From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Wed Aug 31 2011 - 17:52:58 EDT
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/29/the_black_hole_of_911>
The Black Hole of 9/11
As we assess the legacy of the 10th anniversary of America's seminal
terrorist attack, it's worth looking at 10 events from the past decade that
have actually been more important.
BY DAVID J. ROTHKOPF | AUGUST 31, 2011
Recently, I've started to get calls from reporters doing pieces on the
upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11. The thrust of the conversations is the
same: How were we changed by that watershed moment?
But in responding to their questions and mulling the question in my head, I
keep coming back to the same conclusion: 9/11, for all its tragic and heroic
drama, is an easy event to overestimate. Indeed, we have been overestimating
its significance since almost the moment it happened. (According to
President George W. Bush, his chief of staff, Andrew Card, leaned forward to
whisper the news of the attack in his ear and said, "
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32782623/ns/us_news-9_11_eight_years_later/t/he
-told-bush-america-under-attack/#.TlwPW2FOWuI> America is under attack."
Although factually accurate, the statement was in the language of
traditional wars with traditional enemies and implied that the United States
as a nation was somehow at risk in ways much broader than was actually the
case.)
In fact, the success of Osama bin Laden was in masterminding a low-cost,
comparatively low-risk action by a handful of thugs that produced one of the
most profound overreactions in military history. Trillions of dollars were
expended and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the emotion-fueled
maelstrom unleashed by a shaken and clearly disoriented America. Bin Laden
aimed for Wall Street and Washington, seeking to strike a blow against
symbols of American power, but in so doing he also hit us where it would
hurt the most -- right in our sense of perspective.
We spoke of 9/11 as though it were somehow equivalent to Pearl Harbor, the
beginning of a global war against enemies bent on, and at least
theoretically capable of, destroying the American way of life (unlike al
Qaeda, a ragtag band of extremists with limited punch). We spoke of cultural
wars and a divided world. We reorganized our entire security establishment
to go after a few thousand bad guys. We went mad.
And now, as we are recovering our senses, withdrawing from Iraq, and soon
starting to exit Afghanistan, having buried bin Laden and hosts of his
henchmen, we are beginning to be able to see this. At least in theory we
can. For the next couple of weeks, we will witness documentary after
editorial mega-feature, interviews with victims and heroes, the American
legend machine producing historical bumpf at full blast. That is not, by the
way, to diminish the brutal blows struck 10 years ago or the deeply felt
human experiences associated with it and its aftermath. Rather it is to say
that once again we will seek to frame 9/11 as a great event, the definer of
an era, when in fact, its greatest defining characteristic was that of a
distraction -- The Great Distraction -- that drew America's focus and that
of many in the world from the greater issues of our time. That distraction
and the opportunity costs associated with it were bin Laden's triumph and
our loss -- and our ultimate victory will come as we get a grip back on
reality.
One way to demonstrate that restoration of historical sensibility comes if
we ask ourselves, looking back over the past 10 years, what other
developments took place that exceed 9/11 in lasting importance? What events
of the past decade will historians write of that will have them looking past
or beyond the attack, its masterminds, or its immediate response? There are
scores, I suspect. Here are just 10 that come to me off the top of my head.
10. The American Response to 9/11
While some might consider America's overwrought response to 9/11 to be proof
of its significance, so much of that response was irrational and more
directly related to issues in America's past (the invasion of Iraq, for
example) that it needs to be seen as a thing apart. Indeed, we had been
directly and indirectly fighting wars in and around Iraq for years. Further,
that war was a "war of choice," just as the violation of our national
principles at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo was purely self-destructive,
auto-terrorism if you will. We did more damage to ourselves than did the
two-bit criminals who baited us. In any event, our response -- which extends
on the positive side to our coming to better understand how to combat
terrorism (the "intelligence war" and drone attacks bin Laden ended up
bitterly lamenting) -- was both vastly bigger in scope and in consequence
than the events that triggered it.
9. The Arab Spring
We have no idea how the string of revolutions in the Middle East and North
Africa this year is going to turn out. But we do know that they are a sign
of deep change that has toppled more governments in the region than either
al Qaeda or the United States could. These revolutions are having a broader
social impact than extremism and are linked more directly to the
self-interest of the masses in the region -- which ought to have us
handicapping it with better odds than we'd give fundamentalist murderers
practicing their ancient, outmoded, and ineffective trade. The United States
was right to focus on the rise of nonstate actors and asymmetric power -- it
was just focusing on the wrong sources of that power.
8. The Rebalancing of Asia
This trend is related to the No. 1 story of the decade (keep reading), but
it touches more lives and will be of far greater impact to global foreign
policy than anything that happens in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or anywhere in
the Middle East. In fact, the intensive efforts to forge new alliances and
open new relationships among all the international players with interests in
Asia will probably play a decisive role in AfPak as it encompasses
developments like the U.S. embrace of India. That evolving partnership
between the world's two largest democracies will have important regional
consequences vis-à-vis the battle against terrorism and containing threats
from within Pakistan while at the same time creating an important
counterbalance to China. These strategic shifts across Asia touch far more
countries than those, however, as they involve creating new alliances and
deepened relationships to address, engage with, and at the same time, manage
the consequences of China's rise -- as well as that of other emerging powers
such as India and, someday soon, perhaps a reunified Korea. It's
complicated, but it's the big leagues of foreign policy compared with the
Middle East, which is attention-grabbing but over the long term strictly
second division.
