Questions like this, asked in the yet occupied territories of Iraq, came surprising. Because outside views on the country were centered to a boolean argument whether Iraq would at all appreciate foreign interference, timing details got less coverage. And as none of the numerous voices commenting the war from different points of view ever has expressly plead for any given delay, but instead pro or con in general, it could prove as difficult to provide a satisfying explanation.

The pre-D-Day discourse did not anticipate the scenario that one of the first things Iraqis could do is asking questions. Accordingly, we are not preparared to answer them. But for the sake of the future it must be tried. However, the very fact that such questions are posed proves that history matters. It indicates that some more or less recent Middle Eastern events could require a second look.

Such a look might begin with the word Gulf War itself, which implies a geographically closed view of the events that followed the end of the Cold War. Most people, when they imagine the region around one of the worlds economically most sensitive waters, see a dispute on access and a trade-driven skirmish on resources, fueling conflicts between the eight coastal states not necessarily limited to an unpopulated maritime battleground and local armies. In fact, parallelizing the crude oil price graph and the long record of armed conflict is more a visual test than a scientific challenge.

The latter rather can be sought in explaining why so often the effects of their moves developed poignantly different from what any of the respective players in the economic game had anticipated. But such explanations would pinpoint that commercial rivalry carried out by other means never had been unilateral nor temporary to the period known as Gulf War. Instead, as regional background noise, it just provides the platform for more far-ranging objectives.

The prevalent story of Saddams 1990 conquest is easily told: On the morning of August 2, his troops took the Emirate of Kuwait in a half-a-day blitzkrieg. In the lee of the all-side approved abolition of Germanys intra-national border, which just took place, Iraq expected the facts it had created to be accepted as a similiar, intra-Arab merger. But after a few days of hesitation, the United Nations were sure they wouldn't.

Operation Desert Shield, a deployment of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia begun, declaredly intended to stop a direct Iraqi advance to the neighboring kingdom. Obviously successful with that, it didn't achieve the stipulated restoration of Kuwait by mere threat. After an ample ultimatum ran out, Operation Desert Storm was launched, a 35 day air campaign complemented by a 5 day ground operation. It finally hammered the Iraqi troops out of the city state, albeit without consideration of body count nor aftermath. Saddams way to the south was blocked, and his stepping stone to the kingdom was drawn off.

One could believe that for a decade. But in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was this very matter which entailed a dispute inside the Arab League, causing Egyptian state TV to cut down its life feed and later being described as a "drama" by Saudi media. In an impromptu speech intercepted by Crown Prince Abdullah with grim swearings and the threat of leaving the conference, Libyan dictator Qaddafi had pointed to the Saudi depiction of the Iraqi plans beyond Kuwait:

"I told King Fahd that American forces are moving into Saudi Arabia. He then replied 'America is a big country and we cannot prevent it and it can come.' I told him: 'How can this happen to Saudi Arabia, which is an independent country?' After that in a telephone conversation, the king told me that Iraq had intention to invade the Kingdom. I asked him how he knew. He said: 'We have seen the Iraqi forces deployed on the front. That means the Iraqi threat was a source of concern and threat for the Kingdom and all the Gulf states. America has pledged to protect this region because it is an important source of energy.'"

Yet since the so-called Gulf War, it had been questioned that a military buildup at the Saudi border in the immediate aftermath of the Kuwait conquest had ever taken place. If it had, even Operation Desert Shield commander Norman Schwarzkopf didn't know it from the very beginning, when he was briefed that the U.S. wouldn't go to war for Kuwait only. He learned it a few days later: "I was stunned," Schwarzkopf wrote in his autobiography. "A lot must have happened after I left Camp David that Powell wasn't talking about. President Bush had made up his mind to send troops."

Jean Heller, a reporter to the Florida-based Petersburg Times claimed to have bought imagery from a commercial Russian satellite provider which didn't show the 265,000 Iraqi soldiers and 1,500 tanks the administration said it had simultaneously pictured on military satellite photographs still classified for security reasons. Obviously it had not been in the then Presidents mandate to expose what Saddam had in his mind when he invaded Kuwait. The Elder Bush administration simply copied the Saudi allegation that Saddams next hop from Kuwait would be Riyadh.

