The ugly legacy of 9/11 is devilishly hard to get right in Washington, writes Gamal Nkrumah Nobody, save Europe perhaps, shrugs off international humiliation as disingenuously as the United States of America. Time and again since the loss of face in the Vietnam War and the terrible human cost to Vietnamese and Americans alike, Washington has embarked on fruitless and exorbitantly expensive military escapades throughout the world in the most ruthless manner under the pretext of defending freedom, democracy and human rights. This would be remarkable enough, but Washington does all this without any qualms about its moral right to do so. The world sees Washington for what it is: a sickening superpower with a morbid imperial mentality. Its politicians and policymakers are laser-brained careerists who have since 9/11 manipulated the unfortunate event to further their careers. The conventional wisdom in Washington holds that politicians must be packaged as thick-skinned, sharp-elbowed robots of the Dick Cheney variety dedicated to self-aggrandisement and self-advancement. The so-called "War against Terror" was nothing but a hoax designed to win the sympathy of gullible governments around the world. The leaders of the emerging economies and nascent democracies need to look realpolitik unsparingly in the eye. US President Barack Obama disappointed those around the world who hoped his address on the anniversary of 9/11 would signal a fresh start to America's foreign policy. Instead, the focus was on domestic American concerns with an eye for next year's presidential election campaign. Looking backward on 9/11, one wonders why Washington is bothering to pursue a subject so uncongenial to its politicians and policymakers. If Obama promised Americans change, then the world, too, is looking forward to radical change. This is one pledge that Obama should take up seriously, because we live in the proverbial global village. Obama needs to spell out the ugly truth about Washington's bellicose foreign policy. If you seek to identify the last day of the United States as an invincible superpower you'll have many choices. However, a majority of historians in years to come will no doubt date the downfall of the US from 9/11 -- the day the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York came tumbling down and the Pentagon in Washington was hit. To the naked eye, New York was New York and Manhattan was Manhattan as it had always been minus, of course, the Twin Towers. However, to the historical eye, change was everywhere and continual. The self-remaking of America under the presidency of the first black man in America's history to assume such an office took the wind out of the sails of the adversaries of the US in a world populated predominantly by people of colour. Dissolution now threatens the hold of the US imperialist regime over its far-flung realms. On 9/11 2001 something decisive occurred to humble the US. A decade ago, I wrote a commentary entitled Giant's Feet of Clay and received an astounding amount of hate mail from presumably patriotic Americans, red necks and neo-conservatives. But I was also applauded by conscientious citizens of the US who were not fooled by the lies spewed by the administration of George W Bush. Policymakers and politicians in Washington were not in the least interested in principled answers to the poignant questions posed by 9/11 concerning the national security of the US. America's liberal politicians were well aware that plenty of hard work lay ahead to improve the tarnished image of the US. And then, as if by sheer coincidence, Americans elected the first black president in its history. Alas, it did nothing to alter America's imperial ambitions. The powers that be in Washington were more interested in fishing out, hounding and bringing to book those they regarded as having a treacherous and disloyal disposition. Even Obama himself was suspected of being a closet Muslim. Through all this, moreover, Washington was shameless in its pretensions that it was warring with Taliban's Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq for justice and retribution. Muammar Gaddafi once raved and ranted that Arabs are racially related to Native Americans. He was rightly ridiculed since there is no genetic proof for such a claim. However, metaphorically, he was spot on. The images projected by the international media of militant Islamists are eerily reminiscent of the Hollywood stereotypical Indians of yesteryear. The onus was and is on depicting the dispossessed as savage subhuman. Furthermore, the very foundations of the US have been based on the appropriation of the lands of North America's indigenous population. The European settler colonial mentality that created apartheid South Africa and is now savagely expanding the Zionist entity, Israel, on dubious Biblical grounds, is the same ideology upon which the US was founded and underlies the neo-imperial land grab of today. The forceful appropriation of land was cynically used to justify genocide -- then and now. A wry look as Washington's fiasco in Afghanistan, the morbid mess in Iraq, casts doubt on the credibility of US interventionist policies overseas. Can intervention work as a foreign policy instrument? We'll first have to reframe the question as one that can be answered, and answered on a human scale. Anecdotes about American and Western ineptitude almost defy credulity. But by this point the joke of Al-Qaeda's American quest had started to wear thin. Perhaps the most disquieting part of the Al-Qaeda suspects' individual stories is how easily they took up the reins of their pre-9/11 lives. The ex-Guantanamo inmates are very much unlike the Native Americans who adopted the Roman Catholicism of the Spanish Conquistadors in South and Central America, or the African Americans in North America and the Caribbean who sought solace in the Christianity of their slave masters. The Islamist militants of Al-Qaeda stuck to their guns -- or daggers and swords -- aiming for martyrdom and Islam. US policymakers do not have a prayer of a chance. The irony is that the name given to the military operation to execute Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was none other than Operation Geronimo. For those familiar with the history of the US, Geronimo was the Native American Apache chieftain who led his people in a brave albeit desperate resistance bid to rid his land of the invaders. He was defending his ancestral lands from European settler colonialism. He was branded as a vagabond and a menace to the European settlers' peace and prosperity. Washington's