The World after September 11

The World after September 11
Burning the Haystack (1)
Joel Rocamora
TNI Website, 15 March 2002

The conventional war in Afghanistan is over. They have sealed the caves at Toro Bora. But they have not sealed the torrent of emotion, the avalanche of violence unleashed by September 11. Al Quaida has been severely damaged, its leader in hiding, its networks disrupted. But war between India and Pakistan threatens next door; Palestine continues to burn. The suicidal rage that piloted the planes in New York and Washington DC has not been suppressed in Afghanistan.

September 11 (911) is a macabre metaphor for globalization. More than 30,000 tons of steel scrap from the Twin Towers - possibly contaminated with asbestos, PCBs, cadmium, mercury and dioxins - has been exported to India and other parts of Asia. It was a gruesome event prepared by men crisscrossing borders. The victims were from more than fifty different nationalities, taken together outnumbering the Americans. In response, the US government has launched a worldwide "Coalition Against Terrorism" whose extensions beyond Afghanistan remains uncertain. September 11 and its aftermath pushed the international economy into recession.

I am not sure where the events September 11 provoked will lead. To more horrors beyond Afghanistan and again in the US? Or to greater understanding of the extensions of meaning of September 11 from the past and into the future? It is the potential for 'meaning' that tempts me about September 11. Close to the event itself, the fear and loathing were real enough. 'Loathing' is too soft a word to describe my disapproval of that act of terror. Beyond grief and horror, what then? Only the jingoistic, macho rhetoric of retribution from George Bush, Jr.?

America will never be the same again. If Fukuyama said the "Fall of the Berlin Wall" marked the end of history, one might say that September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of American history. Both, of course, are hyperbole. But I've always felt an insularity about Americans, a vacuum for history, an absence of war and the horror of war, the kind that the rest of the world lives with. Many Americans have died in wars abroad. More Americans died on American soil on September 11 than at any time since the Civil War a couple of centuries ago.

"The United States has become expert in the art of sanitizing and dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no longer a national obsession, it's a business that is now largely out-sourced to experts. This is one of the country's many paradoxes: though the engine of globalization around the world, the nation has never been more inward looking, less worldly. No wonder Tuesday's attack, in addition to being horrifying beyond description, has the added horror of seeming, to many Americans, to have arrived entirely out of the blue". (2)

If the American people only 'joined' the world and its travails on September 11, 2001, the American government has been the leader of globalization, the rapid expansion of capitalism into the nooks and crannies of the countries of the South, and the political and military enforcement of that economic expansion. I would have preferred less brutal pedagogy, but it is time the American people understood what its government and multinational corporations have been up to in the world.

The wrenching loss of the American people's 'innocence' is the necessary basis for making the American government accountable for its actions. The psychic shock of 911 and the uncertainty of the outcome of the American 'War Against Terrorism' is forcing a rethinking of all kinds of political frameworks. The push to recession in the US and the rest of the capitalist world that 911 provided has already led to economic policy measures which have undermined the ideological basis of globalization, - neoliberalism and its virulent American variety, the 'Washington Consensus'.

911: Before

The shock of 911 made it seem like an event without extensions, without a past. The Bush administration has played on this to highlight American innocence. The theme of much of American commentary is "How could they do this to us?" Indeed the shock of 911 is precisely because it was unexpected, because Americans never thought something like that could happen to them. But that is not the same as saying 911 does not have a history. As the art historian Frederick Jameson put it "historical events...are not punctual, but extend in a before and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves".

The US government knew that it was at war with Al Quaida. Two days before 911, on September 9, Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, the US ally, was killed in Afghanistan, apparently by Al Quaida operatives. Two months before, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American military strikes against them. The threats of war unless the Taliban surrendered Osama bin Laden were passed to the regime in Afghanistan by the Pakistani government. (3) In October 2000, a US warship, The USS Cole, was bombed while at port in Yemen. Two years before, the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed. Assuming the attacks were the work of Al Quaida, the US bombed its camps in Afghanistan and what it believed, erroneously as it turned out, was a weapons factory in the Sudan. The CIA was specifically authorized by the Clinton administration to find and kill Osama bin Laden.

