September 11: Again and Forever

This year’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks may be different. The victory over al-Qaida and the pursuit of its remnants leave only unpleasant memories. The U.S. administration that raised the banner of global war on terror lost both internally and externally, though the organization itself lost a lot of key members who were able to wage effective attacks against Western interests. Western interests in the area are not as clear as they were at the beginning of the millennium, so the current U.S. administration has tried to remove itself from the region. Attempts by regional players to lure them in a second time have not succeeded.

Former President George W. Bush spent long vacations on his ranch, rarely attracting the attention of the media until there were terrorist attacks against his country. The same thing has happened with Obama lately, after the execution of journalist James Foley, but he still insists that he is not following Bush’s footsteps and that he will not repeat his mistakes. This shows some apathy, as opposed to the emotional response and “recklessness” of his predecessor. If Obama follows in Bush’s footsteps to work with an international and regional coalition to fight the Islamic State, and if he also insists on giving boundaries to the war zone, then he is not announcing a boundless global war. What’s important, perhaps, is that Obama is not using the language of terrorism in order to establish a new coalition, particularly when it comes to potential regional allies. He lets the Islamic State intimidate those potential allies in the region on behalf of his administration.

But the similarities between the two Septembers should not make us forget the great differences between them. History never repeats itself, and we must remember this when comparing the state of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. When al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, representing the deep state, interface among local partners became a thing of the past. The emirs of the Islamic State don’t see the need for similar etiquette. Rather, they set themselves and their state up as an efficient and international caliphate. Any organization crossing the borders into the caliphate “state” crosses into the organization. This negates the need to adapt to the state of affairs as al-Qaida had done in Afghanistan, and rather demands the adaption of everything else to the state of affairs that the caliphate has imposed. While the Islamic State developed as a regional choice for the al-Qaida way, even so it came as a severed part of al-Qaida, on the grounds of not radicalizing the latter. Al-Qaida became a part of history after the Islamic State announced its caliphate as the culmination of history, bringing along with it the worst parts characterizing the end of all things.

From the caves of Kandahar to the deserts along the Syrian-Iraqi borders, the difference here does not stop with logistics: The difference is that between the twisting of meaning and complete clarity. But in direct logistical considerations, there is a current, irreversible clarity compared to the surprise of al-Qaida when it executed the 9/11 attacks. The Islamic State, after all, is a “state” occupying land — its nature does not allow a large margin for military maneuvering; air and satellite surveillance can track the proliferation of weapons. The financial sources of the organization are not shrouded in mystery so as to confuse Western intelligence agencies, as they were when dealing with al-Qaida. Sales deals for oil and grain in Syria are known to everyone, as well as the seizing of assets of the Central Bank in Mosul and the equipment of the defeated Iraqi army. This makes individual financial transfers less common, as long as the Islamic State is given the status of statehood, trading with the Syrian regime and taking over its Iraqi counterpart. Drying up Islamic State funding is theoretically easier. Its difficulty comes primarily from the lack of desire to expose its multilevel trade with the Syrian regime and its recent classification as a partner in terror according to international law.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the idea spread that Bush’s war on terror met the interest of two parties. The war kept danger away from American soil, and at the same time, it lured American soldiers into the crossfire of al-Qaida, so that they would be unable to focus on planning future long-range attacks. Meanwhile, the Obama administration does not wish to target the Islamic State in a quick and fatal war, and the new coalition does not provide a vision for a future for the area as the neoconservatives did. The problem of the current administration is with the Islamic State’s “here to stay and expand” slogan, and its presence and expansion in Syria throughout the past year is not the same thing as expanding outside its borders. Throughout the year, the administration has seemed content to leave Syria a battlefield for the Islamic extremists, and today as well it seems that the administration is searching for an Iraqi solution to the Islamic State problem without involvement from the Syrian side. France, which was at one point classified as part of the “Old Europe” by Rumsfeld, is trying to get in the way of U.S. involvement by focusing on the Syrian side of the Islamic State. Perhaps that just shows the truth of such a limited war as the U.S. administration wants (the current administration being more modest in its intentions to eradicate terrorism).

Without counting the invasion of Iraq, the war on terror was a focus of global consensus, weakening al-Qaida in terms of financing and recruitment in the surrounding region and the West. Today, as the globalization of an organization has shifted to the globalization of a caliphate, thoughts of a new war appear untenable, and perhaps they are marred by some despair. The strength of al-Qaida was derived from the presence of locals sympathetic to their anti-West stance. As for the Islamic State’s strength, a significant part comes from the West’s hesitation to fight it when its damage was only local. The need for another war still lacks credibility, and the true spirit of partnership of the potential coalition is weak. There is no effective Western strategy for partnership in solving the structural crises in the region, removing the threat posed to their children and to the world. Between the Septembers, there will be despair that the world hasn’t changed, that the lesson has yielded no benefit. There’s no doubt that the new war is imminent, but the lesson in how to end it has not begun. In a number of trials in the region, the West cannot claim such a virtue.