Maybe we should just forget 9/11 for all the shit it's caused us

1. Global Media Abhors US Response to 9-11 (from Alliance France Press)

Newspapers across the world have strongly criticised the US response to September 11, accusing the Bush administration of bungling its "war on terror" and squandering global goodwill by invading Iraq.

On the fifth anniversary of Al-Qaeda's assault on New York and Washington, editorials united Monday in condemning the attacks and expressing revulsion for the Islamic extremists who carried out the atrocity.

While papers said many people were still grappling with the immensity of what happened on that day, nearly all agreed the world had since become a more dangerous and uncertain place.

Much criticism, especially in the Midde East and Europe, was reserved for US President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq under the banner of the "war on terror".

The New York Times acknowledged the United States had lost the feeling of unity and purpose which gripped the nation in the aftermath of the attacks, and lamented a lost opportunity.

"When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy," said the paper's editorial.

Summing up the mood in the British press, the Financial Times said: "The way the Bush administration has trampled on the international rule of law and Geneva Conventions, while abrogating civil liberties and expanding executive power at home, has done huge damage not only to America's reputation but, more broadly, to the attractive power of Western values."

German daily Handelsblatt said the war in Iraq had been erroneously started in the name of September 11, while Spain's El Pais said the Bush administration used the attacks to impose a neo-conservative foreign policy.

"The result, five years after, is a more dangerous world," El Pais said.

The criticism, and in particular the condemnation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was echoed in newspapers across the Middle East and Asia.

Many Arab newspapers said the US campaign and the invasion of Iraq had pushed the world closer to a clash of civilisations between the West and the Muslim world.

"Instead of isolating and wiping out Al-Qaeda, Bush has created a long list of new foes in his ever-broadening war on terror," Lebanon's Daily Star said.

"In doing so, he has bolstered the popular impression that the United States is waging a crusade against Islam -- an impression which Al-Qaeda skillfully exploits in order to gain more support."

Egypt's semi-official Al-Ahram compared Bush to the mastermind of the attacks Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

"Five years ago, the history of the world changed twice, once in the hands of Bin Laden and his gang, and once in the hands of Bin Bush and his administration."

The Al-Ghad daily in Jordan was similarly critical saying: "The administration of George W. Bush used a vengeful mentality in dealing with the 9/11 crime and has turned the entire world into a battleground."

Many newspapers in Iran speculated that Washington staged the attacks so that it could justify attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraq, meanwhile, ignored the anniversary altogether with not a single mention of it in the press.

In Pakistan, a key US ally in the battle against Al-Qaeda, The News daily wrote a hard-hitting editorial entitled "Five Years of Nothing".

"Looking back it would be hard to say whether the years have been spent in something meaningful or constructive," it said. "Many would agree the world is a more dangerous place and the United States is nowhere close to winning the war on terror."

The US administration received some support from the media in Australia, where the government has been a staunch supporter of US policy since the 2001 attacks.

The Australian newspaper said terrorist strikes against Western interests since 9-11 in London, Madrid, Indonesia and elsewhere had left no doubt the world faced a concerted attack by extremists.

"Radical Islam is corrupting impressionable minds, encouraging disaffected youth and the newly converted with a poor understanding of faith to offer their lives as suicide bombers in what is essentially a political campaign."

In Thailand, The Nation said the impact of September 11 on Asia was much bigger than people wanted to admit, while in the Philippines the Manila Times said the damage was so great that many were still trying to cope.

"We are still shocked by the number of lives that were lost that day, close to 3,000. And we still remember how dread enveloped the world like a thick black shroud.

"But 9/11 left us with a deeper sense of loss, a loss of innocence. We are still trying to comprehend how hatred could drive people into a senseless act of violence. It is that loss that we find it hardest to get over."


2. On 9/11, New Yorkers Faced the Fire in the Minds of Men
Hollywood's attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise
By Slavoj Zizek

Two Hollywood films mark 9/11's fifth anniversary: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Both adopt a terse, realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity to them and most critics have praised their sober styles and avoidance of sensationalism. But it is the touch of authenticity that raises some disturbing questions.

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of "cognitive mapping" is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That's the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as "subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda". The result is that the political message of the two films resides in their abstention from delivering a direct political message. It is the message of an implicit trust in one's government: when under attack, one just has to do one's duty.

This is where the problem begins. The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.

