David Hayes et al
A terror-filled day of mass murder in the eastern United States imprinted itself on the world's consciousness - and became the prelude to a decade of further violence. Open Democracy writers reflect on the impact and legacy of the events of 11 September 2011.
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Paul Rogers
The lost decade
What has been the biggest single impact of 9/11 on the public and political world?
The diversion of security thinking into a fatally flawed “war on terror” and the sidelining of far more important human-security issues - not least poverty, malnutrition and disease. In addition, it has meant the loss of an entire decade in beginning to react seriously to climate change. The combination of an economically-divided and environmentally constrained world is the core issue for the coming decade and the response to 9/11 has meant that we have lost precious time in facing up to this.
There has been so much loss. Have there been any winners from 9/11?
The main winner has been the military-industrial complex, especially in the United States, where substantial increases in the defence budget have brought in numerous examples of highly profitable new lines of destruction. Private-security contracting has also expanded massively, with many new contracts being available, and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “terrorism industry” has extended its reach, in the process soaking up think-tankers and academics who were heading for difficult times after the ending of the cold war. For all these people and companies, 9/11 came not a moment too soon.
Did the events that day change you in any way you care to mention?
No real change as I’d been part of a small group of analysts who, sadly, had seen something like this coming for some years. Looking back over ten years, though, the most daunting consequences have been the human costs, with at least 225,000 people killed, twice that number seriously injured and well over 7 million refugees. That we failed to argue loudly enough against the war on terror, as its consequences were already becoming clear, is something for which we still bear responsibility. We did not try hard enough.
Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010)
Also by Paul Rogers: "America's lost wars: the choice in 2012” (18 August 2011)
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Tarek Osman
The inner change
The crime of 11 September 2001 and the Arab spring of 2011 have the same root: the failure of almost all Arab states in the course of the 20th century to improve the livelihoods of their citizens and deliver justice. As a result, millions of young Arabs came to experience the social and political conditions they were obliged to live under as humiliating and regressive, and determined to change their lives.
The nineteen suicide-crashers of 9/11 - and tens of thousands of other young Arabs who intimidated their own societies across decades - chose to respond to these failures by inflicting nihilistic violence on their own countries and those beyond. They saw terror and aggression as the means to bring about change.
A decade later, a new Arab generation - from the 185 million-plus under 30 years old - chose a peaceful awakening. These young people are working to remove the domineering regimes that have long entrapped and weakened their societies. They are mature and courageous enough to realise that Arab societies’ problems are predominately internal. They understand that foreign powers, including the United States, exploited the Arabs’ failures - but that the main responsibility for creating these failures is internal.
They also have the biggest of all stakes in the region’s future: its members will benefit most from stability and progress, and lose most from chaos. The growth of the private sector and entrepreneurialism across the region is a crucial index of their potential. They choose to build, not destroy.
9/11, an act of intellectual and moral bankruptcy, represented a moment of Arab frustration. 2011 embodies the promise of a new Arab generation creating a world worthy of themselves, and in the process rediscovering the true potential of an old civilisation.
Tarek Osman is an Egyptian writer. He was educated at the American University in Cairo and Bocconi University in Italy. He is the author of Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak(Yale University Press, 2010)
Also by Tarek Osman: “The Arab prospect: forces and dynamics" (9 May 2011)
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Arthur Ituassu
The costs of resoration
In a large perspective, beyond the horrible events of that single day, the most significant consequence of 11 September 2011 is that both the nation-state and the international system of states were able to rise to the challenge, and once again show their capacity to adapt and survive.
9/11 questioned the very ability of the state to guarantee the security of its citizens - the heart of what defines the state’s proper purpose. Suddenly, the most powerful and best armed state on earth could not anymore protect the lives of its people (and those under its jurisdiction) from a foreign threat. The United States’s response showed its ability to restore itself in this role, and the US along with other powerful states reorganised themselves to meet the new situation - though in the process, and amid the international mess caused by George W Bush's administration, proved that the threat could not be vanquished permanently but only contained.
