The forgotten history of 9/11

It’s been 22 years since 9/11. Yet still, the events of that day are central to the global upheaval now underway. In the wake of terror, our country’s leaders set out to establish a precedent, that the US would not tolerate an attack on US soil. For our national security, we needed to respond. But along the way, we trusted but did not verify, and we set many weak and dangerous precedents which only emboldened our enemies. These precedents continued for years, in spite of the good work of our countrymen who fought global terror to protect the homeland. Now, we are left with a decision to make: do we let our past mistakes define our future decisions?

Do we let the perceptions of our choice to go into Iraq, or to prematurely pull out of Afghanistan, dictate whether we will do the right thing in Ukraine?

Let's consider the wreckless withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan that cost us hundreds of billions of dollars in equipment, twenty years of a "democratic" reconstruction down the drain, and was a signal to Vladimir Putin that the US can be outlasted. Indeed, if there was anyone who would stick around for war all while in the confines and comforts of his bunker, it's the Russian president. In otherwords, he will keep going if we let him.

There is only one credible alternative: handing Russia total defeat. Yet as some would have it, there is actually the notion that the US should pressurize Ukraine to cede territory to the Russian war criminals. Even against the backdrop of the protracted war in Afghanistan, would Americans realistically support concessions for Russia, when already hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars have been appropriated for Ukraine’s fight to expel Russia? We cannot in good conscience believe that pushing Ukraine to settle any territories to Russia is actually an argument to “prevent human suffering”, as doing so would actually reward the perpetrators of human suffering. Indeed, the idea that Ukraine settling an inch of its territory to Russia has nothing to do with morality nor humanity nor peace. The idea is propaganda for useful idiots to convince American public opinion to support Russia in getting some sort of gain.

What does Eastern Europe have to do with 9/11? Many Americans overlook the fact that the War in Iraq was an offshoot of the often forgotten Pankisi Gorge Conflict, wherein we fought side-by-side Russian military in Georgia, in search for “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as one of our first foreign interventions post 9/11. The Pankisi Gorge is a mountaineous region which separates Georgia and Chechnya. In Pankisi Gorge, we were given “credible” information in order to fight alongside Russia, that there were “Weapons of Mass Destruction” being created by “Islamic Terrorists” in the Caucus mountains. Similarly, we were given “credible” information when we were told by a single source, that there were “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq. But we never found them, and were later told this was a lie by a “curveball” informant who was apparently just a stone cold liar, and supposedly not backed by any government, as unlikely as that may be.

Yet Russia’s president Vladimir Putin did not miss an opportunity to use this “blot in history” to mock our country, as he did during his Feb 24. 2022 declaration of war on Ukraine, when he cynically incited the “Iraq War” as “the example that stands apart”, and in doing so, conflated the War in Iraq into a false pretext for Russia’s invasion into Ukraine. You see, the Iraq war was not a credible pretext for Russia to invade Ukraine because US foreign intervention in no way justifies Putin’s brutality, even from a realist perspective. Instead, the mistake with the Iraq war - when applied to Eastern Europe - was that we let Putin drag us around while we turned a blind eye to Russia’s constant invasion of neighboring countries.

The War in Iraq was an offshoot of Pankisi Gorge. But Pankisi Gorge, being just opposite of Chechnya, was actually an offshoot of Russia’s brutal attack on Chechnya. In 1999-2001, Russia had been brutally bombing Chechnya, and the capitol of Grozny was considered to be “the most destroyed city on earth”. Russia’s false pretext was that the predominantly muslim region was infected by “Islamic Extremism”. Sound familiar? But actually, the Chechnyans were simply freedom-loving people, who put forth a struggle to be their own independent country after the fall of the Soviet Union, as did many other Eastern European countries. Russia spent centuries of oppressing and conquering the Chechnyans. And so aside from the freshly Post-Soviet Russia’s invasion of Moldova’s Transistria-a former soviet republic to the west of Ukraine- the Chechnyan war in the 90s was actually the first brutal campaign which gave rise to the KGB idealogue who would soon become Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Ultimately, the post-9/11 US intervention in Pankisi Gorge destablilized Chechnya even further, and demoralized the Chechnyans. Just a year prior, the US was condemning Russia’s brutal attacks on Chechnya. Then after 9/11, the Chechnyans were all of a sudden branded as Islamic Terrorists across the globe. In the heightened paranoia of Islamaphobia, Russia’s cruel false pretext against the ethnic mountain people had actually gained momentum. In the wake of 9/11, everyone forgot about the Battle of Grozny. And thus, Russia completely got away with their brutal invasion in Chechnya.

We know Grozny to be one of the first moments Russia threatened Nuclear force to extort the US.

