When 9-11 happened and I watched Aaron Brown on TV broadcasting from the top of his building as the second tower was struck and then went down first, some of my thoughts were:
1. this will bring out the most regressive elements in the US, understandable or not, especially with a Bush as President (since the Bush agenda is, in part, revenge against Arafat and Hussein on behalf of his old man).
2. this was some sort of highly motivated revenge plot involving coordination between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists from the Middle East (I've always thought the fundamentalism of OBL has been a red herring pursued by all sides in this game.)
Now I'm starting to wonder if it was something gone terribly wrong with the US efforts to put together a coaliton of forces to topple Hussein in Iraq. This would make very good sense because it correlates so nicely with a new Bush-Cheney administration.
When something like this happens, you do have to ask: why this, why this now?
Clearly, the US had military planning in place for the Taliban and Afghanistan (and I have no doubt the strategic value of a non-Russian route for Caspian gas and oil were of primary importance, which work nicely with the bottom line of Halliburton and Carlyle Group).
However, Afghanistan was always something of a sideshow (which is why the prisoners at Gitmo have nothing much of anything to offer the US in terms of intelligence). Iraq, with Hussein in power and all that oil in the ground, must have been the biggest goal the Bush presidency set for itself.
Is it possible that some elements of Al Qaeda as well as secular but anti-Hussein Arabs were being nurtured as assets for the anti-Hussein scheme but got turned around to wreaking havoc on the US instead? Or perhaps some ingenious elements in Al Qaeda or some other group were able to exploit security loopholes because they were able to obtain good intelligence from this anti-Hussein effort.
Charles Jannuzi