Satan's Little Helpers: Al Qaeda and the Empire

Subtitled: My Annual Hate-Filled Anti-American Rant (as certified repeatedly, over the years, by many nice patriotic Americans and admirers of the USA).

OK, eleventh anniversary of 11/9, and what hate-filled filth do I have to spew this time round?

Plenty.

Anti-American Hatebag. Kind of.

One of the recurrent things one comes across in trawling the current affairs sites on the net is a sense of bafflement among so-called anti-war commentators: how is it that the United States is backing Al Qaeda terror groups in Syria? Isn’t it strange that they should be doing this?

Answer: No, it is not strange.

The simple fact, to anyone with any sense of discernment at all, is that Al Qaeda has never been anything but a tool of the Empire. Their mutual antagonism has been nothing but a bit of fairly transparent eyewash. As I’ve said elsewhere:

Old time Marxists had a term worth remembering: objective allies. It referred to forces, which while apparently at loggerheads, were united, secretly or otherwise, against a common foe. Anyone who has a fair knowledge of current affairs and a mind capable of even basic analysis can hardly come to any other conclusion but that the Empire and Al Qaeda are objective allies.

Look at the actual evidence. With the single exception of Afghanistan in 2001, the regimes overthrown (directly or indirectly) by the Empire in Muslim countries have followed a pattern. They have been secular dictatorships with a strongly socialist economy, where resources were nationalised and religious fundamentalism ruthlessly crushed. Such was the pattern in Iran with the CIA-run coup which overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh. That was the pattern in Afghanistan, where the Empire conspired with Muslim religious fundamentalists to destroy the socialist government of Najibullah. So too it went in Iraq – Saddam, for those readers who have chosen to forget, was a secular dictator under whom Christians and other religious minorities were perfectly safe...

Such was also the case in Libya, where Gaddafi had destroyed an Al Qaeda rebellion earlier. Such was the case even in Chechnya, where the West provided full backing for the Al Qaeda affiliated Islamic terrorists who fought the Russians – to this day, surviving Chechen warlords are hosted in London. Even Afghanistan, which I mentioned earlier, is fast slipping back into religious intolerance under the Western-anointed puppet government. In Pakistan, the broadly modern and secular society is under a double threat, from the Empire and the fundamentalists, who seem to work to reinforce each other.

Consider: in every one of these cases, the Empire and Al Qaeda are on the same side. Despite all the “they hate our freedoms” rhetoric, the actual target of Al Qaeda isn’t the Empire – it’s the secular Muslim governments on the one hand, more so if they dare follow socialist policies; and the corrupt and despotic Saudi monarchy on the other. The Saudi monarchy is too vital to the Empire to sacrifice. Therefore, diverting Al Qaeda’s attention to the socialist and secular Arab regimes had a twofold advantage for the Empire: it protected the Saudi royals, and at the same time it furthered the Empire’s double agenda of controlling the world’s oil deposits and strengthening the hand of the Zionazi pseudostate. The elimination of an irrelevant liability named Osama bin Laden, quite likely orchestrated by Al Qaeda itself, is neither here nor there.

What, ultimately, was the effect of the 11/9 attacks on the World Trade Centres? Wasn’t it the opening up of Iraq to Al Qaeda activity, and the energising of Sunni fundamentalist terrorism around the globe? Isn’t “stopping Al Qaeda” the excuse behind virtually every single occupation or intervention the West is running in a Muslim nation today, from Yemen to Somalia, from northern Nigeria to Afghanistan, even where there is no evidence that Al Qaeda even exists?

It’s a strange thing that so few have noted the recurrent pattern: the Empire gets itself in a spot of bother, and Al Qaeda is on hand to help. Let’s consider a few cases:

New York/Afghanistan, 2001: The Empire is looking for a casus belli to launch the takeover of what Americans like to call the “Middle East”, with its oil and pipeline routes.  It requires a “Pearl Harbour Moment”, something so shocking that most people can be dragged along in a wave of “manufactured consent”. Unfortunately, such a moment seems difficult to arrange until...

