9/11: Beware of faulty connections
The 25 years since 9/11 have made that cataclysmic event seem ever more relevant. Not only did it anticipate a now-common view of an irrational world subject to terror and violence, it also prefigured a time when states could more easily make war than peace.
To understand why an international system of alliances that worked for decades could not stop the world from stumbling into prolonged spirals of death and destruction, it is necessary to insert 9/11 into its proper historical context. That requires linking it to 1989 and 1991, dates celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union as the triumph of liberal democracy. What was overlooked in the enthusiasm over these developments was the danger zones formed when an international infrastructure had not only outlived the purpose for its existence but also the logic for its operations.
That the Cold War’s demise brought immeasurable improvements in the quality of life of millions living under communism is clear. That these developments gave momentum to bursts of new freedoms is undeniable. Why such obvious and verifiable progress has not become the predicate for moving the world toward more harmony remains, however, a critical unanswered question.
Tearing down walls quickly became inseparable from crossing the borders intended to map a country’s sovereignty and the range of its authority. Without enforceable boundaries, dark forces began to turn openness into killing fields, spreading grief and bloodshed. On 9/11, those terrors arrived at American shores and reached into one of its iconic commercial centers and into at least one of its military headquarters.
Nested between two oceans, America had always appeared too distant from other continents to consider the havoc tearing apart their lands an immediate danger. 9/11 tore down that assumption. The assaults triggered shock, but they also galvanized the determination to forge instruments that could and would defend the homeland. Such measures are the reason such attacks did not become commonplace on American soil. America built up strong state institutions, albeit not without controversy. And it is a state, possessing legitimate authority, that is the only known antidote to terrorism.
Dismantling the Soviet Union gave many parts of the world the opportunity to declare independence, but not all built legitimate states capable of controlling the lands they claimed. Ironically, Cold War antagonisms had often occluded the outbreak of locally based violence. Ending a global rivalry with such ominous lethal potential was surely a blessing. But however good that tiding, it also lifted the constraints holding back rampages now rolling across the globe.
Too often, such disorder is viewed – particularly by international agencies that have been shorn of their original Cold War mandates – as continuing a righteous campaign against the remnants of an unjust colonial order. But inserting an anti-colonialist thrust into the transformational events of 1989 and 1991 distorts their history and misreads the nature of current international strife. It also ignores the ever-larger numbers of people living in wreckages wrought by fantasies curdled in rhetoric, however pious, and not in reality.
To see the Middle East as a major exporter of such turbulence should not be difficult. Nor is the Middle Eastern version simply a byproduct of a locally rooted religious fanaticism. Terrorism is a feature of the Middle East because there, the idea of the state has been vested with a troubling ambiguity bestowing on religious fanaticism enormous political utility. The very notion of separate Arab states is deemed transgressive. Their borders supposedly fragmented the Arab nation. That a single Arab nation would restore a lost unity has certainly lodged itself fully in the minds of men and women in the Middle East. Still, repeating an idea because of its sacred political status does nothing to strengthen its credibility nor to reduce the almost impossible burdens it inflicts on governance.
Discomfort with statehood has hatched serious disfunctions: there are no officially issued maps of Syria delineating the country’s border with Lebanon. There are areas in the Arab Middle East where government authority is non-existent, constantly brewing up one or another kind of slaughter. Sometimes the conflicts run along ethnic or religious-sectarian lines: between Turks, Kurds, and Arabs as in Northern Iraq; or between Sunnis and Shia in the country’s center; or between Sunni and Zaydi tribesmen, many of whom now claim a new identity as Houthis, where Saudi Arabia touches the Yemeni hills. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have seized power from constitutionally mandated governing bodies. In Lebanon, the elected government struggles to reclaim a sovereignty seized by the Iran-backed Hezbollah. The Middle East may have generated powerful regimes, but they are laced with networks of repression that command obedience and win no respect for how authority is wielded.
The lessons of 9/11 must begin by acknowledging that emotions, no matter how noble in origin or in aim, cannot drive the serious policymaking required about how to reduce conflict. Recycled words, ritualized slogans, and algorithmic gestures may satisfy activists and adorn rallies, but they do not resolve disputes or stamp out barbarism. Nor can they ensure a future at least as free and prosperous as the world had in the not-too-distant past.
