TRANSATLANTIC RESPONSES TO TERRORISM

The End of Innocence:
the attack on the World Trade Center
and its aftermath

Revised version of a talk given to Churches Together, Ilkley, UK
9 October 2001.
.

By James O'Connell, Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies and a board member of BASIC.

A new awareness
Last January an American President came into office thinking that he could concern himself almost exclusively with his own country and its interests. He was indeed sensitive to international security issues, and he put forward as a corner-stone of his foreign policy the construction of a defence against long-range missiles from rogue states (NMD). In the process he was willing to set aside the ABM treaty that had been negotiated with the Russians; and he seemed insensitive to antagonising the Chinese government. He made little early effort to meet the leaders of other influential countries. Unlike his predecessor, Bill Clinton, he downplayed the US role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Moreover, sure of the power of, and concentrating on, the interests of his own country he refused to sign the Kyoto agreement on global warming and held back from the protocol on biological weapons.

If he thought however that his country could act in these times while ignoring other countries, he, his cabinet and his advisors were stripped of the idea when on the 11th September two planes were crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and a third into the Pentagon building in Washington. From that moment on the American government had to take on board external enemies whom missile defence would never have stopped. In the aftermath of the attack President Bush and his team moved away from aggressive isolationism and set about constructing a series of alliances with other states across the globe. It remains however to be seen how much influence other members of the coalition of states may be able to exercise on the United States.

Why does the 11th September mark the end of innocence, not just for the United States but for the rest of us as well? Innocence ends when an awareness of danger in a new situation begins. There are at least three reasons for a new Western consciousness of danger. First, Westerners generally have become aware of a threat that security experts have understood for a long time, namely, that modern technology makes communities vulnerable in new ways. In fact, experts had for long been afraid of a miniature nuclear weapon from a decaying Soviet arsenal being smuggled into a capital city ‑ or a chemical or biological weapon.[1] No one however thought of great aeroplanes being seized and smashed into three crowded buildings.

Second, we have had already to change security arrangements to protect against these new dangers. In the process we will have to accept limits on our liberties that are uncongenial and hampering. We will not be at ease for another thirty years, and perhaps not even then.

Third, governments that had believed that wars and conflicts going on in far-off parts of the world would touch them only tangentially now know that fall-out from such violence can with some ease cross their own frontiers. For that reason, they have to consider not only terrorist crimes but the causes or sources of such crimes; and they also have to try to understand the psychology of terrorists. The sad thing is that terrorism tends to be the weapon of the weak, those with little to lose, and those who feel that without it they and their cause are neither seen nor heard. Americans and others in the West have to reflect on why some groups in areas as far apart as Indonesia, Northern Nigeria, Pakistan and Palestine rejoiced when they heard that those planes had brought those buildings down. It should nonetheless be said that many in those regions were horrified by the savagery of the deed and mourned in human sympathy with the people of New York.

Searching for explanations
Why did these young men launch so terrible an onslaught on the United States? It makes sense to look for reasons but in exploring them let me insist that I am not justifying anything that has happened. Historians, it has been pointed out, have correctly identified the punitive terms of the treaty of Versailles as a factor in the rise of Hitler but that does not turn them into apologists for what happened subsequently in Germany. In looking for reasons we have first to look at the Middle East since this attack came from Middle Easterners. Ever since the U.S. restored the Shah of Iran to power and then tried to keep him there, deep resentment of the U.S. has existed in Iran whose revolutionary regime has exercised a profound influence among Muslim countries. More widely than its interventions in Iran has been the role of the US in propping up oligarchic and often corrupt Arab regimes that sit on great oil riches. This support of oil-controlling regimes was compounded for some religious Muslims by the presence of infidel military personnel on sacred Islamic soil in the proximity of Mecca and Medina. Yet if it is true that the US - and other Western countries ‑ pursue their own interests, it is also the case that the central problem for Arab countries, whether in terms of autocracy or commitment to the development of their peoples, has been their internal weaknesses rather than external intervention.

