How should the US have responded to the attacks on 9/11

By Ted Belman

When America was attacked on 9/11, it had to do something, but what? The first thing America did was to rule out Saudi Arabia who was the major supporter of al Qaeda and Wahhabism and instead went after al Qaeda and its training grounds in Afghanistan. Never mind that there are a multitude of places that they could have trained in or other terrorist groups that could be trained. The US just created another in Libya.

They also went after Saddam Hussein in Iraq who had nothing to do with 9/11 and, in the scale of things, was a minor figure. Iran which was named as part of the Axis of Evil wasn’t touched.

The end result is that the monster is bigger now and the US is weaker.

There is a comprehensive treatment of this question in “Just War Theory” vs. American Self-Defense by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, published in 2006. It is a long but excellent article so I’ll just whet your appetite.

    To fulfill the promise to defeat the terrorist enemy that struck on 9/11, our leaders would first have to identify who exactly that enemy is and then be willing to do whatever is necessary to defeat him. Let us examine what this would entail, and compare it with the actions that our leaders actually took.

    Who is the enemy that attacked on 9/11? It is not “terrorism”—just as our enemy in World War II was not kamikaze strikes or U-boat attacks. Terrorism is a tactic employed by a certain group for a certain cause. That group and, above all, the cause they fight for are our enemy.

    The group that threatens us with terrorism—the group of which Al Qaeda is but one terrorist faction—is a militant, religious, ideological movement best designated as “Islamic Totalitarianism.” The Islamic Totalitarian movement, which enjoys widespread and growing support throughout the Arab–Islamic world, encompasses those who believe that all must live in total subjugation to the dogmas of Islam and who conclude that jihad (“holy war”) must be waged against those who refuse to do so. [..]

    Given that the enemy that attacked on 9/11 is primarily ideological, what, if anything, can our government’s guns do to defeat it? Our government cannot directly attack the deepest, philosophical roots of Islamic Totalitarianism; however, to defeat Islamic Totalitarianism as a physical threat, it does not need to do so. Why? Because an indispensable precondition of an active, threatening Islamic Totalitarian movement—one for which individuals are willing to take up arms—is its active support by Arab and Islamic states that assist, embody, and implement it. Without this state support, Islamic Totalitarianism, and thus Islamic terrorism, could not exist as a major threat.
    [..]

    For Islamic Totalitarianism, the “sun” (the equivalent of Communism’s Soviet Union) is Iran. Iran was founded on the principles of Islamic Totalitarianism, implements the ideals of the movement in a full-fledged militant Islamic theocracy, and thus embodies its cause—providing the movement with a model as well as indispensable spiritual hope and fuel. Iran is also a leading supporter of the terrorist groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. (Compared with Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan was a bit player.) The second leading state supporter of Islamic Totalitarianism is Saudi Arabia, which has spent more than seventy-five billion dollars on the Wahhabi sect of Islam that inspires legions of Islamic Totalitarians, including Osama Bin Laden.

    Without physical and spiritual support by these states, the Islamic Totalitarian cause would be a hopeless, discredited one, with few if any willing to kill in its name. Thus, the first order of business in a proper response to 9/11 would have been to end state support of Islamic Totalitarianism—including ending the Iranian regime that is its fatherland. As a secondary priority, a proper fight against the enemy that attacked on 9/11 would have involved ending state sponsorship of terrorism by Arab states derivatively connected to Islamic Totalitarianism—states such as Syria (and, before it was ended, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). These regimes are active supporters of Arab–Islamic terrorism and mouth support for the Islamic Totalitarian cause, but are not ideologically committed to it; these regimes support this cause out of political expediency. Supporting Islamic Totalitarianism gains power for them; by supporting anti-Western causes and jihadists, Arab states direct the misery of their people toward America and Israel and away from their own brutal rule. Supporting Islamic Totalitarianism also gains money for Arab states; for example, the leaders of Syria, a stagnant nation with no oil wealth, are wealthy because oil-rich Iran pays them for providing assistance to terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah. Dealing effectively with these accessories to Islamic Totalitarianism would require, first and foremost, getting rid of the primary supporters of the movement. The next step would be, where necessary, making clear to these derivative regimes that any cooperation with that movement or its aims is not expedient, but a guarantee of their destruction.

