Yesterday was the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and, no, I don’t expect you to have remembered. On the contrary, I think the forgetfulness is due to more than the passage of time.
There is a widening gap between how we understood the world of 9/11 and the facts of our world today. The immediate post-9/11 narrative now sounds incongruent. We can remember the events, and where we were at the time, but not telling a compelling story.
Among the things fading from memory is how grandly the event was first described. It was said to turn a historical page. It was described as a world event on a par with Pearl Harbour. It seemed to vindicate those who described a new epoch as a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and Islamic civilisation.
The battle cry was to defend Western liberties and freedoms. But a lot of what was said a generation ago sounds threadbare, hollow and morally bankrupt today.
Take war. In 2001, the West was a victim. Since then? Afghanistan was bombed and invaded in 2002 in the name of restoring world order. Iraq was invaded in 2003 on the pretext of preserving world order. Millions of lives were destroyed.
The incongruence is not just due to the aggression. The narrative of defence-of-civilisation calls for leaders who can be depicted as sober statesmen, not miscalculating fools.
And, yet, in Afghanistan, after a generation of war, the target of the invasion, the Taliban, are back in power – with billions of dollars of additional military equipment.
Iraq was wrecked in order to spread democracy. But democratic life is still elusive, while Iraq’s geopolitical weakness has led to the growth of Iran’s influence, which is now said to be the threat to world order.
Libya and Yemen were also wrecked in the name of fundamental freedoms and values. But whether we measure the results in humanitarian or cynical terms, what we had was foolish leadership with no accountability. Libya remains on the brink of chaos. NATO bombed it but
Russia is one of the major beneficiaries. Meanwhile, out of Yemen’s ungovernability the Houthis have emerged, bombing Western shipping.
The actions taken after 2001 were justified as a restoration of order. It’s evident, however, that they were sowing the seeds of today’s disorder. Few would have the nerve to invoke the defence of Western values while surveying the destruction carried out in its name.
In the US, the wars that followed 9/11 are today widely considered to have been gross mistakes. As a result, 9/11 can be remembered as a domestic atrocity but not as a story whose second or third act ends with catharsis and victory.
Contrast with the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. That story ends with the capitulation of the aggressor, Japan. But 9/11 ends – depending on your version – with your leaders either having lied to you or recklessly miscalculating.
As for the terrorist enemy, it is only partly destroyed and has been transformed. Today, the US intelligence agencies claim the most dangerous terror threats come from within the US, not outside it.
From a European perspective, there’s another reason why it’s difficult to remember 9/11 in terms of a coherent story. Within the EU, the immediate post-9/11 years were interpreted as marking a change in the balance of power between Europe and the belligerent neoconservatives dominating Washington.
France was critical of the Iraq war. The US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, spoke acidly about ‘old Europe’.
And, although it was divided on the Iraq war, the EU was united in thinking that European ‘soft power’ was the future and US ‘unilateralism’ lay in the past. There were grand plans for the EU to share limited governance and trade areas with third countries – from the Arab world to Caucasia – that were never to become EU members.
Fast forward to today. Those plans of shared governance are gone or mere fictions. Far from charting its own path, the EU follows the US more than ever.
In 2003, the warmongering US neocons were resisted and mocked by European leaders and commentariats. Today, the words coming out of European leaders’ mouths echo those that come out of US right-wing think tanks. The new EU foreign policy chief is someone who has said Russia must be broken up – as casually as the neocons spoke of breaking up Iraq and Libya, or, indeed, Russia itself. And most pundits walk in step.
The central plot of immediate post-9/11 narrative cannot hold. It’s not just a problem of weak leadership that doesn’t measure up to the grandiloquence of defending civilisation. It’s a problem of social and cultural behaviour as well.
The 9/11 narrative was articulated in the pre-social media age. But how can you talk of defending civilisation in an age of rampant incivility? The problem is systemic on social media platforms. Many of those who denounce “hate speech” are themselves organised partisan trolls.
We were asked to defend “who we are” but we’re no longer, culturally or socially, what we were then. The post-9/11 story is difficult to tell because it’s no longer quite about “us”. It was a story about the religious lunatics’ attack on a sane society. But we are no longer convinced our society is sane. Unsurprisingly, history has unfolded in ways that were unpredictable.
In conventional Western storytelling, foolish pride, hubris, precedes the tragedy. But 9/11 has turned out to be an anniversary in which the protagonist’s tragedy preceded subsequent hubris. It’s why the event is easy to remember but the story is difficult to tell.