The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Recall August's alert and the thwarted attempt to blow up a dozen planes on their way from London to the US. No doubt the alert was not a fake; to claim otherwise would be paranoiac. But a suspicion remains that it was a self-serving spectacle to accustom us to a permanent state of emergency. What space for manipulation do such events - where all that is publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves - open up? Is it not that they simply demand too much from us, the ordinary citizen: a degree of trust that those in power lost long ago? This is the sin for which Bush and Blair should never be forgiven.

What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the "happy 90s", the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war. But the problem is that the US is not in a state of war. For the large majority, daily life goes on and war remains the business of state agencies. The distinction between the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the same time a state of emergency.

When Bush celebrated the thirst for freedom in post-communist countries as a "fire in the minds of men", the unintended irony was that he used a phrase from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, where it designates the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: "The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses." What Bush didn't grasp is that on September 11, five years ago, New Yorkers saw and smelled the smoke from this fire.

(Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.)


3. Time to Join the Rest of the World
Forgetting September 11
By ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI

September 11, 2006 marks the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

If you are living in the United States, there is no way that you could have escaped from reading or hearing the sentence above, or something like it, over the past few weeks. One might think that it would be unnecessary to have to write or utter such a sentence, but nevertheless there isn't a mass media organ anywhere in the country that does not seem to feel the need to remind us, lest we forget, that September 11 is the anniversary of September 11.

Every day, residents of New York City still encounter bumper stickers and signs and other public markers exhorting us to "never forget" that date. But how could it be possible to do so? September 11, we have continually been told, was perhaps the most historic day in the history of the United States, the day when "our" lives-indeed, the entire world-changed forever. It would be hard to imagine the possibility of forgetting, even if you tried.

In his book Imagined Communities , Benedict Anderson suggests that one of the most important developments in the history of nationalism was the daily newspaper. Every morning, people within a bounded geographical region read essentially the same news in the same language, with a few minor variations. The general point of similarity, from the perspective of those reading the newspaper, is that all the news contained in it is somehow relevant to "us." This "us" is usually contained within national borders. If a plane crashes in Germany and five Americans are injured, this latter fact is taken to be news of a particular kind. Anderson is interested in the way this conveyance of news actually creates the "us" of national identification as an emotional connection: after all, the chances are that I, the average reader, have never met any of the five people on that plane; they might live thousands of miles away and have nothing in common with me. And yet, they are part of a larger "us" that we are constantly called upon to recognize; they make up that large group referred to by U.S. presidents as "my fellow Americans."

It is in this specific context that I propose a certain kind of remembering, and a certain kind of forgetting. Certainly, do not forget those who died on September 11, 2001. But remember them in the larger context of the millions of people throughout the world who have faced the consequences wrought by the U.S. government and its allies in retaliation. Don't forget the events that happened on September 11, 2001 and their aftermath; forget "September 11" as a glib phrase that has obfuscated this larger context and has been instead used by the U.S. government to wreak havoc throughout the world in the name of a principle that has not yet been actively rejected by people in the United States: the principle that American lives are somehow worth more than the lives of others.

In this context, it becomes necessary to try to imagine the five years since September 11, 2001 from the perspective of people in Afghanistan, who bore the first brunt of the U.S. government's revenge. The initial U.S.-led attack alone, mostly in the form of an air campaign, killed an estimated 3,400 people. Thousands more have died due the subsequent violence that has marked the continuing U.S.-led occupation of the country. Lest we forget, the establishment of a pattern of collective punishment and slaughter perpetrated against a larger population that had nothing to do with a given an act of aggression-which we have seen repeated in recent months by the Israeli government against populations in Gaza and Lebanon-was firmly set in place by the U.S. attack on and occupation of Afghanistan in retaliation for the attacks of September 11.

While the attack on Afghanistan was being carried out, people in the United States were introduced to two innovations in governance: the Patriot Act, part of an unprecedented attack on civil liberties whose effects are only now beginning to make themselves known through revelations such as those involving the National Security Agency; and the unveiling of the term "enemy combatants," as part of the U.S government's equally unprecedented attack on the guiding principles of international law and, in practice, as part of the larger process that has led to the detention, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of people throughout the world in a global prison system the full extent and horrors of which still remain unknown to us.

The anniversary of September 11, 2001 has to be viewed from the perspective of people in Iraq, who-as we now know-were always seen by the Bush Administration as the primary target of its manipulation of "September 11." Two years ago, estimates of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation stood at 100,000; according to recent reports, more than 10,000 have been killed in the last four months alone. But one does not have to engage in this calculus of horror to understand the scale of the destruction unleashed by the U.S. government wielding a sword labeled "September 11."

