The decade that began on 9/11 saw the brutal efficacy of terror repeatedly demonstrated, in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza as well as on the streets of New York and London. But the purveyors of fear have not had it all their own way.
This is a guest post by David Wearing, first published on (the British website) New Left Project. I post it here with his permission.
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Acts of terrorism, by definition, are designed to elicit a response of shock, awe and fear in an audience, with the purpose of intimidating or coercing that audience into adopting a political response favourable to the terrorists’ agenda.
My own immediate reaction to the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 was probably not uncommon. Shock (in spite of countless historical precedents) that anyone could consciously, deliberately and indiscriminately kill so many of their fellow human beings. Awe at the sheer scale and audacity of the crime. And fear that people capable of such cold, pitiless violence - and so fanatical that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives - would commit another spectacular atrocity in the near future. Would more planes fall out of the sky tomorrow, or the next day? Would another major international city (like my own, London) come into the terrorists’ firing line? In a recent essay on the post-9/11 decade, Gary Younge quotes Arjun Appadurai saying that "terror is first of all the terror of the next attack". Who, in the hours and days following the collapse of the Twin Towers, could have doubted that?
Accompanying those sensations however, for me, was a feeling of dread at the coming Western response. In Washington, a new right-wing President was surrounded by senior officials and advisers who had urged his predecessor to effect regime change in Iraq by any means necessary. In Downing Street, Tony Blair had already shown a zealous approach to the use of military force without UN approval, in respect of Kosovo. And Israel had a Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who in his earlier role of Minister of Defence during the savage war on Lebanon in 1982, had shared responsibility for one of the most grotesque atrocities in modern Middle Eastern history; the massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
This would have been troubling enough if we were to read the situation purely on the level of personalities and policy choices. But placing our understanding in a historical and material context, and looking squarely at the nature of western power and its place in the world at the start of the 21st century, made the cause for genuine alarm very clear. What was to stop the world’s sole superpower and its allies from employing their overwhelming military strength (representing as they did well over half the globe’s combined military expenditure) to aggressively reshape the Middle East according to their own interests, using 9/11 as a pretext and catch-all justification? And would this not in turn fire more of the same murderous anger that al Qaeda had employed to commit its assault on New York in the first place?
Evidently fear has its uses; a point that was not lost on Western governments in the disorientating aftermath of the attacks. The “one per cent doctrine” advanced by US Vice President Dick Cheney, which held that a one per cent chance of a terrorist act occurring should be treated as an absolute certainty, encapsulated the contempt for rationality or evidence, and the elevation of fear as the guiding principle of policy, that characterised the Bush administration’s cynical resolve to exploit the terror of 9/11 in pursuit of its pre-existing geopolitical ambitions. Talk of the lack of a “smoking gun” in terms of evidence of Iraq’s WMD capability was met with the response from Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”. At every turn, rationality was to be silenced by fear.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Labour government engaged in a dedicated effort to mislead the public about the nature and level of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, playing on anxieties about the prospect of an al Qaeda attack on the UK. When that attack finally came, in London on 7 July 2005, it was justified by the perpetrators in part as a response to the invasion of Iraq. As the security services had warned, the war had been a propaganda gift to al Qaeda in terms of radicalisation and recruitment. This was no surprise, and we might conclude that the considerations driving US-UK policy at the time were held to be more significant by at least some of those in charge than the mere threat of terrorist attacks on the citizens of those two countries. At any rate, what we know is that policymakers were told the invasion would increase the threat of terrorism, and they went through with it just the same.
The uses of fear were also apparent in the military conduct of the US and its allies. The nature and purpose of the “shock and awe” bombing campaign that heralded the start of the invasion of Iraq scarcely requires any elaboration. The destruction of the rebel-held city of Fallujah by US forces – compared by the Guardian’s senior foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele to the atrocities at Guernica and Grozny – was clearly an attempt to convey a message to other insurgent strongholds through the medium of extreme violence. Similarly, when Israel responded to a cross border raid by Hezbollah by waging a devastating weeks-long war on the whole of Lebanon, the intention of conveying to Hezbollah’s compatriots the cost of failing to disarm the group was plain for anyone to see. The UN fact-finding mission on Israel’s assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-09 found that the Israeli army’s aim had been to “punish, humiliate and terrorize” the population of the enclave. That this was the modus operandi of the IDF was a point well understood by anyone who had been paying serious attention.
The exploiters and purveyors of fear did not have things all their own way in the decade following 9/11. Osama Bin Laden was reduced to watching the Arab world caught up in the sort of mass uprising that he never stood a chance of leading, before being extra-judicially executed by US forces. Tony Blair, a man who appears to suffer slightly from an excess of vanity, has earnt a place in history that he neither wants nor is able to escape from. The credibility of American military power is much diminished in light of the twin quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, the failure to secure a sufficiently pliable client government in Baghdad that would allow a permanent US presence in Iraq stands out as a particular failure. In recent wars, Israel finds itself unable to land the decisive military blows that it inflicted on its enemies in 1967, while its international reputation degenerates into richly–deserved pariah status. And those who peddled the “clash of civilisations” myth, pitting an enlightened, rational West against a fanatical Muslim culture, have been left with nothing worthwhile to say about today’s seminal event in the Arab World: the massive, popular demands for freedom and democracy, often against tyrants previously backed by the alleged forces of the Enlightenment. Fear had its uses in the decade following the collapse of the Twin Towers, but its power may now be diminishing.
First published on New Left Project