Was the 9/11 a curse or cure to the mankind? There is no logical defining narrative of the 9/11 and how and why it happened? Its real reasoning is buried under clusters of shadowy vengeful politics of greed, hatred and animosity. Its exclusive targets were Muslims and Arabs as if they were born in the eye of the storm. Had it happened elsewhere in Europe, Asia or Africa, would the hasty outcomes or consequences be similar? In a knowledge-based age of reason, ignorance and arrogance topple all rational approaches to crisis management and conflict resolution. When incapacity is joined by complacency, the worst outcome is predictable. The 9/11 attacks projected superpower America a weak in intelligence apparatus caught up in the turmoil of war and continuous intellectual degeneration. Doubts overshadowing its military credibility undermined its stability and futuristic role in global affairs. The George Bush administration defied commonsense analogy of the events and rushed to fake judgment overwhelmed by a planned scheme to warped the ideal of a New World Order and instigate animosities against the Islamic world – the impelled reality of ‘the Clash of Civilizations.” From Bush to Obama, they mocked reason and truth and viewed Muslims and Arabs as scum floating on the stream of time to be cleansed by the US power. Although Islam and Muslims were not the perpetrators of the 9/11 acts of terrorism, American politicians had no understanding of the true universal values and global relationships in a crisis situation. They alleged Osama bin Laden- Al-Qaida organization that was created and financed by the US. What followed was the fictitious game of blame and suspicion used as law to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

How to Reason with the post 9/11 American War Agenda?

 

To reasoned with the 9/11 mythology, global humanity should have assumed greater importance than the immediate hasty response and to recognize that all humans share a common natural capacity to reason and to understand the global affairs and to govern the political power that might grow from the combined reason of mankind. Reason welcomes people of new ideas to demonstrate power of logic in emergency situations warranting flexibility and enlightened leadership. Instead, America pursued ‘war on terrorism’, a neo-conservatives planned favorite perversion from reality to murder and terrorize innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and other parts of the Arab Middle East. This was a sharp departure from the American history of moral and intellectual values and global vision of the future. The same insane ego that brought downfall of Fascism and Nazism.

 

Immanuel Kant had a vision (“Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” 1784), and the German philosopher outlined that as ‘the only rational creatures on Earth’, men behave ‘not just instinctively’ they also possess the capacity to be ‘rational citizens of the world’. American strategic thinking in post 9/11 could not comprehend the power of logic instead preferred logic of power to undermine the interest of global humanity. In a fragile world, economic and political emergencies are becoming more frequent than normalization of human affairs. All policy makers rush to abhor conclusion lacking foresight and credibility. This is what led the US leaders to launch multiple wars against the innocent people and nations who had no part in making the 9/11 tragedy. There was no vulnerable global threat to the American security. The 9/11 events distinctively encompass US internal intelligence involvement into the making of the terror tragedy. It exposed mental incapacity of the US administration to cope with a conflict-making situation. A greater reasoned determination was much needed to analyze the global implications of vengeful war strategy. Two shades of the 9/11 exposed political hypocrisy and mocking of the reality – the real factors which caused the 9/11 terror attacks on America. If human life is sacred, American politicians should have the capacity to distinguish between friends and foes.

 

“Arrogance and ignorance led the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq” explains Eric S. Margolis (“Think Before You Rush to War.” Ericmargolis.com: 12/3/2015) is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist and a reputable Canadian journalist that “Heedless of past mistakes, Washington is again rushing in where wisemen fear to tread….The American plan in Iraq and Syria is merely to kill as many “bad guys” as possible. Such sterile, juvenile strategy helped lead to America’s humiliating defeats in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. One would wonder what US special forces “trainers” have to teach Iraqis, Afghans and Syrians about war?”

 

Ira Chernus (“Six Mistakes on the Road to Permanent War” Tom Dispatch.com: 12/8/2015), Professor of Religious Studies at University of Colorado and author of American Nonviolence- The History of an Idea, attempts to list the inherent misconceptions of the US policy makers:

 

1. Treating the enemy as absolute evil, not even human

2. that the enemy is not in any sense human like us is absolution for whatever hand we may have had in sparking or contributing to evil’s rise and spread. How could we have fertilized the soil of absolute evil or bear any responsibility for its successes?  It’s a basic postulate of wars against evil: God’s people must be innocent.

3. Call it blotting out history. We lose the ability to really understand the enemy because we ignore the actual history of how that enemy came to be, of how a network of relationships grew up in which we played, and continue to play, a central role.

4. We assume that the enemy, like Lucifer himself, does evil just for the sake of doing it. Even the most liberal parts of the media often can’t see IS fighters as more than “lunatics” bent on “slaughter for its own sake.”

 

Professor Chernus wonders, “why do we as a nation keep on playing into the same dismal scenario and committing the same mistakes? Why this seemingly irresistible urge to fight yet another war against evil?”