If we can allow ourselves to forget this "September 11," we might be able to remember that five years ago marked the beginning of a specific pattern of targeting communities in the United States that continues today. In the first year following September 11, 2001, three thousand Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians were detained in the United States without criminal charges. Thousands more have faced detention and deportation since then. Today U.S. politicians from both parties actively embrace racial profiling measures at airports and other public places-for "our" safety, of course. If it were not for the cloud of fear that has been caused by the constant invocation of "September 11," these proposals-essentially a set of differential and discriminatory laws, policies, and procedures directed at a particular group of citizens and residents based on their race, ethnicity, and/or religion-would be instantly identifiable for what they are: a recipe for apartheid.

In short, if people in the United States can forget the official version of "September 11," we stand a chance of remembering what these five years have meant to all the people of the world: in Palestine, as Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government instantly picked up the rhetoric of the U.S. government and began to intensify the brutality of its acts of repression and ethnic cleansing in the name of the global "war on terror"; in Haiti, as Haitians had to withstand yet another all-too-familiar intervention and occupation by U.S. and French troops; in Iran and Syria, which have lived under the threat of a U.S. attack since the inception of the war in Iraq; in Colombia, the first target of the Bush Administration's re-positioning of the "war on drugs" within the terms of the "war on terror," as Alvaro Uribe used his financial and military backing from the U.S. to consolidate power and repress dissent; in the Philippines, another "front" of the U.S.-backed "war on terror," where Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's government has similarly used the rhetoric that has arisen since "September 11" in order to repress democratic dissent.

In fact, if people in the United States can manage to momentarily forget "our" September 11, we might even be able to remember, against the forgetting pushed upon us, that the world did not begin on September 11, 2001. As a particular pneumonic device, there is the memory of what Ariel Dorfman and others have called "the other September 11": September 11, 2006 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This can help us remember the struggle of people throughout the Americas against U.S. imperialism that has been going on for decades and that continues today.

This particular form of historical remembering also means remembering-or, for many people, learning for the first time-that none of what has been listed above as the aftermath of "September 11" in fact began on that day. Afghanistan had been a site of U.S.-sponsored violence since the Cold War days of the 1980s; Iraq has been under attack at the hands of the U.S. and its allies in the form of sanctions and air strikes since 1991; in the other instances, the "war on terror" has led to the intensification of already-existing forms of repression and violence, generally with U.S. funding and military support, over the past five years. In the U.S. itself, all of the necessary laws and mechanisms necessary for the Patriot Act and the state of siege imposed against particular immigrant communities since September 11, 2001 had already been put in place under the Clinton Administration throughout the 1990s. This is not to mention the many communities in the United States, foremost among them the African American community, who have not had a moment of respite from "racial profiling" and a state of lived apartheid since the establishment of the nation.

All this remembering needs to begin immediately. For among the many ways that the left in the United States failed after September 11, 2001, this is one of the most important: the failure to fight to make people in the United States see their own place in the world. In the days immediately following the attacks, Slavoj Zizek wrote of the experience of walking the streets of lower Manhattan, still filled with rubble and clouded with smoke, and of another scene that came to mind: "If one adds to the situation in New York rapist gangs and a dozen or so snipers blindly targeting people who walk along the streets, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago." For this, he was roundly criticized, including by those on the left, for "insensitivity." Apparently, "our" pain was incomparable to the pain of the rest of the world.

But this point is more crucial today than ever before. People in New York are far from the only ones who have had to watch the bodies of loved ones brought out from the rubble of a destroyed building. (If you can forget "September 11," you might remember Lebanon.) This was true before September 11, 2001; and, thanks largely to the military efforts of the U.S. government, it has certainly been true over the past five years. The unspoken consensus among people in the United States that American lives are worth more than others must be addressed and dispelled once and for all, and this effort must become a major part of the fight against the Bush administration's "war on terror."

This inability to overcome American parochialism and to allow people here to imagine a larger-than-national mindset-call it a critical internationalism, call it a radical cosmopolitanism, call it what you like-continues to haunt the present. It is this sense of isolation from the rest of the world that allows people in this country to be again and again convinced by various administrations that the role of the United States is to somehow oversee and police the world, rather than to become part of building international solutions. Of course, like the police themselves in all too many places, the government of the United States remains entirely unaccountable, either to the people of the world or even to its own citizens.

