Some folks in the 9/11 truth movement obsess over narrow evidentiary issues. Others focus mainly on the family members and first responders. Quite a few are mainly concerned with the fewer than 3,000 Americans killed on that day, rather than the 1.2 million Iraqis and untold Afghanis who have been and are still being murdered as part of the same crime.
Me, I’m a big picture guy. I want to know WHY they did this. And by “this” I mean the whole shebang — not just blowing up the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, but all of the shifts in geopolitical and economic policy that were set in place even before 9/11 was staged as a pretext.
David Ray Griffin, the unofficial dean of 9/11 studies, blames a hawkish element in the US national security establishment. That is obviously correct as far as it goes. The problem is, how exactly did US “national security” benefit from 9/11 and the 9/11 wars? On the surface, 9/11 and its wars seem to have weakened the US geopolitically, not strengthened it. Instead of the low oil prices and balanced budgets and happily democratic, pro-US, pro-Israel Middle East we were promised, we have high oil prices, an angry, less-democratic less-pro-US Middle East, and most importantly a catastrophic fiscal situation that has produced the worst economy since the Great Depression. What does any of this have to do with “national security”?
Explanation A: Nothing. But it has everything to do with Israeli security. The point of 9/11, in this view, was to trigger a long-term US war against the whole Islamic world on behalf of Israel. As 9/11 Commission coverup-commissar Philip Zelikow said, “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel…And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.” In this view, 9/11 was a coup d’etat by the hardline Zionists in and around PNAC, designed to trick the US into perpetually smashing Israel’s Arab and Muslim enemies.
The implications of Explanation A — that the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog to death — are rather astounding. How could the Zionists have convinced people like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Richard Myers to commit treason on such a grand scale?
Enter Explanation B: The Oil Card. As James R. Norman writes in his book of that name, the 9/11 wars may actually be directed against China. By driving up the price of oil and wrecking the global economy (including the US economy) the US National Security State is shooting itself in the foot, but simultaneously shooting China in the heart. China is far more dependent on imported oil than the US is, so by taking Iraqi oil off-line, and throwing much of the Islamic oil-producing world into chaos, along with other measures, the NATSSIs (National Security State Idiots) have jacked up oil prices to the point that, they calculate, China will be unable to sustain its breakneck pace of economic growth, and will fail to emerge as a geopolitical challenger to US hegemony. (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that — for the details, read Norman’s book.)
Norman’s analysis is supported by George Friedman’s very useful introduction to geopolitics, The Next 100 Years. Friedman persuasively argues that national elites rationally pursue their predictable interests within predictable constraints, making history, including future history, understandable. If this is true, the US national elites who staged 9/11 and its pre-scripted wars cannot have done so for any of the reasons they gave us. Whether the real reason was Explanation A, Explanation B, or both of the above, it was an act of the foulest treason against the American people and the people of the world.