But in contrast, the Sheikh of Kuwait said it would be Jerusalem and gave a poignantly different explanation of the events in the run-up to the war: "By calling for convening the Arab Summit in May 1990, the Iraqi regime aimed at gaining Arab support as regards the Iraqi attitude against Israel and the USA. Iraq succeeded, to a certain extent, in making the Arabs believe that after the Iraqi-Iranian war was over, they should only be concerned with the Palestinian issue and that Iraq's political aim was to obtain modern weapons in order to put an end to the Israeli attacks. Thus, Iraq was able to gain the Arabs' support after threatening to burn Israel with chemical weapons.

When the Arab support for Iraq reached its utmost, the Iraqi regime fabricated a crisis with Kuwait, believing that this was the right time to carry out its plan to seize Kuwait. So, Iraq deliberately aggravated the crisis quickly and invaded Kuwait. Iraq thought that the Arabs would approve that as long as it would help liberate Palestine. In addition, Iraq thought that no foreign power would oppose that aggression as long as the foreign interests (concerning the oil) in the region were not affected in any way."

In 1990, the fallout of the Saudi victory in Afghanistan had brought an unanticipated consequence for the Middle East. As the Soviet Union opened her borders, immigration to Israel had skyrocketed from 2,000 to more than 185,000 a year and, encouraged by Yasser Arafat, Saddam had taken the initiative to channel the proportionally increasing hatred. At her annual summit in Baghdad, the Arab League embraced a non-negotiable common stance against "the planned, organized Jewish immigration to the occupied territories" as well as "Western efforts to prevent Iraq from developing advanced weapons technology."

Driven by the consideration that warmongering against the common enemy also could help turning the balance of power inside the Arab League, Iraq had chosen a risky gamble on the anti-Israeli ticket. While feared at home, Saddam was on the run to become the popular strongman that many non-Iraqi Arabs expected to appear in the regional arena.

But though sharing that goal, the Saudis didn't want him to wreck Israel but preferred to pocket the fame themselves. As yet an absorption of Kuwait could shift the center of gravity to Iraq, Saudi Arabia saw its role as lead nation of the Arab League threatened.

In a move unanticipated by many Arabs, including Saddam, Al Saud asked their primary prop, the United States of America, to expand her military presence. As the U.S. then were embetted in a United Nations and Arab League coalition factoring out Israel, they would forcibly undo the conquest of Kuwait, but not touch the regional setting which facilitated it.

As pro-Israeli Marxist writer Joachim Bruhn had put it in 1991 for a joint statement of German intellectuals criticizing the then peace camp, that demonized Israel and later took down its placards when the slaughter of the uprisings begun: "The U.S. did the right thing, but for the wrong reasons."

Besides preserving the unstable balance of power within the Arab League, the Saudi regime was on the brink of a decision how to deal with his yet nonresident new military wing. While the domestically obnoxious House of Saud always had run its regular army by principle of coup-proofness by inefficiency, the external offensive-only army cultivated in the Afghan jihad now was slowly getting out of control. This is how a Bin Laden biography aligned to the Saudi allegation put it:

"He reacted swiftly to Iraqi invasion and saw it fulfilling his prophecy. He immediately forwarded another letter to the king suggesting in detail how to protect the country from potentially advancing Iraqi forces. In addition to many military tactics suggested, he volunteered to bring all the Arab mujahedeen to defend the kingdom. That letter was presented in the first few days of the incident, and the regime response was of consideration! While he was expecting some call to mobilize his men and equipment he heard the news which transferred his life completely. The Americans are coming."

Although a southbound Iraqi advance was questionable and border-defense never had been the mujahedeens strength, it was obvious that the Saudis had made a more or less permanent decision against the backflow of their Afghanistan veterans. They feared that any shift of power away from the royal family easily could become a slippery slope.

When erstwhile secular Saddam realized that his Saudi neighbours were serious with the U.S.-enforced ultimatum, he switched to openly appeasing the Islamists. On Jan 13, 1991, two days before it ran out, Iraq included an "Allahu Akbar" commitment into the national emblem, or as Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid put it recently, "wrote the hostility against Israel on its flag."

Then came the Operation Desert Storm. Saddam fired missiles against Israel, but the world took it as a gesture that a beaten conquistador suddenly had to prove he was an Arab leader rather than the remainders of his primary war goals. Kuwait was restored, Iraq contained and Saudi Arabias internally questioned regime preserved.

