Remarks: 9/11 and 9/12 + 10 = The United States, Al-Qaeda, and the World

• Author: Richard Falk
• Pages: 9-29

9/11 & 9/12 +10 = The United States, al Qaeda, and the

World

Richard Falk

I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR 9/11 ............................................................ 9

II. WHY 9/11 WAS A REVOLUTIONARY EVENT ....................................... 13

III. WHY AL QAEDA FAILED .................................................................... 23

IV. THE FLAWED LOGIC OF 9/12 ............................................................. 25

V. DRAWING CONCLUSIONS IN 2011 ..................................................... 28

I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR 9/11

Over the last twenty years, the U nited States’ glo bal role has been

transformed by four major ruptures of political exp ectations. Each saw the

U.S. government’s global role come under intense scrutiny and each caught

the U.S. government unprepared and ill-equipped to fashion effective

responses. First, there was the abrupt ending of the Cold War followed by the

collapse of the Soviet Union. Then the 9/11 atta cks came leading to the

United States’ init iation of a global war on terror, more prudently called ‘the

long war’ by Pentagon strategic planners. Next, and without sufficient

acknowledgement, came the realization th at climate change was posing

unprecedented challenges to the global environment, which if not met with a

sense of urgency and commitment could lead to a series of catastrophic

developments with both local and global grave reperc ussions. Finally, the

financial meltdown giving way to a prolonged, deep recession that is raising

doubts over the viability and desir ability of neoliberal globalization and

generating a crisis of global capitalism that is, in turn, producing a series of

formidable and specific challenges for re gional and national governing bodies

and private sector actors. These ruptures are interrelated and overlap, and

each can be expected to exert persisting influences although of varying

degrees of salience. Of them, 9/11 and the U.S. response, viewed from the

perspective of ten years after the attacks, is what I propose to concentrate

upon.1

The end of the Cold War was an almost universally unexpected

development until the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989. The im plosion of

the Soviet Union a few years later heralded a new phase of international

1 Other crucial global developments during this period were less obviously linked to 9/11 and the

American response, and will not be addressed in this article. These include the rise of China,

Brazil, and Turkey as geopolitical players, the radiating effect for better and worse of the Arab

Spring, and catastrophic humanitarian emergency that exists in its most extreme form in

Somalia, but is bringing violence and suffering to many African countries.

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relations associated with the ascent of the United States as global actor and

as the uncontested source of ideological orthodoxy, and the disappearance of

the Soviet Union, and its successor, Russia, as a global f orce. Triumphalist

American voices arrogantly announced “the end of history”2 and “the unipolar

moment,”3 trumpeting the claim that not only had the Soviet Union fallen,

discrediting Marxist–Leninist alternative s to capitalism, but that the

American star was shining more brightly than ever, lighting up the

geopolitical skies with its ideo logy of “market-oriented constitutionalism” or

capitalist-constitutional de mocracy. Various pundits insisted that the 21st

Century was likely to become even more “an American century” than was the

20th, given U.S. military dominance, control of the world economy,

technological innovativeness, and globa l diplomatic leadership. 4 In the early

1990s, there seemed to be no signific ant obstacles to this Americaniz ation of

the world. Strategic goals of government policy makers focused on prospects

for an Americanized hegemony of global scale. Despite its grandiosity this

vision of the future seeme d realistic and reasonable from the perspective of

Washington.

As we approach the anniversary of 9/11 ye t again, we should keep two

seemingly opposed features of the preceding decade or so in view. First, as we

have seen, the most transforming developments of the past twenty years

were not anticipated, nor did they follow from projecting trends into the

future. This should make us modest about the human capacity to project

current political realities into the future. Secondly, U.S. vulnerabilities that

have emerged in the decade following 9/11 have shaken the perception of the

1990s that the United States wa s the unassailable model of success and

influence in the world. However, just as past projections failed to predict even

the most influential events, these vulnerabilities should also not be presumed

to provide reliable insight into future course of American develo pments at

home and globally.

Even during the 1990s, not all commentary coming from the United

States expressed as positive a view of the future as would have been expected

given the mainstream celebrations of the end of the Cold War widely

interpreted to signify the triumph of democracy and neoliberal versions of

capitalism. There were signs of nervousness about whether the future would

turn out to be as supportive of America’ s hopes and goals as the mainstream

preached. Samuel Huntington’s inflammatory formulation of an emergent

“clash of civilizations” was by far the most inf luential insistence that there

were dark clouds gathering on the h orizon. For some, his analysis was a

prefiguring of 9/11 with its emphasis on ‘the West against the rest,’ which he

2 See generally FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN (1992).

3 See generally Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, 70 FOREIGN AFF. 23 (1990).

4 Id. at 24.