12 September 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks President Bush and other U.S. officials
declared that the attackers were motivated by hatred for America's freedom and
values. It was a lie, one of the biggest ever told by U.S. officials. The
truth was that the attackers were motivated by anger and rage over pre-9/11
U.S. government interventionism in the Middle East, especially the large
number of people, including children, that the U.S. military and the CIA had
been knowingly and intentionally killing in Iraq prior to 9/11.
After the national-security branch of the federal government unexpectedly and
suddenly lost its official Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union and communism, in
1989, Americans were increasingly discussing the prospect of a ''peace
dividend,'' which would have meant a large reduction in the size of the
Pentagon, CIA, and NSA. Since the federal government had been converted into a
national-security state to wage the Cold War, people were naturally asking:
Why do we need a big Cold War apparatus when no Cold War exists anymore?
For the Pentagon and the CIA, that meant the necessity to find a new official
enemy, one that would last as long as communism, if not longer. Terrorism
would fit that bill perfectly.
The process began with U.S. interventionism into the Persian Gulf War, during
which U.S. troops killed untold numbers of Iraqis with bombs, bullets, and
missiles. At the same time, the Pentagon ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Iraq's
water and sewage treatment plants with the knowledge that such action would
help spread infectious illnesses among the Iraqi populace.
(Needless to say, that war, like all the other wars that the U.S.
national-security establishment has waged in the post-WWII era, was waged
without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war, making
the killings of all those Iraqis illegal under our form of government.)
At the same time, the U.S. government imposed a brutal system of economic
sanctions on Iraq, with the goal of achieving regime change — that is, the
ouster of Iraq's ruler, Saddam Hussein, and his replacement with a
U.S.-approved ruler. The U.S. aim was to inflict as much suffering as possible
on the Iraqi people, in the hopes that they would rise up and revolt against
their own government, or that the Iraqi military would initiate a coup, or
that Saddam Hussein would simply resign.
While the sanctions failed to achieve regime change, they did succeed in
causing untold economic misery for the Iraqi people. By the end of the 11
years of sanctions, the once-prospering Iraqi middle class had been reduced to
penury.
But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was the year-after-year death toll
of Iraqi children. Keep in mind, after all, that the sanctions prevented Iraqi
officials from repairing those water and sewage treatment plants that the
Pentagon had ordered bombed with the knowledge that such action would spread
infectious illnesses among the Iraqi people. Those illnesses, along with
malnutrition brought on by the sanctions, was exacting an enormous death toll
on the children of Iraq.
In 1996, the official spokesman for the United States to the world, U.S.
Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, was asked whether the deaths of
half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were worth it. She responded
that while the matter was a difficult one, the deaths were, in fact, worth it.
By ''it'' she meant the U.S. efforts to achieve regime change in Iraq.
The sanctions continued wreaking death and destruction for another 5 years
after Albright issued that statement. If you'd like to get a good idea of the
banality of evil among U.S. bureaucrats who were enforcing the sanctions, read
''Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction'' by Joy Gordon
or her book Invisible War: The U.S. and Iraq Sanctions.
It's also important to note that not one single U.S. official, from President
Clinton on down, condemned or even mildly criticized Albright's statement.
There can be only one reason for that: They all agreed with what she had said.
It is impossible to overstate the ever-increasing anger and rage that was
boiling over in the Middle East as people saw those children dying week after
week, month after month, year after year. Two high UN officials, Hans von
Sponek and Denis Haliday, even resigned their humanitarian positions at the UN
in protest against what they considered was genocide against the children of
Iraq.
When Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center
in 1993, appeared before a New York federal judge for sentencing, he angrily
cited the deaths of the Iraqi children for his retaliatory act of terrorism,
telling the judge that U.S. officials were butchers.
That's not to suggest, of course, that there weren't other causes for the
Yousef's rage and, for that matter, the anger that motivated other pre-9/11
terrorist attacks (e.g., the attacks on the USS Cole and U.S. embassies in
East Africa), but none of them had anything to do with hatred for America's
''freedom and values.'' They all had to do with U.S. interventionism, such as
the U.S. government's unconditional support of the Israeli government, the
stationing of U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands, and the constant bombing
campaigns over Iraq while enforcing the so-called no-fly zones, campaigns that
were killing people, including children, on a constant basis.
Was all that interventionism worth it? It certainly was worth it to the
national-security establishment, which not only wasn't reduced in sizez in the
post-Cold Era but instead grew and prospered in the post-9/11 era.
For those for whom liberty, peace, and prosperity, however, clearly the
interventionism wasn't worth it, given that the brought to America the
pre-9/11 terrorist attacks, the 9/11 attacks, the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, a never-ending war on terrorism, a formalized federal program of
international assassination, indefinite detention and torture for Americans
and others, the prison camp and torture center at Guantanamo Bay, massive
secret surveillance schemes, partnerships with brutal dictatorships, an d, of
course, out of control federal spending, taxation, and debt that is
threatening America with national bankruptcy.
On the 15th anniversary of 9/11, U.S. public officials and mainstream media
commentators said that 9/11 will forever stand as one of history's greatest
acts of evil. What they all failed to point out, however, was that killing
those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, which motivated the terrorists
to commit their acts of evil on 9/11, was evil too.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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