The residual U.S. troops in the kingdom and beyond became the shock absorber for regional disconcertment. If they haven't had yet before, bin Laden and Saddam now shared the goal to get rid of them. Though Israel and Iraqs Palestinian proxies for the time being were involved in the new internationalized truce of the Oslo Process, the House of Saud had prevailed in any means. Slowly but accelerating the war dispersed throughout the world.

The war crystallized again, when in the sunset of the Clinton Years, on Sep 28, 2000, Al Saud - increasingly incapable to maintain domestic stability without deflection - hijacked the Israeli election campaign. Embedded into Palestinian public relations efforts depicting the highly internationalized conflict as bilateral in an isolated environment, a chain of suicide bombings scheduled to peace-brokering attempts pulled the country into a war of attrition. Perspectively, it seemed to amount to a reenaction of the fate of pre-Munich Czech, which in the run-up to WWII had been screwed up by pro-Hitler rejectionists.

Yet while the Israeli election campaign hung over, American ballots took place, soon disemboguing into what observers described as the closest and most extraordinary presidential election in history. However, the mere duration of the proceeding indicated, that there was at least a widespread perception of spoofing. But focussed on Middle Eastern issues, the Nov 7, 2000 elections showed a poignantly clear-cut pattern.

In the eve of the ballot, Rachel Donadio, a journalist to the leftist Jewish weekly Forward, said signs were growing that the outcome of the elections could hinge on perceptions of the Middle East crisis: "The seemingly intentional nod to Arab Americans by Mr. Bush reinforced a pro-Bush trend already visible in that community, thanks to what many Arabs here and in the Middle East see as a pro-Israel tilt in the Clinton administration, and, by implication, in the Gore-Lieberman ticket. ... Mr. Bush was endorsed early this week by the Michigan-based Arab-American Political Action Committee, and a survey conducted this month by John Zogby, a New York-based Republican pollster, shows Mr. Bush beating out Mr. Gore among Arab-American voters by 40% to 28%."

Zogby also conducted on a post-election survey commissioned by Abu Dhabi Television, which backed up this prospect even stronger: "The initial finding of the poll was that Arab Americans supported the candidacy of Republican George W. Bush over the candidacy of Democrat Al Gore by a margin of 45.5 per cent to 38 per cent. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader won 13.5 per cent of the community's vote. ... The Bush victory occurred despite a 40 per cent to 38 per cent Democratic edge among Arab American voters. The Bush margin of 7.5 per cent over Gore when compared with Clinton's 20 per cent margin over Republican Bob Dole in 1996 represents a dramatic shift of almost 28 per cent - with approximately 390,000 Arab American votes moving between the Democratic and the Republican and third-party candidates from 1996 to 2000. ... Because this election took place against the backdrop of escalating Israeli violence against Palestinians, the trauma produced by that conflict apparently influenced the votes of a number of Arab Americans."

Josh Pollack, a writer to the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal, indicated that Younger Bush, whose White House biography mentions "a career in the energy business", was not merely the "'Arab' candidate", but rather cast as a Saudi bagman: "The first factor was the personal relationship between the Bush family and the Saudi royals, inherited from Clinton's predecessor and the new president's father, George H.W. Bush. This connection seemed to offer hope to Riyadh for a renewal of the relationship through known channels. Like his father, the younger Bush was a former oilman, likely to grasp the importance of U.S.-Saudi relations. The first Bush administration had confronted Israel over the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and brought Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government to the peace table at Madrid. President George W. Bush had also returned to office two senior officials familiar from a decade before, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and presumably was also receptive to his father's advice."

Though stuck to approvalism and its non-negotiable scope of options, the new Bush administration was hesitating to follow the United Nations on their way of growing a proxy of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Meanwhile, after the Israelis cut off funds, the Palestinian Authority finally became a Saudi-European joint venture. From the very beginning designed as a puppet of the Arab League, the Palestinian people granted self-governance in Israel under Arafats control had become what Barbara Lerner described as a "rejectionist front in miniature". Complementary, Old Europe embraced the role of a declared affiliate to the U.S., suggesting a further and irreversible internationalization of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict falsely depicted as the source of instability in the region rather than its target.