"Clinton allowed himself to pressurise Russia yesterday," then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin told reporters in Beijing in Dec 1999, a reponse to the US criticism over Grozny. "He must have forgotten for a moment what Russia is. We have a full arsenal of nuclear weapons." The US in fact created the conditions for Russia's nuclear saber rattling, when at the onslaught of his career Clinton helped Yelstin broker the transfer of 1900 nuclear warheads from Ukraine to Russia in the "Budapest Memorandum" - all in exchange for security assurances to Ukraine which the US has gravely fallen short of fulfilling as of yet. The "mood of the time" was to avoid nuclear conflict, but in effect, the decision actually cemented Russia's hold on former Soviet republics, and further emboldened the Russians to invade independent countries. That is, of course, because quite possibly the only thing that binds Russia together as a state at this point is its ability to pursue its policies while over 6,000 nuclear weapons rest on its territory.

The neutralizing of Ukraine's nuclear status emboldened Russia to comit atrocities in Grozny, and reinforced Russia an attractive partner to China - with Russia as a sort of thug accomplice willing to go down for all of the dirty work. Amid Russia's 1999 invasion into Chechnya, then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin stated that China and Russia would strive towards a "multi-polar world" - shorthand for a policy to clip the pretensions of the world's only superpower. The same sentiment between China and Russia have been echoed by Chinese President Xi Jin Ping in 2023 amid Russia's invasion in Ukraine. "China will work with Russia to uphold true multilateralism, promote a multipolar world . . ."

And during the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, as a convoy of 10,000 Russian troops amassed Ukraine's border, China and Russia on the opening day of the Winter Olympics declared a "no limits" partnership, backing each other over standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West.

China has written a "blank check" for Russia, in the sense that there are no bounds to how far it will go for the Sino-Russia axis, which through Russia's brutal invasion over the years, has added more and more territories to its control. Once popularized by Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orban as the "Eastern Opening", Russia is China's geopolitical inroad into Europe. Why has China proposed to avoid “nuclear proliferation”, in its so-called 2023 "Ukraine Peace Plan"? Because "nuclear proliferation" is what we can expect should the Russian terrorist regime collapse. But China is concerned about "nuclear proliferation" not because it is concerned with human life, but because it is concerned with economic instability, and the loss of it's loyal minion, the Russian regime. How the "mood of the times" has changed since the 1990s, when the US was clouded by the highs of a newfound "friendship" with Russia, and thus was responsible for brokering Russia's nuclear fortification. Of course, more poor decisions which we cannot expect to deter by satiating a criminal appetite.
 

With Russia and China deeply embedded with each other, we cannot actually believe in the decrepit idea that the US should descope Russia's threat in the wake of growing threats from China.  9/11 taught us this is a mistake.

Before the attacks on our twin towers, Russia was prioritized as the US top national security threat. After 9/11/01, the Bush administration removed Russia from the threats list. A capitalist for terror, Vladimir Putin was the first international leader to call Bush when the towers went down. At the time, the US wanted to topple Al Quaeda in Afghanistan, and we pinpointed Uzbekistan as a good military launch point to enter. Being a Eurasian country within Russia’s sphere of influence, we needed to beg at the doorsteps of Russia in order to operate out of Uzbekistan. At that point, practically eating out of the palm of Russia’s hand, the US got right back to work in Afghanistan. There, we fought side by side the muhjadeen, or “freedom fighters”, who we once backed in the Afghan War during the Cold War Era. This time, our goal was to oust the Taliban, which funded the Al Quada terrorists. The Taliban came to power during the Afghan Civil War, which stemmed from the US-backed mujadeen battling the Soviet “puppet state” which had re-emerged to seize control after the Soviet-Afghan war. But did the Soviet puppet state ever go away? It is safe to say that Russia never gave up it’s ambitions in Afghanistan, as it never did in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union fell. It is widely believed that Russia funded Al Quaeda groups during the US intervention in Afghanistan, but these reports have yet to be verified. I might note, the Russia-funding Al Qaeda allegations are not just another "9/11" conspiracy theory - but actually yet-to-be-corroborated information which came from the intelligence community. Of course, 28 pages of declassified information eventually revealed that Saudis were actually behind the 9/11 attack, in other words, the truth always eventually comes out. For now, one thing is for sure, our campaign in Iraq on search for “Weapons of Mass Destruction” sapped our resources in Afghanistan as the US chased the rabbit hole during its hunt of terrorism in the middle east. And who could this have served?

