Published on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 by TomDispatch.com
The Real Link Between 9/11 and Iraq (Finally) Revealed
by Tom Engelhardt

You've heard the President and Vice President say it over and over in
various ways: There was a connection between the events of September 11,
2001 and Iraq. Let's take this seriously and consider some of the links
between the two.

Numbers and comparisons

*At least 3,438 Iraqis died by violent means during July (roughly
similar numbers died in June and August), significantly more than the 2,973
people who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

*1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone in August, according to revised
figures from the Baghdad morgue. That's over half the 9/11 casualties in one
city in one increasingly typical month. According to the Washington Post,
this figure does not include suicide-bombing victims and others taken to the
city's hospitals, nor does it include deaths in towns near the capital.

*By the beginning of September, 2,974 U.S. military service members
had died in Iraq and in the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, more
than died in the attacks of 9/11. (Twenty-two more American soldiers died in
Iraq in the first 9 days of September; at least 3 in Afghanistan.)

*Five years later, according to Emily Gosden and David Randall of the
British newspaper, the Independent, the Bush administration's Global War on
Terror has resulted in, at a minimum, 20 times the deaths of 9/11; at a
maximum, 60 times. It has "directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people,
created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay
off the debts of every poor nation on earth. If estimates of other,
unquantified, deaths -- of insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003
invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying
from wounds -- are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000."
According to Australian journalist Paul McGeough, Iraqi officials (and
others) estimate that that country's death toll since 2003 "stands at 50,000
or more -- the proportional equivalent of about 570,000 Americans."

*Last week, the U.S. Senate agreed to appropriate another $63 billion
for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where costs have been
averaging $10 billion a month so far this year. This brings the (taxpayer)
cost for Bush's wars so far to about $469 billion and climbing. That's the
equivalent of 469 Ground Zero memorials at full cost-overrun estimates,
double that if the memorial comes in at the recently revised budget of $500
million. (Keep in mind that the estimated cost of these two wars doesn't
include various perfectly real future payouts like those for the care of
veterans and could rise into the trillions.)

*In 2003, with its invasion of Iraq over, the Bush administration had
about 150,000 troops in Iraq. Just under three and a half years later,
almost as long as it took to win World War II in the Pacific, and despite
much media coverage about coming force "draw-downs," U.S. troop levels are
actually rising -- by 15,000 in the last month. They now stand at 145,000,
just 5,000 short of the initial occupation figure. (Pre-invasion, top
administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
took it for granted that American troop levels would be drawn down to the
30,000 range within three months of the taking of Baghdad.)

Reconstruction

While Americans are planning to remember 9/11 with four vast towers
and a huge, extremely costly memorial sunk into Manhattan's Ground Zero,
Baghdadis have been thinking a bit more practically. They are putting scarce
funds into constructing two new branch morgues (with refrigeration units) in
the capital for what's now most plentiful in their country: dead bodies.
They plan to raise the city's morgue capacity to 250 bodies a day. If fully
used, that would be about 7,500 bodies a month. Think of it as a hedge
against ever more probable futures.

While the various New York memorial constructions can't get off (or
into) the ground, due to disputes and cost estimate overruns, what could be
thought of as the real American memorial to Ground Zero is going up in the
very heart of Baghdad; and unlike the prospective structures in Manhattan or
seemingly just about any other construction project in Iraq, it's on
schedule. According to Paul McGeough, the $787 million "embassy," a
21-building, heavily fortified complex (not reliant on the capital's
hopeless electricity or water systems) will pack significant bang for the
bucks -- its own built-in surface-to-air missile emplacements as well as
Starbucks and Krispy Kreme outlets, a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and a
sports center. As essentially a "suburb of Washington," with a predicted
modest staff of 3,500, it is a project that says, with all the hubris the
Bush administration can muster: We're not leaving. Never.

Record-breaking Months

*Roadside bombs (or IEDs), "the leading killer of U.S. troops," rose
to record numbers this summer -- 1,200 in August, quadrupling the January
2004 figures according to the Washington Post, while bomb and attack tips
from Iraqi citizens fell drastically. They plummeted from 5,900 in April to
3,700 in July. ("It will improve once it's not so darn lethal to go out on
the street," was the optimistic observation of retired Army Gen. Montgomery
C. Meigs, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat
Organization.)

*According to a recently released quarterly assessment the Pentagon is
mandated to do for Congress, Iraqi casualties have soared by a record 51%% in
recent months, quadrupling in just two years.

