The ‘Clash’ that never was: How Sept. 11 attacks still shape global relations
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 47/100
| Mark Lennihan/AP/File Destroyed mullions, the vertical struts that once faced the soaring outer walls of the World Trade Center towers, were left standing behind a dust-covered bus and subway entrance after terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York, Sept. 11, 2001. Loading...
The nation was shell-shocked from the Sept. 11 attacks by Islamist terrorists – attacks that produced the worst loss of life the United States had suffered on its soil in a single day since the Civil War battle of Antietam.
To many Americans, the “clash of civilizations” historian Samuel Huntington had predicted nearly a decade earlier – that in the post-Cold War era, wars would be fought not between nations but between religions and cultures – suddenly threatened to come true.
Yet even as the ruins of the twin towers still smoldered in lower Manhattan, President George W. Bush left the White House on the sun-splashed morning of Sept. 17 for the Islamic Center of Washington two miles up Massachusetts Avenue.
After the 2001 attacks, pundits predicted a “clash of civilizations,” a geopolitical theory popular in the 1990s. The reality has been much more complicated.
There, he declared that America was not at war with Islam and that the U.S. did not confuse the nihilistic extremists – who claimed to advance their religion through terrorism – with Islam.
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” Mr. Bush said. “Islam is peace.” The U.S. president then quoted a passage from the Quran, stating that, “in the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil.”
Doug Mills/AP/File President George W. Bush delivers a statement as he stands with Muslim religious leaders during a visit to the Islamic Center of Washington on Sept. 17, 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now, a quarter century after that stunning attack, the jihadism that inspired the terrorists that day has been largely sidelined. And the future Huntington predicted of wars pitting religions and cultures against one another has for the most part not come true.
The reasons range from the limited appeal of the jihadists’ worldview and its incongruity with the challenges of life in a modern world, analysts say, to rising secularity and the return to big-power conflict that Huntington believed was something of the past.
Some historians and foreign policy analysts say that if there is a cautionary coda to add to the overarching demise of the “clash of civilizations,” it is this: A quarter century after launching a global war on terror that precipitated “endless wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. seems as enthralled as ever with the use of force to solve complex international challenges.
President Donald Trump’s war with Iran and his repeated threats to wipe out a “civilization” echo Huntington’s thesis and what some say is its inherent Islamophobia.
Still, for many, the broad waning of the “clash of civilizations” cannot be decoupled from the actions taken by leaders both in the West and in Arab and Muslim countries to thwart the extremists’ appeal and prevent the threatened clash.
And for many scholars, those efforts can be traced back to President Bush’s Islamic Center speech.
“It’s often forgotten now, but when President Bush went to the Islamic Center it was less than a week after the attacks,” notes Jon Alterman, senior vice president in global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Saying that alone was “remarkable,” he adds. “The president’s clear instinct was to not make this into a war on Islam, and that message resonated widely but particularly in Muslim and Arab countries.”
Mr. Alterman joined the State Department just a month after the attacks and eventually its policy-planning team. He recalls officials’ general bewilderment over how to respond to the attacks and the challenge posed by Al Qaeda – as well as the awkward and ineffective proposals the confusion engendered.
“My favorite was ‘mosque in a box.’ The idea was that we, the United States, would ship containers and drop boxes with everything the local populations needed to pray,” he recalls. “We had to gently explain,” he adds, “that aside from maybe a rug, Muslims don’t really need anything to be able to pray.”
More effective than much of the U.S. effort, Mr. Alterman says, have been the efforts by governments, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Jordan and Indonesia, to open the door if only a crack to reforms of their societies, and to address the aspirations of their people.
Saudi Arabia launched a cautious campaign of expanding individual rights, including for women, while Egypt moved to accept Islamist political participation – before eventually banning the Muslim Brotherhood. Indonesia accelerated political reforms initiated in 1998 that replaced a centralized military dictatorship with a decentralized democracy.
“The message of jihadism was essentially dark and murderous, and people wanted to escape dark and murderous, they wanted some measure of prosperity and better futures,” he says. “Al Qaeda was never going to address those aspirations, but governments could, and they started to.”
For some, President Bush stands out as a symbol of the post-9/11 quarter century for another reason: In many ways, he embodied the paradox of the West’s response to the challenge posed by Al Qaeda and jihadism. There were initiatives of compassion and solidarity with the Islamic world, but there was also the global war on terror, with its strains of Islamophobia.
“I credit George W. for his strong rhetorical stand that this was not a conflict between Islam and Christianity, and for his attempts to prevent the 9/11 aftermath from becoming a national crusade,” says Michael Doyle, an international relations scholar at Columbia University in New York.
Alex Brandon/AP/File President Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a news conference at the…
Read the original at Christian Science Monitor →
Open in TruthVane →