Issue No. 609
Opinion
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24 - 30 October 2002 Issue No. 609 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Looking the tiger in the eye
The events of 9/11 carry a clear message for the Arabs, but have they received it, asks Abdel-Moneim Said* in the first part of a series of articles dealing with Arab responses to the attack on the World Trade Centre
On 11 September 2001 there unfolded a chain of events that defied imagination. As people around the world watched, two commercial airliners crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Soon afterwards, a third airliner hit the Pentagon. Then, a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania, before it reached its target, which might have been Congress, the White House or, perhaps, another site altogether. Television and satellite stations held audiences around the world in their thrall, as they witnessed, aghast, while events more shocking than those of any horror- filled doomsday film unfolded before them. It was as though history had suddenly unleashed its stockpile of accumulated hatred and tragedy, sweeping away the life stories of 3,000 persons from all walks of life, nationalities, religions and colours, burying beneath the rubble futures that would have been filled with joy and sorrow.
Emerging from that rubble was a spectre that loomed larger than the composite narrative of individual tragedies: the US's determination to respond with force. When this occurred, it set off a chain of reactions akin to a nuclear reactor in the process of meltdown. That meltdown was precipitated at the core of the international system and accelerated the largest and most far-reaching series of reactions to challenge the minds of mankind.
We will perhaps never be wholly certain of what happened that day. Even if someone does come close to solving the mystery of how the actual assault on vital targets was executed, the more complex questions of why it happened, the forces involved in the subsequent chain reaction and, more importantly, the future it has destined for mankind will continue to elude us. By the standards of ordinary warfare, 11 September's death toll was relatively small. However, the effects it is having on human civilisation, the changes it wrought in the patterns of international relations and the prospects for both open and latent conflict it has generated are unparalleled in history.
Still, history's watersheds cannot be gauged merely in terms of the number of victims they claimed or even the extent of their impact on individuals, nations or the world. Rather, they must also be assessed in terms of the operative forces and trends they expose, whether blatantly obvious or whether still lurking below the surface, not quite visible or so repulsive or sorrowful that we deliberately avert our gaze. The attacks on the US last year marked precisely one of those major revelatory events, both with respect to the state of the US and the state of the world, so much so that it should have compelled all international actors to scrutinise themselves in the mirror of those events.
Those events exposed as much about the Arabs as they did about the US, Europe and other nations and quarters around the globe. Indeed, they cast a glaring light on forces and political trends that hastily sought to crawl back into the dark. The Arabs were directly involved in the events by virtue of the fact that all the perpetrators of the attacks were Arabs. Those Arabs who hit the Twin Towers demonstrated a drive and unity of purpose that the Pan Arab movement had never dreamed of. According to US investigators, 19 Arabs took part in this operation after having lived for a period in the US and learned how to fly civilian aircraft in preparation for that unprecedented calamitous blow.
Arab reactions to 11 September betrayed, like nothing before, the current condition of the Arab world. Many Arab writers and commentators were gripped by a complete state of denial; it was all a hoax and the perpetrators could not have been Arabs, they protested. Denial persisted and grew throughout the year, as respected pundits continued to cry, 'where's the proof?' Apparently nothing would satisfy them until Mohamed Atta and his cohorts awoke from their eternal slumber beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center so that they could appear on Al-Jazeera and other satellite stations to give their personal testimony that they, indeed, had perpetrated that atrocious act. Or perhaps they thought the mighty US intelligence agency would cough up voice and video recordings that they had made but kept under wraps of the conspirators as they were plotting their attacks. Then, when the US did produce a recording of Bin Laden openly admitting that he masterminded the operation, Arab commentators shouted that it was faked. It did not stand up to logic that the leader of Al- Qa'eda would be so naïve as to leave behind such damning evidence, they said.
Such reactions epitomise the Arab mentality to an alarming extent. Many Arabs have persisted in burying their heads in the sand, demanding proof. When proof is forthcoming, though, their immediate reaction is to reject it as falsified, without bothering with a so much as a cursory empirical test of its veracity. It is curious that Arab intelligence agencies have been enigmatically silent over the past year on the subject of 11 September. They have cooperated with US intelligence in anti-terrorists efforts, but they have left the field entirely open to the coffeehouse generals to pronounce their verdicts on the authenticity of the evidence. The Arab mentality was further exposed for its inability to discriminate between accusation and proof. Accusations are leveled on the basis of the existence of a body of evidence, but actual guilt is determined in the courts where the evidence is scrutinised in the presence of the attorneys for the defence. Over the past year, US agencies have spoken only in terms of the accused and corroborative evidence. Yet Arab opinion-makers have acted as though they have actually issued a verdict -- perhaps out of analogy to the justice systems in some Arab countries where accusation and guilt are virtually synonymous.
The US has furnished considerable evidence to back up its allegations. There is no doubt that the 19 individuals were Arabs and that they were on board the four hijacked planes that crashed. There is no doubt that many of the suspects had attended flight school and that the other passengers had not. It is equally certain, on the basis of the evidence furnished by the governments of the countries to which these individuals belonged, that they embraced militant Islamist ideas and espoused the destruction of the US as the greatest of all evils. It is further evident that Al- Qa'eda, a network of radical Islamist organisations to which these individuals belonged, had as its declared objective the destruction of the US and its allies on the grounds that they embodied crusader and Zionist forces.
Nor is there any doubt that at least two of the suspects who were on board those planes had also been accused of taking part in the terrorist attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar Al-Salaam and against the destroyer Cole. The prerecorded videotapes screened on Al-Jazeera point directly to the group that mounted the operation and include at least one open confession. Equally incontrovertible is the evidence of contacts between many of the perpetrators shortly before the planes were hijacked to be used as bombs. Finally, there is no doubt that US security agencies had, in fact, monitored the communications of Islamist terrorist groups and learned that a large operation was being planned. That this information was not taken seriously at the time and therefore suggested a frightful flaw in the US national security system is not at issue here.
For the Arabs none of the previously cited evidence was sufficient to support the allegations, let alone condemnation of the 19 Arab suspects. Their persistent denial took many forms. The Arabs could not have possibly mounted an operation with such precision coordination and execution, some claimed. Others hastily pointed their fingers at the Mossad, at ultra-right white supremacist groups in the US, or at Russian or Serbian extremists. Yet others leapt to the imaginative conclusion that a military coup had been staged against the US government. The astounding irony is that while proponents of these theories continued to demand "proof" from the US, they never offered a shred of evidence to support their flights of fancy.
One of the most outrageous scenarios related to the accusations directed at the Mossad. Three thousand Jews did not go to the World Trade Center that day because the Mossad had given them advanced warning of the operation, they said. Not that they supplied the name of a single Jew who received such instructions or the testimony of a co-worker who observed a sharp rise in absenteeism among their Jewish colleagues that day. Not that they bothered to explain how a forthcoming operation could be kept secret after it had been divulged to three thousand people or why, once it was divulged, 134 Israelis died in the World Trade Center. Nor did they consider to ask why the US would cover up the true identity of the perpetrators and leave them at large to commit another atrocity.
Nevertheless, the Arabs clung to their stories. How indicative that is of faces that cannot look themselves in the mirror, of minds that are aloof to logic, of hearts incapable of confronting the facts. But, this is not all that 11 September exposed.
* The writer is director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
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