Last week, far-left Democrat Melat Kiros won her Denver, Colorado, U.S. House primary against 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette, making the 29-year-old the latest in a slew of democratic socialists to have defeated establishment Democrats in this midterm election cycle.
In Kiros’s race and the others, almost all of the Democrats involved have been considered progressive, but the older, incumbent guard still hews closely to the party line of unqualified support for Israel, while the coalition of younger, hard-left Democrats have been strident critics of U.S. support for Israel and of the continuing bloodshed in Gaza.
Kiros in particular has come under fire, particularly from some conservatives, for depicting Islamic terrorism as blowback from American and Israeli policies. On the left-wing podcaster Hasan Piker’s show, she said that the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas was “the inevitable consequence of apartheid, of occupation, decades of occupation.” Following that interview, a reporter at Denver’s 9News asked Kiros if she believed the 9/11 terror attacks 25 years ago were also an “inevitable consequence” based on U.S. foreign policy.
She replied,
Inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East, which led people to believe that another act of violence was the only response. And again, just like I said before, our responsibility is to get rid of those conditions that lead to violence in the first place.
Conservatives on social media pounced.
The internet personality Benny Johnson said Kiros “thinks America deserved 9/11.” Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said Kiros “blamed the United States for 9/11.” The Republican Jewish Coalition claimed that “here she is saying that 9/11 was America’s fault.” The influencer Greg Price repeated that claim to over half a million viewers. TheBlaze also shared the 9News interview and described it thus: “Here is an old clip of her justifying the 9/11 attacks and saying it was America’s fault.”
I thought I was in a time warp. Besides Haley and the RJC, these conservatives are not necessarily neoconservatives, yet each was parroting the laziest Bush-Cheney-era response to anyone who has ever tried to explain the conditions that led to 9/11 or any other negative consequences that have stemmed from U.S. foreign policy. Kiros, in their view, had revealed herself to be anti-American.
The neocons used to insinuate the same about Pat Buchanan, a cofounder of this magazine, because he too explained terrorist attacks by reference to U.S. and Israeli policies.
In the fall of 2002, Buchanan thundered on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews that “9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted!”
Nearly 20 years later, Buchanan wrote:
well before 9/11, Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of war on us, listed his grievances. Our sanctions were starving the children of Iraq. Our military presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca, was a national insult and a blasphemous outrage to Islam.
In the two decades in between these two statements, Buchanan repeatedly explained, in his columns and books and on television, the reasons why the Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Much of what he said, including the above, was not unlike what Kiros is now attacked for saying.
Was Pat Buchanan blaming America first? Is Buchanan—perhaps the most famous populist conservative of his generation—anti-American?
That sounds stupid on its face. Buchanan had long been one of the most influential voices on the patriotic American right. For young right-wingers like me, his influence reached a crescendo when he won the New Hampshire Republican primary during his 1996 presidential run.
Those weren’t anti-American lefties in New Hampshire voting for Buchanan.
In 2009, as an MSNBC contributor (yes, both Buchanan and Tucker Carlson were MSNBC fixtures in this era), he said in a debate with the neoconservative Cliff May, “Gaza… is an Israeli concentration camp… a million and a half people are locked up… the Israelis continue to steal their land…why haven’t they given back the Golan Heights?”
Buchanan wasn’t done. “You sit here and tell me that the Israeli people, the Israeli nation, have treated the Palestinian people with any kind of justice?” he asked incredulously. He wasn’t indifferent to Israeli security. Indeed, he was explaining how it had been undermined by Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians.
“I tell you how to create people for Hamas,” Buchanan said. “You kill 675 people, you wound and injure 3,000. What do you think the brothers and sisters of those five little girls who died, what do you think they’re going to be when they grow up?”
Melat Kiros could have said this.
And what Kiros said about the inevitability of 9/11 looks less contentious when you consider that Buchanan predicted years before the attack that a catastrophic terrorist event would occur in an American city. He even named the terrorist.