And in answer to the question in the title,

    What specific military actions would have been required post-9/11 to end state support of Islamic Totalitarianism is a question for specialists in military strategy, but even a cursory look at history can tell us one thing for sure: It would have required the willingness to take devastating military action against enemy regimes—to oust their leaders and prominent supporters, to make examples of certain regimes or cities in order to win the surrender of others, and to inflict suffering on complicit civilian populations, who enable terrorist-supporting regimes to remain in power.

As for the Just War Theory;

    Just and Unjust Wars serves as the major textbook in the ethics classes taught at West Point and dozens of others colleges and military schools. More broadly, Just War Theory—for which Just and Unjust Wars is the most popular modern text—is the sole moral theory of war taught today.

    Just War Theory is conventionally advocated in contrast to two other views of the morality of war: pacifism and “realism.” Pacifism holds that the use of military force is never moral. Just War theorists correctly criticize this view on the grounds that evil aggressors exist who seek to kill and dominate the innocent, and that force is often the only effective way to stop them. War, they hold, is therefore sometimes morally necessary.

    “Realism” is the view that war has no moral limitations. Just War Theory rejects this theory as well, holding that war, when necessary, must be conducted in accordance with strict moral principles. Since “realism” renounces morality, Just War theorists observe, its advocates cannot in principle oppose wars or acts of war in which the guilty unjustly kill the innocent. More broadly, Just War theorists argue, “realism” is deficient because it denies the need to think carefully about the moral issues raised by war. Given that, in wartime, thousands or millions of lives hang in the balance—given that war is a major undertaking with the potential to do massive good or massive evil—we are obligated to consider the important, and non-obvious, moral questions that war raises. These questions include: Under what circumstances should a nation go to war? And: What should a nation’s policies be toward the soldiers and civilians of enemy nations?

    [..]

    All of these arguments against pacifism and “realism”—and for systematic analysis of the morality of war—are valid. They lend credence to the claim that Just War Theory is a practical and moral theory of war. But an investigation of Just War Theory—and its consistent practice in our so-called “War on Terrorism”—demonstrates that it is neither practical nor moral. To the extent that Just War Theory is followed, it is a prescription for suicide for innocent nations, and thus a profoundly unjust code.

I dealt with the issue of morality in Don’t muddy the waters.

    “Im ba l’hargekha, hashkem l’hargo,” “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him (first).”

    I asked Col. Bruce T Smith for a legal opinion on what restrictions or laws Israel is subject to in its self defense and included the opinion in my post Bomb Gaza. Win the War.

    In sum: Israel is free to employ ALL munitions, tactics, equipment and personnel in her arsenal to defend herself against the outlaw Hamas terrorist organization. Short of the intentional targeting and murder of truly uninvolved and innocent civilians, Israel can (and should) operate as freely as she desires to protect her territorial sovereignty and the lives of her citizens.

    What could be clearer.

Israel, are you listening?

CONTINUE. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

October 30, 2011 | 15 Comments »

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15 Comments / 15 Comments

  1. RE: If you want to survive, learn to organize and use force to protect your turf. Otherwise you wind up like the American Indians did, eating out of the white man’s shit-bucket. And no, I don’t feel sorry for anybody. And that includes the Indians.

    Due to the complacency of Jews in America (not to mention the Soros’, Finkelsteins, etc. amongst us) and the reluctance of Israel to comprehensively defeat its enemies, will the above be amended one day to read:

    If you want to survive, learn to organize and use force to protect your turf. Otherwise you wind up like the American Indians Israelis and Jews did, eating out of the white man’s Muslim’s shit-bucket. And no, I don’t feel sorry for anybody. And that includes the Indians Israelis and Jews.

  2. “There’s an enormous risk,” said Michael Braun, who retired as chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008. Members of Hezbollah, for example, “are absolute masters at identifying existing smuggling infrastructures on many borders around the world where they operate.”

    Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu emphasized the risk of terrorists crossing the Mexican border into the U.S. in a May 26 open letter to President Obama.

    “If the majority of regular illegal immigrants can sneak into America, what does this say about the ability of terrorist sleeper cells?” Babeu wrote. “The porous U.S.-Mexican border is the gravest national-security threat facing America.”

