Opinion: Nine Eleven

09/12/2014 - 09h01

Today, the 11th of September, is the 41th anniversary of the Coup in Chile which overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973. General Augusto Pinochet launched a reign of terror where thousands were killed, interned and tortured. He ruled for 17 years.

This week on Monday a bomb exploded next the Escuela Militar Metro station in the upscale residential and shopping Santiago neighbourhood of Las Condes. No one was killed, but a score of people were injured. The perpetrators, who have so far not claimed responsibility, are assumed by the Chilean authorities to be members of an anarchist group.

It was the most serious terrorist attack in Chile for over twenty years. A sad reminder that Latin America is not immune from the terrorist violence which rages in so much of the rest of the world.

Today is also the anniversary of the 2001 coordinated suicide terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in New York City and Washington, when 3000 innocent people were killed, and over US$10 billion in damages caused to property and infrastructure.

Four passenger airliners were hijacked: American Airlines flight 11 and United Airlines flight 175 were crashed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Centre, both of which collapsed within two hours.

A third airliner, American Airways flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth airliner, United Airlines flight 93, also targeted on Washington, crashed instead into the countryside in Pennsylvania. As a result

President George W Bush launched his "war on terror," leading to the invasion of Afghanistan, and of Iraq, with thousands more lives lost, more internments, more torture, and more catastrophic consequences, with which we are all still living.

It is doubly ironic that on these anniversaries, Henry Kissinger, in an exclusive interview with the London "Sunday Times," should be urging President Obama to launch "an all out assault on Isis in Syria and Iraq and warning that it should already have happened."

But then Kissinger supported the war in Iraq. He thinks that George W Bush and Tony Blair acted "in good faith." He was also the prime mover in the clandestine campaign against Salvador Allende. But the criticism about him as an "abuser of human rights," he told the "Sunday Times" is "not a problem that preoccupies" him.

At the age of 91, and having undergone heart surgery in July, he is busy promoting his new book "World Order," published this week on both sides of the Atlantic. Obama he says "does not seem to understand that "without us, and without some leadership from us, the new order cannot be created."

He complains that Obama has never consulted him. This is very good news. Or at least it was until Islamic state militants beheaded two US journalists, and US public opinion shifted in favour of military intervention, yet again.