I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
The Trump administration is planning to move forward with a massive military aid package for Israel that will include 40,000 2,000-pound bombs, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, as the US continues to support Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and its wars and occupations in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.
The report said the sale, paid for with US taxpayer dollars, will include 20,000 MK-84s and 20,000 BLU-117s, each weighing 2,000 pounds. It will be funded by the State Department’s Foreign Military Finance program, under which the US provides foreign governments money to purchase US weapons.
Tucker Carlson first reported the massive transfer in a post on X minutes before the Post published the report.
President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on July 28, 2026 (White House photo)
“An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor,” Carlson said.
“The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians,” he added. A recent US strike in southern Iran that hit a house hosting a wedding, killing at least five civilians, was likely carried out with an MK-84, according to an investigation from The New York Times.
Carlson noted Israel’s extensive use of 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza. “In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated,” he said.
According to Carlson, the Israeli request for the massive bomb shipment “originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin.” He said it was quickly approved by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and now needs the approval of Senate leaders, though the Trump administration has previously bypassed the normal congressional review process to arm Israel with 2,000-pound bombs.
To examine the unyielding multi-billionaire dollar shield that the United States provides Israel is to confront the coarse mechanics of modern empire.
Washington has, for decades, maintained a posture of absolute defense, supplying advanced weaponry, providing diplomatic immunity, and rationalizing actions that human rights organizations and international courts characterize as war crimes, apartheid and genocide.
The mainstream narrative has relentlessly framed the U.S.-Israel alliance through the comforting lens of shared democratic values and mutual defense. This rendering, however, crumbles under the weight of reality. Nothing has dissuaded Washington from its entente with and acquiescence to Israel – not the regime’s racist policies; not even genocide.
Every U.S. administration has backed its brutal regimes, because they have buttressed American power and interests in the Middle East. This fatal alignment evokes the question: what exactly is Israel’s role, and whose interests are being served?
Israel has long functioned as an imperial agent for Western powers seeking regional dominance. Initially, the British Empire was crucial in helping its Zionist proxies secure a foothold in Palestine during and after World War I. In the mid-20th century, the United States seized the geopolitical mantle from Britain, taking control of the resource-rich region and becoming Israel’s primary benefactor.
Since the 1950s, Washington has viewed the Middle East – a vital nexus of global energy routes, trade corridors and geopolitical leverage – through the lens of dominance and resource control.
Lacking permanent colonial possessions in the heart of the Islamic world, Washington engineered an alternative: a heavily subsidized, fortified and technologically advanced military outpost. For the Pentagon and State Department, Israel has functioned as an unsinkable aircraft carrier; a military stronghold to project force, suppress independent anti-colonial movements, and to act as a counterweight to Iranian regional influence.
The Washington-Tel Aviv partnership is reinforced by the military-industrial economy of the United States that thrives on perpetual conflict to drive demand.
Defense spending fuels the domestic economy. The billions in military aid funneled to Israel are, in practice, massive subsidies paid directly to U.S defense conglomerates like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. U.S.-Israeli wars have contributed substantially to the financial survival of these industries.
Occupied Gaza and the West Bank have long served as testing laboratories for advanced weaponry, surveillance technology and crowd-control systems.
Surveillance and weapons systems that have been battle-tested on captive civilian populations are subsequently marketed globally as “combat proven.”
This multi-billion-dollar defense network closely connects the interests of the U.S. military sector with the continuation of Israel’s military operations. It also ensures fierce bipartisan resistance in Washington to any meaningful arms embargo or policy shifts, since almost every congressional district in the country is tied in some way to the defense industry.
American politicians aggressively safeguard Israeli “exceptionalism” and fiercely buffer it from accountability. Robust networks of well-financed lobbying groups, political action committees and institutional gatekeepers ensure that unwavering support for Israel is a requisite for political survival in Washington.
When elected officials dissent from established foreign policy positions or condemn the slaughter of civilians, they become the targets of well-funded, organized efforts to end their political careers. As a result, domestic priorities are sidelined as Congress aligns itself with a powerful military lobby rather than the American public; a growing majority of whom oppose unconditional foreign military aid.