The costs of this restoration - political, legal, human and moral - have been huge. The cases of Guantánamo and the intervention in Iraq (to name but these) have inflicted deep wounds on democracy and international institutions, and undermined the credibility of the language used in international democratic discourse (concerning justice, legality and freedom). Even now, the true extent of these costs is very difficult to measure.
But the way they are being exacted can be seen, for example, in the limits imposed on western governments’ ability to support democratic forces and moderate voices in the wake of the Arab spring. This might become more significant as the nation-building process continues, and in the turbulent contexts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. More broadly, it is surely not by chance that as the US and other strong states retrench, weaker states have become the preferred targets of transnational terrorism.
Arthur Ituassu is professor in the department of social communication at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro.
Also by Arthur Ituassu: "Brazil, the United States, and Chile: military ghosts" (21 August 2009)
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Thomas de Waal
The victory of fear
Fear is the biggest legacy of 11 September 2001. Terrorism is one part destruction to a hundred parts terror. The loss of life on 9/11 was appalling but that in itself was a small part of Osama bin Laden’s goal. The bigger goal was to sow fear and change attitudes by creating a satanic spectacle; and in that, it has to be said, he achieved success.
It was understandable in the short term for the United States government to fear that al-Qaida might be plotting more attacks. But once Osama and his cronies were thrown out of Kabul and taking shelter in the caves of Tora Bora, the organisation was clearly on the run. President Bush ground on and missed the opportunity to echo FDR’s “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
The story since is dismally familiar. In western countries fear has become institutionalised, almost routine in the bureaucratic imposition of “security procedures” that have stultified everyday life.
The other depressing aspect of 9/11 was how governments round the world instantly recruited the “war on terror” to seek support in their struggles against their own “terrorists”. The nature of the conflicts in Chechnya or Kashmir or Gaza did not change but the perception of them did, spreading more darkness than light. Only now are local conflicts slowly emerging from the shadow of 9/11, again to be understood on their own terms. That puts a grimly positive spin on the latest reports from Libya: if renditioned Libyan rebels can ally with the western powers who formerly betrayed them, then pragmatism is now out-trumping 9/11 eschatology.
Thomas de Waal is a senior associate for the Caucasus at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) in Washington. He is the author of The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). His earlier books include Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (NYU Press, 1999) - with Carlotta Gall; and Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (NYU Press, 2003)
Also by Thomas de Waal: "The lightness of history in the Caucasus" (4 November 2010)
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Andrew Stroehlein
A new American reality
In September 2006, I wrote an article that sought to gauge the atmosphere in the United States five years after 9/11 (“The war in American hearts and minds”, 10 September 2006). At the time, I was struck by the way that a dark and destructive conflict mentality - something I had become accustomed to in places like Serbia and Kosovo during fourteen years’ away from the country of my birth - seemed to have become entrenched in American society.
“This is what wars do”, I wrote then. “(They) push people into mental corners, where us-and-them thinking works in two pernicious ways: it makes people unwilling to accept other points of view, and utterly blinkers them to facts that do not fit the prevailing group-think. The result is that the very ability to reason gets squeezed, sometimes until it disappears entirely.”
Five years on, it is clear that things have changed enormously in the second half of the post-9/11 decade.
[To read on, click here]
Andrew Stroehlein is communications director at the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Also by Andrew Stroehlein: “The war in American hearts and minds” (10 September 2006)
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Madawi al-Rasheed
The memory of violence
Osama bin Laden and the United States may have been interlocked in a secretive and incestuous relationship that started in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but ten years after 9/11 the rest of us refuse to be drawn into their ungodly affair. We remain spectators as (in a repeat of the pattern) the ex-emir of jihad, Abdal-Hakim Belhaj - who fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s under the banner of al-Qaida, founded the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the 1990s, was captured by the CIA in 2004 and returned to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya - now becomes the beneficiary of a supportive Nato umbrella of bombs.
