Tuesday marked the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. For those who felt it necessary to relive that day, all one had to do was tune into the American television networks, where the newscasts covering those attacks were being replayed, as they have been every year since 2001.
Those newscasts reflect our collective, immediate response to the attacks, which was characterized by horror, confusion, and above all, surprise. But six years into the so-called “post-9/11” world, it is now prudent to ask if we really should have been taken off-guard by the attacks, especially as the West seems to be fuelling the situations that contributed to those massive acts of violence.
After 9/11, the media tried address the confusion and shock left in the wake of that day by asking one question: “Why?” The news reports and talk shows struggled to give the world an answer, but the one they settled on, and the one the Bush administration soon began espousing, can be summed up in the single phrase “They hate our freedom.”
Terrorists despise our way of life. This has become the most important thing to know about the people the U.S. and its allies are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hunting down inside our own borders.
But this characterization of those we are fighting is, at its roots, utterly flawed, because it completely ignores any actual interaction between the West and the Islamic world over the past 20 years. It also reduces the millions of people who support armed action against America and its allies to one-dimensional, irrational ideologues, bent on destroying people for no other reason than that we live in democratic freedom.
Examine the record of Western actions in Islamic regions of the world in the years leading up to 9/11. In Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, we supported highly unpopular democratic governments, which ruthlessly stifled any political opposition or moves towards democratic reform.
To Israel, we sent billions in economic aid with no strings attached. No pressure was brought to bear upon our closest Mideast ally to end the occupation and find a solution to the plight of millions of Palestinian refugees.
After bombing Iraq into submission during the Gulf War, the West used the United Nations to impose sanctions that were so strict and arbitrary that medicine and other vital resources became non-existent in the country. It is estimated that the sanctions led to the death of at least 500,000 Iraqi children, but when questioned about the high figure, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously answered it was “worth it.”
While these events were overshadowed in the West by the details of a president’s sexual relationships and the murder trial of a sports superstar, they did not go unnoticed in the Mideast. Anyone who felt connected to the victims of Western policy in the region, by virtue of common religion, race, or basic humanity, would feel aggrieved. To be angered would not be an irrational response.
Those of us who were shocked by the 9/11 attacks, then, must have been ignorant of the implications of these events.
An inevitable question now is whether we have addressed these issues. Have we done anything to prove that we in the West care as much about the lives of Muslims in the Middle East as we do about the lives of Europeans or Americans? The answer is certainly negative.
In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan we continue our support of oppressive autocrats. In Afghanistan our stewardship has installed warlords into government.
Last year, when the Israeli military claimed the lives of 1,000 Lebanese civilians, what was our response? We advised Israel to continue their bombardment for another week or so, to let them finish the job.
The U.S. and the U.K. took custody over Iraq, only to see it dissolve in violence and displacement. The Coalition invasion in 2003 has created over 2 million refugees.
Our post-9/11 policies in the Mideast can easily be read as the continuation of those we pursued before the attacks. While the leaders of the movements we seek to quell may be homicidal and even insane, they draw on a vast pool of financial and logistical support that persists in dozens of countries, support which can only have been fed by our actions in the “post 9/11” world.
If we wish to understand those attacks six years after they occurred, it is well past the time to examine the implications of our interaction with the world from which that day’s assailants came.
