September 11, 2011
ALL AMERICA'S WARS HAVE BEEN WARS OF CHOICE:
The legacy of that terrible time will be less significant than we then feared (Francis Fukuyama, 9/11/11, The Guardian)
The real problem was political. As the terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, democratic publics always overreact to the threat of terrorism. It would have been very difficult for an American administration of any stripe to tell the public the truth after September 11, namely, that western civilisation was not facing an existential threat from al-Qaida, but rather a long twilight struggle best fought by police and intelligence agencies.The Bush administration did much the opposite, elevating the "war on terrorism" to the level of 20th-century struggles against fascism and communism, and justifying its invasion of Iraq on these grounds. By neglecting Afghanistan and occupying Iraq, it turned both countries into magnets for new terrorist recruitment, diminished its own moral stature through prisoner abuse, and tarnished the name of democracy promotion.
September 11 spawned many theories of a Muslim or Arab exception to the global trend toward democracy. After the green uprising in Iran and the Arab Spring, we can see clearly that this was one area where the Bush administration was right: there was no cultural or religious obstacle to the spread of democratic ideas in the Middle East; only, it would have to come about through the people's own agency and not as a gift of a foreign power. Even if democracy does not emerge quickly in places such as Egypt and Tunisia, the popular mobilisation we have seen signals a key social trend far more powerful than anything a Bin Laden or Zawahiri could muster.
As Mr. Fukuyama accidentally acknowledges, the war on Islamic dictatorship turned out to be exactly like the wars on communism and Nazism, unnecessary but easily won. This was just the coda to The Long War and wholly of a piece with our natural tendency to hasten the End of History.
Posted by oj at September 11, 2011 8:46 AM
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