What was the WSWS's original analysis in 2001 of how US imperialism's own policies created the conditions for the September 11 attacks?

The WSWS's foundational analysis appeared the day after the attacks, in David North and David Walsh's "The political roots of the terror attack on New York and Washington" (September 12, 2001). Its central argument was that the attacks could not be understood apart from the record of American imperialism in the Middle East — a record the US ruling class and its media refused to acknowledge.

The core thesis

The article opened with an unequivocal condemnation of the attacks as mass murder, and a rejection of terrorism as a reactionary method — one that "plays into the hands" of the very elements in the US establishment seeking a pretext for war, and one that disorients rather than mobilizes the working class. But it insisted that this condemnation implied no lessening of opposition to US policy. The key passage:

"Anyone who wishes to understand the why and wherefore of yesterday's events must study the historical and political record of the US in the Middle East, especially over the last thirty years."

What the analysis identified as the causes

The article laid out several interlocking points about how US policy had created the conditions for the attack:

Continuous US warfare in the region. The US had been bombing one or another Middle Eastern country almost continuously since 1983 — Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan — including nearly eleven years of military operations against Iraq. The daily bombing of Iraq was "barely mentioned in the American media," which made no attempt to count Iraqi deaths. The article asked pointedly: "Given this bloody record, why should anyone be surprised that those who have been targeted by the United States have sought to strike back?"

Support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. The "unstinting support for the Israeli state's oppression of the Palestinian people" had placed the US "in violent opposition to the legitimate and irrepressible democratic, national and social aspirations of the Arab masses."

The hypocrisy of the US media. The same media screaming for blood had "routinely applauded the use of violence" against US-designated enemies, exemplified by the article's quotation of Thomas Friedman's genocidal 1999 column urging that Belgrade be "pulverized."

Washington's own officials acknowledged the blowback. The article cited former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger's admission during the Balkan war that the US had presented itself as "the bully on the block" who kills people from a distance — an insight that did not prevent Eagleburger from demanding immediate bombing the night of September 11.

The CIA had nurtured the very forces it now blamed. The article noted that bin Laden and the Taliban had been "financed and armed by the Reagan-Bush administration" to fight the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. If they were involved, "the American CIA and political establishment are guilty of having nurtured the very forces that carried out the bloodiest attack on American civilians in US history."

It also raised the question — left pointedly unanswered — of how bin Laden could have organized an attack on the same tower hit in 1993 without detection, given the US's massive surveillance apparatus, suggesting the "crusade against terrorism" had been far more a propaganda campaign to justify US violence than a genuine effort to protect Americans.

The conclusion

The article's summation was direct: "It is the policies pursued by the United States, driven by the strategic and financial interests of the ruling elite, which laid the foundations for the nightmare that unfolded on Tuesday." It warned that the "escalation of US militarism abroad" would be accompanied by intensified attacks on democratic rights at home, with Arab-Americans as the first victims — a prediction borne out in the months that followed, and that Bush's "no distinction" doctrine would "only set the stage for further catastrophes."

This analysis — terrorism as reactionary, US imperialism as the source of the conditions for terrorism, and the working class as having no side in an inter-imperialist conflict — set the framework for everything the WSWS wrote subsequently, from its condemnation of the Afghanistan war to its rejection of both the "war on terror" and the pseudo-left's "anti-Americanism of fools."