The 9/11 Wars (7 page)

Many TV networks had trained cameras on the Twin Towers after the impact of the first plane and thus captured both the arrival of the second plane and the eventual collapse of the entire complex. The strikes had been conceived to exploit the capabilities of new communications technology and in this had succeeded perfectly. The events and the live broadcasting of images of it were without historical parallel.

Though there were to be many more terrorist attacks over the coming decade – as there had been over previous centuries – none would come close to being as individually striking as the 9/11 attacks. Though over coming years terrorists would inflict many more casualties than the 2,977 victims who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, no one incident would break so dramatically with previous examples of spectacular political or religious violence. The impact of the 9/11 attacks was inevitably magnified by their sheer unexpectedness. Many later accounts refer to the ‘clear blue sky’ from which the planes came, a metaphor for an imagined pre-war calm supposedly shattered by the strike. That the victims were in the middle of such mundane rituals as settling at a desk in the morning before a day’s work, so well known to so many in the West, also amplified its effect, as did the extraordinary scale of the attack. There was the almost unimaginable sight of the collapse of two 110-floor towers but simultaneously there were the individuals caught up in the tragedy: the husbands ringing wives from their offices as the floors below burned, the 200 men and women forced to chose between fire or falling as a mode of death and who opted for the latter, the calls from the passengers before their ill-fated bid to retake control of the fourth hijacked plane, the firemen who continued to search empty floors in the doomed towers unaware because of faulty radios that orders had been given to evacuate the burning buildings and who perished as a result. The dead came from sixty different nations and represented almost every religion on the planet. Apart from fifty-five service men and women who died in the Pentagon, they were all civilians. They were bankers and postmen, short order chefs and stockbrokers, cleaners and artists, aspirant writers and out-of-work actors, senior counter-terrorism officials and tourists. Over 400 were emergency workers. The youngest victim was two-year-old Christine Hanson of Groton, Massachusetts, who was with her parents aboard the plane that crashed into the South Tower. The oldest was eighty-five-year-old Robert Grant Norton of Lubec, Maine, on the plane that struck the North Tower. ‘Today is obviously one of the most difficult days in the history of the city,’ Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York, told reporters at a hastily arranged press conference hours after the towers had collapsed, with the air still thick with ash and acrid smoke. ‘The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.’
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Reactions around the world were instant and, as the attacks had been, were broadcast live. They naturally comprised, in those early instants of horror and shock, automatic, instinctive expressions of sympathy for the bereaved and solidarity with the American people. Early estimates of casualties ran higher than 15,000 – the number of people who were thought to be working in the World Trade Center at the time. ‘We are all traumatized by this terrible tragedy,’ Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said as the organization’s headquarters building in New York was evacuated. In London, the national anthem at the Changing of the Guard was replaced by ‘The Stars and Stripes’. Queen Elizabeth herself expressed ‘growing disbelief and total shock’ at the events.
Le Monde
, the French newspaper, declared, ‘we are all Americans now’. The prime minister of New Zealand spoke of ‘the sort of thing the worst movie scenario wouldn’t dream up’. Many spoke of the ‘barbarity’ of those responsible. Gerhard Schroeder, the German chancellor, said the attacks were ‘a declaration of war against the civilized world’. The European Union’s external relations commissioner, Chris Patten, called the attacks ‘the work of a madman’.

Within twenty-four hours NATO had unanimously invoked Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which describes an attack on one member as an attack on all, and diplomats were calling for the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on any governments or groups found to be responsible. European foreign ministers scheduled a rare emergency meeting to discuss a joint response. Around the world, government installations and tall buildings were evacuated amid widespread fear of imminent further strikes. Information on supposed plots, on sleeper cells waiting to be activated poured in as intelligence services, stunned by their collective failure, scanned every last file for any hint of a potential danger. President Bush, who had spent much of the previous day in the air or in protected bunkers far from Washington, was told on the morning of the 12th that the CIA believed there were more ‘al-Qaeda operatives’ within the USA and that they wanted to attack with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
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The ambient fear deepened and spread. Each public reaction provoked its own reaction, sparking a chain of accelerating, proliferating live commentary on an event the scale and significance of which no one knew quite how to gauge.

But even as their aides issued their statements of sympathy and grief, many world leaders saw immediately how the 9/11 attacks could be exploited to their own personal advantage and that of the nations they led. In public President Vladimir V. Putin publicly supported a tough response to the ‘barbaric acts’. Privately, speaking to Blair on the afternoon of the attacks, the Russian premier lectured the British prime minister about how the world had long ignored his warnings about ‘the threat of Islamic fundamentalism’ and hoped that would now change.
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Putin, who had been the first foreign head of state to call the White House on September 11 itself, repeated his message to Bush on the day after the disaster. For several years Putin had sought to cast the brutal war in the southern breakaway republic of Chechnya as a battle against Islamic radicalism rather than the latest manifestation in a centuries-old conflict between local irredentist tendencies and the Russian state. He had astutely sensed the shift that would now come in the perception of any conflict that could be said to involve Islamic militants. Ariel Sharon, the hawkish prime minister of Israel, was also equally quick to realize that the attacks, whatever the immediate calls by statesmen across the world for reconciliation and moderation, signalled a paradigm shift that would allow Israel greater freedom of action in combating Palestinian militant groups in Gaza and the West Bank and in consolidating the Israeli hold on the Occupied Territories.
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Sharon immediately declared a national day of mourning in solidarity with the United States while urging the world to fight all terrorism. The coming weeks would see politicians ranging from David Trimble, the Northern Irish Unionist leader, to Robert Mugabe, the dictatorial ruler of Zimbabwe, all proclaiming that their long-term domestic or international enemies were in fact the equivalents of the terrorists who had struck the US.
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Efforts to misrepresent domestic enemies or long-standing local conflicts as generated by or at the very least exacerbated by al-Qaeda were to become systematic over coming years, becoming a key element of the 9/11 Wars.

