From The Asia Times
By Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke

There was a time in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when Western intellectuals debated the meaning of the attacks that occurred on that day and the most appropriate way to counter them. There was a welter of voices, a cacophony of opinions.

Struggling to understand the event’s magnitude, German philosopher Jurgen Habermas reflected that September 11 carried with it a “foreboding atmosphere” that exposed “a long-known vulnerability of our complex civilization”. French intellectual Jacques Derrida went further, suggesting that the event’s complexity forced us to question our most “deep-seated conceptual presuppositions”. Opinion makers, intellectuals, politicians, foreign-policy analysts, and the great mass of the public wrestled with September 11’s meaning, as if suddenly caught off balance by the sheer audacity of the event. And so it was that for the merest moment – a shimmering and hopeful period so brief that it now seems that it might never have occurred at all – Americans, and others in the West, rejected “the received concepts” of “war” and “terrorism” and shook themselves from certainty’s slumber.

The hopeful moment passed. Driven by the shattering visions of the assault – the specter of living beings falling through the clear air of lower Manhattan – the United States and its allies attacked Afghanistan and drove the Taliban from power, jailed al-Qaeda members and their sympathizers, strangled Middle Eastern banks and purged financial accounts, identified an “axis of evil”, passed new and more stringent security measures, legislated new powers to domestic spying agencies, and increased funding to their intelligence services. They unseated Saddam Hussein. Yet after five years and the expenditure of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, there remains what Habermas calls a “vague feeling of angst”: an indefinable yet precise sense that somehow and in some way we in the West have gotten this thing, this “war on terrorism”, terribly wrong.

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