9/11: It is time to move on
Article from The Guardian, 7th of September 2011:
Memories are still vivid, but we need to declare the end of the 9/11 era
"We need to declare the end of the post-9/11 era.
Of course that will be impossible for those directly affected. No one expects – and no one would ask – those still grieving for a wife or son, a husband or sister, to put the September 11 attacks behind them.."
"But if grief and art will necessarily stay fixated, the realm of politics needs to move on. Osama bin Laden is dead; George Bush and Tony Blair are long gone from office. The two 9/11 wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not over, but both now have a timetable for troops to come home. The phrase of the age – "the war on terror" – has been retired."
"Of course no wants to tempt fate with complacency. For that reason one aspect of the post-9/11 landscape will and should remain in place: vigilance. Police and intelligence agencies charged with protecting the public cannot revert to September 10 pretending that 9/11 – or, for that matter, Bali, Madrid and London – did not happen. The threat has changed, but it has not disappeared."
"Other aspects of the post-9/11 order persist too. Guantánamo Bay remains open, one of the early disappointments of the Obama presidency. The US "homeland security" apparatus created a decade ago is now well dug in. Given the tenacity of such bureaucracies – plenty of cold war American military structures linger to this day – few would bet on this newer one allowing itself to be mothballed."
"But it's the mindset that has to go. In those dazed days after the attacks, a new foreign policy doctrine was hastily assembled. It said that the world faced a single, overarching and paramount threat in the form of violent jihadism. Every other battle had to be subordinated to, or subsumed into, that one. And the call went beyond foreign policy. Culture, too, was to be enlisted in a clash of civilisations between Islamism and the west that would rank alongside the great 20th century struggles against communism and fascism."
"Such talk has been a constant of the 9/11 decade but its time has passed. For one thing, it's predicated on a mistake. The right way to regard the 2001 attacks was as a heinous and wicked crime – not a declaration of war. As Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, argued in her first Reith lecture calling it a war "legitimises the terrorists as warriors". It's exactly what al-Qaida wanted – feeding their fantasies of grandeur – and we gave it to them."
"Second, post-9/11 thinking has led to grave and lethal misjudgments. The greatest of these is agglomeration, lumping disparate and complex threats under one easy heading. The most notorious example will always be Iraq, casting that as part of the war on terror even though there was nothing to connect Saddam Hussein to Bin Laden."
"But it worked in subtler ways too. The director of Chatham House, Robin Niblett – who was in Washington when flight 77 struck the Pentagon – recalls how, during the cold war, regimes in Africa, Asia or Latin America won western backing as they fought off local, domestically motivated rebels simply by casting their opponents as part of "the global Communist foe". In the past decade, the west fell for the same trick all over again."
"Making the war against jihadism paramount has had other consequences too, still being felt. On post-9/11 logic, the shredding of civil liberties – condemned by Manningham-Buller as handing "victory to the terrorists" – was almost inevitable, for surely such freedoms had to take second place to the supreme threat. More serious has been the unleashing of a rampant Islamophobia – intense in Europe, recently lethal in Norway and rising in the US. That too is all but inevitable once Islamism is deemed the greatest peril faced by the human race."
"Again, this is not to say the dangers have receded. Would-be terrorists have seen the earth-shaking impact a spectacular attack can have – especially if it prompts a massive reaction that fuels the terrorists' cause, as the Iraq invasion did for al-Qaida. If one of the Arab revolutions fails, an al-Qaida offshoot could find purchase in that country. But vigilance is not the same as a careless, undiscriminating monomania.
Even those who were not there say the memory is so vivid, it feels like yesterday. But it was not yesterday. It was 10 years ago. We should mark the 9/11 anniversary with respect and care for those who died. But then we ought to close this sorry and bloody chapter – and bury the mentality it created."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ptember-11-era
The italics and underscore are mine.
I agree with this article wholeheartedly, and would in fact have put it much stronger.
Attacks like that, which have occured in other countries just as heinously if less spetacularly, have not resulted in wars or loss of personal freedoms, but in strengthening of intelligence and policework. Nor have they benefitted the criminals to such an extent, or distorted politics elsewhere - as far as I know, anyway.
I find it the of the utmost importance to stop the 'war-on-terror" slogan with all it entails, and to start to see the whole problem with fresh eyes. Concentrate on what the problem is - and isn't.
