[A-List] 156 Tuesdays Later

[Bill Totten]

by Ted Rall

Universal Press Syndicate (September 02 2004)

"We've shown the world New York can never be defeated", Mayor Michael
Bloomberg told delegates to this week's Republican National Convention.
Nice sentiment, but utterly untrue. Three years after terrorists wiped
out zipcode 10048, revised maps of lower Manhattan still read "former
World Trade Center site". Thanks to a wounded economy and only token
help from the federal government, the WTC-replacement Freedom Tower may
never go up. Worst of all, no one has done anything to avenge the deaths
of the 2,801 murdered New Yorkers.

Though the war against Iraq has galvanized the anti-Bush opposition,
from the far left to moderate Republicans, the carnage has served the
Bush Administration well as a distraction from its cowardly, inept and
self-serving early responses to 9/11. Thanks to Michael Moore, we know
that Bush had a fratboy-in-the-headlights moment after being told that
planes were flying into buildings. But the fog of the Iraq war has so
obscured Bush's behavior that even his opponents buy into the myth of 
a resolute commander-in-chief, neither shaken nor stirred, who grew in
stature as he rose to meet the dreadful challenge posed by the horrible
day.

On 9/11 Mythic Bush rushed to reassure his subjects that everything was
fine and that he would promptly kick whatever asses needed kicking. Real
Bush turned tail and ran like a girlie boy, hopscotching Air Force One
from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska. The American people heard nothing
from their head of state until over four hours later, when a man clearly
in way over his head broadcast an assurance that other officials would
carry out "the functions of your government". Half a day later, he snuck
back into DC under cover of night. The speech everyone remembers, the
one atop The Pile with the firefighter, happened three days later -
after Bush's underwear had undergone a thorough bleaching.

Among Democrats as well as Republicans, the invasion of Iraq somehow
sucked all memory of the wimpy Real Bush down a media memory hole. The
more you despise the war, after all, the more you tend to view its chief
proponent as a vicious, venal and greedy man - an image of pigheadedness
that's hard to square with the scaredy-cat Real Bush.

Iraq has had a similar effect on our memory of the Administration's
first major reaction to 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan. "Our military
has done an absolutely terrific job in Afghanistan, which is a war I
supported", said even Howard Dean, the Democrats' most prominent Iraq
war opponent. Yet, as we would see later in Iraq, the Administration's
constantly shifting rationales for war against Afghanistan make no more
sense than the lies used to justify taking out Saddam. Let's go through
them:

{Al Qaeda Attacked Us on 9/11}. Maybe, maybe not. In late September 2001,
Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to "put out a paper ... that
will describe clearly the evidence that we have linking" Al Qaeda to
9/11.  We're still waiting. Osama bin Laden, who claimed credit for 
the East Africa embassy bombings and other terrorist acts, denied
involvement in 9/11.  "I have already said that I am not involved in the
11 September attacks in the United States", bin Laden told a Pakistani
newspaper.  "As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie".  And
the famous Osama "confession video", proven by European media outlets to
have been overdubbed and intentionally mistranslated by US officials, 
is nothing of the sort. What we do know is that all nineteen hijackers
belonged to Islamic Jihad, based in Egypt. But rather than insist that
Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarek turn over the group's leaders for
questioning, Bush sent him more money and weapons. Islamic Jihad remains
free to attack us again.

{Osama was in Afghanistan}. Certainly not. Afghan witnesses told
reporters they saw bin Laden and his entourage leave the country shortly
before 9/11.  CBS News places him in a military hospital in Rawalpindi,
Pakistan, where he received treatment for a bum kidney on the day of the
attacks. This much is certain: when the US went to war on October 6 2001,
US officials knew that Afghanistan was the one nation on earth where
Osama was not.

{Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan}. Only partly, and not mostly. As Steve
Coll notes "Ghost Wars", his comprehensive study of the covert struggles
in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda's core group of anti-Soviet mujahedeen veterans
came together around Osama in Peshawar in western Pakistan. Arms and
fighters were funneled through western Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir,
financed by Saudi money routed through Pakistani banks and protected by
the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency. Stating that Al Qaeda was 
in Afghanistan is like saying that the US financial industry is in San
Francisco because it has a small stock exchange and a few big banks. 
You can't cripple Wall Street by taking out Market Street. Bush went
after Afghanistan - a back lot of ramshackle camps - while leaving
Pakistan, the center of south Asian jihadiism and then as now the site
of most of Al Qaeda's training facilities, intact. Even if you believe
that Al Qaeda carried out 9/11, Afghanistan should have been a secondary
rather than a primary target of retaliation. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,
on the other hand ...

{The Taliban were despicable}. True. But while everyone deplores the
Bamiyan Buddha bombings and the subjugation of Afghan women, Taliban
atrocities were unrelated to 9/11.

Liberal conventional wisdom on Iraq - that it distracted us from the
real war on terror in Afghanistan, that it pulled resources from a just
war to one of choice - is itself a distraction from a broader, more
damning truth.

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/

Copyright 2004 Ted Rall

See also:-

"Sad Sack vs The Madman: Kerry, Bush Offer Competing, Depressing Visions"
by Ted Rall, Rall.com (September 07 2004)

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/