Some interesting thoughts from Europundits blog:
CATALYSTS
By Nelson Ascher
The NYT’s Tom Friedman wrote many silly articles in the last three years. But once in a while he arrives at a synthesis or insight that is so good that it justifies reading his next silly op-eds. His best insight ever about 911 is the following: those attacks weren’t the outcome of intelligence failures, but rather of a failure of imagination.
This formulation, which could hardly be bettered, means that, more serious than, say, the CIA’s inability to penetrate Al Qaeda or other similar groups, has been the West’s inability to think like an Islamist. Not even the best intelligence could compensate for this problem. If you cannot get inside a suicidal terrorist’s mind, you won’t know what to do with the best information you can get.
Before 911 nobody thought that anybody was crazy enough to kill thousands of American civilians in the US. And the trouble is right here because when it comes to something as complex as our world, one cannot simply divide human beings between normal and crazy. Why? Because, to begin with, what looks like madness to us might be perfectly rational for someone else. And then because what we call madness is not homogeneous, but rather quite varied.
The worst failure was our inability to get inside the Islamists’ thought processes and, to be able to do so, one doesn’t need the CIA or the FBI: the monitoring of the web or of Friday sermons in mosques around the world would be more than enough. That’s where anyone who wanted to understand 911 should have turned to. But, instead of doing this, most people in the West have been searching for those root-causes, that is, an explanation that would make sense in our worldview, not theirs. There’s, of course, a lot of arrogance in this, since this is a way of saying that only our way of thinking makes sense, only our logic is natural.
One of the most terrifying aspects of 911 was the fact that it wasn’t claimed by any group. Whenever the Palestinians blow up an Israeli bus, there’s usually a real race between Hamas, Jihad, Tanzim and the others, each group claiming the attack for itself. Al Qaeda could have claimed 911 immediately. Why didn’t it do it?
I’d say this was so because of what the Muslim terrorists learned with Marshall McLuhan: that the medium is the message. The message transmitted on that day was a simple one: that’s what we do, that’s how we think, that’s who we are. Pay attention: we are serious. For me that was one of the clearest messages transmitted in all of our world’s history.
Now, what can explain the long silence after that message? Compared to the whole idea behind 911, we could hardly consider Bali or Madrid as new messages. What’s there behind this lack of new messages ever since? Is it a victory for the US or what? Obviously, for a new message to be really scary, it would at the very least have to be something on the scale of 911. Blowing up a couple of trains, airplanes, shopping malls in the US, tragic as any of these could be, would transmit a different message, one of weakness.
That’s where, a couple of months before a crucial presidential election, we need to invest our imagination. What is it that we are not able to think about?
I spent the summer of 89 in Hungary and Yugoslavia, but I couldn’t see the end of communism coming a few months later, nor the Yugoslav civil war which was already brewing in Belgrade and Pristina, in Zagreb and Lubliana. Though there was something strange and oppressive in the air, it wasn’t easy to interpret it.
The same applies to 911. There was something in that whole Durban affair that pointed to strange directions, but who could then guess what was it? In hindsight it is easy to see that what was taking place there made no sense in a worldview according to which we were in a new era of peace, freedom and rationality. The intensity of the hatred couldn’t be understood against a background where the main conflicts had either been solved or were to be solved soon. After all, the Cold War was over, most dictatorships were being replaced by democracies, there was no more Apartheid in South Africa and Rabin and Perez had shaken hands with Arafat in front of Clinton and the world.
It’s quite likely that Bin Laden and his men saw 911 as the beginning of a global war between the Muslim world and the US. But another war started on the same day: a civil war in the Western world. The days and months following those attacks have shown that the West was a radically divided house. It’s not just the case of a couple of Old European governments trying to obstruct America’s actions. With each passing day the division and hatred have been growing more and more inside the US. These division and hatred didn’t start out of nothing three years ago: it must have been festering for a long time. How comes most people couldn’t have seen it before? Why did we think the 90s were a peaceful time if actually we’ve been living inside a bomb?
This situation will take years and years to be really understood. There’s however one point I’m really curious about: did Bin Laden and the rest of the Islamists know how deeply the West was divided against itself and how much their actions would help it to get even more divided? Did they know about this fire and consciously poured more fuel on it? If not, have they understood their own success ever since? Because in any of these cases the most likely is that they must be working on making the gap in the West absolutely unbridgeable. They may have only a couple of matches left, but we’re sitting on a powder-keg.
After 911 many observers noted that what Islam, a civilization that couldn’t have invented the jet liners nor built high-rises, had done was to turn Western science and technology against their creators. What if, having reached the conclusion that they weren’t strong enough to destroy the West, the Islamists discovered that they could play the role of catalysts in the West’s self-destruction?
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