A year ago, a global minute of silence was the right way to mark the anniversary of September 11. Now that another year has passed, a lively and open-minded debate on the consequences of that epoch-making disaster seems more appropriate — and more respectful to the victims — than quiet lamentations or noisy oaths to avenge the dead.
One way to frame this debate is to think about two questions that few politicians have had the courage to ask, never mind answer. Which side is winning the War on Terror? If our side is not clearly winning, is this because we made avoidable mistakes? First, who is winning? If we think back to the way the world was two years ago, the answer is unfortunately quite clear. Let us start by looking at events from our own point of view.
It is true that, despite all the media-led frenzy about anthrax, dirty bombs and terrorist “sleepers”, there has not been another outrage remotely comparable to September 11. But fundamentalist bombs have continued to explode and everyone in America and Europe, as well as in the Muslim-dominated countries of Asia and Africa, now lives in a permanent state of fear that was unimaginable two years and one day ago.
It is true that hundreds of terrorist suspects and al-Qaeda operatives have been killed or arrested. But the main perpetrator of September 11 remains at large and continues to mock the world, apparently from a sanctuary in “friendly, pro-American” Pakistan, as he did again last night on al-Jazeera. Osama bin Laden may not have fulfilled his threats to attack America with a “storm of aircraft”, but in retrospect his boasts sounded almost restrained and poetic compared with President Bush’s B-movie bragging about taking bin Laden “dead or alive”. “If bin Laden thinks he can hide and run from the United States he will be sorely mistaken,” said Mr Bush. “The guy’s a goner. The only question is whether he’s arrested in cuffs or taken dead.” The interesting puzzle now is whether Mr Bush will still be president if and when that rhetorical question, posed two years ago, is answered.
It is true that America has overthrown two of the world’s cruellest tyrannies, freeing tens of millions of Iraqis and Afghans from horrible oppression. In this sense, the net effect of September 11 has probably been to increase the aggregate happiness of the human race. Had it not been for bin Laden, Saddam Hussein would still be murdering his people at will and the women of Afghanistan would still be denied education and beaten like animals if they happened to reveal their ankles or show their eyes. But nobody can pretend that the US invasions that followed September 11 were entirely successful. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan has been secured or freed of terror by any stretch of the imagination. Their people continue to live in misery and fear, above all dreading that America will soon abandon them to another tyranny as bad as the one they overthrew.
Now consider how the world must look from bin Laden’s eyrie. According to many Western analysts, September 11 “failed” because it did not achieve alQaeda’s ambitions. Essentially these were threefold. His first objective was to remove all US troops and civilians from the Arabian Peninsula. His second aim was rather grander: to “destroy America”, as his mad-mullah spokesman declared on television at the start of the Afghan war. But these were just means to an even greater end. “Al-Qaeda’s primary goal,” according to Stratfor, a leading US intelligence consultancy, “was to precipitate a massive uprising in the Islamic world as a preface to re-establishing the Caliphate.” What is the Caliphate? An ultra-orthodox Wahhabi-style Islamic state, stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from Indonesia and Malaysia through Pakistan, Central Asia, the Middle East to North Africa and the Maghreb.
If that was what bin Laden really dreamt of, his attack must surely be declared an utter failure – a comforting view. But suppose that bin Laden was more rational and intelligent than his US psychobiographers suggested. Suppose that he didn’t really crave total global conquest in two years, but something more modest.
Suppose all he wanted was to divide the Western world, to demonstrate the weakness and short-sightedness of American power, to inflame the hysteria of already paranoid Muslim militants and to prove that US foreign policy was motivated by Zionist expansionism and greed for oil. Suppose there was also a streak of personal vanity in bin Laden. Suppose he wanted to humiliate the American Government, to elevate himself to the status of one of the world’s greatest statesmen, equal or greater in importance than the presidents of American and Russia or the UN Secretary-General.
Suppose, finally, that he harboured a genuine and abiding hatred of all Jews and Christians, so that it gave him pleasure to cause them suffering — to disrupt their lives, to ruin their businesses and, above all, to scare the living daylights out of hundreds of millions of fat and contented people in America and Europe who had never even heard of the Prophet Muhammad before September 11, 2001. In that case, his coup must be judged as one of the greatest — and easiest — triumphs in the history of war.
So if bin Laden looks like the winner, at least so far, how on earth did this victory come about? How could a single maniac, commanding just a small ill-trained rabble from a mountain hideout, apparently prevail against the greatest military and economic power the world has seen? The answer lies not in bin Laden’s evil genius, still less in the righteous anger of the Muslim masses (most of whom would far prefer to live in Washington than in a Saudi-style Islamic state), but in the Bush Administration’s own unforced errors. Mr Bush was determined at all costs to avoid the blunder made by his father when he failed to “finish the job” in the first Gulf War. Yet ironically that was exactly what the President did after September 11.
After invading Afghanistan, Mr Bush failed to “finish the job” of stabilising that unhappy country and rooting out the Taleban. After investigating the international links of al-Qaeda, he failed to finish the job by refusing to follow the trail of blood and money to its logical conclusion — the anti-Western theocracy of Saudi Arabia, ruled by a government which is the fount of all the Islamic fundamentalism poison pouring out of Wahhabi-financed mosques all over the world.
Instead of dealing with the sources of fundamentalist terrorism in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan, Mr Bush capriciously changed the subject to Iraq. The Axis of Evil speech was delivered on January 29, 2002, just four months after September 11 — and from that moment it was clear that bin Laden would win.
Why did Mr Bush deflect attention from what was a straightforward and initially successfully war against terrorism centred on Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, to an illdefined, legally dubious and morally ambiguous campaign against all “evil” regimes in the world? Did White House focus groups reveal an emotional longing for a bigger military action than Afghanistan after September 11? Was Mr Bush just a puppet of neo-conservative and Israeli militarists who saw a sudden opportunity to redraw the map of the Middle East? Did the President simply want to keep America on a permanent war footing for political reasons? Did he need another villain after failing to capture bin Laden? Did he have personal reasons for wanting to distract the hostile media attention that was starting to focus on Saudi Arabia just before he delivered his Axis of Evil speech? These questions may only be answered fully by historians in the future, although next year’s election campaign may begin to expose some of the real causes and consequences of Mr Bush’s geopolitical calculations. Meanwhile, bin Laden will be smiling mysteriously in his mountain lair, while the world continues to quake.