    Hiding in a car trunk

    In his letter to the president, Babeu said thousands of illegal immigrants hailing from “special-interest countries” make the U.S.-Mexico border a national-security threat.

    “In some cases, we have confirmed their troubling ties to terrorism,” Babeu wrote. “Yet for those we apprehend, how many today live amongst us?”

    The Border Patrol apprehended an average of 339 people from “special-interest countries” – those that warrant special handling based on terrorism risk factors – at the U.S.-Mexico border each year over the past six years, Homeland Security data show. That’s less than 1 percent each year of the total apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border, Homeland Security figures show

    .

    The 19 people involved in the Sept. 11 attacks entered the country on legal visas.

    And over the last four to five years, the terrorist plots have increasingly involved people already in the United States – citizens and legal residents, he said.

    Read more: http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/article_ed932aa2-9d2a-54f1-b930-85f5d4cce9a8.html#ixzz1cReK0XqM

    The American officials are in denial as it is more important that illegals be let into America than shutting down border access.

    To fight two major wars costing well over a trillion dollars and the loss of thousands of American lives not to mention by some estimates over a million non combatants and complaining that there is no money for sealing the southern border is devoid of any credible logic unless the whole objectof the American exercise was war for it’s own sake and securing American influence over vast energy sources.

    I still contend both wars were mostly about oil and gas and not terror. If it were terror the securing of Americas borders would have be THE major priority. The price of a barrel of crude on 9/11 was less than $20, even with additional demand by India and China the prices naturally could not have jumped 4-6 times in such a short period of time.

    I have always asked the question why America did not seek compensation from the spoils of Iraqi oil? So far nobody has come up with a credible answer.

  3. Actually, OBL initially blamed Serbs, Jews, or Indians for 9/11. Why do you choose to ignore this, instead relying on Time magazine’s version of events??

    United Press International
    September 28, 2001, Friday
    Bin Laden denies involvement in attacks
    BYLINE: By AAMIR LATIF
    SECTION: GENERAL NEWS
    LENGTH: 449 words
    DATELINE: KARACHI, Pakistan, Sept. 28

    Saudi terror suspect Osama bin Laden has continued to deny his involvement in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, saying “American authorities should search for the terrorists inside their own country and intelligence agencies,” a Pakistani newspaper reported Friday.

    In an interview with Ummat — a publication sympathetic to Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban — bin Laden said both he and al Qaida had “nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in America” and that “hard-line Jewish organizations might be involved,” saying they could be angry with President Bush over last November’s Florida election controversy which awarded Bush the presidency by a slim margin.

    Ummat said it sent questions to bin Laden through Taliban officials, and received written responses.

    Bin Laden reportedly said in his replies that dozens of terrorists organizations from countries like Israel, Russia, India and Serbia could be responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that left over 6,000 people dead or missing.

    He also insisted that al Qaida does not consider the United States its enemy, rather the organization is the enemy “of this system which has brought smaller nations in to the slavery of America.”

    “This system is being run by Jews, and the Americans are unconsciously supporting Jewish policies,” said bin Laden.

    Bin Laden also said the attacks may have been perpetrated by U.S. intelligence agencies in an effort to press the Bush administration into funneling addition funds into those organizations. “They need an enemy to grab more funds,” he said.

    He also said he was not angry with Muslim countries who have pledged their support for any potential U.S.-led attack on targets in Afghanistan, as some of them have no choice but to support U.S. policy.

  4. I am not spreading a canard, you are.
    Saudi Arabia and the Rise of the Wahhabi Threat

    Nerve Center of Islamic Extremism

    Even after September 11, the Wahhabi bureaucracy in Saudi Arabia continues to foster religious extremism. When bombs go off in Israel, Kenya, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Saudi Arabia is still the main source of the terrorist money. The kingdom is an unwavering nerve center of ideological indoctrination, incitement, and terrorist financing.

    From time to time, the Saudi elite attempts to confuse Western opinion by claiming that it too is the target of Islamic terror, a rather hollow gesture to hide its complicity in terrorism. Saudi Arabia, being a police state, the monarchy long ago could have ridded itself of extremist elements. But the sobering reality is that international terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda are directly impelled by Saudi clerics. To recover their credibility in the eyes of more reactionary factions after years of excess, the Saudi family has embarked on an ambitious global campaign to support incubators of violence and extremism from Algeria to the Philippines. In sum, Al-Qaeda would not exist absent Saudi money and membership.

