Ten years after 9/11: War cannot bring peace

2011 marks 10 years since 9/11. Two weeks prior to that momentous tragedy I was in New York and passed through the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan many times during my three-week stay. I have often wondered what became of the African-American doorman in the lift who jovially told us that it would take some 15 seconds to reach the Windows of World restaurant located on the 106th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I have also pondered about the staff who served us our meal. I returned to the UK and 9/11 took place. Did the doorman and restaurant staff all work that dreadful day – or were they killed alongside the nearly 3,000 people from many different nationalities in those intimidating and iconic Twin Towers?

Ten years on, it is essential to pause and consider the state of the world today. What have the American government and people learnt from this single greatest atrocity on mainland America? In what ways has our world irrevocably changed since then? Or is it a fallacy that 9/11 changed the world? What are the steps needed to bring about greater peace, social justice and equality in our present world in order to prevent more 9/11s?

DECEPTION ON A GRAND SCALE

It appears new wars have been born – disturbing militarisation, media disinformation and fabrication have all been the direct, devastating consequence of that day. The response to that day of terror was the unleashing of the global war on terror (GWOT) by the then Bush-led administration and British prime minister Tony Blair. In October 2001 Bush carried out a ‘preventive war’ by invading Afghanistan and in March 2003 with his junior Atlantic partner, Tony Blair, carried out ‘regime change’ in Iraq under the iniquity of the dubious name,‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. Up to a million people in London marched on 15 February 2003 against the prospect of war, as did many ordinary people in over 40 countries around the world. These voices were ignored by the political classes that claim terrorists are opposed to democracy and all the good things about Western civilisation.

To date, the body bags of numbers of American and British troops continue to rise. British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq total 379 and 380 respectively. American troops who have been killed to date number 1,670 in Afghanistan and 1,752 in Iraq. In the Western media, rarely are the numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties given, but such numbers catastrophically dwarf those of the dead among the coalition. According to the website ‘Iraq Body Count’, Iraqi civilian deaths from violence stands between 103,344 and 111,861 people. These needless deaths lie on the conscience of the Western ruling classes who sanctioned these wars for economic gain from gas and oil in Afghanistan and Iraq and their ambition for revenge and maintenance of political power.

In the Western psyche of a sanitised war that is often portrayed as being akin to a Hollywood action war film, these deaths of Iraqis are somehow unreal – often referred to as ‘collateral damage’ in military-speak, for non-Europeans are somehow lesser human beings. As the veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges succinctly writes: ‘Our dead. Their dead. They are not the same. Our dead matter, theirs do not.’

Such a mindset that exalts the devaluation of human life lay behind the shocking human rights violations of sexual abuse, rape and sodomy at the Baghdad correctional facility more popularly known as Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 by US troops – one year after the war began in Iraq. America’s British cousins were also complicit in shameful gratuitous violence against Iraqi detainees held in custody in Iraq in September 2003. Baha Mousa’s killing, following 93 separate injuries on his body, led to an enquiry into the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) that established ‘corporate and systemic failures’ in the MOD. How many other Baha Mousas exist, we may never know.

However, the legacy of Western imperialist intervention and brutal exploitation in the South has a much longer history than Iraq, going back to the genocide of the Native American people with the arrival of the expansionist Europeans in the 1600s, as well as other regions of the world such as the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. A decade after 9/11, it remains profoundly despicable that the grand lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction has largely led us to where we are now.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE GWOT

What the GWOT has unleashed in terms of attitudes and values has further emboldened ‘pre-emptive strikes’ that are disturbing for all of humanity, but particularly the peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa who make up the global South. Islam is the new bogeyman for Americans and other Westerners.

Richard Reid, more famously known as ‘the shoe bomber’, returned to Paris airport on 22 December 2001 and boarded American Airlines Flight 63 from to Miami. Wearing special shoes packed with plastic explosives in their hollowed-out soles, Reid also contributed – a mere three months after 9/11 – to the fear and heightened security measures in Western capitals. That we all have to take off our shoes to pass through airport security in some airports is attributable to ‘the shoe bomber’. In the wake of 9/11 and Reid’s iniquitous act, ‘racial profiling’ targeted at Muslims came into practice. Also under attack in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were Sikhs in New York, who to some Americans were indistinguishable from Muslims.

