The TV cameraman constantly wipes the glass clean of the soot and tiny specks of paper sticking to the lens. As I watch the screen, it is close to impossible to grasp what exactly is taking place. Rescue workers pass by like shadows, very close, yet in the distance. The light slowly fades, everything is blurred. This, I think, is what drowning must be like.
CBS documentary, six months after 11 September 2001, calls from the deep a number of feelings. For a few weeks last autumn it felt as if the message of globalisation no man, nor nation, is an island really had registered in the United States. These weeks feel distant now, as if only children of my imagination.
Instead darkness rules the day, and the world is returning to the years before 1989. The battle against communism morphed into the combat against terrorism. Perhaps the years between 1989 and 2001 only represented a glimpse of what could have been, a fleeting moment of possibility?
A condition, not just a war
The winter brought daily reports telling us that this was a totally new war in a reconfigured world. Instead, it turned out to be a remarkably traditional war, with high-tech bombs and all too familiar horror scenes from distant villages. As the light slowly faded over Afghanistan, body parts of what were deemed unfortunate but necessary victims in the search for terrorists, were swept away by desert storms. The American media remain tongue-tied on the number of civilian casualties. Darkness reigns here, too.
Some statistics suggest that since the war in Afghanistan has now claimed as many deaths as 11 September, an eye-for-an-eye kind of justice has been achieved. Does this mean that the war draws to a close? Hardly, since we are no longer merely dealing with a war, but with a condition.
The new just turned out to be a re-run of the very familiar. In one leap, the American administration returned to the simple conflict pattern laid out during the cold war. Undoubtedly the safest route for a political and military elite for whom the 1990s constituted not a promise, but a threat: a short but frustrating period of bewilderment, insecurity, and loss of purpose.
Today, the question as to what the only remaining empire was to do with its solitary supremacy is answered. American exceptionalism the feeling of being unique, and chosen to save the rest of the world from their unfortunate shortcomings is as alive today as it was during Dwight D Eisenhower's presidency.
A missed opportunity
After the Berlin wall collapsed, the possibility of a new way of deciphering the world struggled for space in public media and politics as well as in the private conversations of citizens. During the cold war, international conventions on human rights had been reduced to arguments or tools used by both sides in the dominant world conflict. Now, it seemed they could become not only a means but also the end itself in the way we interpreted the world.
The possibility of a reshaped public understanding with human rights at its heart was advanced in books like John Rawlss The Law of Peoples. It was only logical that social rights too would now be conceptualised in global terms. New global movements seeking justice between the north and the south added the social dimension that had been so often forgotten as an indispensable component of human rights.
These principles started to be embodied in institutions. The International Criminal Court (ICC) and the war tribunals following Rwanda and Bosnia even suggested that a global legal system was possible. Augusto Pinochet was a wanted man, and Henry Kissinger cancelled airline reservations to some countries. Walls everywhere were under attack.
To a certain extent, the world had begun to think of itself as one, a place where equality was not only necessary, but possible. There were even voices heard in favour of a global tax on the transactions of capital, or questioning the superpowers veto in the UN Security Council. The enemy line was being drawn in a different place from that during the cold war; this time the foe was the oppressor who violated human rights and who built the edifices sustaining that repression.
A war of interpretation
The aftermath of 11 September could have seen this new narrative of international cooperation, human rights and justice, triumph. Those guilty could have been forced to face an international criminal court, since the victims were not only US citizens, but representatives of forty-two different nations.
Dont misunderstand me. Violent crime must sometimes be countered with force. This holds especially true when we are dealing with an entire guerrilla movement, protected by an all-encompassing regime of terror. The fact that al-Qaida, the Taliban regime and their networks are now dispersed and weakened is a relief, not just for Europe and the US, but for all democrats who for years have worked for a free middle east. Al-Qaidas ideology is fascism on the basis of Islam, as Christopher Hitchens so accurately describes it. Clearly, there are situations where fascism has to be met by violence, and there is no doubt that this was such a case.
However, considering the war against al-Qaida righteous does not necessarily mean uncritically embracing it. For the war on terror is more than a military campaign; it is also an attempt to establish a new global narrative. It is a war about how to interpret the world, how to structure policy and politics, how to shape lives. Two discourses are posited against one another, two discourses that in the long run are incompatible and where the ultimate purpose of the US is to erase the dominance of the post-1989 one that put human rights and social justice at its centre.
The image of terrorists that slowly takes shape in American media and politics always presents them as the others. We never re-live the images of the Oklahoma City bombing. Instead TV screens overflow with the threat from outside; Africans, Arabs, Asians, even gullible and naïve Europeans are potential terrorists or accomplices. John Walker Lindh faces civil trial and inclusion in the legal justice system. The anonymous Afghans, Pakistani, Brits, Swedes, or other nationalities placed in Guantanamo Bay are excluded from the same rights. This is only one small but significant consequence of the new global dichotomy the US is attempting to establish.
A report from Human Rights Watch shows that several countries since 11 September legitimise their infractions on human rights by blaming terrorism. The new narrative is already in place and silences the voices of those who are tortured and mutilated in the name of anti-terrorism or national sovereignty. This narrative closes its eyes to the individual and strengthens the power of those regimes loyal to the empire.
Darkness falls
The disastrous escalation of the Palestine conflict is but one appalling illustration of the consequences of the terrorist discourse. When the searchlight is focused on terrorists, human rights are easily sacrificed. Each missile makes the boundaries between terrorists and democrats thinner. Soon anybody who in any way questions the empires war on terror might be labelled a potential terrorist or fellow-traveller. The same logic was at play during the cold war: those who are not with us are against us.
On the home front, silence nurtures a potential new McCarthyism. Another small but significant detail is that the National Neighborhood Watch, a network for neighbourhood vigilance against burglary, have received federal funds to secure their suburban homes against terrorists. It sounds like a joke, but is hardly that for Arabic-Americans or south Asian-Americans who in practice fall victim to sanctioned spying.
In the prosperous Triangle area of North Carolina where I live, there is no apparent fear, but it can easily be invoked in peoples hearts as well as in the very structures of an open and democratic society. It has happened before, and it can happen again.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this new discourse is that the enemy, the terrorist, is such a fluid and contextual category. Who is a terrorist? What constitutes terrorist action? Who and what is the war really against?
The narrative that now struggles for dominance rests on a sacrificial myth, which makes it even more dangerous. It draws mythologically on the ashes of the World Trade Center and places the US in the role of the threatened and weak victim of an international conspiracy. If something should go wrong in Afghanistan, then the Russians, the French, the Iranians, or just about anybody waiting to stab the empire in the back, is to blame.
To be on the safe side, the Pentagon now leaks information hinting that the US will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if needed. The targets are already defined and familiar from the old days: Russia, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. The most aggressive of nuclear nations Israel, India and Pakistan are omitted, maybe because they are seen as allies in a battle that from now on will define all future conflicts.
It is more crucial than ever not to be blinded by the smoke, not to let the whirling language of violence obstruct action. The outcome of this war will not be determined by bombs and missiles, but by words and politics. The human rights narrative must not be abandoned. Yet if we maintain it, an eventual collision-course with this American administration will be both inevitable and necessary. Not just human rights but human survival may be at stake.
If there ever was a point to the project of the European Union, now is the time to prove it.