  5. Ted Belman writes:
    The first thing America did was to rule out Saudi Arabia who was the major supporter of al Qaeda and Wahhabism and instead went after al Qaeda and its training grounds in Afghanistan.

    Ted, will you please stop spreading this canard?

    You are deliberately confusing Saudi nationals with the Saudi government, which is itself under attack by Al Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden gave two reasons for declaring war on the US in the mid-90’s: a) That the US and its Saudi allies had defiled “sacred” Saudi soil by allowing American infidel troops to have bases there while ejecting Saddam from Kuwait during the First Gulf War, and b) The unconditional US guaranty of support for Israel.

    http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,451459,00.html

    BlandOatmeal writes:
    I feel now, as I did on 9/12 (after finding out that nearly all the bombers were Saudis) that the US should have taken, occupied and administered Saudi Arabia (ESPECIALLY Mecca).

    Is this your childish attempt at gallows humor? Israel, which in survival mode and, unlike the US, has no responsibility for anything but its own security, cannot even annex J&S and Gaza, from which it is under constant threat of attack, and you want the US to take and occupy an Arab ally that also controls the free world’s oil supplies? And for what? Because some of its citizens joined Al Qaeda and attacked the US? I have never heard such bizarre thinking.

    Birdalone writes:
    You would not need this conversation had the Bush admin not been so stubborn in refusing to listen to the outgoing Clinton-team warning, or if the Bush admin had paid attention to Richard Clarke, or if there had been someone paying attention ON 9/11,

    This is completely false. Richard Clarke had no credibility after his brazen falsehoods about Iraq trying to obtain yellowcake from Niger, now confirmed by Wikileaks. The Clinton administration had also completely destroyed the US intel capabilities by a) refusing to respond to Al Qaeda attacks throughout the 90’s, b) refusing to accept Osama Bin Laden when he was offered up by Sudan THREE times according to the intermediary Mansour Ijaz, c) refusing to give the CIA permission to shoot OVER TEN TIMES when they had him in their sights in Afghanistan according to the CIA agent Michael Scheuer, d) banning the CIA from gathering intel from “unsavory characters”, and raising the wall between the FBI and the CIA in sharing intel.

    Tom Clancy wrote a novel in 1997 that had a Japanese 747 crashing into the Capitol (re-fighting WW2). EVERYONE in the Pentagon reads Tom Clancy. I read Tom Clancy!

    That would explain your own imaginative fiction:-))

    This Bush-Cheney team will forever be remembered for the Iraq debacle, for destroying what remained of the American economy in January, 2001, and for ignoring the fact that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. And for creating the hysteria that enabled Obama to become president.

    You are now quoting Democrat fiction and the radical, Soros-funded anarchists. Iraq is now a functioning multi-party, multi-ethnic democracy instead of a brutal and oppressive dictatorship. The Afghan Taliban regime was completely destroyed by US forces within weeks. The insurgency has continued because of the perfidy of Pakistan and could be quickly stopped if we had the proper Commander-in-Chief who would attack across the Pakistani border. The US economy was destroyed by Democrat social-engineering that started in earnest by Bill Clinton’s threats of lawsuits against the big banks if they did not start lending money to low income people to buy houses. This has now been documented in the new book Reckless Endangerment by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times.

    Susan writes:
    The proper response to 9/11 would have been to beef up our own border security, tighten immigration and actually take it seriously, and declare that we would protect our homeland like never before.

    What are you talking about? 9/11 was just seven months into a new administration which was left with a recession and a broken intelligence system by the Clinton administration, which did not even have the cojones to call Al Qaeda terrorists. After the Bush administration got a handle after 9/11 there were no more attacks on US soil until the series that began after the Obama regime let our guard down again.

    Border security is a different issue that has become a political football. It could easily be solved by giving legitimate low-tech workers guest worker visas like the high-tech workers have. These will then come across the legitimate border crossings. Then we can focus on the drug dealers, gun-runners, terrorists and criminals who will be the only ones coming across open borders.