Yes, America and jihadis may occasionally fall out with each other; but each time it seems that they can mend their relationship and renew collaboration. For the majority of Muslims who have been victims of this dubious partnership, the memory of 9/11 will remain a testimony of how far political violence, cynicism, opportunism, and treachery can go.
To read on, click here
Madawi Al-Rasheed is professor of the anthropology of religion at Kings College, London. Her books include Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kingdom Without Borders: Saudi Arabia's Political, Religious and Media Frontiers (C Hurst, 2008); and A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2011.
Also by Madawi al-Rasheed: “The Saudi complex: power vs rights” (19 April 2011)
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Patrice de Beer
A broader perspective
The largest longer-term effect of 9/11 has been a twofold shift in the world balance of power. It ended the time when western countries could live in peace far away from wars in poor distant lands, protected by a Pax Americana; and it heralded the strategic weakening of the United States, a process accompanied by the emergence of China as the second largest world power.
The strike by Islamist terrorism on the heart of the empire can be seen as a watershed in world history. Yet there had been precedents (including a car-bomb attack on the World Trade Centre itself in 1993, and France too had been hit by jihadists in 1995). In this broader perspective, 9/11 can also be seen it as but an element (albeit exceptionally bloody and spectacular) in a chain of events which started in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Reagan’s manichean world vision underpinned his administration’s support for any force, even the most extreme, ready to fight communism. This included backing (and providing with top-range weapons, such as Stinger SAM missiles) the Afghan mujahideen through a network led by a little-known young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Reagan even dedicated the launch of a space-shuttle to a group soon to be referred to as Taliban. The then United States ambassador to India, John Gunther Dean had courageously warned the state department of the risk of arming potential Islamist terrorists; he was recalled in 1988 and declared insane, leaving him to resign from the service.
The same mindset, both moralistic and cynical, was evident in Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein’s against revolutionary Iran in the 1980-88 war. By the time George W Bush arrived in the White House in January 2001, Saddam - following his invasion of Kuwait and the war of 1990-91 - had long become the enemy. The neo-conservatives around Bush were by then eager to stoke the view that Saddam’s weapons-programmes and support for terrorism made him a grave threat. Even under Bill Clinton’s presidency, in January 1998, leading members of the Project for a New American Century (including Donald Rumsfeld) wrote a letter to the president advocating Saddam's military overthrow.
These currents re-emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 in an ideological strategy that used the legitimate response to al-Qaida and its Taliban allies as a pretext to wage a campaign against other adversaries. The result was to lead the US into a bloody and hopeless quagmire in Iraq, even as its combination of uncompromising support of Israel and arrogance towards the Arab world lost it friends and influence. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, it could still take decades to recover from the gunship diplomacy of the Bush era, which shares some responsibility for fuelling the terrorism and hatred that has lasted across the decade.
The 9/11 attacks also brought one of globalisation’s dark sides into view. The freedoms of travel, exchange and communication were heralded in the 1990s as an unqualified benefit, but they also allowed (inter alia) the spread of extreme Islamism as Saudi-funded preachers, schools, and ideas gained adherents in many countries who went on to wage their own struggle against the infidel west. This and all the other ingredients of 9/11 - from the events which led to the tragedy to those that have followed - have made me even more wary of ideologists, whether religious or political.
Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde
Also by Patrice de Beer: "The scandal of France: power and shame" (8 June 2011)
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Kerry Brown
The China factor
On 11 September 2001, I was working at the British embassy in Beijing. The news of the collapsing World Trade Centre towers came through late in the evening Beijing time, and carried on through the night. Most of the people I knew in China’s capital city stayed up through the night watching the events, mostly on CNN or BBC, in horror. At work the next day, the atmosphere in the embassy was sober. We knew, even before the serving ambassador was to say, that it would reconfigure the global diplomatic system, and the priorities of the United States and the powers around it.
