The road to 9/11: out of a clear blue sky?
By Cain O’Mahony
To mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this two-part article looks at the growth of Jihadist fundamentalism, and how it was cynically used by US imperialism to launch a ‘war for oil’.
Twenty five years on, it is still not a cliché to say ‘you knew exactly where you were and what you were doing’ on that fateful day. We all do. Everyone around the world was glued to television sets watching the jaw-dropping scenes coming out of New York.
It was not just the horrific, almost surreal images of destruction of everyday New Yorkers, running for their lives and chased by a tsunami of dust and rubble. It was the sudden icy feeling of ‘what now?’. Was this the start of a World War? And who is the enemy? And then the eventual near disbelief that just 13 members of Al Qaeda could kill 3,000 people, destroy large parts of one of the world’s most famous cities, put the US President in lock-down, attack the Pentagon, put the White House under threat, and change the course of world politics, armed only with plastic knives and a rudimentary knowledge of flying jet aircraft.
A key phrase repeatedly used by the Western media in its coverage of 9/11 was that it came “out of a clear blue sky”. It was as though the attacks had just inexplicably dropped from the heavens.
Meddling in the Middle East
Rather, the events were intrinsically linked to Western imperialism’s meddling in the Middle East. The road to 9/11 resulted from the failure, firstly of Arab nationalism, but then mainly from the cynical manipulation of the resultant Islamic fundamentalism that filled the vacuum, by a blinkered, short-sighted US and Western imperialism.
The post-war hopes of pan-Arab nationalism, led by Nasser in Egypt, were dealt a hammer blow by the disaster of the Six Day War in 1967, when to everyone’s astonishment, the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were smashed by Israel in a lighting war, mainly because they had been supplied by US and Western imperialism with the latest US and French jet fighters.
It was a disaster for the ideals of pan-Arabism, with Israel occupying Sinai, Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank in Jordan, and Jerusalem, there to remain.
Conventional war had failed, and the failure pushed the liberation movements to the left. But rather than look to the revolutionary socialist method, basing itself on mass movements, and policies that offered the idea of a socialist federation in the Middle East, which still could have appealed to Israeli workers, especially the youth on the kibbutzim, in the heady days of 1968, the movements instead looked to the dead end of ultra-leftism and guerillaism.
Movements, in particular the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Christian based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, looked to the work of the likes of Regis Debray.
A strategy that ignored mass struggle
Debray, a French radical who had spent time with Che Guevara, argued for what he called a ‘Focus Strategy’, saying the working masses had let the revolutionaries down, so they should use terrorism and ideological persuasion to act as a ‘catalyst’. It was a strategy was adopted by the PFLP in its struggle against Israel, and to an extent by the PLO.
As Jason Burke commented: “This so-called ‘Focus’ strategy went against decades of traditional Marxist orthodoxy, which maintained that successful revolutions depended on the right ‘objective conditions’ and the importance of patient work by activists over decades to raise the consciousness of the masses.
“Instead, ‘Foco-ists’ argued, revolutionary violence created its own conditions for success and anyone could overturn the established order with little more than authentic revolutionary commitment, courage and modern automatic weapons” (The Revolutionists, Jason Burke, 2025).
This ‘strategy’ of course failed – small groups, no matter how ‘spectacular’ their terrorist attacks, were never going to outgun the Israeli military machine, armed to the teeth as it was by US and Western imperialism.
As the Arab masses became disillusioned with the ideas of this supposed ‘left’, Islamic fundamentalists filled the vacuum. The turning point came in 1979 with the Iranian revolution against the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran. The weary populace did not look either left or right but adopted a ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude and turned to the Islamic fundamentalism of the Shia clerics.
Tragically, this disillusionment was compounded by the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, aiding and abetting the new Islamic regime. They went into alliance with the Shia clerics grouped around Ayatollah Khomeini, when they should have been drawing clear political demarcation lines between themselves and the clerics.
Instead, they gave the clerics a ‘revolutionary veneer’ and helped propel them to power. Indeed, they supported the regime right up until 1982, when Khomeini turned on them, closing down their papers and offices, and imprisoning 10,000 Tudeh members.
A reactionary, misogynistic force
The fundamentalists are a reactionary, misogynist force that wants to drag society back to the Middle Ages. They are the ‘black hundreds’ [antisemitic pogromists of the old Russian Czarist empire] of the Islamic world. The victory of the Shia fundamentalists in Iran inspired their Sunni counterparts in the rest of the Middle East, equally embittered by the failure of a Palestinian leadership veering between terrorism and patronising Arab sheikhs and presidents. Added to which, there was no let-up in the continuing oppression by Israel and Western imperialism.
And now they had a new enemy to fight. The Soviet Union was becoming equally embroiled. As their puppet regime in Kabul look set to fall, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979. What focussed the Soviet Union’s mind was fear of the new fundamentalist contagion spreading into its southern Muslim states from Iran.
For the Sunni fundamentalists, the conflicts in Lebanon, Palestine and now Afghanistan was confirmation in their minds that all the powers of the world were out to crush Islam. Their war became global.
A key architect was Shaykh Abdullah ‘Azzam. A Palestinian university lecturer, active in the fight for Palestinian liberation, he saw that a victory in Afghanistan as a means to “… mobilise Muslims to action in other conflict zones.”
‘Azzam declared: “I am certain that working in Afghanistan constitutes a revival of the spirit of jihad…We have been deprived from waging jihad in Palestine because of the borders, restraints and prisons… We must prepare for jihad in any spot of the earth we can.” ‘He led the call for Arab volunteers to join the fray against the Soviet-supported Afghan state. (The Arabs – a history, Eugene Roberts, 2011)
While ‘Azzam organised the new Arab volunteers, the money man was Osama bin Laden. The son of a billionaire, he used his personal inherited fortune of $30 million to set up what was called ‘the Base’ (Al Queda) in Afghanistan to co-ordinate the fight against the Red Army.
USA supported mujahidin fighting in Afghanistan
US and Western imperialism were enthusiastic supporters of their new proxy ‘Holy Warriors’ or Mujahidin, in the fight against the Soviet Union. They poured in money – to the tune of $250 million every year – and dispatched military special forces to train them, particularly in the use of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. Incredibly, throughout the 1980s, future members of Al Queda were flown to Scotland to be trained in the use of the ‘Blowpipe’ missile by the SAS (‘We taught terrorists’, Sunday Mirror, 16.02.03).
US and Western imperialism were indifferent to the reactionary sectarianism of the Mujahidin, turning a blind eye when, at the behest of the Pakistani military, Bin Laden undertook an edict from them to suppress a Shia uprising in the Gilgit-Balistan region of Pakistan. Leading a force of Afghan Sunni tribesmen in May 1988, they massacred and raped several hundred Shia civilians in the town of Gilgit.
After over 60,000 casualties from the fighting in Afghanistan, the Red Army eventually retreated from the bloody quagmire, as at home it was clear the Soviet economy was grinding to a halt, leading to the final collapse of the Soviet model throughout Eastern Europe.
In the isolated, delusional mind of the jihadists, they thought that they and they alone had been responsible – and if their forces could topple the ‘Communist Empire’, why not the US capitalist one too? On February 23, 1998, bin Laden announced the creation of the ‘International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders’. The US and the West had created a Frankenstein which was now coming back to bite them, culminating in 9/11.
In part II, Cain O’Mahony charts how US imperialism cynically used the 9/11 attack for its ‘forever war’ on Iraq.
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