When the World Stopped Turning
Excerpt from ‘They’ll Hear From All of Us Soon’ by John Horowitz
Despite the unprecedented intelligence failure, the intelligence services of the US were able to deduce almost by nightfall on September 11th that Hezbollah had been responsible. As the news began to spread around media circles, the geopolitical fallout was immediate. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon leaped on the news to say that America and Israel were aligned against one enemy, which paid off in his frequent interviews on US television (especially the Bush-aligned Fox News network). This caused Israeli-sympathy in the US to reach unprecedented levels in the public and Congress, particularly inside the Republican Party. This was support he would take advantage of to push through the controversies of the Second Intifada. However, it was quickly agreed that Israel would not be involved in the retribution outside intelligence collaboration, in the same situation as the First Gulf War as the US wanted the diplomatic support of the Arab states who did not want to be seen as allied to Israel. This was especially the case given Sharon’s infamous complicity in the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, which made him particularly toxic. The Gulf states on the other hand universally expressed their sympathy for the attacks, in large part due to their fear of Iran. They saw this as the perfect opportunity to neutralize their long-running adversary (some using Hezbollah’s attacks as an excuse to crack down on Shia minority groups more generally whether they were friendly to Iran or not) and offered their air force bases for the task if and when the US decided to overthrow the Ayatollah. The Muslim world in the Balkans, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, North Africa and beyond nearly to a fault were likewise disgusted by the events – though unfortunately, this didn’t prevent the assault of Muslim minorities in the West by bigots. However, the most important reactions were taking place in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah denied responsibility as was their standard operating tactic. They accused the attacks of being an ‘Amero-Zionist false flag’, alleging among other myths that 4,000 Jewish workers hadn’t turned up for work that morning in the World Trade Centre [1]. The reason for the obfuscation was for one reason: they were scared. They had gotten used to passive American responses to terrorism like in the Barrack Bombings, and now the US was talking about the utter uprooting of Hezbollah as an organisation. In Lebanon, a country that had finally gotten Israel out of its territory and having endured a notorious Civil War, the Lebanese could not believe it. After having finally achieved peace, Hezbollah had started a war, and not just with anyone, but it seemed the entire world. Good feelings towards Hezbollah among all sects of Lebanese who were thankful for ending Israeli occupation cratered to non-existence. Even the Amal Movement (a Shia Party aligned with Hezbollah) started to put space between themselves and the organisation. Fistfights broke out in the Lebanese Parliament between Hezbollah and members of other political Parties. But the big decider would be Sunni Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who had gotten a reputation in Washington for playing all sides due to his precarious situation, though he was understood to be unhappy with the Syrian occupation of his country, as were many Lebanese who didn’t understand the point after Israel had withdrawn. After giving a series of non-committal answers, both he (and surprisingly Bashar al-Assad) would give their final word after a speech made by Bush to the American Congress on September 18th, one week after the 9/11 attacks.
To the thunderous ovation of a united chamber, Bush conclusively laid out the evidence for Hezbollah involvement and set his ultimatums to Hezbollah ‘and its supporters’. He said that the US was going to ‘Dismantle Hezbollah assets in Lebanon and around the world’, and to do that ‘the Syrian army that continues their illegal occupation of Lebanon and has supported these vicious terrorists can either leave in peace, and cease their cooperation with Hezbollah, or be considered one and the same’. Lastly, in a pointed threat to Iran – a part of the speech that was added at the insisting of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Bush said, ‘Those who aid and support Hezbollah now have a choice, to renounce them, or to perish with them’. He also revealed that for the first time in NATO history, Article V would be initiated and all NATO members would stand with America as they stood ready to annihilate Hezbollah. As he was delivering his speech, the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean began their journey east, ready to smash all Hezbollah and Syrian army targets. Within hours of the speech, a remarkable message reached Washington from the Syrian embassy – Assad caved.
