11 September has brought the new American 'project' out into the open, writes Gamil Mattar* The American people are still stunned by 11 September. Wounds to one's dignity run deeper than other wounds. Like everyone else, they want the nightmare to recede so that they can feel at peace again. Nevertheless, there are forces in the US which have their motives for not wanting the calamity to fade too soon. They fear that if 11 September is forgotten, they will be forgotten too. At all events, I never imagined that after 1967 I would live to see another disaster to which so many political forces, both in Egypt and abroad, would cling tenaciously in the sole hope of legitimising their own existence and their dubious goals. Before 11 September, certain groups in the US were harbouring ideas and plans upon which they could not act. Bureaucratic hurdles, pressure groups, international sensitivities, all these stood in their way. Most of the avenues through which the US might impose its hegemony on the international order were barred by obstacles that were not as easily surmounted as people may have imagined. Consequently, I believe that when in the future historians come to write about the effects of 11 September, they will judge that what US politicians did with that calamity was far more brutal, and of more extensive and lasting consequence, than the immediate loss of life and trauma caused by the calamity itself. No impartial historian could overlook the savage ruthlessness of those who masterminded the attacks on New York and Washington. There is no need to play down the impact of the strike, the enormous death toll and the depth of the wound it inflicted on American society. However, at the same time, that same impartial historian cannot escape the fact that over the following year, the US government carried out many actions which it could never have initiated with such rapidity and on such a scale before 11 September. The Republican administration headed by George Bush Jr came to power against the backdrop of a growing economic crisis which threatened both the world economy and the American capitalist model. In the months prior to 11 September, all the economic indicators were pointing steeply downwards. Major companies that had previously been thought untouchable were assailed with allegations and rumours, though the scandal repeatedly failed to materialise. If the Enron crisis, or that of Tyco or Anderson, had broken then, the fallout would have sapped the ambitions of the ruling clique in Washington. I try to imagine what would have happened had these citadels of the American economy collapsed before 11 September. I picture the public anger and alarm, the violent recession, the panic on Wall Street that would have ricocheted through other markets. The shock waves would have reached the Pentagon too, and the major armaments firms; military plans drawn up years ago would have been scrapped, and National Missile Defence System project would have been buried along with them. In short, the repercussions would have been such that Washington's attempt to lay the cornerstone of global imperial hegemony would have been brought up short. But then, along came 11 September, and suddenly the full force of American "patriotism" was unleashed. That power, perhaps single-handedly, was able to make the necessary changes possible. It also compelled the White House to intervene urgently to purge the giant conglomerates -- the sector which has nurtured so many of the ruling elite in Washington. It must have been a very painful time, as the establishment drafted and passed laws directed against their own closest supporters. The current Republican administration came to power with a very slim majority and in electoral circumstances that seemed to postpone its legitimacy. The government was initially weak and lacking in coordination and leadership. Yet Bush had brought with him a team which was equipped to run an empire, not just a superpower. They arrived in Washington brimming with grandiose ideas, and an unprecedented readiness to use military means to achieve great aims abroad, should circumstances proved propitious. Before 11 September this administration was a great disappointment, both at home and abroad. The self-appointed leadership of the world was unable to score a single major success in international relations. It failed to impose its unilateral approach to negotiations on new and controversial international agreements, gaining no friends in the process, and losing some allies. Its decision to refrain from intervening in the Middle East crisis was shown to be unwise, to say the least. The result was a chain of diplomatic disasters such as no previous American government had ever experienced. And when restraint finally gave way to direct involvement, it did so with astounding recklessness. As a result, many European nations, especially those closest in spirit and material interests to the US, came to feel that the new Bush administration was more of a liability than an asset. What European and Arab leaders had not properly appreciated was that America was now working with a new and unfamiliar vision of global leadership. They did not realise that the new administration was rallying all its energies to apply this vision as widely as possible. The ordinary channels available to it were simply not congenial to the imperial thrust of its intentions. And then came 11 September. That enormous explosion generated an equally enormous power that could be harnessed to accomplish grandiose ends. The rush of events which followed exposed much of