09/11 – A Historical, Ill-Fated Game Changer !
By 
Lukman Harees
Sixteen years ago, on that fateful day in September, most of those who watched the passenger planes crashing into the World Trade Centre twin towers and the Pentagon may not have known that the world was about to change. And it has. It became “the day that virtually changed everything”, the 21st century’s defining moment, the watershed by which we would forever divide world history: before, and after, 9/11. If the hope of a terror–free world was born in 1945, it virtually died on 9/11. From that point on, the everyday lives and daily comings and goings of not just Americans, but of all the people around the globe were forever altered by what one scholar calls a historical “game changer” akin to that of the attack on Pearl Harbour.
This attack (regardless of who planned and carried them out as there are some conspiracy theories as well!) was indeed a despicable and a barbaric act which killed about 3000 innocent people, shattered lifestyles of millions of people, changed the way we travel, the way we are governed, and the way we view and experience life, and how governments confront the terrorist threat. The 9/11 attacks shattered more than lives and property. The attacks, and the US government’s response, also shattered the boundaries between war and peace. By definition, a “war on terror” can have no clear boundaries in time or space, and no clear boundaries between combatants and civilians. In the post-9/11 era, Americans can no longer define the battlefield or the enemy with any clarity. According to author and York University politics professor James Laxer, ‘what 9/11 did was end a brief “borderless world” of sorts that had emerged following the fall of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War.
However, the question is being asked: which of the many changes are genuine consequences of 9/11? Although Bush Jnr. arrived in the White House in January 2001, with plans of “regime change” in the Arab-Muslim world, it could not carry out those plans without a pretext. The 9/11 attacks provided the needed pretext. Wilfried Gerhard in his book on ‘American Exceptionalism and the War in Iraq’ says, ‘Upon digging deeper it becomes evident that there was a huge effort underway to redesign not only Iraq, but the entire Arab world’. Regime change in Iraq seemed the only way out and at the same time was considered a hopeful undertaking because of the anticipated spill-over effects for the whole region’
There is thus overwhelming evidence that the US policies of pre-emptive strike and regime change started not with the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001 but with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Beneficiaries of war dividends, that is, the military-industrial-security complex, were alarmed by the demise of the Soviet Union,by the end of the “communist threat” as the ready-made justifier of continued escalation of the Pentagon budget, and by the demands for “peace dividends.” Major post-Cold War US military strategies such as regime change were formulated not after the 9/11 attacks, or under President Bush Jr., but under President Bush Sr., that is, soon after the demise of the Soviet Union. According to many critics, including some distinguished figures like Noam Chomsky,, the evidence thus clearly shows that, contrary to the popular claims, 9/11 served more as an excuse, or bogeyman, than a “trap” laid by Osama bin Laden in order to bleed and disgrace the US by prompting it to wage war and military aggression against the Arab-Muslim world.
Anatol Lieven of King’s College London’s department of war studies, says “that the Bush administration would have tried to invade and occupy Iraq anyway. Much of what has happened since would obviously have happened anyway”. The extreme anger of the Muslim world, the blow to US military prestige, the rise of Iran – all of that would have happened.” Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, feels it is questionable whether the US hawks would have won the day on Iraq without the “extreme shock” of 9/11. But he notes that much else in the broader world picture would have happened regardless.
According to Phyllis Bennis writing in Al Jazeera 10 years after the attack, it wasn’t however the crime of September 11 that threatened US’s survival, that destroyed its’ democracy, it wasn’t September 11 that expanded the devastating impact of those attacks far beyond those already directly affected. It was the events of September 12, when the Bush administration made the decision to take the world to war, that changed the world, and that continued to threaten the world’s security and shred US democracy. In the post 9/11 period, we witnessed this so-called war on terror launched by the so-called ‘holier than thou’ developed nations led by US ,turning to a war of terror. In the rush to punish terrorists, the tried and tested principles of democracy and the rule of law were thrown to the winds, and contrary to its principles, international law was used asymmetrically, to favour only dominant countries.
Bush proceeded to initiate two military invasions in which thousands of American soldiers died and probably millions of civilians died too, without even UN approval along with his faithful ally Blair. One war, was waged in Afghanistan, and US bombed that under-developed country back to stone age. The other war was in Iraq and, as we all know, was manufactured out of lies and hubris; the Bush’ White House thus used 9/11 to advance a geopolitical chess game barely anyone else in the world wanted to join. It was a war that unprecedentedly had protesters in the streets before it had even begun, looting the national wealth of Iraq leaving a much shattered land to its’ people. Perhaps, the greatest promise made after Sept. 11 by Bush and Blair,(to cover up their dubious military/economic plans) was that the West would no longer tolerate failed and failing states or extremism. Today ,there are more failed states than ever From Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya to Syria and extremism in all forms. The creation of that monster ISIS clothed in Islamic garb, which has become a global threat too could be traced back to the military and economic strategies of the West.
In the post Cold War era, the world has to deal with an arrogant sole super power the US, whose sense of ‘American Exceptionalism’ has made the world a much worse place to live in, of course with the threat of consequential terrorism and their intervention in affairs of other countries in their assumed role as the ‘global policeman’. All things considered, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States needed to rethink not only the strategy behind its foreign policy but also to consider finding a new enemy in order to justify its continuing internationalism. It is in this context that the so-called Muslim bogeyman comes into play, and US brings in the ‘Islamic threat’ into their military strategic equation, considering ‘political Islam’ as its’ prime adversary.