At its core, the relationship between Israel and the United States is rooted in a shared historical consciousness and legacy. Both countries developed as settler-colonial states built upon the systemic erasure, confinement and dispossession of native populations.
Allegations of apartheid, genocidal violence, and systemic racism leveled against Israel deeply resonate within the American political landscape, mirroring its own foundational legacy.
U.S. policymakers connect Israel’s regional supremacy directly to the preservation of Western influence and global dominance. Racism is not a mistake in the alliance; it is a core function. It ensures that non-Western, non-white casualties are viewed as dispensable; essentially acceptable “collateral damage” in the pursuit of geopolitical objectives.
America’s alignment with Israel is a product of strategic utility, not moral blindness. Washington’s defense of Tel Aviv’s brutal policies exposes the vacuity of Western rhetoric around human rights, international law and democracy. When imperial power, corporate profit and geopolitical dominance are threatened, universal human rights are treated as entirely disposable.
The “indispensable ally” narrative is foundering, as is the U.S. imperium. Israel’s U.S.-subsidized genocide and devastating wars on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran have sparked intense global outrage and blowback, signaling the beginning of the end of American global dominance.
History will record that when major powers rely on the blunt instrument of war to “manage” a complex world – rather than to live in it as one among equals – they ultimately subvert the stability they claim to protect.
Dr. Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia. His “Cultural Foundations of Iranian Politics,” published by University of Utah Press, and still in print, was recognized by Choice as Outstanding Academic Book for 1987–1988.
Professor in the school of law at Queen Mary University of London and is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.
Published On 14 Sep 202614 Sep 20268 mins
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Doctor Victoria Rose, a plastic surgeon who has worked in Gaza, (L) addresses the Gaza Tribunal on September 04, 2025 in London, England. Jeremy Corbyn MP held an independent tribunal into Britain’s role in war crimes perpetrated in Gaza and to try and establish the scale of the British government’s complicity in the genocide against the Palestinian people. [Leon Neal/Getty Images]
History does not really repeat itself, but, as the saying frequently attributed to Mark Twain goes, it often rhymes. Take, for example, Britain’s involvement in the Middle East since the turn of the century. It took six years before the British government established an independent committee of Privy Counsellors to examine the United Kingdom’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war, and an additional seven years before Sir John Chilcot and other members of the inquiry committee published their damning findings that former Prime Minister Tony Blair had misled the public and his own government.
The Inquiry found that the UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted, that Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, pose an imminent threat and that Blair had deliberately exaggerated the danger and then promised former United States President George Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.” It also found that Britain’s intelligence agencies had produced “flawed information”, that Blair had ignored warnings about what would happen in Iraq after the invasion, and that the government had not tried hard enough to keep a tally of Iraqi civilian casualties, which, according to Iraq Body Count, amounts to between 187,499 and 211,046 deaths.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown would not have established the inquiry committee without unrelenting pressure from within Parliament and civil society, and it was only due to these persistent demands that the truth finally saw the light of day (even though Tony Blair has still not been held to account).
Starmer government blocks independent inquiry into Britain’s role in the genocide
Fast forward to the Gaza genocide. In June 2025, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn proposed a bill for a full, independent, public inquiry into Britain’s role in the genocide in Gaza. This inquiry committee would consider any UK military, economic or political cooperation with Israel since October 2023, including the sale, supply or use of weapons, surveillance aircraft and Royal Air Force bases, while also having the power to question ministers and officials about decisions taken in relation to UK involvement.
The bill secured the support of more than 50 MPs. However, when it reached a second reading, Keir Starmer’s government blocked its passage. The government said “there is no need for an inquiry” and that “such an inquiry would be unnecessary as there is no confusion about UK military operations in Gaza.”
