socialist standard              september 2006    

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September 11,
 2001:
Reflections on a
 Somewhat Unusual
 Act of War

On the fifth anniversary of the al Qaeda attack on Washington and New York, we reflect on this act of war,and try to place it in its true political and moral context.

  As an act of war, the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre was somewhat unusual,though not unprecedented, in three respects.First, the method used was non-standard.Standard military practice is to blow things and people up by dropping bombs or firing shells and missiles on them. But flying planes right into the target has been done before. Japanese kamikaze pilots used the technique against US warships in the Pacific during World War Two.

 Second, al-Qaeda is a non-state actor.Such actors rarely have the capacity to carry through such a complex and costly operation.Therefore al-Qaeda must have hadfinancial backing from wealthy sponsors - Osama bin Laden himself comes from an extremely wealthy family - and the support,or at least complicity, of one or more powerful states. In general, arranging wars is a pastime for members of the capitalist class, though they get hirelings to do the dirty work for them. Working people don't command the necessary resources.

 Finally, it is a little unusual for the US to be on the receiving end of a military assault from abroad. For a comparable attack on the continental United States, you have to go back to 1814, when the British army entered Washington and burned down theWhite House and the Capitol.

 In other ways the attack was not unusual in the least. As an atrocity it was par for the course. The death toll, initially estimated at 6,500, was later revised downward to about 2,800. Atrocities on a similar or larger scale are committed routinely by the US in other countries.

To take just one example, 3-4,000 civilians were killed in the invasion of Panama in December 1989. Even if we start the reckoning with September 11,we find that the US was quick to even the score. According to an independent study, 3,767 Afghan civilians (hardly any of them connected with al-Qaeda) had been killed inbombing raids by 6 December, 2001. This figure does not include the far more numerous indirect casualties resulting from the creation of refugees and the disruption of food and other supplies.

Betrayal

The attack should not have been a total surprise, a bolt out of the blue. After all, it was merely the next step in a war that Osama bin Laden had formally declared on the UnitedStates in August 1996. He had built up a farflung network of front companies, banks,"charities," and NGOs (e.g., the World Union of Moslem Youth) to raise funds and recruit young fighters for the war. He had already attacked American assets abroad, notably the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, and there was ample intelligence warning that a major attack on US soil was in the offing. So the parallel with Pearl Harbor is pretty weak.

 And yet September 11 clearly did come as a shock to Bush. That was because the attack came from forces that the US, its sidekicks Britain and Israel, and the Bush family in particular had long regarded as friends, allies and partners. This explains why Bush ignored the warnings - just as Stalin ignored warnings of impending attack by Nazi Germany in 1941 and felt "betrayed" by Hitler when the attack came...continue to next page 7

 
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