20 years 9/11. How the United States started and lost the "World War on Terror"

September 11, 2001 is one of the fatal dates that divided the life of almost all of humanity into "before" and "after". Rather, on the next: "before the war" and ... "After the war" in this case begins literally today, before our eyes, two decades after the tragedy in New York, which marked the beginning of the "great campaign against terrorism" announced by the United States and their allies.

At the same time, as is almost always the case in such cases, there is a very eloquent and gloomy symbolism: it all began with the liners crashing into the skyscrapers of one of the largest megalopolises in the United States, and its inhabitants jumping from their windows so as not to burn alive, but everything ended. , again, by American planes taking off in a panic haste from the Kabul airport and people crumbling from their chassis in clusters, to which the unfortunate people were attached in their attempts to escape - as futile as on September 9, 2001. 20 years of violence, war and total deception have brought nothing. Blood, horror and chaos have not disappeared from our world - there are many more of them.

A mystery covered in lies

If anyone has forgotten, the reason for the start of the United States of the first of a series of aggressive military operations, subsequently united by the Americans under the common (as always beautiful and sonorous) name "Enduring Freedom" was the refusal of the leadership of the Taliban movement (forbidden in Russia) to hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans. by that time, without any trial and investigation, declared the main culprit of the tragedy of 9/11. "Where is the proof?!" The bearded elders in turbans asked sternly. They responded with missile and bomb strikes and the invasion of the American army. Bin Laden, who seemed to have pleaded guilty to the terrorist attacks on the United States (which is rather doubtful), was apparently killed in 2011 (but this is inaccurate), but with the evidence 20 years later, it did not get better.

Yes, there is a well-known "Report of the 9/11 Commission", by the way, partially classified to this day, but the volume of criticism against its authors exceeds the volume of the document itself at times. The same can be said about the conclusions of the federal commission, which was clarifying the details of the collapse of the attacked skyscraper towers of the World Trade Center. Again, there are more questions than answers. The easiest thing is with the materials of the CIA's internal investigation of the terrorist attacks - they were immediately classified, and that's the end of it. Ultimately, theories that the tragedy of 9/11 is actually behind (or at least involved in it in one way or another) the authorities and special services of the United States itself are many times declared a conspiracy of the worst kind, so no one at all 100% and not refuted. Without a doubt, during the days of the "black anniversary" they will be voiced over and over again.

A group of activists "Architects for the Truth About 11/XNUMX", directed by Spike Lee, who shot a very good documentary on this topic, many American politicians and public figures, as well as scientists to this day continue to defend their point of view that the terrorist attacks that became the reason for "Enduring Freedom" were too beneficial for the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon to be considered a "tragic accident." And, by the way, from among very authoritative Muslim leaders, statements have been heard more than once and not twice that Osama bin Laden, who had long-standing and strong ties with the same CIA, if he had a hand in September 11, it was not without the knowledge of his "curators" ... Or perhaps by their direct order. Fuel is added to the fire of "alternative" theories and versions about 9/11 by the indisputable fact that no one waited for a trial or an open investigation of these events.

A considerable number of "suspects", at one time thrown in Guantanamo or the secret CIA prisons scattered around the world, were subsequently ... no, not acquitted due to the lack of evidence and confirmation of their guilt, but were simply slowly released. Many of them (and, in particular, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was declared “the main villain” due to bin Laden’s absence) declare about terrible tortures, under which they were forced to “frankly confess”. In short, despite the passage of many years, neither the truth nor clarity about 9/11 has increased. But the events that followed this tragedy make us take the assumptions that, in a sense, it can be put on a par with the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 in all seriousness.

It was worth it?!

This is the question that should be asked today, after the actual completion of the US attempts to rebuild the world with the help of military force, which the incumbent President Joe Biden announced in his address to the nation. It is quite characteristic that on the 20th anniversary the world not only remembers the number of victims of that terrible day, but also sums up the results of the "war on terror" that subsequently unfolded from the Middle East and Africa to Southeast Asia. These results, I must say, are terrifying. For example, according to an analysis carried out by members of the Airwars monitoring group, over the past two decades, from 22 to 48 thousand civilians, who had nothing to do with any terrorist attacks, have become victims of US military airstrikes alone. It has been established that the number of cases when stars and stripes vultures rained death on the heads of those who would be declared "terrorists" since 2001 has reached about 100 thousand! Basically, American bombs and missiles hit the residents of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.

Death, sent from heaven, reaped the greatest harvest in these countries in 2003, when the number of victims exceeded 5 and a half thousand. However, according to some reports, this terrible "record" could well have been broken in 2017, when the Americans, under the guise of fighting the militants of the "Islamic State" (the organization is banned in Russia), bombed and fired at everything that had the misfortune to hit their target. According to, again, various sources, the number of civilians killed in this case can be from 5 to 19 and a half thousand. The final (I really want to believe it!) "Chord" of this air piracy was played in the spirit of the rest of the "score" - as a result of the US Air Force missile strike on Kabul on August 29, seven children died ...

