9/11—Five Years On

David Aikman

As anniversaries go, it’s not a happy one. Five years ago 19 young Arabs hijacked three airliners and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center in New York, causing the deaths of some 3,000 people. The vicious terrorist act precipitated a retaliatory U.S. attack on Afghanistan, which had given shelter to the al-Qaeda perpetrators of the terrorism. For nearly five years the U.S. and other NATO forces have continued a military presence in Afghanistan, attempting to suppress the still-persistent unwillingness of the ousted Taliban to admit defeat—and permit Afghanistan to enter the twenty-first century.

Indirectly, the 9/11 attacks also led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the assumption that a WMD-equipped Iraq might not only be a deadly threat to the region but might pass on its evil technology to terrorist gangs. The U.S. is still fighting in Iraq, of course, and if it is not exactly mired there, it is at least finding the work of restoring law and order difficult and dangerous.

A Foreign Policy magazine cover article recently expressed the view that, despite the obvious national trauma in the U.S. after 9/11, “nothing much” in the world had changed. The number of the victims of terrorism worldwide had increased alarmingly, the magazine noted, but U.S. foreign policy hadn’t radically altered and the world wasn’t experiencing the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington predicted in his famous Foreign Affairs magazine article in 1993.

It might be said that in the U.S. little has changed. The nation goes about its business with little external indication that it is at war.

But overseas the ripple effects of 9/11 continue to have global impact. Just take air travel alone. To cross the Atlantic from Europe to the U.S. is now a harrowing experience that requires even the contents of pockets to be examined. Terrorist bombings during the past five years have shredded innocent flesh from England to Indonesia, from Spain to India, not always at the orders of al-Qaeda, but always in assent to al-Qaeda’s broad goals.

Most disturbingly, young Muslims who have been born into the comfortable liberalism of the most economically advanced, liberal, and tolerant societies in Europe seem, in disturbing numbers, not to have become reconciled to the culture of their host countries. One of the great global challenges of the next half-decade will be to enlist moderate Muslim states in a global campaign against the emergent new Islamic fascism, the inchoate dream of a new Islamic caliphate across the world. The new challenge: to persuade Islam as a whole that it can become a constructive ingredient of global civilization, not an adversary of it.

This, surely, is one of the most worrying elements in the global mix since 9/11—the unwillingness of a very small, but determined minority within liberal democracies to accept that liberalism. It is as if Britain and the U.S. during World War II contained significant numbers of native-born Englishmen and Americans who supported the goals of the Axis powers.  

Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is www.davidaikman.com.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Good and Evil, Mon 11 Sep 2006