From 9/11 to the Arab Spring

[ChezGiven 0]

Three men: Mohamed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamedeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu – a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur and a Libyan husband and father. In the spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak's Egypt. The third, it might be said, gave his life as well as took it: loading up his modest car with petrol and home-made explosives and blasting open the gate of the Katiba barracks in Benghazi – symbolic Bastille of the detested and demented Gaddafi regime in Libya.

 

In the long human struggle, the idea of "martyrdom" presents itself with a Janus-like face. Those willing to die for a cause larger than themselves have been honoured from the Periclean funeral oration to the Gettysburg Address. Viewed more sceptically, those with a zeal to die have sometimes been suspect for excessive enthusiasm and self-righteousness; even fanaticism. The anthem of my old party, the British Labour party, speaks passionately of a flag that is deepest red, and which has "shrouded oft our martyred dead". Underneath my college windows at Oxford stood – stands – the memorial to the "Oxford Martyrs", Bishops Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, who were burned alive for Protestant heresies by the Catholic Queen Mary in October 1555. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," wrote the church father Tertullian in late first-century Carthage, and the association of the martyr with blind faith has been consistent down the centuries, with the faction being burned often waiting for its own turn to do the burning. I think the Labour party can be acquitted on that charge. So can Jan Palach, the young Czech student who immolated himself in Wenceslas Square in January 1969 in protest against the Soviet occupation of his country. I helped to organise a rally at the Oxford Memorial in his honour, and later became associated with the Palach Press, a centre of exile dissent and publication which was a contributor, two decades later, to the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989. This was a completely secular and civil initiative, which never caused a drop of human blood to be spilled.

 

Especially over the course of the last 10 years, the word "martyr" has been utterly degraded by the wolfish image of Mohammed Atta: a cold and loveless zombie – a suicide murderer – who took as many innocents with him as he could manage. The organisations that find and train men like Atta have since been responsible for unutterable crimes in many countries and societies, from England to Iraq, in their attempt to create a system where the cold and loveless zombie would be the norm, and culture would be dead. They claim that they will win because they love death more than life, and because life-lovers are feeble and corrupt degenerates. Practically every word I have written, since 2001, has been explicitly or implicitly directed at refuting and defeating those hateful, nihilistic propositions, as well as those among us who try to explain them away.

 

The Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan martyrs were thinking and acting much more like Palach than like Atta. They were not trying to take life. They desired, rather, that it be lived on a higher level than that of a serf, treated as an inconvenience by a moribund oligarchy. They did not make sordid and boastful claims, about how their homicidal actions would earn them a place in a gross fantasy of carnal afterlife. They did not wish to inspire hoarse, yelling mobs, tossing coffins on a sea of hysteria. Jan Palach told his closest comrades that the deep reason for his gesture was not just the occupation, but the awful apathy that was settling over Prague as that "spring" gave way to a frosty winter. In preferring a life-affirming death to a living death-in-life, the harbingers of the Arab spring likewise hoped to galvanise their fellow-subjects and make them aspire to be citizens. Tides will ebb, waves will recede, the landscape will turn brown and dusty again, but nothing can expel from the Arab mind the example and esprit of Tahrir. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers, and that the aspiration for a civilised life, that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it, is proper and common to all.

 

Invited to deliver a lecture at the American University of Beirut in February 2009, with the suggested title of "Who are the real revolutionaries in the Middle East?" I did my best to blow on the few sparks that then seemed dimly perceptible. I instanced the burgeoning civil resistance in Iran. I cited the great Egyptian dissident and political scientist (and political prisoner) Saad-Eddin Ibrahim, now recognised as one of the intellectual fathers of the Tahrir movement. I praised the "Cedar Revolution" movement in Lebanon itself, which had brought about a season of hope and succeeded in putting an end to the long Syrian occupation of the country. I took the side of the Kurdish forces in Iraq who had helped write "finis" to the Caligula regime of Saddam Hussein, while also beginning the work of autonomy for the region's largest and most oppressed minority. I praised the work of Salam Fayyad, who was attempting to bring "transparency" to bear on the baroque corruption of the "Palestinian Authority". These were the disparate but not-unconnected strands out of which, I hoped and part-believed, a new cloth could be woven.