what the ruling clique in Washington had hitherto been concealing from its allies in Europe, and from those leaders in the Arab world who had resolved decades ago on an "eternal" friendship with the US. There is nothing new in Washington's policies towards "rogue" states. They existed under Clinton, and, at the time, we tried to understand them. Yes, we said, it was the right of every superpower to create, or maintain, pests that would bite and sting the giant, then flee before they could be caught. Then the younger Bush and his phalanx came along, craving revenge. They said, "Our patience with those rogue states is at an end." And they had the plans to prove it. The international context, however, was not ready yet for Bush's way of venting that frustration. The current mood in Europe was still one of "peace, love and tranquillity". This was radically different from the mood of US foreign policy. In its thirst to use violence, as far as full-fledged war employing the most destructive of weapons, the mood in the US was closer to that in Israel. As a result, the West was effectively divided. On one side their was the US-Israeli culture (by Israeli, here, I refer to that group among the Jewish people who are motivated by vengefulness, strongly inclined to the use of violence and who harbour racist sentiments against the Arabs). On the other side was the European culture, which sympathised with the Jews, but did not condone their violence, and which sympathised with the US too, but neither approved of their impetuousness nor responded to the seductive madness of the ultra right. 11 September did not cause this division, but it brought it to the surface. The US and Europe had always had their differences. These differences would be ironed out, or exacerbated, in conference rooms in Brussels, at NATO's periodic meetings or in other Western forums. We always knew something was amiss, but we only discovered that the difference had become a true "cultural rift" after 11 September. Evidently, Huntington had never imagined that an event on the scale of the terrorist attacks could happen, rocking the foundations of Western civilisation so as to expose the European-American divide. Not that Huntington denied the existence of differences; but he had not foreseen that a calamity might hasten the aggravation of these differences to the point that they would threaten the unity of the "greatest" civilisation in contemporary history. Europeans feel their relations with the US have deteriorated greatly, and they feel the same is true of US-Arab relations. I agree. But I differ with those who claim that this deterioration dates essentially from 11 September. Both these sets of relations were already in a bad way before then; the decline has simply become more precipitous. 11 September did not usher in a step-change in US foreign policy; rather, it gave new impetus to an evolution that had been running behind schedule. 11 September did not introduce anything new into the international order or US foreign policy. The increase in arms allocations had already been brought before Congress. The task of renovating national security systems had also begun. Only a few months earlier, a congressional committee was studying the shortcomings of the CIA and the FBI, their conflicting areas of competence and the lack of communication between them. For years, and in particular since the Waco massacre, congressional reports had been complaining that the judiciary was impeding surveillance of terrorist suspects. Frustration with the legal niceties which hamper the pursuit and prosecution of spies and potential terrorists had also increased following the Oklahoma bombing, which claimed hundreds of lives. Studies for streamlining national security systems were already prepared or about to be put into effect. When the catastrophe did strike, however, it proved the ideal opportunity for vested interests to push these plans forward, purging security agencies of foreign agents and eliminating outright those branches that had been gathering data on certain groups on the ultra right or in big business. 11 September hastened the achievement of an end that had previously been obstructed by the justice system and human rights groups. Suddenly it was possible to reconstruct the entire legal edifice, with lightening speed, in favour of the current administration's vision of how to deal with evildoers at home and abroad. This is not the place to discuss the failure or success of the extremists who masterminded the hijack bombings in New York and Washington. Nor do I want to discuss the failure or success of the US government in preventing the attacks or preparing itself for a new world. However, I am disturbed by the opinion, which is increasingly widespread in this part of the world, which holds that 11 September has functioned as a call to jihad (holy war) for growing numbers of "Islamists" and radical youths in the Islamic world. In my opinion, the true reason for this unexpected upsurge in zealotry is that America's response was grossly out of proportion to the event and exceeded all acceptable bounds. It pains me that the tragedy suffered by the victims of 11 September and their families -- indeed, the tragedy of the American people as a whole -- should be so cynically exploited to fuel the realisation of ends which are clearly not in the interests of world peace, nor in the interests of the American people themselves. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research. Related articles: 9/11 Supplement -- 12 - 18 September 2002 9-11 - WAR COVERAGE -- Archives
