Empire as a Way of Life
Tariq Ali

In a rare public statement, George W. Bush warned a few days ago that blowback is always inevitable. The subtext was a criticism of the Trump administration’s adventurism, “which really means to me,” Bush said, “they just don’t pay attention to the lessons of 9/11, because what happens overseas matters to our national security at home.” Of course, Trump is not the only president who has not paid heed to the lessons of 9/11. The same could be said about Bush himself, Obama, and Biden. It’s been 25 years. Will an American president ever learn this lesson?
Most of the official world and its media networks (including Cuba, China, Russia) responded sympathetically to the US after the hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a quarter of a century ago. In some South American countries (Chile, Nicaragua, Brazil), people celebrated or protested. The Palestinians maintained a dignified silence. I had arrived in NY from Toronto for a series of talks a fortnight after 9/11. My first discussion was with a Costa Rican taxi driver who drove me into town. His cab was festooned with US flags. To make conversation, I asked him where he was when the WTC was hit. He asked where I was from and replied: “I was not close to the WTC but I wouldn’t have minded if I had been and died.” Why? “I was glad they were hit.” I was taken aback by the degree of hatred. He said he was pleased the Americans were getting a taste of their own medicine. And the flags? A safety measure since some Sikh taxi-drivers had been mistaken for Muslims and beaten up by patriots. A wave of Islamophobia swept the Western world.
The 9/11 attacks gave Bush Jr a purpose and he spent the next seven years of his presidency building the foundation for the century that has followed thus far. Since he left office, three more presidents have spent time in the White House: Obama, Biden and Trump. Each of them has followed the cold-blooded dictum pronounced by US National Security Advisor Condeleeza Rice in the White House the day after the attentats: “We must use this to get our way in the world.” Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, the triumvirate that ran the country, were only too happy to put it into practice.
The first debate was whether to hit Iraq first or Afghanistan. Iraq was never a nest of religious fundamentalists, but they could pretend otherwise. Bush asked the Taliban in Afghanistan to hand over Osama Bin Laden, the theorist of al-Qaeda that had organised the attacks. The Taliban government asked for some evidence to meet the request. None was available. Pakistan was given a week to withdraw its military personnel, planes, etc. The ISI (Pakistani military intelligence) forcefully advised the Taliban not to resist but to bide their time. By the time US and NATO troops arrived in Afghanistan, Bin Laden had disappeared and the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar had last been seen heading towards the mountains on a motorbike à la Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape”. The US and its allies occupied the country from October 2001 and countries like Denmark got a whiff of neocolonialism. Mullah Omar found a hiding place in Balochistan and OBL was given refuge by the ISI in Abbottabad, not far from the location of Pakistan’s prime Kakul Military Academy. Long a secret known only to a handful of people. An old school friend, a senior security official in Pakistan at the time, told me that Osama was the “golden goose”, so why should they hand him over? In any case, he said, the US did not want him alive. I wrote about this exchange in my book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of US Power.
Having got their way in Afghanistan, the US began to prepare to take Iraq. This time there was opposition from some allies. European citizens seemed to have realised instinctively that the warmongering politicians – Bush, Blair and Aznar – were lying when they claimed that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction”. The huge antiwar movement that erupted in North America and most of Europe was pre-emptive in character. Over a million marched in London, Spain and Italy. Hundreds of thousands in New York, LA, Chicago and every state capital. Thousands of people who had never been politically active before wanted to stop the war in its tracks. Blair, uncritical of Bush and eager to join in, became a hated figure soon afterwards. After I had spoken at the million-plus Stop the War assembly in Hyde Park where I called for regime-change in Britain, a former Labour leader, Michael Foot, came up to congratulate me: “That was an appalling speech.”
There was resistance in Iraq, but the US handed over an element of power to the Shia majority long denied its political rights from British times to the Baath ascendancy. This had a dual impact: it made Iran a major player in the region and split the resistance. Both Sunni and Shia militias had united to defend Fallujah, the most violated city in Iraq. US brutalities and crimes were committed on a mega scale. But the charismatic leader of the Shia militia was called to and kept in Iran for almost a year, to weaken the resistance. When Baghdad fell, the Israeli Ambassador to the US congratulated Bush but pleaded with him not to stop now but to march onwards to Damascus and Teheran. A bit puzzling as to why he left out Tripoli.
The occupation of Iraq got the oil companies back, if at a high cost. At least a million Iraqis died, the puppet government installed by Washington set the number of orphans at five million. One of the most socially advanced countries of the Arab world was wrecked. Twenty-three years later, electricity and water have not been restored to the country as a whole and to this day many children are forced to do their homework in lantern-light. This has been the real impact of ‘regime-change’.
