Legacy of 9/11
June 17, 2011
Experts gathered Friday at the Heinrich-Böll Foundation headquarters in Berlin to discuss the decade that began with a massive terrorist attack on the United States and ended with a wave of revolutions in the Arab world.
More specifically, they were there to discuss two ideas which apparently link the two momentous events, and which dominated Western foreign policy for the last decade: regime change and promoting democracy.
Christoph Heusgen, a foreign policy advisor to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, challenged the idea that the decade had been only devastating and depressing. Though regime change had caused a lot of bloodshed, he argued there had been notable successes.
"We have to hold on to the fact that we have achieved a lot," he said. "In Afghanistan, we have a situation where the country is no longer under the terror regime of the Taliban. There were elections, the infrastructure is being built up. And Iraq, after the population endured incalculable suffering, is on the way to a more democratic and pluralistic society."
Betrayed principles
Claudia Roth, head of the opposition Greens party, however, took a different view of the events of the last 10 years. Using the examples of Guantanamo Bay and regional repression by China and Russia, she painted a bleak picture of how 9/11 and the "war on terror" has eroded social cohesion and allowed the West to compromise on its principles of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
"If security policy and human rights policy are not two sides of the same coin, then something has gone very wrong," she said. "I hope that now, the events in North Africa will bring about a change in strategy."
Caroline Wadhams, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, said this change is already starting to happen, courtesy of the US President Barack Obama's administration on the one hand - but also courtesy of the conservative Tea Party movement in the United States, which has a much more isolationist approach to foreign policy than former President George W. Bush.
"There is a huge aversion - and you hear this language a lot in the US - we don't want to do nation-building," she explained. "After 2001 there was such a tremendous sense of power and arrogance about the possibilities of American power, and I think that's been largely sapped away now."
9/11: A "brief blip"
But perhaps the most thought-provoking contributions to the debate came from Ahmed Badawi, director of Berlin-based Transform, a center for conflict analysis, political development and world society research, who offered a Middle Eastern perspective on Western foreign policy.
Badawi argued that the US rhetoric of promoting democracy began under Ronald Reagan in the 1980's - long before September 11, 2001.
While democracy rhetoric may have helped the Republican president out-maneuver his political opponents in deciding US policy, that rhetoric has very little to do with today's reality in the Arab world, said Badawi.
"The Egyptians were receiving $1.3 billion (900 million euros) every year for military aid - the army that is ruling now," he said. "They were receiving only $60 million at the height of the push by the Bush administration to promote democracy, for civil society activities.
"If we look back at September 11, say from the perspective of 20 years from now, or 30 years from now, we'll probably realize that it was nothing more than a brief blip," he said.
If Wadhams' view that the US is weary of its attempts at nation-building proves correct and the wave of uprising taking place across the Middle East and North Africa lead to substantial, long-term political change, panelists entertained Badawi's assertion that 9/11 was nothing more than a "brief blip" in a much larger narrative could be true as well.
But Badawi also admitted that the countless variables currently in flux in the Arab World make predicting the future very dangerous.
Author: Ben Knight
Editor: Sean Sinico