  8. I agree with Harris. We must think carefully why they did not do this. The reason is the fear of future people. To this day, many Americans condemn the atomic bombing of Japan, and the incarceration of American Japanese (in spite of the fact the Supreme Court ruled that this is okay). Let’s say they did this, and stopped the cancer of Islam. Let’s say they all said this is part of World War II, for the Moslem Brotherhood fought along with Hitler against us. Let’s say peace and prosperity result. The leaders who did this would be vilified throughout history. It requires courage to do what is right in spite of the condemnation that will certainly result.

  9. I thought a lot about this in autumn 2001. I would not have occupied Mecca or directly nuclear blasts around some isolated al-Qaida target in some wilderness area of Afghanistan. Instead, I would have incinerated Mecca and the holiest Shi’a Islamic city in Iran. No announcements. No warnings. No explanations. Just the most massive death since Harry Truman authorized the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945.

    As a follow-up, I would have begun the planned deliberate destruction of every madrasa in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and especially of the teachers and students in those places.

    Along with that, I would have begun the systematic screening of all Moslems in this country, with massive numbers of them forcefully deported, and any others locked up in concentration camps in the big American deserts, pending screening.

    Then, it would have been a very long time before any such people ever again would even think of fucking with the United States of America.

    I always have thought the world as a whole and the human race that inhabits it is little more than an extension of the grim streets and alleyways of Chicago where I learned all my basic instincts as a child back in the 1940s.

    If you want to survive, learn to organize and use force to protect your turf. Otherwise you wind up like the American Indians did, eating out of the white man’s shit-bucket. And no, I don’t feel sorry for anybody. And that includes the Indians.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  10. You would not need this conversation had the Bush admin not been so stubborn in refusing to listen to the outgoing Clinton-team warning, or if the Bush admin had paid attention to Richard Clarke, or if there had been someone paying attention ON 9/11, e.g., the second you lose the transponder signal from an airplane approaching the Hudson River north of NYC, why is the protocol to activate USAF from the base closest to that airplane’s departure terminal instead of the base closest to the point of lost transponder transmission?

    And there was a specific warning that airliners would be hijacked on 9/11 and would be crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

  11. The proper response to 9/11 would have been to beef up our own border security, tighten immigration and actually take it seriously, and declare that we would protect our homeland like never before. We send troops all over the world, but our own government will not actually defend it’s homeland on it’s own feet on it’s own soil. That says we are not a seperate country and that we are a world enity and the government is in on the joke and they don’t care.

  12. I feel now, as I did on 9/12 (after finding out that nearly all the bombers were Saudis) that the US should have taken, occupied and administered Saudi Arabia (ESPECIALLY Mecca).

    I’m in total agreement with this.

  13. You would not need this conversation had the Bush admin not been so stubborn in refusing to listen to the outgoing Clinton-team warning, or if the Bush admin had paid attention to Richard Clarke, or if there had been someone paying attention ON 9/11, e.g., the second you lose the transponder signal from an airplane approaching the Hudson River north of NYC, why is the protocol to activate USAF from the base closest to that airplane’s departure terminal instead of the base closest to the point of lost transponder transmission?

    Tom Clancy wrote a novel in 1997 that had a Japanese 747 crashing into the Capitol (re-fighting WW2). EVERYONE in the Pentagon reads Tom Clancy. I read Tom Clancy!

    This Bush-Cheney team will forever be remembered for the Iraq debacle, for destroying what remained of the American economy in January, 2001, and for ignoring the fact that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. And for creating the hysteria that enabled Obama to become president.

    America never learns.

    Hmmm, time to again watch “Charlie Wilson’s War”

  15. I feel now, as I did on 9/12 (after finding out that nearly all the bombers were Saudis) that the US should have taken, occupied and administered Saudi Arabia (ESPECIALLY Mecca). Then “W” came out with his “Islam is Peace” speech, and instituted the Geheime Schutzanstaffel (SA, aka “Homeland Security”) to frisk children and grandmothers, and I realized we had been abandoned by our leaders. Barack “Mr. Change” Obama has turned out to be simply a reincarnation of George W. Bush — so that, incredibly, the same Saturday Night Live comedian has uncannily impersonated both men. 9/11 has had only one major effect on the US — to make us more of a police state than we had ever imagined.