Beyond this support for oligarchic regimes was continuing American military, financial and diplomatic support for Israel. The Jewish state expropriated lands for settlements and refused to negotiate an agreement that would leave Palestinians with a state of their own. Undoubtedly the spark to the tinder of recent animosity has been the Palestinian Intifada, which has shown on televisions screens throughout the Middle East as well as the rest of the world the asymmetry of power between Jews and Arabs and the brutality of trained soldiers shooting at stone-throwing protesters. Moreover, it is the Palestinians who have recently fine honed suicide bombings that were aimed indiscriminately at civilians and soldiers in Israel.[2] Israel itself is at once for nearly all Middle Easterners an outpost of Western colonialism, a politically anomalous presence among Arabs, a usurper of the land of Arab people, and a brutal occupant of a central shrine of the Muslim faith.[3]

When President Bush used the term 'crusade' to describe his mission against bin Laden, he hit on a bitter resonance from Arab history. Western countries were the first to industrialise; and they subsequently used that achievement to conquer or to profoundly influence the Muslim world. There has been the West's concept of itself as a superior civilization as well as some recent tendencies to use religious stereotypes in referring to the politics of 'the Islamic threat'. The influence of the West has also helped to worsen the religious differences, often painful and bitter, that mark clashes between traditionalists and modernisers in Islam, the latter being often denigrated for accepting changes that have been prompted by contact with the West.

The broad context of what has been happening has tended to be called globalisation. Globalisation draws the world together in communication, trade, and travel, and so creates new proximities of peoples. In the shape of modernising technology globalisation has also affected the life styles of the most traditional societies, often with a speed that they cannot readily cope with. In the transformation and contraction of the world the West through its media and financial power is much more obtrusively present in other countries than they are in the West. Technologically these regions are worked on unceasingly by inventions emanating from the West; economically they have had terms of trade imposed on them by the West; politically they have been impacted on by the West's desire to protect trade and oil; and culturally many are irritated by the invasion of Western stylistic forms that range from clothes to music, by attitudes that distinguish the secular from the religious, and by the education of, and liberal attitudes towards, women that upset inherited relations between the sexes. It is surely significant that the attacks on the WTC used one of the great technological tools of modernity, aircraft, and crashed them into twin symbols of Western trade dominance. Anger against social and economic transformations which they see as full of sin and injustice lies behind fundamentalist upholders of 'apocalyptic nihilism' ‑ to use Michael Ignatieff's phrase. Afraid and resentful of the freedom that the United States and Western countries embody, they rage against a disruptive present and seek to restore an idealised and impossible past. Fortunately though there is bitterness throughout the Muslim and Arab world, the fundamentalists still remain a minority.

The implications of globalisation
By insisting on the context of globalisation I am in measure shifting the emphasis from the United States. America is in the front line but the whole developed world lines up alongside it. If groups want to hit back at the West, the United States is simply the most obvious target and the scapegoat for Western privileges.[4] Hollywood films and television alone make it the most culturally obtrusive of Western countries. Even its great democratic freedoms do not lessen its obnoxiousness to those who see its interventions abroad as propping up autocratic regimes and disregarding the freedom of other peoples. Critics also point out that Saddam Hussein was originally a client of the Americans who supported his fight against Iran and that during the Cold War they funded bin Laden in his fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Yet to return to the opening theme of this paragraph: the divide between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is not just between the U.S. and the Middle East but between the rich countries of the world, including Japan and South Korea, and all those that are poor. Four fifths of the world's population live in the developing world but earn just 13% of the world's income. For such reasons all the developed countries are targets. In a global village peoples see and want what the prosperous possess. Ironically for countries that are envied and disliked we are today faced with a new migration of peoples in which those from all over the world seek to enter Western countries. Such migration is a painful indicator of the aspirations and frustrations of the poor.

As political awareness grows among elite groups in developing countries there is bound to be a demand for sharing. The fundamental divide in our world is the uneven possession of security, prosperity and health. In a world where we accept that there is one God and/or a common humanity, the claims of the poor are based much more on concepts of justice and hope rather than on the psychology of envy. In practice it may not be possible to even things out quickly but it is certainly politically short-sighted and socially obtuse to overlook the poor of the world. Huge countries like Brazil and Indonesia, China, India and Pakistan are not going to wait indefinitely for standards of living that reach close to ours. Their own rulers will come under too much pressure from elite groups within not to promote their claims outside their boundaries. They may well press their claims in an era when weapons of attack have moved ahead of possibilities of defence.