 

It was clear that a good number of the audience (including, I regret to say, most of the Americans) regarded me as some kind of stooge. For them, revolutionary authenticity belonged to groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah, resolute opponents of the global colossus and tireless fighters against Zionism. For me, this was yet another round in a long historic dispute. Briefly stated, this ongoing polemic takes place between the anti-imperialist left and the anti-totalitarian left. In one shape or another, I have been involved – on both sides of it – all my life. And, in the case of any conflict, I have increasingly resolved it on the anti-totalitarian side. (This may not seem much of a claim, but some things need to be found out by experience and not merely derived from principle.) The forces who regard pluralism as a virtue, "moderate" though that may make them sound, are far more profoundly revolutionary (and quite likely, over the longer-term, to make better anti-imperialists as well).

 

Evolving or honing any of these viewpoints has necessitated constant argument about the idea of America. There is currently much easy talk about the "decline" of my adopted country, both in confidence and in resources. I don't choose to join this denigration. The secular republic with the separation of powers is still the approximate model, whether acknowledged or not, of several democratic revolutions that are in progress or impending. Sometimes the United States is worthy of the respect to which this emulation entitles it: sometimes not. Where not – as in the question of waterboarding – I endeavour to say so. I also believe that the literature and letters of the country since the founding show forth a certain allegiance to the revolutionary and emancipating idea.

 

"Barbarism," wrote Alain Finkielkraut not long ago, "is not the inheritance of our pre-history. It is the companion that dogs our every step." In writing, quite a lot, about the examples and lessons of past totalitarianisms, I try not to banish the spectre too much. And how easy it is to recognise the revenant shapes which the old unchanging enemies – racism, leader-worship, superstition – assume when they reappear among us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists). Over the years I have attempted to alleviate the morbid task of combat, by writing also about authors and artists who have contributed to culture and civilisation: not words or concepts that can be defended simply in the abstract. It took me decades to dare the attempt, but finally I did write about Vladimir Nabokov …

 

The people who must never have power are the humourless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity. Since an essential element of the American idea is its variety, I have tried always to celebrate things that are amusing for their own sake, or ridiculous but revealing, or simply of intrinsic interest. All of the above might apply to the subject of my little essay on the art and science of the blowjob, for example, while not quite saving me from the most instantly misinterpreted of all my articles, concerning the humour-deficit as registered by gender. Still, I like to believe that these small-scale ventures, too, make some contribution to a conversation without limits or proscriptions; the sine qua non of the sort of society that knows to keep the solemn and the pious at bay.

 

In the preface to my first collection of essays, Prepared for the Worst, in 1988, I annexed a thought of Nadine Gordimer's, to the effect that a serious person should try and write posthumously. By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints – of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion – did not operate. Impossible perhaps to live up to, this admonition and aspiration did possess some muscle, as well as some warning of how it can decay. Then, about a year ago, I was informed by a doctor that I might have as little as another year to live. In consequence, some of my recent articles were written with the full consciousness that they may be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected. But it has given me a more vivid idea of what makes life worth living, and defending.

Edited September 10, 2011 by ChezGiven

[ChezGiven 0]

I wonder how many people got past the first paragraph.

 

It was, we were soon told, "the day that changed everything", the 21st century's defining moment, the watershed by which we would forever divide world history: before, and after, 9/11.

 

Ten years on, much of that early reaction to the day America realised, as New York magazine put it on the fifth anniversary, that "there really are ideological-cum-religious zealots out there intent on slaughtering us in large numbers", now looks exaggerated – albeit understandably. 11 September 2001 didn't change the world for ever.

 

The world is, however, a different place. So the question is: which of the many changes are genuine consequences of 9/11? One way of answering might be to ask what the world would be like if 9/11 had not happened.

 

There are obvious objections to counterfactual history, as speculating "what if?" is known by historians, if only because, as any of them will tell you, causality isn't easy to establish with certainty even in conventional historical research. But it does throw up some neat ideas – not least that in the big scheme of things, 9/11, horrific and cataclysmic as it was, may not have changed much at all.

 

If the al-Qaida plotters had not pulled off 9/11, many security and foreign policy experts believe it would only have been a matter of time before they managed something else.

 

Alternatively, a steady accumulation of smaller attacks – an embassy in Africa here, a warship in the Red Sea there – may have provoked a large-scale US response.

 

So an attack on Afghanistan (with all its disastrous consequences for neighbouring Pakistan, and hence, arguably, for the choices made by the 7/7 London bombers) was more or less on the cards, with or without 9/11.

