The attacks of September 2001 became the pretext for a new era of US-led intervention. Twenty-five years on, millions are dead and the promised ‘victories’ remain nowhere to be seen, says ANDREW MURRAY
Crowds in Manhattan watch smoke billowing from the World Trade Centre, September 11 2001
THE “war on terror” began 25 years ago today, when two hijacked passenger airliners were flown into the skyscrapers of the World Trade Centre in New York.
A third crashed into the Pentagon in Washington while a fourth, apparently targeting the US capitol, crashed in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back.
It was immediately assumed that the hijackers — nearly all of them Saudi Arabian by nationality — were organised by al-Qaida, an Islamist militant group then headquartered in Afghanistan. Despite many subsequent conspiracy theories, it would seem that this was indeed the case.
Al-Qaida attributed their actions — which killed nearly 3,000 people, almost all civilian, in the first foreign attack on the US mainland since 1812 — to opposition to Israel’s US-supported oppression of the Palestinians, to the presence of US troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and the sanctions-driven starvation of Iraqi children.
9/11 was thus an act of terror already sitting in a continuum of US-driven violence and oppression across the Middle East — an explanation but not a justification.
It was immediately clear that the attacks would be the basis for a further aggressive extension of US war, across the Middle East and south Asia in particular.
In fact, it led to a devastating series of wars which caused the effective collapse of several states, millions of deaths and millions more made refugees. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have been the principal victims of this war, which has also extended to parts of Africa and, in its impact and influence, most of the world.
Some of these wars had not the slightest connection to terrorism or al-Qaida and — in particular the Bush attack on Iraq — had been meditated long before 9/11.
The “war on terror” began with boasts of military omnipotence from Washington, along with brazen calls for the introduction of a new colonialism to deal with “failed states.”
But nowhere has it ended with an outcome anything like that sought by the aggressors.
Most notoriously, the first theatre of war — Afghanistan — began with the ousting of the Taliban government in 2001 and ended with the return of the self-same regime 20 years, uncounted lives and massive destruction later.
However rightly it can be felt that the people of Afghanistan deserve a much better government, it cannot be denied that this outcome marked a historic defeat for US imperialism.
It scarcely fared better in Iraq, where the overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to a brutal occupation, sectarian civil conflict, economic despoliation and the wrecking of a state which George Bush had fancied turning into a “beacon of democracy.”
The occupation there was wound down in more-or-less ignominy — total in the case of the British forces deployed in Basra, driven out in humiliation.
Libya, the third major target, was turned into a failed state, split between rival governments and generating an immense refugee crisis, as a result of a Nato-sponsored intervention.
In Syria, Western interference in civil war not only sparked a massive refugee crisis but the rise of Isis and the eventual ascension of a jihadi-rooted government in Damascus.
Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries, has been further degraded by a conflict to a large extent armed and directed from Britain, working alongside Gulf dictatorships. Yet the Houthis remain still standing and defiant.
The “war on terror” also spread further afield, to both west and east Africa in particular, with no better results for either the peoples there or the plans of the imperialists.
The full balance sheet for these wars remains yet to be calculated, but it does not seem to yield a single victory of the US and its allies, Britain first among them. The present war against Iran is a linear descendant of these conflicts, and does not look like changing that record.
Despite numerous contingent and specific factors, all these wars are rooted in the structuring of a world around US hegemony, in which Washington arrogates to itself the right to intervene where it wills in order to ensure subordination to its own strategic and commercial interests.
They are thus the main contemporary political expression of imperialism.
9/11 and these subsequent conflicts had the political consequence of restoring the concept of imperialism to the centre of public discourse.
After a generation in which it had been relegated to jargon as the world wallowed in the post-cold war “end of history,” the wars of aggression launched by the US, with British governments invariably at its side, whatever the views of the people, shone an unforgiving light on the realities of global power.
Imperialism has generally taken some care to present its depredations as being motivated by the most high-minded interests.
In the 19th century, colonial adventures were usually promoted as expediting the spread of Christian civilisation to peoples who had the audacity to get along without it.
In the 20th century, a more secular age, interventions were often explained as being necessary to stop the spread of communism, notwithstanding that communism, for all its global potency, was often entirely absent from the territories concerned.
In the present century the “war against terror” has stood duty, the first conflict even declared as being against an abstraction rather than a country or peoples.
This war elided with the developing notion of “liberal” or “humanitarian” intervention, which had been trialled, to its progenitors’ satisfaction, in the 1999 war against Yugoslavia.
It was ideologically amplified by Tony Blair, then still fairly popular, who went to Chicago to spell out the conditions in which great powers, or those with the approved political markers, could and should intervene in other countries’ affairs.
He spelt out five criteria. International law or United Nations approval were not among them, and the wars to follow did not meet all of them in any case. Blair’s political reputation is now collateral damage following his decision to lead Britain into the Iraq aggression alongside George Bush.
That decision, above all, gave rise to the largest anti-war movement in Britain’s history, indeed probably the strongest mass movement of the left since the high days of Chartism in the 1840s.
Its effects resonate to this day, not least in the enduring movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
At its core lay an alliance of most of the socialist left with Muslim communities, alongside trade unions, the mass of young people and sections, like military families, never previously drawn into mass anti-war campaigning.
That coalition was described by the New York Times as the “second superpower” in the world, at the time when the US believed itself to be effectively unchallengeable.
The movement also laid much of the foundation for Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the Labour Party leadership in 2015, something that was certainly not on Blair or Bush’s agenda when they embarked on their policy of open-ended war.
These developments have placed anti-imperialism at the heart of socialist politics in Britain, to the teeth-grinding rage of those savants and organs of the soi-disant left who embrace the international politics of the ruling class even as they pretend to a domestic radicalism.
9/11 also had more negative impacts in Britain — it led to a rising tide of Islamophobia, now reaching epidemic proportions, as well as occasioning one attack after another on our liberties, exemplified in the harassment of the Palestine solidarity movement and the mass arrests of peaceful sympathisers with Palestine Action.
Today, the “war on terror” has faded somewhat behind the darkening shadow of great power conflict. With the rise of China, it is clear that the US is no longer the sole superpower.
The proxy war being waged by Nato in Ukraine is the harbinger of still more devastating conflicts, as the anti-war movement warned from 9/11 onwards.
Today, 9/11 is best marked by the renewal of the anti-war movement in the face of impending neofascism and war, by the re-establishment of its broad fighting unity, and by absorbing the greatest single lesson of those terrible events a quarter of a century ago — that there can never be peace alongside imperialism.
Andrew Murray was the first chair of the Stop the War Coalition, serving from 2001 to 2011, and is now its deputy president
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