Selective War on Terror
(Part 1)
War on Terror was announced by USA after 9/11 attack. How did it reach there? Was there nothing to indicate what was coming? The events in public domain show that persistent attacks on the assets of USA, all over the world were there to indicate but USA was kept napping on 9/11 attack.
The Road to 9/11 and Beyond
In 1995, a truck bomb struck the residence of American military experts in Riyadh. The attack was carried out by Al-Qaida, and its leader Osama Bin Laden publicly boasted of it the following year. It was the first clear warning of a war that Washington refused to name.
The same pattern continued in 1996 when Shiite Hezbollah, acting on behalf of Iran, detonated another truck bomb at a U.S. military housing complex in Al-Khobar, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. The blast was enormous and executed through an intelligence network that included Saudi collaborators. Some of them fled, but the Saudi authorities eventually captured and prosecuted them.
Despite the deaths of American servicemen, the Clinton administration’s response was remarkably slow. It seemed as if Washington wanted the killers in Kandahar and Tehran to get away with murder.
Then, in August 1998, Al-Qaida struck again. Two nearly simultaneous bombings hit the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring more than 5,000. The attacks shocked the world, but the U.S. response was tepid. Under pressure from public outrage and a sense of national humiliation, President Bill Clinton ordered a retaliatory strike that turned out to be little more than a show of force. Cruise missiles hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a handful of empty Al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.
Hours before the missiles arrived, however, Al-Qaida had already evacuated its bases. Someone had clearly tipped them off. The question lingered: who warned Bin Laden, and who wanted him kept alive until his usefulness was exhausted?
Bin Laden operated with full sponsorship from the Muslim Brotherhood network, through its Sudanese branch under Omar Al-Bashir and its Afghan arm led by Mullah Omar. When Saudi Arabia stripped Bin Laden of his citizenship and demanded his extradition, the United States quietly refused to help. By then, he had become too valuable to the shadow play of regional power politics.
The result of this indulgence came on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaida’s operatives hijacked four planes and struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. The attacks were the culmination of years of warnings ignored and alliances of convenience left to fester.
The Persistent Policy
Two decades later, the same logic persists. The Democrats under Joe Biden have revived the cautious evasions of the Clinton era, relying on extremist networks when they appear useful to American strategy. The pattern is old: empower militants to pressure governments, then disown them once the goal is met or the cost becomes embarrassing.
Iraq, rich in resources and once stable, was destroyed by Shiite militias aligned with Iran. Syria met a similar fate when Western and regional intelligence services sponsored jihadist factions that eventually gave birth to Daesh, the so-called Islamic State. These groups slaughtered civilians, displaced millions, and drew in thousands of European extremists who perished in the ruins of Aleppo and Raqqa.
Even the 2021 Kabul airport attack echoed the bombings in Tanzania more than twenty years earlier. The American reaction was the same: outrage for domestic consumption, followed by silence. The body count was immense, but the strategic goals remained obscured behind the smoke of endless wars.
Between the deserts of Arabia and the borders of China, the same twin monsters of Al-Qaida and Daesh still burn at both ends of the battlefield. They are two sides of the same coin, minted long ago under the watchful eyes of Western intelligence and kept in circulation for reasons that remain as dark as ever.
(In the next part of this article we shall discover that the policy of USA persist even today.)