-
1 of 10
-
2 of 10
-
3 of 10
-
4 of 10
-
5 of 10
-
6 of 10
-
7 of 10
-
8 of 10
-
9 of 10
-
10 of 10
ANALYSIS
U.S. quest for security has unsettled the world
Archive
Comments
Story
Two years ago, chances are you didn’t know the name of
Osama bin Laden, certainly not of his organization, al-Qaida.
You knew little of the Taliban that was ruling Afghanistan with
an Islamic iron fist; less of its opponent, the Northern Alliance;
nothing of current Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
You knew Saddam Hussein, but he was just one of the
pain-in-the-neck figures who popped up on every continent in the
globe.
You hadn’t heard of the Department of Homeland Security.
Or the Patriot Act. Or military tribunals.
You had most likely never watched a Donald Rumsfeld news
conference. You had yet to meet Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer and
Jessica Lynch.
Most of all, two years ago, you didn’t know that a dozen
or so people were in the final stages of years of plotting to
hijack three jetliners full of people and do what seemed
unthinkable even to the most cautious security experts — use them
as weapons on a suicide mission.
Two years ago, the World Trade Center’s twin towers
dominated Lower Manhattan with a modernist simplicity that seemed
destined to last for centuries.
That was two years ago.
As the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks arrives
Thursday – with observances greatly toned down from those of
a year ago – there is certainly progress in the international
struggle that began that day.
“There has not been another Sept. 11 and that is something
we have to take comfort in,” says Steven David, an expert on
international security issues at the Johns Hopkins University.
“After the original attack, there were fears that it would
happen again and again. You have to take each day as it comes, but
the fact is that we haven’t had another.”
Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and
Development at the University of Maryland, College Park, agrees:
“Something is working in terms of homeland security.”
the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, there is a feeling something is still
wrong.
“The bigger question is how we are doing in getting an
international coalition together to fight terror, how we are doing
at reducing the motives of people who don’t like us,”
says Telhami, also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
`”I think at that level one has to say that we are not better
off, that in some ways we are worse off.”
The problems did not crop up immediately. The initial focus on
disrupting al-Qaida operations in Afghanistan receives high marks.
The many arrests of top al-Qaida officials in various countries are
seen as evidence of real success in this struggle.
“The original operation in Afghanistan was
positive,” says John Steinbruner, director of the Center for
International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland.
“It took away al-Qaida’s main sanctuary. Systematically
organized terrorism was dispersed in that area. But positive is not
enough.”
Martha Crenshaw, a terrorism expert at Wesleyan University in
Connecticut, agrees. “Al-Qaida was hurt badly, but hurt badly
does not mean the organization is completely destroyed.”
Bin Laden is still at large. And while the United States has
remained safe, terrorist attacks connected to al-Qaida continue,
the worst a bombing in Bali last October that killed 200, most of
them foreign tourists.
What stands out is the contrast between the unanimity of
worldwide support for the United States in the days and weeks after
the attacks, and the status of America in the international
community today. Some blame the Bush administration for using Sept.
11 to advance its partisan agenda.
“What the Bush administration has done is lump together
all of the pet adventures of the (neo-conservative) set under the
rubric of the war on terror,” says Rashid Khalidi, director
of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. “I
don’t think they fit there. The worst example is Iraq. It had
not a thing to do with the war on terror.
of Iraq,” he says. “The people who brought us Sept. 11
constitute a danger of manageable proportions if addressed in a
sober way. But the energy and attention that should be devoted to
these evildoers who are actually attacking the United States and
American institutions is, I think, being distracted because of the
necessity of the attention paid to Iraq.”
The post-Sept. 11 support is a distant memory. “At the
United Nations, the United States had a lot of good will,”
Telhami recalls. “There was tremendous support for the war in
Afghanistan.
“After Sept. 11 nobody was supporting al-Qaida, except
maybe the Taliban,” Crenshaw says. “Now we are in a
situation where the United States is at odds with virtually
everybody except Britain and a few other smaller countries. It is a
sad situation to be in. The problem is, how do we get back out of
it?”
The decision to go to war in Iraq over the objections of most
other countries – traditional allies and enemies of the
United States – was the obvious breaking point. But the seeds
were planted earlier.
“Some resentment against America was inevitable,”
says David. “We are the biggest, strongest power in the world
and there will be times that we feel we have to act even if the
French and the Russians do not support us. But the Bush people have
gone too far. They have made gratuitous insults to the
international community. They have turned their back on
international treaties and agreements when they did not have to do
so and they have, I think, created more resentment and hatred of
the United States.”
Khalidi asserts that the loss of support of U.S. allies over
Iraq damages the fight against terror. “The French know more
about some of these people than anybody else. You don’t
alienate them, start pouring Bordeaux down the gutters. They are
really important in fighting and uprooting people who have lethal
intentions about America. That’s true of each of the European
countries…”
Telhami agrees that the United States needs international help
now more than ever. “When you look at the projection of
American power and the resentment it has engendered, today the
perception is that the United States is entangled in quagmires and
therefore actually less able to project power around the world and
more in need of others to bail it out.”
Michael Hill
The Baltimore Sun
The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
