GeorgeWashington's excellent essay a couple weeks back hit the nail on the head as to how to answer the claim, asked by newbies and exploited as a main debunker talking point, that if 9/11 were an inside job, the hijackers would have been Iraqi.

This reminded me of a post I made on Amazon over a year ago, while debating a guy called Steve Farrell. Steve was an interesting guy by the way. He started out being very civil, so you believe he's a genuine newbie. But a couple hundred posts later, after his points had been continuously answered or rebutted, he became increasingly hostile and JREF-like. Anyway, in an arrogant tone, he said to me:

"For instance, if the entire 9/11 hoax was perpetrated so the USA could invade Afghanistan and Iraq, why would the FBI make their fictional fall guys Saudis instead of Afghanis or Iraqis? See, this fact doesn't support the claim that the 'hijackers' were scapegoats for the inside job."

Here was my answer:
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Admittedly, this is a very valid question, and it requires an answer more than a couple sentences.

In order to answer your question, remember that Rumsfeld on 9/11 wrote a memo to his aide, "Judge whether to hit S.H. at the same time. Not only U.B.L. Go massive. Sweep it all up, things related and not." Rumsfeld, in other words, initially did not want to wait til March '03 for Iraq. He wanted to attack it that fall. Unfortunately, intelligence communities were not convinced that Iraq bore any measure of responsibility (despite FOX news propaganda at the time). So Rumsfeld and crew grudgingly say, "Well, Afghanistan is part of our agenda too, so we might as well get that out of the way (since we planned its invasion back in May). We'll have a quick victory and a regime change, then we'll propagandize the American public into being scared for another year, with terror alerts and threats of west-coast bridge bombings, during which time they'll forget the difference between Saddam and Osama."

Steve, I think you overestimate the dear intelligence of fellow Americans. Polls taken in 2003 showed that 70% of the American public believed Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. Though Craig Unger had published his book "House of Bush, House of Saud" already in 2003, Americans don't read. It actually had to take Michael Moore and his movie in 2004 to get the masses to realize that 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers were Saudis! At that point in 2004, many dumbed-down but well-intentioned Americans were like, "Oh, ya mean teh high-jackurz weren't I-rackiz?"

The point is that they were Arabs, and for base propaganda purposes it didn't matter what nation they were from, as far as the American people were concerned. They most likely chose Saudis because it would receive the highest level of credibility within the international intelligence communities. Different levels of credibility exist (the common man will believe more lies than a high-level intelligence agent), and the international intelligence community wouldn't have believed the hijackers were Iraqi. After all, the "war on terror" was supposed to have been orchestrated by Islamic fanatics, and Saddam and his Baath Party were SECULAR authoritarians who essentially outlawed religion in the open. So if the hijackers had been Iraqi, they wouldn't have operated at the behest of Saddam's government, and the mission of "O.I. Freedom" was to remove Saddam's regime.

And, contrary to what many Americans still think, the international community knew ALL ALONG that Iraq was no threat. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice said in May and July of 2001, respectively that "[Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with regard to weapons of mass destruction; he is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." Condi: "We are able to keep arms from him, his military forces have not been rebuilt."

So it wasn't just the "international" community. U.S. officials knew damn well he wasn't a threat. They were boldly lying to a still-in-shock-over-9/11, gullible American public, and a not-quite-so-gullible international community. Hence, at the eve of war, the majority of the world's Asian and European citizens were universally condemning the coming Iraq invasion, while Michael Moore was considered a traitor in this country for thinking the same. Many people angrily reacted to his Oscar speech with "Have you already forgotten about 9/11?"

However, if we want to speculate more on the mind propaganda thing, it makes sense not to use Afghans as the fall-guys because then it would really have made it look too much like war with one single nation. Afghanistan attacks us with Afghan hijackers, we attack Afghanistan and remove the Taliban, and DONE! Then people would scratch their heads about why we would later be going into Iraq. But when the hijackers are Saudis, the Karl Roves can say: "See, al-Qaeda is a pan-regional boogeyman! The hijackers were originally Saudis but were living in Afghanistan right before they attacked us! So it's about more than just Afghanistan, it's a global war on terror!"

See? So now I've explained why it makes sense that the hijackers were neither Afghans nor Iraqis.

In short, I think the government realized that ORDINARY Americans would be ethnically propagandized by 19 Arabs from anywhere, and they were the convenient patsies to launch a global war on terror involving many nations.

Also, since many people, from the moment Bush got into office (and even before), were predicting that Bush was itching to finish the job his father started with Iraq, an immediate attack on Iraq after 9/11 would, to the international community anyway, seemed too convenient, and in my opinion, it would have made the inside job suspicions stronger, earlier. I personally didn't start seriously looking at inside job claims until halfway through 2005 (after the Downing Street Memo came out), though I realized on 9/12 just how much political gain the previous day's events would reap for the Bush administration. When I saw Bush approval rating reach 91%, the idea of an "inside job" crossed my mind for a few seconds, but back then, I immediately dismissed it on the grounds of "our leaders would never do such a thing" and "too many people would have to keep quiet."

Renowned social historian and author Michael Parenti has written that "Sometimes the policymakers themselves seize upon incompetence as a cover when the truth is more sinister." He writes: "For example, when the Iran-Contra affair was discovered, President Reagan plead incompetence. His admission of incompetence was eagerly embraced by various analysts and pundits who prefer to see their leaders as suffering from innocent ignorance rather than deliberate deception. Subsequent testimony by his subordinates, however, revealed that Reagan was not as dumb as he was pretending to be, and that he had played an active and deciding role in the entire Iran-contra affair."

Incidentally, if the Iraqis had welcomed us with flowers and chocolates, and if we were already out of there, no seizure upon incompetence would be needed, everyone would be happy and everything would be all good, even if no WMDs were found.

So, various guises of incompetence can be orchestrated. People can defend their government's "incompetence" for attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, when the alleged hijackers were mostly Saudi. Look how many people are still calling the Iraq invasion a "blunder, and a distraction from the greater war on terror, and a huge 'mistake,'" et cetera. Meanwhile, Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are in the lunch room laughing at how easy it is to manipulate the majority of the public. Obviously the Iraq invasion was no "mistake" from the eyes of Cheney or Rumsfeld; it was a central part of their plan. But Americans, who would prefer not to see their leaders as deliberate liars re leading the country to war seize upon the "Iraq was an innocent mistake" canard, while also believing the legitimacy of the "global war on terror."
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Steve Farrell never acknowledged my lengthy answer to his question.

Here's my original post, by the way (the above post was just part of an even longer single post)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Official-Story/forum/FxN560U7AP4EHP/TxN5HLXBLVHHVL/3/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?%5Fencoding=UTF8&cdMsgNo...