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Fear politics based on lies is an effective way to manipulate any voter. Perhaps it has never been applied as effectively as the successive US presidents after 9/11, when they used a slingshot to bring Al Qaeda into it and portray Osama bin Laden’s diverse crew as Goliaths.
Later, when bin Laden was assassinated, the United States discovered a list of Al Qaeda members dated 2002, with only 170 names. He identified 20 deaths — only 7 achieved the bizarre goal of “martyrdom” — 11 were detained by the authorities and 19 left altogether — some joined dogmatic groups, some went to study, but most Just go home.
Bin Laden has been committed to his terrorist plan for many years, and the list of faithful believers is only 120. He chose to fill the list with his five sons. Therefore, al-Qaeda members include Omar bin Laden, who left the organization in 2000 and lived peacefully in Normandy for a long time, married to former parish councillor Jan Felix-Brown from Cheshire, England.
Regardless of whether this is the sum of al-Qaeda, it represents an insignificant enemy that the United States faced on September 10, 2001.
The next day, these people uncovered one of the greatest crimes in history.
By any standard, the idea that killing 3,000 civilians is God’s will is crazy.
challenge
However, on this anniversary, the challenge we face is to understand how and why the West chose to promote Al Qaeda as a force against the United States — the United States is the Soviet Union during the Cold War in the 21st century.
First of all, we must ask: On September 12, 2001, was Al Qaeda really an existential threat to the world order? Obviously, this is not the case. They murdered many people in spectacular television broadcasts-a terrible crime.
However, sadly, mankind faces many very real threats.
For example, I grew up amid the imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust. In 1983, more than 100 million people watched the original broadcast of The Day After film about the end of the world, and I was one of them. Who doesn’t tremble with the arrival of the doctrine of mutual assurance of destruction (MAD)? In the last scene of the film, one of the few people still alive is desperately turning the dial of his shortwave radio, looking for another survivor.
When we destroy our own planet through greed and climate change, today’s generation faces another end of the world. Every year, we face other dangers, from 6 million people starving so far in 2021 to an estimated 4.5 million people dying in the current pandemic.
9/11 was greatly emphasized because it took place in the United States and because it was broadcast on television, but when it comes to the chaos we humans cause to each other deliberately, it is actually just a flash in the pan.
We Americans often do not sympathize with the death of brown people, but last year alone, 19,444 people died in the war in Afghanistan and 19,056 people died in Yemen.
When we evaluate how a small group of people caused great harm, the 9/11 incident is not even unique.
In 1995, Timothy McVeigh was almost alone when he planted a bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, 19 of whom were children, and wounding more than 680 people.
“Extremists” are not the only Muslims: McVeigh is a member of the so-called “Patriot Movement”, which is made up of more than a thousand violent right-wing conspiracy groups, and they do pose an internal threat to the stability of the United States-they help We acquired Donald Trump and contributed to the recent attempt to overthrow the US government.
‘Existential threat’
A 2017 report by the National Institute of Investigation Fund showed that between 2008 and 2016, there were 201 terrorist incidents in the United States. Most of these (115 cases) were from extreme right-wing groups, of which 33 people died, while “Islamic extremists” accounted for 63 cases. “, eight of them died.
At the same time, compare this to the fact that the United States reports approximately 20,000 homicides each year—or approximately 180,000 in the same nine years.
Therefore, although the terrible nature of the 9/11 incident should never be forgotten, like basically all American politicians, it is completely foolish to conclude that “Islamic extremism” was, or even, an existential threat to our 330 million people.
Guns may pose a threat to the safety of Americans, and climate change is certainly, but only a very small number of Americans will encounter “crazy Muslim radicals.”
However, this is only half of the story. We must also consider how and why “Islamic extremism” continues to be the central focus of US foreign policy, rather than entering the criminal court with Tim McVeigh.
Indeed, in my opinion at least, Osama bin Laden’s violent goal is malicious-mass murder is not the way to achieve a utopian society.
