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Bin Laden, what have you done to
us?
By Ehsan Ahrari
The
tragic events of September 11, 2001 affected us all. I
mean all, regardless of our religious, national or
ethnic background. For a few moments after those planes
were highjacked - two of them rammed into the World
Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and the fourth one
was reportedly heading for Capitol Hill, but was
surmised to have been crashed by its brave passengers -
the whole world felt the pain.
It felt as if the
entire human race was attacked that day. French
newspaper Le Monde spoke for the international community
by declaring Nous sommes tous les Americains (We
are all American). Several thousand people perished
within moments. We all lost something precious: our
relatives, sense of invulnerability, parts of our
freedom, and our innocence about the basic goodness of
human beings. As if the human loss was not grave enough,
its impact will stay with us long after the threat
related to transnational terrorism has subsided. But
even that moment - ie, when the threat diminishes
significantly - seems so far away in our future.
In the national exercise of finding reasons for
that heinous crime, we came up with a whole lot of
explanations. None of them explained adequately the
reason why those 19 highjackers demonstrated so much
hatred toward the US. Perhaps it was politics, perhaps
it was religious hatred or bigotry. But the rationales
underlying the severity of those acts elude our
collective sense of reasoning. All highjackers were
Muslims, thus Muslims in America were targeted. But even
in expressing its anger, America did not completely let
go of its civility, in most instances anyway.
Still, the rights of innocents were not taken
into consideration in the case of 11,00 Muslims who were
arrested, and several hundred who were detained for long
durations. A whole lot of them were even deported for
minor infractions, unrelated to terrorism. Congress
passed the Patriot Act, and America truly lost its
innocence. There is something really uncanny about
innocence. Once lost, it is never recovered, especially
what it was before the loss.
People of Middle
Eastern extraction were targeted in an era of new
respectability assigned to racial profiling. Many of
them lamented that their religion was "highjacked" by
terrorists. In an age of cliche-making, no one was
paying attention to how silly that cliche really was.
Islam was not an airplane or a bus that could be
highjacked. None of those 19 highjackers, not even Osama
bin Laden, spoke for Islam. They happened to be Muslims,
but how can one blame the entire religion for the
nefarious frame of reference of a few, even when it was
couched in the language of religion. Christianity was
never highjacked when innumerable Muslims lost their
lives in the name of religion in Bosnia and Kosovo, and
in the never-ending factional violence in Northern
Ireland.
In the US, there ensued a meaningless
debate, "Why do they hate us?", as if hatred is only a
one-way street, or a phenomenon that involves only one
group of people with similar background. The American
media zeroed in on Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi tradition as a
new enemy of the US. But that tradition has been in
power in that country for many decades, and Saudi Arabia
has been America's ally for the same amount of time.
Even those who were practitioners of religious
and cultural superciliousness in the West could not
control themselves when they made fools out of
themselves by berating Islam. Franklin Graham cashed in
on his famous last name in the US domestic arena by
calling Islam "a very wicked and evil religion". As if
he was at all not embarrassed by ignominy, he later on
refused to withdraw his earlier comment and said, "We
are not attacking Islam, but Islam has attacked us."
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was
equally eager to show his ignorance on the world scenes
by observing that Western civilization is superior to
Islamic culture. An opposition leader of Italian
parliament, Massimo d'Alema, was probably most apt when
he observed, "Mr Berlusconi is most effective when he
shuts up." Most recently, Jerry Falwell showed his
religious chauvinism by attempting to soil the character
of the Prophet of Islam. One always wonders what
motivates those who claim to speak in the name of one
religion to pass such hateful judgments on another
religion.
In the world of power politics, the
events of September 11 are likely to serve as a
watershed. There were Cold War years, followed by
post-Cold War years, and now we are living through the
post-September 11 era. Whether things will get better or
worse, they will never by the same. The simplicity of
the agrarian era was lost with the onslaught of the
industrial revolution, and especially when that
revolution was institutionalized in the form of the
industrialization of a number of countries of the West.
The age of globalization was even more complicated, but
now we can only lament the loss of a simpler way of
life, which in some way was primitive, but was closer to
our primordial instincts and preferences. But global
terrorism has changed us in a worse way. We seem to be
losing our civility, and respect for the uniqueness of
our respective faiths.
Militancy begets
militancy. The September 11 attacks also initiated
America's global war on terrorism. America unleashed its
military power. First it was in Afghanistan, and rightly
so. The Taliban-al-Qaeda nexus had to be dismantled and
eradicated. The first objective was accomplished, but
not the second. The Taliban, the practitioners of the
jihadi creed, were ousted, but the jihadi mentality
remained intact. The remnants of that culture are
periodically showing their ugly faces in assassination
attempts, and in bombing incidents in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. The continued post-Taliban chaos in
Afghanistan notwithstanding, the US became focused on
toppling Saddam Hussein.