The Bali bombings took place on 12 October 2002 when the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiya killed 202 people and injured many more. This was followed by attacks on the public transport system on 11 March 2004 and on 7 July 2005 in Spain and Britain respectively. Those terrorist acts increased the attacks on Muslims and gave rise to increased Islamophobia. Some eight years after ‘the shoe bomber’, on 25 December 2009 the ‘pants bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmulltallab tried to set himself alight on board flight 253 in Detroit. Such terrorist acts have simply justified in many quarters, particularly in the West, the continued need for greater and more stringent security checks at Western airports with new calls for full body scans to detect explosive devices, particularly after Abdulmulltallab’s abortive attempt.

The GWOT has replaced the Cold War and given the US ruling military and political elite a justification to extend their Monroe Doctrine to the entire planet. It has given rise to the manipulation of the media by reporters, television presenters and journalists who serve the interests of the war machine and the political classes. ‘Embedded journalists, a euphemism for those who spin fabrications and myths, simply condition the minds of ordinary people for further war and interventions that Western citizens are persuaded are necessary. Those Western journalists with a political conscience such as John Pilger, Naomi Wolf and their equivalents in the South such as Khadija Sharife and Olu Owoonor Gordon who speak the unpalatable truth to power are rare indeed.

The GWOT has catastrophically increased the cost of the empire. The US now spends US$700 billion annually on its military, which is as much money as the military expenditure of the rest of the world.

Malcolm X deemed the assassination of J.F. Kennedy in 1963 as a case of chickens coming home to roost. Were he alive in 2011, would he have said the same of 9/11? The denial among many Americans and people in the West of the fact that decades of imperialist policies in the Middle East, particularly the biased stance of successive American administrations towards Israel in the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine, the deliberate flouting of numerous UN Security Council resolutions by the state of Israel, as well as the presence of military bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, contributed to the unleashing of a ferocious political rage among fundamentalist Islamic elements in the Arab world who were the perpetrators of this heinous act. That even the 2004 official 9/11 report into the tragedy avoided the question of why the attack took place in the first place remains staggering.

Ten years later there has been no real significant development towards the realisation of a Palestinian state; Jewish settlers continue to build on Palestinian land; and US military troops remain firmly planted in the autocratic client-state of Saudi Arabia. In fact, Israel continues to act like a spoilt child of the US in its refusal to apologise to Turkey for what a recent UN report characterised as use of ‘excessive and unreasonable force’ to stop the Mavi Marmara flotilla that sought to break the Gaza blockade on 31 May 2010. Nine people were killed when Israeli commandos boarded the flotilla.

The sheer arrogance of the Israeli apartheid state continues to bleat that Israel has the right to maintain the naval blockade on Gaza as a ‘legitimate security measure’. For some in the South – that is, the majority of the world – and particularly the Arab world, this recent impunity of Israel not only breeds further grounds for future fundamentalists outraged by injustices against fellow Muslims in Gaza but also highlights America’s tolerance of Israel’s impunity.

WAR CANNOT PRODUCE PEACE

Ten years on, in the West there is an annual deluge of TV programmes commemorating 9/11 that do very little – if anything – critical and genuine reflection on the real causes of 9/11. Those shown in Britain simply amplify the lie that there was a pre-9/11 world and a post-9/11 world. This new historical turning point in some ways is true and untrue. Overall it is very simplistic. There continues to be a bigger and more dangerous reach of imperial powers in the world today. Such powers existed in the pre-9/11 world but have now extended their ideological justifications for carrying out ‘regime change’ by the sophisticated construction of what Milan Rai characterises in the case of Iraq as ‘a phantom menace’. The doctrine of ‘preemptive strikes’ will allow military hawks to create future phantom menaces to pursue their imperialist agendas around the world. This is the precedent stemming from 9/11 in our times.

However, another 9/11, as many have pointed out, was the overthrow of the popularly and democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile on 9 September 1973, which unleashed a vicious dictatorship led by the US-supported General Pinochet that endured for 17 years. Many innocent Chileans’ lives were lost during those years of butchery. Yet for many people in the West, the power of the Western propaganda machine that erases and exalts the histories and sufferings of some people more than others, there is only one 9/11 in the Western consciousness.