These events were but the extensions of more than a decade long US operation in Afghanistan to counter Soviet support for a communist regime there. "With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad". (4)

It was in the supercharged atmosphere of Afghanistan that Osama bin Laden was shaped. In the mid-1980s, he became the financier and logistics man for the Maktab al-Khidamat, The Office of Services, an overt organization trying to recruit and aid Muslim, chiefly Arab, volunteers for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The friendships and associations made in The Office of Services gave birth to the clandestine al-Qa'ida, The Base. The war against Iraq in 1990, half a million American troops in Saudi Arabia, and Bin Laden's sense of outrage at the holy center of Islam becoming a base for war against another Islamic country transformed anti-Soviet sentiment to anti-American rage.

"During the cold war it was easy, and easily justified on pragmatic grounds, to enlist the help of political Islam in the fight against Communism. Yet this enlistment of Islam, which helped hammer the final nails in the coffin of Communism by defeating the Red Army in Afghanistan, led to catastrophe - first for the Middle East and later for America". (5) In the Middle East, the cynical manipulation of Islamic fundamentalism led to the defeat of nationalist movements, and their replacement with authoritarian, often feudal regimes. By the 1990s, the products of this manipulation, the Al Quaidas of the Islamic world began to turn against ruling regimes in their countries, but reserved their rage for the United States, the buttress of these regimes and the hated Israelis.

This rage has even older provenance. "The Muslim world has an old and proud culture, but one that has felt under assault from the West for the past century... This has coincided with a feeling of political powerlessness across much of the Islamic world, a feeling that America dictates the agenda by which the world lives and that Western assumptions now order the affairs of nations. That feeling fuelled the Khomeini revolution in Iran and its virulent denunciation of the Great Satan. Often I have sat in Palestinian refugee camps or the homes of ordinary, moderate Arabs and heard accusations not just of British responsibility for the creation of Israel but of America's unstinting support for Israeli occupation and Israeli settlements". (6)

American involvement with Afghanistan also has clear economic roots. The region of Central Asia-encompassing the "newly-independent" states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgizstan and Kazakhstan-holds about 10 percent of the world's known reserves of oil and gas, which today is worth $5 trillion. The problem with this huge bonanza is transport to the markets of the West. This is where Afghanistan comes in for it provides the cheapest route for an oil pipeline. American negotiations with the Taliban regime for constructing a pipeline had been going on for some time before 911. (7)

The government knew that this war could enter the US. The World Trade Center itself had been bombed in 1993 by people later linked to Al Quaida. It was not just that the government did not want to spook the American people by telling them. The people who run the United States simply did not believe that there was a serious threat to the US from Al Quaida or anyone else. They believed, and apparently continue to believe that American power can be used throughout the world without too much cost to the American people. "The United States is a country that believed itself not just at peace but war-proof, a self-perception that would come as quite a surprise to most Iraqis, Palestinians and Colombians. Like an amnesiac, the US has woken up in the middle of a war, only to find out it has been going on for years". (8)

911: After

In the immediate aftermath of 911, there was no arguing against the anger and anguish of the American people. But as more and more details about the young men who were triggers of the 'planes-become-weapons' came in, incomprehension mixed with incredulity. "How do people reach this level of anger, hatred and frustration? ...explanations that they are brainwashed by a perverted leader who holds some kind of magical power over them is an escapist simplification... Anger of this sort, what we could call generational, identity-based anger, is constructed over time through a combination of historical events, a deep sense of threat to identity, and direct experiences of sustained exclusion". (9)

The sources of anger in the abominable living conditions of hundreds of millions in the shanty towns of the South have been there for a long time. What was new was the collapse of the socialist camp and its leader the Soviet Union which had provided bipolar ordering to world politics. The United States was now the only superpower in the world. It now became the emotional focus of frustration and anger in the South. "The era of the video game war in which the US is always at the controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share their pain". (10)

The defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1989 removed the emotional focus for tens of thousands of mujahideen who had trained and fought there. This was compounded by the American withdrawal from Afghanistan after it had achieved its goal of defeating Soviet troops. Back in the Middle East, the abject defeat of the Iraqi forces in the world's first 'video game war' in 1990 poured salt on Muslin Arabs' long festering wounds. It was this war that gave the world its first taste of American superpower superiority. It was the potent combination of American invulnerability and shared humiliation of Iraqi defeat that fueled Al Quaida rage.

