9-11: Twenty years later, a world less safe

1. Airports are more secure but the streets and neighbourhoods less so

The most tangible change in daily life has been in the way we fly. Security at airports increased over the last two decades, with passengers now required to go through X-ray machines before they get to the gate. Taking off your shoes and belt at security is a regular occurrence. Large liquids like shampoos or body washes, and knives were banned on airplanes after 9/11. While attacks on planes have become rarer (even if Malta experienced one by alleged Gaddafi loyalists in 2016) terrorist attacks on soft targets like the Bataclan theatre in 2015 in Paris, have become more regular. An emergent far-right that fans Islamophobia also contributed to more insecurity, culminating in a spate of attacks on mosques like that in Churchville, New Zealand. And the allure of jihad remained strong even among second and third-generation migrants living in marginalised ghettoes and where countries are devastated by war and western occupations. In short the “war on terror” unleashed even more savagery and America and the West are still hated, and in some cases with good reason.

2. Bin Laden, Saddam and Gaddafi are gone… the Taliban is back

Osama Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. special forces ground attack on his Pakistani compound in 2011 in what looked like an extra-judicial execution. Saddam Hussein was hanged by an Iraqi court in 2006, while western-backed rebel insurgents killed Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Of the three, only Bin Laden was linked to 9-11. And while Saddam was a brutal and dangerous dictator who gassed his own people when he was in the West’s good books still fighting Iran, claims by the US. that he posed a global security through his WMD programme and links to Al Qaeda were bogus. Gaddafi dismantled his more real WMD programme to save his skin, but his rehabilitation as a trusted guardian of the EU’s external frontier was always fragile, and interrupted by the Arab Spring which prompted a so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ by French, US, and UK-backed forces which left the country in chaos. Libya and Iraq remain destabilised, and Afghanistan is now back in the hands of the Taliban.

After 9-11, George W. Bush and Tony Blair moved fast to initiate war against Iraq by attempting to convince the United Nations Security Council that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction

3. The Middle East is still ruled by nasty monarchs, dictators and occupiers

Despite claims by the likes of Tony Blair that the Iraq invasion would serve as a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, the region still harbours some of the most unsavoury and repressive rulers in the world, like the Saudis and their bloody war in Yemen for the past years. Thee courage of protesters in the streets of Cairo, Benghazi, Tunis and Damascus did unleash a wave of hope which brought about the downfall of western-backed dictators like Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali. But a counter-revolution set in with the military taking back power in Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, whose security services are notorious for torturing and butchering their victims. And in Syria, Bashar al-Assad is backed by Russia, and winning his war against an opposition that started as a peaceful democratic challenge but then was radicalised by sheer brutal repression. The festering wounds of the occupation of Palestine, now a sideshow as wilder fires raged in Syria and Iraq, remain unseen.

Withthe exception of Tunisia’s fragile democracy, dictators and monarchs still rule through sheer brutality. All after 9-11 strengthened the misguided narrative that dictators are best to keep the Arab masses in line, a narrative favoured by isolationists and right-wing sovereignists who like dictators that can keep migrants away. No wonder Donald Trump praised the Saudi monarchy (“a magnificent kingdom”), Al Sisi (“a fantastic guy”) and even the Taliban (“good fighters who are really smart”).

Even regional powers like Turkey, the Saudis, Qatar, the UAE and Pakistan have their own links with radical groups like Isis and Al Nusra in Syria and the Taliban, pursuing their own strategic interests. In 2015 the Turks looked away as Isis advanced into the Kurdish border towns in Syrian; ironically, the Americans gave cover to the communist Kurds, until they succumbed to pressure by Reccep Erdogan.

The Taliban resurgence again puts a difficult question to the anti-war movement: should the west withdraw after unleashing hell, to see Afghanistan relapse into the dark ages? As Joe Biden came to realise, staying on may well have meant keep digging in a swamp from which new monsters were likely to emerge.

Bin Laden, gone... Saddam Hussein... gone. But the Middle East remains still in the grip of dictators, the brutal repression of their people, and new terror attacks on European soil

4. Terror threats enabled the surveillance complex, deprive human rights and clamp down on whistleblowers

Under George W. Bush, the United States waged their generic “war on terror” without Congress’s approval but also used it to amass more intel on citizens. The Patriot Act made it easier to use surveillance against its own citizens. Torture was disguised as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’; hundreds were detained in Guantanamo Bay to evade international law; U.S. allies were bullied to assist in secretive ‘rendition flights’ for interrogation and torture. While the war on terror was nominally fought in the name of western democratic values, it eroded these same values to the extent as illustrated by the cases of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who faced American wrath simply for revealing the ugly truths of the war. Indeed it was the images from hell-holes like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq which dealt a fatal blow to U.S. humanitarian pretensions.

5. After setting the world on fire, the US is in retreat as China is on the rise

After over-extending itself in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the US is in full retreat. Now an assortment of regional powers and an emergent China want to set the tune, such as China’s Silk Road diplomacy across Central Asia. Less squeamish on human rights but sharing an interest in keeping Islamic terrorism at bay due to fears of Muslim insurgency at home, China seems to have a freer hand in dealing with despotic regimes. Vladimir Putin’s Russia also carved out its own foreign policy in hotspots like Syria, where it backs the murderous Assad regime. Bush’s unilateralism contributed to an unstable and violent world; but the absence of a multilateral alternative, and a durable system of global governance bound by respect of human rights, has left a vacuum, now increasingly being filled by an assortment of nasty tyrants.

Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden have suffered imprisonment, forced exile, trumped-up charges, and the threat of extradition to the United States for having blown the whistle on the United States’ human rights abuses and their surveillance-state complex

6. Europe bluffs its way on the international stage but remains impotent

France and Germany did distinguish themselves from the US during the invasion of Iraq by refusing to support the war. But with Tony Blair’s Britain actively joining the invasion and other countries like Poland supporting it, the war deepened rifts within the EU. Since then the EU has struggled to build its own common foreign and defence policy, which has been further destabilised by Putin’s support for the European far-right through social media manipulation.

7. Malta remains neutral but more exposed to migration flows, while global checks on financing of terrorism has caught up with its economic miracle

One of the consequences of the 9-11 attacks was greater concern on funding to terrorist organisation and organised crime through elaborate financial transactions, which exploited loopholes in the global capitalist economy. Although the FATF greylisting was more the result of Malta being put under the spotlight as a result of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination, the mechanisms set in place to police financial transactions was a direct consequence of 9-11.

The international climate was also at odds with the Labour government’s golden passport scheme which raised fears of infiltration of the Schengen area by unsavoury groups. The greater instability brought about by the war on terror, particularly the spillage of the monsters unleashed by Iraq into neighbouring Syria and chaos in Libya, also contributed to a greater influx of migrants across the Mediterranean.

This has increased the temptation to entrust the policing of the EU external borders in the hands of coastguards like Libya’s, who are not bound by the strictures of international law.

Malta also came under increased pressure from the US to sign a SOFA agreement exempting US military personnel from local jurisdiction which would further erode the country’s constitutional neutrality. And while Malta has had an active role in supporting the emergence of a stable government in Libya, for most of the past 20 years its foreign policy has been relegated to an after-thought of commercial and energy deals. Even hallmarks of Malta’s foreign policy like its support for a Palestinian state have been side-lined, resulting in an erosion of the country’s ‘soft power’ and influence.

Yet these have also been fatally wounded by reputational problems arising from corruption and the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, which was in its own way Malta’s own mini “9-11 moment”.