Originally Posted by
sonatine
Did you find that article particularly revelatory? Feels like we pretty much knew that. I don’t see much in there we hadn’t heard beyond a few Saudis that helped the hijackers had some diplomatic and gov’t gigs.
I usually find The Atlantic excellent, but it starts off with the premise that we may have approached fighting the attacks completely wrong? Isn’t that a no shit fact we knew a decade ago?
I mean Bin Laden was a Saudi. All the hijackers were Saudis. The whole operation was largely financed by Saudi money. Basically Saudi Arabia shipped them out to Afghanistan because there was some like minded fanatics there who would give them safe haven and having them in Saudi Arabia was bad for business. Afghans are rather poor. Obviously the genesis of Al Qaeda was born in Saudi Arabia and financed by Saudis. That they had Saudis here supporting them was always kind of obvious. That they had diplomatic gigs doesn’t really change much. We bombed Iraq because we were idiots. We knew that. We went to war in Afghanistan because that’s where the main Saudi bran trust lived, and because Bush, Cheney, and basically the entire government at the time was completely in bed with Saudi Arabia. And we still are. They are horrible friends, but they have a river of oil under their country and we aren’t going to wreck our economy by holding them accountable.
We held Iraq and Afghanistan at fault as a whole because they’re poor and we didn’t need them. You can feed the war machine Iraq and Afghanistan. You aren’t feeding them Saudi Arabia.
We only held the Saudis involved accountable because we simply couidn’t afford to ever go to war with them and hold their country responsible, even though their citizens came up with the plan, financed it, and carried it out.