The tenth anniversary of September 11 gives us the opportunity to make a brief assessment of that tragic event and the ten-year history of imperialism that followed it.
First, it should be noted that the official version of events doesn’t hold up. This was enshrined in the report of the _Commission on September 11_, which opened and closed its enquiry with a haste that was, at the very least, suspicious. The finding that we "_knew nothing, we were surprised to the point of not being able to respond quickly to attacks_" is false. Between July and early September of 2001, dozens of alerts reached the White House from secret service organisations around the world which insisted that attacks would be made on sensitive targets (including the Twin Towers) directly through the hijacking of civilian aircraft. The story of a plane crashing into the Pentagon is an insult to human intelligence. No plane, much less a DC8, would be able to enter the defense ministry causing a 5 metre diameter hole, leaving the facade of the building and windows outside the hole intact whilst it "evaporated" to nothing.
But this is not the point, however it happened: in the impossible official version or as claimed by conspiracy theorists that everything was made up by the U.S. government itself, or that they knew about the threats and allowed them to take place ... September 11 presented the opportunity on a silver platter for U.S. imperialism to pursue its energy objectives through the use of force in the name of fighting terrorism. It could also take advantage of the then recent implosion of Soviet imperialism and the inconsistency of the European version. In quick succession, while all factors of the future financial and economic crisis were preparing many other disasters, while the “in house” theorists such as Kagan and Wolfowitz were putting on paper the political line of the aggressive Bush administration (that the U.S. has the right to pursue its interests in any area of ??the world and defend them with the use of force without having to answer to anyone), the two oil campaigns in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were launched. Leaving aside all the stories about September 11, if it had not taken place they would have had to invent it.
The ten and seven years wars that have followed have produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, untold suffering to the people, misery and hunger for millions of proletarians who have just suffered the consequences of war, all crushed in the iron grip of imperialist interests. That things then went differently than the U.S. government expected is part of another story. Both in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. imperialism, despite the enormous expenditure of men, equipment and financial capital, has not been able to satisfy its appetites.
The current administration has had to revise its former ambitions. President Obama is gradually dismantling the U.S. military presence in the two theatres of war. The financial and economic crisis has given the coup de grace to what was for decades the most powerful and voracious imperialism in the world. The dollar continues to be the official currency for international trade, but it comes off badly in competition with the euro and the yen. Many countries, including China, India, South America and some of the Middle East oil, plead the need for a new international currency to replace the dollar as speculation is oriented on raw materials, gold and other safe commodities.
In conclusion, the September 11 tragedy with its burden of innocent victims, should have been the springboard for American imperialism’s attempt to consolidate control of the international oil and natural gas markets, to reaffirm the role of the dollar in the international money market, to continue to drain surplus parasitically from the four corners of the earth, to continue to sustain an economy based on debt and speculation that is close to collapse. In fact it has turned into its opposite. The crisis of low rates of profit has continued to proceed, undisturbed by swelling speculative activity. This has done nothing to shift the financial basis of the explosive effect of the crisis, which in turn, has returned to the ground that had stimulated it, the real economy, thus creating the conditions for the most serious crisis since World War II.
On September 11, today the international bourgeoisie society is preparing to commemorate the symbol of a decadent capitalist society, in both its economic crisis and political identity. It is a commemoration for crying crocodile tears about the nearly three thousand deaths in the Twin Towers, which glorifies the victory over international terrorism to hide the true meaning of its wars, its economic failure, its arrogance and the political imperative today will be to make the world proletariat pay the price for it.
-- FD