At the same time, of course, we must ask whether American generals have shed light on the path to a better world.
Response to 9/11
After 9/11, I was talking with the principal of my son’s elementary school. He has served in the British Navy for 20 years, and I am curious to know what he thinks of the “military solutions” he provides for many problems in the world. He said that World War II was the only conflict he believed worthy of British intervention in the past 100 years. It is true that we should support those who challenge tyranny, but this does not mean that we should send our children to invade their country.
The records of the past two decades seem to prove his point.
The recent war in Afghanistan is a pointless example-as of April 2021, about 241,000 people have died, but we are finally back to the beginning and the Taliban are back in power. From Iraq to Libya, the chaos caused by the entire Middle East is equally serious.
So, where is the booming freedom promised by the United States?
It is not only the fact that our various invasions have stirred up hatred throughout the Muslim world. After all, our aggression is commonplace.
Since 1776, the United States has not been involved in one war or another for less than 20 years. Here, most of the answers can be found in the terrible policies we have adopted. Every time the United States takes up arms, we will advertise that our purpose is to promote democracy. However, after 9/11, the first victim was the rule of law.
We rushed into the war in Afghanistan. The response to 9/11 should be a criminal investigation, not a war. Of course, the United States could have used the immense sympathy expressed by the whole world to round up bin Laden and Al Qaeda without pretending that the world was near the end of the world? Why should we try to “marty” a group of radicals whose ultimate honor is martyrdom?
Then we gloated when we established Guantanamo Bay on January 11, 2002-pretending to be in a legal black hole without trial and indefinitely detained is the way to keep the United States safe. We did not stop to consider whether it would be wise to abandon the legal principles of the Magna Carta of 1215. We say that the Muslims we round up do not deserve the protection of the Geneva Convention because they do not respect our “rules of war”-as if somehow Osama bin Laden’s crimes were much more serious than those of Adolf Hitler, who was in his death camp. Wiped out millions of people in China.
At the same time, the world has been moving steadily towards the elimination of torture for hundreds of years. This culminated in the 1985 United Nations Convention against Torture.
Overnight, after 9/11, we left it behind and Donald Rumsfeld declared that waterboarding was nothing more than an “enhanced interrogation technique.”
He borrowed the term from the Gestapo, which referred to it as waterboarding verschärfte vernehmung (enhanced interrogation), rather than the medieval inquisition, which described it as tortura del agua (waterboarding). We sent the general who oversaw the atrocities at Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, where it also brought the benefits of freedom.
In fact, by then we had already invaded Iraq, and when we had the opportunity to support fledgling democracies in the Arab Spring, we would either stab them in the back at a critical moment, such as when we withdrew from the Kurds in northeastern Syria. In air support, we basically invite Turkish President Erdogan to attack them, or we actively participate in military coups, just like in Egypt.
From waterboarding to drones
Then, when the professor of constitutional law asked President Obama to retreat from torture, he replaced the execution without trial—as if the predator drone turned into a “bug” seems to be a step beyond being abandoned and rotted in Guantanamo.
Finally, hypocrisy is the yeast that ferments hatred, and there is no more obvious hypocrisy than propagating projects that promote freedom while torturing people to accept it. All these policies, and more, alienate those we should pursue-including Muslims around the world.
However, we ultimately failed to fulfill our greatest duty: to inspire people’s dreams of a better life.
President Joe Biden recently stated that the United States spent US$2 trillion in Afghanistan alone, which means that each Afghan citizen spends more than US$50,000. The World Bank estimates that the average annual income of this poor country is US$500, so my dollar taxes represent 100 years of wealth for every Afghan man, woman, and child.
What have we done with our money?
We handed over most of them to the weapons manufacturers and embezzlers of the regime we established in Kabul. What is the price that we have paid such a huge amount for the Afghan people?
Some people say that the only lesson we learn from history is that we will never learn from history. Let us hope that we can look back over the past two decades and learn some useful things at once.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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