But another thing has happened during those five years whose anniversary we are being told to commemorate. Around the world, people's movements have constantly resisted the U.S. government's attempts to impose its own vision of the world through the use of "September 11." In place of this "September 11," I offer another date to remember: February 15, 2003, when more than eleven million people across the world stood together, not just against the imminent U.S. attack on Iraq, but against the larger imposition of U.S. hegemony across the globe.

The spirit of resistance that came together on February 15 still exists; it manifests itself, for example, in the protests that erupt every time a U.S. official sets foot anywhere in the world today. But the millions who stood, and who continue to stand, against the actions of the U.S. government are also watching us today, and wondering-as they should-about the relative lack of resistance on the part of people here in the United States against their own government's acts of terror since September 11, 2001. It is past time for people in the United States to forget the official version of "September 11" and to join this new world that was glimpsed on February 15.

For the corollary of Zizek's point, in comparing New York and Sarajevo, was that only by accepting such a connection can Americans begin to make what he called "the long-overdue move from 'A thing like this should not happen HERE!' to 'A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!'" Forgetting "September 11" is an important step towards a very different kind of remembering of the events of that day within a larger history and a larger context, one that extends beyond national borders and imagines a different kind of world. It would mean, for people in the United States, at long last trying to find a way, with due humility, to join the rest of the world.

(Anthony Alessandrini is an Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY in Brooklyn, and an organizer with the Action Wednesdays Against War collective. He can be reached at tonyalessandrini@yahoo.com)


4. The End of Civilization -- by James Carroll

To return in memory to that beautiful blue morning is to visit a lost country, a place as beloved as it is gone. The first thing to recall is how alike we Americans were in what we felt that day. Only months before, in the acrimonious aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the nation had seemed so divided. It would seem so again. But during the hours of Sept. 11, 2001, we were brought together as we hadn't been in years, a people bound by fear and trembling. What a few saw in person, and what the vast population saw on television, was a glimpse of the human future to which, ordinarily, we are willfully blind.

It is important to distinguish between the event and the interpretation of it. The experience of 9/11 was one thing, the meanings imposed upon it afterward are another. Those meanings (``the clash of civilizations"; a Manichaean good-evil polarity; the rule of law versus the rush to war; blood for oil; imperial hubris or democracy now; Israel as cause or effect) are in dispute. America's enemy has triumphed already in the way Americans regard one another as enemies.

Abstracting from such painfully contested interpretations, can we return to the event that set all of this in motion? Today, can we leave the conflict aside to ask, Why was this nation's first reaction to the catastrophe of New York-Washington-Pennsylvania defined by the empathy we felt for one another? Indeed, empathy that day was nearly universal, including much of the world's instant identification with American anguish. Before we knew anything about Al Qaeda, bin Laden, the Cheney-Wolfowitz war plan, the new threat of global terrorism, the axis of evil -- the most important aspect of the event had already occurred . This aspect, however, the interpretations would ignore.

Some (including me) have said that an inch below the surface of our horrified reaction was a long-standing but subliminal dread of a nuclear war, as if the smoke above Ground Zero were a mushroom cloud, the Manhattan Project come at last to Manhattan. Soon enough, nuclear preoccupation (Iraq's WMD, Iran's enriched uranium, North Korea's bomb) would define the national purpose (with the United States renewing its own nuclear weapons program).

But I believe now that the immediate trauma Americans experienced that first morning was still more primitive than that. Beyond politics, beyond nationality even, what humans saw in that flash was a glimpse of nothing less than the end of the world. Here is the final meaning of the name ``World Trade Center" -- what happened that day was a world-event, almost certainly the first fully realized one in history. The collapse of the Twin Towers on themselves was a manifestation of the radical contingency of the human project itself. The terrorists were mere instruments of this world-historic destruction, far exceeding as it did any outcome they could have imagined. Their purposes were mundane, even irrelevant, when compared to the transcendent epiphany that resulted from the unprecedented combination of venality, accident, technological innovation, and instantaneous global communication.

What did we see? Not merely the end of the majestic towers, although their majesty was essential to what we saw. Not merely the mortality of those men and women whose bodies could be glimpsed in free fall (hemlines and neckties fluttering), although their mortality was absolute. We saw the stunning courage of a legion of heroes, rushing right before our eyes into selfless jeopardy, and we saw, finally, how such heroism was futile. In that destruction, we saw the destruction of the mainspring of meaning and hope -- not the clash of civilization, but the end of it. This was more than a sense of individual mortality, the sure knowledge of a coming death that each one carries. We humans live with that by assuming the open-ended continuation of other lives, our children and their children -- on into the indefinite future. But on 9/11, we saw the future itself as mortal.