politicians' knack of sweeping historical myths and blatant lies into some corner cabinet of the recesses of their evil, heartless minds led them cynically to call their weapons of war and warplanes after the Native American peoples they vanquished. The Blackhawk and the Apache have become buzzwords for US imperialism and are synonyms of American military might. Imagine the public outcry had Hitler's Luftwaffe named its fighter jets "Jew" and "Gypsy"? Such hypocrisy begs serious introspection and retrospection. In the aftermath of World War II, Washington dispensed with antiquated European imperial traditions in order to create its particular imperial edifice. And as hard as it is to acknowledge how short-lived in historical terms that was, especially for those of us born when the US was at its very apogee, Washington did not rule the roost for very long. The US is an empire that hasn't quite fallen yet. Nevertheless, it is an empire that fears it is at the risk of falling and by many accounts actually has tripped over and is about to fall flat on Ground Zero. Flinty-eyed political hawks tenaciously hold to the moribund notion that Washington could maintain hegemony and dominion over the whole world. Hogwash. The US was the first nation to deploy the nuclear bombs that ravaged the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now the chief oddity is that the US has the audacity to caution Iran not to go ahead with its peaceful nuclear development programme. It is as if the US has assumed the high moral ground which it in fact never possessed. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is a reminder of the central place of military power in the US empire. The lesson US President Barack Obama ascribes to 9/11 is that Al-Qaeda's leader has been caught and executed. He no doubt has the 2012 presidential campaign in mind. But this hollow victory does not wash with the people of the Muslim world, nor does it impress peace-loving political activists the world over. The overall picture of American intervention held by Obama, like the Bushes and Bill Clinton before him, simply does not ring true. Obama's mumbo-jumbo is not grounded in history, but debunked by Ground Zero. What is striking about the theory of America's invincibility is the way it uses the authority of Washington to stand truth on its head. It worked when America was expanding westwards stealing the lands of the indigenous peoples of the "Wild West". It worked in Australia when white settlers exercised genocide as a sport against the indigenous Australian Aborigines. Then as now, the military might of the US and its Western allies required scrutiny and sober judgment. At furthest remove from Western civilisation is Afghanistan, the contemporary "Wild West". Washington's policymakers insist that intervention does work there just as it did in America's hinterland. The entire US body politic believes so. The liberal interventionists of Obama's administration are no less cold, callous and calculating than the hawks and neocons of the Bush administration. Obama's shortest public speech on record was as eloquent as ever, but for all its finesse, it hasn't changed the reality on the ground. Like Teddy Roosevelt eulogising General Custer after the Battle of Little Big Horn, Obama lamented America's fallen heroes. "Two million Americans have gone to war since 9/11... Too many will never come home. Those that do carry dark memories from distant places, and the legacy of fallen friends." Ironic that a black president, whose own father hailed from "distant places", uses the adjective "dark" to describe the horrors of war. In sharp contrast, Bush mumbled in Shanksville Pennsylvania, where the third plane crashed, with the president looking on disapprovingly at his predecessor's crassness, "They have kept us safe, they have made us proud." When Clinton or Obama expresses outrage over WikiLeaks that allow us to overhear the West's leaders wrangling, they are simultaneously ridiculous cranks and establishment figureheads. Being right is rarely enough to win the day for Western leaders, it is just a pretext for waging war. We can take that as a measure of what would soon be lost -- Western credibility and political prestige. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban draw few enthusiasts in the Western world. But the world is becoming too big for Washington to control. The imperialist myth of omnipotence has three things wrong with it. First, the expansive multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious community of nations under US hegemony had little to do with each other. Take NATO members Greece and Turkey, or Turkey and Israel for that matter. US policymakers are not in the least concerned about such minutiae. The traditional rivalries between supposed American allies are beyond the ken of American politicians. Second, AK-47s are more enduring than the most sophisticated drones. Third, the US was never the champion of democratically elected leftist governments. Whenever the people chose the latter, the empire imposed the most ferocious dictators to mop up anti-imperialist forces. Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us reminds us that the first 9/11 was in 1973 when the US encouraged the toppling of the democratically elected government of Chile's Salvador Allende in a bloody military coup d'��tat that put the rightwing dictator Augusto Pinochet in Allende's place. Such is the twisted logic of the world's leading advocate of democracy, freedom human rights -- the formidable United States of America. 9/11 demonstrated that the US is heading toward paper tiger status. Such is the legacy of 9/11: the hypocrisy of the powers that be in Washington, who first used militant Islam to fight Communism, then as a bogeyman and terrorists, as an excuse to re-colonise the oil-rich lands of the Middle East and North Africa such as Iraq and Libya. Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction as the hawks in Washington claimed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. That was a flippant excuse to pilfer Iraq's petroleum. The US might have dumped the body of Osama Bin Laden in the Arabian Sea. However, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda still command considerable respect among a broad spectrum of the frustrated unemployed youth of the Muslim world and Taliban still pose a lethal threat to America's interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan regardless of the ill-fated end of Bin Laden. Militant Islam remains as popular as ever, in spite of -- and even more curiously because of -- 9/11.