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail in 2007–08 Barack Obama pledged to end the war in Iraq. After winning political office he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize only to escalate the numbers of American troops sent to Afghanistan in 2009. Yet peace remains unachievable in Afghanistan while American troops remain there. Ten years on, it seems the American people and their government continue to fail to understand this.

To date, victimisation along with growing intolerance towards Islam and Muslims was demonstrated in the hysteria among some Americans towards the proposed construction in August 2010 of what right-wing extremist forces dubbed ‘the Ground Zero mosque’. The truth is that the proposed building would be a multi-faith community centre with an Islamic prayer area which is to be located two blocks north of the site where the Twin Towers stood. The centre would not be seen from the Twin Towers which is now referred to in the American press as ‘hallowed ground’. According to a CNN poll, 70 per cent of Americans opposed the multi-faith centre with only 29 per cent approving it.

Despite this fact, prominent republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin vociferously protested against the construction. They were joined by right-wing zealots and evangelical Christian groups who launched a sustained campaign against it. A Florida-based pastor, Terry Jones, inflamed the sensitive matter further by threatening to burn copies of the Qu’ran to coincide with the ninth anniversary of 9/11 to demonstrate his opposition to the centre and his insistence that it be moved. He suspended the plan in the face of condemnation from Obama, the Pentagon, the State Department and international outrage.

In the wake of the posturing right-wing pastor came the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 by American troops. This may have quenched the American desire for revenge, but there is the prospect that it may also further radicalise fundamentalists in the Arab world to replace their assassinated leader and continue his mission as devout heirs to bin Laden’s vision and objectives. For some Americans the assassination gave rise to a groundswell of patriotic triumphalism, particularly around the site of the former Twin Towers, as hundreds celebrated the announcement of bin Laden’s execution.

Peace for Americans and all who cherish human life cannot exist when America continues to possess over 200,000 troops stationed in 144 countries around the world. Some will seek to justify this military presence, yet as America and other Western countries such as Britain continue to face a deepening capitalist economic crisis Americans need to ask themselves if they can afford to live in a state of permanent war. Similarly, the British need to ask themselves why it is that, whilst austerity measures are imposed on the working people of Britain, Prime Minster David Cameron can justify spending taxpayers’ money to bomb Libyans. The power of the ruling classes has always been to disconnect what is happening at home from what is happening abroad. The truth is that they are inextricably linked.

THE FARCE OF WESTERN DEMOCRACY AND ‘RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT’

Perhaps the only lesson the British establishment has learnt from the 10 years since 9/11 is that authorisation and sanction for their wars in the UN Security Council is necessary to legitimate their actions before the public. Unlike his obnoxious predecessor, Tony Blair, Cameron’s government, along with France and Lebanon, received legal support on 17 March 2011 for Security Council Resolution 1973 for NATO-led military action to assist the Libyan rebels. The resolution also demanded ‘an immediate ceasefire’ and imposed a no-fly zone ostensibly to protect civilians. The reality is the responsibility to protect doctrine is a dangerous 21st century version of the 19th century ‘white man’s burden’ that was used as an ideological cloak to colonise Africa.

The new mantra of responsibility to protect (R2P) has seemingly replaced the alleged ‘humanitarian intervention’ of Kosovo in the late 1990s. Both mask political and economic agendas of the Western powers. In addition, the selective use of the no-fly zone policy by the UN Security members smacks of double standards. In the Gaza strip during the winter of 2008–09, not one member of the UN Security Council called for a no-fly zone when phosphorous bombs were used by the Israeli military against the people of Gaza.

Whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, the constant rhetoric of Western leaders and policy-makers that their involvement in other people’s countries is about bringing democracy and freedom, as in Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq, is a great farce. As the late Sierra Leonean journalist and pan-Africanist Olu Awoonor Gordon argued: ‘The West is not interested in democracy. The West is interested in political control. If the West is interested in democracy why have they never raised the question of democracy with the King of Saudi Arabia?’

The question can also be asked about why Blair and David Cameron never raised the question of Gaddafi’s democratic credentials since the rapprochement in March 2004 between him and then British prime minister Tony Blair. Just as oil contracts for Britain were the objective of Blair’s willingness to shake hands with Gaddafi in his tent in the Libyan desert, oil contracts are the real motive for the Cameron government’s desire to oust him. Recently unearthed secret files show that Blair insisted on meeting the Libyan leader in his tent for the photo opportunity it would afford journalists. Such is the political vanity and showmanship of Blair’s missionary zeal to embrace a dictator whose contradictory record in Africa has also contributed to create Africa as the ‘scar on the conscience of the world’ that Blair bemoans. In the outrageous hypocrisy and recent political somersaulting that has characterised British foreign policy towards Gaddafi, the British have always been keen adherents to the dictum that in politics one does not have permanent friends but permanent interests to be pursued by any means necessary.

