10.06
Pax Americana
In suggesting motives for the U.S. government to have carried out the attacks, Professor David Ray Griffin claims that a global “Pax Americana” was a dream held by many members of the Bush Administration. This was first articulated in the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted by Paul Wolfowitz on behalf of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, in a document that has been called “a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.”
Matt Taibbi, in his book The Great Derangement argues that this is “taken completely out of context”, and that the “transformation” referenced in the paper is explicitly stated to be a decades-long process to turn the Cold War-era military into a “new, modern military” which could deal with more localized conflicts. He further ridicules this position by pointing out that, for this to be evidence of motive, that either those responsible decided to openly state their objectives, or read the paper in 2000 and quickly laid the groundwork for the 9/11 attacks using it as inspiration. In either case, he argues that this is a form of “defiant unfamiliarity with the actual character of America’s ruling class” and constitutes part of a “completely and utterly retarded” narrative to explain the attacks.
Invasions
There are claims that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq were both planned in advance of 9/11. The military intelligence journal Jane’s Intelligence Weekly reported on March 15, 2001, that India was believed to have joined Russia, the USA and Iran in a concerted front against Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, and that the efforts of the four countries facilitated the capture of a strategic town in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance. The BBC reported on September 18, 2001 that Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. MSNBC reported on May 16, 2002 that unspecified “U.S. and foreign sources” said President George W. Bush received plans on September 9, 2001 to begin a worldwide war on al-Qaeda but did not have the chance to sign it before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
Conspiracy theorists have questioned whether the Oil Factor and 9/11 provided the United States and the United Kingdom with a reason to launch a war they had wanted for some time, and suggest that this gives them a strong motive for either carrying out the attacks, or allowing them to take place. For instance, Andreas von Bülow, a former research minister in the German government, has argued that 9/11 was staged to justify the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, an American neoconservative think tank known as Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which brags influential members such as Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in September 2000, released a strategic treatise titled Rebuilding America’s Defences that reads “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams and former Republican Congressmen Pete McCloskey and Paul Findley have voiced their concerns about the influence of the PNAC on the decision by President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.
Suggested historical precedents
Time magazine contrasts events which inspired past conspiracy theories with those that inspire 9/11 conspiracy theories such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whereas the assassination of Kennedy was a private, intimate affair, the attack on the World Trade Center was witnessed by millions of people and documented by hundreds of videographers. Time magazine explains that “there is no event so plain and clear that a determined human being can’t find ambiguity in it.”