The scale of the challenge posed by the 9/11 attacks is yet to be fully appreciated even now, writes editor-at-large Paul Kelly

September 09, 2006
FIVE years later the wounds of September 11 have not healed. The terrorist threat has escalated, the world is more aggravated and the US, the indispensable nation, has squandered the goodwill engendered by that morning's brutality. The new world crisis that continues to gather momentum is defined by its unpredictability. Devoid of any road map or leader of authority to light the way, the tragedy of 9/11 has been compounded by more tragedies in the five years since the attack.
That assault from the sky did more than kill 3000 people. It violated the US, destroyed its immunity, provoked its religious, cultural and political passions and unleashed an American strategic response under the leadership of George W. Bush whose wisdom has not matched its righteousness. The civil war within Islam that inspired 9/11's aggressive martyrdom has escalated rapidly. It invades the globe like a noxious gas as fanatics and recruits to jihad launch murderous attacks on civilians from Bali to Madrid, Baghdad to London.

The 9/11 assault created a unique opportunity for Bush. His response was fateful: to play down the US campaign against the al-Qa'ida terrorists who were responsible and to launch an invasion of Iraq, a country that was not responsible. It was a fatal misjudgment that undermined American legitimacy, confusing the strategic and moral meaning of September 11.

Former US counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke bumped into Bush on the evening of September 12 at the White House and was stunned when the President said: "I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way." An incredulous Clarke could not stop himself: "But Mr President, al-Qa'ida did this." It was an omen; from the start Bush and his loyalists would ensure that 9/11 led to Iraq.

The inspiration for the attack was a Saudi Arabian fanatic, Osama bin Laden, who three years earlier issued a fatwa calling for the murder of any American anywhere on earth as the "individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it". This was an appeal to a war of civilisations. The frontline would be the civilian population and this became the meaning of 9/11. Bin Laden's strategy was to trap the West into his type of war.

The globalised, multicultural, hi-tech domain symbolised by New York was incinerated by messengers from the caves of the pre-modern world. September 11 displayed, in fact, the fragility of civilisation. This fragility has been on display since in even more grisly formats and with more lethal threats.

At 8.24am, American Airlines flight 11 from Boston sent the transmission: "We have some planes." Two of its unarmed flight attendants were stabbed. Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian Muslim, was flying the plane in a cloudless sky. Just after 8.42am on United Airlines flight 175, the hijackers stabbed the flight crew, killed both pilots and changed course for New York. Four planes were hijacked by a team of 19 men, of whom 15 were from a supposed ally of the US, Saudi Arabia.

They flew to redeem the prophecy of bin Laden, who ordained that the people being killed on 9/11 were symbols of a corrupt culture. "It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind," bin Laden said. Al-Qa'ida would prevail, its leaders boasted, because the US was fighting a nation "that desires death more than you desire life". For bin Laden, it was a "religious obligation" to acquire a weapons of mass destruction capability.

This is the new equation of global terrorism inaugurated at 9/11: the cult of death in the name of God. The West remains in a state of divided incomprehension about this enemy. Its weakness is palpable. The nature of the ideological fanaticism that inspired 9/11, because it is so alien to secular rationalism, defies the Western imagination. September 11 has changed the world in many ways and in ways that defy comprehension. There are, however, three epic transformations.

First, bin Laden insists that Muslims must chose between God and satan and, by denying a middle path, seeks to provoke military upheaval and political revolution within the Muslim world, a message whose appeal lies in the purity of its extremism but that dooms any accepting Muslim society into a pre-modern failed society. This crisis within Islam will take decades to resolve, but the critical nations are Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second, the US and the West are entangled fatally in this struggle because the extremists insist the US is at war with Islam and is responsible for all conflicts involving Islam. This is the answer to the question: "Why do they hate us?" It is a propaganda device to radicalise Muslims worldwide. Yet it is far more: it signals a clash over power and territory, with the sweeping geostrategic aim of the Islamists (and many others) being to drive the US and Israel from the Middle East.

Third, these forces play out against a worldwide resurgence of Islam as a religion and identity, creating a potential conflict of loyalty within Western multicultural societies. This has triggered an internal debate about Western identity, values and culture. For the terrorists the twin towers were a symbolic target. The first attack on the towers was in February 1993 and the low toll of six dead was miraculous. Sunni extremist Ramzi Yousef, who planted the bomb, said he hoped to kill 250,000.

