'Now we were in a Clash of Civilisations, with "radical Islam" replacing fascism and Soviet communism as the west's global enemy'
Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian, UK
Saturday 17 October 2009
A Palestinian killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, 2004. Photograph: Kristen Ashburn
The historian Eric Hobsbawm declared the 20th to be the "short century", an era that ran from the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. It's possible that the chroniclers of the future will make a similar judgment on the noughties, branding this the "short decade" – one that began on 11 September 2001 and drew to a close when Barack Obama took the presidential oath on 20 January 2009.
For this was the era defined by what the American president called "the war on terror". That conflict, begun so spectacularly with the felling of the twin towers, came to dominate every aspect of world affairs in the first decade of the 21st century. It spawned two wars, separated the United States from some of its oldest allies, fatally hobbled the premiership of a British prime minister and reconfigured the liberal left, on both sides of the Atlantic. And it left an uncounted number of people – perhaps in the hundreds of thousands – dead.
Unusually for a historic turning point, this was one that could be seen without the benefit of distance or the passage of time. By the evening of 11 September, it had become a commonplace to say the world would never be the same again. The Guardian's front page showed an image of the World Trade Centre, holed and belching great billows of clouds, below four simple words: "A declaration of war."
And so it proved to be. Al-Qaida's grandiosity, its desire to be granted the status of an equal adversary, was fulfilled when George W Bush treated the 11 September attacks as the opening salvo in a fully-fledged war. Within less than a month, the bombs were falling on Afghanistan, the place al-Qaida had made its own.
By then, the new era had begun. Suddenly the long decade that had just ended – spanning from the fall of the wall in 1989 until 10 September 2001 – began to look like a rare respite, the only time since 1939 when the free world had not been locked in a titanic struggle against a vast and terrifying enemy. Starting on 9/11, the noughties saw normal service resumed.
Now we were in a Clash of Civilisations, with "radical Islam" replacing fascism and Soviet communism as the west's designated global enemy. Even those conflicts with only the slimmest connection to the battle against al-Qaida were squeezed into the "war on terror". In Russia, Vladimir Putin said he was fighting terror in Chechnya; in Israel, Ariel Sharon insisted he was engaged in the same struggle as his buddy Bush, with Hamas and the ailing Yasser Arafat standing in for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. India tried to say the same about the Pakistani militants in Kashmir.
But the most outrageous stretch, because it proved to be the most lethal, was the battle Bush declared to be not only connected to the war on terror but its new frontline: Iraq. According to those who were there, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was itching to bomb Iraq on 12 September 2001. There were, he explained, no good targets in Afghanistan – just rubble – but plenty in Iraq. From then on, Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney embarked on a largely successful effort to persuade the American public that the trail of guilt for 9/11 somehow led to Baghdad.
The lead-up to the war – the reports to the UN by Hans Blix, the furrowed-brow sincerity of Tony Blair – transfixed world attention and consumed international relations throughout 2002 and into 2003. It divided a western alliance that had remained united through four decades of opposition to the USSR. The recusants of Germany and France were dismissed as "Old Europe"; the gung-ho nations of the east, fizzing with post-Soviet pro-Americanism, were admired as the new.
"Mission accomplished," Bush declared in May 2003, but the Iraq war cast a shadow over the entire decade. It enabled Bush to run as a "war president" in 2004 and so win a second term. The confirmation that Saddam did not, after all, have weapons of mass destruction broke public trust in Blair, never to be restored. Though it was not the direct trigger for his eventual downfall, it was the underlying cause. It also left Europe split at precisely the time its luminaries hoped it would come together, after a massive expansion to the east. But the energy that might have been devoted to forging a successful new constitutional settlement for Europe was constantly devoured instead by Iraq.
And all the while, the real enemy – al-Qaida – remained at large, its leader elusive. While the US and Britain were seeking to remake Iraq, al-Qaida and those it inspired were free to kill and maim in Madrid, in Bali, in Mumbai – and in London on 7 July 2005.
Like the cold war before it, this claimed "clash of civilisations" sundered the liberal left. Those who spoke of combating Islamo-fascism were deemed warmongers; those who refused to see Islamists as Nazis were branded appeasers.
And all the while those conflicts that predated 9/11 kept spilling blood. After the failed talks of Camp David in 2000, Israelis and Palestinians descended into murderous waves of violence, whether the suicide bombings of the second intifada at the start of the decade or the aerial bombardment of Gaza at the end. In Africa, there were success stories of good governance and debts forgiven – but also, away from the world's gaze, a slow slaughter in Darfur and a diabolical war in Congo.
It's probably too early to say that the arrival of Obama brought the decade to a close, but it seemed that way at the time. He dropped the talk of a war on terror, announced an eventual withdrawal from Iraq and – most important of all – promised that the US would no longer seek to rule the world alone. At the G20 meetings of 2009, Obama showed he understood that the US would now share the top table with the emerging economic titans, China and India.
Historians might come to view the first decade of the 21st century as an exercise in terrible distraction: our overriding concern should have been climate change. But they might also decide that this was the period in which US power was displayed at its most extravagant, reckless and deadly – just before it began to wane.
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