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The Jordan Times, September 14, 2005
This month, America and the whole world with it remembered the bitter memory of Sept. 11, 2001. For America, the fourth anniversary of the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania is a reminder of terrible loss of life and the loss of a sense of invulnerability of the American "homeland". Most often costly events in history turn into useful lessons from which the human race learns how to fortify the future. Progress, after all, is an accumulation of the positive experience of individuals and groups, by simply pursuing the good and excluding the bad. A quick assessment of the gains and losses in this "war on terror" reveals fairly horrifying results. Almost 2,000 US service personnel have been killed in Iraq and another 230 in Afghanistan. Nearly 15,000 Americans have been injured. An unknown number of Afghan and Iraqi civilians have also paid with their lives. In Iraq alone, credible estimates range from 15,000-100,000 and hundreds of bodies of people who died violent deaths show up in Baghdad's morgue each week. Despite countless "turning points", Iraq appears no more secure, stable and free than it was three years ago. If anything, the situation is worse, as sectarian divisions, fuelled by the occupation, threaten to explode into civil war. While Afghanistan appears to be a success story in comparison to Iraq, the "democratically elected" government is totally reliant on external support and controls little outside the capital, where the same old warlords continue to run their personal fiefdoms and drug empires, as they always did. At the same time, the number of people killed in terrorist attacks has increased, as has the scale and frequency of outrages. Yet many Americans are starting to question this simplistic and politically convenient logic which absolves the United States of any responsibility for the situation. The challenge has come from respected scholars like Robert A. Pape, a University of Chicago expert on Al Qaeda and author of "Dying to win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide terrorism". Pape agrees that Al Qaeda does have a strategy, but not to force freedom lovers to retreat as Bush claims. It is "to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries", Pape wrote in the International Herald Tribune in July 12 2005. Pape asserts that contrary to what most Americans had hoped, Al Qaeda has not been weakened as a result of American counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, 2001. "Since 2002, Al Qaeda has been involved in at least 17 bombings that killed more than 700 people - more attacks and victims than in all the years before Sept. 11 combined," he wrote. He noted that "the overwhelming majority of attackers are citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in which the US has stationed combat troops since 1990", and that "of the other suicide terrorists, most came from America's closest allies in the Muslim world - Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco - rather than from those the State Department considers "state sponsors of terrorism, like Iran, Libya, Sudan and Iraq". Afghanistan, he observed, produced Al Qaeda suicide terrorists only after the country was invaded by US forces in 2001. Pape finds strategic logic in Al Qaeda operative behaviour noting that "[s]ince 2002 the group has killed citizens from 18 of the 20 countries that Osama Ben Laden has cited as supporting American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq". This kind of evidence flies in the face of those who insist on denying any link between superpower behaviour and the irrational and often violent reaction of those who are most affected. Continued denial would only obscure effective methods of dealing with the issue of spreading violence and terror. This seems to be a major factor for the decline of public confidence in Bush's management of the war on terror, according to analyst Jim Lobe who points to the increasing sense of vulnerability of the American people to terrorist attacks as a result of the administration's actions, adding that "it now appears that much of the national security elite has made a similar assessment and, in an indication of the shifting political winds, is now more willing to speak out about it". Lobe cites an increasing movement among Washington elites to express an alternative to Bush's strategy, as well as recognition by some that an American withdrawal from Iraq and an Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories would do more to fight terrorism than military action could ever do. There is evidence that some of these shifts among elites are reflected in public opinion. Poll after poll shows that Americans are no longer so easily appeased by Bush's self-righteous sloganeering. A Newsweek poll published to coincide with the Sept. 11 anniversary found that while 46 per cent approve of Bush's handling of "terrorism and homeland security", 48 per cent disapprove. One interpretation of these results is that until now, Americans were largely shielded from the worst results of Bush's policies, although here in the region - whether in Iraq, Palestine or surrounding countries - we experience them directly. The disastrous performance after Katrina demonstrated to many ordinary Americans that the most important thing in government is not just a swaggering attitude and feel-good appeals to patriotism and folksy cowboy values, but that lives depend on sound policies executed by wise and qualified people. Perhaps Americans will now scrutinise those who want to lead them more closely. If that is the case, then the whole world will benefit from better American leadership which has a crucial role in making the world truly safer and more peaceful for everyone. That is an America the world will have no trouble supporting.
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