Columnist – John Sammon
The 10-year anniversary of 9-11 will include memorializing and flag-waving on television networks under the motto “We Won’t Forget,” but will not include any mention of our attack on Iraq in a false attempt to link that country to 9-11.
We choose to forget that part.
No mention will be made of the approximate million Iraqis killed in a war started by George Bush and Dick Cheney, who lied us into a war by claiming that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11. Bush later openly admitted they weren’t.
He has never faced justice for these deceptions.
Apparently, what Americans choose to remember in the 9-11 tragedy through the media is selective.
The fanatics who did 9-11, mostly Saudi Arabians, came from a country with which we have the friendliest of relations. Let’s say for argument’s sake these nuts attacked us and will do so in the future for no other reason than they don’t like us because we are primarily a Christian country.
That still doesn’t change the fact that we attacked Iraq because we didn’t like its leader, and killed a million people not to mention the lives of U.S. soldiers lost because we falsely tried to tie Iraq to 9-11. The perpetrators of this misdeed remain unpunished, even glorified.
The observances of 9-11 will also include no objective assessment of our role in the Middle East in past history, and how it has helped to de-stabilize the region and give impetus to extremists. Let me give some specific examples of the history Americans choose to forget, or are totally unaware of.
Let’s take Iran. The United State backed the former Shah of Iran, a brutal dictator who had secret police forces imprisoning and murdering Iranians. Backing by the U.S. fueled hatred of the U.S. in that country and gave unwitting help to extremists under the Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to the taking of American hostages at the embassy there and the current hostile, authoritarian regime.
Our behavior in the Middle East has been less than wise.
How about Egypt? We supported Hosni Mubarak, a ruthless dictator now facing court trial, virtually right up until the time he was overthrown by a popular people’s street movement.
What about Saddam? We supplied equipped and encouraged him guaranteeing him we wouldn’t let him lose a war with Iran. Former Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld posed for a famous picture shaking Saddam’s hand in his palace.
We choose to forget that.
We gave at least voiced support to rebel units fighting the Russians in Afghanistan during the last of the Cold War who later became the Taliban.
We choose to forget that too.
The list goes on and on.
Bush and Cheney approved the torture of prisoners and threw out the rules of the Geneva Convention, instituted a gulag of camps in which prisoners had no recourse to an attorney, and instituted illegal wiretap spying on American citizens that violated The Bill of Rights under the guise of making us safer and which was ludicrously and perversely called “The Patriot Act.”
We’ll also forget that.
Rather than acting as a peace broker in the Middle East, which occasionally we have, for example, the attempted Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt, we have pretty much given Israel a blank check to do whatever it wanted. This included pushing Palestinians out of ancestral homelands and building settlements which has heightened tensions.
Our memorializing of 9-11 will not include an overall objective assessment of this history as a whole. The idea conveyed will be that the U.S., innocent of ever doing anything unwise, was picked on for no reason by evil people.
There is some truth to this. But that is a stilted viewpoint.
What terrorists did on 9-11 is evil. They are fanatics. The heroism of responders to the tragedy and the loss and sacrifice should be remembered and honored.
But to selectively choose to remember only what we want to or to “cherry pick” history so that a one-sided viewpoint (good guys versus evil fanatics) is presented does no one any good. History is not a vacuum, or wearing blinders, but a long catalog of events, often decisions errantly made.
Our history of involvement in the Middle East has not always been wise. That will not be discussed during the remembrances of 9-11. This website, Politicalarticles.net, allows me to say this. Other websites will not and would censor what you are reading here because they are afraid or angry with ideas with which they don’t agree.
There is nothing unpatriotic about the truth, or criticizing the government of this country for its past mistakes in a volatile region. It is not unpatriotic to disagree in a so-called “Free” country.
Reference: Contradictions and Hypocrisy Haunt U.S. Policy in the Middle East
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