If we face a long term problem of overcoming the immense divisions of wealth in the world, we have an immediate problem in dealing with Muslim terrorists. I want to argue however that Islam has no more to do with such terrorism than Catholicism has had to do with republican bombing in Northern Ireland or Buddhism with civil war in SriLanka. When men and women organise in conflict situations, they draw on boundaries that separate them from others. In Northern Ireland it is denomination, in Belgium it is language, in Nigeria and Sri Lanka it ethnicity and religion. In two great European wars it has been state and ethnicity. If Islam has been an organising principle in the recent attacks, it is for several reasons. First, in a global world it offers a widely spread differentiating principle; and it offers an organising principle of global fellowship to a substantial part of the poor of the world. The fellowship is deepened by the fact that poor people ‑ like the impoverished Irish in the last century ‑ take their dignity from religion when they feel inferior in their poverty; and the tension between the Islamic world's sense of religious superiority but cultural unease and political and economic weakness begets no small degree of rancour. Muslim anger against Western countries emanates in no small measure from the failures of countries where Muslims live. Second, Muslim countries have been colonised or defeated by Western countries within recent memory. They still smart from such defeats; and they link them with a folk memory that goes back to the crusades. Third, since petroleum is essential to their economies, Western governments, and particularly the American and the British, have propped up well-disposed regimes and frustrated Arab attempts to introduce political change. Resentments may be couched in religious terms ‑ just as a willingness to die may also be ‑ but these resentments are political rather than Muslim. Islam may give an extra edge to the resentments but they would exist without it.

In short, I am arguing that the attack on the WTC came from many sources of hatred and discontent: the rage of those who felt that the West impeded reform or upheld injustice in their countries, the impatience of those who want more for their peoples than subsistence, the desire to be heard by those who feel that they have no voice, and the destructive dream of apocalyptic fundamentalists who want to push back time and reject its Western rhythms. All the sources of trouble in the world do not however inevitably create young men with their personal decisions to kill and to die. They only make it easier or more likely for such men to turn towards hatred and to act the way they did.

Finding a way forward in a world where the future is not what it was
Faced with the aftermath of carnage and atrocity the US had no easy way forward. To the relief of many observers it did not strike out blindly and immediately but curbed instincts of immediate revenge and indiscriminate indictment. It started in an obvious place, namely, to increase internal and external security for its citizens. It also sought for collaborators of the suicide bombers of the 11th September. It began to examine financing, fund-raising and money laundering that may lie behind terrorist organisations. Not least, it set about creating a grand alliance by calling on old allies in the international system, reminding other states that their interests are similar to its own, and cajoling or pressuring a few states. Yet it is also the case that the US government began to get plans for military action under way from the time immediately after the destruction of the twin towers. The US government ‑ and the British government as well ‑ in arguing their case of fighting for freedom has had to carry as lightly as possible the embarrassment including the governments of many states in its own coalition who are terrified of democratic ideas.

The US and Britain have begun what they declare to be a war against the Afghan rulers. To support their actions they have argued: the Taliban government is unwilling to hand over Osama bin Ladan to justice, it harbours training camps for terrorists, and it helps to support a worldwide conspiracy of terror. I understand the provocation given but I deeply regret that they did not wait longer. It is also clear that they began to plan war almost immediately after the 11th September. I believe that they could instead have put the emphasis on the investigation of those involved in the New York crime, given more time to Pakistani mediators, and possibly relied on special forces to capture bin Laden and his associates.

As things are - and five weeks into a bombing campaign - a lack of intelligence, the apparently shifting location of bin Laden, the failure to find local collaborators, the tough obduracy of the Taliban government, and the difficult terrain of the country have frustrated American efforts. The US is directing enormous firepower at sites in a poor country already threatened with famine and weakened by surges of refugees; and it is supporting with weapons, supplies and advisers the military forces of the Northern minority ethnic groups who themselves have a particularly poor human rights record.

The intent to remove an unsatisfactory government without knowing clearly how it will be possible to put a government in its place suggests policy confusion. If the US does not find an enduring replacement government, it may not avoid being drawn into a political and military quagmire or of abandoning a shambles of a country to its sorry fate. Its tactics also run the risk of destabilising Pakistan and throwing its nuclear weapons into uncertain hands. Matters will worsen if there is a move against Iraq, further turmoil is created in the region, and even the break-up of states becomes a possibility. In the process the US and its partners risk appearing to make war on Islam, making more enemies among Muslims and playing into the hands of bin Laden who has cleverly spun his propaganda in terms of the Palestinians, Jerusalem, the Muslim holy places and the sufferings of Iraqi children. If the Taliban government does not break in the immediate future ‑ and if bin Laden is not found and charged somewhere in a proper court ‑ the US is faced with continuing a bombing operation that will deepen hostility among enemies, alienate neutrals and increasingly upset friends with its destruction and futility. There is no way in which the war and bombing can continue indefinitely.

