War on Terror | “We still live in the world of September 11th”

US President George W. Bush is interrupted by his chief of staff Andrew Card (l.) during a visit to a school shortly after news of the plane crashes in New York City arrived. Photo: AFP/Paul J. Richards Where were you at the time of the attacks on September 11, 2001?

I was three blocks from the World Trade Center. My children attended the nearest elementary school in Tribeca. I had just dropped my youngest off at kindergarten; my older child was already in third grade. I heard the first plane fly over us - I didn't see it, just the explosion right above us. As I was talking to other parents, the second plane hit. It was then clear that something much worse than an accident was afoot: the school dismissed the kids and we walked the mile and a half home in Greenwich Village. The school remained closed for months.

You are a Middle East historian. How did they classify the attacks after they found out who was behind them?

Anyone who studied the region already knew about al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, bin Laden, and the earlier embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Therefore the attribution was plausible. The following week, we organized what was believed to be the first public panel discussion in New York on the historical context of the attacks—why certain groups viewed the United States as an enemy and portrayed the attacks as retaliation for American violence. The point was to explain — not excuse — why al-Qaeda viewed the attacks as retaliation for violence against Muslims. Whether this reading was accurate is another question, but it was understandable. The prevailing explanation after 9/11, however, was that the attackers simply hated “our civilization.”

Can it be said that political Islam has replaced the Soviet Union as the West's designated enemy?

In any case. In the 1980s, Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu helped popularize the idea of ​​an international terrorist network - not an Islamic one, but one controlled from Moscow that linked the Baader-Meinhof gang, the South African ANC and Palestinian groups to the Kremlin. The US government under Ronald Reagan adopted this idea. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the portrayal of the threat shifted to “radical Islamist terrorism.” Around the same time, some jihadist groups shifted their strategy from the “near enemy”—regimes in Egypt, Pakistan, and elsewhere—to the “far enemy,” the United States, in the hope of drawing it into a war that would destabilize local and U.S.-backed regimes. The strategy was not entirely successful, but it drew Washington into a quarter-century-long conflict that cost countless lives.

How did Al-Qaeda itself emerge from this environment?

It began with support for Arab volunteers fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan - a war that the Saudis financed with billions. Bin Laden was not initially in conflict with the Saudi regime. According to his own statements, the turning point came when the Saudis deployed American forces on Saudi soil before the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. He came to the view that the monarchy was corrupt and un-Islamic and must be overthrown. After the Soviets' defeat, al-Qaeda turned against the United States, which it saw as an occupier of Muslim territories and a supporter of regimes that attacked Muslims - leading to attacks on U.S. targets in Yemen and East Africa, and ultimately in New York. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda found a safe haven because the Taliban treated them as a war ally, even though they themselves had no interest in global jihad.

In your book Contending Visions of the Middle East, you discuss how Orientalist perceptions - following Edward Said's 1978 criticism - have shaped the Western view of the Islamic world. Can you explain this in more detail?

There was a long-standing tendency, rooted in 19th-century European thought, to treat the Muslim and Arab worlds as a fundamentally different, static civilization. Said's criticism challenged this view, and by the 1970s and 1980s it had already lost much of its influence in serious scholarship, which increasingly favored historically informed analysis over the assumption of fixed civilizational differences. There is no more a single “Islamic civilization” than there is a single “Western” one – is the West the liberalism of the Enlightenment or National Socialism? Neither the one nor the other and yet both; it is controversial and pluralistic.

Outside academia, however, 9/11 exacerbated Islamophobia, and we still see it—for example, in communities resisting the construction of mosques because of trumped-up "Sharia" threats. There is a widespread perception that people outside the West are fundamentally different from “us,” threatening, and deserving of less consideration. Israel was mostly treated as an exception.

Many Americans saw Israel as part of “us,” while Arabs and Muslims were portrayed as foreign or alien. Israel conveyed the image of a Western, European country - a "villa in the jungle," as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak once put it. The claim that it was the region's "only democracy" reinforced this distinction. This became increasingly important as the US found itself increasingly in conflict with parts of the Muslim world: the Middle East became a theater of repeated American failures, while Israel appeared successful and powerful, and from the 1970s onwards Washington treated it as a strategic ally - first in the Cold War, later in the fight against radical Islamism. After 9/11, Ariel Sharon framed Israel's conflict with the Palestinians as part of that common struggle and told Washington that Israel could bring a century of counterterrorism experience to the table.

Today the USA is waging war against Iran alongside Israel. Déjà vu?

The US government under Joe Biden already supports Israel's war in the Gaza Strip almost entirely. In a sense, the US-Israeli alliance reached a high point. Biden was politically influenced in the 1970s, and people around him advocated a certain distance between Washington and Israel. Nevertheless, he stood behind Israel. His successor Donald Trump has largely adopted the position of the Israeli right - recognizing Jerusalem as the capital, recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights, supporting settlement policy - and this year, as briefly last summer, the US joined Israel's war against Iran. But there are also tensions as Israel moves further to the right and fights conflicts that Washington does not always see as a priority.

Trump described the Iranian regime as “irrational” and “crazy.” That sounds like orientalism...

Trump was happy to have Iran's head of state Khamenei and Iran's top leadership killed. But he would much rather make a deal with Tehran - he just hasn't found the right people to do there what he did in Venezuela. He has no ideological objections to a deal as long as it helps him politically in the run-up to the midterm elections. Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu and much of his government, on the other hand, seem comfortable with an endless war, and some would prefer to drive the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip entirely. We have also heard disturbing signals from the West Bank, so much so that even Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel and a Christian fundamentalist, seems to recognize that this is problematic by any rational standard.

Did Orientalist perspectives become entrenched in policymaking in the 1990s?

As academia became alienated from US foreign policy after the Vietnam War, think tanks mushroomed. Although they recruited their staff from the universities, they concentrated on shaping policy. Some, like the Heritage Foundation, have been far more Islamophobic than others, like the Brookings Institution. Orientalism has persisted in American politics, but I would resist reducing it all to an abstract, uniform "Islamophobia." Many policymakers don't care whether an ally is Muslim - they care whether they are useful. In 1991, Washington worked with Muslim and Arab allies against Iraq, against the Soviets in Afghanistan and against the Islamic State (IS). Saddam Hussein was first a friend, then an enemy. As anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City's mayor, put it: "Good Muslims" and "bad Muslims" were sorted by their usefulness, not their faith.

Did Orientalist thinking specifically shape the George W. Bush administration's response to 9/11?

To some extent, certainly - the Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose work, in Edward Said's view, was particularly susceptible to an Orientalist view, was brought into the White House, and Bush's early suggestion of a "crusade" was quickly retracted after advisers warned that it would worry allies such as Saudi Arabia. Bush never used the word again. But the deeper pattern was more complicated: Washington's closest allies included Muslim-majority states, and policymakers cared less about the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims than between allies and enemies. Cultural stereotypes made it easier to justify certain interventions; but strategic interests determined who was treated as a partner.

What changed after September 11th?

There was a sharp rise in Islamophobia: Muslim communities were arrested and monitored, and the connection between Muslims and terrorists became significantly more important - a connection that continues to be drawn, especially on the political right and in conservative Christian America. The “war on terror” rhetoric quickly justified the invasion of Iraq, even though Iraq had no significant connection to the attacks, and later interventions and security measures elsewhere. The United States remains militarily engaged in Yemen, Somalia and other parts of Africa and the Middle East. The American security state - the military, but also the entire apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security, which is now massively directed against immigrants - has expanded enormously. This is a direct result of that day.

Did the “War on Terror” triggered after September 11th ever end?

No. If you wage war against an abstract concept like “terror,” it can never really end. The consequences have been a sustained series of conflicts and a massive expansion of American power, with catastrophic consequences, especially for the peoples of the region - millions of people have died in wars associated with the post-9/11 period. Democracy was never really the goal. The Bush administration briefly invoked it in 2005-06 after its justification for attacking Iraq - its alleged weapons of mass destruction - collapsed. But that didn't last long. The real goal was to preserve American power and suppress forces seen as a threat to U.S. hegemony: first Al-Qaeda, later the Islamic State.

What does this tell us about the flexibility of American alliances?

Washington can confront Islamist movements in one case while working with actors affiliated with them in another—whenever this serves its interests. Saudi Arabia was a close ally and at the same time promoted extremely conservative Islam; After 1991, bin Laden viewed the regime as corrupt precisely because it hosted American forces, and radical Islamists turned against both Riyadh and its protector. Other states took different paths - Qatar maintains good relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, while the United Arab Emirates was far more hostile to it. Everyone used religion and their relationships with Islamist groups to suit their own interests.

So ultimately, how should we understand the relationship between stereotypical ideas about the Islamic world and American politics?

The cultural aspect plays a role, but cannot be separated from power politics. Attitudes that portray people outside the West as alien, threatening, or less worthy of attention have shaped public debate and made interventions easier to justify—and 9/11 significantly reinforced these attitudes. Ultimately, however, strategic interests determine which governments are treated as allies and which as enemies. This explains the contradictory history of American relations with predominantly Muslim countries: cooperation with authoritarian regimes, support for some Islamist actors in one context and resistance against them in another, changing definitions of "good" and "bad" Muslims.

September 11 was a turning point, particularly in terms of the extent of American military involvement in the Middle East, although it also built on real continuities. Its significance extends beyond the region: it changed the structure of American power at home and abroad and sparked widespread violence around the world. We still live in the world that 9/11 created - not just a terrorist attack, but a historical rupture whose consequences have never fully subsided.

Zachary Lockman teaches modern Middle Eastern history at New York University and is editor of the Middle East Report. The focus of his research and teaching is on the socio-economic, cultural and political history of the region. In his book »Contending Visions of the Middle East. The History and Politics of Orientalism (2004/2009) examines how scholars and other actors in the West have researched and represented Islam and the Middle East, paying particular attention to the ideas, political currents, and controversies that have shaped Middle Eastern studies in the United States—including debates over Edward W. Said's influential 1978 critique Orientalism.

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