9/11

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the mass murder perpetrated at New York’s World Trade Center.  The images of passenger planes crashing into densely-populated office blocks marked humanity with an indelible stain and today we should put aside a moment to remember the 3,000 victims of all the utterly senseless attacks on September 11 2001.

But just as the Great War of 1914-18 had the farcical aspiration to ‘end all wars’, so the West’s attempts to pre-empt further 9/11s by killing as many Al-Qaeda sympathisers as possible have merely created a depressingly never-ending conveyor belt for militant recruitment.

America will never forget any of the victims of those terror attacks.

But neither should we forget the scale of wanton destruction unleashed by the Bush/Blair sponsored ‘war on terror’. The lowest credible estimates of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since the US-led coalition invasions currently stands at over 900,000, the overwhelming majority of this obscene tally occurring as Iraqi civilian deaths (654,965 according to a Lancet study).

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