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The worst day in modern American history – that’s right, September 11. 

In the early hours of that day, two planes crashed into both World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon, and one crashed on land in Pennsylvania. 2,977 innocent victims perished, including the passengers on all four planes and employees of the towers.
 
The image and purity of Islam came under fire amid hopeless attempts to tarnish it by an act of terrorism falsely attributed to it. Nevertheless, the religion’s innocence was deliberately violated by American hedonism in retaliation.
 
America after that day was never the same, that’s true, but its foreign policy remained true to its original nature.
 
And so, the question is not why or how the US government invaded Iraq and Afghanistan among other nations, but how the American government sought the acceptance of the public to fuel the invasion of the Middle East in order to compensate for its loss in 9/11.

‘Us versus them’

On September 20, 2001, then-US president and warlord George W. Bush declared the so-called “global war on terror” – and thus began the war on the Middle East as the American public mostly cheered and watched the events unfold. In the eyes of the American people, the government has failed to do its job of protecting them – failed to prevent it, compensate for it, and tackle it. Bush needed a scapegoat. The US invaded Afghanistan a month after the attack in 2001; Yemen in 2002; Iraq in 2003; Pakistan in 2004; Libya in 2011; and Syria in 2014.
 
A September 2002 survey by the Pew Research Center demonstrated that the percentage of Americans who harbored suspicions around people of Middle Eastern descent increased from 28% to 36% in less than a year. That was merely the flick of a lighter for the government to move forward.
 
9/11 refueled the ‘us versus them’ – the civil and the savage - narrative in the American social fabric and public mindset: We, the American government, represent the civilized culture and you, people of the Middle East (in a campaign of generalizing all people in West Asia and North Africa), must abandon your "savage" ways by allowing us to invade your land in order to show you the ropes.

Read more: 9/11: Terror in Resonance

The invasions were an attempt to close the wounds for the American people, wounds with salt rubbed onto by the media that made its mission to exacerbate bigotry and xenophobia. Al-Qaeda was no longer the sole target, but the people of MENA as a whole.
 
The invasions were the result of a sought validation or justification of killing millions of civilians in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and other nations, plundering their natural resources, destroying their social fabric, and bringing their economies to the ground in order to install suitable puppet governments in case they ever left.
 
The government abused the tragedies of its citizens, a tragedy rooted in the US' own support of Afghan insurgents in the 80s, to sell its own campaign of terror as one of justice.

Back to the ‘Line in the Sand’ 

In October 2001, 45 days after the attacks, the US passed the Patriot Act law, which allows internet service providers to give the government information about ordinary citizens and allow them to monitor their emails and phone records under the pretext of preventing future terrorist acts. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) decried the USA Patriot Act as a bill that violates the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens from being searched and/or monitored by the government without a warrant.
 
In the wake of the public’s knowledge of the illegal surveillance and whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of the matter to the public, expired provisions in the Patriot Act were amended and thus the bill became the Freedom Act, which limited the National Security Agency’s ability to monitor people’s privacies.
 
On the popular level, although 83% of the US public approved of the government’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the support quickly waned a few years later as the public began to worry about this act of aggression and question it.
 
However, to soothe the public concern about war, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell flipped the board to demonstrate the "necessity" of this imperial tactic at a UN Security Council meeting in 2003. He raised the matter of “facts and conclusions, based on solid intelligence” that painted Iraq as a country violating UN weapons resolutions, further claiming that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was “in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option” and that such a possibility should not exist “in a post-September 11 world."
 
Two years later, Resolution 1624 was adopted by the UN Security Council concerning the incitement to commit acts of terrorism and the requirements of countries to comply with international human rights laws.
 
Despite the fact that as part of the Resolution, adopting nations are required to submit annual reports on counterterrorism activities, both the United States and “Israel” declined and refused to do so. Well, color me surprised.
 
Shortly after Powell’s declaration, a survey showed that 61% of Americans believed invading Iraq to end Saddam Hussein’s rule was logical. That number later jumped to 74% after his “Mission Accomplished” speech declaring the end of major combat in Iraq in 2003, but that was the last time that number was ever seen.
 
In the summer of that year, the number of Americans who believed the war in Iraq was going according to plan, a few months earlier at a whopping 90%, plunged to around 60%.
 
Wounded victims and families of the victims who perished in the 9/11 attacks were not the drivers behind the point of no return. It was the US government that used their pain to flame the jingoistic fires of hell flung upon by the march of troops.

To this day, many Americans – 72% of those who identify as Republicans at least – still believe that the religion of Islam preaches the encouragement of violence, according to an August 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, a belief only exacerbated by the US state’s continuous aggressions against Muslim-majority countries and the subservient media cheering upon the bodies of Arabs and Muslims murdered by US strikes.
 
It is the state-enforced education policies and political follow-ups that are to be blamed for the engraved idea in many American mindsets that Muslims have violent tendencies that come with religion. It is through the abuse of the American grief and the premeditated spread of fallacies and lies that the invasion of the Middle East and the murder of its people was "justified" and used to revive James Barr’s “Line in the Sand” – but on US terms.
 
The American population played into the hands of its government – from Bush to Biden, passing by Obama and Trump – a duplicitous government that sought the approval of whom it has failed to justify the invasion of nations and claim civilian body counts as proof of success.