20 - 26 September 2001
Issue No.552
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552 |
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The mosaic shatters
Terrorism has widened its net to include nationals of each and every state as targets, writes Abdel-Moneim Said*
Anyone who visits New York immediately feels its pulse and it is the pulse of a "global city" in every respect. Through its airports, across its streets, in all its buildings, pass members of every nationality and race. Indeed, there are days when the face of WASP America is a rare sight on the streets. The city is a rainbow of racial and ethnic groups -- African Americans, Jews, Arabs, and Muslims -- and each group seems to prefer life in New York more than in any other city in America. And it was their city, as much as anyone else's, that was chosen as the target for last Tuesday's horrific terrorist attack.
The attack on the World Trade Center was certainly an attack on one of the most recognisable symbols of American financial might. But it was also, if less obviously, an attack against the whole world, an assault on all those peoples, colours, faiths and races that combine to make the mosaic that is the city.
The death toll among foreigners, at the time of writing, had reached 1,318, including four Egyptian, figures that are, sadly, likely to rise. There were missions from 46 countries present at the World Trade Center. The attack, therefore, on this most symbolic of buildings, suggests a critical change in international terrorist thinking. No longer are such actions directed, on a piecemeal basis, against individual states, as was the case with the Luxor massacre, or previous outrages in Saudi Arabia, in Germany, and in Tanzania. In the case of the World Trade Center it is clear that the terrorists have widened their net to include nationals of each and every country as targets.
The perpetrators of this horrific crime must have been biding their time, watching intently. They had the opportunity to examine, in the minutest detail, security arrangements. They had time to identify lapses and plan how they might be exploited, time enough to coordinate the devastating series of strikes that the world watched on television screens as they were happening.
The first attack on the northern tower was enough to attract the cameras of every American television network, which broadcast the images to every corner of the globe. At that stage no one thought, or perhaps cared to believe, that it was a deliberate act. It seemed instead some kind of horrible accident. But only 18 minutes later a second plane came into view, and plunged into the second tower. By the time the awful reality dawned on officials a third plane was hurtling towards the Pentagon while a fourth was possibly heading to the White House. This last airplane crashed in Pennsylvania, the first failure in this ruthlessly planned operation. The unfolding of the horrific aftermath of these attacks was watched by the world. And in that unfolding came a message of warning.
The US has discovered, and in the most tragic manner imaginable, that the anti-ballistic missile shield it had placed at the top of its national security agenda would have been useless in protecting it from attacks launched with commercial airliners that took off from American airports. The threat, when it came, came not from sophisticated technology, but from something far more quotidian, an everyday part of life in modern America, the domestic flight. And it is this very fact that accounts, at least in part, for the rush by many countries to offer the US far more support than mere verbal condemnation.
American anger itself was quickly translated into concrete measures. Congress allocated $20 billion, and then another $20 billion, to meet the expected costs of retaliation and rebuilding. NATO members speedily implemented Article 5 of the Washington Agreement, which states that any attack on one of the 19 member states will be considered an attack against them all. This commitment will eventually be made concrete, in terms of financial and military help, should it be called for.
But it was when the 46 member states of the Partnership for Peace, which includes NATO and former Warsaw Pact members, alongside Russia and Ukraine, declared their full support for the US, that the changes in the world order provoked by the collapse of the former Soviet Union became most apparent. Vladimir Putin found no difficulty in declaring full support for any efforts to eradicate terrorism, and probably saw no real difference between the blasts in New York and the explosions reported lately in Moscow. China and Japan, too, have been suffering from their own brands of terrorism. And India, Australia, Arab and Islamic countries, each vulnerable to differing forms of terrorism, joined in the chorus.
Some countries, inevitably, tried to seize the opportunity for point scoring. Foremost among these was Israel, which has been trying its utmost to link the Palestinian resistance to the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington. Worse still, it viewed the attacks as a diversion, and in the aftermath immediately launched fierce onslaughts in Jenin, Jericho, and other Palestinian cities. And sadly, certain Arab groups played into Israel's hand by volunteering to exhibit feelings of joy in Ramallah at the tragedy on American soil, or else lashing out against American policies in such a manner as to appear to be confessing that Arabs were the perpetrators. Arab officials and spokesmen, fortunately, took note of the trap. We saw Yasser Arafat and his assistants donating blood to American victims, and Palestinian children praying for the souls of the dead.
As far as the impact of the attack in America on the Egyptian domestic scene goes no one can make predictions beyond the fact that Egypt will inevitably face difficult decisions in the coming days. Before the attacks we had thought the problems we faced were mainly domestic, home-bred. Now we know we are facing a host of regional or possibly international problems. Much of what will come is currently beyond our power to influence for at the moment no one is certain in what direction the winds on the international scene will blow.
* The writer is director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
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