Until, on the morning of 11 September, alleged Al Qaeda terrorists hijack four airliners and use three of them in kamikaze attacks on the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld declares that the time has come to “sweep up matters, related or not,” and the Empire invades and occupies Afghanistan, routs the Taliban, and sets up a puppet regime.

One of the most interesting things about this invasion, of course, was the simple fact that (as even Fox News admits), over 90% of the Afghan people have not, to this day, heard of the 11/9 attacks, which, even according to the official account, were planned and executed in Germany and Florida, not in Afghanistan. Even according to the official accounts, Al Qaeda is a decentralised entity comprising franchises strung out across the globe, so invading Afghanistan was hardly ever going to destroy it. But it would damage the Taliban, and possibly destroy it.

Now why should the destruction of the Taliban be something the Empire should desire? Contrary to the general perception, the Taliban are not Al Qaeda. The two organisations are completely distinct, and did not even like each other very much in the years before 2001. The Taliban hated Al Qaeda’s version of puritan Saudi-style Islam and disregard for local customs; the Al Qaeda thought of the Taliban as brutal, uncivilised savages. Taliban leaders were, by the late 1990s, agitating for Osama bin Laden and his men to be kicked out of Afghanistan, and Mullah Omar had responded by virtually placing the latter under open arrest. And after the alleged 11/9 attacks, Mullah Omar had offered to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial if proof of his guilt was given. It certainly wasn’t his fault that the Empire gave no such proof (and has not, to this day).

In fact, had it not been for 11/9, the Taliban would likely have taken over all of Afghanistan in short order (though I do not believe they could have held on to it for long). Just two days earlier, they had finally killed the top opposition commander, Ahmed Shah Masood, and stood poised to drive the Northern Alliance warlords into defeat and exile. And once they did, once they were, at least temporarily, the undisputed masters of Afghanistan, would they require Al Qaeda? Not likely.

So, was the fall of the Taliban bad news for Al Qaeda? Hardly.

Nor was it bad news for the Empire. It had long wanted pipelines from the ‘stans of Central Asia through Afghanistan and Pakistan, pipelines for which it had been negotiating with the Taliban until 1998, but which the accursed group had decided to grant to Argentina’s BRIDAS, not the Empire’s UNOCAL (vide Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story Of The Afghan Warlords). After the fall of the Taliban government in Kabul, a UNOCAL employee, Hamid Karzai, was imported as puppet President, and the BRIDAS agreement tossed in the wastebasket. Also, occupying Afghanistan helped the Empire to surround Iran, and threaten the underbelly of Russia (still its long-term target) and the western frontier of its next opponent, China.

Also, the “strikes” helped fuel Islamophobia in the homeland, which in turn facilitated the introduction of a surveillance state, the kind of thing we used to be told was the hallmark of the Evil Communist Empire, and massively increased expenditure on the military industrial complex; expenditure it might have been impossible to justify otherwise.

Really, the (alleged) 11/9 strike by Al Qaeda was so convenient! How nicely it worked out for everyone, and how conveniently Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape from Tora Bora when surrounded and ready for annihilation. If he was eliminated, after all, how could one justify an occupation?*

One couldn’t.

Another extremely interesting thing about the entire 2001 “World Trade Centre Attack” episode is how Al Qaeda’s response to it. I don’t want to get into a digression on the likelihood of the two WTC towers and Building 7’s collapse here, or of the many discrepancies of the Pentagon attack; but let’s say there are at least reasonable grounds for debate as to what really happened on that occasion. Whether Al Qaeda was or was not responsible for those attacks, though, they did arouse worldwide revulsion, including in Muslim nations, and were the direct excuse the Empire used to invade and destroy Afghanistan and Iraq, while destabilising Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. So, it might be assumed that Al Qaeda would rather play the victim card here, and duck responsibility? It might even so easily pass on blame to the Zionists, for instance; after all, Zionist agents were caught watching and celebrating the strikes. Right?

 Wrong. Amazingly (at least it’s amazing if you believe the official story) Al Qaeda is eager to take credit for that episode, and has threatened doubters, including the government of Iran, with “dire consequences” for daring to dispute its authorship of that terrorist crime. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said to herself.