Excerpt from ‘The Family: How the Assads Plundered Syria’ by Abdul Malik
Bashar’s radical shift in Syrian foreign policy was not done in a moment of bold strength but of genuine terror. He knew Syria would be helpless before the might of NATO, and his support base knew that whatever followed the US dismantling of the Assad regime was not going to be one in which they were welcome. Unused to the bright lights of international pressure, the simple doctor thrust back into the business of the real-life Corleone Family, he froze when faced with the might of the West ready to fall on his head. To that end, Bashar risked being seen as weak and hoped for a reproachment with the broader Arab and Western worlds - to do that, Iran and Hezbollah would have to be thrown under the bus. Bashar announced that all Syrian military assets would withdraw from Lebanon by October 10th, a date far ahead of capability since the West demanded them out as soon as possible to put boots on the ground, leading to unused army surplus kits being left behind. Bashar further cut off funding and support for Hezbollah, giving the Hezbollah members two choices of tickets: one for Lebanon, or one for Iran. Supposedly, it was the latter that proved more popular.
Bashar’s abrupt shift caught his friends and foes off guard, proving there was no honour among dictators as well as thieves. America and Israel expressed their cautious approval, with Syria quickly being rewarded by being removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. A week of horror stories about the Assad regime on Western television sets was ended as soon as it began, with ‘Cosmopolitan, tolerant Syria’ being the face of the ‘New Middle East’, a tourist destination like Egypt. Surprisingly, the move was quite popular in Syria itself, if only because people were terrified of war coming to their door. It was in this circumstance that Sharon saw the chance to get a third illusive peace deal for his country. In Hezbollah and Iranian media, of course, Assad became a greater Satan than Israel and America put together. He was viciously condemned for his ‘treachery’ among Anti-American factions in the Middle East. He was even condemned by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a secular, Syrian ultranationalist group who dreamed of a Pan-Syrian empire including Palestine and Lebanon who were most notable for having a swastika for their logo. They called for his overthrow and resumption of the Anti-American status-quo but were soon to find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place.
The Pro-Assad media blitz in the West would intensify with the Christmas of 2001, when he would give an interview with American media with his family beside a Christmas Tree. As an Alawite and separately a shrewd politician, he was among the number of Muslims who celebrated Christmas and took advantage of this to build sympathy with Western Christians. He also would picture himself drinking alcohol to Western press (while ruthlessly censoring the same pictures inside Syria) to further underline the distance between himself and the groups his father had made bed with. His wife likewise became a fashion symbol among certain Western publications, with some Western leaders going as far as to compare him to Gorbachev. Privately to American diplomats, Bashar would compare his ‘plight’ to those of the Israelis, as his dictatorship was the same ‘sad necessity’ as Israel’s occupation of Palestine to ‘prevent a genocide of my (Alawite) people’. To their retrospective embarrassment, many people firmly believed that Bashar was leading Syria from his dad’s dictatorship to democracy, much as what happened in Taiwan. Even in the Saudi media, Bashar was portrayed positively as man they could do business with, now that he had ‘Dragged Syria from the Ayatollah’s Dungeon’ as one state-media commentator put it.
Of course, life in Syria was just as repressive before – and would even tighten as Assad became paranoid that the whiplash from his policy changes would startle the population to resistance. The infamous Stasi-like intelligence and spy network of Syria created a culture of terror about speaking out about the family. Those who did would often simply vanish into the night. While there was indeed an influx of investment coming into the country due to the lifting of US sanctions, significant amounts were simply embezzled and stolen by the Assad family. Ultimately, to many Syrians (especially the more discriminated against Sunni majority), keeping their head down was simply the best thing to do to avoid trouble. While the political and religious discrimination was awful, they at least understood how grateful they were to not have the War on Terror visited upon them, the one that started in neighboring Lebanon.