The Gaza Tribunal
In response, Jeremy Corbyn decided to hold a public tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal organised by the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1966 to investigate US war crimes in Vietnam. Corbyn invited Shahd Hammouri, an international law lecturer at the University of Kent, and me to join the Tribunal panel, and the hearings were held on September 4-5, 2025, in Church House, Westminster.
We heard 29 testimonies from witnesses, journalists and survivors of the Gaza genocide, as well as a range of international law experts, lawyers, medical doctors and whistleblowers. At the time, the official death toll in Gaza was nearing 65,000, of whom almost 20,000 were children. With more than 150,000 injured, Gaza had become the home of the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. Almost 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza had either been damaged or destroyed, including more than 90 percent of housing, 97 percent of schools, 33 of 36 hospitals, and every single university in the Strip.
The two days of hearings were among the most difficult in my life, given the emotional toll of listening to so many horrific testimonies. In addition to testimony after testimony describing the extent of the British government’s complicity in the mass murder and destruction, we also heard from a whistleblower about the culture of deception – to cover up the government’s wrongdoings – that had taken over the corridors of power. In the subsequent months, we analysed the findings and concluded that Britain had played a vital role in Israeli military operations in Gaza, including but not limited to:
The sale, supply and transfer of weapons that have been used to extinguish human life and destroy vital infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. This included individual export licences issued directly to Israel, as well as the indirect supply of components for F-35 fighter jets. The use of Royal Air Force surveillance flights over Gaza and British airbases to facilitate the transport, refuelling and maintenance of military equipment. The provision of political and diplomatic support, which has empowered Israel, enabling it to commit atrocities with impunity. This support has included the dehumanisation of Palestinians in political rhetoric, the justification of Israel’s actions, the hosting of Israeli officials, the failure to uphold the authority and decisions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the demonisation of international solidarity, including the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group.
In March 2026, Corbyn submitted the Tribunal’s findings to the ICC, encouraging the court to interview government ministers regarding British complicity in war crimes. Since then, he has continued to demand a full, official, independent public inquiry into any cooperation between the UK and Israel since October 2023.
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Corbyn knows that the Tribunal he organised is no substitute for a full, public, independent inquiry, and given that there is a new prime minister in Number 10 who said Labour “got it wrong” over Gaza, Corbyn wanted to know whether the current Labour government would finally commit to investigating Britain’s role in the genocide. Expressions of regret are certainly important, but if justice is the goal, then the UK public requires both truth and accountability.
Last week, the bill that Keir Starmer’s government blocked back in June 2025 was once again brought before Parliament, and once again the government blocked MPs from voting on it. The Burnham government’s decision to postpone the vote on Corbyn’s Bill is reminiscent of the way previous governments postponed the establishment of an inquiry to investigate the Iraq war. It appears that, like previous UK governments, the current government’s strategy is to demur and delay, with the goal of sending the Gaza inquiry bill to purgatory.
The ruling elite have lost the ‘common sense’
The problem for Burnham is that, today, he and other members of the ruling elite no longer have the power to define the “common sense” through which Gaza is understood. Public opinion on Israel has shifted, as the huge pro-Palestinian marches and opinion polls demonstrate. The majority of the UK population knows that Israel is committing a genocide and that it has been able to do so, in part, because of the support of Western governments. While the US and Germany were undoubtedly the most enthusiastic supporters – providing Israel with the lethal mechanisms and the diplomatic shield to carry out mass killings – the public also understands that Britain has played a vital role.
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s recent – and I would say courageous – announcement that the UK government would ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements and sanction companies and individuals supporting settlement activity is a very important first step. Yet, it does not absolve the UK government of its alleged complicity in atrocity crimes.
The disturbing testimonies we heard during the Tribunal underscore the importance of formal scrutiny. The vote on Corbyn’s bill was postponed last week, but the need to reveal the role the British government played in Israel’s genocidal onslaught is not going away. Burnham and Miliband have a historic opportunity to prove that this new government is committed to the principles of international law and currently face a straightforward choice: Continue to block efforts to expose the truth and seek accountability, or break with the past and stand on the right side of history. History often rhymes, but it does not have to.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Neve GordonProfessor in the school of law at Queen Mary University of London and is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social SciencesNeve Gordon is a professor in the school of law at Queen Mary University of London and is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author of Israel’s Occupation and co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (2015), Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire with a new preface and epilogue about Gaza (2026) and The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide (2026).