Across the Islamic world, there were effectively three different types of reaction: those of heads of state, those of the clergy and those of the general population. Figures like President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, favoured allies of the USA and recipients of significant American aid, all expressed sympathy and offered cooperation with America, refraining, at least in the first instance, from any attempt to exploit the attacks. This was largely predictable. Whatever their views in private, such leaders understood how poorly a wounded America would view any disloyalty. More surprising was the strong condemnation of the attack by President Mohammad Khatami of Iran and Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Khatami went as far as describing the strikes as ‘terrorist’, and Gaddafi offered aid to the American people. Only the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq broke ranks. Spokesmen in the former denied bin Laden was responsible. State television in the latter hailed the attacks as the ‘operation of the century’ which the United States deserved because of its ‘crimes against humanity’.
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Clerics in the Islamic world had a more delicate path to tread. The fact that their influence depended not so much on any formal qualifications or positions but largely on the number of people who accepted and acted on their
fatawa
made them naturally more responsive to public opinion. A compromise needed to be found between the strongly pro-American position taken by rulers and the much more ambivalent sentiment of the street. Clergy close to or protected by governments, like Mohammed Tantawi, the Grand Mufti of the hugely prestigious al-Azhar university in Cairo, and Abdul Aziz Abdullah al-Sheikh in Saudi Arabia, could call the strikes ‘stupid’, ‘forbidden’ and underline that they constituted a ‘grave sin’ that would be ‘punished on judgement day’, but other religious figures needed to be more nuanced in their response.
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So although Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the cleric who had attempted to dissuade the Taliban from destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas, denounced the attacks, particularly on those simply ‘earning their daily bread’, as a ‘heinous crime’ and urged Muslims to donate blood for the victims, he made a point of simultaneously stressing the United States’ ‘political bias towards Israel’ as a reason for the strike and went as far as implicitly criticizing its perpetrators for mistaking their target. Instead, he said, Muslims should ‘concentrate on facing the occupying enemy directly’ inside Gaza and the West Bank.
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This was to recur as a key argument – and a dynamic debate – in the decade that followed.

Beyond the clergy and the rulers came the genuine popular reaction. It was deeply conflicted. Horror, shock, genuine sympathy for individual victims was mixed in much of the Islamic world with a strong sense that the attacks were, if not legitimate in themselves, at least justified by the perceived misdeeds of America and Americans over recent decades. Bin Laden had previously been careful to pick targets that would have some popular resonance – the strike which had immediately preceded the 9/11 attacks was against a US warship anchored off the Yemeni port of Aden in October 2000 – and there can be no doubt that levels of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world in the late summer of 2001 were high. Certainly this had been abundantly clear to anyone travelling in the Middle East, Pakistan or the Muslim majority countries of the Far East. The author spent the week before the September 11 attacks in Algeria, passing several evenings in the garden of one local human rights activist whose friends, most of whom would have been described as ‘cultural’ rather than practising Muslims, took American enmity towards the Islamic world as an indisputable given, barely worthy of discussion. The same had been the case in Jordan and in Morocco, as well as among many Muslims living in the West.
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Yet such sentiments were far from straightforward. Few remained unmoved before the images of those forced to jump to their deaths.
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Nor was the sense that the USA had somehow ‘got what it deserved’ limited to the Muslim world.

These various tensions were one of the reasons for the astonishing rapidity with which conspiracy theories sprang up, spread and became embedded in the public consciousness in the Islamic world and beyond. Within days of the attacks al-Manar, the satellite chain run by the Lebanese Hezbollah militant Islamist organization broadcasting from Beirut was reporting that 4,000 Jews ‘remarkably did not show up in their jobs’ on September 11, clearly implying that responsibility for them lay with some kind of global Jewish conspiracy rather than with the nineteen hijackers and their organizers.
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Rooted in longstanding and widespread anti-Semitic stereotypes, some imported from Europe, such ideas, often strongly encouraged by governments and carefully fused with anti-Zionist rhetoric, had become a part of general daily discourse in much of the Middle East over previous decades. Others strands of conspiracy theory and denial, such as the idea that ‘it must have been the Jews or the Americans’ as it was impossible that Arabs could organize such a complicated operation, revealed a noxious mix of psychological evasion of the hard questions posed to Muslims by the 9/11 strikes and to a lesser extent the internalization of centuries of Western statements about the incapacity of Muslims or Arabs. Sitting at dinner with American Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith in Riyadh during a short tour of the Gulf and central Asia by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, wondered aloud who indeed was behind such a sophisticated operation given it was inconceivable that ‘cave dwellers in Afghanistan’ were responsible. As America was now at war with the Islamic world, al-Faisal mused, the answer surely would be found by seeking out who stood to benefit the most. After all, he continued, he had read press stories that Israel had warned Jews who worked in the Twin Towers not to go to the office on the day of the attacks.
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Overall, one poll found, only 18 per cent in the Middle East as a whole, 4 per cent of Pakistanis and just one in ten Kuwaitis believed that Arabs were responsible for 9/11.
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A poll in November 2001 showed that, while 81 per cent of British Muslims felt the 9/11 strikes were unjustified, 60 per cent felt that America was wrong to blame them on al-Qaeda.
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Conspiracy theories also spread rapidly among non-Muslim populations, especially among the extreme left or in countries like France with a long history of anti-Americanism.