 

Crucially, Iraq too may well have come under attack regardless. "There's quite a strong argument," says Anatol Lieven of King's College London's department of war studies, "that the Bush administration would have tried to invade and occupy Iraq anyway.

 

"The question is, would they have got away with it? Would they have been able to win over the more moderate Republicans, get it through the Senate, rally support at the UN, convince Tony Blair?

 

"I think Iraq would certainly have been more difficult for the US without 9/11, because Bush explicitly made that Saddam-al-Qaida link. But I think it would have tried."

 

Assuming the neocons did carry the day, "much of what has happened since would obviously have happened anyway", Lieven points out. "The extreme anger of the Muslim world, the blow to US military prestige, the rise of Iran – all of that would have happened."

 

Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, feels it is questionable whether the US hawks would have won the day on Iraq without the "extreme shock" of 9/11. But he notes that much else in the broader world picture would have happened regardless.

 

"Economic growth, continuing globalisation, the rise of a giant consumer class … the twin towers and al-Qaida barely even dented that," he says. "The debt crisis would have happened, too.

 

"The fact that America had a $700bn defence budget, was spending $200bn, $250bn a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, that was a massive additional drain. But the underlying economic and financial causes were unrelated. And the whole Arab spring really had nothing to do with 9/11.

 

"I'm struggling to think of a single thing that I wouldn't see today if the twin towers hadn't happened."

 

It was not 9/11 but the invasion of Iraq that set in motion the real changes: the "emboldened" state of Iran; the significant hardening and legitimising of anti-American attitudes in Turkey; the fact that the leaders of "rogue states" such as Venezuela or Iran could pull off the unlikely feat of "presenting themselves as much-maligned forces for stability".

 

And it was the war in Iraq, notes Toby Dodge, of the LSE and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, that imposed such serious and lasting strain on transatlantic relations, and on relations within Europe.

 

"If the transatlantic relationship was born in 1945, it died on 9/11. The fact [is] that Le Monde could say on its front page, 'We're all Americans now,' and that the US could then so completely squander that with bombastic, imperialist incompetence," he said.

 

Other major post-9/11 winners, says Lieven, include China, which avoided the consequences of "a very gung-ho, almost McCarthyite anti-Chinese agenda" when Bush came to power to "benefit enormously from the fact that the US was spending itself into the ground on military hardware that was never going to be a threat to China".

 

And if the Bush White House had not been occupied with Iraq, it might not have resisted attacking North Korea, Lieven speculates. "That would have led it into a confrontation with China."

 

In fact one of the greatest victims of the US response to 9/11, argues Dodge, was the country's own strategic focus, which "just got completely skewed". Pakistan was neglected. Israel was neglected ("The road to Tel Aviv and Ramallah ran through Baghdad").

 

And so too, adds Niblett, were Latin America ("Bush was the guy who was going to open up Mexico") and Asia.

 

"Everything became focused on this one thing," Niblett says. "The US simply withdrew from pretty much everything else. As a result, Washington was largely absent at a senior level from the rest of the world, at a time when the rest of the world was changing, and growing, very fast indeed. That's not made things easy for Obama."

 

The pendulum swings, though. Niblett explains: "The fact that 9/11 was such a massive attack, that it drew such a massive, big-stick response, and that America saw that response fail … The US was, after all, checked, even in some ways defeated in Iraq.

 

"Current US foreign policy under [barack] Obama, altogether more nuanced, more restrained, is a product of that. There's an awareness that the big stick approach doesn't always work."

 

Which is probably, in the grand scheme of things, a good thing. Because as Lieven suggests, America under Bush was spoiling for a fight.

 

"It's worth examining the agenda with which Bush came to power and which he pursued in the first eight months," he says. "Anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Iran, anti-North Korea … If a 'non-9/11' had made Iraq impossible, it's perfectly possible the US would have got into equally terrible trouble. Just in different places."

Edited September 10, 2011 by ChezGiven

[Park Life 70]

Monsanto is the biggest threat to the world now that America is winding down the war trumpets.

[Billy Castell 0]

I thought it was the space lizards. Anyway Monsanto is that GM crop company isn't it?

 

I always get the Hitchens confused. Is this written by the one with cancer, or the fish faced Facsist one who wants to gas single parents, Labour voters and so on?

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Why did you post this one Chez? Are you a regular reader of Hitch's columns?

