When it comes to legendary cluelessness, France’s House of Bourbon and its émigrés had nothing on the current ruling class of America. Twenty-five years after 9/11 it somehow self-righteously declares itself a victim and survivor while simultaneously perpetrating the same type of atrocities (e.g., bombing girls schools in Minab and wedding parties in Sirik) that led to that fateful and horrible day twenty-five years ago when 2,977 Americans, including over 400 first responders, were needlessly killed because of at least 52 previous years of American meddling in the Middle East.
Motive? What Motive?
When a horrific crime is committed, law enforcement, the courts, and the public are always interested in learning the perpetrator’s reasons for committing the crime. Yet, on 9/11, we weren’t allowed to ask about, know, or discuss a possible motive. In the strange days that followed the carnage, even wondering aloud or speculating about a motive brought forth indignation, and, if you persisted, allegations that you were a “terrorist sympathizer,” if not an outright terrorist per se. What would make 19 young, mostly Saudi men hijack four large passenger jets and engage in actions leading to the deaths of 2,977 Americans, 574 more fatalities than Pearl Harbor? Over and over we heard something along the lines of, “Shut up! They did it because they hate our freedoms!”
Osama bin Laden offered three reasons for the 9/11 attacks:
- The stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia after Gulf War I (1990-1991). This was regarded as a Western military occupation of Islam’s holy land near its most sacred sites at Mecca and Medina, and thus an intolerable desecration.
2. US economic and military support of Israel in its steady encroachments on land in Palestine and Lebanon.
3. US support of sanctions against Iraq that killed approximately 500,000 Iraqi children.
The routine US response to these claims is to either 1) ignore them or 2) assert that they are lies.
However, there was one exception that glaringly revealed the true colors of the US ruling class. When asked by CBS reporter Lesley Stahl about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from US-supported sanctions, US UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright memorably replied, “…we think the price is worth it.”
Albright never disputed the numbers. Mountains of dead Iraqi children were definitely worth the US’s obsession of controlling the Middle East for cheap oil and Israeli regional hegemony. Albright would later deflect blame toward Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein for the deaths, conveniently ignoring the US’s former bromance with Hussein when it facilitated the sale of chemical and biological weapons components to Iraq to be used against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Most outrageous of all, not only did Bill and Hillary Clinton not regard Albright’s slip as an embarrassing gaffe worthy of termination, the following year they handsomely rewarded Albright by promoting her to US Secretary of State.
The US’s sudden divorce from Hussein before Gulf War I was all but the same as it was from Osama bin Laden after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan: when each stopped doing the CIA’s dirty work (Operation Cyclone in the case of bin Laden, and poison gassing and sickening Iranians in the case of Hussein), the US was done with them. Each went from ally to “terrorist.”
Of course the official US assignment of motives for 9/11 was George W. Bush’s infamous fever-dream, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” It was as delusional as it was self-serving. Delusional in that no one in the Arab world outside of US-bought allies or puppets would remotely recognize it as a legitimate Arab grievance against the US; self-serving in that it would enable Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and many other members of the US ruling class to acquire power and wealth like never before.
Sure enough, the successful mass sale of these lies was parlayed into a full invasion of Iraq, not because Iraq still had a shred of the chemical and biological weapons that the US had effectively sent it 15 years earlier or that it had the capability of launching biological or germ missiles against Cyprus or Europe as a British government dossier and British media claimed. Ariel Sharon and the rest of Israeli leadership wanted Hussein gone, and Bush was oddly only too happy to oblige. The end result was eight years of war, 4,500 US casualties, 32,000 US injured, and a minimum cost of $2 to $3 trillion in terms of military operations and veteran expenditures.
As for the other US tactic of treating Arab grievances as all lies, why would the Arab world lie in its complaints about American foreign policy in poll after poll and survey after survey? There’s never been a coherent explanation of this from any agency of the American government, never mind the US State Department or CIA. The only plausible explanation is that none of them actually believes it. How could they?
Ils N’Ont Rien Appris (Learning Nothing)
The rubble and toxic dust of 9/11 was the fourth legacy of ignoring James Madison’s warnings about the existential dangers of peacetime standing armies. In June of 1787, he gravely warned that,
The means of defence agst foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
Obviously, Madison was not the first member of the founding generation to express such sentiments. In 1776, Samuel Adams, writing six years after British troops perpetrated the Boston Massacre, observed that professional militaries were “always dangerous to the Liberties of the People,” partly because of their insularity from the general population, greater loyalty to officer hierarchy than civilian leadership, and blind obedience to the chain of command. Indeed, the outcome of any sober and thoughtful national retrospect in the wake of 9/11 would have been a complete US withdrawal from NATO and complete defunding of the Pentagon, literally still scarred from the impact of American Airlines Flight 77.
Instead, we have history repeating as Marx (right on one thing) predicted, this time not as tragedy (Iraq) but as utter farce (Iran). Donald Trump bombed Iran’s “nuclear program” (June 22, 2025) almost three months after his own Director of National Intelligence testified (March 25, 2025) to a Senate committee that Iran had not had such a program since 2003. After this bombing, Trump and Israeli intelligence operatives declared that Iran’s non-existent nuclear program lay completely destroyed and not re-buildable for literally years.
Not even nine months after this first bombing, Trump and the Israelis were back again (February 28, 2026) declaring that Iran’s nuclear program—dead for 23 years but somehow bombed into oblivion the previous year—was somehow two weeks away from a nuclear weapon. It’s so absurd that even Franz Kafka wouldn’t be able to use it as story material.
Ni Rien Oublié (Forgetting Nothing)
Bolstering the current war against Iran, according to Trump and most GOP politicians, is the claim that Iran first declared war on the US in 1979 when, in the wake of the Shia revolution, Iranian students took 52 Americans hostage in the US embassy in Tehran. This claim was repeated just about hour by hour in the early days of the current conflict with Iran on the Fox News Channel and is unquestioned gospel to paid conservative influencers who repeat it endlessly.
The real story that Trump, the GOP, Fox, and paid conservative influencers never want to talk about is what led to the Shia revolution, the taking of the hostages, and Iranians first chanting, “Death to America!” In August of 1953, the US CIA helped overthrow duly elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in order to seize control of Iran’s oil industry. This led to expanded powers for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and, with assistance from the US, the formation in 1957 of one of the most vicious secret police and domestic spy forces (SAVAK) the world has ever known. SAVAK ruled Iranians with omnipresent surveillance, electrocutions, severe beatings to the verge of death, and extrajudicial assassinations. In sum, for the control of oil, the US helped subject Iranians to one of the most brutal dictatorships for 26 years until the Shia revolt of 1979. Most Iranians still know this history well. In contrast, most Americans not only know little to nothing about Pahlavi and SAVAK, they cannot even locate Iran on an unlabeled map.
Conclusion
In the days after September 11, 2001, the US had a massive reservoir of goodwill, sympathy, and understanding from the rest of the world after losing almost 3,000 of its citizens. Its subsequent wayward adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq were somewhat understood, if impossible to condone. Today, incredibly mired in yet another interminable war in the Middle East, its ruling class deserves no such understanding. Because there are never any costly personal repercussions for such hubris and folly (in fact, too often, as in the case of Madeleine Albright, there are only substantial rewards), we can expect the hubris, the folly, and ever-widening senseless disasters and destruction to continue.
