The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION: SEPTEMBER 11 AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Did September 11, 2001, really change the world? This question was being asked across the globe within hours of the attacks taking place. But within days, it had become clear that there was to be no consensus on the answer. In Britain, at one remove from the raw emotion being felt in the United States, political commentators wasted no time in setting out their opposed positions. On 13 September, writing in The Guardian, Hugo Young, the most measured and reasonable of British political observers, declared:
What happened on September 11th, 2001, changed the course of human history. We cannot yet grasp, by any stretch, all that this means. But already we start to imagine how it will poison trust, wreck relationships, challenge the world order, and vastly magnify the divide between the enemies and friends of democracy. It will harden the last vestiges of tolerance for compromise, and further reverse the presumptions of freedom--of travel, speech, politics, everything. It calls into question what power any longer is or means.1
Two days later, in The Times, Matthew Parris, an equally clear-sighted writer about politics, responded to Young. "And after September 11, 2001," he wrote, "and the horrible, horrible deaths of thousands of innocent people, one thing will be certain: the world will be the same again after all".2
Is it possible, after the passage of a few years rather than a few days, to say who was right? One thing now seems abundantly clear: Young was correct when he foresaw a poisoning of trust and a wrecking of relationships. There are few political relationships--between states, between political leaders, between politicians and their electorates--that have not suffered contamination from the fallout of that fateful day. Some important political institutions--NATO, the United Nations (UN)--may now be in permanent decline. Others, like the European Union (EU), are in flux, and it is impossible to be sure in what form they will eventually settle down, if they settle down at all. Yet does it follow from all this upheaval that we can no longer be confident what power is, or what it means? The turmoil in global politics over the last few years is a consequence of the exercise of political power in one of its most recognizable forms: the power of the determined leaders of well-armed nations to seek security through force. When politicians exercise this power, the results are invariably serious, and often deeply disorienting. But it does not follow that the power itself is unfamiliar, or that we should be doubtful about what it means. It means what it has always meant: war.
It was not what happened on September 11, 2001, that contaminated political relationships and destroyed trust; in fact, for a short while many traditional political ties, including those between Europe and the United States, seemed to have been strengthened by the challenge of confronting the terrorist threat. It was the Iraq war of 2003, its build-up and its aftermath, that did the damage. It is true that this war would never have happened as and when it did if the United States had not been attacked two years earlier. But to many observers, September 11 simply provided George W. Bush and his administration with a convenient prop on which to hang a set of military and ideological objectives that had been identified well in advance. The feeling has been widespread feeling among opponents of the Iraq war that the Bush administration exploited the opportunity provided by September 11 to pursue its own, preferred course in Middle Eastern politics, and it is this sense of exploitation which has generated so much of the mistrust. This mistrust only deepened when it emerged that in attempting to fit the case for war in Iraq onto a post-September 11 political framework--in attempting to justify it in terms of the terrorist threat--the Bush administration was forced to stretch the evidence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and so misrepresented the nature of the threat he posed. Having been confronted with the evidence of this misrepresentation, Bush, and his ally Tony Blair, were repeatedly forced back onto their last line of defence. They had to argue that those who wished to pick holes in the arguments presented before the Iraq war for taking military action were missing the bigger picture. What was the bigger picture? It was, as Tony Blair put it in his speech to the Labour Party conference in September 2004, in which he defended his conduct in Iraq notwithstanding the mistakes that had been made over the intelligence, simply this: "September 11 changed the world".3