In the short term, that is what happened. But my feeling is that the impact of the tragic and appalling events in New York and Washington was limited. Almost a decade later, Osama bin Laden was dead, and the revolting group around him largely tamed. The ongoing war in Afghanistan continues, but is connected to more complicated issues than the virulent anti-west hatred of a core of radicals around a charismatic but diminished and then destroyed leader.
Only a few weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers, a far quieter event happened in Beijing - China's entry, after years of negotiation, to the World Trade Organisation. It was covered in most of the broadsheet newspapers, but received nothing approaching the attention that the 11 September events did. In fifty years time, however, I am certain that historians will see this event as being far more significant.
The final embrace between China and the rest of the world, at least on trading terms, has already changed millions of lives. It will continue to do so, and fundamentally. In the last decade - as the “war on terror” has trickled to its various conclusions - the People’s Republic of China has risen to become the world's largest exporter, importer, holder of foreign currency, and second largest economy. For the first time in modern history a developing country stands in pole position to become the dominant economic force of the coming century.
The radicals around Osama bin Laden fought a doomed and vicious war, armed with weapons and the rhetoric of hate. In many ways they succeeded only in reinforcing the dominance (albeit temporary) of the United States and the west. The different contest that has shadowed it over this decade - over markets, factories and trade flows - will continue, and have a far more profound impact on the lives of every person on this planet. In a longer perspective, this - rather than the horror of 11 September 2001 and all that followed - will be seen as the true historic moment of our time.
Kerry Brown is an associate fellow on the Asia programme, Chatham House. He is the author of The Purge of the Inner Mongolian People's Party in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1967-69: A Function of Language, Power and Violence (Brill, 2004); Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (Anthem Press, 2007), The Rise of the Dragon: Inward and Outward Investment in China in the Reform Period 1978-2007 (Woodhead, 2008);Friends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China (Anthem Press, 2009); and Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State (Zed Books, 2011).
Also by Kerry Brown: “China goes global” (2 August 2007)
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Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
The ripples of global violence
There are few events in history that are truly inescapable, penetrating and global. Revolutions come to mind, world wars and spectacular natural catastrophes as well. Despite its relatively local impact, the terror attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 have been turned into such a global event.
In fact, 9/11 has - as the media coverage of its tenth anniversary shows - been “marketed” as an instantly recognisable worldwide brand: an epithet for terror, destruction and spectacular cruelty. This is the biggest single impact of 9/11: globalised violence. 9/11 means many things to different people, but today it can’t be associated with anything positive, ethical, or humane. After all, who would say, “I was born on 9/11”?
Yet like any other global event, 9/11 has been the midwife of something new. It was the first example of postmodern terror organised and executed within the networked structures of a globalising world order that contracts the transaction of violence beyond space. Geographical distance is not a security guarantee anymore, and war has ceased to be a state of exception. Consequently, as a global event, 9/11 cannot be mourned in isolation. After all, it also delivered the “war on terror” which devastated Iraq, Afghanistan and more recently Pakistan too.
[To read on, click here]
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is reader in comparative politics and international relations at SOAS, London. His latest book is A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them beyond Orientalism (C Hurst / Columbia University Press, 2010). His previous books include Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (C Hurst, 2008 / Columbia University Press, 2008).
Also by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: "After the 'west'" (23 June 2011)
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Krzysztof Bobinski
The world of others
9/11 arrived as an amazing spectacle, foreshadowed by many a Hollywood disaster-movie. Then the real-life catastrophe hit: the tragic loss of life, the horror and the suffering of the victims in the hijacked planes and in the burning and collapsing buildings - and awe at the chilling determination of the suicidal-hijackers themselves.
The event had a profound psychological and symbolic effect in the United States. It ended the conviction that no harm would ever come to the homeland - safe on its continent, protected by oceans on either side and mostly friendly countries to north and south. It also marked the moment when things stopped going right for the US and showed that America’s unilateral moment was over. The resulting military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have confirmed the slide, and the financial crisis has severely undercut the US’s economic might.