The the Saudis still needed to consolidate their influence by carefully pressing the U.S. into what their European proxies used to market as multilateralism. As Michael Leeden put it: "The French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we'll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans. The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States. This required considerable skill, and total cynicism, both of which were in abundant supply in Paris and Berlin."

That process was vulnerable to domestic repercussions. Pollack: "In the public sphere, the intifada tended to overshadow these problems. By disrupting the Middle East peace process, it brought to its conclusion a relatively easy period in America's post-Cold War experiment in balancing relations with both Jewish and Arab allies. A demographic surge, combined with both the coming of age of Arabic-language satellite television news and the recent introduction of the internet to the kingdom, put pressure on the Saudi leadership. The kingdom's youthful populace, inflamed by constant broadcasts of Israeli military actions against the Palestinians, was also enraged at America, widely perceived as backing the Israelis, and angered by the their own authorities' ties with the United States."

Simultaneously, the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah was more and more urging America. Pollack: "While maintaining this distance, he repeatedly called on Bush to restrain Israel. ... The extent to which the Saudi leadership was drawn into the loop of the Israeli-Palestinian problem, or was perceived to have been, was illustrated by an account alleging that Gaza Preventive Security Chief Muhammad Dahlan, having come under fire from Israeli troops on April 5, 2001, complained to Arafat, who called Crown Prince Abdullah, who called Prince Bandar, who phoned Vice President Cheney, quickly spurring a call from Secretary of State Powell to Prime Minister Sharon."

When the U.S. denied to join the U.N. Durban Conference against Zionism in late summer of 2001, this precipitated a temporary demarche of Saudi ambassador Bandar, threatening a break in the noticeable interlaced relationship: "A time comes when peoples and nations part. We are at a crossroads. It is time for the United States and Saudi Arabia to look to their separate interests."

A decision of some historical momentousness hung in the balance. The U.S. were on the brink of dropping support for Israel at all in favour of a more vital ally. But George W. Bush, who was designated to sell the treachery to the public, still hesitated to make Ariel Sharon another Eduard Benes and himself a burlesque of Neville Chamberlain.

It was this very moment that became the eve of 9/11. What came as the Mother of All Suicide Attacks hit a nation which was on the verge of a completed Saudi hostile takeover, just a few steps away from subordination to what is just the last bastion of archetype medieval theocracy on the planet.

Inside the perceived black box of Saudi Arabias divine rights ideology, the legitimation of the self-styled rulers' political power is provided by the religious duty they accomplish. King Fahd and his Crown Princes - who control the Makkah and Madinah mosques their ancestors conquered in 1924 - tell their people that noone lower than God himself made them the "Custodians of the two Holy Places."

This must have been in the minds of the terrorists when they attacked the building Islamofascism depicted as "the symbols of Mammonism, of Yahweh cult" while Laurie Kerr nicknamed it "The Mosque to Commerce": "Yamasaki [the architect of the World Trade Center] described its plaza as 'a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.' True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers - minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites - the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring - by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's."

What would be the effect on Al Saud and the impact on the society they rule if the two ritualistic sites in their custodianship were suddenly vaporized in an inexplicable attack? It's just a thought experiment, based on the assumption that bin Laden looked at America through Saudi glasses. But it could help to provide ideas what he expected to happen with the U.S. after such a strike against the sites he considered to be the ritual centres in President Bushs guardianship.

Focussing on the description of the hijackers state of mind as a fantasy ideology, Policy Review writer Lee Harris put it as such: "The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation - in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?"

As Saudia Arabias administration doesn't provide an overall emergency phone number, there might also have been considerations regarding the impact of the events on America. But from this view, what happened on Sep 11, 2001 primarily was a clash inside Islamosphere. The intra-feudalistic opposition of Saudi Arabia, which in the 1990s even had gathered its own puppet state, was wrestling with the royal family for the power of definition what is Islam. Al Qaeda didn't want Al Saud to finish their creeping acquisition of America and destruction of Israel.

They wanted to do it themselves, with a - in their minds - singular, glamorous and final strike, and thus prevail against the outdated dominion of King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah. Though the political objective of 9/11 was targeted against Al Saud, its delivery could best be achieved by a deflection of the actual strike against their primary prop. America, through a chain of events tracing back to Operation Desert Shield, had got into a cross fire inside Islamosphere, where the attack also made prior rivals of the House of Saud, including Saddam, reinforce their stance.

