{"id":11713,"date":"2011-09-16T11:56:11","date_gmt":"2011-09-16T19:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=11713"},"modified":"2011-09-16T11:57:07","modified_gmt":"2011-09-16T19:57:07","slug":"follow-up-to-dc-column-beating-the-same-dead-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/16\/follow-up-to-dc-column-beating-the-same-dead-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"Follow Up to DC Column: Beating the Same Dead Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

The piece I wrote for the Daily Caller<\/a>\u00a0was in response to a piece by Jamie Weinstein<\/a>, the senior editor there, in which Weinstein denies aggressive US foreign policy had anything to do with the motivations behind 9\/11. I relished in an evidence-based response, but to be honest I’m saddened that this discussion is still going on 10 years after the fact. That the obvious reality – agreed upon by the CIA, the State Department, the FBI, all of the relevant academic literature, reiterated by al Qaeda members ever since, etc. – is still a minority view should trouble us. After all, the evidence is there.<\/p>\n

But I actually only chose to respond to a portion of Weinstein’s column<\/a>\u00a0(brevity pays these days). He also incorrectly argued that defense budgets aren’t part of our fiscal problems right now. I’ve written<\/a> enough on defense budgets<\/a> to lay that<\/a> one to rest<\/a>. But Weinstein argues entitlements are the problem. Yes, they’re a problem. But let’s consider discretionary spending as well and what that might do to the debt and deficits: military spending makes up\u00a059% of discretionary spending<\/a>\u00a0in the 2012 federal budget. And we’re wasting it on an aging Empire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The other point I didn’t address in my Daily Caller response was Weinstein’s claim that there is no evidence for the belief that al Qaeda’s aim was to drag the US into a costly war in Afghanistan to bleed us dry\u00a0\u00e0 la Soviet Union. Clearly, Weinstein hasn’t done his homework, since this conclusion is broadly agreed upon by experts too. The Pakistani journalist Syed\u00a0Saleem Shahzad, murdered by the Pakistani secret service, was perhaps most knowledgable on this point. He delved into the gritty details in his book<\/a>, published just before his death, in which he features interviews with some of al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s top operatives and confirms that this was the strategy from the beginning. Investigative journalist Gareth Porter reviewed Shahzad’s book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Al-Qaeda strategists have been assisting the Taliban fight against U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan because they believe that foreign occupation has been the biggest factor in generating Muslim support for uprisings against their governments, according to the just-published book by Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistani journalist whose body was found in a canal outside Islamabad last week with evidence of having been tortured.<\/p>\n

Shahzad writes that al-Qaeda strategists believed its terrorist attacks on 9\/11 would lead to a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan which would in turn cause a worldwide \u201cMuslim backlash.\u201d That \u201cbacklash\u201d was particularly important to what emerges in Shahzad\u2019s account as the primary al-Qaeda aim of stimulating revolts against regimes in Muslim countries.<\/p>\n

Shahzad makes it clear that the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were the biggest break al-Qaeda had ever gotten.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And US strategy continues to exacerbate the hatreds against the US fostering for years in the Muslim world, which I spoke to in the piece. I’ll repost part of a previous blog<\/a> to illustrate that:<\/p>\n

…the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on\u00a0Trends in Global Terrorism<\/a>\u00a0[sic]\u00a0said that the Iraq war was \u201cbreeding deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.\u201d It was also admitted, writes Porter, by former\u00a0head of the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier who\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0the war \u201chas convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq.\u201d Night raids in Afghanistan, which have been\u00a0ramped up by Obama<\/a>\u00a0to become one of the primary military approaches in the country, get the wrong person 50 percent of the time\u00a0according to senior commanders in JSOC<\/a>. Both former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair\u00a0recognized<\/a>\u00a0that \u201chatred of America is increasing in Pakistan\u201d because of the drone strikes, which\u00a0kill exorbitant<\/a>\u00a0numbers of civilians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So I guess however much it saddens me to be beating the same dead horse all these years past, apparently there is a demand for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The piece I wrote for the Daily Caller\u00a0was in response to a piece by Jamie Weinstein, the senior editor there, in which Weinstein denies aggressive US foreign policy had anything to do with the motivations behind 9\/11. I relished in an evidence-based response, but to be honest I’m saddened that this discussion is still going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-11713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11715,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11713\/revisions\/11715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11713"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=11713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}