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Dr. Walid Phares
The War on '9-11'
September 14, 2009
The jihadi attacks against New York and Washington created an
unforgettable date in the collective psyche of Americans: this nation
was bled by men indoctrinated by an ideology that, both in its texts and
in its actions, knows no mercy for free societies. The terrifying three
numbers and a hyphen 9-11 took their place in the country's national
identity, alongside Pearl Harbor in the high drama of American history.
But 9-11 became also a benchmark to other nations and regions of the
world. In Europe, Russia, and India, civil societies began identifying
the date 9/11 with their own subsequent traumas. Madrid had its own 9-11
on March 11, 2004. Russia had a sister horror on September 6 of the same
year in Beslan. London encountered its 9-11 on July 7, 2005. The rest of
Europe prepared for the forthcoming "ones." India's two Mumbai attacks
are perhaps the equivalent of their own 9-11.
So what is the first meaning of this symbolic date, deeply embedded in
the minds of millions of people around the world? Despite the denial by
intellectual elites in all of these countries (at least since the end of
the Cold War), there is a jihadi global movement espousing terror as a
means, seeking violence against what it perceives as kuffar
countries, and making no room for international law.
Contradicting what academia stubbornly has asserted since the end of the
Cold War in 1990, Bin Laden's Ghazwa (jihadi raids) on America
shattered not just buildings, but also houses of denial; it killed
thousands of civilians, but also wrong teachings. It planted the seeds
of a cultural revolution where the American People was forced by blood
to wake up to new world realities resulting from the Soviets demise.
Unlike the Fukuyama vision of an "end of history" as asserted in the
early 1990s, it was rather some of Huntington's writings and the warning
by Middle East dissidents that materialized instead.
Lesson Number One
There was a threat rising against America, other democracies, and even
against non-democratic systems, such as China. The threat was first
wrecking havoc in Middle Eastern lands: massacring women, children and
the elderly in Algeria and Sudan, filling mass graves in Iran and
Afghanistan, and torturing and assassinating individuals in Lebanon.
Jihadism butchered women's rights across the Muslim world and hunted
liberals in the Arab world, while the West slept deeply throughout the
1990s.
Al Qaeda awoke the free world with images of planes hitting the center
of the world's economy, and shook conscious nesses with the sight of men
and women jumping from the twin towers.
But 9-11 wasn't just one horrible day to remember as a passing
nightmare. Salafi Jihadism's insatiable ideology went on to strike other
capitals' trains, subways, buses, schools and hotels before producing
mutant forms of horrors: videotaped beheadings, maimed bodies,
assassinated teachers, girls, legislators, and more.
Lesson Number Two
The jihadists wanted to seize the East, and to do so, they had to strike
the West as hard as they could, beginning with America on September
11th.
However 9/11 begot a US-led campaign to crumble the Taliban in
Afghanistan. The international community accepted the equation: America
was hit; it had to hit back on the aggressors. The deal was to be closed
on the insistence of Oil producing regimes, themselves the irresponsible
producers and exporters of jihadi ideology.
But the United States didn't stop as 9-11 opened a new era. At the time,
many in Washington argued that only a significant change in the region
could prevent future strikes against the mainland. The question was how
to go about this change. It was decided that another regime had to be
changed before democracy was to be promoted.
But was democracy really fought for strategically? Apparently not, or at
least not by the US bureaucracy. The democratic dividends were taking
time to appear in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the Islamist movements
seizing the microphone were louder than the reformers. It was clear that
avenging 9-11 alone couldn't buy international endorsement of free
campaigning in the region, certainly not for democracy, and just a
little to find Bin Laden and his acolytes.
By 2007, the Bush Administration has used all the goodwill generated
from 9-11, without fulfilling the promises of creating palpable change
in the region yet. It failed because of its own bureaucracy, a relic
from pre-9/11 era, fully in tune with oil interests and the regimes
irritated by democracy. Since then, the counter offensive began.
Petro-regimes such as Salafists, Khomeinists, and authoritarian
Baathists, and their apologists on Western shores, moved together
against the historical clock generated by 9-11's awakening. Pressure
against the Syrian and Iranian regimes ceased. The Iraq campaign was put
on a time schedule. The campaign to end the Darfur genocide was slowed
down. In Lebanon, the Cedars revolution was abandoned and Hezbollah was
allowed to take back the country as reformers across the region were
told to wait.
With the change of American administration in 2009, the clock was turned
back completely: Damascus and Tehran are to be engaged, Iran's democracy
uprising is not to be "meddled in," the Muslim Brotherhood is to be
partnered with, the good Taliban is to be invited to sit downs. And at
home there is a cascade of retreats: the term War on Terror was dropped,
Jihad becomes Yoga, and dismantled jihadi cells are ignored. That
brought the push back close to the big bang where the whole national
awareness began, the commemoration of 9-11.
Gradually, 9-11 symbolism may be on its way to a museum, or perhaps to
cold storage. On Tuesday September 8, three days before the eighth
anniversary, the US President addressed the school population of
America. These little folks will carry the collective memory of this
aggression into the next decade. Not one word mentioned the September
Jihad. Is this is where America's classroom needs to go now: to erase
those eight years from its memory? We'll see.
On Wednesday September 9, the Presidential address in Congress was
obviously dedicating its full force to the highly debated healthcare
crisis. But at two days from the commemoration, a sentence rang into my
ear: "The plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten
years -- less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars." No
comments on 9-11.
And to close, note that Hollywood didn't produce the expected gigantic
movies on the single most important event in America's national security
since 1941. "Flight 93" or "The World Trade Center" are good as parts of
a series, but should not be the only movies on this cataclysm. There has
been no movie that shows and analyzes Bin Laden and his lieutenants'
discussions of the attacks, that goes back in historical background
about the jihadi war against democracies, and that explains what were
the motives, to help Americans understand their future. As Hollywood
excels in, when it wants to teach.
So, in a sum, this is going to be a very different celebration, not
because of the actual ceremonies and speeches, but because of where we
are in history. |
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