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AZG Armenian Daily #172, 09/09/2006
World press
IF 9/11 HADN'T HAPPENED
Five years since 9/11, and we are still being told that the world has
changed forever. But the terrorist attack on the United States on 11
September, 2001 was a low-probability event that could just as easily
not have happened.. The often careless and sometimes incompetent
hijackers might have been caught before boarding those planes,
and there were not ten other plots of similar magnitude stacked up
behind them.
Would the world really be all that different now if there had been
no 9/11?
There would have been no invasion of Afghanistan, and probably no
second term for President George W. Bush, whose main political asset
for the past five years has been his claim to be leading the United
States in a Global War on Terror. Deprived of the opportunity to
posture as a heroic war leader in the mould of Winston Churchill
or Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bush would have had great difficulty in
persuading the American public that his first-term achievements
merited a second kick at the can.
Would Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co. have succeeded in
invading Iraq anyway? That was high on their agenda from the moment
they took office, but without the 9/11 attacks eight months later they
would have had great difficulty in persuading the American public
that invading Iraq, a country on the other side of the world that
posed no threat to the United States, was a good idea. Whereas after
9/11, it was easy to sell the project to geographically challenged
Americans: maybe no Iraqis were involved in 9/11, but they're all
Arabs, aren't they?
So no Afghanistan, no Iraq -- and probably no Israeli attack on
Lebanon either, because that was pre-planned in concert with the
United States. Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the
killing of three others in a cross-border raid in late June was a major
provocation, but the Bush administration had already signed off on an
all-out Israeli air assault to destroy Hezbollah months before. All
they needed was a suitable excuse, which Hezbollah duly provided.
But assume no Bush second term, and that also doesn't happen.
Without 9/11 there would still be a "terrorist threat," of course,
because there is always some terrorism. It's rarely a big enough
threat to justify expanding .police powers, let alone launching a
"global war" against it, but the fluke success of the 9/11 attacks
(which has not been duplicated once in the subsequent five years)
created the illusion that terrorism was a major problem. Various
special interests climbed aboard the band-wagon, and off we all went.
That is a pity, because without 9/11 there would have been no
governments justifying torture in the name of fighting terrorism, no
"special renditions," no camps like Guantanamo. Tens of thousands of
people killed in the various invasions of the past five years would
still be alive, and Western countries with large Muslim minorities
would not now face a potential terrorist backlash at home from their
own disaffected young Muslims. The United States would not be seen
by most of the world as a rogue state. But that's as far as the
damage goes.
Current US policy and the hostility it arouses elsewhere in the world
are both transient things. The Sunni Muslim extremists -- they would
call themselves Salafis -- who were responsible for 9/11 have not
seized power in a single country since then, despite the boost they
were given by the flailing US response to that attack. The world
is actually much the same as it would have been if 9/11 had never
happened.
Economically, 9/11 and its aftermath have had almost no discernible
long-term impact: even the soaring price of oil is mostly due to rising
demand in Asia, not to military events in the Middle East. The lack
of decisive action on climate change is largely due to Bush policies
that were already in place before 9/11.
And strategically, the relations between the great powers have not
yet been gravely damaged by the US response to 9/11. There may even
be a hidden benefit in the concept of a "war on terror."
It is a profoundly dishonest concept, since it is actually directed
mainly against Muslim groups that have grievances against the various
great powers: Chechens against Russia, Muslim Uyghurs against China,
Kashmiri Muslims and their Pakistani cousins against India, practically
everybody in the Arab world and Iran against the US and Britain. The
terrorists' methods are reprehensible, but their grievances are often
real. However, the determination of the great powers to oppose not
only their methods but their goals is also real. That gives them a
common enemy and a shared strategy.
The main risk at this point in history is that the great powers will
drift back into some kind of alliance confrontation. Key resources
are getting scarcer, the climate is changing, and the rise of China
and India means that the pecking order of the great powers is due
to change again in the relatively near future. Any strategic analyst
worth his salt, given those preconditions, could draw you up a dozen
different scenarios of disaster by lunchtime.
Avoiding that disaster at the expense of the world's much abused
Muslims is not an acceptable option, but it appears to be the preferred
solution of the moment.
And that, five years on, is the principal legacy of 9/11.
