Interesting article MD, thanks for posting.
Our local paper published the following on September 11, a retrospective look back. It is long, but I thought it was worth reading, and thought of it when I read your post, as there are some similar themes.
America's self-inflicted 9/11 legacy
Collateral damage from terror attacks can be felt throughout much of the world
By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun September 11, 2010
Even in his most evil fantasies, Osama bin Laden cannot have foreseen that collateral damage from his Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States would include the emergence of Glenn Beck as a serious element in American politics. The vastly popular Fox News commentator's appeal for a revival of fundamental American values and "restoring honour" drew huge throngs of people to Washington at the end of August.
But while Beck, a glib salesman of cure-all political ShamWows, intended to convey a message of hope if America rededicates itself to the country's founding principles and obedience to the perceived will of God, the effect was just the opposite. That tens of thousands of people -- maybe even hundreds of thousands, depending on whose crowd estimates one believes -- felt moved to travel from across the country to this revivalist celebration of Christian, middleclass, patriotic values is a commentary on how low American self-esteem and self-confidence have fallen since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
But a good deal of the damage to the American psyche in the last nine years has been self-inflicted. By its responses to the attacks on New York and Washington, particularly those replies launched by the administration of former president George W. Bush, the United States has done more damage to its stature both in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, in the judgment of very many of its own people than bin Laden ever could have achieved.
In the awful aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Americans abandoned some of the central ideologies of their republic with barely a murmur. They acceded to administration insistence that kidnappings -- "extraordinary rendition" -- torture, and the denial of the most basic human rights of detainees -- illegal combatants -- were essential weapons in the fight to keep America safe. In so doing they ignored the fundamental truth that campaigns against ideologically motivated terrorists are wars of ideas. A nation, a political and philosophical culture, conspires in its own defeat when it starts such a conflict by abandoning its most basic and cherished principles of human dignity. But that is exactly what the U.S. did, and matters such as the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and the public relations disasters of the Guantanamo Bay tribunals continue to damage America's international reputation and credibility.
And Americans agreed without a murmur to the creation at home of a security apparatus that is now so large, unwieldy and secretive that, to quote the Washington Post, "no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work." The best guess is that about a million people in more than 3,000 government and private agencies are working in about 10,000 locations across the U.S. on programs related to counter-terrorism and homeland security. Homeland security has become the watchword that justifies any abuse or erosion of traditional American liberties. It even sees armed border patrol agents stopping, questioning and requiring proof of citizenship from Americans going about their daily lives just south of the Canadian border. In the last five years these patrols, operating in northern New York state within 160 kilometres of the border with Canada, have arrested nearly 3,000 people. In all, about 6,000 people a year are being pulled out of buses, trains and cars and arrested in America's northern states if they are not carrying the documents to prove their identity.
It's the sort of picture that Hollywood used to use to give a snapshot of the iniquities of life behind the Iron Curtain. And the fallout from 9/11 has not happened in isolation, either at home or abroad.
Governments not only in the West but throughout the world have imposed all kinds of restrictions on their people and enhanced the capacities of their security agencies in the name of fighting terrorism and rooting out radicals. In several western countries, such as Canada and Britain as well as the U.S., what may well be a symbiotic response has arisen with the phenomenon of the radicalization of young, native-born Muslims, often from middleclass and professional backgrounds. It was young British Muslims apparently radicalized by bin Laden's example who launched the July 2005 suicide bombings in London that killed more than 50 people.
Britain already had a substantial closed-circuit television network on the public streets before those attacks. Now it has 4.2 million such cameras deployed, one for every 14 people, and it is reckoned that every person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times a day. Meanwhile, years of abandonment by successive American administrations of the most basic governmental responsibilities to oversee marketplace probity have caused a stubborn recession. Its defeat will require a rebirth of consumer and investment confidence that is not in the offing at the moment.
The elections in 2008 and the coming to office of Barack Obama with a Democrat administration carried, for very many Americans, the promise of positive revolutionary change and national spiritual revival. But the Obama revolution has fallen flat. He has struggled to demonstrate clear mastery over the tangle of massive problems bequeathed to him by the Bush administration, from wars to an imploding economy. And despite the promise and Obama's clear skill as a platform speaker, there is a disquieting soullessness about his performances and little aptitude for the common touch.
The aftermath of the 2001 attacks has also accelerated shifts in the tectonic plates of global power and influence that were already beginning to happen. The rise of China, India and other middle powers such as Brazil and the reconstructed Russia are products of globalization. But the speed of change has been affected in part by the sharp shift in United States foreign policy prompted by the drive to respond to the 2001 attacks. The Bush administration's declaration of a global "war on terror," the manipulation of intelligence information to attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq that Bush officials had labelled a priority years before, the reassessment of friends on the basis of their response to the Iraq invasion, and the acceleration of nuclear weapons programs in countries like Iran and North Korea that considered themselves threatened by the administration's "pre-emptive defence" doctrine, all served to disturb the world's view of America and Americans' view of themselves.
