Our Frankenstein

In openDemocracy, Anthony Barnett claims that a "media re-run of the events of 11 September promises too little in the way of enlightenment. What is needed is a fundamental re-think." He conceded the need for a measured military response last fall, but is generally disturbed by the political climate that has emerged since:

Bin Laden’s assault offered no...peaceful resolution. A focussed military response was essential, as Todd Gitlin, openDemocracy’s North American editor argued eloquently from New York on the night of the 11th, and as Susan Richards and I argued when the US assault began.

But the need for intervention, we argued (and we were not alone) was also a moral and political defeat. The fundamentalism holed up in the Tora Bora was as least as much the by-product of CIA cynicism as it was an expression of Islamic purity. Its repugnant terrorism was not just an evil ‘other’ the West could triumphantly eradicate thereby vindicating its own goodness. It was, and is, also our own Frankenstein – one that had to be dealt with, certainly. But in the sober way you clear up your own mess when you learn that your negligence has made it toxic.

Instead, the American campaign whose swift outcome followed the Taliban’s collapse, so characteristic of bully regimes, became a victory parade for the worst kind of triumphalism: the celebration of power itself as righteousness. It became an excuse for not learning lessons.

The overriding aim of the Bush administration today is to try and make things the same again – only this time even more so, restoring American supremacy to the untroubled days before Cuba and Vietnam but without even the restraints imposed by the cold war. Now they can be free of the tiresome need for anti-communist alliances and ‘the mission can define the coalition’. Now they no longer need run the risk of being criticised as hypocrites for advocating democracy, freedom and human rights, they can simply not advocate them at all.

...Rather than declaring a crusade against evil, after 11 September the US could have embraced a policy of ‘democracy everywhere’. This would have been the surest way of achieving a creative peace – one capable of isolating terrorism, and attracting the defections without which its organisations will not be broken.

Instead we got the President’s call for no more than a ‘regime change’ in Iraq. One justification is that Saddam Hussein has used weapons of mass destruction to ‘kill his own people’. In 1988 I helped to publish images of the nerve gas attack on Halabja and have strongly supported the removal of Saddam ever since. Where was the Bush family, then, when its influence was needed?

I did not and do not the support the Afghan campaign, but still appreciate Barnett's contribution here, especially the point about how the mantra of the 'war on terror' has become a perverse "celebration of power itself as righteousness." That's spot on.