September 11: 13 Years Later and the Enemy Is Still There

It was 8:46 in the morning in New York when an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. It was the beginning of a nightmare that left nearly 3,000 dead and that history would remember as the 9/11 attacks. The world would never be the same.

Today is the 13th anniversary of a massacre that meant the beginning of a new world order — an earthquake whose shock waves are still felt today — and the threat of Islamist hatred against the U.S. and the West remains. Now it has new energy with the bloody momentum of the Islamic State and its home video butchers.

The anniversary of the attacks comes the day after President Obama, an anonymous member of the Illinois senate back in September 2001, made public his plan to fight Islamic State, a challenge that reminds us that, in these times, the jihadi enemy may have changed leaders and initials, but it has not disappeared.

Many things have happened in these 13 years. Then-President George W. Bush reacted to the terrorist attacks by declaring his “war on terror,” under the aegis of which Washington launched invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, interventions in which it lost the lives of thousands of military personnel, large amounts of money and a great deal of its international credibility. It was a bloody fight that revived for Americans the ghosts of Vietnam and projected an arrogant image of the Bush administration overseas.

Americans at the time became used to images of the dead bodies of its young people coming home in plastic bags, and of bin Laden and his weathered Kalashnikov. Meanwhile, parallel to Bush’s wars, al-Qaida’s terrorist tree was producing offshoots everywhere. Branches such as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabab in Somalia and the al-Nusra Front in Syria sprang up, and its followers spilled blood in places as far away as Madrid, London and Nairobi.

In 2009, Democrats returned to the White House thanks to the charismatic and promising figure of Barack Obama, and American foreign policy took a Copernican turn. The new president recovered the Wilson-ian banner of multilateralism and committed himself to a withdrawal from the Afghan and Iraqi fronts. But neither the new rhetoric nor the transfer of power in Iraq to the government formed by Nouri al-Maliki stabilized the region, which continues to spread resentment against America, and the vacuum left by the American withdrawal was filled by the most fanatic local factions.

In all this time, the Pentagon’s intelligence services never wavered in their “shadow battle” against Islamic extremism, and on May 2, 2011 the long-awaited news arrived. The most wanted criminal, Osama bin Laden, was shot dead by Navy SEAL soldiers in his hiding place in northern Pakistan. The disappearance of its leader was a hard blow, but it did not finish off the terrorist hydra. The ensuing months confirmed that the policy of eliminating prominent targets was not enough either. The proliferation of drone attacks and the strengthening of international cooperation allowed for the dismantling of terrorist cells all over the world, but not the eradication of their parent organization. Less than 24 hours had elapsed after bin Laden’s death when he was replaced as head of al-Qaida by Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri.

Shortly before that, a massive popular mobilization in Tunisia had toppled its elderly dictator Ben Ali. It was the first spark of the Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave that would rattle the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean. Obama reacted to these movements with an erratic policy that his detractors will not stop criticizing, which, according to critics, led to the current strength of Islamic State. With his lack of intervention in Syria and his backtracking on the decision to arm the rebels fighting Assad, Obama allowed the well-organized and financed Islamic State to become an enemy as deadly as bin Laden was in 2001, or even more so. Thirteen years later, Islamic extremism has changed standard bearers, but its sword continues pointing toward the West’s heart. Obama, although far less convinced than his predecessor, finds himself dragged into a new war in Iraq.