The rise of global Islamism, which was in part a response to American and Soviet imperialism, thus derailed the hopeful new order of liberal interventionism and launched a new phase of neo-colonialism with the Gulf War of 1991. In both Britain and France culture wars broke out over the issue of Islam. Immigrants of Arab or Pakistani origin identified increasingly as Muslims, while host communities panicked about invading ‘hordes’ and defined national identities which rejected multiculturalism and espoused monoculturalism. In Britain, there was a cult of beneficent imperialism and the Second World War while in France, painful memories of the Algerian War returned to haunt and divide. Immigrant communities felt alienated and excluded, and the young generations abandoned assimilation and defined themselves more radically as Muslims, loyal to a global Muslim community. Racial and religious tensions and violence increased, both at home and internationally, opening a road that would lead to 9/11.
8
Hubris and Nemesis: Iraq, the Colonial Fracture and Global Economic Crisis
At 8.45 a.m. on Tuesday 11 September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center of New York City. At 9.03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, flew into the Pentagon while a fourth, in which the passengers fought back against the terrorists, came down in a field in Pennsyvlania. These targets represented the financial centre of global capitalism and the nerve centre of US military power. The towers collapsed at 9.59 and 10.28 a.m. respectively. In the four attacks 3,000 people were killed and 6,000 injured. The core group of attackers belonged to the ‘Hamburg cell’ of Middle Eastern activists who had gone to study at the Hamburg Technical Institute in 1992–6, trained in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden in 1999, and went on to the United States in June 2000. The pilots of the deadly planes were Mohammed Atta, born in Cairo in 1968, Marwan al-Shehhi, born in Beirut in 1975, and Ziad Jarrah, born in the United Arab Emirates in 1978. ‘Muscle’ to control the passengers was provided by veterans from Saudi Arabia who had fought in Bosnia such as Khalid al-Mihdhar, born in 1975, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, born in 1976.1
The events of 9/11 were followed by four overlapping crises that shook the first decade of the twenty-first century. First, the displacement of liberal or humanitarian interventionism by new ambitions of empire, masquerading as a War on Terror which set aside all rules and provoked blowback from the regions invaded. Second, the alienation of immigrant communities at home by the pursuit of pseudo-colonial wars and the demonisation of Muslims as terrorists, so that some young immigrants came to identify less with the host community but with former oppressed colonial peoples or with global Islam. Third, a crisis of global capitalism, as global financial flows in pursuit of ever greater profits became unsustainable. The burst of the financial bubble in 2008 provoked economic recession, fiscal crisis and austerity, and inflicted pain on populations from the developing world and Europe to the United States. Fourth, increased and defensive nationalisms triggered a renewed crisis over Europe, this time over the proposed European constitution of 2004. This was rejected in a French referendum of 2005, which excused Britain from having to hold its own referendum, but only postponed her crisis by ten years.
‘American Empire (Get Used to It)’
9/11 was a watershed in global history. ‘History starts today’, said US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.2 While still governor of Texas, in November 1999, George W. Bush asserted that the goal of American foreign policy was ‘to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace. America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused – preferring greatness to power and justice to glory […] Let us reject the blinders of isolationism, just as we refuse the crown of empire.’3 Once elected president in 2000, however, Bush was surrounded by a group of neo-conservative politicians with other ideas. The Cold War had been won and nothing, logically, stood in the way of the United States imposing its will globally. A think tank founded in 1997 called the Project for the New American Century, whose leading lights included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, argued that the United States might take unilateral action in pursuit of its goals and use force preventively, before potential enemies could launch an attack. In 1998 they had put pressure on President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but did not prevail. In the Bush administration, however, they called the shots as respectively Vice-President, Secretary of Defence, Under-Secretary of Defence and Secretary of State. In the days and weeks after 9/11 they decided that Osama bin Laden had plotted the attacks, declared a War on Terror and made plans to invade those countries that were said to be harbouring terrorists, first Afghanistan, then Iraq.4
The Bush administration was supremely confident that it had the right answers and challenged the international community to follow its lead or, like the League of Nations, face historic oblivion. Bush told Congress on 20 September 2001 that the War on Terror had started and that ‘Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.’5 British Prime Minister Tony Blair was certainly with Bush. After they first met in February 2001 Blair basked in Bush’s announcement that Britain was ‘our strongest friend and closest ally’.6 Blair attended the 20 September session of Congress and was welcomed as a ‘friend’.