In contrast, from the outsiders point of view, understanding Islamosphere as a black box producing unpredictable behavior, 9/11 was a lateral attack according to the definition of the 1970s Asian-American philosopher Robert M. Pirsig: "Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth."

The parallel that can be drawn between the strike of Saudi military leader bin Laden in Afghan exile and Saddams Kuwait blitzkrieg, which created the preconditions for the latter, just fits on that score: From the outside, they both look like unprecedented surprises, while from the inside, they each make up the peak of a chain reaction. Precisely, when the permanent competition for control of Islamosphere was to spawn a decisive shift of power, this caused unanticipated effects to outer props.

The cardinal difference between these two events is that while the fallout of 1990 still could be contained into the Middle East, this wasn't an option any more a decade later. The deflection had globalized by then.

The lateral knowledge delivered by the Saudi terrorists was poignantly basic: Islamosphere is here on the planet and requires a careful look into. Possibly, the remarkable low information payload of 9/11 to outside observers was the reason which caused the quest for explanations to disembogue into a discourse that doubts all the proven concepts of foreign policy.

Though todays Afghanistan still is in an infinitely prolonged interim condition, which won't change as long as it stays an U.N. domain, the commenced meltdown of the policy of regime preservation - Americas precarious inheritance from WWII carried throughout all the Cold War - provides the environment for a new view of the Middle East to arise.

What happens inside Islamosphere can scarcely be described as an axis. In contrast to the designs favoured by the 1936 and 1940 Antikomintern pacts of Germany, Italy and Japan, that made up the foundation for the subsequent containment of Communism, the contemporary situation lacks any defined subdivision into spheres of influence whose hubs could be connected.

There is hardly a Muslim government agreeing with any other Muslim government on mutually exclusive but complementary geopolitical roles. Overlapping claims are prevailing. Every state is willing to relentlessly cheat all others, best in the name of pure public utility. In matters of anything but warriorism, Islamosphere must exert herself for performing united to outsiders.

The freedom gaps within are bridged by the deflection of domestic opposition against outside props. Criticism against Islamospheres governments is limited to criticizing them for being too cooperative with Islams declared enemies. Consequently, the easiest way to satisfy protest is not to work on gaining up with the freedom gap, but to rush against these props.

More and above, it makes warriorism an instrument in the struggle of the diverse governments and non-governmental factions for the control of Islamosphere, which lacks an immotile hub. The harder you go against Islams declared enemies, the more likely you are to win over your neighbours people and to keep your own in subjugation.

Such an environment transforms hatred to strength. He who is Israels ultralargest enemy holds the power of definition what is Islam. This is how the skirmish for leadership of the Ummah - the Islamic Nation - arouses a competition of evil.

The struggle inside Islamosphere is being deflected to the outside. Iraqs grasp for leadership of the Arab League was best accomplished on the platform of a war against Israel. Besides that, such deflection can cause repercussions therein. Iraqs run-up to this war provided the lee for its conquest of Kuwait. And of course, their effects can enforce further deflection. The Saudi response to the conquest directly involved America more and more as a prop which paved the way for the 9/11 attack.

As Donald Rumsfeld had put it: "You cast it as though it's the United States and the Moslem world, or the United States and people who are anti-United States. I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. I think there's a real struggle taking place in the Moslem faith. ... The whole world is part of this process; it's not just the United States."

As recently as with this new view of the Middle East, the so-called Gulf War didn't look any more like a closed chore. Instead, at second glance it had begun to look more and more like an unfinished screw-up.

After all, it had required 9/11 to bring about significant outside coverage of Islamosphere in the emerging arena of global public opinion. Since then, the focus was first on Afghanistan, later shifted to Israel by Al Saud, and now moved to Iraq by the U.S. It required some time of Saudi-American tug-of-war to adjust this focus to the source of the now top layer of the nested instability within Islamosphere.

That's why the situation inside Iraq finally was perceived to matter. However, the idea that Saddams regime could find back into its pre-war role always was crap.

Leo Bauer is an Antifascist living in Berlin.

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