By IVAN ELAND
The Independent Monday, 7 August 2006
As both the Bush administration and its client government in Israel, with their
invasions of Arab states in Iraq and Lebanon, respectively, make the United
States ever more hated in the Islamic world, a new book by the chairmen of
the 9/11 commission admits that the commission whitewashed the root cause
of the 9/11 attacks—that same interventionist U.S. foreign policy.
Former Governor Tom Kean and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairmen
of the 9/11 Commission—publicity hounds that they are—want to keep the
long-retired but much celebrated panel in the public mind. They have written
a tell-all book, Without Precent: The Inside Story of the 9-11 Commission
(Knopf, Aug. 15, 2006), about the trials and tribulations of the panel’s work.
Despite the commission’s disastrous recommendations—which led to a
reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community that worsened its original,
pre-9/11 defect (a severe coordination problem caused by bureaucratic bloat)—
and apparent whitewashing of the single most important issue it examined, the
chairmen are trying their best to write another bestseller.
The book usefully details the administration’s willful misrepresentation of its
incompetent actions that day, but makes the shocking admission that some
commission members deliberately wanted to distort an even more important
issue. Apparently, unidentified commissioners wanted to cover up the fact
that U.S. support for Israel was one of the motivating factors behind al-Qaeda’s
9/11 attack.
Although Hamilton, to his credit, argued for saying that the reasons al-Qaeda
committed the heinous strike were the U.S. military presence in the Middle East
and American support for Israel, the panel watered down that frank conclusion
to state that U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy on Iraq
are “dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.”
Some commissioners wanted to cover up the link between the 9/11 attack and
U.S. support for Israel because this might imply that the United States should
alter policy and lessen its support for Israeli actions.
How right they were. The question is simple: if the vast bulk of Americans would
be safer if U.S. politicians moderated their slavish support of Israel, designed to
win the support of key pressure groups at home, wouldn’t it be a good idea to
make this change in course? Average U.S. citizens might attenuate their support
for Israel if the link between the 9/11 attacks and unquestioning U.S. favoritism
for Israeli excesses were more widely known.
Similarly, if American taxpayers knew that the expensive and unnecessary U.S.
policy of intervening in the affairs of countries all over the world—including the
U.S. military presence in the Middle East—made them less secure from terrorist
attacks at home, pressure would likely build for an abrupt change to a more
restrained U.S. foreign policy.
But like the original 9/11 Commission report, President Bush regularly obscures
this important reality by saying that America was attacked on 9/11 because
of its freedoms, making no mention of U.S. interventionist foreign policy as the
root cause.
Yet numerous public opinion polls in the Islamic world repeatedly prove the
president wrong. The surveys show that people in Islamic countries admire
American political and economic freedoms, culture, and technology. But when
Muslims are polled on the level of their approval of U.S. foreign policy, the
numbers go through the floor.
Much of this negative attitude derives from mindless U.S. backing of anything
Israel does. In addition, Osama bin Laden has repeatedly written or stated that
he attacks the United States because of its military presence in the Persian Gulf
and its support for Israel and corrupt regimes in the Arab world.
The Bush administration has worsened the anti-U.S. hatred in Islamic countries,
which drives this blowback terrorism, by its invasion of Iraq and its support of
Israel’s excessive military response in Lebanon.
Unfortunately, innocent Iraqis and Lebanese are unlikely to be the only ones
afflicted with the damage from U.S. interventionism. Innocent Israelis and
Americans have been, and likely will continue to be, the victims of policies that
have been sold by President Bush on the basis of making the citizens of both
countries safer and more secure, while the 9/11 Commission obediently has
covered the administration’s tracks.
Ivan Eland is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, Director of the
Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty, and author of the books The Empire
Has No Clothes, and Putting "Defence" Back into U.S. Defense Policy.
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