[ChezGiven 0]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

 

He has a new collection of essays out. Reckons it'll be his last book. He's still been on good form in his essays.

 

Talking of 9/11, there was a programme on BBC3 the other day where some Irish comedian took a load of English 9/11 truthers on a road trip around america meeting people who were somehow involved in 9/11, or who could explain certain things about the events, in an attempt (mostly fruitless) to convince them that the US government wasn't behind the attacks. There was one particular scene that summed up how much of a cunt you have to be to be a 9/11 truther. They met a woman whose son had died on one of the flights. He had spoken to her on the phone and the phonecall (among several others) has since been released. The truthers believe that the call was some kind of hoax, that her son's voice was a recording or soundboard that was used to have a real-time conversation with his mother (I should mention, they met a special effects whizz who can digitally manipulate voices and so on. It took him a good while to do one sentence. He said it would be inconcievable that someone could render a voice in real-time and carry on one side of a conversation like that. The truthers remained unconvinced).

Anyway, they met this woman, and she received them with incredible grace and kindness, she was very emotional, I think they were at a crash site or something. They asked her if she thought it could have been a hoax. She said absolutely no way, it was definitely her son she spoke to. The biggest cunt of the group said, "I've no doubt that's what she believes." What an arsehole. He wouldn't say it to her face obviously. A lot of Brits are very snidey about Americans, but I can't imagine many people acting with such dignity when faced with absolute bastards like that.

[ChezGiven 0]

The american kid who made that famous internet film was on one of these programmes recently and when he introduced one of his mates he said "this is dwayne, one of the best people for truth in upstate NY" One of the best people for truth? Wtf?

 

I've got an open mind about some of the events, i think its possible the military shot down United 93 but that doesnt mean a conspiracy. I also dont get the building 7 stuff and there are some fairly incompetent activities that went on between the FBI and the CIA before the event. It doesnt add up to much though. The art of politics is to not control events but shape them to your own narrative. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush did just that. From a very basic perspective, its not exactly cost-effective to have a military the size of the US and to be at peace with the world. A permanent war-footing against 'terrorism' is a perfect solution and in this sense, it doesnt surprise me that people are suspicious because of how conveniently it suited the neoconservative agenda.

[topcat 0]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

 

 

 

10 years on from 9/11 will be the 9th of November you cock!

[ChezGiven 0]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

 

10 years on from 9/11 will be the 9th of November you cock!

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Anyway, fuck off back to Sunderland you shit-licking mackem prick.

[topcat 0]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

 

10 years on from 9/11 will be the 9th of November you cock!

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Anyway, fuck off back to Sunderland you shit-licking mackem prick.

 

 

don't live in sunderland you abuse riddled big mouthed fuckwit!

[NJS 3978]

The american kid who made that famous internet film was on one of these programmes recently and when he introduced one of his mates he said "this is dwayne, one of the best people for truth in upstate NY" One of the best people for truth? Wtf?

 

I've got an open mind about some of the events, i think its possible the military shot down United 93 but that doesnt mean a conspiracy. I also dont get the building 7 stuff and there are some fairly incompetent activities that went on between the FBI and the CIA before the event. It doesnt add up to much though. The art of politics is to not control events but shape them to your own narrative. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush did just that. From a very basic perspective, its not exactly cost-effective to have a military the size of the US and to be at peace with the world. A permanent war-footing against 'terrorism' is a perfect solution and in this sense, it doesnt surprise me that people are suspicious because of how conveniently it suited the neoconservative agenda.

 

While completely accepting that Muslim Fuckwits actually carried it out, I've always thought I wouldn't be surprised if certain elements in the US knew something was coming - definitely not Bush though - his reaction was too honestly stupid.

 

The building 7 stuff is quite interesting though.

[ChezGiven 0]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

 

10 years on from 9/11 will be the 9th of November you cock!

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Anyway, fuck off back to Sunderland you shit-licking mackem prick.

 

 

don't live in sunderland you abuse riddled big mouthed fuckwit!

You're still a mackem cunt though.

 

The BBC call it 9/11 so given you called me a cock for referring to a cultural event how the most British of corporations refers to it, that makes you a deserving target for some honest abuse.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

The american kid who made that famous internet film was on one of these programmes recently and when he introduced one of his mates he said "this is dwayne, one of the best people for truth in upstate NY" One of the best people for truth? Wtf?

