Playlist 9/11

If not for the CIA, would either 9/11/1973 or 9/11/2001 have happened?

We can't change the past, nor can we predict the future.  But if we take a cursory look at what's gone on on Planet Earth in my lifetime, it would be overwhelmingly reasonable to assume that neither 9/11/1973 or 9/11/2001 would have happened without the existence of the CIA and its practices in support of US foreign policy.

At this point I'm probably losing most of my readers, aside from the most conspiracy-obsessed ones.  This is by design, on the part of the social engineers.  You're supposed to be thinking of emotionally unstable incel nerds with aluminum-foil hats ranting about secret societies, and your eyes should shortly start glossing over.

But I wonder if I could reel your attention back in with a little fantasizing.  Imagine with me a world where everything else remains more or less the same, but in which the USA disappears.  It's preposterous, I know, but what if the world woke up on New Year's day in, say, 1970, and the United States was just gone, like Skull Island or something.  What would be the geopolitical ramifications, specifically with concern to these two famous September 11ths?

Before I even go there, let's dwell in the brains of the Cold Warriors whose minds will be veritably screaming at the notion that anything might transpire short of a Soviet invasion and occupation of the rest of the world, and just say that this was never in the cards in the first place, and if you believed this was ever a serious prospect, you were drinking NATO Kool-Aid.  If the Soviet Union ever had such global imperial ambitions, they would have invested in an air force and a navy, but they never developed the kind of military machine necessary to transport large numbers of troops across oceans like that.  If the USSR ever had ambitions of continuing much further to the west after the occupation of Berlin in 1945, certainly the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that would soon be governing direct military interactions between the nuclear powers would make any such move in 1970 pretty impossible.

And what of the two 9/11's?  Without the School of the Americas to train the soldiers, and Henry Kissinger and the CIA to participate in the destabilizing of Salvador Allende's government in Chile, together engineering shortages, industrial sabotage and disinformation campaigns, without the CIA to provide money and Nixon to provide political cover, would there ever have been a military coup that would successfully overthrow this popularly-elected government on 9/11/1973?

It seems exceedingly unlikely, especially in the absence of another imperialist actor taking the place of the United States.  If all things are to be as they were, aside from the disappearance of the USA, there wasn't another imperial power playing this role.  Without the history of the Monroe Doctrine and all that, would another power have taken the place of the US?  Realistically, if the corporation that owned Chile's copper were from another country, maybe that country's government would want to pursue the organizing of a military coup against the government nationalizing their corporation's mining operations.  Or maybe they wouldn't.  Other countries have managed to nationalize resources without having their elected governments overthrown.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan.  If our fantasy is based in the magical 1970 disappearance of the USA, in 1970 it was still quite safe to travel the old Silk Road, by land, all the way from western Europe to India and back.  I know lots of people who did that back then.  They'd go right through Afghanistan, with rave reviews of the place to boot.

Afghanistan today is known as a "war-torn country," pretty much by definition at this point.  In 1970 it wasn't, though, none of that had started yet.  What if the US was out of the picture?  When Soviet help was invited by the new Afghan government, would there ever have been such widespread hostility to the schools for girls and other modern institutions they were helping to build there, if not for the massive military aid the CIA was funneling into all the most wackiest elements of the Afghan government's Islamist opposition?  

When you know, for example, that it took the Afghan government years to fall to the Mujahideen after the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops, rather than hours, in the case of the US withdrawal decades later, you realize that what was going on throughout the 1980's was a proxy war, which would never have been anything like it was without billions of dollars of CIA intervention.

Without the CIA, and the Afghan war, there would never have been an Al-Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden wouldn't have had Afghanistan as a staging ground for building his international movement against the infidels.  There would never have been an Al-Qaeda to turn its attention from the godless communists to the American capitalists (if they hadn’t disappeared in 1970), if not for the CIA and the Afghan war of the 1980's.

I figure when you look around and most everything out there seems pretty dismal, it's a better time than ever to dream about how things could be.

Playlist 9/11 (Soundcloud)

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