...as with every September 11 since 2001, my thoughts wander two places: to my friend, Mark Bingham, who was on United 93, and to the response to the events of that day. For the latter, I found an article of interest below. Do/read/respond/ignore of it as you choose.
-----
The world offered unity. It was rejected
September 11, 2006
Paul McGeough was there as the twin towers collapsed. Today he concludes his series on The War of Ideas, a 10-week assignment that has taken him to Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, the Palestinian territories and back to where it all started, New York.
Maybe this is still the early days. There could be worse to come. Looking across the emptiness of ground zero last week, two sickening feelings assailed me. Might there be another strike? If there was, would the response be any different?
I was in the streets of lower Manhattan as the twin towers came crashing down - an unbearable day. Then, on to Afghanistan as the Taliban were routed, and Osama bin Laden got away. Later, to Baghdad, to watch American troops stage-manage the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein: a spontaneous cry for democracy, we were told, that now struggles against the savagery of civil war.
It sounds trite, but it's true. Good and evil did clash here on this day five years ago. By its very nature, evil writes itself out of the equation; but what about goodness and its defenders - how have they performed? Did they cope well? In their parlance, did they keep the faith?
The authors of the neo-conservative ideology that demanded the invasion of Iraq confidently predicted that the "virtue of American foreign policy" would be their trump card. All would lie down before the United States as it set out to reshape the world.
But in Baghdad, virtue seems an absent friend when I catch up with an acquaintance who is close enough to the Shiite death squads to keep me abreast of their ghoulish activities. He likes to sit back after we've eaten. He pats his paunch and declares: "Mr Paul, everything is beautiful."
I move on and it's interesting to hold in mind this idea of American virtue as I have tea in the streets of Tehran and catch up with old contacts in Gaza City.
Sure, the Iranians seem to understand that they are playing with fire. But, they insist, as a country surrounded by other nuclear powers they are within their rights. And the Palestinians - from their perspective, the crude tactics they adopt are not so different to those used against them by the Jews as they set about carving out the state of Israel back in the 1940s.
Go on to Beirut. Read Rami Khouri, who writes in The Daily Star more as a constructive globalist than as a blinkered local cheerleader. Hear him in the aftermath of the recent Israeli invasion: "The strength and assertiveness of the Islamist movements - whether through military confrontation like Hezbollah or through winning elections as in many other cases - is a sign that [Arab majorities] are not content to remain docile and dejected, in the state of subjugation and defeat that has defined them for decades."
Back in 2003, I was uneasy as the huge Saddam bronze bounced on the pavement in Baghdad's Firdos Square - and certainly not because it was the end of the man and of his ghastly regime. But we had already been through more than a year of the Washington enterprise in Afghanistan - which had been marked by an obsession with pursuing Osama bin Laden that was so single-minded that there was little or no thought for the interests or rights of the Afghan people. There still isn't.
My unease in Firdos Square was because, once again, this was a US-scripted show and the rest of the world - not to mention rank-and-file Iraqis - was not getting a look in.
Layers of often petty international tension and *****rdliness were blown away with the twin towers. It never amounted to a global rallying around the "virtue of American foreign policy", but at the time a frightened world wanted to help a stricken power and it offered something the US refused to accept: unity. Instead, Washington thrust back with something the globe could not take: a self-assigned right for pre-emptive strikes against any or all; and a new level of unilateral decision-making.
This came to be called the Bush Doctrine and it is based on a huge contradiction - the US is strong enough to organise the world as it sees fit, but weak enough for the likes of al-Qaeda to pop through the back door.
They dressed it up in technical terms that gave it a veneer of diplomatic respectability. In the context of US attacks on Afghanistan after the Taliban regime refused to hand over bin Laden, objections were not voiced publicly. But as Washington segued from Kabul to Baghdad, some US voters were able to see the doctrine for the frat-house battle cry that it was - an opinion poll early in 2003 found that 59 per cent feared that taking the war to Iraq would create the risk of more terrorism against the US.
The American interest in Afghanistan never really went beyond the pursuit of bin Laden. Hamid Karzai, the man they engineered into the national presidency - to be endorsed later by a democratic vote - is still mocked as the mayor of Kabul.A hydra-headed monster - Taliban insurgents, corruption and drugs - has the country by the throat and the Americans want to sign off. But instead of handing power to a civilian authority, they have just given control of the explosive south to NATO forces, who in turn have given themselves six months to prove to sceptical and fearful locals that they can best resurgent Taliban forces. And despite all Washington's tut-tutting, Afghanistan this year is expected to produce more than 90 per cent of the world's opium - a stunning achievement in lawlessness, given that thousands of hectares of poppy crops had to mature right under American noses before they could be harvested.
Iraq is worse. A country that sits on more than 20 per cent of the world's oil reserves is exporting just a trickle of the black gold because insurgency and sectarian violence make exports virtually impossible.
Remember how the former US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz predicted that the invasion would cost the US almost nothing, because Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction? And how he believed that by the summer of 2004, US troop numbers in Iraq would be down to 30,000?