Palestinian Prisoner Society says 19 are held under administrative detention without charge or trial
Layan Bsharat and Mohammad Sio
AA.Com, 13 September 2026
RAMALLAH, Palestine / ISTANBUL
Israel is holding 37 Palestinian journalists in its prisons, including 19 under administrative detention without charge or trial, the Palestinian Prisoner Society said Sunday.
The nongovernmental group said all 37 journalists were detained following the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023.
It said Israel continues to target Palestinian journalists through arrests, prison sentences, solitary confinement and prosecution over their work and freedom of expression.
Among the latest detainees are journalists Muath Ammarna and Sabri Jibrin, who were arrested Thursday after Israeli forces raided their homes in Bethlehem in the southern West Bank.
The group said Ammarna has been repeatedly targeted by Israeli authorities and is now being detained for the third time over his journalistic work.
It also cited the case of journalist and writer Mahmoud Fatafta, who was sentenced to 48 months in prison over what Israel describes as “incitement,” one of the harshest sentences issued in such cases, according to the statement.
The society said Israeli authorities increasingly use “incitement” charges against journalists, alongside administrative detention based on what authorities describe as “secret files.”
Nineteen journalists from the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are currently held under administrative detention, accounting for 51% of all detained journalists, it added.
The group also highlighted the case of journalist Bushra al-Tawil, 33, who was transferred from Damon Prison in northern Israel to solitary confinement at Ramla Prison in central Israel.
It accused Israeli authorities of intensifying isolation and other restrictive measures against female Palestinian prisoners, alongside food deprivation, denial of medical treatment and poor sanitation conditions.
The society said detained journalists face the same conditions as other Palestinian prisoners, including hunger, medical neglect, torture, abuse, solitary confinement and denial of basic rights.
Journalists are also targeted through killings, enforced disappearances and direct attacks while carrying out their work, it added, describing this as part of a systematic policy aimed at restricting Palestinian reporting and documentation of Israeli crimes and violations.
The occupied West Bank has seen daily Israeli army raids and escalating attacks by occupiers since the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023. The attacks have included killings, arrests, demolitions, attacks on homes, vehicles and mosques, destruction of agricultural land, restrictions on farmers, displacement of Palestinians and expansion of illegal settlements.
On Thursday, the Palestinian Prisoner Society said Israeli forces detained more than 100 Palestinians across the West Bank over the previous week, bringing the number of West Bank detainees since October 2023 to more than 25,000, in addition to thousands detained from Gaza.
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Washington is pressing its NATO allies to help “systematically dismantle” the International Criminal Court (ICC) and abandon its mandate, in an effort to shield US officials from war crimes prosecutions and Israeli leaders from accountability over the genocide in Gaza, POLITICO reported on 9 September.
US envoy Matthew Whitaker reportedly delivered the demand behind closed doors in Brussels in mid-July, in front of the alliance’s 32 ambassadors, urging member states to help take the court apart and to walk away from the Rome Statute, three anonymous NATO diplomats told POLITICO.
“We will be watching closely who stands with America,” Whitaker said as he closed his remarks, according to the three diplomats.
Alongside his intervention, the US mission circulated a document to NATO delegations stating “The United States will systematically dismantle the capabilities of the ICC … we firmly request that you immediately take steps to withdraw.”
The paper instructed allies to assess the court as a threat to their own governments, to publicly denounce its mandate as “overreach,” and to halt all material support to it without delay.
It closed by calling for an “end [to] the charade of the ICC once and for all.”
This comes after US State Secretary Marco Rubio announced on 13 July 2026 a sweeping Washington campaign to isolate and dismantle the ICC “brick by brick,” pressuring allied nations hosting US troops to reject the court’s authority or face retaliation, following Trump’s 6 February 2025 executive order that imposed asset freezes and travel restrictions on ICC prosecutors and judges investigating US and Israeli war crimes.
