According to Mahdi Dakhlallah, in a piece that appeared Wednesday, the intelligence agencies were behind the September 11, 2001 attacks to provide a pretext for a preplanned US plan to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

“These plans were ready and prepared [in advance] - and all that was needed was to find a pretext to begin their immediate implementation,” wrote Dakhlallah, in a piece of which excerpts were translated by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Dakhlallah wrote that in the US, the end justifies the means, and Washington’s overarching goal was to invade Afghanistan “to get close to the Caspian Sea gas and oil pipelines, and then to invade Iraq and to fix the poles of the tent of unipolarity in the ground.”

Indeed, wrote Dakhlallah, “the shock following 9/11 created an American public opinion that supported the war, aggression, and madness of our time, to which Afghanistan, Iraq, and all global stability fell victim. No one believes that it would have been possible to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in the same way and so fast had it not been for the 9/11 attacks. That’s how it always is: the end justifies the means.”