9/11; five years later

Amidst in all of the 5-year anniversary of 9/11, no U.S. officials (and hardly any mainstream commentators) are asking this critical question: what did the 9/11 victims die for? Most of the commentators will simply focus on the horrors of the attacks themselves and the tragedy of the deaths. Yet, as discomforting as the question is, it must be asked and answered if we are ever going to bring back a sense of normality to our nation.

The people who died on 9/11 died because of U.S. government policies in the Middle East. That's it. They didn't die for freedom. They didn't die as a result of a random act of violence. They died in terrorist attacks that were in relation for what U.S. government officials had done previously to people in the Middle East.

After all, don't forget that this wasn't the first attack on the World Trade Center. The terrorist previously attacked the WTC in 1993. Why? Again, in retaliation for U.S. policies in the Middle East.

What were those policies?

For one, there was the Persian Gulf intervention, where U.S. officials interfered in the dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, killing countless Iraqis in the process, after having supported Saddam Hussein's war against Iran by giving him those infamous WMD.

That was followed by the brutal sanctions against Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

The sanctions were accompanied by the callous attitudes of U.S. officials to the brutal sanctions, not only in terms of the mocking attitudes by which they enforced the sanctions but also in their indifference to the deaths of the Iraqi children, as reflected by UN Ambassador Albright's statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children were "worth it".

Their was the unconditional foreign aid provided to Israel as well as the corrupt Arab regimes in the Middle East.

And, most of all, there was the stationing of U.S. troops indefinitely in Islamic holy lands in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, as well as the rest of the Middle East.

That's what the 1993 attack on the WTC was all about. It was what the terrorist attack on the USS Cole and the U.S embassies in Yemen and Tanzania were all about. It was what the 9/11 attacks on the WTC and on the Pentagon were all about.

The U.S. government's attitude is: "We've got the right to do whatever we want to with the people of the Middle East, and they must learn to accept this." But, as we have learned time and time again, not everyone in the Middle East agrees. That's why those people died on 9/11.