The campaign has already stripped lead prosecutor Karim Khan of his post, following a sustained Israeli effort that weaponized sexual misconduct allegations against him after he issued the November 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former war minister Yoav Gallant over their leading roles in the Gaza genocide.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was sanctioned in February, after US technology firms complained to the White House about her findings that they were complicit in Gaza.
Nine of the court’s 18 judges and both deputy prosecutors have since been placed under US sanctions.
A Border Patrol Tactical Unit agent sprays pepper spray into the face of a protester attempting to block an immigration officer vehicle from leaving the scene where a woman was shot and killed by a federal agent earlier, in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday, January 7, 2026.
(Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States.
On September 11, 2001, the world watched as the World Trade Center, the twin towers that represented US global dominance, were struck by hijacked US commercial jetliners and came crashing to the ground. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, from high-powered executive to clerical workers and immigrant kitchen workers. The hijackers were Middle Eastern men, primarily from Saudi Arabia.
Twenty-five years later, many questions remain about how the US military and security establishment could have allowed this to happen. Hardly anybody believes the official 9/11 story, which raises more questions than it answers, and there are many competing theories about who was behind this tragedy. Was this an incredible US security lapse or a highly coordinated false flag? Whatever the case, the neocons in George W. Bush’s administration immediately declared a “war on terrorism,” and put into motion their longstanding designs to conquer seven Muslim countries in the Middle East (as revealed by General Wesley Clark)—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Over the last 25 years, the US has initiated wars against all of these countries, as well as Afghanistan.
US administrations under Presidents George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump (again) are responsible for creating a hell on Earth throughout the Middle East, resulting in millions of deaths and millions more homeless refugees. Thousands of US soldiers also died in Iraq and Afghanistan, any thousands more carry the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds to this day.
These nations may never fully recover, but Iran still stands. It may be the only Middle Eastern country still strong enough to resist domination by Israel, the US, and the former European colonial powers. That is why it is being frantically targeted by militarists in Israel and the US And that is why the US peace movement must do all we can to end the escalating US on Iran.
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Under the slogan of “the war on terror,” the US government has carried out an increasing campaign of terror worldwide and against its own people. Torture has been normalized as represented by the extralegal Guantánamo torture prison on occupied Cuban land. The US and NATO provoked Russia into a catastrophic war in Ukraine which they continue to fuel with billions of dollars, arms, and military advisers. Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses have enabled an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. In January of this year, the US made a brazen attack on Venezuela, kidnapped its president and first lady, and are holding the Venezuelan government hostage while they steal Venezuelan oil. The US has blocked all oil shipments to Cuba, greatly exacerbating the damage done by the 64-year-old US blockade of Cuba, even as they threaten to invade. President Trump and “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth post “snuff videos” of their blatantly illegal bombing of boats in South American waters, where they have murdered hundreds of fisherman and alleged “narco-terrorists” without any evidence or judicial proceeding.
Trump’s War of Terror Comes Home
The stepped-up US aggression abroad is now being mirrored by state-sponsored terror in these United States. Armed gangs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents routinely carry out racist attacks on immigrant communities and people of color, no matter their immigration or citizenship status. The mass incarceration of Black men is now matched by mass incarceration of brown men, women, and children in for-profit prisons, where abusive conditions have led to many deaths. White supremacism is out in the open as cruel fascist practices are being normalized. US peace activists and immigrant rights activists are being labeled as terrorists and prosecuted as terrorists for nonviolent resistance to the terror of the state.
Even as the US war on Iran continues and escalates, the Trump administration and Republican Party are openly seeking to undermine the midterm US elections by blatant last-minute gerrymandering of congressional districts, by trying to prevent mail-in voting, by reducing the number of polling places, by threatening to deploy intimidating ICE agents at polling places and even “joking” about canceling the elections altogether. Veterans For Peace has joined with other veterans’ groups and military families in the Veteran Against Fascism coalition to do all we can to defend the elections, for example by providing safe accompaniment to the polls.