In that vision, all that ordinarily separates humans was instantly ash. With the future ripped away from us, there was only the present. For a moment, we stopped struggling against time, and entered its most sovereign province, also known as providence. If all things will cease to exist, then the wonder is that they exist right now. With the fateful indifference of history so instantaneously clear, the human rejection of such indifference loomed as the magnificent exception. So, of course, we turned toward one another -- what else to call it? -- in love.

(James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Boston Globe. His most recent book is " Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War”)


5. The War with al-Qaeda – by Prof Juan Cole (from juancole.com)

The war with al-Qaeda has many dimensions. There is the war with the organization itself. There is the struggle against its offshoots and copycats. There is cooperation with Muslim governments and communities in derailing the threat. There is the question of the strength of Sunni fundamentalist parties that might support al-Qaeda. And there is winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

The war with the organization itself largely succeeded by 2003 and no further progress seems to have been made since that time. Some 600 al-Qaeda operatives were captured in Pakistan, many of them through a sting arranged inside the Karachi Western Union office, according to Ron Susskind. The original al-Qaeda has been badly disrupted as to command and control.

It is not, however, dead. Every evidence is that the London subway bombings of a little over a year ago had a strong connection to Ayman al-Zawahiri. He appears to have worked with a Pakistani terrorist group such as Jaish-i Muhammad or Lashkar-i Tayyibah or whatever they are calling themselves these days to recruit the young Britons that carried out the attack. Al-Zawahiri had in his possession their suicide tapes, and broadcast them on Aljazeera. It is urgent that Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri be captured. Declan Walsh explains why this is is difficult .

It may well be that the Egyptian Islamic Jihad offshoot operating in the Sinai, which conducted the Sharm El Shaikh and Taba bombings of tourist hotels, has a link to Zawahiri.

Al-Qaeda's popularity is declining in some quarters. A Pew poll in 2005 found that significantly fewer numbers of Moroccans, Turks and Indonesians were confident in Bin Laden that year than the two previous years. On the other hand, a majority of Jordanians and Pakistanis continued to have a high regard for his competency.

The Madrid train bombings show the severe challenge posed by local copycat groups that do not have a direct connection to al-Qaeda, but take up one of its calls to action and learn techniques from the internet. If a group has at least some email connections to a known terror group or individual already under surveillance, at least there is a chance of cracking the plot. If they are all "newskins," that makes them invisible.

US cooperation with Middle Eastern governments is at a high level, from all accounts. The operation against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi appears to have been very significantly a Jordanian operation. Egypt and the US conduct joint military exercises. I have a sense that the relationship with Morocco has deepened. Algeria's government fought a decade-long civil war against Islamist political forces, some of them very violent, and has reason to cooperate.

On the negative side, the Sunni Arabs of Iraq appear ever increasingly to be organized by radical Muslim fundamentalist forces of various sorts. This population of some 5 million had been among the bulwarks of secular Arab nationalism in the past, but those days are long gone.

The Islamic Action Council in Pakistan, some members of which sympathize with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, continues to rule the Northwest Frontier Province. The central government, however, which is more secular, has stopped it from implementing Islamic law and hisbah (measures that give anyone standing in enforcing morality on others). Parliament has even moved to rewrite Pakistan's flawed rape law , which is based on Gen. Zia ul-Haq's Islamization measures and is so poorly framed that it often ends up allowing the victims to be punished!

Four MPs from the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan went to mourn Zarqawi's death with his family, triggering sanctions against them. The incident raised questions about how much distance there is between the Salafi Jihadis, the violent revivalists, and the conservative religious parties that seem to eschew violence and pursue ordinary politics.

The US pressured Egypt to open up its parliamentary elections last fall, and the Mubarak regime took revenge by letting 88 Muslim Brother delegates be seated in a chanber with a little over 400 members. These supported Hizbullah in the recent Israel-Lebanon War and have demanded that the Camp David Accords be revoked.

Hamas won the elections in the Palestine Authority. The Israelis have taken many of the elected Hamas representatives and officials into custody, however, and have repeatedly bombed the Interior Ministry in Gaza. These developments have added to the popularity of Hamas and radical fundamentalism while making a mockery of the Bush administration's stated commitment to democratization.

Hizbullah itself achieved enormous popularity, and enhanced the prestige of radical Muslim fundamentalism, by its ability to make a stand before the Israeli military machine. This development will ripple through the region, to the disadvantage of more secular, moderate forces.