The meaning of 9/11 will be discussed for decades. The enemy has a dual identity: as al-Qa'ida, a stateless terrorist network; and, beyond this, as a radical ideological movement within the Islamic world that spawns its own political movements and terrorist units. Bush has enjoyed success against the former and failed against the latter. This is the best way to mark his balance sheet.

Perhaps September 11 is best understood as an event triggered by a crisis within Islam that has the potential to trigger a crisis within the West. This potential derives from two polarising sources.

On the one hand, it arises from the misjudgment and militaristic response from Bush, whose intervention in Afghanistan was half-hearted and inept (letting bin Laden escape) but whose main miscalculation has been the Iraq invasion. On the other hand, it derives from a denialist school of the West's progressive Left that pretends variously that nothing much is happening (and that terrorism is a familiar foe) or that the attacks on the West are its own fault (thereby repeating the Islamist propaganda) or that the problem lies in political leaders such as Bush and John Howard corrupting our values.

There are other messages from 9/11. As Harvard University's Joe Nye said, "the paradox of American power is that it is too great to be challenged by any other state yet not great enough to solve alone the problems such as global terrorism and nuclear proliferation". Bush enunciated a sweeping war on terrorism that was conceptually flawed because, as argued by National Intelligence Council former vice-chairman Graham Fuller, "The task was Sisyphean, the enemy generalised, the goals unclear, the scope open-ended."

Yet the 9/11 story also exposes the bankruptcy of the Islamist vision for the Muslim world, with its resort to violence, intolerance and repression. This cannot constitute a solution to the socioeconomic malaise that plagues Islamic nations and mocks claims to civilisational greatness.

There is, however, one message Bush has radiated: that Islam as a religion is not the enemy. It would be fatal for the West if this message were not heard. The task is difficult because it runs in parallel with a related message that violent Islamist ideology is the enemy. Selling these two separate yet related messages is a daunting global challenge beyond Bush's ability.

Five years later the strategic picture is uncertain. Neither Bush nor bin Laden is winning this strange war.

Bush and his allies have destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; demolished large parts of al-Qa'ida's structure; captured many terrorist leaders including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operational leader behind the 9/11 attack, and Hambali, mastermind of the 2002 Bali attack; displayed a mettle that shocked al-Qa'ida; prevented any further attack on the US; and, critically, have won the support of many governments within the Islamic world. Although Bush's tactics for spreading democracy are flawed, the US remains, even for many of its opponents, the best model for a successful modern society. This ambivalence towards the US is entrenched in the Islamic world. It is an opportunity to be exploited by a future US leader with a better balance of soft and hard power skills.

Yet the list of negatives is long. Afghanistan's future is in doubt, the US intervention was too little and too brief, and the Taliban are recovering. Iraq has been converted into a jihadist recruitment field, exposing US arrogance and ineptitude. Egypt's leader Hosni Mubarak has warned that the Iraq war will produce "100 new bin Ladens". The war has energised the Islamists, shifted the regional power balance in favour of Iran, helped to radicalise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and encouraged rogue nations to pursue nuclear options.

Bush's campaign against Islamist terrorism is flawed. It relies too much on military means, overlooks the need to legitimise military options and fails to mount a strong political campaign within the Islamic world to counter radical ideology and seek a partnership to support genuine Islam.

One way 9/11 changed the world was the inauguration of the Bush Doctrine. He embraced the idea of preventative war, the removal of rogue regimes, the spread of democracy by military force and dismissed as outdated deterrence and containment, the techniques that won the Cold War. The irony is that the Bush Doctrine has failed. It won't be dismissed in its totality. But its failure in Iraq has prompted a substantial rethink within the Bush administration. It is a singular insight into Bush that his core strategic response to 9/11 is seen to be so flawed within five years of the attack.

The US has to redraft its strategy for what it calls the Long War. The immediate challenge flows from Iran's nuclear ambitions. Yet the weakness of the US position, with few military options and little diplomatic leverage, is almost embarrassing. The US struggles because 9/11 was the symbolic inauguration of an age of asymmetrical warfare. A bunch of terrorists trained by a non-state actor for a total operational cost of $US500,000 launched a more lethal attack on the US mainland than any action dared or not dared by the Soviet Union, Japan or Germany in the previous century. This was because technology empowers the terrorist and because deterrence works only against states (the Soviet Union or China or Iraq) that have to protect their national assets.

There will be many articles written this weekend suggesting that 9/11 was not a transforming event. You will need to be naive or a professional optimistic to believe them.