Two Towers and 20 Years
Our century has been defined by the 9/11 attacks and the lies and deaths that followed
Just days after the 9/11 attacks George W. Bush told members of the press why al-Qaeda had attacked the US. “They hate our freedoms”, he said. The US was a bastion of democracy; the proverbial city upon the hill. It was this mindset which infected the country as it carpet-bombed an already impoverished Afghanistan. Now the Taliban-led state would have to deal with the full might of the technological and military prowess of the US.
Iraq, as we all know, would soon suffer a similar fate. Colin Powell tried to sell the world that war based on lies about Saddam Hussein’s supposed biological and chemical weapons programmes. Many knew it was bogus. Powell, the US, and its allies went to war anyway, adding to the misery they’d already inflicted on the region over the previous decades.
The majority of the West’s mainstream press fell for the lies of Bush and Powell. Ireland was no different. We had columnists on the front page of Sunday papers decrying the massive anti-war protests as being nothing more than the naive posturing of a bunch of hippies and students. At one such protest in Dublin in June 2004 I saw one of these scribes. He wasn’t amongst the crowd. No.
Instead, he was at the rear of the protest hobnobbing with members of the heavy garda presence, smirking at the protesters as he smoked a cigarette amongst Templemoore’s finest. To me at the time you couldn’t have found a better example of the relationship between journalism and power. We’d soon hear yet again from the same writer about uprightness of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He was no Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist who repeated verbatim in the pages of The Gray Lady intelligence reports that were completely false. But it was indicative of a trend.
Getting to the truth
Over the last 20 years activists, journalists, and researchers have all confirmed what we already knew: That the Iraq war was based on a lie.
What about earlier lies though, like one still repeated to this day? Did the Muslim world hate the West, and specifically the US, because of its freedoms? No. And the Pentagon knew as much as early as 2004, just three years after the 9/11 attacks. The Pentagon wanted to know why there was such resistance to its military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. An obvious answer eluded it so it commissioned a study to find out why the reputation of the US was so poor. For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention the answers weren’t in the least bit surprising.
As the report itself stated, winning “hearts and minds” is part of any successful military campaign. One aspect of this was “separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists”. But this had gone very badly wrong for the US. It not only failed on this objective but “may also have achieved the opposite”. US military intervention in the region “elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies”.
It was clear to the report’s authors what was driving this:
Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
In the eyes of the Muslim population the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had “not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering”. US intervention was seen as being done for “ulterior motives” simply to “best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination”.
Two decades of extremism
Twenty years on and nothing has changed. Promises were made and broken again and again. Countless civilians were murdered in Iraq alone by the US military and private contractors such as Blackwater. In Afghanistan the US propped up a corrupt government, as avaricious as it was incompetent. And all the while Bin Laden was across the border in Pakistan, essentially under house arrest with little to no influence anymore.
All the Middle East got was more of the same. It had plenty of experience of the West’s perfidiousness in the aftermath of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire when Arab nationalism was encouraged and then stamped out when it got in the way of Western interests. The invasions of the Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the unkept promises, was history repeating itself.
In the West we saw the construction of the greatest surveillance system in history. Civil liberties were crushed and dissent was considered unpatriotic. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt pointed out that one of the seeds of fascism was imperialism. What the world powers learned from imperialist lessons abroad would eventually be put to use at home. Looking at the US today we see a militarised police force that would have been at home in the streets of Basra in 2003.
What Bin Laden and the 19 hijackers did was create an economic boom for the military-industrial complex. It set the tone that eventually allowed supposedly human rights-focused Democratic presidents like Barrack Obama to murder US citizens without due process via drone strike. It helped give us the Donald Trumps of the world as the Overton window continued to shift to the right. All of this because of a terrorist attack 20 years ago.
It seems as if the 21st century will continue to be defined in some way by an event that took place at its outset. Our already troubled democracies will struggle to deal with another two decades of increasing and evolving extremism. All that we know for sure is that a group of terrorists set out to change the world. And they did just that.