"This is very important to understand, because ...our response to the immediate events have everything to do with whether we reinforce and provide the soil, seeds, and nutrients for future cycles of revenge and violence. Or whether it changes. We should be careful to pursue one and only one thing as the strategic guidepost of our response: Avoid doing what they expect. What they expect from us is the lashing out of the giant against the weak... This will reinforce their capacity to perpetrate the myth they carefully seek to sustain: That they are under threat, fighting an irrational and mad system that has never taken them seriously and wishes to destroy them and their people". (11)

As it turned out, the Bush administration did exactly what Lederach and other analysts advised against, deepen the emotional logic of terror. The very manner the war in Afghanistan was fought assured this. The Taliban regime was destroyed by bombs rained down from miles in the sky, American casualties kept to a bare minimum, reinforcing in the process a raging sense of powerlessness among its targets. Prisoners of war, many of them Arabs and Pakistanis were either killed in masse, or brought to the American base in Cuba in manacles and kept in outdoor cages. Thousands of Arabs were arrested in many parts of the world, victims of intelligence sweeps against Al Quaida cells or racial profiling.

Reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan have been deliberately controlled by the American military and their local allies. It is clear, however, that there were many more victims of American bombing than at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon combined. More than 3,500 non-combatants alone were killed in Afghanistan by US bombs, according to a study released last December 10 by Marc W. Herold, Professor of Economics, International Relations, and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire. A report by Robert Fisk, one of the few Western correspondents in Kandahar at the height of the war, provides a harrowing example of the deep emotional wounds of that war.

"Out of a dust-storm came a woman in a grey shawl. "I lost my daughter two days ago,'' she wailed. "The Americans bombed our home in Kandahar and the roof fell on her.'' Amid the chaos and shouting, I did what reporters do. Out came my notebook and pen. Name? "Muzlifa.'' Age? "She was two.'' I turn away. "Then there was my other daughter.'' She nods when I ask if this girl died too. "At the same moment. Her name was Farigha. She was three.'' I turn away. "There wasn't much left of my son.'' Notebook out for the third time. "When the roof hit him, he was turned to meat and all I could see were bones. His name was Sherif. He was a year and a half old.'' (12)

The Americans have destroyed the Taliban regime which provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and the Al Quaida. Probably a major part of the Al Quaida financial and organizational network throughout the world has been destroyed. But neither the Taliban nor the Al Quaida leader has been captured or confirmed dead. The political and emotional conditions in the Muslim world out of which both movements arose has, if anything, been strengthened by George Bush' war. "Recruitment happens on a sustained basis. It will not stop with the use of military force, in fact, open warfare will create the soils in which it is fed and grows. Military action to destroy terror, particularly as it affects significant and already vulnerable civilian populations will be like hitting a fully mature dandelion with a golf club. We will participate in making sure the myth of why we are evil is sustained and we will assure yet another generation of recruits". (13)

"What choice was there for America but to take action?" Conrad De Quiros asks. "Well, there was another choice America might have taken. And that was not to take action at all. Or that was the action America might have taken in the face of the obscenity that was the murder of 6,300 Americans at the World Trade Center-to not take action. That would have been the loudest action of all. At the very least, it would have retained the incandescent purity of America's pain, instead of blotting it out with the more copious blood of innocent Afghans. Left to itself, without being filled with corpses from a strange land, the black hole where the World Trade Center used to be would have been Osama bin Laden's fiercest accuser. Left to itself, without being filled with the cries of other widows and orphaned children, that open wound where America's heart used to be would have been terrorism's most savage indictment". (14)

Closer to earth than Conrad De Quiros' eloquence, there were other means available for the US to seek justice. "War and bombing are one option for the immediate future; but another is an International Commission on global terrorism which might be modeled on the Nuremberg and Tokyo war tribunals, working under the authority of a reenergised and revitalised United Nations. Such a commission could be empowered to investigate those responsible for the new mass terrorism and to bring them to justice. Backed by the capacity to impose economic, political and military sanctions - and supported by UN and NATO military capacities, among others - it might be the basis of an investigation and system of punishment which commands global support... Terrorism must be criminalised on an international basis, not eradicated through arbitrary violent action". (15)