Extract from ‘‘All of Them means All of Them!’: A History of the New Lebanon’ by Charbel Saqr
On September 19th, in a joint address between Sunni Prime Minister Hariri, Christian President Émile Lahoud and notably Shia Legislative Speaker Nabih Berri, the three declared they concluded Hezbollah was indeed responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that Hezbollah was to turn their weapons in and surrender to the Lebanese army immediately. Berri’s turn had been a startling reversal of events, as the leader of the Shia Amal Movement that was in alliance with Hezbollah in Parliament, something that until a week ago was a point of pride. Within minutes of the speech, the army tried to arrest Hezbollah members inside Beirut, leading to scattered gunshots and explosions beginning to sound around the city. The residents in Beirut felt agony in their hearts that once more, by the insanity of Nasrallah, they would have to go through it all again. Syrian troops dropped posts and often simply walked, ran or on at least some occasions stole civilian cars at gunpoint to drive to the border and escape the incoming American intervention. Among Hezbollah’s allies were the SSNP and local Baath Party, who now switched their praise of Assad to praise of Saddam Hussein owing to his condemnation of Assad for his accommodation with the West – it should be noted that any talk of a civilizational struggle against Islam quickly collapsed as Hezbollah’s allies were primarily secular while every religious institution in Lebanon ran a thousand miles from the party. Unfortunately for the Lebanese army, Hezbollah was ferocious, ruthless and had a vastly more formidable series of weapons handed over to them by the Syrians in years past. Hezbollah quickly asserted their presence, seizing most Shia areas with their firepower advantage and summarily executing members of the Amal Movement for their ‘treachery’, all the while Syrian troops simply tried to scramble out of Lebanon before the deadline by any means necessary.
In order to gain support like Saddam did back in 1991, Hezbollah in South Lebanon began to launch missiles in all directions at Israel, who were already struggling from the Second Intifada. Israeli civilians would die, with some forty-four being killed [2] in the missile attacks. Faced with the same dilemma as his father did in the Gulf War, President Bush made the same call. He pleaded with Sharon not to fire back, but to provide the locations so that the US Air Force could begin the attacks on Hezbollah. Claiming he had gotten clearance from ‘the legitimate government of Lebanon’, on September 20th the first US planes began bombing Hezbollah targets in South Lebanon. While the Lebanese government had not cleared the US to intervene so early, they quickly realised there was nothing they could do, God help them. While the ground invasion was still weeks away, the US was already striking back at the people who attacked them on 9/11.
Hezbollah positions in South Lebanon were pulverised from the air with a ferocity not seen in all the years of Israeli occupation. As one surviving Hezbollah member put it, “It was as if all the stars above had fallen upon our heads.” The bombings were met with overwhelming approval by the US public, desperate for payback on those who had massacred them weeks ago (not that any of the innocents caught in the crossfire had anything to do with it). In the meantime, Beirut itself was left to the Lebanese army and police who had the monumental task of trying to flush out Hezbollah from the multiple-floor buildings across the city, Water was cut off to try and flush out Hezbollah fighters who would try to stage break-outs in the sewers, leading to gunfights in pitch-blackness with the way lit only by machine-gun fire. While not as much of a state-collapse as before due to the widespread anger at Hezbollah among the population for what they did, the bitter memories of the seventies and eighties bubbled back to the surface. But while some worried that it would re-entrench sectarian division among a new generation, what that generation instead saw was a struggle by all sects in Lebanon working together, something that would only fully manifest in the years long after. By early October, Hezbollah’s units had been decimated by American firepower with relative ease due to the relatively small size of Lebanon making it easier to find and destroy Hezbollah assets. America and the rest of NATO began to lull themselves into a sense of security – maybe they really
could take out Iran without much of an issue …
Extract from ‘The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Iran’ by Zoreh Rahimi
The reaction among Iranian people to 9/11 was (like most else of the world) of visceral revulsion. Spontaneous candlelight vigils formed outside the Swiss Embassy (the de facto US mediator in Iran). President Khatami declared the attack ‘Barbaric’– meanwhile, the Ayatollah himself was silent. However, once US intelligence began to point the finger at Hezbollah, with the obvious implications that their supporters were now considered their target, alarm bells began to ring inside the halls of Tehran. Initial warm words of support to America were suddenly replaced with denunciations from state media about how Hezbollah could not have been behind the attacks and that it represented an attempt by America and Israel to remove their regional rivals. But there was one person who was not buying it, and that was President Khatami. He was repeatedly briefed by the Revolutionary Guards that there was no way Hezbollah could have been behind the attack and that their intelligence network would have spotted and stopped it in time. Outraged by how blatantly he was being lied to, he tried to meet the Ayatollah, who constantly delayed and pushed back meetings.
