In Focus: Moments of change Gamil Mattar* finds much ambivalence amid the soul searching that accompanied the fifth anniversary of 9/11 Sometimes I feel it may have been hasty to conclude that 9/11 was a historic turning point in international relations and in the relationship between our region and the rest of the world. Then I am assailed by doubts in the opposite direction. Perhaps, I think, I have not treated 9/11 seriously enough or accorded it the degree of importance it merits. But if I have erred too much in either direction, after having read so much of what others have written to mark the fifth anniversary of that tragedy, I refuse to reproach myself too harshly. To begin with, five years is not really enough time to be able to assess the extent to which 11 September "changed the world". At the same time, it is an inescapable fact that we -- the Arabs -- are the primary focus of the changes that did take place, even if we are divided over whether we are victims or beneficiaries of that change. From the discussions that have taken place in the US and Europe over the past month I counted at least ten arguments as to why 9/11 was a historical watershed. Not that it is always clear what constituted the watershed. What is clear is that there are those who believe the world will never be the same and others who disagree, arguing that they have adopted a longer-term, more dispassionate view. Many of the articles I read quoted a statement Bush made soon after becoming president. He said he thought the role of the American armed forces was to fight and win, and that was what prevented wars. At the time Bush clearly meant that a strong American army kept others from making war. It was only later that he charged the army with a task it had not performed since the war against the Philippines over a century earlier, and even then unsuccessfully. This task was "nation building, spreading democracy and reconstruction". This is when the wires got crossed. Suddenly an army designed and equipped to do battle was instructed to police the streets of towns in Afghanistan and Iraq and guard public buildings and senior officials in various overseas capitals. In addition the army became responsible for implementing a strategy devised by the more diabolic among civilian officials and advisors in Washington. They were asked to incite political and sectarian discord which would exacerbate intellectual and ideological confusion, give extra stimulus to rival militias and otherwise aggravate the forces of death, destruction and national disintegration. Certainly Iraq would not be heading so resolutely in this direction if American forces had not been there to safeguard "creative chaos". Few inside the US or abroad took issue with Bush's personal faith in the value of democracy and democratic ideals. Nor did many dispute the conviction he took with him to the White House that spreading democracy around the world was the best way to spread the free market economy, to prevent any revival of extremist ideas such as communism and the spread of religious intolerance. It was with 9/ 11, though, that this conviction attained the degree of an imperative. Democracy would, if necessary, be spread at gunpoint, and the mission would take priority over everything else. The "spread of democracy abroad" was pursued with such evangelic zeal that democracy at home was not only ignored but steadily eroded. The Patriot Act, which imposed restrictions on a number of civil and individual liberties, was followed by executive acts and regulations that allowed ever greater violations of the American people's right to privacy. This retrogression has severely undermined one of the fundamental principles of America's constitutional system. Many Americans have also charged that the "honourable" mission the US military was undertaking abroad was the obverse of the "dishonourable" mission being undertaken by civilian officials at home as they expanded the powers of the executive, particularly the president, at the expense of the legislature and judiciary. Bush's evangelical drive to spread democracy abroad and its recoil effects at home have so harmed the image of democracy that it is hard to imagine how it can be resuscitated with any speed or at minimum human cost. Bush and his colleagues have long criticised Clinton for having paid too much attention to domestic concerns while ignoring American interests abroad. They fail to mention, however, that Clinton's predecessor, Bush Senior, had been very energetic abroad -- waging the first war against Iraq and laying the cornerstones of the new global order, though without having formulated a vision of America's international role following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some on the margins of the Bush Senior administration did have a vision, though it was one of which the then president did not approve. As a consequence they had to wait through Clinton's two presidential terms before they could begin to put that vision into effect. Their opportunity came with the election of Bush Junior as president. After two decades of dreaming they could now act to usher in the decisive moment in the international order when a new footing would be established for the relationship between America "the reborn leader/mentor", and the rest of the world. They took the plans on which they had worked to the White House and Pentagon. These included a revamped "Star Wars" project and one, first mentioned by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to target Islam that now went by the name, concocted by American political and strategic research centres, of "the clash of civilisations". It was 9/11 that provided the opportunity to put these schemes into effect, furnishing the excuse to release the American giant, penned in under Clinton and which even Bush Senior had kept on a tight leash. But while the giant was on the loose abroad things began to collapse at home. Perhaps the most salient manifestation of things gone wrong was the scandalously inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina which destroyed New Orleans and large tracts of Louisiana and Mississippi. But gross negligence was only one of the charges increasingly being levelled at central government, already under attack for its rollback of domestic democracy, torture of political detainees, rising fuel prices, soaring national debt and catastrophic budget deficit. The criticisms came on top of foreign policy disasters in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the collapse of democratic evangelism, the recoil from liberal economics in many parts of the world and America's international prestige plummeting to hitherto uncharted depths. Then came the war in Lebanon to further expose the political and ideological structure of the current administration in Washington, not least its relationship with Israel. It was Henry Siegman, of the American Council on Foreign Relations, who noted the relationship has lost value for both sides now Israel stands accused of waging a war by proxy on behalf of the US, an accusation that ultimately threatens the survival of Israel in the region. It is no longer the exception to hear the Bush administration accused of flagrant lying; indeed, if there is one thing that even friends of the administration agree on it is its unrestrained propensity to lie. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was not exaggerating when he said Bush wanted to invade Iraq the moment he entered the White House. Evidence abounds that he was waiting only for misleading or falsified information from the CIA, though afterwards he attempted to blame the agency for the failure of the invasion and its impacts on the US. Closely connected with this administration's mendacity is its defiance of international law and the many international agreements to which the US is party. The very best that can be said of the administration is that, in the wake of 9/11, its key officials exhibited a cynical disdain for civil liberties, honesty, responsibility and the dignity of other nations and cultures. Bush's slur regarding "Islamic fascism" and his determination to codify American exemption from the Geneva Conventions were not isolated acts but the reflection of the deeply entrenched ideological mindset of his administration. But it is also obvious that things are not going the way the ideologues of the new administration had hoped. Colin Powell is unlikely to be the last of the administration's officials to come to regret having been taken in by the neo-conservatives. It may well be that 9/11 ultimately turns out to have been a transient moment in history but it is, too, the moment America's political and religious extremists choose to emerge from the sidelines to which they had been confined for two centuries and more. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
