Hearings on Cause of September 11 Miss Real Reason

Sep 23, 2002

The Congress has been holding hearings about what it calls the "intelligence failure" to anticipate the September 11 attacks. The only thing they didn’t look into was the very U.S. policy which laid the basis for these attacks.

From the standpoint of the U.S. ruling class, U.S. government foreign policy has been a success. It’s enabled the big corporations and banks to drain immense wealth from most of the rest of the world. In most of the countries of the world U.S. corporations own mines, plantations, factories and service industries, which directly employ millions of very low-paid workers. Further, the big U.S. banks plunder entire countries by obtaining billions of dollars in interest payments paid for by the labor of the workers and peasants of these countries. A small handful of billionaires in the United States become immensely wealthy at the expense of the mass of the population of the world.

U.S. foreign policy, which has always aimed at maintaining this exploitation, is based on brute force, on violence to keep the population in line. And the real success of U.S. policy–as far as the ruling class is concerned–is the ability of the U.S. government to rest on the armed forces of other countries to keep the poor masses of their population under control. The U.S. supplies them with arms–the U.S. is by far the largest arms seller in the world. The U.S. military trains the armies of many of the poorest countries, and in fact makes them almost an auxiliary of the U.S. military. These local militaries are swift to intervene against strikes, urban protests and peasants who resist local landlords.

The U.S. uses various local powers to be regional policeman and to do the dirty work in their area. Examples are Israel, and its brutal repression against the Palestinian people, in addition to having invaded Lebanon, Egypt and Syria with U.S. support; Iran under the Shah, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which the U.S. supported against the Iran of Khomeini. The result is that U.S.-made bombs rain down on the civilian population around the world. It is no wonder that hundreds of millions of people around the world hold the U.S. responsible for the destruction they suffer.

Should the local government prove too weak to suppress social movements or control wayward neighbors, the U.S. government itself intervenes militarily. The U.S. has in readiness numerous military bases throughout the world and the navy with massive fleets in the various oceans. Many times over the last decades the U.S. has invaded or used military force in other countries: in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The result of U.S. policy is to subject the population of the poor countries to a brutal state terrorism. When the local army shoots into crowds, breaks up protests by small shopkeepers, herds peasants off the land they farm, what is it but state terrorism? This is terrorism supported by the U.S. and understood as such by the population of the world.

Not surprisingly U.S. imperialist domination in poor countries has generated a deep hatred of the United States around the world. Terrorists of various types are able to tap this immense hatred and to use it for their own ends, even though they are the bitter enemy of the mass of the population in whose name they claim to act.

All the Congressional hearings about "intelligence failures" do nothing to show the real problem, because it’s not the lack of intelligence that’s the danger, but the imperialist policy itself.