On the anniversary of 9/11, a professor at the University of Minnesota said the United States had never been serious about fighting terrorist groups, and that its goal in launching a campaign into the Middle East was to provide security for a specific group.
On September 11, 2001, a seemingly terrorist operation took place on US soil, with various political, economic, security and military consequences for the country and the international community. Many political analysts believe that this incident was as important as the attack on the US military port of Pearl Harbor; an attack that led to US involvement in World War II.
Analysts say 9/11 changed the country’s political history. Especially since the Americans, who had no rivals in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, faced a new fictitious enemy called “religious extremism.”
The 9/11 attacks were planned by al-Qaeda and were perpetrated by several countries, including Saudi Arabia, not Iraq or Iran. People who had fought for years in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation of this country. Al-Qaeda operatives, especially its leader Osama bin Laden, were directly supported by the US government because during the Cold War, the US wanted to counter Soviet influence in the region, and al-Qaeda was one of the tools. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was no longer interested in the group. Why?
Because they were armed, they had received revolutionary training and were committed to overthrowing governments and establishing the religious system of their choice in their countries. As a result, the United States abandoned what were then called “freedom fighters” and retreated to Pakistan, rebuilding itself as the Taliban, and of course their radical figures joined al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda was the main target of the Saudi royal family, and the United States was the group’s second target due to its military support and military presence in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaeda-linked 9/11 was an attack on the United States, but its main purpose was to oust the United States from the Middle east and in particular from Saudi Arabia. Saudi members of al-Qaeda were and still are strongly opposed to the Saudi royal family, but this fact has been buried by both the United States and the government of Saudi Arabia.
The United States did not condemn Saudi Arabia for the 9/11 attacks, and instead the Bush administration put the slogan “Never let a good crisis go to waste” as its motto and decided to use this tragedy to implement the “neocons” strategy in the Middle East to change the structure of the region by changing its governments.
The neoconservatives advocated that in order to secure Israel, the United States should overthrow the governments of Syria, Iraq, and Iran and replace their leaders with those in line with US and Israeli policies, and that is what the Bush administration did.
They (the United States and its allies) used the tragedy of 9/11 to invade Iraq and overthrow and destroy Saddam. They did so on the pretext that Saddam was building nuclear weapons and carrying out massacres, even though Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In 2003, they (the United States) used the same strategy again, this time falsely claiming that Iran was building nuclear weapons.
Until the Barack Obama administration, the United States was never serious about stopping al-Qaeda. Although the Obama administration succeeded in killing bin Laden, even his administration avoided any attempt to limit the activities of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Accordingly, the United States has never really confronted the threats posed by the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS in recent years. The US actions in this regard were scattered and limited and never took a serious turn, and instead these attacks and actions were used against countries and groups such as Iran and Iraq that did not pose any terrorist threat. Iran, Iraq, and Syria were targeted by the United States because they were likely to pose a threat to Israel.