 

John W. Whitehead (“The Tyranny of 9/11-The Building Blocks of the American Police State from A-Z” www. Rutherford.com: 9/06/2016) is an American Attorney in Constitutional Law and Human rights and President of Rutherford Institute. He points out that “These past 15 years have indeed been an unbearable, choking hell…..The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded. This is not freedom. This is a jail cell….Since the towers fell on 9/11, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process….In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, underwear bombers and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the true enemy to freedom was lurking among us all the while. Whitehead clarifies: “As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.”

Where to Find Transformational Leadership for the Post 9/11 Sustainable Future?

 

There are dreadful spillover consequences of the American led ‘war on terrorism’ leading to frightening trends of inhuman torture, destruction of the environment, committing genocide of approximately three millions people in Iraq; 1.5 millions destroyed in Afghanistan, more than 11,000 civilians killed by the US drone attacks in Northwest tribal Waziristan (Pakistan), several thousands US troops casualties of these wars, American public surveillance, loss of freedom and human dignity – a pattern of police state, all outcomes of the war on terror. Is there a cure to the self-inflicted cruelty of the ‘War on Terrorism?’ In dealing with the characteristics of cruelty, one finds it consequential that once the conditions which are favorable to a mindset of cruelty are established, it spreads with frightful rapidity. President Obama crafted the illusion of hope and willful bluffing strategy to talk of peace and harmony amongst varied nations and more so to his global well wishers for a New World of friendly relationship between the US and the Muslim world. It was all charged deceit and bluffing to kill the time and find new issues to reassert the American absolute authoritarianism in global affairs. In post 9/11 affairs, the crippling images of lost America are the outcomes of the failed US warmongering in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan. During the election campaigns, President Obama promised to reverse the Bush’s era violations of human rights, torture and the savagery of killings across the globe but once he entered the White House, Obama preferred marriage of convenience to settle down in Bush’s psychopathic behavior as business as usual.

 

Why the intents and real purposes of the War on Terrorism are politically so secretive that none of the US policy makers would dare to talk about in public - the on-going wars and the 9/11? Michael Meacher was the British Minister of Environment in PM Tony Blair Cabinet (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus”, The Guardian: 9/6/2003), he explains that the overriding motivation for the war on terror has been the scarcity of hydrocarbon energy supplies and that the US and UK will run out of sufficient supplies by 2010. Whereas, the Islamic world will control 60% of the global oil production and equally important, 95% of the remaining oil export capacity. Minister Meacher concludes that “the global war on terrorism has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – The US goal of world hegemony built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.”

 

Beyond Warning New Initiatives are Needed for Global Peace and Security

If President Obama was serious enough to rebuild America, he would need a navigational change and start thinking anew, a different perspective to understand the prevalent realities of the world and put an end to the bloodshed carried on with active US forces and support to many self-styled illegitimate dictators and politicians in those countries implementing the American war agenda. Renee Parsons - former lobbyist for Friends of the Earth in Washington (“US Plans for Perpetual War” www.sott.com, 01/27/2012) captioned the prevalent Obama’s naïve momentum:

“With the world's largest military force including an incomparable nuclear arsenal and a budget to match, exactly who are we protecting the Homeland from -- and what condition will it be in when they arrive? If al Qaeda's goal was to destroy the country's quality of life, its economic prosperity or its high regard for the First Amendment and civil liberties while creating a second-rate banana republic, they have done a terrific job.”

In a critical analogy, world is not as it is sensationalized on the television screen, Arabs or Muslims are not the “terrorists” and all the Western leaders are not the individualistically insane “warmongers.” Rational thinkers and scholars crystallize facts from fiction. If conscientious intellectuals are above the issues of helplessness, moral impotency and political fragmentation, surely, futuristic optimism could be clarified. Wars, violence and torture do not achieve human harmony and peace. There is truth and facts of life outside the news media’s box and glued labels of extremism warranting serious contemplation to evolve our attitudes and perceptions as conscientious citizens in the 21^st century changing global affairs. People of knowledge and intellect must initiate presence to clarify the delusional and monstrous mindset of the minority ruling elite across the globe.

 

Would the American and British political leaders learn any lessons from their failure in the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? For 15 years, they were not engaged to promote democracy or to protect human dignity and rights or any logical discourse against the ruthless Arab authoritarianism. They are leading a new Crusade against the Muslim world. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most transgressors do not know about it when they crossover the limits of the Laws of God. The Roman, Austro-Hungarian and British Empires and the USSR collapsed after they violated the limits of Laws of God governing the Earth. Nazis claimed to run the world for thousands of years, but ended up just in 12 years after killing millions throughout the Western hemisphere. Fascism met resistance at its early stages. Every beginning has its end. On the continuing daily massacres of the civilians in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen and places under the ISIL terror and devastation, perhaps, Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) knew more about the futuristic human ignorance and arrogance and to have imagined the 21^st century’s favorite political perversion:

And let us bathe our hands in blood, up to the elbows
And besmear our words
Then we will walk forth, even to the market place.
And weaving our red weapons o’er our heads
Let us all cry “peace, freedom and liberty.”

 

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international relations - global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, May 2012), and forthcoming book: One Humanity and The Remaking of Global Security, Peace and Conflict Resolution).