I'd have an easier time believing the conspiracy theories if they were at least internally consistent. If the Right was saying "The Bush administration screwed up when they accidentally brought the WTC to the ground while trying to provoke a war in the Middle East. Damn Big Government never can do anything right can they?" it would be more plausible somehow. The problem is that Michael Moore and the Left believe in Big Gov and so it was completely plausible to them that the government could have rigged the whole thing and somehow gotten the towers to fall without it being too obvious and that's what has stuck. If somebody were to suggest that a certain real estate magnate wanted his money back on the WTC and also wanted the real estate and could not figure out how to do a controlled demolition that would trigger his insurance policy nor be executable without literally hundreds of billions of dollars in potential liability, well with that I could see him trying to broker a deal with somebody to do the job for him, although whether that somebody be a natural born citizen or not is not clear. It's just that all the ideas are cock-a-mamie when you look at them compared to the reality that the WTC was a huge target and Al Qaeda was looking for some way to get themselves and Bin Laden on the map in a big way. The only conspiracy theory around 9/11 that I am really willing to look at is the fighter shot down Flight 93 theory. That one is plausible for no other reason than I'd have probably shot down the flight if I thought it was going to potentially kill thousands of people somewhere and there was no other way to be sure it didn't.
Brad, I'm not a believer in the controlled demolition theory, but you are way overstating the case by pissing on 9/11 as if it was some top down conspiracy engineered with the goal of orchestrating the specific invasion of a specific country. Since the end of the bilateral cold war, and after the modest Clinton era disarmament, there was a vast political/military/intelligence industrial complex that had a lot of product that it needed a market for. I'm not suggesting that the twin towers attack was orchestrated in advance either, but when you look at the sheer amount of post attack opportunism that it spawned, and couple that with the number of questions that are not adequately answered, well, you get people making up their own. I don't buy it either, but its not as simple as you dismiss.
The Security Entertainment Complex is as bad as the Military Industrial Complex ever was. Big Lies are easily told when you have the sheer wattage of Hollywood behind the effort. Oops, there *I* go thinking like an Arab on the street.
The 2 countries that benefited the most from 9/11 were Iran and Russia, secondarily Hezbollah. Lets here the conspiracy theories.
Russia definitely benefited from 9/11 in that it gave them the opportunity to recapture their Great Power status, a thing that was definitely not there at the time the towers went down. The way they benefited was that the world got a chance to remember that they didn't like Imperial overreach much and the US was the one overreaching for most of the decade that followed. This gave Russia the ability to overreach themselves without seeming like the big bad menacing bear of days past. China benefited from 9/11 in that the US war machine was focused like a laser on the Middle East and so the big military build up that China embarked upon went largely unnoticed outside the think tanks. It has taken the Japanese becoming unnerved by the last decade for attention to begin to be focused on the Far East again. I don't think Iran benefited from 9/11 in any significant way. They did get a major ally placed in Iraq instead of the supremely hostile foe they faced there before. However they also got all the Gulf States and Israel focused on containing Iran and some really nasty sanctions have come out of that. The current Iranian President is not relaying flowers of peace from the Supreme Leader because that is what Iran wants to do. He's relaying those overtures because the Iranian economy is on the verge of collapse and a popular revolt is very much in the nature of the average Persian.
None of the benefitted near as much as defense contractors,weapon dealers, Opiate industry and those interested in a pipeline to the Caspian sea.
defense contractors - I can see, same with weapons dealers and the opiate industry(although I doubt they were struggling) but you'll have to explain to dumb old me, both - how 9/11 resulted in benefiting those interested in a pipeline to the Caspian Sea, and why/which folks would be interested in such a thing.
Iran has benefited both in the short run and the long run more than anyone by Saddam being ousted and the Shia take over of Iraq. The Russians have sold more arms and have had their oil prices at artificially high levels for years because of the instability in the ME caused by the destabilization of Iraq. The US has lost most of it's influence in the region and the short term profits will be looked on as peanuts.
I just don't see this. They've gone from being immersed in a melange of bogeymen to being almost the last one standing. That can't be good for them. There were short term benefits in this whole deal for us? I just don't see it. 9/11 has been an unparalleled disaster for the US in general. It may have benefitted a few special interests here and there but it has crippled our economy, further eroded trust in government and damn near deep-sixed us as a superpower.
How can you of all people be this stupid. How good would it have been for France to have Nazi Germany left intact? They had a 6 year war that killed close to a million people.
