More Britons were killed on September 11, 2001 than in any other terrorist atrocity, and the past decade has been characterised by uncertainty in a changed world. Yet, says Charles Moore, we are far wiser for the lessons taught us
More British people were killed on September 11, 2001 than in any other terrorist incident ever, including 7/7 and the Lockerbie bombing
On a lazy summer's day in 2002, it came home to me. I was mink-hunting (then a legal activity) by a river on the Kent/Sussex border, and a cockney foundry worker called Vince was there with his terrier.
We chatted, and eventually it came out that his sister had been killed in the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. She had been helping to organise a conference there, Vince said. More British people were killed on September 11, 2001 than in any other terrorist incident ever, including 7/7 and the Lockerbie bombing.
Sixty-seven out of the 2,996 people who died in the attacks on the United States that day were British citizens.
The figure is relevant as the 10th anniversary approaches because it is a reminder that the argument that "it was nothing to do with us" was never, from the very first moment, true. We were in it from the start. The death toll of Americans was 40 times higher.
The sheer "lethality" of the event, as well as its spectacular, filmic quality, proved that terrorism works: it achieves the "propaganda of the deed" which it seeks.
It lives up to its name. No democratic government which did not try to defeat the perpetrators could hope or deserve to survive.
On this basis, the governments which agreed to hit back at al-Qaeda have done better than is usually acknowledged.
The United States has successfully protected the homeland from further attack. In Britain, scores of plots have been foiled, and no successful outrage has been carried out since 2005.
Even more important, al-Qaeda has achieved very few of its aims. Two months before September 11, 2001, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who today leads the organisation, wrote: "The mujahid Islamic movement will not achieve victory against the global infidel alliance unless it possesses a base in the heart of the Muslim world."
At that time, thanks to the Taliban, it had Afghanistan. Within months it had lost it. The word "al-Qaeda" means "the base", but since 2001, it has not had a base where it can be secure.
In the following year, its terror campaign in Saudi Arabia failed. So, after some short-lived successes, did its jihad in Iraq, which many of its more strategic leaders opposed as being the wrong place to build the true Islamic state of which it dreams.
Its behaviour in Iraq was so revolting that tribal leaders united their populations against it. The eventual, post-invasion elections were fraught, but people voted in large numbers. Al-Qaeda, rejecting elections because they were not taking place in a proper "Islamic" context, ruled itself out of the next bit.
Nobody yet knows what the Arab Spring may mean, but everyone knows that it was not sprung by al-Qaeda. The faces on the celebratory posters in Tripoli depict David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy, not Osama bin Laden.
And he, in case you had forgotten, is dead. Al-Qaeda is now so beset by electronic surveillance that it has to send its secret communications by hand. A very high percentage of its best (ie worst) people have been killed by US drones.
Its followers seek martyrdom, but they have got more of it than they bargained for. Its ambition to shape the Muslim world has been thwarted.
If you look at Western politics 10 years on, you will see that the successor governments have repudiated much less of the Bush-Blair policies than their rhetoric suggests. America's anti-war, anti-Bush President, Barack Obama, ordered the death of bin Laden and the surge in Afghanistan.
Mr Cameron is more robust than any other British leader about how to deal with Muslim extremism at home, and in Libya has just executed a spot of "liberal interventionism" with an adroitness which Tony Blair must envy.
It is a curious fact that the three most important leaders who supported and prosecuted the war in Iraq – Bush, Blair and John Howard in Australia – were all re-elected after it. Iraq goes down as the great overwhelming disaster in history-as-written-by-the-BBC, but most voters have never seen it so unequivocally.
Nevertheless, if Mr Blair had known and said on September 12, 2001 that, 10 years later, we would have lost 179 servicemen in Iraq and 200 more than that in Afghanistan, and that we would still be in the latter until at least 2014, one presumes that British participation in the invasions would not have got off the ground.
