Twenty-two years isn’t much time, historically-speaking, and it seems even shorter when you look backwards not forwards. Like most people, I remember very well what I was doing on September 11, 2001. I was in my study working on a novel, when my mother called to tell me that something was happening at the World Trade Centre.
That was after the first plane hit, and over the rest of the day I tried to continue with my novel, while flitting in and out of the rolling news coverage. I felt disgust, despair and sorrow at the atrocity that was unfolding on my tv screen, and I also recognized the fiendish brilliance of it - the ‘creativity’ that must have gone into preparing such a horrific spectacle of destruction and mass murder.
My daughter was five years old then, and my wife and I agreed to tell her what had happened, so that she could hear it from it us first. I remember that I picked her up from school and said something bad had happened in New York. I may have said something about bad people doing bad things, but it was nothing for her to worry about, because how do you explain to a five-year-old that our world contains such possibilities?
Of course there was a great deal to worry about, and what worried me - and many others - was that in the world that we had, with its brutal global divisions of wealth and power, and with the leaders that we had, the wrong choices would be made.
Many of us sensed that it was likely, if not inevitable, that September 11 would unleash a cascade of retributive violence and make a bad situation even worse, even if we didn’t know exactly what form it would take.
As the whole world knows, that is exactly what happened. A wounded - castrated? - superpower used the attacks to launch a global war on ‘terror’ with no coherent enemy or definition of victory, no boundaries to its theatre of operations, and no limits on the means that it was prepared to use.
Effective military strategy implies clear goals and a realistic assessment of what is possible and what can go wrong, and an understanding of your own resources and reserves of national power and the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy, so that you can avoid fighting the war your enemy wants you to fight.
All that went out the window in the ‘changed world’ of 9/11, as a US administration made up of the most gimlet-eyed Reaganite hawks seized on an opportunity to wage global war against whoever America wanted to fight and whoever it wanted to take out. Riding shotgun with the Bush posse was Tony Blair; part-Jesus, part-Machiavelli, who always seemed to be staring at monsters that only he could see and protect us from.
While Bush did his ‘we’ll smoke ‘em out’ John Wayne impressions, Blair was always more grandiose, telling the Labour Party Conference the ‘kaleidoscope had been shaken’ and that it was time to ‘re-order the world’ while the pieces were ‘in flux.’ Other bit-players joined in the chorus. Berlusconi, the bunga-bunga gangster-mogul, advised the West to remember the ‘superiority of our civilization’ over Islamic culture.
This sense of superiority made anything possible. Regime change became the order of the day. Regional opponents of American power were all lumped together into a common ‘Axis of Evil’ to be picked off one after another, and linked to 9/11 or al-Qaeda, or nuclear weapons, or all of these things.
Bombings, invasions, and military occupations; kidnappings and ‘extraordinary renditions’ that removed counterterrorist procedures from legal scrutiny; Guantanamo; the insanely racist ‘porno-interrogations’ at Abu Ghraib; draconian antiterror laws that stigmatized entire communities; assassination-by-drone - all these measures were presented by conservatives and neo-conservatives as an expression of ‘moral clarity’ against an enemy comparable to Nazism or Communism.
The world, or so the architects of the war on terror believed, could be remade, or at least policed, by the world’s only superpower. America was Rome, and its enemies were barbarians. Dictators would fall - at least the ones we didn’t like - and democracies would sprout up across the world, because terrorists hated democracy and democracy was the best cure for terrorism.
It was all so horrendously overblown, wrong-headed, dishonest and downright devious - and all served up with a mixture of cynicism, wishful thinking and hubris that has rarely been equalled.
9/11 provided the opportunity to escape the mediocrity of late capitalism. It enable countries to be great and their leaders to be great too, and the leaders we had were in no mood to listen to the bleeding hearts, or the little people and ‘appeasers’ who suggested that there might be more effective, targeted and lawful ways of destroying the networks responsible for the attacks, without tearing the Middle East to pieces.
Because America was an ‘empire now’, as Karl Rove supposedly suggested, and the ‘reality-based community’ could only watch in awe as the empire-builders dazzled the world with their feats of imperial derring-do. This was the moment for the little men who wanted to be Churchill; for the desktop warriors and laptop bombardiers and the backroom boys; for Michael Ledeen, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the architects of the ‘American century’.
And so we got Afghanistan and Iraq, the Syrian civil war and Libya, Islamic State, the bombing of Lebanon, three wars in Gaza, the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, and the war in Yemen, and many other ‘battlegrounds’ that the world hardly remembers.
We got death and carnage on an epic scale, some of which we saw and some of which we didn’t. And millions of refugees crossing borders, many of whom we had no interest in helping.
And even though politicians insisted that we were fighting ‘over there to stop them fighting us over here’, we also got a lot of terrorism ‘over here’’ as one country after another experienced ‘its 9/11’ and self-proclaimed holy warriors massacred concert-goers, mowed pedestrians down in trucks, blew up commuters, and shot people down in hotels and beach resorts, and murdered school-children.
Some of these murderers - and in the end they were never anything more than that - were pathetic amateurs plucking half-baked bomb plots from the Internet or former drug dealers seeking to cleanse themselves through virtuous murder of the kuffar. Others were terrorist ‘operatives’ acting under the al-Qaeda franchise or some national organization, or waging politics and warfare other means.
