On September 11 2001 a series of daredevil coordinated terrorist attacks on symbols and institutions of U.S. economic and military power traumatised the United States. Such trauma would have been total had one of the hijacked aircraft hit the White House or the House of Congress instead of crashing in the fields of rural Pennsylvania. The attacks shattered the myth of
The fact that four commercial airliners were hijacked simultaneously and for several hours the hijackers were not intercepted and they hit most of their targets gave birth to a plethora of conspiracy theories whose bottom line was that the
In any event, the US immediately blamed Al Qaeda for the outrages because that organisation had been involved in a number of attacks on U.S. targets previously, including one on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on US embassies in two East African capitals in 1998. Moreover, the Americans claimed that a plot to attack targets in the U.S. had existed in a prolonged planning stage within the innermost circles of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda initially denied any involvement but when inculpating evidence began to be unearthed and some of its senior operatives were arrested and confessed their involvement, Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks in a video clip. Meanwhile
Yet the conspiracy theories have remained very much in circulation. Their greatest attraction outside the US has been the Arab Middle East but also the wider so-called Muslim world. The reason is that in the popular mind ideas of a US-Israeli plot to subjugate and humiliate Arab and Muslims still exist. The main reason was
However, when on October 07 2001 the US launched airstrikes on Afghanistan because the Taliban regime was not willing to surrender al Qaeda leaders, conspiracy theories took off forthwith. It now began to be argued that President Bush and his mentors such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had in connivance with the Pentagon hatched a plot to invade and occupy
Other theories that were projected included an ingenious Israeli plot to make the 9/11 attacks appear as a vile act of Muslims and thus turn the American public against Islam and Muslims. According to that theory, hundreds of Jews worked in the
Nothing contributed more to strengthening these conspiracy theories than the decision of the Bush administration to invade Iraq in March 2003. That invasion did not enjoyed popular legitimacy in the West and many people doubt if it was legal in any reasonable sense. Former UN Secretary-General described it as unlawful. From the Muslim point of view it was the resurgence of a historical crusade.
It is not the purpose of this essay to prove such theories wrong though some comments are in order. Firstly, nothing can be more disturbing for a superpower than to be exposed as weak and vulnerable. Why would the US power elite want to do that? If the answer is: to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq then one must assume that such a conspiracy was hatched by morons and not by some evil power elite. Because even after slaughtering approximately 3000 of its citizens and injuring many more the intervention in Afghanistan has been nearly a disaster. And that in Iraq has done more harm to U.S. influence and popularity than any other act of a U.S. government because it received stiff opposition both within the West as well as among Muslims and even other nations.
With regard to the Israeli involvement, the reasons for discarding such a theory are equally compelling. No such plot to slaughter thousands of innocent people can be foolproof. Any leak or exposure is possible and imagine the Israelis being found party to the murder of innocent citizens of a state without which it cannot maintain its existence. There is no evidence to suggest that Bush or the Pentagon were thinking of switching their loyalties from Israel to the Arabs, so how can a plot meant to blame the Muslims help Israel gain greater support than what it enjoys already?
I shall now try to demonstrate that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were masterminded and ordered by al Qaeda and carried out by its global network of operatives. Terrorism as a tool to challenge a state or some social and political order has deep historical roots in the politics of the world but from the late 19th century onwards it become attractive as an ideology to both extreme right and left wing political forces. Right-wing terrorism often times originated from within the establishment and was directed against revolutionaries, democrats and freedom fighters. Left-wing terrorism held an attraction to those convinced that if the state and its supportive institutions such as the church were attacked the social and political orders would collapse and people would be liberated from the yoke of organised authority.
In the late 19th century left-wing Russian anarchists used terrorism as a strategic weapon against the Czarist Empire; even as recently as the late 1970s such ideas attracted some marginal revolutionary groups such as the German Baader-Meinhof and the Italian Red Brigades. Left-wing anarchism is premised on the assumption that if the state is exposed as a paper tiger it will set in motion chain reactions that result in a spontaneous mass uprising, which in turn will mean that the state disintegrates and people are liberated from all forms of oppression. It is important to keep in mind that mainstream anarchist movements are not in favour of force and terror even though the state and other institutions of authority are considered oppressive and negative entities.
Some analysts, however, look upon al Qaeda as an Islamist vanguard party comparable to the Communist Party founded by Lenin. The idea of a vanguard party that Lenin advanced was that a group of dedicated revolutionaries can capture state power, and from that vantage point provide leadership to the working class to take part in a great societal experiment to transform a capitalist or feudal society into a socialist one.
Al Qaeda bears the hallmarks of a secretive, terrorist anarchist party and movement that may consider itself a vanguard of an Islamist revolution that will sweep all over the Muslim world as well as the wider world beyond it. Notwithstanding its roots among a band of dedicated cadres and leaders removed from state power and therefore representing what is being described currently as a non-state actor it represents a right-wing Islamo-anarchist movement that intends to liberate Muslims from the real or perceived domination by the Christian West and its Jewish and Hindu sidekicks, and placing them under the yoke of totalitarian Islam. It is therefore a peculiar type of anarchist terrorism.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks were meant to demonstrate that the
Muslims in the West have become an object of suspicion, this is especially accentuated when some individuals carry out terrorist outrages in the West or some plots are uncovered of planned attacks. Right-wing anti-immigration and racist parties and movements in the West are the beneficiaries of such radicalisation of Muslims. There are fears that civil liberties and democracy in general will be curtailed in the West and in some cases such legislation is already in place.
Did Al Qaeda anticipate all this? I seriously doubt that. As in the past and now, terrorism alone cannot change or transform society or bring down a state, unless both are beset with irreversible decay and disintegration. There is no evidence to suggest that the West in general or the
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The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science,
Source: Viewpoint
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