By Gwynne Dyer
World press
IF 9/11 HADN'T HAPPENED
Five years since 9/11, and we are still being told that the world has
changed forever. But the terrorist attack on the United States on 11
September, 2001 was a low-probability event that could just as easily
not have happened.. The often careless and sometimes incompetent
hijackers might have been caught before boarding those planes,
and there were not ten other plots of similar magnitude stacked up
behind them.
Would the world really be all that different now if there had been
no 9/11?
There would have been no invasion of Afghanistan, and probably no
second term for President George W. Bush, whose main political asset
for the past five years has been his claim to be leading the United
States in a Global War on Terror. Deprived of the opportunity to
posture as a heroic war leader in the mould of Winston Churchill
or Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bush would have had great difficulty in
persuading the American public that his first-term achievements
merited a second kick at the can.
Would Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co. have succeeded in
invading Iraq anyway? That was high on their agenda from the moment
they took office, but without the 9/11 attacks eight months later they
would have had great difficulty in persuading the American public
that invading Iraq, a country on the other side of the world that
posed no threat to the United States, was a good idea. Whereas after
9/11, it was easy to sell the project to geographically challenged
Americans: maybe no Iraqis were involved in 9/11, but they're all
Arabs, aren't they?
So no Afghanistan, no Iraq -- and probably no Israeli attack on
Lebanon either, because that was pre-planned in concert with the
United States. Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the
killing of three others in a cross-border raid in late June was a major
provocation, but the Bush administration had already signed off on an
all-out Israeli air assault to destroy Hezbollah months before. All
they needed was a suitable excuse, which Hezbollah duly provided.
But assume no Bush second term, and that also doesn't happen.
Without 9/11 there would still be a "terrorist threat," of course,
because there is always some terrorism. It's rarely a big enough
threat to justify expanding .police powers, let alone launching a
"global war" against it, but the fluke success of the 9/11 attacks
(which has not been duplicated once in the subsequent five years)
created the illusion that terrorism was a major problem. Various
special interests climbed aboard the band-wagon, and off we all went.
That is a pity, because without 9/11 there would have been no
governments justifying torture in the name of fighting terrorism, no
"special renditions," no camps like Guantanamo. Tens of thousands of
people killed in the various invasions of the past five years would
still be alive, and Western countries with large Muslim minorities
would not now face a potential terrorist backlash at home from their
own disaffected young Muslims. The United States would not be seen
by most of the world as a rogue state. But that's as far as the
damage goes.
Current US policy and the hostility it arouses elsewhere in the world
are both transient things. The Sunni Muslim extremists -- they would
call themselves Salafis -- who were responsible for 9/11 have not
seized power in a single country since then, despite the boost they
were given by the flailing US response to that attack. The world
is actually much the same as it would have been if 9/11 had never
happened.
Economically, 9/11 and its aftermath have had almost no discernible
long-term impact: even the soaring price of oil is mostly due to rising
demand in Asia, not to military events in the Middle East. The lack
of decisive action on climate change is largely due to Bush policies
that were already in place before 9/11.
And strategically, the relations between the great powers have not
yet been gravely damaged by the US response to 9/11. There may even
be a hidden benefit in the concept of a "war on terror."
It is a profoundly dishonest concept, since it is actually directed
mainly against Muslim groups that have grievances against the various
great powers: Chechens against Russia, Muslim Uyghurs against China,
Kashmiri Muslims and their Pakistani cousins against India, practically
everybody in the Arab world and Iran against the US and Britain. The
terrorists' methods are reprehensible, but their grievances are often
real. However, the determination of the great powers to oppose not
only their methods but their goals is also real. That gives them a
common enemy and a shared strategy.
The main risk at this point in history is that the great powers will
drift back into some kind of alliance confrontation. Key resources
are getting scarcer, the climate is changing, and the rise of China
and India means that the pecking order of the great powers is due
to change again in the relatively near future. Any strategic analyst
worth his salt, given those preconditions, could draw you up a dozen
different scenarios of disaster by lunchtime.
Avoiding that disaster at the expense of the world's much abused
Muslims is not an acceptable option, but it appears to be the preferred
solution of the moment.
And that, five years on, is the principal legacy of 9/11.
By Gwynne Dyer