All of them were ‘terrorism’ - a justification for the media spectacle of terror and counter-terror and asymmetric warfare that we gawked at like spectators at a bloody Wimbledon, at least when Western targets were attacked. Still our governments pledged to ‘keep us safe’ even when, as was the case with the British army in Helmand Province, they often had no idea who they were actually fighting.
Historians may one day piece find some sense and meaning out of this mayhem, but for the moment we can say quite clearly that no one ‘won’. The United States was defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending trillions of dollars and losing more casualties through suicide than combat - an astonishing 30,177 of the former compared with 7,057 of the latter.
Defenders of these operations can point to Bin Laden’s death - executed in a compound less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad - as some kind of endpoint, but it was certainly not a victory. And the same could be said about Al-Zawahiri or al-Baghdadi.
No one can mourn men like these, but they are executions, not victories. And if the organizations and movements that they led have been weakened or destroyed, then it is also worth pointing that they might not have existed, or grown to the size they reached, had it not been for the strategic lunacy that gave them the wars they wanted.
And these organizations also won nothing. Al-Qaeda got its ‘fields of jihad’, but twenty-two years after 9/11 it controls no territory and its political project, such as it was, has collapsed. Even Islamic State’s hideous utopia, that once spanned two states, has fallen to pieces. The only clear beneficiaries of these wars are the Private Military Companies like Blackwater, the military suppliers and arms companies - and the Taliban.
History is made in the dark, and those who make it have no idea how it will turn out. Nor are they able to prevent unintended consequences of their actions that they may not even have considered - not to mention ‘unknown unknowns’ that are always waiting in the future. But too many of the people who presided over the war on terror were too blinkered by their own ideological convictions and premises to see how shallow they were.
Once, ‘extremism’ was a ill-defined concept that was generally synonymous with ‘Islamic’ terrorism or Islam in general. A range of pundits from Christopher Hitchens to Melanie Phillips depicted Islam or ‘Islamofascism’ as a threat to the West, to liberalism, or to global democracy.
Now the West is under threat primarily from itself, as electorates turn away from democracy towards authoritarians and demagogues. Mismanaged and ill-conceived wars of choice have merged into a succession of institutional failures. Misgovernance and bad governance and an indifference to the basic nuts and bolts that hold society together have fuelled the rise of white supremacists, ethnonationalists and far-right ‘populists’ espousing the wildest conspiratorial politics, who are as contemptuous of liberal democracy as Osama bin Laden was.
In this topsy-turvy world, nothing is as it was. Who could have predicted that Liz Cheney - the paleoconservative whose Keep America Safe group once called the Department of Justice the ‘Department of Jihad’, because seven of its lawyers acted on behalf of alleged terrorists - would now be ejected by her own party and leading - with honour, courage and integrity - a Congressional Inquiry into the Jan 6 assault on the Capitol?
No one can be surprised to find ‘Mamma Grizzly’ Sarah Palin threatening civil war in America in defence of Donald Trump. But Palin was once hailed as the great hope of the Republican right by Bill Kristol, the affable and ever-smiling editor of the Weekly Standard who never saw a country he didn’t want to bomb into democracy.
Kristol once looked to Palin to ‘channel a certain kind of populism into… a healthy conservatism.’ Now he considers her to be a ‘disappointment’. Now America is potentially just one election away from democratic collapse, and Kristol, like Cheney, is opposing Trump and his own party.
And then there is Michael Flynn, the JSOC death squad general in Afghanistan, forced out of Trump’s team for alleged Russian espionage, now spouting a mixture of Christofascism and QAnon insurrectionary politics. And Alistair Campbell, the swaggering former tabloid journalist-turned war propagandist who helped con his country into war, now holding forth as the voice of liberal reason.
Life, in the twenty-first century, really does come at you fast. And it isn’t always convenient to consider the connections between our ‘post-truth’ world and the lies, fantasies and fabrications that accompanied the era of terrorwars. Or ask why it is that we now reject refugees from the countries we once set out to liberate, even when they fought on our side.
Thirteen years after the overthrow of Muamar Gaddafi, twenty-thousand Libyans have died because two dams were not maintained by one of the two ‘governments’ that rule the country between them. Libya was another product of the ‘regime change’ agenda that has left a world with many broken eggs and no omelettes, which none of the governments or the politicians responsible, have ever really taken any responsibility for.
Waging the war on terror it seems, means never having to say you’re sorry or even admit that you have done anything wrong. Meanwhile, at the end of this sordid and sorrowful history, 30 terrorist suspects are still in Guantanamo Bay. Some of them have never been charged with anything. Others cannot be tried because they were tortured. No one can know if they are innocent or guilty. And no one wants to ask.
Do I feel sorry for Khalid Sheikh Muhammed? No. But I would like to see him tried. And I would like to know what the others have done - or not done. Instead they are permanently warehoused people, who may well spend the rest of their lives in a jail that is not jail, in a world that has moved on, where too many people have no interest in looking backwards.
We like to believe that we can learn lessons from history. But as far as the mistakes of the war on terror is concerned, there is no evidence of any such inclinations. Today ‘terror’ has slipped into the political background of the world’s political priorities, but if - or should we say when? - it ever comes back, we might want to take another look, and use these anniversaries to remember, not just those who died on September 11, but of what came afterwards.
You forgot to mention José María Aznar, Spanish PM at that time. This ridiculous little man, one of the Trio of Azores, believed himself being on the top of the world when he met the other two criminals. Never apologized neither asked for forgiveness.