The evidence with regard to hearts and minds is mixed. The Pew Global Attitudes Project reports on Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, with a population of 224 mn. In 2000, 70 percent of Indonesians viewed the United States favorably. (Such numbers were typical for US Muslim allies in areas not consumed by the Arab-Israeli conflict). In 2002 as a result of the Afghanistan war, the number fell to 60 percent. Then in 2003 after Bush invaded Iraq, it fell to 15 percent . After Bush sent the US Navy to help Indonesia in the aftermath of the tsunami, the numbers rebounded in 2005 to 38 percent. In 2006 they have fallen again, down to 30 percent.

So since 2000, we have fallen from 70 percent approval in Indonesia to only 30 percent, and at some points we were way down. This story contains a caution and also some encouraging news. The caution is that we are losing the Indonesia public because of this Iraq occupation. It is true in Turkey, as well, and lots of other places. The good news is that it is not irreversible. Do some nice things for someone, and the numbers go up. (The numbers also went up in Pakistan after we diverted some military helicopters to help the victims of the Kashmir earthquake). If we ended our Iraq presence, there is a chance we could repair these relationships with some munificent gestures.

In Turkey, the favorability rating of the US in 2002 was 52 percent. It is now 15 percent. That is a scary plummet! I suspect it is all about Iraq, and particularly the feeling that the US is letting the Iraqi Kurds harbor the PKK terrorists, who are blowing things up in Turkey.

The only really good news in the Pew findings is that the US has grown in popularity in Morocco, to nearly 50%, and is especially popular with youth and women. Moroccans have said they are worried about terrorism and about too much influence of religion in politics. I don't entirely understand what is driving the Morocco numbers, since they were pretty upset about Iraq, but the change should be studied for what it can tell us about doing things right. One thing that helps is that Morocco is a long way from the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, in fact, has good behind the scenes relations with Israel.

The Arab world mostly just dislikes US policy, mainly because of kneejerk support for Israeli depredations against Palestinians. The dislike doesn't change that much, though we reached a nadir in 2003-2004. In 2002 76 percent of the Egyptian public disapproved of us. In 2004 that rose to 98 percent . It has fallen down to 86 percent in 2006. Very few Egyptians approve of US foreign policy. They don't even like US intervention to open up the Egyptian political system.

To the extent that small terrorist groups benefit in their recruitment and in motivating recruits from deeply negative attitudes to the United States, these polling numbers are extremely disturbing. The main things driving a polarization between Muslim publics and the US are not al-Qaeda or terrorism, however. They are Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. It is the policy. The policy can provoke anger and engender threat, and that is why it had better be a damn good policy. It can also make for friendships, which is what we should be aiming at.

It wouldn't take much now to settle the Israel-Palestine thing, and the time is ripe to have Israel give back the Golan to Syria and the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon in return for a genuine peace process. The Israelis are not made more secure by crowding into the West Bank or bombing Gaza daily. South Lebanon has demonstrated the dangers of ever more sophisticated microwars over rugged territory. It is time for Israel, and for the United States, to do the right thing and rescue the Palestinians from the curse of statelessness, the slavery of the 21st century. Ending this debilitating struggle would also be the very best thing for the Israelis themselves. In one fell swoop, the US would have solved 80 percent of its problems with the Muslim world and vastly reduced the threat of terrorism.

But of all the things this administration has done badly, it has been worst of all at making friends in the region. That could end up hurting us most of all, and playing into Bin Laden's increasingly ghostly hands.


6. 9/11/06 (NY Times editorial)

The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years. The attacks themselves have begun to acquire the aura of inevitability that comes with being part of history. We can argue about what one president or another might have done to head them off, but we cannot really imagine a world in which they never happened, any more than we can imagine what we would be like today if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor.

What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as well?

The time when we felt drawn together, changed by the shock of what had occurred, lasted long beyond the funerals, ceremonies and promises never to forget. It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.

But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.

That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.

When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.

Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement.

Today, every elected official in the country will stop and remember 9/11. The president will remind the country that he has spent most of his administration fighting terrorism, and his opponents will point out that Osama bin Laden is still at large. It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction.

Over the last week, the White House has been vigorously warning the country what awful things would happen in Iraq if American troops left, while his critics have pointed out how impossible the current situation is. They are almost certainly both right. But unless people on both sides are willing to come up with a plan that acknowledges both truths and accepts the risk of making real-world proposals, we will be stuck in the same place forever.

If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances.