Memo From Cairo: 9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom

I was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when the attacks occurred. From the very get go, Saudis were incredulous that arabs could plan and execute such an attack (as alluded to later in the article)...

However, I think that the conspiracy theories detailed below are not limited to the Middle East but are also felt in the rest of the world, based on conversations I have had with numerous people from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America since then...

CAIRO — Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too.

This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.