New York, Sept 11: In the immediate aftermath of the extraordinary terrorist attacks on New York and Washington two years ago, some commentators outside the United States were sceptical of the claim that the world had changed forever.

Forever, after all, is a long time. And it was hard to imagine how a change in the New York skyline, albeit effected in a manner calculated to maximise the loss of life, could catalyse a global transformation. Perhaps it’s time to admit that we were wrong. There can, after all, be little question that the world we live in today is crucially different in several ways from the one that existed before September 11, 2001.
Yet our scepticism wasn’t entirely misplaced. It was clear from the outset that the way things panned out would depend chiefly on how Washington responded to the first serious foreign attack on the US mainland. (The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour targetted what was effectively an American colonial outpost in the Pacific. Yet, as we shall see, analogies between— to cite them the American way—12/7/1941 and 9/11/2001 are not entirely inappropriate.)

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It became obvious early on that, whenever it had a choice, the administration of George W. Bush was liable to do the wrong thing. There wasn’t a great deal of international resistance when the armed forces of the mightiest nation on Earth pounced on Afghanistan, in alliance with some of that nation’s most discredited warlords. Ostensibly, the chief purpose of the invasion was to track down Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda factotums. The rout of the Taliban was a bonus.



Inevitably, thousands of Afghans died during the one-sided conflict. Prisoners of war were denied that status; many of those who survived the bloodlust of Rashid Dostum ended up in cages at Guantanamo Bay, a naval base the US maintains in Cuba against Havana’s will. The site of their imprisonment was chosen primarily in order to keep them out of reach of the American judicial system.



Small batches, including children and the elderly, have in recent months been returned to Afghanistan or Pakistan. But among those captured during the conflict, there apparently are no senior Taliban commanders or Al Qaeda decision-makers.



Those among Osama’s henchmen who have been taken into custody were apprehended via police action—which, logically, ought to have been the way to go had the US intended primarily to track down terrorists with possible 9/11 connections, rather than to demonstrate its firepower.



Today, Hamid Karzai, handpicked by the US to administer Afghanistan, is in effect no more than the mayor of Kabul. Elsewhere, the warlords, sidelined to some extent by the Taliban, have re-established their fiefdoms.



The international aid that Afghanistan had every right to expect has not been forthcoming. Poppy fields are flourishing. Skirmishes between US troops and what are described as reconstituted Taliban have been increasing. And anecdotal evidence suggests that Osama bin Laden is planning more nasty surprises as he flits from one sanctuary to another along the Durand Line.



He may, of course, be dead. Beyond the existential murkiness, however, he hardly figures at all in the rhetoric emanating from Washington. The 9/11 anniversary is unlikely to affect his status as the great unmentionable.



Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, just about remains in vogue as a bogeyman. The story of how Saddam came into this particular picture is a tribute to the power of propaganda. It also illustrates the extent of American gullibility.



Donald Rumsfeld was among those who felt the first response to the strikes against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon ought to have been a blitzkrieg against Baghdad. Better sense prevailed but not for long.



While intelligence agencies were ordered to dig up evidence implicating the Iraqi dictator in the crimes of Al Qaeda, George W. and the Bushies (a vicious circle that Tony Blair cannot be excluded from) were busy insinuating that such links undoubtedly existed.



The CIA came up empty handed. Yet a Washington Post poll at the weekend suggests nearly 70 per cent of Americans still believe it is likely that Saddam had something to do with September 11.



The alleged Al Qaeda connection wasn’t, however, the main reason advanced for the invasion of Iraq. It was Saddam’s arsenals of chemical and biological weapons, and his nuclear ambitions, that we were told had become intolerable in the wake of 9/11.



More than four months after the war supposedly ended, not a shred of reliable evidence has been found to validate the charges.



Never mind, say Rumsfeld and others of his ilk. At least the tyrant is gone. Iraq has been liberated. That being the case, isn’t it a trifle strange that most Iraqis, including many of those who detested Saddam and all that he stood for, seem desperate to get rid of their ‘‘liberators’’?



Furthermore, if, as Rumsfeld claimed in Baghdad last week, ‘‘a wonderful start has been made’’ to reconstruction, why has the US found it necessary to swallow its pride and plead for help from an organisation that was dismissed as irrelevant when the Security Council refused to become a party to Bush and Blair’s grubby little war.



The UN subsequently seemed to cave in by sanctifying the US-UK occupation. But resolution 1483 is a twin-edged sword: it encumbers the Anglo-American occupiers with open-ended responsibility for the fate of Iraq. Hence the current effort to supersede it.


The US and Britain needed little assistance in making a huge mess. But they don’t think it’s fair that they should have to clean up afterwards.



It won’t be easy. A UN-guided Iraqi administration and a date for elections would possibly be a welcome outcome, if the US can bring itself to desist from interference at every stage of the process. There was no indication in Bush’s speech this past Sunday that he has any intention of changing course, despite overwhelming evidence of a disaster in the making. He is, however, clearly worried. Suddenly, re-election (make that election, given that 2000 was a virtual coup) in 2004 no longer seems like a sure bet.



It remains to be seen where the desperate quest for an exit strategy leaves the Plan for the New American Century — which, drawn up back in 2000 by men who subsequently became key members of the Bush brigade, envisaged a rout of the Taliban and the control of Iraqi oilfields.



At the time they longed for ‘‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbour’’ that would provide an adequate excuse for launching their quest for direct global domination. Was 9/11, then, merely a convenient coincidence?



Significant numbers of people around the world (including the US) strongly suspect official American connivance in that day’s awful events. If the Washington hawks didn’t instigate the monstrous tragedy, goes the theory, at the very least they decided not to prevent it.



Although some compelling circumstantial evidence can be cited in support of the latter conclusion, it may be unfair to take it too literally.



The Pearl Harbour analogy, though, isn’t completely far-fetched. Desperate to enter World War II, the Roosevelt administration faced popular reluctance. A German attack on American shipping in the Atlantic would have changed the public mood, but the Nazis refused to oblige.



Crippling sanctions against Japan did the trick. Franklin Roosevelt and his closest aides anticipated a Japanese assault, although they didn’t know precisely when or where it would occur. The naval fleet at the Hawaiian base received no warning.



After the attack, Roosevelt breathed a sigh of relief, pronounced it a ‘‘day of infamy’’, and the US entered the war in time to exercise a profound influence on the outcome in Europe as well as in the Pacific.



Machinations during and after the war enabled the US to transform itself into what the American novelist and polemicist Gore Vidal describes as a national security state. That aspect has been reinforced during the past two years, but there are indications that the days of aggressive empire-building may be numbered.



While Iraq and Afghanistan bear ineloquent testimony to imperial overreach, terrorism is proliferating from Iraq to Indonesia and beyond. It provides an excuse for American aggression, but it is also a measure of American failure.



Terror certainly needs to be tackled, but not this way. The world today is a far more dangerous place than it was two years ago. If there is any lesson to be learnt from the continuing series of disasters, it is that resistance is not futile. That holds true, above all, for the misled (in more ways than one) people of Britain and the United States.