By John Wight
On a personal note, I was living in America at the time of 9/11 - in Hollywood, to be specific - and will never forget in the days following the palpable fear and confusion that paralyzed the place. In the day following, streets normally teeming with traffic were eerily quiet. The world-famous Sunset Strip was deserted, its flashing neon lights now reminiscent of an abandoned theme park. People were paralyzed with shock, many too numb to be able to discuss what had just happened with anything approaching coherence. The vituperative calls for revenge, the unvarnished patriotism and nationalism, was still to materialize in those first few days.
Interestingly there were a few, though not many, who held dissenting opinions of 9/11 - opinions at odds with the deluge of condemnation it unleashed. One of the attendants at the parking garage where I parked my car at the time was one of them. Originally from Mexico, Roberto and I had got into the habit of exchanging a few words whenever our paths crossed. A day or so after the attack on the Twin Towers, on my way to my car, he was at his usual place at the entrance to the garage. As I reached him along the alleyway, he lowered his head and in a quiet voice said, “You see what happens, senor? You see what happens when you go around the world bombing and killing people?”
Without meaning to, Roberto, with this simple and succinct observation, accurately defined not only the meaning of this atrocity but also the countless atrocities committed before it and committed in its name thereafter.
Modern history did not start with 9/11, but it did change its course in ways the men of war who used it as a pretext for the most prolonged and destructive military onslaught since World War II did not anticipate. For instead of achieving the domination and mastery of the Middle East and Central Asia, as intended, the wars unleashed after 9/11 ended in a humiliating retreat and panicked and shambolic evacuation from Afghanistan.
Such a far cry from the bombastic speeches and pronouncements which spilled from the mouths of George W. Bush and his neocon friends twenty years ago, relishing, all of them, the prospect of unleashing bombs and missiles on Afghanistan and Iraq not with justice but revenge in mind.
It was not as if they weren’t warned and warned mightily of the consequences of what they had in store for a world they mistakenly and hubristically believed was theirs to control. As a footsoldier with the US anti-war movement, which I joined not long after 9/11, I along with countless others from every part of the world – Muslims, Christians, atheists – marched and rallied against the invasion of Afghanistan and the now impending war on Iraq as if the future depended on it, which it did.
It was one of the most inspiring and also tragic periods I have ever lived through – the inspiration of seeing millions of people in every corner of the world coming together as one in a desperate if futile attempt to drown out the growing drumbeat to war with a cry of peace. That we failed is a human tragedy measured in the shedding of an ocean blood of the innocent.
9/11 was an act of terror against innocent civilians for the crimes committed not by the powerful in their name but by the powerful in the name of the powerful. The hatred that fuelled it was a long time in the making, hatred produced by Western foreign policy. When it comes right down to it, the salient lesson to be drawn from 9/11 is really quite simple. It is that the best way to stop terrorism is to stop committing acts of terrorism - and that the best way to ensure ‘your’ children are safe is to make sure that ‘their’ children are safe.
When, for example, then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright opined in her infamous 1996 interview with Lesley Stahl on the US current affairs show 60 Minutes that the ‘we think the price is worth it’, when asked about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of US sanctions, she paved the way for 9/11. The unending oppression of the Palestinians with the connivance of the West paved the way for 9/11.
This, to be clear, is not in any way to defend 9/11 or the barbarians responsible. It is to understand it, however, in the interests of those yet unborn if the right lessons are to be learned from it – lessons required in the cause of forestalling the possibility of anything like it happening again.
A catastrophically misplaced sense of exceptionalism, a mistaken belief that might is right and that your values are universal values, has since 9/11 been the underlying cause of carnage and misery on a truly biblical scale. Wars unleashed in the name of democracy, human rights and security, but in truth in the name of imperialism, hegemony and domination, have killed and displaced millions, produced failed states, and given succor to Salafi-militancy. Heroin-production and corruption not new roads and women’s education is the real story of Afghanistan over two decades of Western military occupation, while ISIS rather than democracy is the most significant outcome of the occupation of Iraq.
Despite such a grim balance sheet, the direction taken by the West after 9/11 is still defended by its truest of true believers. Like one of those Japanese soldiers who only emerged from the jungle decades after the war was over, out of the jungle of his own madness comes Tony Blair to publicly defend the slaughter of which he was a prime mover in the wake of 9/11. Not one second of justice has he or George W. Bush faced for their role in the heinous crimes committed against the peoples of Iraq and the wider region at their direction.
Even so, being self-declared religious men, there still must be a voice somewhere deep inside warning them of the justice that awaits them in hell. There Bin Laden and al-Baghdadi will be waiting to greet them - not as foes but as kindred spirits.
End.
John Wight is an author and political commentator based in Scotland.
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