On 9/11, I was an antiwar conservative in my 20s, and as I watched the smoking towers, the first thing that came to my mind was Buchanan’s warnings over the years, especially those in his 1999 book A Republic, Not An Empire. One prophetic passage is worth quoting in full:
It is in February of 2005 that the explosion occurs in the port of Seattle. It is a low-yield crude atomic device, but the devastation is incredible. Thousands are dead; thousands more are injured or wounded, many burned horribly. The device was smuggled in the cargo hold of a ship and detonated only hours after the ship had docked. No one knows for certain who put the device there. Iran condemns the act as an inhuman atrocity and an affront to Islam, but notes that America was the first to use such weapons. North Korea is also suspect. But intense speculation focuses on a group associated with the financier of terror Osama Bin Laden, whom U.S. special forces ran down and killed years earlier. Bin Laden’s agents reportedly acquired nuclear weapons from rogue army elements in Russia or Kazakhstan in the 1990s, or got one from a Pakistan now controlled by allies of the Afghan Taliban.
That’s not precisely how it happened, of course, but it lends credence to the idea that U.S. foreign policy made something like 9/11 more likely, if not inevitable, especially since Buchanan identified the network of Osama bin Laden as the prime suspect. He was warning his countrymen that their government’s actions abroad could lead to terrible blowback.
Too bad he was ignored.
What Buchanan wasn’t doing was “blaming” the American people for anything.
Neither was Ron Paul during a fiery debate moment with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani—after which Paul and his message exploded in popularity. It was the 2008 Republican presidential campaign, and Paul, similar to Buchanan, explained how U.S. foreign policy had laid the groundwork for the 9/11 attacks. “Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?” Paul said. “They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.”
A debate moderator asked Paul if he was suggesting the United States invited the attacks. “I’m suggesting we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” Paul answered. “And they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said: I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.”
Of course, that set off Giuliani, the neocons’ favorite candidate at the time. “That’s really an extraordinary statement,” said Giuliani. “As someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq—I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11.”
Giuliani demanded that Paul retract his statement.
Instead, Ron Paul doubled down, going all the way back to the 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of Iran’s government and the installation of the Shah, saying it had been a recipe for future terrorism. He noted that the CIA had invented the term “blowback” precisely to describe the unintended negative consequences of American intervention abroad.
That single debate moment is what launched Paul’s political movement, which has had influence far outside the 2008 presidential election. This magazine dubbed that exchange “The Ron Paul Moment” in a cover story. Paul’s spat with Giuliani has proved a memorable moment for critics of U.S. foreign policy, some of whom are now referencing it in response to the hawks attacking Kiros over her statements.
The independent journalist Glenn Greenwald observed, “Ron Paul said the same thing about the causes of 9/11, and he did so repeatedly, including on a nationally televised GOP primary debate stage.”
Greenwald added, “He then got more than 2 million votes in the GOP primary and was repeatedly reelected to his House seat.”
Indeed. Dr. Paul’s naked truth-telling to a largely hostile audience of establishment hawks made him more popular than ever.
As antiwar messages often do.
Another high-profile conservative who agreed with Buchanan and Paul on the causes of 9/11 was the late columnist Robert Novak.
In 2001, Novak suggested that U.S.-Israel relations contributed in part to the 9/11 attacks. In the midst of those who compared the attacks to Pearl Harbor, Novak wrote, “Unlike Nazi Germany’s and Imperial Japan’s drive for a new world order, however, the hatred toward the U.S. by the terrorists is an extension of its hatred of Israel rather than world domination.”
Novak challenged the neoconservative notion that questioning U.S. foreign policy meant hating America. “It is absolutely outrageous to say that anyone who has criticized the wisdom of this attack on Iraq hates their party and the president, and hates their country,” Novak said in 2003. “It really poisons the political discourse to say that if you feel this hasn’t been a wise decision on the part of the United States, you’re criticizing your country and hoping for defeat.”
It does poison the discourse. It also dumbs it down.
Greenwald wrote, “The level of wilful blindness and emotional immaturity when discussing the 9/11 attack—a full 25 years later—is stunning.”
Some of the greatest conservatives of our time have said different versions of what right-wing hawks attacked Melat Kiros for saying, as if they were trying to enforce those old Bush-Cheney speech codes about what conservatives can and can’t say about foreign policy. It was sad.
Greenwald would add, “It’s good to see that these dumb attacks are losing their potency as the candidate who said it—Melat Kiros—basically won a Congressional seat last night in Colorado, defeating a worthless Democratic incumbent pointlessly filling that seat for 30 years.”
It’s not good for the country that democratic socialists keep winning primary elections. But it is good for America—and for American conservatism—that more of us can now speak more honestly about U.S. foreign policy than we used to be able to, thanks to those conservatives who did so without fear before us.
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