Billed as a War on Terror, and later as a war on the Axis of Evil which included Iraq and Iran, the American offensive appeared very much a war on Islamism and even on Islam. In his 20 September Congress address Bush explained that ‘The terrorists’ directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans and make no distinctions among military and civilians, including women and children.’ This black and white division of the world allowed Israel to show the United States that she too was signed up to the War on Terror against Palestinian ‘terrorists’.7 On 19 September 2001 Premier Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Old Jerusalem, a site which included the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Stones were thrown at him by angry Palestinians and this moment has been seen as the beginning of the Second or Al-Aqsa Intifada. On 23 November, Sharon visited Ground Zero, the site of the Twin Towers, and returned home saying that America and Israel were fighting the same War on Terror. In March, June and September 2002 the Israelis attacked the Palestinian National Authority in Ramallah, reducing much of it to rubble. They also built an Iron Wall to contain the Palestinians, cutting off villages from their fields and wells.8 The injustice and humiliation suffered by Palestinians were witnessed by Muslims worldwide on their TV screens and computers and provided a powerful incentive to take the fight to imperialists and Zionists.9 ‘For me, the most important thing is Palestine’, said 31-year-old Nabil, a Muslim held in a French prison. ‘There have been too many massacres. Frankly, I hate the Jews […] I live near Belleville in Paris. It is a Jewish area and I have Jewish friends, but when I get out, I’ll ditch them.’10
The United States was reluctant to let go of the liberal interventionist idea that it was fighting to bring democracy and the rule of law to the world. ‘Write this down’, Bush told Republican governors at the White House on 2 September 2002: ‘Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.’11 This suggested that the liberation of Kabul and Baghdad would be like the liberation of Paris in 1944, replacing dictatorship by democracy. What struck observers, however, was the scale and ferocity of the American attack on Afghanistan which began on 7 October 2001, after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, who was alleged to be in their hands.
‘These people were fascinated by historical examples of might’, Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann said of the neo-conservatives around Bush, ‘the Roman Empire, or eighteenth- or nineteenth-century
Great Britain, an admiration that is rather scarce in American history’.12 The model of British imperialism was picked up by journalist Max Boot. ‘It is striking and no coincidence’, he wrote in October 2001, ‘that America now faces the prospect of military action in many of the same lands where generations of British colonial soldiers went on campaigns. Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine, Persia, the Northwest Frontier (Pakistan). Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith-helmets.’13 Publicly the claim was made that the Americans were helping Afghanistan rebuild itself as a democratic nation, through the good offices of Karzai, who became the country’s interim president. Not everyone was fooled. According to Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times on 28 July 2002:
In Washington they call this nation-building lite. But empires don’t come lite. They come heavy, or they do not last. And neither does the peace they are meant to preserve. Call it peacekeeping or nation-building, call it what you like – imperial policing is what is going on in Mazar. In fact, America’s entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don’t like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America’s legions of soldiers, spooks and Special Forces straddling the globe?14
Six months later Ignatieff made the point even more strongly. The cover story of the New York Times on 3 January 2003 was ‘American Empire (Get Used to It)’. In his article on the burden of the American Empire, he warned, ‘What every schoolchild also knows about empires is that they eventually face nemeses. To call America the new Rome is at once to recall Rome’s glory and its eventual fate at the hands of the barbarians.’15
Empire, in reality, was not only imperial glory but colonial brutality. The provisos of liberal interventionism were punctured as early as 17 September 2001 when Bush announced, ‘there are no rules’. The War on Terror brought with it massacres, prisons, torture and the strengthening of the security state at home. In Afghanistan 500 Taliban forces who had surrendered were imprisoned in the fortress of Qala-i-Jangi. On 25 November 2001, as Americans moved in to root out al-Qaeda sympathisers among them, the POWs rose in revolt. They were ruthlessly put down by US bombing and only eighty-six survived.16 The struggle in Afghanistan became a magnet for young Muslims from the West to join the jihad against American and British imperialism. Many of them were captured and became part of the network of prisons being developed by the Americans and British – Bagram in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – where they could be held indefinitely and interrogated secretly. Three young British Muslims from the Birmingham area – Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, aged 20, and Shafiq Rasul, aged 24 – later known as the Tipton Three, were seized in Afghanistan in 2001. They were transferred to US military custody as enemy combatants and imprisoned in Guantanamo. Meanwhile Birmingham-born Moazzem Begg, now aged 33, who had been living with his family in Kabul and moved to Pakistan for safety, was arrested in February 2002 as an alleged member of al-Qaeda, held and tortured in Bagram prison, and transferred to Guantanamo a year later. The British offensive in Afghanistan also had the effect of alienating and radicalising groups of young Muslims back in Britain. Many young Pakistanis who had been imprisoned for their part in the July 2001 riots in Bradford, 82 per cent of whom were Muslim, came to identify with the struggle of their Muslim brothers while serving their term.17 The government responded to such threats by an Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill which was introduced in Parliament on 19 November 2001 and became law on 14 December. It allowed foreign nationals suspected of terrorism to be detained indefinitely without charge. Many of those arrested were held without charge in Belmarsh Prison in London, the United Kingdom’s response to Guantanamo.
