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Title: Mirror Crack’d Author: Noam Chomsky Date: September 2002 Language: en Topics: 9/11, terrorism Source: Retrieved on 2nd July 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200209__02/ Notes: Published in Outlook India.
It is widely argued that the September 11 terrorist attacks have changed
the world dramatically, that nothing will be the same as the world
enters into an “age of terror” — the title of a collection of academic
essays by Yale University scholars and others, which regards the anthrax
attack as even more ominous.
There is no doubt that the 9/11 atrocities were an event of historic
importance, not — regrettably — because of their scale, but because of
the choice of innocent victims. It had been recognised for some time
that with new technology, the industrial powers would probably lose
their virtual monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous
preponderance.
No one could have anticipated the specific way in which the expectations
were fulfilled, but they were. For the first time in modern history,
Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of
atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere. The history
should be too familiar to review, and though the West may choose to
disregard it, the victims do not. The sharp break in the traditional
pattern surely qualifies 9/11 as a historic event, and the repercussions
are sure to be significant.
Several crucial questions arose at once: who is responsible? What are
the reasons? What is the proper reaction? What are the longer-term
consequences?
To begin with, it was assumed, plausibly, that the guilty parties were
Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. No one knows more about them
than the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], which, together with its
counterparts among US allies, recruited radical Islamists from many
countries and organised them into a military and terrorist force, not to
help Afghans resist Russian aggression, which would have been a
legitimate objective, but for normal reasons of state, with grim
consequences for Afghans after the mujahideen took control. US
intelligence has surely been following the other exploits of these
networks closely ever since they assassinated President Anwar Sadat of
Egypt 20 years ago, and more intensively since the attempt to blow up
the World Trade Center and many other targets in a highly ambitious
terrorist operation in 1993.
Nevertheless, despite what must be the most intensive international
intelligence investigation in history, evidence about the perpetrators
of 9/11 has been hard to find. Eight months after the bombing, FBI
[Federal Bureau of Investigation] director Robert Mueller, testifying to
Congress, could say only that US intelligence now “believes” the plot
was hatched in Afghanistan, though planned and implemented elsewhere.
And long after the source of the anthrax attack was localised to US
government weapons laboratories, it has still not been identified. These
are indications of how hard it may be to counter acts of terror
targeting the rich and powerful in the future. Nevertheless, despite the
thin evidence, the initial conclusion about 9/11 is presumably correct.
Next, the question: what are the reasons? On this, scholarship is
virtually unanimous in taking the terrorists at their word, which
matches their deeds for the past 20 years: their goal, in their terms,
is to drive the infidels from Muslim lands, to overthrow the corrupt
governments they impose and sustain, and to institute an extremist
version of Islam.
More significant, at least for those who hope to reduce the likelihood
of further crimes of a similar nature, are the background conditions
from which the terrorist organisations arose, and that provide a mass
reservoir of sympathetic understanding for at least parts of their
message, even among those who despise and fear them.
In George Bush’s plaintive words, “Why do they hate us?” The question is
not new, and answers are not hard to find. Forty-five years ago,
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff discussed what he called
the “campaign of hatred against us” in the Arab world, “not by the
governments but by the people”. The basic reason, the National Security
Council advised, is the recognition that the US supports corrupt and
brutal governments that block democracy and development, and does so
because of its concern “to protect its interest in Near East oil”. The
Wall Street Journal found much the same when it investigated attitudes
of wealthy westernised Muslims after 9/11, feelings now exacerbated by
specific US policies with regard to Israel-Palestine and Iraq.
Commentators generally prefer a more comforting answer: their anger is
rooted in resentment of our freedom and love of democracy, their
cultural failings tracing back many centuries, their inability to take
part in the form of “globalisation” (in which they happily participate),
and other such deficiencies. More comforting, perhaps, but not wise.
What about proper reaction? The answers are doubtless contentious, but
at least the reaction should meet the most elementary moral standards:
specifically, if an action is right for us, it is right for others; and
if wrong for others, it is wrong for us. Those who reject that standard
simply declare that acts are justified by power. One might ask what
remains of the flood of commentary on this question (debates about “just
war”, etc.) if this simple criterion is adopted.
To illustrate with a few uncontroversial cases, 40 years have passed
since President John F. Kennedy ordered that “the terrors of the earth”
must be visited upon Cuba until their leadership is eliminated, having
violated good form by successful resistance to US-run invasion. The
terrors were extremely serious, continuing into the 1990s. Twenty years
have passed since President Reagan launched a terrorist war against
Nicaragua, conducted with barbaric atrocities and vast destruction,
leaving tens of thousands dead and the country ruined perhaps beyond
recovery — and also leading to condemnation of the US for international
terrorism by the World Court and the UN Security Council (in a
resolution the US vetoed). But no one believes that Cuba or Nicaragua
had the right to set off bombs in Washington or New York or to
assassinate US political leaders. And it is all too easy to add many far
more severe cases, up to the present.
Accordingly, those who accept elementary moral standards have some work
to do to show that the US and Britain were justified in bombing Afghans
in order to compel them to turn over people who the US suspected of
criminal atrocities, the official war aim, announced by the president as
the bombing began; or to overthrow their rulers, the war aim announced
several weeks later.
The same moral standard holds of more nuanced proposals about an
appropriate response to terrorist atrocities. The respected
Anglo-American military historian Michael Howard proposed “a police
operation conducted under the auspices of the United Nations… against a
criminal conspiracy whose members should be hunted down and brought
before an international court, where they would receive a fair trial
and, if found guilty, be awarded an appropriate sentence” (Guardian,
Foreign Affairs). That seems reasonable, though we may ask what the
reaction would be to the suggestion that the proposal should be applied
universally. That is unthinkable, and if the suggestion were to be made,
it would arouse outrage and horror.