 

I've got an open mind about some of the events, i think its possible the military shot down United 93 but that doesnt mean a conspiracy. I also dont get the building 7 stuff and there are some fairly incompetent activities that went on between the FBI and the CIA before the event. It doesnt add up to much though. The art of politics is to not control events but shape them to your own narrative. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush did just that. From a very basic perspective, its not exactly cost-effective to have a military the size of the US and to be at peace with the world. A permanent war-footing against 'terrorism' is a perfect solution and in this sense, it doesnt surprise me that people are suspicious because of how conveniently it suited the neoconservative agenda.

 

Regarding the part in bold, some of the people they met talked of that, these huge bureaucracies that didn't communicate effectively with each other, along with a lack of action and incompetence from members of the government following warnings about potential terror threats to public airlines. As you say, it doesn't add up to much, it's just the inevitable consequence of human failings within organisations (incompetence). Unfortunately in this case it allowed for a terrible incident to take place. I've no doubt the US government weren't keen for the full scale of their incompetence to be revealed in investigations and so on.

 

The war on 'terror' is a bad name for what is a war against radical Islamists. It's a war whether we like it or not, you can't reconcile with such an ideology. People like NJS will say that the existence of such a death-obsessed cult is a result of our previous governments' foreign policies and the conditions they have created: abject poverty, so on, so forth. What people like him ignore is that radical Islamists are the creator of poverty--the first thing they do is subjugate half the population and deny them access to employment or education. They are not an anti-imperialist movement, rather they seek to reestablish the Caliphate, however they are without any capacity for self-criticism, and their actions and beliefs are so hateful that ultimately it is a self-defeating movement. Hitchens is a great advocate of the battle against radical Islamists, a battle as he puts it, "of everything I love against everything I hate." I'm sympathetic with his views, hence I can get on board with the idea that military action in Afghanistan and even Iraq could potentially be a force for good. At the very least I'm interested in taking discussion of the issues further than a lot of the anti-war movement are willing to. They are still going over the same tired points that were brought up before the invasion began, and the reality of their position is that they'd rather have had Saddam Hussein remain in power until Iraq inevitably imploded (it was already well on its way, and who's to say the consequences of that wouldn't have been worse?), than have the freely elected president Jalal Talabani, an educated Kurd and longtime campaigner for democracy, in power.

 

The truth is a lot of Brits are very conservative and this shows in their objection toward intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Kosovo, Bosnia, Ruanda and so on. I tend to lean toward intervention where it is possible and warranted. Saddam needed getting rid of since the late 80s.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Was that something to do with the fall of the Ottoman Empire?

[ChezGiven 0]

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Was that something to do with the fall of the Ottoman Empire?

 

Call 911 for emergency services. Tbh that might not be true, just something i heard back then, just thought i'd throw it out there

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Was that something to do with the fall of the Ottoman Empire?

 

Call 911 for emergency services. Tbh that might not be true, just something i heard back then, just thought i'd throw it out there

 

that's funny. I heard somewhere it was related to the fall of the Caliphate, part of the Ottoman Empire fell on that date apparently, someone might know on here, got some clever history buffs about. It's times like these when we will really rue the loss of Deano to the forum, as whatever you thought of him personally, there was no doubting the fact he was a hyper-intellectual polymath with an encylopedic knowledge of world history.

[topcat 0]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

 

10 years on from 9/11 will be the 9th of November you cock!

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Anyway, fuck off back to Sunderland you shit-licking mackem prick.

 

 

don't live in sunderland you abuse riddled big mouthed fuckwit!

You're still a mackem cunt though.

 

The BBC call it 9/11 so given you called me a cock for referring to a cultural event how the most British of corporations refers to it, that makes you a deserving target for some honest abuse.

 

oh well then - all hail the BBC that most venerable of institutions for getting all americanised - why dont you nip down the 7-11 and buy some tampons and dry your fukkin eyes!

[ChezGiven 0]

The american kid who made that famous internet film was on one of these programmes recently and when he introduced one of his mates he said "this is dwayne, one of the best people for truth in upstate NY" One of the best people for truth? Wtf?

 

I've got an open mind about some of the events, i think its possible the military shot down United 93 but that doesnt mean a conspiracy. I also dont get the building 7 stuff and there are some fairly incompetent activities that went on between the FBI and the CIA before the event. It doesnt add up to much though. The art of politics is to not control events but shape them to your own narrative. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush did just that. From a very basic perspective, its not exactly cost-effective to have a military the size of the US and to be at peace with the world. A permanent war-footing against 'terrorism' is a perfect solution and in this sense, it doesnt surprise me that people are suspicious because of how conveniently it suited the neoconservative agenda.

