America is in a class of its own, but it's no enviable position, writes Nyier Abdou More than one year on, to argue that 11 September "changed the world" is not only mundane, it's wrong. When America came under attack, the reverberations were felt around the world, but it was only America that changed. A sleeping giant, tipsy on a cocktail of military might and economic strength, the US staggered back, then lunged. US President George W Bush, who fought a tooth-and-nail campaign against former Vice President Al Gore in 2000, ran on a traditional Republican platform of tax cuts and big business at home, and added a locally popular call for pronounced disengagement in foreign affairs. Disenchanted with the aggressive internationalism of the Clinton era, the Bush team pledged to extricate itself from the Arab-Israeli conflict, reduce US military presence worldwide and turn its attentions to strengthening the fort through increased focus on the ambitious, though at times dubious, National Missile Defence (NMD) system -- the so-called son of Star Wars. The attacks of 11 September drastically changed the landscape of America under Bush. Rather than pulling troops out of conflict areas, the US cranked up its war machine. Bush, who had never set foot in Europe when he was inaugurated as the 43rd president of the United States, was thrust into a tour of diplomacy, collecting support from equally shaken governments for a "war on terrorism" -- or, as it was often nebulously referred to, the "war on terror". Still clunky in his savoir faire, Bush's consultations were hardly a charm offensive typical of the later Clinton years, but more of a campaign of coercion. The message of US foreign policy, however, is unchanging -- albeit more frank in the hands of Bush: "Either you are with us," he warned in his address to Congress following the 11 September attacks, "or you are with the terrorists." The events of 11 September did change America, but in many ways, it has not been a qualitative difference. Rather, the rage, the fear and the uncertainty that followed the terrorist attacks empowered the leadership to accelerate a slow, but steady trend of increasing isolationism and paranoia. Like an anxious king dissociated from his kingdom, the US has grown suspicious of the international community, shunning international agreements and imposing its will by fiat. The decision to dismantle the landmark 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty with Russia in order to pursue NMD set a dangerous precedent of manipulation of international conventions to meet the needs of a single country's programmes -- something the US would never accept from a state like North Korea or even China. From the Bioweapons Convention, to the Kyoto Protocol, to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test- Ban Treaty -- even the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women -- the US has eluded a sense of responsibility to the international community. But nothing has made this more clear than Bush's decision, in May of this year, to "unsign" the Rome Charter, the agreement that laid the foundations of the International Criminal Court (ICC), despite the inevitability of the court's establishment. The treaty came into force on 11 April, without the US. The US has for some time displayed an acute aversion to acknowledging a body of international law, preferring, as numerous human rights groups have alleged, to pick and choose which laws are convenient to its needs. By choosing not to name combatants captured during the war in Afghanistan -- prisoners of war (PoWs) -- and the removal of the detainees to an isolated prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the US roused the suspicion of human rights watchdogs inclined to think there was something to hide. Strict anti-terrorism laws enacted in the wake of 11 September put a squeeze on civil liberties, freeing up authorities in the US to detain thousands of Arabs and Muslims in the US without charges. Along with the military tribunals instituted for foreigners charged with terrorism, the adoption of some of the methods of less democratic regimes the world over was conspicuous. The anti- terrorism laws increased the powers of the CIA and FBI, making surveillance more pervasive. Following announced killings of six suspected Al- Qa'eda militants by an unmanned Predator aircraft in Yemen last month, it was made clear that extra- judicial assassinations are not only permissible, they are not necessarily even covert. Throwbacks to less savoury periods in American history have increasingly made themselves felt. In July came Operation TIPS, the brainchild of Attorney-General John Ashcroft and condemned by civil libertarians as the rebirth of McCarthyism. The programme formally enlisted American workers such as truckers and utility employees to report "suspicious terrorist activity", and was subsumed within the troubled legislation to establish Bush's new Department of Homeland Security. Despite the outcry over TIPS, the embracing of Big Brother government has marched ahead unimpeded. The development of the bluntly named "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) system, a planned database of information intended to track the patterns of terrorist behaviour, has left those who wasted all their 1984 metaphors on TIPS at a loss. The system will utilise data-mining and profiling technologies, analyse commercial transactions, even track personal correspondence in order to catch the seeds of terrorism before they can take root. The idea was disturbing enough, but the appointment of John Poindexter, formerly the national security advisor under Ronald Reagan and tied in the collective consciousness with the Iran-Contra scandal, to head the programme clinched the unwelcome nostalgia. This week, civil liberties groups were in an uproar over mass arrests in California of Arab and Muslim men following an order to register with authorities by 16 December. Some 500 men, mostly Iranians, were detained in the Los Angeles area, many of whom were later released. But many are being held and threatened with deportation, sparking outrage over a laughably flawed idea that necessarily implies that people involved in terrorist activities would present themselves to the authorities. Most of the detainees are being held by the INS due to their immigration papers being out of order. An INS spokesman staunchly maintained last Friday that "We need this programme to better protect our borders," but obvious implication that the US needs to protect itself from Muslim and Arab immigrants cannot be ignored. When reports of celebrations on the Arab and Muslim street over the 11 September attacks seeped into the American consciousness, the frenzy of hatred that imploded in racial attacks left one question hanging heavily over New York, Washington and beyond: Why do they hate us? That question remains unanswered -- in fact, unaddressed. "They hate our freedom," said Bush, but certainly the seeds of resentment are crystal clear: poverty, duplicity, self-centred policies. The Arab and Muslim world, from Cairo to Baghdad, from Jakarta to Peshawar, responded angrily to the war in Afghanistan, claiming that it punished the people of Afghanistan without attacking the root causes of terrorism, and they will respond even stronger to a war in Iraq. Talk of a new imperialism is common when attacking US hegemony and disregard for the United Nations, but perhaps imperialism is the wrong word. Selfish may be a better one. It does not want to do the hard work of change from the inside, or to admit its past policies have been to blame. While the US has struck back hard at the symptoms of resentment and frustration in the developing world, it continues in the same policies that engender it: strategic alliances with insalubrious leaderships or opposition groups and the failure to address the conflict in Palestine. The hostage-taking in Moscow, the bombing in Bali -- as devastating as these incidents were -- they are still warning shots. It is not too late to heed the warning.