Unfortunately, however, he was also getting uncomfortable signals from his American contacts. They told him that the Neocons within the White House like Cheney and Rumsfeld were steering Bush to go after Iran, no matter what, since they saw this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to cripple the source of so much of their political headaches. While Assad was given the chance to flip by simply changing his foreign policy orientation since American diplomats were not sure a better alternative was available in Syria at the time, there was so much bad blood with Iran that nothing short of accepting fully democratic elections would do in Iran’s case since the Americans knew it would be the end of the regime. While Khatami would be fine with that, he knew the Ayatollah would not accept in essence being told to resign. It should be noted that for a long time, American officials denied that their demands included elections in Iran and consisted of nothing more requests to cut off aid to Hezbollah and other designated terrorist organisations, but papers uncovered in 2006 by the Washington Post proved that Iranian officials were given this deliberately tall demand and that it had been encouraged by Neocons within the Bush Administration like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who smelt blood in the water to realise their dream of crushing all of America’s enemies by military might.
Outside in Iran the mood was turning sour, with one case of a football game the following weekend having the player’s arrange for a minute’s silence due to the events on September 11th. Regime police, now cracking down on displays of affection for America due to the fact their proxy group was being blamed, ordered the players and referees to cancel the minute’s silence and immediately proceed to the game. In response, the game kicked off without the minute’s silence, only for the teams to immediately pause and have a minute’s silence inside the first minute of the game – one the entirety of the 60,000 people in attendance adhered to. Even the police on the scene were intimidated into silence. While inspiring, it unfortunately played a role in deluding the White House into thinking the Iran war could be wrapped up in a matter of a few months – something that was very,
very wrong. [3]
Khatami finally had a face-to-face meeting with Supreme Leader Khamenei on September 24th, the latter flanked by Yahya Safavi (commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards) and commander of the Quds Force Qasem Soleimani. Khatami pleaded with the Ayatollah to cut off and denounce Hezbollah before the US and its allies would turn their guns on Iran itself. That it might be enough to sway US opinion away from an attack on Iran. Soleimani laughed at the suggestion, saying that the terrain of Iran was so impassable it would be ‘100 Vietnams’ and that any invasion from the United States would lead to its implosion, meaning America would probably do nothing more than strike Hezbollah sites within Iran if they wanted to live. When finally asked for intervention from the Ayatollah, Khamenei cast his lot. He said that whether Hezbollah did the attack or not, America would not let this excuse pass them by and that it was foolish to communicate weakness ‘like the apostate Bashar’. He said any talk by America of installing democracy outside the command of his Supreme Leadership was little more than the ‘Second American Coup’ in reference to Operation Ajax (1953), and that to do so would lead to another Shah. He believed that if Iran held out long enough, they could strangle the global economy by keeping the price of oil to unsustainable highs and eventually the West would take a ceasefire that would leave Iran on top. “Therefore,” he reportedly said, “we will finally achieve our slogan – Death to America.” Outraged and broken, all his work gone up in smoke due to the politicking of jealous zealots who wanted war over peace, Khatami announced his resignation on the spot. However, when he got into his car, he noticed that the person in the front seat did not share the same dimensions of his driver, before noticing that the man at the front seat was not his driver at all. The man in the front seat turned around and shot Khatami multiple times with a pistol all over his body. Reportedly, Khatami’s last words were, to his assassin, “God have mercy on you, God have mercy on Iran.” President Khatami was dead at the scene.