And yet another interesting thing was that the FBI was specifically ordered not to investigate terror links, which might have tracked down Al Qaeda networks. One might think their bosses wanted a major terrorist attack.

Without Al Qaeda, in fact, wherefore the Global War Of Terror?

Let’s move on a bit to another interesting episode:

Iraq, 2003-7: In 2003, the Empire – alleging complicity between the hardline secular government of Iraq and the fundamentalist Al Qaeda – invaded Iraq. Though organised Iraqi resistance, weakened by over twelve years of sanctions and undeclared but constant war, quickly collapsed, the soldiers went home with their weapons and within days began an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupation. By 2005, in fact, the Empire’s occupation troops were on the ropes.

But what happened? A Jordanian named Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi set up an Al Qaeda franchise called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, obtained the approval of bin Laden, and ignited a vicious sectarian civil war. Car bombs and massacres of civilians became the order of the day, and instead of fighting the occupation, the Shia and Sunni of Iraq began fighting each other. By the time Al-Zarqawi was eliminated, he had outlived his usefulness; the civil war was in full swing, and the two sides were making deals with the Empire in order to be left alone to fight each other. In fact, it’s interesting to note that, before his capture, Saddam Hussein himself had released a message warning the people of Iraq of the danger posed by the foreign jihadists. He was not wrong.

By 2007, then, the threat to the occupation had passed. The Empire felt emboldened enough to build an embassy bigger than Vatican City in Baghdad, and planned on a permanent occupation. Occasionally, expendable occupation troops (basically poverty draftees) were still being killed, but by 2007 the Shia and Sunni were too busy fighting each other to care about the Empire, and, in fact, their internecine fighting was cited as a reason for the Empire to maintain its occupation.

It would be four more years before the Empire was forced to withdraw, and then it was because the Iraqi government no longer wished to give the occupation forces immunity from prosecution, not because of the resistance.

Once again, Al Qaeda had come to the defence of Empire.

Yemen, Somalia, et al. Again and again, in Africa and West Asia, we have seen a pattern: a strategically located nation with a client regime threatens to slip out of the Empire’s grasp. In response, Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-affiliated units spring up like mushrooms after the rain, virtually “forcing” the Empire to intervene militarily, whether directly or via proxies like Ethiopia. Result: the strategically important nation remains firmly in the Empire’s grasp.

We’ve even seen it in Nigeria, where a collection of comical goons called Boko Haram, who declared that it was “un-Islamic” to believe in a round earth or to use weapons more advanced than bows and arrows, was built up into a “potent threat” by the government, its leaders massacred, and the rest of the membership driven into hiding, where they decided that guns and bombs were necessary, un-Islamic or not, and began a genuine terror campaign. At which stage they were declared Al Qaeda affiliates, and therefore northern Nigeria a deserving case for Western attention.

Farcical terror “attacks” in the Empire: I’ve alluded above to the utility of Al Qaeda as an excuse for the Empire to install a police surveillance state at home. It’s aided and abetted by repeated – but incredibly incompetent – Al Qaeda terror attacks, which fizzle pathetically. The same Al Qaeda which can manufacture undetectable intestine bombs is reduced to underwear explosives? Just whom do those idiotic plots benefit?

So, it’s not exactly surprising that in Libya, and now in Syria, Al Qaeda and the Empire should be openly on the same side. In fact, it would have been astonishing if they hadn’t.

And, on the eleventh anniversary of 11/9, the fact that Imperial medics should be treating Al Qaeda casualties in Syria isn’t strange, at all, at all.

Eleven years after 11/9, there are calls to put the Global War Of Terror away. But that won't happen.

It's, after all, just too convenient to everyone.

*Assuming one believes that Osama bin Laden was actually killed as described in May 2011, despite all the holes in that story, even that fits neatly in the narrative. By 2011, the Imperial occupation of Afghanistan had run into serious trouble, the Taliban were resurgent, and the Nobel Peace Prizident desperately needed a boost in his ratings. What better opportunity to sacrifice a figurehead who had grown to be an irrelevant liability?