If George W Bush had said that the United States would spend $ 1.3 trillion on the ensuing wars, there might have been a similar reluctance in his country. In the last 10 years, there has been a series of agonies – about the death of brave men and women, about lying, civil liberties, torture, equipment, cost, community cohesion, religion and immigration.
The great institutions of this nation have been strained. The intelligence services have been accused of compromising truth and bowing to political pressure.
The domestic civil service and the police have made a series of mistakes about how to treat with Muslims and which ones to treat with.
The universities have harboured Muslim students who preached murder. The judges have upheld continental versions of human rights with scant regard to the real threats posed by the prisoners in question. Cabinet government has looked shaky.
Even the Armed Forces, though rightly praised for courage, have not been seen as very successful: it is hard to remember a time when their future role has been less clear.
And if one looks at the state of the world, one cannot claim that stability has been achieved. Ten years ago, Afghanistan was called a "failed state". Today, it has not conclusively shed that title, and the description also fits the far more important and dangerous Pakistan.
Lots more people hate America; and America feels, almost certainly rightly, that it can do much less in the world than it could at the end of the Cold War. The problem of Israel/Palestine feels no nearer solution.
So the charge-sheet is formidable. But I come back to where I began. It is not imaginable that the West could have failed to respond violently to the attacks of September 11. Over time, that response has had some good effects.
The first has been what the Left calls consciousness-raising. We British love to praise Winston Churchill, but until 1940, most of us thought he was a wretched nuisance. With Neville Chamberlain, we confused the proper desire for peace with the less admirable longing for a quiet life.
In relation to Islamist extremism, we behaved similarly. We looked away. We elevated our extreme boredom with the whole subject into a policy of inactivity, and even cowardice. I don't think that is nearly so true today.
We have learnt that some of our fellow citizens wish for the destruction of our society.
We have become much more realistic and better-informed about who believes what. It came as a surprise, for example, to find that the Muslim Council of Britain, which we thought was the representative body, includes admirers of the extremist teachings of people like Abul Ala Maududi, the godfather of Islamist extremism. We have gradually learnt more about whom we are dealing with.
Next, unpopular though we are, we have not united the Muslim world, as critics predicted, to turn against us. Despite all the mistakes in Iraq, the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein did send a message about the fate of tyrants which resonated through the region, causing even Colonel Gaddafi to sue for peace.
Iraq has not fallen apart, or been taken over by Iran, and its current politics is one in which different groups and parties bargain constantly. This is no new model nation, but neither is it the spearhead of jihad.
President Bush, of course, was mercilessly mocked in Europe for saying, in his second inaugural address in 2005: "The survival of liberty in our land depends on the success of liberty in other lands." But was he so wrong to identify the desire for liberty in many Muslim lands, even if few of them wanted to thank an American for saying so?
The Arab revolts in Egypt and Syria, Tunisia and Libya could each turn out badly for Western interests, but all of them look like the sort of rebellions we recognise. Young people, using modern media, see freedom and want more of it.
You don't have to believe that technology cures human sinfulness to think that the scales are now more heavily weighted against tyrants than they were. Of the many dangers which remain, two could be singled out.
The first is that our very success in bearing down on the ultra-extremists may make us too tender to the slightly less extreme ones who believe very much the same things. The dominant Western official doctrine is that we should find the "moderates" among the nasty ones, rather than assist real moderates who never had any truck with terror.
This is the doctrine behind the Northern Ireland peace process, and it is more dangerous than we yet understand. Watch out for praise being showered on the increasingly Islamist policies of Turkey.
The second is that this huge struggle which America has led could drain away the very power it tries to preserve, so that victory becomes pyrrhic, and the West's rivals become its successors. This can be stated statistically. In 2001 US indebtedness to China stood at $ 78 billion. In 2011, it is more than $ 1.1 trillion.
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ilham 05 Sep, 2011--
Source: http://fundush.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-what-have-we-learnt.html
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