They are still at 130,000-plus and American flanks are exposed as thousands of soldiers are being pulled from outlying areas of Iraq in the latest in a series of US efforts to liberate Baghdad by quelling the sectarian mayhem now overlaying the insurgency chaos that the Americans previously failed to clean up.
One of the worst failings of the doctrine is that little thought was given to how to back out of any messes it might create. It means that today the biggest obstacle to retooling the US response to September 11 is that virtually anything other than more of the same will be seen - rightly and dangerously - as US weakness and a retreat.
But it is more complex. Iraq and Afghanistan are just two of what the US scholar Anthony Cordesman sets out as "America's Six Long Wars": the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Palestinian and Lebanese struggles with Israel; the crisis with Iran; and, lastly, the war on terrorism.
Writing that each of these conflicts promises a decade or more of religious, ideological, political and perceptual struggles, he warns in one of his regular email appraisals of the war on terrorism: "The irony is that there was never a time when the US needed bipartisan realism and allies more than today. The reality, however, is growing and largely opportunistic partisanship, uncertain realism at best, and an ongoing compulsion [by the US] to transform or to pressure allies rather than to treat them as partners."
"The US can lose quickly in some of these cases, but it can't win quickly in any; it can't act unilaterally - in every case, success depends on international and regional partners."
And notwithstanding a combination - in imprecise portions - of good luck and good management, the Bush Doctrine has not made the world any safer and whether what the Americans call "the homeland", is any safer is a point of hot debate.
One of the most widely quoted fifth-anniversary scorecards for the war on terrorism is that by Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran who headed the agency's bin Laden unit.
Is the US safer or more vulnerable to terrorism? More vulnerable, he says. "Billions have been spent to stop the dumb-head who tries to come into the country ... [But] we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. From the standpoint of democracy, Saudi Arabia looks much worse than Iran. We [the US] now use the term 'Islamofascism' - but we're supporting it in Saudi Arabia, with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and even Jordan is a police state."
Why hasn't there been another attack on the US? "It's not just a lack of capacity; they are not ready to do it ... They could shoot up a mail truck [but] the next attack has to be bigger than 9/11."
Has the war in Iraq helped or hindered? "It broke the back of our counter-terrorism program. Iraq was the perfect execution of a war that demanded jihad to oppose it - you had an infidel power invading and occupying a Muslim country and it was perceived to be unprovoked ..."
Afghanistan? "The idea that we can control Afghanistan with 20,000 soldiers is far-fetched - the Soviets couldn't do it with 150,000 soldiers and utter brutality". Lebanon? "It validates bin Laden ... it shows that the Americans will let Israel do whatever it wants."
Wolfowitz and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told parents of raw Americans their soldier sons and daughters would be welcomed by "liberated" Iraqis with candy and flowers - but thousands have come home in flag-draped coffins and tens of thousands have been wounded.
Worse, the democratic fundamentals that Washington insists must be exported to these states have been prostituted in spectacular form - not only was the case for war against Iraq a fabrication, but Americans are being told their civil liberties and the human rights of others must be curbed for the greater good. Washington is aping the US general who told reporters in Vietnam: "We had to bomb the village to save it."
The Administration now runs a campaign of fear, likening any who dare to criticise its policies to the appeasers of Hitler and warning Americans that it may be necessary to confront "the enemy" in the aisles of their supermarkets.
They have cheekily coined the term "Defeatocrats", but their audacity is breathtaking. Rumsfeld leads the charge with cries of appeasement - but just as Chamberlain was photographed shaking the hand of Hitler at Munich, it was Rumsfeld who was snapped shaking the blood-soaked hand of Saddam as the US curried favour with Baghdad during the Iraq-Iran war.
And on Friday, after five years of White House fact manipulation and spin-doctoring, a 364-page tome by the Senate intelligence committee lobbed in Washington: Saddam only ever saw bin Laden in a bad light and had no truck with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it says without qualification.
In a swipe at Rumsfeld, the report quotes the CIA on the search for Saddam's illegal weapons: "There comes a point when the absence of evidence does indeed become the absence of evidence." It was a play on Rumsfeld's haranguing of United Nations weapons investigators in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, when the Defence Secretary told reporters: "The absence of evidence [of WMD] is not evidence of absence."
But just who is the enemy of the US becomes more complicated by the day, especially as Americans try to wrap their heads around the emergence of Tehran as a regional power in the Muslim Middle East, at a time when the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have reignited the Sunni-Shiite schism that is at the heart of Islam.
Bush and Rumsfeld now hector a non-specific entity they call the "Islamofascists". But who are they - the Shiite-controlled Government of Iraq, which, nominally at least, is a US ally but also increasingly an ally of Iran and is dependent for political support on murderous militias? Or are they the mad mullahs of Tehran, who also are Shiite? Or are they the West-friendly Sunni House of Saud, which controls Saudi Arabia's huge oil wealth and has for decades funded the propagation of the virulent Wahabi strain of Islam that underpinned the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda?
And what of Washington's other ally, Pakistan? Does the distribution of nuclear know-how and parts to rogue states or the provision of shelter to al-Qaeda fugitives make it Islamofascist?
A Flash Developer Resource Site
Reply With Quote