But none of this was what bin Laden intended. His central objectives are as distant and out of reach as they were when he started on his crusade with the founding of al-Qaida in September 1988. Osama bin Laden was one of 54 children -- 25 sons and 29 daughters -- by the more than 20 wives of Yemeniborn, Saudi Arabian mega-wealthy construction magnate Mohammed bin Laden. Osama bin Laden's world changed with the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979 and his encounter in Saudi Arabia soon afterward with charismatic Palestinian Muslim cleric Abdullah Azzam. With Azzam's encouragement, bin Laden got involved with the Services Office, which placed Arab volunteers with relief agencies helping Afghan refugees or with the Arab elements in the mujahedeen groups fighting the Soviets. Bin Laden, however, split with Azzam after coming under the influence of the far more radical Egyptians of the Muslim Brotherhood fighting in Afghanistan. Westerners who met bin Laden and the Arab mujahedeen at that time say they were far more dangerous and prickly people to deal with than the usually friendly Afghans. The Arabs were highly radicalized and showed active hatred of foreigners and non-Muslims.
It was through this Egyptian influence that bin Laden conceived, as the Afghan war ran down in the late 1980s with the imminent departure of the Soviets, of creating an organization using the young men trained fighting Russians to carry on and spread the jihad holy war in defence of Islam. Bin Laden's dream was, and presumably still is, the creation of a single Muslim state -- a caliphate -- from Indonesia across the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic in Morocco. At this time, bin Laden still supported the Saudi royal family, whose patronage had made his family massively wealthy. But that changed definitively in 1990 when the Saudi government allowed 500,000 American troops to use Saudi Arabia as a base from which to turn back Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. For bin Laden, this amounted to an unforgivable defilement of the holy ground of Saudi Arabia. In his mind, this gross insult to Islam justified the ousting of the Saudi royal family. But that was not easy to achieve. The royal family's grip on power was and is both backed by considerable muscle and exercised with a good deal of skill. During his exile in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, bin Laden began speaking out angrily against Saudi royal family hypocrisy. It was then that he hit on the notion that to undermine the legitimacy of the royal family in the eyes of Muslims, he should expose the links with the U.S. by attacking America. He also saw American influence over sectarian, non-Islamic regimes in the Middle East as equivalent to the Soviet empire. By launching jihad against "the head of the snake," he believed he could liberate Islam and hasten the creation of a fundamentalist caliphate.
The Central Intelligence Agency had opened a file on bin Laden six months before when, in June 1996, a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia was truck-bombed, killing 19 American soldiers. Al-Qaida struck again in 1998 when two truck bombs struck U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 257 people. And 17 American sailors died when an al-Qaida suicide bomber rammed the USS Cole with an explosives-packed boat in the port of Aden in Yemen in 2000. But it was not until the September 2001 attacks on the U.S. homeland that al-Qaida and bin Laden got the attention of the American people as a whole. The response of the newly installed Bush administration, however, was cockeyed from the start. Several of the ideological standard bearers of the incoming Bush administration -- men like defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick -- already had an agenda and script tucked in their pockets, drawn up at a think-tank called the Project for the New American Century. Reports from the project called for the U.S. to maintain its status as "the world's pre-eminent power" in the new century by acting vigorously with the help of a strongly supported military to defend and promote American principles and interests. High on the list was completing the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, from which the elder president Bush shrank in 1990. So firm was this fixation in the new Bush administration that after the September 2001 attacks, a sustained effort was mounted both in Washington and London to bend and interpret intelligence and information in a way that could be presented as justification for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
That was a gift for bin Laden because it allowed the creation of al-Qaida terror squads in Iraq, for which there had been no local fertile ground before. And it took the pressure off Afghanistan, allowing al-Qaida's allies, the Taliban, to regroup after the ousting of their regime at the end of 2001. Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces, including Canadians, are still paying the price of the Bush administration's Iraq obsession. But in his core objectives, bin Laden has failed.
Although the U. S. has removed its troops from Saudi Arabia, they remain in the Gulf states and there is no sign of Washington abandoning the Saudi royal family. The notion of a Muslim caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia is as much a dream as it ever was. Governments in the Middle East and places like Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Philippines where al-Qaida copycat groups have been formed have been largely victorious over the terrorists. Libya, long a supporter of terrorism everywhere and anywhere, has even repaired its relationship with the West. And one of the results of bin Laden's efforts at destabilization has been the rising influence in the Middle East of Iran, which is, of course, a Shiite Islamic republic and thus in bin Laden's devoutly Sunni Muslim eyes, an heretical nation of the worst sort.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun