The first time in history that the U.S. hasn’t used ‘deception’ to start a war?

 Who benefits?

I suggest that Dubya Bush would have had no clue as to what his foreign policy was supposed to be, without 9/11. It gave him Terrorism as the new Enemy, able to threaten all that we hold dear, and his presidency is unthinkable without it. The Enron scandal and Bush’s transparent electoral fraud were closing in on him, when he was rescued by 9/11. 

After the attack it was Christmas every day for the national security establishment and its corporate cohorts. All their wish lists were fulfilled, and then some. In short order, they massively increased defence spending; shamelessly stifled social spending; promoted obscenely extensive tax breaks for the largest corporations; greatly increased surveillance and prosecutory powers over the citizenry, including license to enter their homes virtually at will, to an extent a dictatorship might envy; tore up the Bill of Rights for non-citizens, including legal residents; created a new Office of Homeland Security”, etc. (Blum,  Rogue State, xxi).

The Bible of the new American right has been Brzezinski’s  The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), spelling out the brutal and devious world-domination strategies of the US. It encountered the problem that, ‘… as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.’ So, where might that come from? Likewise the ‘Project for a New American Century’ (2000, ‘ Rebuilding America’s Defences’), a key document written by the ultra-right wing now in power, lamented that America hardly had the capability of waging two wars at once (p.3). The process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force," it explained, could be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" (p.51). Thus, two of the sacred texts of the New American Right have called for a cataclysmic event, of just the kind which then materialized. 

The US military had endured twelve difficult years without an Enemy. Did it generate its own, somewhat as a virtual reality exercise? The alleged Arab hijackers refuse to come into focus and appear increasingly as media-constructed images. None of us know what the answer is, though the event affects all of us. Of one thing we may be sure: the world will not be a safe place, until we find the guilty culprits. The US has always in the past relied upon deceptive war-precipitating incidents to make possible the wars that it wants, eg the sinking of the Lusitania 1915, Pearl Harbour 1941 and the Gulf of Tonkin 1964. A review of these terrible but phoney events concluded that: “If, indeed, September 11 was caused solely by Al Quaeda, then that would be the first time in history that the U.S. hasn’t used ‘deception’ to start a war” (‘How to start a War’,  Global Outlook, Summer 2002 17).

from: Who Did 9/11?

A View from Across the Pond