To avoid constitutional violations, Bush had decreed that arrest without trial of suspected terrorists on US bases abroad was permissible and necessary. Muslims were arrested and incarcerated at Guantanamo (GITMO), the US’s notorious base in Cuba, and held in appalling conditions, with reports of US soldiers urinating on prisoners and the Korans permitted in their cells. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama continued along the same path. In fact, the number of prisoners at GITMO increased substantially under Obama and more troops were sent to Afghanistan to cope with an increase in resistance attacks. Only in Iran did Obama impose a harsh treaty that the Iranians accepted. The US was still getting its way in the world.
What of al-Qaeda the organisation responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Worth remembering that this and other jihadi-type groups were created and armed by the US during the Cold War. As I explained in Clash of Fundamentalisms, Islamic and other fundamentalist religious groups (Catholics and Jews, for instance) were part of the global alliance against communism. After the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, went to the Pakistan-Afghan border to pose with jihadis and spur them on. When Afghans requested a Saudi presence, preferably a Wahhabi prince, Riyadh suggested Osama bin Laden, as close to a prince as possible and better educated on some levels. He and his Egyptian Islamist deputy, Ayman-al Zawahiri, set up base in Pakistan and later shifted further northwards. After the Soviet withdrawal in December 1989, the two moved to Afghanistan. The US, feeling that it had accomplished its mission, stopped funding and arming them. Al-Qaeda felt betrayed and pledged revenge anywhere and everywhere. 9/11 was the most dramatic act of revenge.
Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan were going well for Obama and his hardline Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. They needed a feel-good moment. By May 2011, the CIA had located OBL’s whereabouts. The Pakistani military was informed that a seal operation was about to take place and the boys in Islamabad decided to switch off their radar defences and surrender the golden goose. The world witnessed Obama and Clinton watch a live stream of Obama’s capture and killing. Why didn’t they bring him back and try him in court? He probably knew too much. Better to just bump him off. Another ghastly precedent on the Israeli pattern was established.
News of the assassination inspired some excitement at home. In N+1’s blog, Richard Beck reported liberal chants at Ground Zero the day Osama was dispatched: “U-S-A, U-S-A. Obama got Osama. Obama got Osama. You Can’t Beat Us (clap-clap-clap-clap) You can’t beat us. F*** bin La-den, F**** Bin-Laden.” The chants heard on campuses at Iowa, Stanford and UC Davis had a more literary flavour: “We Got Voldemort, We got Voldemort.”
The taste of blood proved intoxicating. Shortly after bin Laden’s killing, Obama greenlit the 2011 NATO assault on Libya and British and French soldiers were responsible for killing 30,000 people. Gaddafi was captured and brutally killed. Hillary Clinton was exultant: “We came, we saw, he died.” During his turn in office, Biden encouraged and paid $ 18 billion to Israel and supported the Palestinian genocide. Trump who followed him has done the same and launched a new war on Iran. Western civilization, shaken after 9/11, is still getting its revenge.
Twenty five years on, Bush is right that the US does not take seriously enough the risk of blowback from its adventures abroad. Since Osama bin Laden’s execution, Al-Qaeda relations have been restored. A Western-backed Al-Qaeda faction in Libya was empowered to control a region of that country after Gaddafi’s death. The 2025 regime change in Syria saw Assad replaced by Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who was anointed as president of Syria and warmly received at the White House, 10 Downing Street, and a number of European chanceries, as well as in Turkey and Israel. 9/11 enabled the US and its allies to recolonise the Middle East. The non-stop chaos that marks the region today with the Iranians bombing US bases in the Gulf states and their Houthi allies in Yemen now in control of the entire Western coast of their country has further weakened imperial power. Despite the lack of sufficient coverage, the oil crisis created by Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is affecting large parts of the world, including India and China. Since 9/11, the US has pursued its whims, constructing the world along the lines of its imperial fantasies. But in doing so it has unravelled its previously boundless soft power. Trump’s war with Iran has accelerated the transition to green energy, a development from which its proclaimed economic adversary, China, has been the clearest beneficiary.
Today, 9/11 is largely a media-generated imaginary that serves to encourage fantasies on the part of some. Donald Trump can seriously tweet that he remembers being carried out of the WTC rubble by the helping hands of New York firemen. The Iranian Foreign Minster, Abbas Araghchi, countered by insisting that Iran has incontrovertible proof that on 9/11 Trump was actually busy on Epstein’s island. Opinions in the US will be divided as to which of these guys is telling the truth.