Consequences of 9/11 | “The hopes raised by the Arab Spring have been defeated”

January 2011: Protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo against Egyptian ruler Mubarak Photo: AFP/Mohammed Abed How do you assess the impact of 9/11 and the war on terror in the West itself?

The result is catastrophic. Since 9/11, we have seen a series of murderous attacks, from the Bataclan to Berlin, each one serving as a pretext to further expand an already formidable apparatus of repression. The far right has ruthlessly exploited these attacks; in a sense they were a permanent life support for right-wing politics. Today the main ideology of the right is anti-Muslim racism.

And how would you characterize the situation in the Middle East?

The Middle East has descended into chaos and oppression. As was predictable from the start, a notable side effect of U.S. interventions after 9/11 was the strengthening of Iran, the biggest beneficiary of the region's destabilization. Tehran took full advantage of the US occupation of Iraq; After all, it was the USA itself that brought pro-Iranian parties into government in Iraq, thereby enabling the emergence of a Tehran-dominated corridor from Iran through Iraq to Syria and from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The same regional destabilization also enabled Iran to help the Houthis take control of northern Yemen. One of the causes of the recent US-Israeli attack on Iran lies in the very position of power that the Iranian regime gained as a result of the US intervention after 9/11. And consider Iran itself, where the regime is slaughtering its own people. The brutal repression and public executions are intended to terrorize the population into silence. The region is experiencing long-term destabilization; it is probably the most unstable part of the world today. It's a really sad situation.

When the demonstrations broke out in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, marking the start of the Arab Spring, you were quite optimistic. How has your assessment of the Arab Spring changed over time?

When the Arab Spring broke out, I insisted that it was rooted in a deep structural crisis and should therefore be understood not as a temporary episode but as the beginning of a long historical process. The clearest symptom of the region's social and economic paralysis is that the Middle East and North Africa region has had the highest rates of youth unemployment in the world for decades - a direct result of the clash between neoliberal economic policies and the type of state and system of rule that prevail there.

Gilbert Achcar is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the University of London. The interview was conducted by Caspar Shaller, editor of the English website of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The long version of the conversation, which has been shortened here, can be found at rosalux.de/international.

At the beginning, the uprisings were initiated everywhere by progressive forces, but the region was - and in some cases still is - characterized by reactionary opposition currents against the old regimes. Religious fundamentalists are not progressive, but rather reactionary in their social and cultural programs. So what we saw was not a simple dichotomy of revolution versus counter-revolution, but rather it became clear that there was a triangle: a revolutionary camp and two different forms of counter-revolution, on the one hand the old regimes, on the other right-wing religious, fundamentalist forces grabbing for power.

But the hopes raised by the Arab Spring have been defeated. We have seen civil wars, the return of dictatorships in even more draconian forms than before, and the continuation of US wars in the region, culminating in the genocidal US-Israeli war in Gaza and the attack on Iran. The situation of the Palestinian people has reached its historic lowest point. Hamas' attacks are among the worst miscalculations in the history of the anti-colonial struggle. In my view, all of this is a consequence of the lack of a credible political alternative in the region: no progressive force has emerged capable of channeling the mass anger generated by the social and economic crisis in a way that would make real change possible. This failure created a political deadlock that superimposed on the already existing social and economic deadlock.

In Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, former leader of the Islamist group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, now controls the country. Doesn't this suggest that Sunni Islamists have had success in some places?

There is a certain irony in the victory of the Islamic fundamentalists in Syria, as it was a side effect of Israel's wars in Lebanon. By dealing a devastating blow to Hezbollah, Israel removed the last pillar of the Syrian regime. This regime had previously relied on Iranian and Russian military aid, but after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia came under so much pressure there that it withdrew most of its troops from Syria. After Israel crippled Hezbollah's ability to intervene on Iran's behalf, the fundamentalist forces controlling Idlib in the north were able to intervene with relative ease. The Assad regime collapsed, just as the government in Kabul collapsed in 2021.

Since then, however, Al-Sharaa has tried to portray itself as moderate. He is trying very hard to be accepted by the West. He has not yet taken any major steps to introduce Sharia law, although there are signs of the Islamization of the state and society. This is not the same as the way the fundamentalists ruled Idlib province until 2024, and certainly not the way Daesh, the so-called Islamic State, ruled parts of Syria and Iraq and declared its so-called caliphate.

Why did the Kurds in Rojava agree to integrate into the Syrian state? At the same time, the PKK in Turkey has agreed to disarm and entered into peace talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Why have Kurdish movements in both countries abandoned their bases?

In the Syrian case, especially because they were abandoned by the United States. After Daesh was defeated, Washington no longer needed the Kurds. Trump showed no interest in continuing to support them.

Erdoğan, meanwhile, has regularly lost votes in elections since 2015 and has tried to cling to power using all available means: suppressing the opposition, arresting its leaders, even interfering in the leadership of the CHP. His approach to the Kurds is another such maneuver: a bet that the Kurdish movement will not play the role it did in 2015 when it threatened the AKP's dominance in parliament.

The Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan has been calling for a compromise with Ankara for years. Because the PKK's armed strategy has clearly failed. Having focused the movement's strategy on armed struggle for so long, Öcalan has now completely steered it in the opposite direction towards compromise. But I am not convinced that this strategy will be successful. The oppression of the Kurdish nation has not abated and there are no real guarantees for the Kurds in either Turkey or Syria.

The agreement with the Syrian government calls for the dissolution of the Syrian Democratic Forces and its integration into the Syrian army, but this remains largely theoretical. Who is in charge in practice? Will the leadership in the Kurdish-administered areas remain in Rojava, or will Damascus take control of the northeast? This process will face many obstacles, not least regarding the role of women. Feminism was at the heart of the Kurdish struggle, but women fighting in army units - as in the YPJ - have no place in Al-Sharaa's vision of society.

The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung has more than two dozen foreign offices on all continents. As part of a cooperation project with "nd", there are regular reports here about developments in a wide variety of regions. All texts on: dasnd.de/rls

In your 2002 book “The Clash of Barbarisms,” you describe a dynamic in which reactionary forces in different contexts feed off and radicalize each other. Has this process slowed down, or is it just continuing?

I countered Samuel Huntington's idea of ​​the so-called clash of civilizations with the thesis of a "clash of barbarisms." The wars between Western imperialist powers and Islamic fundamentalist forces were not conflicts between opposing civilizations, but between barbaric tendencies inherent in those civilizations.

This process has reached its climax with Gaza. I have described Gaza as the first genocide committed by an industrially advanced state since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. There have been other genocides since then, such as in Rwanda, but none perpetrated by an industrialized state supported by Western powers.

You have written that Gaza marks the final end of the Western liberal order. Why not the invasion of Iraq in 2003?

Because the invasion of Iraq was opposed by figures like Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac and even by some voices within Washington. The illusion that liberal forces would ultimately correct the course persisted. Barack Obama ultimately built part of his political identity on his opposition to the Iraq War and adopted the principle of participating in a war only under a UN mandate. He intervened in Libya only after the Security Council approved a no-fly zone. This illusion of a liberal, rules-based order survived and was later used against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But the contrast between Western governments' response to Ukraine and their response to Gaza was the final nail in the coffin of this order.

The United States has a clear material interest in its alliance with Israel as an agent of US hegemony in the region. European governments' support for Israel has far less to do with material interests. The starting point of their stance on Gaza is ideological; it lies in the way October 7th was portrayed as the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. This sentence was repeated again and again. The Hamas-led attack sparked a wave of shock and sympathy, with Western governments rallying behind Israel's so-called right to self-defense. Only months later, when the scale of the destruction could no longer be ignored and it became clear how disproportionate the Israeli response was, did their position shift to calling for a ceasefire.

Her most recent book, "The New Cold War" from 2023, deals with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Do you see Russia's attack as a long-term consequence of the war on terror and neoconservative interventionism?

In a sense, the 2003 invasion of Iraq showed Russia, China, and everyone else that the United States would not abide by the rules of order it supposedly upheld. The invasion of Iraq was a blatant violation of international law. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, things could have been very different; there was talk of a “peace dividend” and the like. Instead, the US made conscious policy decisions that angered Russia, particularly NATO expansion. I believe this was intentional. Washington wanted Russia to remain a bogeyman for the rest of Europe, so that other European states would remain in a vassal-like relationship with the United States.

However, none of this justifies the invasion of Ukraine, a terrible crime whose price is being paid by the Ukrainian people - and increasingly by the Russian people. Putin bears the greatest responsibility for this catastrophe.

Looking back on a quarter century of U.S. imperial intervention and the War on Terror, where is the U.S. today?

The United States "lost" every war it started after 9/11. I put that in quotes because Washington succeeded in destroying the regimes. The real losers were the civilian populations of these countries, not the USA itself. Nevertheless, the USA failed to achieve its set goals in every case.

This was a classic case of imperial overextension. In the late 1980s, British historian Paul Kennedy wrote a best-selling book in which he noted the rather obvious fact that empires collapse when they become more charged than they can handle. But he was wrong in his reading of the Reagan era: Reagan succeeded in restarting both the American economy and American hegemony. However, after the Soviet collapse, the Bush administration succumbed to hubris. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were textbook examples of overreach, far beyond what the US could actually control, and they failed in both countries.

But anyone who thinks the American empire is over is dreaming. The United States remains an extraordinarily powerful state, still the most powerful on earth, still capable of enormous destruction. However, the limits of American power are far more visible today than they were at the turn of the century.

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