A few days after 9/11 a colleague and I were interviewing Ryszard Kapuściński, Poland’s award-winning reporter who made his name writing about what was once called the “third world”.
During the conversation Kapuściński kept returning to the theme of how the western developed countries had become ever more uninterested in what was happening elsewhere in the world, and that we didn’t understand (or care) what people there thought about us. This, he thought, was one of the reasons for what had happened.
A decade on, the western media coverage of the rest of the world is still diminishing. Yet the shock of 9/11 may yet prove a turning-point in the west’s awareness of the importance of understanding other peoples, their religions, history and cultures. Should such a high price have been paid, though, to learn such a self-evident lesson?
Krzysztof Bobinski is the president of Unia & Polska, a pro-European think-tank in Warsaw. He was the Warsaw correspondent of the Financial Times(1976-2000) and later published Unia & Polska magazine
Also by Krzysztof Bobinski: "Poland's European infusion" (13 July 2011)
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Thomas Hylland Eriksen
A politics of suspicion
With 9/11, the upbeat optimism of the fin-de-siècle ground to a halt. In the preceding era apartheid had been consigned to the dustbin of history, the cold war had been called off, mobile-phones and internet connectivity had started to shrink the world as neo-liberal openness to global opportunities took hold. The events of 11 September 2001 shattered the optimism and opened the way to a decade of mistrust, fear and anxiety.
The politics of mistrust has taken root across continents: helping the new right in its rise to prominence in Europe, making air travel a humiliating ordeal, deepening the gulf between the largest monotheistic religions, and making cosmopolitan dialogue more difficult. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, along with the occasional report of “collateral damage” in Afghanistan, have made it more difficult than ever (or at least since the Vietnam war) for the United States to take the moral high ground in geopolitics.
The main benefactors of the 9/11 legacy have without doubt been those who thrive on divisive identity politics based on the dehumanisation of the other. Both nationalist bigotry and militant Islam have lived through a period when their opposing, yet almost identical worldviews have apparently been confirmed every day. Yet by contrast, 2001-11 was also Lula's decade and, for better and worse, that of Hugo Chavez. The Latin American left has indirectly benefited from the relative lack of attention bestowed upon it by the US, a country currently involved in three wars in Muslim countries, each hopeless in its own way.
This has been a decade marking a paranoid phase in the short history of globalisation. To find an optimistic scenario for the next, it is necessary to look beyond the north Atlantic with its dismal economic outlook and entanglements in distorted legacies of imperialism. It may seem that those regions which have been least affected by 9/11 - Brazil, China, India among them - presently have greater cause for confidence than the heirs of the Semitic and Greco-Roman worlds.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is professor in the department of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. His books include What is Anthropology? (Pluto Press, 2004); Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010); and Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010).
Also by Thomas Hylland Eriksen: "The paranoid phase of globalisation" (24 October 2001)
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Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi
A painful lesson
The events of 11 September 2001 occasioned many memorials. For me, the one who best conveyed the truth of the moment was written by the film critic Roger Ebert: that what happened “is not the possession of a nation but a sorrow shared with the world”.
Ebert's tribute spoke of landscapes that elevate the human spirit: parks, and ponds, a green field with trees and flowers. Alas, ten years on, there is precious little evidence of these being the principal physical legacy of 9/11. Instead, the landscape is littered with battered metal, broken glass, and bodily scars.
The thousands of dead and wounded are of every kind: combatants and civilians from dozens of nationalities, countless Afghans and Iraqis as well as the American and other soldiers sent to their countries, victims of urban terrorism and remote drone-bombing alike. “War begets war” is a painful lesson that it has taken a decade to relearn.
[To read on, click here]
Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is an analyst of Arab affairs
Also by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi: "Egypt: from revolt to change" (8 February 2011)
