The victims of terrorist
strikes in London and New York are just as innocent as all those whose lives
have been claimed in the Middle East and beyond by the often cold calculus of
geopolitics. The CIA have long had a term to describe the unintended
consequences of it's covert operations - it's called 'blowback' and it's
principle applies just as readily to innocent peoples impacted negatively by
American foreign policy decisions.
Confining ourselves to the Middle East and only to recent years, the list of the disgruntled is a long one and includes the majority of Saudi citizens, Egyptians who long pined for democratic reform under the US-backed dictator Mubarak, Yemenis labouring under the yolk of their own Western 'puppet' dictator, Somali supporters of popular Shar'ia reform designated terrorists and gunned down by US armed warlords, dispossessed and stateless Palestinians aghast at America's unilateral support of Israel, victims of the incompetent bombing and sanctions regime imposed on Iraq and the subsequent 'liberation' which cost hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives, innocent Afghan Pashtunis bombed into obliteration by US drones and spyplanes and an entire generation of Iranians who saw their country's wealth robbed from under their noses by a US-backed coup to restore the warped extraction rights of the thieving Anglo-Iranian oil company.
The wonder is not that there was a 9/11 or a 7/7 but that there hasn't been any more of them (my jaw certainly didn't drop on either occasion) and to this I have no doubt we can attribute the strength of character of the majority of Muslims and Arabs in these countries who have managed to restrain their worst impulses and refused to allow themselves degenerate down the militant fundamentalist path and become outright supporters of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda; but how hard it must be for them sometimes - especially when their difficulties are so seldom discussed or debated in the Western press to the extent that when an event like 9/11 happens, the vast majority of Americans are genuinely dumbfounded, can't credit what historical forces may have contributed to a multi-pronged attack on their economic (World Trade Centre), political (White House) and military (Pentagon) centres and are thus left helpless to reflexively imbibe the well-polished neocon narrative which thrusts them headlong into the Iraqi oilfields under the pretext of "revenge".
However, that their lives were claimed in the tremoring web of imperial overstretch is I'm sure scant consolation to the relatives of the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Confining ourselves to the Middle East and only to recent years, the list of the disgruntled is a long one and includes the majority of Saudi citizens, Egyptians who long pined for democratic reform under the US-backed dictator Mubarak, Yemenis labouring under the yolk of their own Western 'puppet' dictator, Somali supporters of popular Shar'ia reform designated terrorists and gunned down by US armed warlords, dispossessed and stateless Palestinians aghast at America's unilateral support of Israel, victims of the incompetent bombing and sanctions regime imposed on Iraq and the subsequent 'liberation' which cost hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives, innocent Afghan Pashtunis bombed into obliteration by US drones and spyplanes and an entire generation of Iranians who saw their country's wealth robbed from under their noses by a US-backed coup to restore the warped extraction rights of the thieving Anglo-Iranian oil company.
The wonder is not that there was a 9/11 or a 7/7 but that there hasn't been any more of them (my jaw certainly didn't drop on either occasion) and to this I have no doubt we can attribute the strength of character of the majority of Muslims and Arabs in these countries who have managed to restrain their worst impulses and refused to allow themselves degenerate down the militant fundamentalist path and become outright supporters of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda; but how hard it must be for them sometimes - especially when their difficulties are so seldom discussed or debated in the Western press to the extent that when an event like 9/11 happens, the vast majority of Americans are genuinely dumbfounded, can't credit what historical forces may have contributed to a multi-pronged attack on their economic (World Trade Centre), political (White House) and military (Pentagon) centres and are thus left helpless to reflexively imbibe the well-polished neocon narrative which thrusts them headlong into the Iraqi oilfields under the pretext of "revenge".
However, that their lives were claimed in the tremoring web of imperial overstretch is I'm sure scant consolation to the relatives of the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Centre.
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