Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

We Were Warned. 9/11 Was Blowback, and Washington Answered With More Empire.

A CIA word, a warning published before the towers fell, and a bill our children still inherit. The killing was never justified; pretending no one saw it coming is its own kind of lie.

On a debate stage in Columbia, South Carolina, on May 15, 2007, a ten-term Republican congressman from Texas said something that ended his standing with the room and, for a night, looked like it might end his campaign. Asked why he opposed an interventionist foreign policy, Ron Paul answered that the men who attacked the country on September 11 had reasons, and that those reasons ran straight back through decades of American bombing, basing, and meddling in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani, the front-runner, called it an “extraordinary statement” and demanded Paul take it back. The crowd roared for Giuliani. Paul did not take it back.

He was right, and the reaction to him proved a second point he never said out loud: in American politics the safest target is rarely the policy. It is the person who names the cause. A quarter-century after the towers fell, the verdict is in. The September 11 attacks were not a bolt from a clear sky. They were blowback — foreseeable, in fact foreseen — from an American empire that had spent half a century treating the Middle East as a province to be managed. The men who built that empire understood the risk and ran it on everyone else’s behalf. When the bill came due in fire over Lower Manhattan, Washington’s answer was to build more empire.

None of that excuses the murder of 2,977 people. Saying a thing was predictable is not the same as saying it was permitted, and anyone who blurs that line is selling something. But refusing to look at why it happened is its own kind of cowardice, and it has cost this country more than most Americans have ever been asked to count.

Disclosure: The Atomic Privilege and Generational Malpractice, cited in this piece, are books written by the author.

A word the CIA invented

Start with the word, because the word does a great deal of work. Blowback is not an antiwar slogan. It is a CIA term of art, and it first appears in print in a classified March 1954 agency history of the operation that overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, the year before. It means the unintended consequence of a covert action: the part of the bill that arrives later, paid by people who never saw the original transaction. The agency’s own role in that 1953 coup, long an open secret, was finally confirmed by declassified records released in 2013.

Paul named that exact case on the debate stage. When the United States installed the shah in 1953, he argued, the reaction came back as the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, and it never really stopped. The agency had a word for the pattern, and Paul used it. Chalmers Johnson built a book around the same word. Blowback came out in 2000, the year before the towers fell, written not by a peacenik but by a former CIA consultant who called himself an Eisenhower Republican. His warning was specific. Among the things an overextended America might reconsider, he wrote, was its large and provocative military presence in Saudi Arabia. He published that line with no idea how literally it would read fourteen months later.

The empire was real

The presence was not a metaphor. During the 1991 Gulf War the United States led a coalition of roughly 550,000 troops into the Saudi desert. President George H. W. Bush promised King Fahd the troops would go home when the job was done. They did not. A residual force of around 5,000 stayed on, flying patrols over Iraq from at least seven Saudi bases. American soldiers were stationed, indefinitely, in the country that holds Islam’s two holiest sites.

That is the kind of thing empires do without noticing. They call it stability, or a forward presence, and they are puzzled when the people who live there call it occupation. The Saudi deployment was one entry in a long ledger. There was the 1953 coup in Tehran that handed the country a shah and a secret police. There were decades of arming and excusing client governments from Riyadh to Cairo. There are, by the most careful independent count since the Pentagon stopped publishing its own list, roughly 750 American base sites in 80 countries and territories, about three times as many foreign bases as every other nation on earth combined, manned on the quiet assumption that the map is America’s to garrison. There was the 1980s, when Washington ran its largest covert operation pouring weapons and money into the Afghan war against the Soviets, and the transnational fighters that mobilization helped knit together outlived the Soviet retreat and turned on the patron that armed them. Ron Paul put the principle plainly that night: imagine how Americans would react if China built bases here. We would not call it stability.

They told us why

The men who planned September 11 were not coy about their reasons. Osama bin Laden’s 1996 statement carried the title “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” His 1998 fatwa, issued with four co-signers under the banner of a “World Islamic Front,” named three grievances in particular: American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the sanctions strangling Iraq, and American backing for Israel. The 9/11 Commission Report — the official finding of the United States government, not a pamphlet — documented every word of it. Fifteen of the nineteen men who carried the attacks out were Saudis, sons of the kingdom where the troops sat.