War in Afghanistan was one thing; war against Iraq was another. It could be argued that al-Qaeda was being sheltered in the former but the case for war against the latter was more difficult to make. It would be necessary for the United Kingdom and United States to act together to persuade – indeed to mislead – the United Nations and worldwide public opinion. At a meeting with Vice-President Dick Cheney on 11 March 2002, Tony Blair said that ‘it was highly desirable to get rid of Saddam. The UK would help so long as there was a clever strategy.’18 The centre-piece of this strategy was to demonstrate that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The commitment to work together was explicit in Blair’s note to Bush of 28 July 2002 which began, ‘I will be with you, whatever’. The rest, and there was much of it, simply flowed from that. ‘If we recapitulate all the WMD, add his attempts to secure nuclear capability, and, as seems possible, add on the al-Qaeda link’, continued Blair, ‘it will be highly persuasive over here. Plus the abhorrent nature of the regime.’ On 12 September 2002, the first anniversary of 9/11, Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He denounced Iraq’s refusal since 1991 to meet UN demands for its disarmament, and indeed her development of ‘weapons of mass destruction’. This was less a request for solidarity than a threat that if they did not act the United Nations would be finished. Tony Blair immediately slapped him on the back: ‘Dear George, it was a brilliant speech. It puts us on exactly the right strategy to get the job done. The perception has been very positive with everyone challenged to come up to the mark.’19 On 8 November 2002 UN Security Council Resolution 1441 duly gave Iraq ‘a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations’, but it was less than clear that this resolution authorised military action if it did not.
This close conspiracy of the United States and United Kingdom had a chilling effect on their relations with other European countries, which were much less enthusiastic about the drive to war. France, together with Germany, Russia and China, wanted to give UN weapons inspectors more time to verify whether the Iraq regime did indeed have weapons of mass destruction before war was unleashed. On 22 January 2003 President Chirac welcomed German Chancellor Helmut Schroeder to Paris to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Élysée Treaty between General de Gaulle and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer which had cemented the two powers as the heart of the European Community. They agreed to stand up to the Americans, only to be denounced by Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld as representatives of ‘old Europe’.20 At its meeting on 14 February the Swedish head of weapons inspection Hans Blix reported that his inspectors had not yet found the cast-iron evidence of WMD they needed. The French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, turned the dismissal of ‘old Europe’ against the Americans by pointing out that Europe also stood for historical experience and solidarity. To loud applause he offered America, a new and brash power, the advice that
an old country, France, an old continent, Europe, which has known wars, occupation, barbarism, is telling you this today. A country that has not forgotten what it owes to the fighters for freedom who came from America or elsewhere. Which has not ceased to stand strongly in the eyes of History and of men. It wishes to remain faithful to its values and act resolutely with all members of the international community. It believes in our ability to build a better world together.21
On behalf of the Americans, the British drafted a Security Council resolution that effectively imposed an ultimatum on Iraq to disarm by 17 March or face war. This required the support of nine of the fifteen members of the Council, but France, Germany, Russia and China were not on board. Three of the undecided members were African and two, Guinea and Cameroon, were former French colonies whose bids for liberation France had done its best to frustrate. Villepin nevertheless drew on the remaining influence it enjoyed in Françafrique to make a lightning tour of these states on 9 March 2003. In Cameroon, Villepin announced that ‘France would not let a new resolution pass that would open the way to war in Iraq.’22
Worldwide, there was a powerful swell of public opinion against war. Huge demonstrations took place on 15 February 2003 in 600 cities from Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Los Angeles
, San Francisco and New York to Barcelona, Rome, London, Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki, Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Athens and Tokyo.23 Robin Cook, who had been Labour Foreign Secretary in the 1997 government and was Leader of the Commons after 2002, responded to the verdict of public opinion and the dangers of Blair ‘going to war as Sancho Panza to George Bush’s Don Quixote’ by resigning from the Cabinet on 17 March. Free to speak his mind, he told the Commons:
The longer that I have served in this place, the greater the respect I have for the good sense and collective wisdom of the British people. On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator. But they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain […] they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb on a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies.24
This speech, in the short term, was in vain. Tony Blair brandished the spectre of appeasement, the last refuge of all British politicians seeking a mandate for war. He warned the British people not to repeat the experience of the 1930s and ‘the almost universal refusal, for a long time, of people to believe Hitler was a threat’. Later he clarified, ‘I was careful not to conflate Saddam and Hitler and specifically disowned many of the glib comparisons between 2003 and 1933. But I did mention how joyful people had been at Munich when they thought action had been avoided.’25 This feat of oratory secured a Commons majority of 412 to 149 for a war that had not been sanctioned by the United Nations.
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