By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 11, 2021
I have not written very much on this blog about the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. By the time I launched the site, in 2012, that terrible day was more than a decade in the past.
A lot of innocent people died on Sept. 11, and millions if not billions of others were terrified by the sight of buildings collapsing after being hit by hijacked civilian airliners. Thousands of people were mentally scarred by what they saw either on 9/11 or in the aftermath, as rescuers searched for survivors in the rubble of the World Trade Center — an effort that was primarily in vain. Many of those who tried to help 9/11 victims suffered physical ailments as well, often because the collapsed towers coated a great deal of Lower Manhattan with toxic dust.
Whether you consider 9/11 to be completely unavoidable or a massive intelligence failure, there is no question that it gave Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a group of highly placed United States government officials an excuse to launch a military operation they’d long desired: One that would topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq.
The links between Hussein and the four civilian airline hijackings that comprised the 9/11 attack were spurious. Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist group that planned and executed the Sept. 11 killings, consisted of fervent Islamic worshippers who harbored radical interpretations of their religion, while Hussein’s embrace of the faith was inconsistent and largely opportunistic.
The neoconservatives in President George W. Bush’s administration weren’t too bothered by this discrepancy. They soon began arguing that Iraq posed a threat to global security because of the regime’s weapons of mass destruction. This arsenal of deadly nuclear, chemical and biological weapons existed more in the imaginations of top Bush officials than it did in reality.
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