However, above we are talking only about those whose lives were taken away by the Pentagon's favorite way of fighting. In fact, the number of those killed in the "great war on terrorism" is immeasurably higher! The exact numbers, of course, do not exist, since the American "democratizers", naturally, did not keep any statistics on how many natives were sacrificed on the monstrous altar of the "values" they implanted. It remains to be content with data from independent sources, which are very different both due to the completeness of the information used and due to the calculation methods. For example, scientists from Brown University in the United States speak of a reliably recorded one million killed residents of countries under direct US occupation.

However, some of their colleagues consider this figure to be not just underestimated, but underestimated by orders of magnitude. They base their dissenting opinion on the fact that in this case only those whose lives were cut off by a bullet, shell or bomb fired by soldiers under the Stars and Stripes flag or their allies are taken into account. If we talk about those who did not survive the total hell created by these non-humans in the occupied territories - with hunger, epidemics, total devastation, then it will be difficult even to say which multiplier should be applied to the above-mentioned million. The same representatives of the organization "Physicians for Social Responsibility" argue that such a number of residents were carried away only by the active military actions that the United States waged in 2011-2015 in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It should also be borne in mind that, in the opinion of the same experts at Brown University, the absolute majority of the almost 400 persons enlisted "retroactively" by the Pentagon as "liquidated terrorists" were not, in fact, such.

The result of the "great war": shame and chaos

One can, of course, argue that there are no wars without casualties and losses. Nobody will undertake to argue with this axiom. However, there are, as they say, nuances. First of all, the fact that the irrecoverable losses of the US army (according to the official data of the Pentagon) in the epic "battle against terrorism" amounted to about 7 thousand people. Let's add to this the same number of various "contract soldiers", that is, fighters of PMCs and other mercenaries, which, no doubt, is underestimated twice, if not more (a recent story with just such characters, mercilessly abandoned by the Americans in Kabul is the best confirmation such a guess), and we get a scanty amount, in fact, for 20 years. But the expense of various "allies", that is, servicemen of armies and other armed formations, created by the US occupiers to support the puppet "governments" they imposed, and, first of all, for use as "cannon fodder" in anti-partisan hostilities, goes to hundreds of thousands of people.

On the other hand, what boggles the mind is the astronomical sums of trillions of dollars that Washington threw in not so much even in military campaigns as in attempts to "build a democratic society" in the territories it seized. That is, I wasted it absolutely in vain, since none of these experiments, which were initially doomed to failure, were not crowned with success. It is now Joe Biden who, with the most honest air, profoundly broadcasts that in 2001 his predecessors were not at all going to “teach democracy to Afghans”, but simply “wanted to get to Al-Qaeda (the organization is banned in Russia) and“ to protect America from new terrorist attacks ”. Lie more! Even as they were going, what is already there.

The "World Campaign Against Terrorism" was actually a new stage in the global expansion of the United States, confident that they could easily create and subsequently hold on their own bayonets "tame", obedient regimes in any state on the planet that managed to get into the "sphere of vital interests. »Washington. The fact that at the same time in the composition of the "democratic governments", which would be much more suitable for the name of the colonial administrations, invariably turned out to be the most selective bastard of the local, Americans, building their foreign policy on the principle "this is our bastard" was not at all embarrassing. Here are just the viability of such "governing bodies", as well as the entire "state system", which the invaders mounted on a blunder, turned out to be equal to absolute zero.

The years that have passed since 9/11 were supposed to be the beginning of an era of triumph of the peoples of the new world order, built on blood by force, dragged into the "kingdom of democratic values ​​of freedoms", the architect of which would be the United States. But their completion was marked only by the complete and final collapse of this insane project. Millions of people killed and trillions of dollars spent - it was all wasted and another attempt is unlikely to follow. The overwhelmed "hegemon" will obviously not be able to do it. This war was lost by Washington with a bang, mediocre and shameful, and nothing can be changed here. There is no doubt that official representatives of the current American administration will say a lot of loud words about "victory" at the corresponding commemorative events, but they cannot hide the overwhelming defeat obvious for the whole world.

“Wait, what about terrorism ?! After all, in fact, they fought with him for 20 years? " - you might ask. In this case, it remains only to state that just this "global threat" as a result of the "uncompromising struggle" that lasted against it since 2001 to the present time was not simply not eliminated, but decreased to the smallest degree. Quite the opposite - the military adventures of the Americans and their allies in the Middle East, in addition to the Taliban and the same Al-Qaeda, have spawned a much more terrible monster - ISIS, which they managed to put an end to only after the direct intervention of Russia. Mass migration from countries hit by the US military has made terrorism with Islamist roots a huge problem for the European Union as well. And finally, some concrete figures: immediately after the start of Enduring Freedom, the number of terrorist acts and the number of their victims in the world increased three to four times (over the period from 2003 to 2008). In 2012-2014 alone, 185 thousand people became their victims.

At present, the situation has stabilized somewhat solely thanks to the military defeat of the main forces of the "Islamic State", the main credit for which belongs not to the United States and its allies, but to our country. However, practically all the major known terrorist groups continue both their existence and active activity. Nothing else was even worth expecting. After all, how could the United States crush and destroy what it itself created and continues to support to this day? However, this is a completely different story ...