Tripoli suffered heavy fighting in May, 2014. Demotix/Maryline Dumas. All rights reserved.9/11 was a crime against the US and a crime against humanity. The trauma of the planes crashing into the World Trade Towers will remain an image of lasting profanity. Since then, wars have been fought to keep terrorism offshore and to eradicate extremism and despotism at their source.
Recently, there is much press commentary about the consequences of failed post-9/11 wars and intervention, renewed by the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Commentators note with alarm the spread of IS across Northern Syria, large swathes of Iraq, parts of Libya and other countries with copycat armed groups. The beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya and 45 people burned to death in Iraq inevitably raise the loudest possible alarm; the grotesqueness of the events only matched by the brazenness of the executioners’ celebrations. There is a call, again, to arms.
Some blame the failure to stabilise Afghanistan after 2001 on the start of the war in Iraq in 2003. Some blame the failure of the war in Iraq on a lack of adequate planning and a failure to follow through. Some blame the failure of intervention in Libya on reluctance to put “boots on the ground” due to the widespread war fatigue that followed Afghanistan and Iraq. Some people blame the chaos in Syria on the ad hoc arming of rebel groups and an unwillingness to intervene more directly. The point being that all these wars might have succeeded if only the tactics had been better, the strategy sharper, and post-conflict reconstruction more clearly defined.
