Another 9/11 in the Works?

Who knows how time works, if there is a science to the unfolding of history -- "Progress!" -- a la Hegel's dialectic? But we currently seem to be situated in a significant moment. The continuing impact of the Snowden revelations, which began in May of this year, with the latest report of the U.S. eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, puts one in mind of another era, the Vietnam era, with the battle over publishing the Pentagon Papers and then Seymour Hersh's frontpage expose of the CIA's Family Jewels at the end of 1974.

The neoconservative/neoliberal reaction that took place in wake of the exposure of the Vietnam era abuses by the intelligence agencies does not seem to be an option this time around because the neoconservative/neoliberal reaction has been the dominant global paradigm since the late 1970s. It is an exhausted paradigm that serves no one but the elites who profit from it.

But the ruling elites are so out of touch they do not realize that a paradigm shift is in order. This passage jumped out at me from Robert Worth's article on Saudi and Israeli disappointment in the current drift of Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East:

Some Middle East experts said that the unease over American policy went beyond the details of the United States’ position on Syria or a potential nuclear deal with Iran. It is also fueled, they say, by the perception that the Obama administration’s policy is grounded in the desire to avoid diplomatic and especially military confrontations in the Middle East. 

“There is a lot of confusion and lack of clarity amongst U.S. allies in the Middle East regarding Washington’s true intentions and ultimate objectives,” said Robert M. Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who was a State Department official on Middle East issues during both Democratic and Republican administrations. “There is also widespread unease throughout the Middle East, shared by many U.S. allies, that the United States’ primary objectives when it comes to Iran, Egypt or Syria are to avoid serious confrontation.”

The ruling Likudniks and scions of the House of Saud must not realize that there is no public support for another war in the Greater Middle East. Any U.S. politician or party that bangs the drum for such a war can expect to be voted out of office at the next election. Obama's attempt to win approval for missile strikes on Syria proved this point unquestionably.

A possible course of action to maintain the spent neoconservative/neoliberal paradigm that ruling elites so cherish is one voiced by Rowan Berkeley yesterday in a comment on the Moon of Alabama blog:

In my view, much of what has happened recently has been driven by a rather desperate push by the US to restore its deniability regarding AQ [Al Qaeda]. It wouldn't be altogether surprising if the US staged another major AQ attack on itself, another 9/11, just to restore this deniability. It cannot under any circumstances allow the fact that it is reliant on AQ to wear down its (or rather, Israel's) enemies, to become obvious. It has to create a massive facade of enmity between itself and AQ, and another two or three thousand USAian civilians might not be too great a price for it to pay. Then, when everybody is once again certain that AQ is the US's most deadly enemy, it will be possible for covert cooperation with AQ against Syria, Iran, Russia and China to increase substantially without fear of the secret relationship becoming publicly perceived.

While it is easy for people to dismiss this type of thinking as paranoid, I think that it needs to be seriously engaged; looked at from the perspective of paradigm maintenance it makes perfect sense.