The Power of Nightmares

September 11, 2001 changed our future. The semblance of freedom and hope driven by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the USSR (1991) was crushed with the attacks on New York’s twin towers. Suddenly, the black premonitions of Samuel Huntington regarding the clash of civilizations seemed to have come around, with the sinister image of Osama bin Laden in the background. Al-Qaida, a little known terrorist organization, had struck the heart of the empire, exposing its vulnerability. The neocons could pronounce that we lived in a Hobbesian world of pervasive blind violence which could only be combated by a new Leviathan, the United States — even if it had to act unilaterally, undermining, if necessary, the UN and international law.

Such was the discourse, which was greatly driven by public opinion and Western foreign policy, after 9/11. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security, general Islamophobia and the electoral ascension of the extreme right were the consequences. We were entering another cold war, albeit low-intensity, where the new absolute enemy was al-Qaida (and by extension, Islam, supposedly incompatible with democratic values), which sought to destroy Western civilization. Al-Qaida, as the antithesis of the neocons, asserted that the “crusaders” — the United States, Israel and its allies — after centuries of occupation, humiliation and exclusion from the Muslim world, wanted to finish with Islam.

And yet, nothing was as new as it seemed. The roots of al-Qaida were to be found in the war of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The foolish policy (implemented by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.) of sponsoring radical international Sunni Islamists to attract Muslim combatants from the world over in the fight against the Red army had turned on its head. In Afghanistan, it was the Taliban that governed, and al-Qaida had become a genuine threat to Western interests in the Middle East and in Muslim countries generally. After 1993, several terrorist attacks were carried out against United States targets, including the car park of the Twin Towers in 1993, military bases in Saudia Arabia in 1995 and 1996, embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the USS Cole destroyer in the Yemeni city of Aden, not to mention dozens more targets in various Islamic countries.

George Bush’s response to the September 11 attacks was the declaration of the war on terror. According to the conclusion of the July 2003 report on 9/11 by an investigation committee appointed by the U.S. Congress, it was the most desirable response for al-Qaida: a disproportionate military one that would generate an anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries and, at the same time, foster sympathy toward al-Qaida. The invasion of Iraq was another mistake. With the media response to the 9/11 attacks and the inadequate response of the neocons, bin Laden succeeded in converting al-Qaida into an icon that that would act without exemption, carrying out attacks against Madrid (2004) and London (2005), the capitals of the governments that had supported the invasion of Iraq. This was the socialization of terror, which tallied so well with the neocon analysis of global insecurity, and the path to the chain of action-reaction-action, which suited al-Qaida so well. The war in Iraq presented a new battleground for the terrorist organization, while the Afghanistan conflict provided an opportunity for expansion into the tribal Pashtun region of Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf cultivated a calculated ambiguity between alliance with the U.S. and support for terrorist groups operating in Kashmir and Pakistan.

The result has been a double nightmare of tragic consequences that, for nearly a decade, has kidnapped Western public opinion with the fear of a terrorist threat and, as shown by the Arab revolts, led to the propping up of dictators who massacred their countries’ people, denied them their liberties and infringed on their human rights. But al-Qaida today is very weak, thanks to international cooperation (judicial and at the police level, rather than military) and owing to its internal contradictions: Global jihad feeds off militants from local conflicts who have little interest in going beyond their homelands’ borders, has failed in Saudi Arabia and has been unable to consolidate itself where there are strong national liberation movements (e.g. Palestine).

Furthermore, the intransigence of its religious discourse, anti-Shi’ite sentiments, sectarian violence and the adoption of takfir, whereby a Muslim declares another Muslim a non-believer and may kill him, are obstacles to increasing its dwindling support base. On the other hand, the change in tune toward the Muslim world by Barack Obama has proved to be considerably more effective than the use of force, and, despite the reproach for how it was carried out, it was Obama, not Bush, who finished off bin Laden. It would seem, then, that the power of nightmares that opened the 9/11 attacks is at an end. As a legacy, we are presented with an economic crisis that has much to do with the imperial dreams of Bush and his preventative wars.

The author is a professor of contemporary history.