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.
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