In a sense the American authorities have found bin Laden invisible; and they have in the Taliban created a visible enemy for a conventional war. The trouble is that the real enemy is to be found in a combination of Bin Laden as a resistance/martyr symbol and the widespread terrorist network of which he is the titular head and part financial officer. Were enough young men encouraged through his elimination as a martyr (or survival as a hero) to become martyrs or activists for a Middle Eastern and Muslim cause not even the most stringent measures could prevail with total security against a new multiplicity of terrorist plotting that could draw on ingenuity and resources at least as great as those of the attack on the WTC building. In Northern Ireland internment, Bloody Sunday and the hunger strikes served only to recruit for the IRA. The truth is that we will never convince the young men of al Quaida to cease to be our enemies, especially by making martyrs. Terror networks cannot be defeated with missiles and bombs. They can be defeated only by thorough investigative and intelligence work as well as by convincing Muslims other than the extremists that Westerners are not opposed to Islam and that the wrongs bin Laden and others point to can be resolved in more satisfactory ways than by terrorist methods. The most immediate move in this respect would be to use American and European influence to secure a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. The longer term move is to work on the causes of poverty and despotism as well as increasing cultural understanding.

Conclusion: a new age on the way
What we don't know yet is whether 2001 is a turning point in modern Western history such as was 1453, 1517, 1683, 1789, 1848, 1914, 1945 or 1989. I suspect that it is. It is the year in which most of us have for the first time realised how small the world has become through its technology, how inter-dependent peoples are, and how easily the unequal inter-dependence of rich and poor can turn to hatred. The present era has been compared to 1914 when a complacent world was suddenly thrown by a Serb assassin into the first world war. It was the first war of modern technology, and it exacted a terrible cost in lives. I think there is insight in the comparison with 1914 but I think that we need to move back also to 1881 when a liberalising Tsar Alexander II of Russia was murdered by an anarchist. The Tsar who had freed the serfs was about to promulgate a reform constitution. With his death the constitution was rejected and the Russian state moved back into a repression that impeded liberal change and that culminated in military defeat in 1917 and in the wretched Bolshevik takeover. We now have had the only military superpower rendered unsafe by attacks that were not foreseen and whose warships, cruise missiles, F16 jets and even nuclear weapons look inadequate to meeting new forms of aggression. It could be in danger of drawing wrong conclusions on where the enemy is and of seeking undue security control both within and without its borders.

It is true that the United States and the rest of the West cannot afford to be complacent. But neither can we be thrown off course by anarchical crimes, even a crime as great as that of 11th September. Security against terrorism has to go on being worked for in all sorts of ways - through pursuing justice, mediating in quarrels, sharing resources and prompting development, handling peoples thoughtfully and respecting their dignity, and building up adequate military and police resources through national and international agencies. Western countries have however to learn from our present predicament that the last thing we can do is to pull up the drawbridge on the rest of the world. Under the present stress we need to face outwards, respect international law and build towards global cooperation and governance.

We have moved from an age of innocence into an age of anxiety. To deal with anxiety we need to live up to the best of our own religious, ethical and cultural values; and we need to be sensitive to the anger of those who feel that the West impedes reform or supports injustice in their countries, the impatience of those who want more for their peoples than subsistence, the desire to be heard by those who feel that they have no voice, and the impossible wish of power-hungry idealists to turn back the wheel of history. We will have to live for some generations at least with sensible concern and thoughtful defence. But we must not become neurotic with anxiety. If we recognise a common humanity linked to balanced communication and social trust, if we pursue a vision of the interdependence of peoples, if we seek to build sensible global and regional structures, if we research for new materials and fresh sources of energy, if we implement policies of fair trading and worthwhile aid, then we may reduce conflict and marginalise terrorism. In the process we may make a future of more stable peace, create deeper respect for human rights, and produce greater shared prosperity than history has hitherto known.

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Endnotes

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