The Terror of Nuclear War
Adding to the atmosphere of global terror is the ever-growing threat of nuclear war. Multiple sources have confirmed that the Trump administration has been discussing the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in its war on Iran. Pentagon war-gaming of the US use of tactical nuclear weapons has consistently resulted in global nuclear war that leads to a nuclear winter in which billions of people would starve to death—those that survived the initial nuclear blasts and radiation illnesses. Seventy-five countries have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which outlaws possessing sharing, transporting, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has ditched the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with Russia, while it carries out a series of wars that—if not checked—will inevitably lead to nuclear war. In fact, the US is actively planning to wage a war against China that would start with a US nuclear first strike on China. These policies only lead more countries to seek nuclear weapons, directly the opposite of the stated US policy and treaty obligations to seek nuclear non-proliferation and good-faith negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we must rededicate ourselves to resisting US wars at home and abroad.
It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits.
It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do.
Many people said we wouldn’t last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong.
Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work.
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The attacks of September 2001 became the pretext for a new era of US-led intervention. Twenty-five years on, millions are dead and the promised ‘victories’ remain nowhere to be seen, says ANDREW MURRAY
Crowds in Manhattan watch smoke billowing from the World Trade Centre, September 11 2001
THE “war on terror” began 25 years ago today, when two hijacked passenger airliners were flown into the skyscrapers of the World Trade Centre in New York.
A third crashed into the Pentagon in Washington while a fourth, apparently targeting the US capitol, crashed in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back.
It was immediately assumed that the hijackers — nearly all of them Saudi Arabian by nationality — were organised by al-Qaida, an Islamist militant group then headquartered in Afghanistan. Despite many subsequent conspiracy theories, it would seem that this was indeed the case.
Al-Qaida attributed their actions — which killed nearly 3,000 people, almost all civilian, in the first foreign attack on the US mainland since 1812 — to opposition to Israel’s US-supported oppression of the Palestinians, to the presence of US troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and the sanctions-driven starvation of Iraqi children.
9/11 was thus an act of terror already sitting in a continuum of US-driven violence and oppression across the Middle East — an explanation but not a justification.
It was immediately clear that the attacks would be the basis for a further aggressive extension of US war, across the Middle East and south Asia in particular.
In fact, it led to a devastating series of wars which caused the effective collapse of several states, millions of deaths and millions more made refugees. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have been the principal victims of this war, which has also extended to parts of Africa and, in its impact and influence, most of the world.
Some of these wars had not the slightest connection to terrorism or al-Qaida and — in particular the Bush attack on Iraq — had been meditated long before 9/11.
The “war on terror” began with boasts of military omnipotence from Washington, along with brazen calls for the introduction of a new colonialism to deal with “failed states.” But nowhere has it ended with an outcome anything like that sought by the aggressors.
Most notoriously, the first theatre of war — Afghanistan — began with the ousting of the Taliban government in 2001 and ended with the return of the self-same regime 20 years, uncounted lives and massive destruction later.
However rightly it can be felt that the people of Afghanistan deserve a much better government, it cannot be denied that this outcome marked a historic defeat for US imperialism.
It scarcely fared better in Iraq, where the overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to a brutal occupation, sectarian civil conflict, economic despoliation and the wrecking of a state which George Bush had fancied turning into a “beacon of democracy.”
The occupation there was wound down in more-or-less ignominy — total in the case of the British forces deployed in Basra, driven out in humiliation.
Libya, the third major target, was turned into a failed state, split between rival governments and generating an immense refugee crisis, as a result of a Nato-sponsored intervention.
In Syria, Western interference in civil war not only sparked a massive refugee crisis but the rise of Isis and the eventual ascension of a jihadi-rooted government in Damascus.
Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries, has been further degraded by a conflict to a large extent armed and directed from Britain, working alongside Gulf dictatorships. Yet the Houthis remain still standing and defiant.