Meanwhile, after conquering Chechnya and destabilizing the Pankisi Gorge, Russia went on to invade Georgia in 2008, for which it forceably seized Azbhekia and South Osettia. The US and NATO, had earlier that year pledged at the Bucharest Summit to admit Georgia and Ukraine as a member state into the European alliance. But a far cry from the days of our intervention in Pankisi Gorge, the US and NATO stood by and watched as Russia invaded Georgia. This flaccid and weak precedent set by the US during the Georgia war led Russia to do exactly the same thing in Ukraine in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, “Europes forgotten war”. If you examine a map, you will see that since the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, Russia has forcibly annexed territories in the Eastern European countries of Georgia, Chechnya, Modolva, Kaliningrad, and now, Ukraine. A capitalist for terror and instability, Russia also occupies Syria, Nagorno Karabakh, Sudan, Niger, and more countries. We now know Russia is in military negotiations with Cuba, where there is also a Chinese spy base, only 60 miles from Florida’s coast.

If the future can be forcasted on historical patterns, we can reasonably judge that Russia will invade again. If Russia is permitted to make gains in Ukraine, we beget future wars for our children, and trade long-term stability for a “bad peace” for now.

In the continuum of history, the US decisions and actions surrounding 9/11 taught us if we give an inch to a terrorist, they will take a mile.

Today, we are so concerned with "preventing" WWIII, that our avoidance has created the same conditions for which the US decided to go to WWII. After the mass civlian killings in villages like Bucha, targeting Ukraine's energy grid during the freeze of winter, the ecocidal bombing of Khahkova Dam, and the hijacking of Zaporizhiazhia powerplant, the destroying of Ukraine's grain infrastructure and ports threatening a global hunger crisis, and Belarus now harboring Russian nuclear warheads, what more tragedy must take place in order for the US to fulfill its security promises to Ukraine which were enshrined in the Budapest Memorandum, and our promises in the 2008 Bucharest Summit, and 2023 Vilnius Summit, where it has been stated that Ukraine's rightful place is in NATO ? 

With China's growing global influence and exploitation of its partnership in Russia as a willing aggressor, how will the US reaffirm its status as the world's superpower - the status which has brought our own American nation many decades of prosperity, security, and dedicated global alliances? It is not acceptable for the US to stand by and watch the decimation of Ukraine, when over time the war further encroaches on NATO's territory - most recently in Romania across the Danube- which raises the question whether NATO would re-calibrate those red lines for which they promised to defend every inch. In order to reaffirm US global influence, and in order to guarantee security in the Euro Atlantic, we Americans cannot have a NATO wherein our European allies refuse to stand up to Russia. We cannot have this.

Going all the way to support Ukraine’s defense would be an act of dignity to quickly end the war for both Ukrainians and Russians. That means admitting Ukraine into NATO now - before the war ends, sending weapons fast to expel Russia from every inch of the occupied territories since 2014, and at the very minimum, helping Ukraine to enforce a No Fly Zone. But giving an inch of Ukrainian territory to Russia for a “bad peace” to quickly "freeze the conflict" in order to "avoid a protracted war" would set a precedent that tarnishes the honor and prestige of US international security interests, reward war criminals and terrorists, and would ultimately result in an endless conflict. Instead, if we are to avoid supporting "endless wars in foreign nations", the US must write a "blank check" for Ukraine - in the sense that our support must know "no limits" in the wake of our allied enemies. To that end, we can be confident this partnership would be well within the framework of "Just Ad Bellum" a.k.a. "Just War Theory". In other words, military support for Ukraine is justified, and very likely to succeed. If we choose "peace through strength", we will most likely find that the scales can be greatly tipped in Ukraine's favor. Right now, NATO is strengthening its forces, adding hundreds of thousands of soldiers, in direct preparation to the already degraded Russian military, who has exposed itself as incompetent and third rate- albeit barbaric threat - and is now begging countries like North Korea for weapons systems. No wonder Russia is hyper-actively calculating the resolve of NATO through its periodic attacks on the Romanian and Polish borderlands. They are clearly testing to see how far we'll actually go, which for Russia, would undoubtedly be a game changer. But if we give Russia a "consolation prize" by even the suggestion that Ukrainian territory is negotiable, then we degrade our very own country and our credibility to maintain global security. We would set a precedent for this to happen again and again. Just this summer, Russian and Chinese warships were spotted patrolling the American islands of Alaska. What do Americans stand to lose if we continue to allow Russia to take whats not there's?

Now in this time when Russia faces fragility, concessions would needlessly perpetuate Russia’s terrorist state. Victory means the liberation of all Ukrainian territory, but it could also mean the liberation of all Russian occupied territories around the globe. Not to mention, the dismantling of China's strategic partner in its quest for a "multi-polar world".

Let’s not lay to waste this moment in history which is ripened for change in our favour.

-Alexandra Zakhvatayev