*From the same report, monthly attacks on U.S. and allied Iraqi forces
rose to about 800, doubling since early 2004. In Anbar Province, the
heartland of the Sunni insurgency (where a "very pessimistic" secret Marine
Corps assessment indicates that "we haven't been defeated militarily but we
have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost."),
attacks averaged 30 a day.

*A sideline record in the War on Terror: Afghanistan's already
sizeable opium crop is projected to increase by at least 50%% this year and
would then make up a startling 92%% of the global supply. According to
Antonio Maria Costa, the global executive director of the UN Office on Drugs
and Crime, those supplies would exceed global consumption by 30%% -- so other
records loom. (Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, the
investigation into the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden has hit a record low.
His trail has gone "stone cold. U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or
kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two
years.")

The Iraqi Condition

Along with civil war, the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, the
still-strengthening insurgency, and the security situation from hell, Iraqis
are also experiencing soaring inflation, possibly reaching 70%% this year
(which would more than double last year's 32%% rise); stagnant salaries
(where they even exist); an "inert" banking system; gas and electricity
prices up in a year by 270%%; massive corruption ("An audit sponsored by the
United Nations last week found hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraq's oil
revenue had been wrongly tallied last year or had gone missing altogether");
lack of adequate electricity or potable water supplies; tenaciously high
unemployment, ranging -- depending upon the estimate -- from 15-50/60%% (the
recent Pentagon report to Congress offers Iraqi government figures of 18%%
unemployment and 34%% underemployment); acute shortages of gasoline,
kerosene, and cooking gas in the country with the planet's third largest oil
reserves, forcing the Iraqi government to devote $800 million in scarce
funds to importing refined oil products from neighboring countries and
making endless gas lines and overnight waits the essence of normal life
("Filling up now requires several days' pay, monastic patience or both.");
an oil industry, already ragged at the time of the invasion, which has since
gone steadily downhill (its three main oil refineries are now functioning at
half-capacity and processing only half the number of barrels of oil as
before the invasion, while the biggest refinery in Baiji sometimes operates
at as little as 7.5%% of capacity); government gas subsidies severely cut (at
the urging of the International Monetary Fund); malnutrition on the rise
and, according to that Pentagon report to Congress, 25.9%% of Iraqi children
are stunted in their growth.

In other words, economically speaking, Iraq has essentially been
deconstructed.

Diving into Iraq

On December 9, 2001, Vice President Cheney began publicly arguing on
Meet the Press that there were Iraqi connections to the 9/11 attacks. It was
"pretty well confirmed," he told Tim Russert, that Mohamed Atta, the lead
hijacker, had met the previous April in Prague with a "senior official of
the Iraqi intelligence service." On September 8, 2002, he returned to the
program and reaffirmed this supposed fact even more strongly. ("[Atta] did
apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one
occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi
intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade
Center.") All of this -- and there was much more of it from Cheney, the
President, and other top officials, always leaving Iraq and 9/11, or Saddam
and al-Qaeda, or Saddam and Zarqawi in the same rhetorical neighborhood with
the final linking usually left to the listener -- was quite literally so
much Bushwa.

These were claims debunked within the intelligence community and
elsewhere before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq. We learned only
the other day from a belated partial report by the Senate Intelligence
Committee that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the
alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush
administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify
invading Iraq. We learned as well that our intelligence people knew Saddam
Hussein had actually tried to capture Zarqawi and that the claim that
Zarqawi and he were somehow in cahoots was utterly repudiated last fall by
the CIA. None of this stopped the Vice President or President -- who as late
as this August 21 insisted that Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi" -- from
continuing to make such implicit or explicit linkages even as they also
backtracked from the claims.

As is often the case, under such lies and manipulations lurks a deeper
truth. In this case, let's call it the truth of wish fulfillment. The link
between 9/11 and Iraq is unfortunately all too real. The Bush administration
made it so in the heat of the post-9/11 shock.

Think of that link this way: In the immediate wake of 9/11, our
President and Vice President hijacked our country, using the low-tech
rhetorical equivalents of box cutters and mace; then, with most passengers
on board and not quite enough of the spirit of United Flight 93 to spare,
after a brief Afghan overflight, they crashed the plane of state directly
into Iraq, causing the equivalent of a Katrina that never ends and turning
that country -- from Basra in the south to the border of Kurdistan -- into
the global equivalent of Ground Zero.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The Last Days of
Publishing, a novel, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books),
the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.