 

Regarding the part in bold, some of the people they met talked of that, these huge bureaucracies that didn't communicate effectively with each other, along with a lack of action and incompetence from members of the government following warnings about potential terror threats to public airlines. As you say, it doesn't add up to much, it's just the inevitable consequence of human failings within organisations (incompetence). Unfortunately in this case it allowed for a terrible incident to take place. I've no doubt the US government weren't keen for the full scale of their incompetence to be revealed in investigations and so on.

 

The war on 'terror' is a bad name for what is a war against radical Islamists. It's a war whether we like it or not, you can't reconcile with such an ideology. People like NJS will say that the existence of such a death-obsessed cult is a result of our previous governments' foreign policies and the conditions they have created: abject poverty, so on, so forth. What people like him ignore is that radical Islamists are the creator of poverty--the first thing they do is subjugate half the population and deny them access to employment or education. They are not an anti-imperialist movement, rather they seek to reestablish the Caliphate, however they are without any capacity for self-criticism, and their actions and beliefs are so hateful that ultimately it is a self-defeating movement. Hitchens is a great advocate of the battle against radical Islamists, a battle as he puts it, "of everything I love against everything I hate." I'm sympathetic with his views, hence I can get on board with the idea that military action in Afghanistan and even Iraq could potentially be a force for good. At the very least I'm interested in taking discussion of the issues further than a lot of the anti-war movement are willing to. They are still going over the same tired points that were brought up before the invasion began, and the reality of their position is that they'd rather have had Saddam Hussein remain in power until Iraq inevitably imploded (it was already well on its way, and who's to say the consequences of that wouldn't have been worse?), than have the freely elected president Jalal Talabani, an educated Kurd and longtime campaigner for democracy, in power.

 

The truth is a lot of Brits are very conservative and this shows in their objection toward intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Kosovo, Bosnia, Ruanda and so on. I tend to lean toward intervention where it is possible and warranted. Saddam needed getting rid of since the late 80s.

Good post that. The criticism now is that the reaction to 9/11 and subsequent wars gave rise to further anti-west hatred from within Islam (am sure HF has put some figures up in past debates around this). However, we'll never know counter-factually how al qaeda would have exploited a more muted liberal response from the US. Obama's strategy of going back to the reasons for the Afghanistan war and killing Bin Laden was a coherent approach to what he inherited.

 

On the subject of Iraq, did you see this article on Michael Moore last week?

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/0...ted-man-america

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

I saw it, but I couldn't bring myself to read it, beyond a few snippets. What did you take from the article?

[ChezGiven 0]

10 years on from 9/11 today, the Arab spring and capture of Bin Laden bookending the decade perfectly and Hitch's writings are always worth a read. Think he has a book out too.

 

10 years on from 9/11 will be the 9th of November you cock!

No its not, the event happened in the US and therefore retains their method of dates, not ours. It was planned by Bin Laden to fall on this date so 9/11 would be used to describe it.

 

Anyway, fuck off back to Sunderland you shit-licking mackem prick.

 

 

don't live in sunderland you abuse riddled big mouthed fuckwit!

You're still a mackem cunt though.

 

The BBC call it 9/11 so given you called me a cock for referring to a cultural event how the most British of corporations refers to it, that makes you a deserving target for some honest abuse.

 

oh well then - all hail the BBC that most venerable of institutions for getting all americanised - why dont you nip down the 7-11 and buy some tampons and dry your fukkin eyes!

Aye, like i'm the one thats been through 3 boxes of Kleenex this weekend. 36,000 for Chelsea, Gyan prefers to play in an actual desert rather than a cultural one and bottom 3 by the end of the day. One box each.

[ChezGiven 0]

I saw it, but I couldn't bring myself to read it, beyond a few snippets. What did you take from the article?

Eventually I found myself back on The Tonight Show for the first time in a while. As I was leaving the stage, the guy who was operating the boom microphone approached me.

 

"You probably don't remember me," he said nervously. "I never thought I would ever see you again or get the chance to talk to you. I can't believe I get to do this."

 

Do what? I thought. I braced myself for the man's soon-to-be-broken hand.