MILITARISATION AND THE LATEST TERRORIST TRAGEDY

In the wake of 9/11 we have seen efforts to re-colonise Africa and extend the militarisation of US foreign policy to the continent. This was carried out by the Bush regime under the ideological pretext of the GWOT extending to Africa’s Sahel region, Gulf of Guinea and the Horn of Africa. The establishment of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) on 6 February 2007 ostensibly to address US interests of counter-terrorism, contain armed conflict, arrest the spread of HIV/AIDS and reduce international crime conceals America’s need to protect its growing need for alternative oil resources to be found in Africa, which China’s growing presence threatens.

A recent tragic event to remind us of the agonising ties to 9/11 is the gruesome massacre of 77 people in Oslo on 22 July this year. Initially the Western media presumptuously jumped to the conclusion – without any concrete evidence – that the perpetrators were al-Qaeda operators, only to find the terrorist was one of their own. However, it is also interesting that most of the Western media coverage of this horrific event tended not to cast the perpetrator, a blond blue-eyed well-educated Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, as a ‘terrorist’ but as a ‘Christian fundamentalist’. Is it the case that in the Western mind ‘terrorists’ are only brown- or black-skinned people? Surely Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahama City bombing, and Breivik necessitate that we understand that ‘terrorists’ come in all ethnicities and, more importantly, that we try to understand the motives of their dastardly acts in order to counter them.

In the aftermath of the cold-blooded shootings, Breivik claims to have launched his vile actions ‘to save Europe from Muslim takeover’ because he believes there is a conspiracy to impose multiculturalism on the continent and destroy Western civilisation. His anti-immigrant politics chimes with the politics of many right-wing and anti-immigrant parties and policies in Sweden, Holland, Italy, Austria and elsewhere in the last decade. For example, in Britain since October 2009 the English Defence League (EDL), a far right-wing group that openly states it is opposed to Islamism and Islamic extremism in England, has used street marches to disseminate and publicise its toxic views. In the last two years they have organised 40 marches in Britain and invariably all have ended in violence often against the organisation Unite Against Fascism (UAF). The latter was formed in late 2003 as a direct response to the electoral successes of the racist and right-wing British National Party (BNP) in Britain.

In addition, mainstream European leaders such as David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi and others have added to the mood of ethnic and cultural intolerance and anti-immigration by condemning multiculturalism as having failed. Contributing to the generation of anti-Muslim sentiments in Britain and across the European continent is the populist press that presents all Muslims without distinction of their nationality (that is whether they come from Turkey, Tunisia or Pakistan) as one homogenous group of people without class or political differences.

The response of some Muslims has made them more defensive about aspects of their culture such as wearing the hijab, particularly in Britain. In France the hijab and other conspicuous religious symbols were banned in all state schools in 2003. The action was supported by two-thirds of the left-wing National Front and the centre-right. Needless to say, France’s Muslim population of 6 million feel under threat and under scrutiny whilst the justification given by the French government is to enforce secularism.

Ten years since 9/11 the challenges of resisting deep-seated prejudice in the configuration of Islamophobia and continued racism against people of African descent – which manifests in the high number of black males dying in police custody in the UK – are symptomatic of the domestic and foreign policies that are often the twin sides of the same coin of imperialist nations. In pursuing such policies, people of colour continue to be perceived as ‘the other’ and not fully human. Similarly, the continued violence of occupation in Palestine, the continued hypocrisy and double standards of Western foreign policies that mask current imperialist agendas, obviously make for a radically unstable world. Despite the fact that Barack Obama pledged to close down Guantánamo Bay during his campaign, it remains open, with individuals who are in the eyes of the American administration guilty before proven innocent of their links with Al-Qaeda.

Intensifying the struggles to challenge all these political and social injustices is the task of all those desiring genuine justice, freedom and equality for all in our world.

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* Dr Ama Biney is a pan-Africanist and historian living in the United Kingdom.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.