Re: [Marxism] re: On 9/11 (was Re: conspiracy)

[davidquarter@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

 Certaintly, there are a billion and one reasons to attack the U.S.

 But that doesn't eliminate the possibility  that the U.S. administration knew 
about an
impending attack and didn't act to prevent it, or even, given the benefits it 
would
provide them in the foreign policy arena (which wasn't hard to predict), helped
(encouraged?) the attackers along, via the CIA.  That doesn't in my mind make 
it a
conspiracy theory, it makes it a really plausible theory...

DOQ



On 10 Mar 2005 at 19:38, M. Junaid Alam wrote:

> The primary problem with conspiracy theories about 9-11 is that -
> somewhat ironically -  they deny the primacy of human agency. I don't
> think an intricate CIA plot was necessary for the attack to have
> happened for a very simple reason: a few hundred thousand dead Arabs is
> more than enough impetus for some of them to have wanted to exact
> revenge. That was the political calculus of bin Ladenism - we cannot hit
> the tyrannies locally, so let us attack the paymaster directly. The
> anger was channelled at the source: America.
>
> To suggest the thing was all some CIA-sponsored plot would be to admit
> that killing people en masse will not spawn blowback and create
> reservoirs of hatred from which fanatics will arise to strike back. This
> is a manifestly impossible position, because we already know a lot of
> Arabs are pissed at America for all the obvious reasons. The only
> remaining alternative conclusion is that they were too stupid to be able
> to have orchestrated the attacks - again, a conclusion vitiated by
> present-day realities of the armed resistance in Iraq.
>
> So ultimately, conspiracy theories on this score are inherently
> reactionary. In an environment where there is no mass political action
> against imperialism, it is simply comforting to varnish it with
> super-human capabilities.
>
>


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