 

"I never thought I'd get to apologise to you," he said, as a few tears started to come into his eyes. "I'm the guy who ruined your Oscar night. I'm the guy who yelled 'ASSHOLE' into your ear right after you came off the stage. I … I … [he tried to compose himself]. I thought you were attacking the president – but you were right. He did lie to us. And I've had to carry this with me now all these years, and I'm so sorry …"

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

It doesn't surprise me that people want to kill Moore. He was very famous at that point, and he's quite an annoying bloke. All famous people seem to have utter nutters who want to kill them, of course that will be amplified if you go on the Oscars and start all that kerfuffle. Equally he'll have been celebrated in other parts of the country. I don't like Moore, though some of his film work is good. His books are terrible. He's one of those blokes who you just look at and want to shoot, like Adrian Chiles and Big Brother contestants.

Edited September 11, 2011 by Kevin S. Assilleekunt

[NJS 3978]

The american kid who made that famous internet film was on one of these programmes recently and when he introduced one of his mates he said "this is dwayne, one of the best people for truth in upstate NY" One of the best people for truth? Wtf?

 

I've got an open mind about some of the events, i think its possible the military shot down United 93 but that doesnt mean a conspiracy. I also dont get the building 7 stuff and there are some fairly incompetent activities that went on between the FBI and the CIA before the event. It doesnt add up to much though. The art of politics is to not control events but shape them to your own narrative. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush did just that. From a very basic perspective, its not exactly cost-effective to have a military the size of the US and to be at peace with the world. A permanent war-footing against 'terrorism' is a perfect solution and in this sense, it doesnt surprise me that people are suspicious because of how conveniently it suited the neoconservative agenda.

 

Regarding the part in bold, some of the people they met talked of that, these huge bureaucracies that didn't communicate effectively with each other, along with a lack of action and incompetence from members of the government following warnings about potential terror threats to public airlines. As you say, it doesn't add up to much, it's just the inevitable consequence of human failings within organisations (incompetence). Unfortunately in this case it allowed for a terrible incident to take place. I've no doubt the US government weren't keen for the full scale of their incompetence to be revealed in investigations and so on.

 

The war on 'terror' is a bad name for what is a war against radical Islamists. It's a war whether we like it or not, you can't reconcile with such an ideology. People like NJS will say that the existence of such a death-obsessed cult is a result of our previous governments' foreign policies and the conditions they have created: abject poverty, so on, so forth. What people like him ignore is that radical Islamists are the creator of poverty--the first thing they do is subjugate half the population and deny them access to employment or education. They are not an anti-imperialist movement, rather they seek to reestablish the Caliphate, however they are without any capacity for self-criticism, and their actions and beliefs are so hateful that ultimately it is a self-defeating movement. Hitchens is a great advocate of the battle against radical Islamists, a battle as he puts it, "of everything I love against everything I hate." I'm sympathetic with his views, hence I can get on board with the idea that military action in Afghanistan and even Iraq could potentially be a force for good. At the very least I'm interested in taking discussion of the issues further than a lot of the anti-war movement are willing to. They are still going over the same tired points that were brought up before the invasion began, and the reality of their position is that they'd rather have had Saddam Hussein remain in power until Iraq inevitably imploded (it was already well on its way, and who's to say the consequences of that wouldn't have been worse?), than have the freely elected president Jalal Talabani, an educated Kurd and longtime campaigner for democracy, in power.

 

The truth is a lot of Brits are very conservative and this shows in their objection toward intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Kosovo, Bosnia, Ruanda and so on. I tend to lean toward intervention where it is possible and warranted. Saddam needed getting rid of since the late 80s.

 

I actually think both.

 

Any ideology, no matter how fucked up and fundamentally wrong, can flourish given the right fucked-up stimulus.

 

Just as I think that British actions in various parts of the empire including Ireland almost deserved some kind of response - even if that response is cuntishness in itself.

[ChezGiven 0]

It doesn't surprise me that people want to kill Moore. He was very famous at that point, and he's quite an annoying bloke. All famous people seem to have utter nutters who want to kill them, of course that will be amplified if you go on the Oscars and start all that kerfuffle. Equally he'll have been celebrated in other parts of the country. I don't like Moore, though some of his film work is good. His books are terrible. He's one of those blokes who you just look at and want to shoot, like Adrian Chiles and Big Brother contestants.

The bit i quoted was just to give anecdotal support to the idea that Americans on the whole probably think Iraq was a mistake.