7. The Stagnation of the U.S. and Other Developed-World Economies
This trend started a few years before 9/11 with Japan's economic meltdown.
But it really gained momentum in the 2000s, when the United States
experienced its first-ever decade of zero net new job creation and declining
median incomes. Europe also spluttered, especially in the south -- and this
weakening of the pillars of the post-World War II world clearly fed a
reordering of geopolitics. Entering an age of limitations is forcing big
powers to work together differently and has put the kibosh on the momentary
and misguided unilateralism of the Bush era in the United States.
6. The Invention of Social Media
What's more important? Knocking down the World Trade Center and killing
several thousand innocents or linking half a billion people together as
never before (as Facebook did)? Passing notes from cave to cave in
Waziristan or fueling a Twitter revolution in Cairo's Tahrir Square? It's
not even close.
5. The Proliferation of Cell Phones and Hand-Held Computing Devices
As big as the advent of social media is, the big technology story of the
past decade is the unprecedented, mind-boggling, world-reordering spread of
cell phones. In 1991, 10 years before 9/11, there were 16 million cell-phone
subscribers worldwide. Today, we are rapidly approaching 6 billion
cell-phone subscribers. Eight trillion text messages will be sent in 2011.
Within three or four years, more people will access the Internet via phone
than via computer. And growth is fastest in the emerging world. There are
more cell phone cameras today than all other forms of camera added together.
Everyone is connected. Everyone is a witness. Everyone is part of a global
news network, an instant coalition, a mob, an electorate.
4. The Crash of 2008
The Dow Jones industrial average fell from a peak of 14,164 on Oct. 9, 2007,
to 6,469 the following March, a decline of 54 percent. It took 17 months to
"recover." (The jury is still out on what's next.) The U.S. housing market,
which peaked in 2006, has plummeted virtually unabated ever since, and some
experts expect that those past highs may be unattainable for years, if ever.
The resulting tens of trillions of dollars in losses sent hundreds of
millions of people deeper into poverty, crushed retirement accounts,
impacted the well-being of billions of people, and called into question the
viability of countries and companies in ways that cannot yet be calculated.
It also had political and policy implications -- from reconsidering national
priorities to changing global views toward "American capitalism" -- that
will dwarf those associated with 9/11.
3. The Eurozone Crisis and the Crash of 2011-2012
Don't believe point No. 4? Well, keep watching. The weakening caused by the
decline of developed-world economies, the crash of 2008, reckless
overborrowing by European governments, and lax management of the banking
sector (as well as localized national problems such as the failure by the
Spanish to learn the lessons of the U.S. housing crisis) has led to a crisis
that could undo the European Union, blow up the euro, and -- even if neither
of those things happen -- send the world's economy into another tailspin
that could recall or exceed 2008's crash. If it does, it will have an even
more devastating impact on already weakened economies worldwide; and if it
undoes the European experiment, which has helped ensure decades of peace on
a continent previously riven by conflict, well, then it will again on
totally different grounds easily trump 9/11.
2. The Failure to Address Global Warming
While evidence piled up that man-made warming was accelerating in ways that
outstripped all models and all precedent in human history, while the
scientific community united in its agreement that the crisis would be
existential for many forms of life and coastal communities where billions of
people live, while the entire planet was threatened as never before, the
leaders of the world were otherwise engaged. If global temperatures rise
another degree or three this century, 9/11 will be seen as a comparative
footnote to an event that could remake the nature of life on Earth and lead
to a toll many, many times greater than either 9/11 or the wars it
triggered.
1. The Rise of China and the Other BRICs
The only reason global warming is not No. 1 is that we haven't seen its full
effects yet. But its contours -- and that of economic growth and political
power on the planet -- will be shaped increasingly by the influence of the
"new" powers of the 21st century, led by China, India, Brazil, and others.
Of course, they're not new: China and India were the world's largest
economies from the dawn of time until almost the mid-19th century. But
still, on September 11, 2001, they were considered players to watch -- in
the distant future. The past decade has seen them emerge to the point that
they are now the engines of growth that will determine whether a market
crash of 2011 occurs, whether the United States and Europe can borrow to
fund their ailing economies, whether the world will reach an agreement to
manage greenhouse gas emissions, whether we will truly contain the spread of
weapons of mass destruction, and what the real future of international
institutions and agreements will look like. The BRICs rose while the United
States was distracted by bin Laden's sideshow; now, America's future will
depend on how quickly Americans can refocus on what's really important.
So, does all this mean 9/11 was not important? Of course not. It was a
significant day in the life of America, a turning point in our view of our
vulnerabilities and of the nature of threats and real power in the world. It
led us to question many of our assumptions about the nature of our country,
our alliances, our military capabilities, and our worldview. It and its
aftermath have had a horrific human cost -- on victims of the attack, on the
families of our soldiers, and on the many victims and their families of the
wars we subsequently conducted in the Middle East. It has changed America,
taught us our limitations, and forced us to question ourselves. We have been
diminished by it, raised up by the noble examples of individual Americans --
and in the end we have learned much from it. Foremost among those lessons,
however, must be that we as a nation need to summon the discipline in times
of great national challenges to frame events in the broader context of time
and our larger interests. We cannot allow single isolated events to warp our
view of all around them, like historical black holes twisting the fabric of
adjacent time and events. It is important to our process of consigning 9/11
to history to understand both what it was and what it was not, why it was
important and why it was just one of many even greater stories of the past
decade.
------------[ Sent via the dehai-wn mailing list by dehai.org]--------------