On June 6, two different events were reported in the press that, on the surface appeared entirely unrelated. but were in fact deeply intertwined.

The first was the trial of 9/11 planners and Osama bin Laden’s operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others in what the New York Times called “the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s war crimes system here,” in Guantanamo Bay.

The other newsworthy item was the measures Washington is utilizing to force Baghdad into accepting the preliminary draft of the Status Of Forces Agreement, or SOFA.

On the surface, these two events appear disconnected; in the minds of liberal supporters of the “war on terror,” the first is legitimate self-defense, while the second is part of the “quagmire” of “failed policy.” Yet what the two have in common can be summed up in one word, the same word that was the answer to the big question everyone was asking right after 9/11 – why do they hate us?

Empire. It’s the dirty, open secret that Muslims and leftists always knew, but most Americans don’t know.

It’s why 9/11 happened, and why the U.S. is giving a third world country that suffered decades of dictatorship, sanctions, war and occupation the option of signing away its self-determination, or becoming a failed state.

Specifically, the agreement would allow the U.S. to install 50 permanent military bases, the right to detain and conduct military operations without consulting the Iraqi government and giving American troops and contractors legal immunity, according to the Independent. In order to meet the July 31st deadline, Bush is threatening to rob the country of 20 billion dollars, or 40 percent of its foreign exchange reserves, to force this diktat through by withdrawing presidential protection against outstanding lawsuits.

The reason is threefold – to continue shaping Iraq’s destiny as Washington sees fit; to better position itself to pressure Iran and launch air strikes; and to maintain control of an oil-rich region to maintain leverage against other industrialized nations.

“Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” according to the Project for a New American Century report in 2000, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.”

An April 2001 report by the Baker Institute for Public Policy, commissioned by Dick Cheney, called “Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” said, “Iraqi reserves represent a major asset that can quickly add capacity to world oil markets.”

A new era … of sorts.

As the Bush era comes to a close, these two episodes have come to symbolize a decade in which America made a shift from one colonial phase to another, from international communism to Islamic fundamentalism as global enemy no. 1.

Looking back, the 1990s were just a transitional time when the American empire was trying to re-orient itself in a new world order where Washington was – and still is – the sole global power with no rivals. The emergence of Al-Qaeda changed all that, and the specter of Islamism haunting the world both threatened the West’s hegemonic control over key regions and provided the pretext to push for more hegemony.

That, in a nutshell, is what the “war on terror” is all about — defending and expanding the empire in the name of the American citizenry. Al-Qaeda isn’t a threat to the existence and values of Western civilization, but to Western hegemony, especially in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The irony of Islamism’s status as the official bogeyman is that it was once a tool to overcome communism and nationalism of populations’ occupiers sought to “pacify.”

One notorious example is Israel’s divide-and-conqueror strategy of pitting Hamas against the PLO during the first intifada. Turkey employed a group called Hizbullah (no connection to the Lebanese group) to fight against the communist Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK throughout the 1990s. Saudi Arabia countered Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism by promoting the Muslim Brotherhood; even Saddam Hussein was said to have brought Sunni Salafists into Iraq to help terrorize the Shi’a in the years after the first Gulf War.

The most notorious example is Al-Qaeda, which germinated in the Afghan Mujahideen that fought the Soviet occupation during the 1980s and was backed and funded by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Both Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed fought in the war and were shaped by the experience; the rest is history in one word; “blowback.”

That’s one half of the “jihadist” phenomenon. The other half is what they’re fighting for and against; for theocracy and against colonialism and secular dictatorship. Anti-colonialism is, in fact, Islamism’s lifeblood because neocolonialism is very real and affects the lives of millions of Muslims, whether it’s in Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir.

Kamal Daoudi, an Algerian-born French citizen, was arrested in England for plotting to blow up the American Embassy according to the New York Times in 2002. Among Daoudi’s reasons for being a terrorist, according to essays he wrote, was France’s support for the Algerian military regime that cancelled elections in 1992 and killed thousands of Algerians.

Aukai Collins, an American convert to Islam who detailed his experiences in Chechnya and Kosovo in his memoir, “My Jihad,” wrote that he was ready to fight when “a Muslim land is being attacked and Muslims are being killed.” Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a “moderate cleric” according to a Feb. 2003 article in the Washington Post, advocated in one breath both women’s rights and resistance against the coming invasion of Iraq.

As for bin Laden, it was Iraq that was one of the catalysts that set him on his course. When Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden lobbied to send his Afghan veterans to expel Iraqi occupation forces, only to be rebuffed by Al-Sa’ud.

U.N.-imposed sanctions that killed over half a million Iraqi children and the U.S./U.K. enforced no-fly zones – which were outside international law – fueled the growth of Al-Qaeda and was a frequently cited grievance throughout the group’s communiqués.

“More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died … as a result of the unjustifiable aggression imposed on Iraq and its nation,” wrote bin Laden in the 1996 Declaration of Jihad. “One million Iraqi children have thus far died in Iraq although they did not do anything wrong,” he wrote in his warning in Oct. 2001.

The occupation of Iraq gave Al-Qaeda what it wanted and Iraq has been turned into the kind of magnet for foreign fighters that Afghanistan used to be.

What is needed is a new movement that is committed to anti-imperialism and democracy — to self-determination and secularism.

Otherwise, Iraq could end up like another country where anti-colonial rhetoric was dominated by theocrats — Iran. The diktat Bush is pushing through bears an eerie resemblance to the infamous “capitulation law” the Shah approved that granted American military advisors and other American personnel in the country complete political immunity in the early 1960s.

A young cleric in 1964 gave a famous speech that denounced the capitulation on Oct. 27, 1964: “The government has sold our independence, reduced us to the level of a colony, and made the Muslim nation of Iran appear more backward than savages in the eyes of the world!” That cleric was deported a month later by SAVAK secret police and didn’t return until 1979.

His name was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.