As of Sept 10th 2001 The Islamic Republic of Iran had a relatively moderate President in power. They had neatly split the West over the prior decade, since the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process began. The UN proclaimed the year 2001 "The Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations" the idea was the aforementioned relatively moderate President Mohammed Khatami's. Western Europe looked with more alarm at a US led by President Bush and the Neocons than they did on Iran run by Khatami's moderates. The Middle East was, as usual, a festering pile of serpents - hard to sort out and rank in terms of threat level and relevance. Fast forward to 2011. Iran lives under nearly permanent sanctions that are crippling the economy. They have become threat #1 in the Middle East for the Israeli's, the Saudi's and the power that backs both of those countries, the US. The parallel bogeymen of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Quaddafi have already bitten the dust and Bashar Al-Assad is just about at the end of his leash also. What do you think happens to Iran when the economy tanks more and the Supreme Leader becomes the next targeted bogeyman? The last decade has been a nightmare for Iran and it's just about to get worse.
A deal was in place for a pipeline to be run to the Caspian,with the Taliban in the late 90s,which included a meeting in Texas with America Oil people and key members of the Taliban. The deal went south,next thing you know,The Taliban,which we aided in power through the 80s,were now enemy #1. (That's in my own words,i will try and find something better)
Iran benefitted because the American Gov falsely used 9/11 to attack Iraq? That's not going to help squash a conspiracy theory at all.
Iran has the most educated, modern society in the ME. They have no enemies on their borders. They have full access to all the important water ways in the region. You are thinking short term. Once the sanctions are lifted and they moderate their government they will dominate the region for decades possibly centuries. They are far better off today with a population that isn't under the duress of chemical weapons and war that puts their entire future in danger. The sanctions aren't going to last forever and neither are the radical religious nuts. Iran has an extremely bright future.
They have the Israeli's and the Saudi's bitterly opposed to them. They have one of the most unstable countries on earth right next door in Afghanistan and they're about to see old enemies return to power there as well. They have an erstwhile ally to the north in Russia, who actually has conflicting goals with their long-term vision for the region and who would not be happy with the Shiite ascendancy that the vision would require. They have a nuclear-armed Pakistan in the vicinity, a Saudi ally of long-standing, who will be looking for any way to inconvenience them. They have Turks to the west, an x-factor that is likely to be deeply unsettling given the nationalistic impulses that continually emanate from that country. It's a mess. And the clergy would spit on your vision as the absolute last direction they would allow Iran to go.
I understand your fear mongering. It's the reason we live in a police state. I simply don't think your negative fantasy of the future is any clearer than the reality of a moderating State where the vast majority of the people are ready to join the future.
The reason we live in a police state is because we've allowed politics, technology and information control to meet at a junction that takes civil liberties and absolutely dices them into irrelevance. If you think that Iran is somehow threatened because the US is a police state you're nuts. Iran is threatened because they live in the oldest political environment that we know of and that environment has become a state of permanent instability, with recurring cycles of violence that reinforce the horrible status quo every few decades. Shiites and Sunni's were killing each other and fighting over the true faith long before the Saudi's or the Israeli's existed. They'd be killing each other even if the West had not interfered the way we did in their natural political evolution. You can do the "Ghandi is great/Everything is the West's fault" thing all you want but never forget that as soon as Ghandi was gone Indians began slaughtering each other in the millions and quickly split into two countries of their own choosing. They have been fighting that battle non-stop for going on 70 years now and there is no sign of letup. Our mistake is that we become over-involved in events that we truly have no control of. Western intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world is just a minor regulator on a political flow that we can't possibly understand or control because the participants themselves have little understanding or control.
Who said Iran is threatened by our police state? You and I are threatened by it. We took out Iran's democratically elected leadership and replaced it with the Shah. We allowed the Ayatollah to come back into Iran during what might have been a reasonable populist uprising or a failed uprising, a mistake compounded by another mistake. Getting rid of Saddam and installing a Shia state has set up Iran to dominate the region for decades. The US has political and economic interests that go beyond just being a policeman in a region. Sometimes we get it right sometimes we don't. Much of our role is still based on unwinding from the cold war. Without having the cold war as perspective, it's easy to throw stones at the US. Without understanding where the world is today it's easy to repeat the mistakes of the cold war. People don't even get why we installed the Shah in the first place. At the time it might very well have been the right move. It may well take another decade or 2 to fully unwind. Iran is a very dangerous state, but it may well have a very bright future and it is decades ahead of Egypt and Saudi Arabia in unwinding it's past.
If we were unwinding from the Cold War mentality finally that would be a good thing, but we're not. We still have a vast Military Industrial Complex looking for a threat large enough to justify the amount that we spend maintaining them. To that we've added a propaganda arm, the Security Entertainment Complex, that would make Joseph Goebbels blush.
