legitimate form of political rule.
The main figures, as I've come to understand, are Hassan Albana, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the late 1920s, Islamic scholar and philosopher Abul Allah Madudi, who wrote extensively throughout his life in Pakistan and founded the Jalalat Islami, which is a uh Islamic political party in 1941.
Prior to that, he was opposed to any participation in politics by Muslims.
And then the much earlier ideology of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose religious ideas formed the foundation of what would later become Saudi Arabia through his alliance with Ibn al-Saud in the 1740s, but what we really call Saudi Arabia doesn't arise until much, much later.
All three of these figures advocated a return to pure practices of Islam, including the Sharia.
Al-Wahhab represents a version of Salafism, which idealizes the first three generations of Muslims as the model to revive.
From within the Muslim Brotherhood, Saeed Kutub would also become a highly influential figure.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated two different prime ministers, leading to the government then assassinating Hassan Albana in 1949.
Kutub would be executed as well in 1966 for his involvement in a plot to kill Gamal Abdel Nasser after he had come to power via the 1952 coup.
Even though Nasser overthrew the monarchy, he established a one-party state, and he would become a hero to the Arab world for standing up to the West on the issue of who controlled the Suez Canal.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, technically still part of India at that time, Madodi was resisting partition.
He was opposing communist groups, and even the idea of democracy, calling for an Islamic state, universal jihad, and advocating that all humans should submit themselves to Sharia law.
We know that Osama bin Laden was influenced by all three of these thinkers, and that even though he opposes the regime in Saudi Arabia, that regime has spent tens of billions exporting Salafi Wahhabist mosques all over the world to spread that ideology.
At the same time, Baathism, a form of Arab socialism somewhat related to NASA's Arab nationalism, was rising, especially in Syria, Iraq, and to some extent Libya, Lebanon and Jordan.
And this leads to the father and then son Assad regimes in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and to an extent Mumar Gaddafi in Libya, all of which turned out to be brutal dictatorships that lasted several decades and were vigorously opposed by the Islamists.
And why is any of this relevant?
Well, there's three reasons.
First, the sheer number of potent regional religious ideological conflicts in the Middle East make it complicated way beyond a simple colonizers versus resistors template.
Second, I think the history of Soviet involvement here, as well as their activities and agenda during the Cold War, should not be left out.
Third, the legacy of imperial rule experienced from most of the first 1300 Years of Islam, along with the strains of political ideology that center the religion, don't reduce neatly to just a minority of fundamentalists reacting to colonialism, though of course that is a factor.
It's just super complicated.
And I've barely even scratched the surface here in the interest of time to unpack even my small amount of knowledge on the topic.
As I understand it, the thinkers at the heart of political Islam hearken back to and imagine a future caliphate.
Look up the letters to King Farouk from Hassan Albana if you have any doubt of this.
They focus much less on the problem of colonialism than on the necessity of re-establishing theocracy and moving away from Western cultural and political corruptions of a pure Islamic way of life.
Consider too the letters to the American people from Osama bin Laden that lists not only foreign policy grievances, many of which are justified, as I detailed to some extent earlier, but also quotes scripture right at the top on the justification of fighting the unbeliever, who are friends with and worshippers are of Satan.
Much of the letter is also a call to Islam to install Sharia and a detailed description of the specific ways in which American society and culture are profane.
This includes homosexuality, fornication, use of intoxicants, gambling, and usury or lending with interest.
So that's my Rorschach for 9-11.
It's a super complicated rabbit hole into history, religion, empire, conquest, and war.
I've abbreviated so much of it.
I don't by any stretch see the West and America in particular as blameless.
I don't know how we as humanity break these cycles while also being realistic about the immense number of conflicting factors that add up to the world we live in right now, which seems perpetually poised on the edge of descending into absolute chaos— But I do think that naming the host of factors at play historically and ideologically might be a good starting point for trying to come to grips with our many dilemmas.