The next morning on Iranian state television, Iran announced the ‘Diabolical Assassination of our President by CIA Assassins’. It reaffirmed its support to ‘all those who resist US Hegemony and Tyranny’ and called upon Lebanese people to resist the incoming US intervention. It rejected all demands by ‘The Great Satan and its Zionist overlords.” Fearing that Khatami’s funeral would be a rallying call to anti-regime forces, Khatami was buried in an unmarked grave outside Tehran, the location of which remains a mystery. Vice-President Mohammad Aref became President, himself a liberal and pro-reformist though he was terrorized into silence by the Revolutionary Guard, as were all dissenting voices and liberals inside the regime, as the hardliners sought to regain the power denied to them by Khatami. None but the most fanatically pro-regime Iranians (of which there were few) bought the story and saw it for the government assassination it was. In the ensuing days, protests broke out across the major cities in Iran. Among the chants were ‘Death to the regime’, ‘Down with Khamenei’ and perhaps the most chilling and human, ‘We don’t want to die’. Portraying the protests as an American operation, the Revolutionary Guard crushed the protestors with unprecedented brutality, with roughly 1,000 people killed. Though some American military leaders considered immediate shots into Iran, it was considered too early with worries that it could solidify support for the regime instead. Ultimately, the protests fell away by the end of October, with the regime still very much in power, and still defiant towards the US.
Strategically, the Ayatollah did not close the borders to Iran, not wanting a pressure cooker of anti-regime sentiment to explode in Iran. This led to an estimated five million Iranians fleeing the country even before the first US boots hit the ground. They sold their cars, houses, family jewellery to get plane tickets now worth their weight in gold. Some fled in the night to Iraqi Kurdistan, some fled by boat across the Caspian to make landfall near Baku, those with families in the West had their communities do everything they could to pull them out before it was too late. Other governments, like Turkmenbashi’s Turkmenistan and Saddam’s Iraq either turned the refugees back to Iranian authorities and their prisons in the former case, while the latter simply ordered them massacred for ‘invading Iraqi land’. Crossing into Saddam’s Iraq was the riskiest option of all, with a local population so terrorised that few locals dared to do anything to help the newcomers lest their family be forced to pay for the bullets used to execute them. Marjane Satrapi would include her parents’ harrowing escape from Iran in her graphic novel ‘Persepolis’ [4], subsequently writing that their escape to France ‘Relieved and destroyed her, as she knew that thousands of men and women like her still had family trapped at home, trapped in a soon to be burning house. A house that would burn before the eyes of the world for years.”
Khatami, despite his membership of the Islamic Republic’s government, remains a hero in Iran today, and is seen as an embodiment of ‘True Islam’ as compared to the Ayatollah’s ‘False Islam’. He has to some extent become a symbol of peaceful coexistence in the West like Ghandi. Upon his death, former Indonesian President Gus Dur would write in eulogy, “He was Islam – not in it’s ‘best’ form, but it’s true form. He was not killed for being ‘insufficiently Muslim’, but because he
was a Muslim. There is no great division between Sunni and Shia, nor between Muslims and Non-Muslims, only between good and evil. Khatami was good, and the Ayatollah evil.” While Khatami’s fame became legendary, in the Western media the Ayatollah now became seen as something of the puppet-master behind Nasrallah, for whom no retribution would be sufficient if he got away with it. But the Ayatollah remained steadfast in his defiance of the US, regardless of what the brutal invasion of Iran would look like for his citizens. He wanted a long, bloody war that would force the US to relent, and it didn’t matter how many Iranians would die to achieve it. It was as if the Ayatollah had been possessed by the spirit of Korechika Anami, who was the War Minister of Japan in the final apocalyptic days of World War Two. When screamed at by his colleagues that if they did not surrender that all Japan would be wiped off the Earth in nuclear fire, Anami would simply smile and ask, “But would that not be wonderful? For this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?”
Though nuclear fire did not await Iran, a long and tragic war did.
[1]
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/israelis-absent-911/ - A genuine (in the sense of the claim rather than its accuracy) conspiracy theory that spread in the aftermath of 9/11 among Anti-Semites.
[2] Same as the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War
[3]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5377914.stm A real event, without the regime trying to stop it IOTL
[4] Great book/film.