One might, with an excess of generosity, call the American 'war on terrorism' the result of 'failure of imagination'. Led by a president who does not know how to eat a pretzel, one could say the US could not imagine any other way to fight. Others are less generous. "The manner in which this war is being waged, as well as the context and the profound consequences it will surely have, leave no doubt as to what this war is about. What it is all about is not so much the question of justice for the victims of the September 11 tragedy but the re-assertion and reconsolidation of US hegemony and 'invincibility,' perceived to have been challenged, if not threatened, by the September 11 incidents, the pursuance of interests of the global military-industrial complex, and the reorientation of international politics and strategic alliances". (16)

The elements of this geo-political logic are clear. The consolidation of the "Western alliance" across the Atlantic, led by George Bush' spear carrier Tony Blair, was achieved relatively easily. The new Muslim states carved out of the Soviet Union and their oil resources on one side of Afghanistan, and Pakistan on the other side have also been roped into military alliances. All this was achieved in the course of the Afghan war. It is in the postwar period that the US is having difficulties. Bush' decision to support Sharon's extremism in Palestine has made it even more difficult than before 911 for US surrogate Arab states to support US goals in the Middle East. Even European allies recoiled against Bush' 'axis of evil' rhetorical extremism.

The American people have not been spared. The military budget has been increased, social programs gutted at the same time as the rich have been given new tax cuts. A newer, more virulent form of McCarthyism has invaded campuses and media news rooms. Even William Safire has attacked Bush' military courts for 'terrorists'. "His kangaroo court can conceal evidence by citing national security, make up its own rules, find a defendant guilty even if a third of the officers disagree, and execute the alien with no review by any civilian court. No longer does the judicial branch and an independent jury stand between the government and the accused. In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner". (17)

How successful Bush will be in shoring up the political foundations of the world's one remaining superpower remains to be seen. The damage to the rest of us is already clear. "Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a living hell for all of us? At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many emails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom - that precious, precious thing - will be the first casualty". (18)

Beyond 911

When 911 invaded our living rooms, we were shocked and horrified together with Americans. Many of us had relatives and friends who could have been among the victims. Our shared history as colonizer and colonized brought Filipinos closer to New York than many other peoples. We condemned the act of terror because we were among the terrorized. I also agree with those who say that this act of terror was fundamentally reactionary.

"Far from dealing a powerful blow against imperialist militarism, terrorism plays into the hands of those elements within the US establishment who seize on such events to justify and legitimize the resort to war in pursuit of the geopolitical and economic interests of the ruling elite. The murder of innocent civilians enrages, disorients and confuses the public. It undermines the struggle for the international unity of the working class, and counteracts all efforts to educate the American people on the history and politics that form the background to contemporary events in the Middle East". (19)

Beyond terror, I share the disapproval of Islamic fundamentalism of an old friend Eqbal Ahmad, as remembered by Edward Said. "In a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion". And this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds". (20)

But we were not just horrified spectators of 911. "It is they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event losses all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity... That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact..". (21)

This does not mean we have to choose between George Bush, Jr. and Osama bin Laden. "Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other". (22)

What does 911 then mean for our various counter hegemonic political projects? We have to start with the fact that even as 911 strengthened George Bush, Jr. and the US Right, it has also generated difficult new dynamics. What 911 has done is raise the contradiction between globalization, the opening of economic, political, technological, and physical barriers with the need to control the flow of threat from areas of disorder in the world.

How do you allow cheap labor from the South including the flow of illegals which keeps migrant labor cheap, and at the same time prevent terrorists from entering. The class bias of these flows actually facilitates the work of terrorists because it does not take much to dress up a terrorist, to secure credit cards and the other symbols of affluence that lull the sensibilities of immigration officers. "For these groups, there are no borders. They may consider it better or easier to have explosive materials in some countries and support bases in other countries, electronic matters in others and financial support - forged papers or forged credit cards and so on - in still others". (23)

Even if you can control entry of people from the South, what do you do with the South within the North, the large populations of restless deprived among migrant populations of London, New York, Hamburg? The 911 terrorists were mainly from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but their support base was in Europe, from among young Muslim men caught in the trap of emigrant groups in these countries, especially in France and Germany which have the greatest difficulty integrating refugee groups. Then there is the North within the South, the embassies and corporate headquarters, the millions of innocent, vulnerable tourists, expatriates, missionaries. The first strikes of Al Quaida were in Africa, the US embassy in Kenya, the US Navy in Yemen. You might be able to limit military vulnerability by keeping out of ports and bombing from four miles in the sky, but globalization will stop on its tracks without its many agents wandering around the world.

Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach puts it differently. "My fear was that this was a transforming event that could result in the functional equivalent of a new tax on cross-border connectivity. The tax would show up in the form of heightened national border security, higher shipping costs, increased insurance rates, and an increased risk premium associated with the uncertainty over what comes next. That would not only raise the price of the trade and capital flows that underpin globalization, but it could also play a key role in crimping the outsourcing strategies that lie at the heart of increasingly globalized supply chains. To the extent that financial markets are still priced for further progress on the road to globalization, investors could be in for a rude awakening". (24)

While predictions of the coming end of globalization remain premature, 911 and its aftermath has put the political question squarely on the agenda. International capitalism cannot continue to expand in the South without taking account of the social consequences of its activities. The North cannot remain oblivious to the scandalous conditions its corporations have generated in the South. The rage spawned by these conditions has now exported itself into the living rooms of the North courtesy of Al Quaida.

In the 1990s, during the Clinton years, American military intervention gave way to economic tools. The US was in the midst of an unprecedented decade long period of growth. It was a time of 'emergent market' and 'new economy' exuberance. Opening up markets of the South was achieved through economic and ideological tools, by high velocity capital markets and Washington Consensus neo-liberalism. These tools were blunted by the 1997 financial crisis. 911 pushed the slowing US economy into recession.

The Washington Consensus was now reversed: the US pushed Europe into putting more money into circulation by lowering interest rates and deficit financing. Greedy Enron managers added moral opprobrium to criticism of unregulated, high flying finance capitalism.

The brash, young, designer clothed securities dealers have now been replaced by crew cut, camouflage uniformed soldiers, the smooth talking Clinton by the bumbling, intellectually challenged George Jr. The lead globalizer has been forced to use the bluntest weapons of the last superpower in the world. But are B52s and 'Daisy Cutter' bombs useful for dealing with the social consequences of globalization? Afghanistan and the Taliban provided convenient targets. But is the US in fact capable of turning George Junior's 'axis of evil' rhetoric into actual wars? Unfortunately for us, for now the closest thing to an American war is against the puny Abu Sayyaf in Basilan. If the US does not find another enemy soon and they decide to take on the MILF, god save us. We will be in for a nasty war.

References

1. More has been written, in such a short time, about 9/11 than any other event I can remember except perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall. I resisted writing about 9/11 because so many eloquent people have already written. Now, almost six months later, the results of 9/11 have become much clearer. I have finally written, using the words of many people, because I realize that in this new, epochal 'war', discourse is one of the most important arenas of struggle.
2. Naomi Klein, "Game Over", The Nation, 18 Sept 2001
3. Jonathan Steele, Ewen MacAskill, Richard Norton-Taylor and Ed Harriman, The Guardian, September 22, 2001
4. Michel Chossudovsky, Who Is Ousmane Bin Laden?
5. Saad Mehio, "How Islam and Politics Mixed", New York Times, 2 December 2001
6. Michael Binyon, "How Islamic world learnt to hate the US"
7. Nina Burleigh, Missing the oil story
8. Naomi Klein, "Game Over" The Nation, 18 Sept 2001
9. John Paul Lederach, "The Challenge of Terror: A Traveling Essay"
10. Klein, op.cit.
11. Lederach, op.cit.
12. Robert Fisk, "Blood, Tears, Terror and Tragedy Behind the Lines"
13. Lederach, op.cit.
14. Conrado de Quiros in the Philippine Daily Inquirer
15. David Held, "Violence and Justice in a Global Age"
16. Against War and Terrorism. A Statement of the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA) in the Aftermath of the September 11 Events in the US and US Military Retaliation
17. William Safire, "Seizing Dictatorial Power " NY Times, November 15, 2001
18. Arundhati Roy, "Why America must stop the war now" Guardian Unlimited, October 23, 2001
19. Editorial Board, The World Socialist Web Site, 12 September 2001
20. Edward W. Said, "The Clash of Ignorance", The Nation - October 22, 2001
21. Jean Baudrillard , "The Spirit of Terrorism", Le Monde 2/11/01
22. Arundhati Roy, "The algebra of infinite justice", Guardian, September 29, 2001
23. Judge Jean Louis Bruguiere, French Judge specialist in terrorism, IHT, Dec 29-30, 2001
24. Stephen Roach (New York), Globalization's Haunting Past