The “war on terror” also spread further afield, to both west and east Africa in particular, with no better results for either the peoples there or the plans of the imperialists.
The full balance sheet for these wars remains yet to be calculated, but it does not seem to yield a single victory of the US and its allies, Britain first among them. The present war against Iran is a linear descendant of these conflicts, and does not look like changing that record.
Despite numerous contingent and specific factors, all these wars are rooted in the structuring of a world around US hegemony, in which Washington arrogates to itself the right to intervene where it wills in order to ensure subordination to its own strategic and commercial interests.
They are thus the main contemporary political expression of imperialism.
9/11 and these subsequent conflicts had the political consequence of restoring the concept of imperialism to the centre of public discourse.
After a generation in which it had been relegated to jargon as the world wallowed in the post-cold war “end of history,” the wars of aggression launched by the US, with British governments invariably at its side, whatever the views of the people, shone an unforgiving light on the realities of global power.
Imperialism has generally taken some care to present its depredations as being motivated by the most high-minded interests.
In the 19th century, colonial adventures were usually promoted as expediting the spread of Christian civilisation to peoples who had the audacity to get along without it.
In the 20th century, a more secular age, interventions were often explained as being necessary to stop the spread of communism, notwithstanding that communism, for all its global potency, was often entirely absent from the territories concerned.
In the present century the “war against terror” has stood duty, the first conflict even declared as being against an abstraction rather than a country or peoples.
This war elided with the developing notion of “liberal” or “humanitarian” intervention, which had been trialled, to its progenitors’ satisfaction, in the 1999 war against Yugoslavia.
It was ideologically amplified by Tony Blair, then still fairly popular, who went to Chicago to spell out the conditions in which great powers, or those with the approved political markers, could and should intervene in other countries’ affairs.
He spelt out five criteria. International law or United Nations approval were not among them, and the wars to follow did not meet all of them in any case. Blair’s political reputation is now collateral damage following his decision to lead Britain into the Iraq aggression alongside George Bush.
That decision, above all, gave rise to the largest anti-war movement in Britain’s history, indeed probably the strongest mass movement of the left since the high days of Chartism in the 1840s.
Its effects resonate to this day, not least in the enduring movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
At its core lay an alliance of most of the socialist left with Muslim communities, alongside trade unions, the mass of young people and sections, like military families, never previously drawn into mass anti-war campaigning.
That coalition was described by the New York Times as the “second superpower” in the world, at the time when the US believed itself to be effectively unchallengeable.
The movement also laid much of the foundation for Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the Labour Party leadership in 2015, something that was certainly not on Blair or Bush’s agenda when they embarked on their policy of open-ended war.
These developments have placed anti-imperialism at the heart of socialist politics in Britain, to the teeth-grinding rage of those savants and organs of the soi-disant left who embrace the international politics of the ruling class even as they pretend to a domestic radicalism.
9/11 also had more negative impacts in Britain — it led to a rising tide of Islamophobia, now reaching epidemic proportions, as well as occasioning one attack after another on our liberties, exemplified in the harassment of the Palestine solidarity movement and the mass arrests of peaceful sympathisers with Palestine Action.
Today, the “war on terror” has faded somewhat behind the darkening shadow of great power conflict. With the rise of China, it is clear that the US is no longer the sole superpower.
The proxy war being waged by Nato in Ukraine is the harbinger of still more devastating conflicts, as the anti-war movement warned from 9/11 onwards.
Today, 9/11 is best marked by the renewal of the anti-war movement in the face of impending neofascism and war, by the re-establishment of its broad fighting unity, and by absorbing the greatest single lesson of those terrible events a quarter of a century ago — that there can never be peace alongside imperialism.
Andrew Murray was the first chair of the Stop the War Coalition, serving from 2001 to 2011, and is now its deputy president
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(Photo credit: Laure Boyer / Hans Lucas)
Crowds in Manhattan watch smoke billowing from the World Trade Centre, September 11 2001