Here is where honesty matters more than anywhere else in this piece. That same 1998 fatwa called for the murder of any American, civilian or military, anywhere on earth, and called it a religious duty. That is the sentence that turns a grievance into terrorism. The 2,977 people killed that morning did not set Middle East policy. One of them was Carl Max Hammond Jr., a 37-year-old researcher from Derry, aboard the plane that hit the South Tower. He never voted for the Saudi deployment. He was owed nothing but his life, and he was robbed of it. Explaining the cause of a killing is not the same as forgiving the killer.

Why the truth was unspeakable

So why did naming the cause cost Ron Paul the room? Because an empire, once it is old enough, stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the weather. The hierarchy becomes so internalized that pointing at it reads as derangement. I argued in The Atomic Privilege that the world’s nuclear order runs on exactly this trick: a handful of states get to hold the ultimate power and place their force where they please, the rest are expected to accept the arrangement as the natural order, and any nation that resents its assigned rank is treated as irrational by definition. Swap warheads for bases and the logic is identical. Giuliani’s word for Paul’s argument was “absurd.” That was not a rebuttal. It was the hierarchy defending itself, the reflex of a power that has forgotten its dominance is something other people have to live inside.

The wrong lesson, at a generational price

Then came the response, which is where the real indictment lives. Faced with an attack rooted partly in America’s footprint abroad, Washington enlarged the footprint. It invaded Afghanistan, then invaded Iraq in 2003 on the strength of weapons that did not exist. The Costs of War project has done the grim arithmetic: roughly $8 trillion spent; at least 940,000 people killed directly by the violence; an estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million dead once the indirect toll is counted; 38 million people driven from their homes.

And the bitterest detail of all. In 2003, quietly, the United States pulled its troops out of Saudi Arabia, a move reported almost in passing at the time. It handed bin Laden the one concession he had demanded since 1991, but only after the towers were down, only as it marched into Iraq, only on its own terms. The grievance was conceded and the war was kept. That is not strategy. That is a country that learned nothing and called it resolve.

The people who decided all of this mostly did not pay for it. The dead of September 11 paid. The troops paid: the Global War on Terrorism monument in Hampton now carries the names of 81 Granite Staters who died in service since September 11, 23 of them in the Iraq war alone by Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s own official accounting, and more than 2,500 members of the state’s National Guard deployed to those wars, a figure the governor’s office has cited at Memorial Day services for years. Iraqi and Afghan civilians paid in numbers most Americans will never trouble themselves to learn. And the bill is still being mailed to people who were in grade school when it was run up: the Costs of War team puts the future tab for caring for these veterans at $2.2 to $2.5 trillion by 2050, most of it borrowed, most of it unpaid. A generation that never voted on any of it will spend its working life servicing the debt of a war that was invited by policies it never chose. That arrangement, one generation spending and the next one paying, is the subject of my book Generational Malpractice.

What New Hampshire already knew

There is a New Hampshire footnote here that ought to be a headline. The man who said the unsayable in 2007 came to this state in 2012 and finished second in the first-in-the-nation primary, with 22.9 percent behind Mitt Romney’s 39.3, the best primary result Ron Paul ever posted anywhere. The state that prints “Live Free or Die” on its plates heard the blowback argument, looked at the wreckage of two wars, and handed the messenger his high-water mark. Then it kept sending the same war party back to Washington, election after election, and is on track to do it again in this year’s Senate race.

The lesson of blowback was never that America had it coming. It is narrower and harder than that. A small class of people in Washington gets to gamble with other nations’ stability and other families’ sons, lose, and walk away to write memoirs and collect board seats while the cost compounds for everyone beneath them. The first step to ending that arrangement is the step Ron Paul took on a stage in Columbia, the one Giuliani tried to shout down: someone has to be allowed to say it out loud. Name the policy. Name the people who chose it. And stop pretending the fire came from nowhere.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. This is a signed opinion column; its argument is the position of Granite State Report. Every factual claim was checked against primary sources before publication, listed in the fact-check table above. The count of New Hampshire’s fallen is drawn from the Hampton Global War on Terrorism monument’s roll and Senator Shaheen’s official accounting of Iraq losses; the National Guard deployment figure is attributed to the state governor’s office. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.