All sorts of
"rationales" were created for it. Saddam was a tyrant,
but that reason was not sufficient to oust him. It was
argued that he had stored weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), and had al-Qaeda connections. Those rationales
have become albatross around the necks of George W Bush
and his British counterpart Tony Blair, as no WMD have
yet been unearthed. There never was any credible
intelligence about Saddam-al-Qaeda connections.
The US military victory in Iraq was never an
issue of contention, the emergence of a stable and
democratic Iraq was. In the US the military victory was
celebrated as a triumph of unilateralism, and the
emergence of the concept of "regime change" was regarded
as a sliver bullet for the rest of members of the
so-called "axis of evil". Those Western European nations
- mainly France and Germany - which disagreed with the
invasion of Iraq were berated at the official level in
the US as part of "old" Europe in official circles and
as practitioners of the Kantian philosophy of peace and
harmony in the semi-official neo-conservative circles in
Washington.
The notion of "old" became a
euphemism for anachronistic thinking that does not
recognize the use of military power as a panacea for
what ails the extant authoritarian and totalitarian
political systems. The Kantian label was a euphemism for
Pollyannaish wimpishness that has purportedly entrenched
in the thinking of some Western European leaders. The
trans-Atlantic harmony among allies and friend became a
victim of the swagger of American unilateralism. In the
weeks following the collapse of Saddam's tyrannical
machinery, the US was in no mood to forgive and forget
those who did not sanction its invasion of Iraq.
But then Iraq became a bloody and violent place
for the American occupiers. Those elements of Saddam's
security apparatus that could not take on the US on a
force-on-force basis became guerrillas. Foreign jihadis
also became heavily involved in guerrilla attacks on
American troops. The fact that the Bush administration
did not have a well-thought out plan to control the
chaos, or to reestablish the infrastructures to fulfill
the basic needs of the Iraqis, led to the escalation of
opposition to American occupation by leaps and bounds.
Now the quest is on in Washington for creating an
arrangement for multilateral peacekeeping operations,
without sharing the political authority to rule Iraq
with those countries that are expected to supply troops
for that purpose.
The wounds of trans-Atlantic
disagreements preceding the US invasion of Iraq are open
once again, as France and Germany are insisting that the
UN and other nations that are expected to commit their
troops to peacekeeping operations must also share the
ruling authority with the US in Iraq. Except this time,
Bush is not likely to have his way.
As the
modalities of an arrangement to govern Iraq evolve, the
Iraqis seem to have started a new phase of sectarian
violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis. The death of Grand
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim at the Imam Ali Shrine
on August 30 is followed by an attack on September 5 on
a Sunni mosque located in Sha'ab, a mostly Shi'ite
neighborhood. The prospects of the emergence of a
Shi'ite-dominated government is causing a lot concern
among Sunni groups as the erstwhile tormented Shi'ites
of Iraq are about to flex their newly discovered muscle
in the post-Saddam era.
The immediate shape of
who will become, or remain, in charge in Iraq will only
slightly affect the chances of that country's emergence
as a serene place. I am not certain whether even the
emergence of a UN-dominated governing authority - the
chances of which are not terribly bright right now -
would lower the level of violence in the country. But at
least such a development would create a stake and
commitment on part of the entire international
community. Moreover, it might also improve the prospects
of legitimacy for a future Iraqi government. The
creation of an Iraqi government under the domination of
the US, on the contrary, would deprive that government
legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis and the entire
Arab countries.
So, the post-September 11 era
has created a very unsettling situation in the Middle
East. The very promise of Bush - that he would transform
that entire region - appears on very shaky ground, to
say the least. More important, within the Middle East,
and even in South and Southeast Asia, the perception is
that Islam is under attack. No extant government is
doing anything publicly to counter that perception. That
is one of the most troubling outcomes of our time.
In terms of transnational human interactions, we
seem to feel better about our faith and our way of life
by attempting to berate those of others in the
post-September 11 era. Our sensibilities have become so
numb - whether we are conscious of it or not - that we
do not realize that when we are derisive or contemptuous
of others, we are diminishing our own humanity and
belittling our frames of reference, and, yes, our own
religion. Perhaps we will grow out of it. But has bin
Laden caused us to fall into it, or are our "real"
personalities finally emerging? I hope the latter is not
the case.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an
Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic
analyst.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
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