Did the United States use 9/11 as a Pretext to Invade Iraq?

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At the present moment the United States of America and its Western allies are deeply involved in the Syrian War and in a series of ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts that have cost the lives of well over a million people and displaced millions more. The continuing US military presence in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan has been reframed so as to present the United States as a peacekeeper or some sort of supreme arbiter. US foreign policy over the past number of decades has something to do with the these atrocious and deadly conflicts, and, by extension, the current refugee crisis which is doing serious damage to human beings, escalating racial tensions across the world, and threatening to destabilise the European Union.

The People vs. United States Foreign Policy in the Middle East
11 September 2001

Over this series of posts we will put US foreign policy regarding the Middle East on trial. As always, innocence will be presumed until otherwise proven. We will collect and present evidence from first hand witnesses, from relevant documents that have been made public, and from other significant sources. 11 September 2001 – the date on which members of Al-Qaeda hijacked domestic flights over the eastern territorial United States and launched suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre towers in New York, the Pentagon complex in Virginia, and a failed attack on Washington DC – provides us with a starting point. These terror attacks were the catalyst for the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror,’ the pretext on which the United States launched its 7 October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (codenamed “Operation Enduring Freedom”), and its subsequent 19 March 2003 invasion of Iraq (codenamed “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) without a formal declaration of war.

We the People put it that US foreign policy with regard to the Middle East has followed a policy doctrine that has sought to destabilise governments in the region to assist in their replacement with puppet regimes under the control of the United States. We charge US foreign policy and US foreign policy makers with wilfully causing the deaths of millions across the Middle East and around the world in its global war on terror. We put it to you that the US has done this to increase its influence in the Middle East against international competitors, and to gain greater access to oil and other economic and strategic resources.

Our first witness to take the stand is General Wesley Kanne Clark, Sr., United States Army (retired). He had a distinguished career in the military, serving as a staff officer with the first infantry division during the war in Vietnam, went on to lead the allied forces during the Kosovo war, and ended his active military career as NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe. On 11 September 2001 he held top level clearance at the Pentagon and was called to a briefing with the US chiefs of staff.