Similar questions arise with regard to the “Bush doctrine” of
“pre-emptive strike” against suspected threats. It should be noted that
the doctrine is not new. High-level planners are mostly holdovers from
the Reagan administration, which argued that the bombing of Libya was
justified under the UN Charter as “self-defence against future attack”.
Clinton planners advised “pre-emptive response” (including nuclear first
strike). And the doctrine has earlier precedents. Nevertheless, the bold
assertion of such a right is novel, and there is no secret as to whom
the threat is addressed. The government and commentators are stressing
loud and clear that they intend to apply the doctrine to Iraq. The
elementary standard of universality, therefore, would appear to justify
Iraqi pre-emptive terror against the US. Of course, no one accepts this
conclusion.
Again, if we are willing to adopt elementary moral principles, obvious
questions arise, and must be faced by those who advocate or tolerate the
selective version of the doctrine of “pre-emptive response” that grants
the right to those powerful enough to exercise it with little concern
for what the world may think. And the burden of proof is not light, as
is always true when the threat or use of violence is advocated or
tolerated.
There is, of course, an easy counter to such simple arguments: WE are
good, and THEY are evil. That useful principle trumps virtually any
argument. Analysis of commentary and much of scholarship reveals that
its roots commonly lie in that crucial principle, which is not argued
but asserted. Occasionally, but rarely, some irritating creatures
attempt to confront the core principle with the record of recent and
contemporary history. We learn more about prevailing cultural norms by
observing the reaction, and the interesting array of barriers erected to
deter any lapse into this heresy. None of this, of course, is an
invention of contemporary power centres and the dominant intellectual
culture. Nonetheless, it merits attention, at least among those who have
some interest in understanding where we stand and what may lie ahead.
Let us turn briefly to the question: what are the long-term
consequences? In the longer term, I suspect that the crimes of 9/11 will
accelerate tendencies that were already under way: the Bush doctrine is
an illustration. As was predicted at once, governments throughout the
world seized upon 9/11 as a window of opportunity to institute or
escalate harsh and repressive programmes. Russia eagerly joined the
“coalition against terror” expecting to receive authorisation for its
terrible atrocities in Chechnya, and was not disappointed. China happily
joined for similar reasons. Turkey was the first country to offer troops
for the new phase of the US “war on terror”, in gratitude, as the prime
minister explained, for the US contribution to Turkey’s campaign against
its miserably-repressed Kurdish population, waged with extreme savagery
and relying crucially on a huge flow of US arms. Turkey is highly
praised for its achievements in these campaigns of state terror,
including some of the worst atrocities of the grisly 1990s, and was
rewarded by grant of authority to protect Kabul from terror, funded by
the same superpower that provided the military means, and the diplomatic
and ideological support, for its recent atrocities. Israel recognised
that it would be able to crush Palestinians even more brutally, with
even firmer US support. And so on throughout much of the world.
More democratic societies, including the US, instituted measures to
impose discipline on the domestic population and to institute unpopular
measures under the guise of “combating terror”, exploiting the
atmosphere of fear and the demand for “patriotism” — which in practice
means: “You shut up and I’ll pursue my own agenda relentlessly.” The
Bush administration used the opportunity to advance its assault against
most of the population, and future generations, in service to the narrow
corporate interests that dominate the administration to an extent even
beyond the norm.
In brief, initial predictions were amply confirmed.
One major outcome is that the US, for the first time, has major military
bases in Central Asia. These are important to position US multinationals
favourably in the current “great game” to control the considerable
resources of the region, but also to complete the encirclement of the
world’s major energy resources, in the Gulf region. The US base system
targeting the Gulf extends from the Pacific to the Azores, but the
closest reliable base before the Afghan war was Diego Garcia. Now that
situation is much improved, and forceful intervention, if deemed
appropriate, will be greatly facilitated.
The Bush administration perceives the new phase of the “war on terror”
(which in many ways replicates the “war on terror” declared by the
Reagan administration 20 years earlier) as an opportunity to expand its
already overwhelming military advantages over the rest of the world, and
to move on to other methods to ensure global dominance. Government
thinking was articulated clearly by high officials when Prince Abdullah
of Saudi Arabia visited the US in April to urge the administration to
pay more attention to the reaction in the Arab world to its strong
support for Israeli terror and repression. He was told, in effect, that
the US did not care what he or other Arabs think. As the New York Times
reported, a high official explained that “if he thought we were strong
in Desert Storm, we’re 10 times as strong today. This was to give him
some idea what Afghanistan demonstrated about our capabilities”. A
senior defence analyst gave a simple gloss: others will “respect us for
our toughness and won’t mess with us”. That stand too has many
historical precedents, but in the post-9/11 world it gains new force.
We do not have internal documents, but it is reasonable to speculate
that such consequences were one primary goal of the bombing of
Afghanistan: to warn the world of what the US can do if someone steps
out of line. The bombing of Serbia was undertaken for similar reasons.
Its primary goal was to “ensure NATO’s credibility”, as Blair and
Clinton explained — not referring to the credibility of Norway or Italy,
but of the US and its prime military client. That is a common theme of
statecraft and the literature of international relations; and with some
reason, as history amply reveals.
The basic issues of international society seem to me to remain much as
they were, but 9/11 surely has induced changes, in some cases, with
significant and not very attractive implications.