9/11 - Part Two

11-09-2006

President Bush has owned up to running secret prisons where inmates are held for years without trial - behaviour normally associated with the kind of tyrant the West wants to topple. So on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 can someone please tell me, who's protecting our freedom now?

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers, that would have seemed an absurd question.

Innocent folk in the West were being slaughtered by extremists willing to perpetrate the most horrific killings in the name of Islam.

We wept with our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic as we witnessed on rolling news the destruction of so many lives.

The “special relationship” came to the fore, as Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with a nation that had stood by us in difficult times.

It seemed inevitable that the States would want to lash out against those responsible - and if they needed help, this country would not be found wanting.

Thus ran the official version, and it's one I suspect that many British people - probably the majority - had sympathy with.

Five years on, the consensus has been shattered and the world is an infinitely more dangerous place. And by helping them, we have helped to make it so.

Not that we don't still love the Americans.

Their music, their movies, their fast food all seem as popular as before - it's just their foreign policy we can't stand.

When they attacked Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden some of us at least were still with them.

We could understand why they wanted to bring Osama to justice and their desire to chase the Taliban out of Kabul also made sense - although the heavy bombing of civilian areas made many of us feel more than queasy.

It didn't help that Bin Laden remained free and that the Taliban continued to be active either.

Dumb then became dumber, as we chose to pick a fight with Iraq - a conflict that was militarily unloseable but morally unwinnable.

Whatever Saddam Hussein was - mass murderer, despot, you name it - he was no advocate of the kind of radical Islam that deliveredGround Zero, nor did he have the firepower to launch an attack on America or Britain.

We knew all this of course; and we also knew that Bush's neo-Conservatives didn't much care about that.

They had a vision for the States as the world's imperial overlord, imposing its values of "Freedom "Democracy" and "Coca Cola" on others regardless of whether they wanted them or not, and so they wanted a ruck with Saddam.

Britain might have been a restraining voice; a mate offering words of well-meant advice.

Instead, we pulled on our Doc Martins and decided to help out in giving the old despot a kicking, driven partly by Blair's scary Christian zeal and partly by a collective desire to “play our part” in the world.

But like the Fool assuming the role of Lear it's clear we're not up to it - the ambition just throws a cloak of desperate comedy over what is otherwise the deep, deep tragedy of post imperial Britain.

By becoming embroiled in the conflict, we have made both made targets of our citizens and terrorists of them too, as the London bombings proved.

Bush and Blair, quite simply, are the best recruiting sergeants Al Q'aeda has ever had - and ordinary citizens with no axe to grind have been thrown unwittingly and unwillingly into the front line.

Daily our freedoms are being curtailed - whether it's the ban on impromptu protests near Whitehall or the tedious waits in airport lounges, life has become more closed, more narrow.

I can't speak for those who died in the New York attacks, but if I was among them this is not the legacy I would have wanted.

Justice yes, by all means; a degree of vengeance too possibly extracted on those responsible..

But the killing of thousands of equally innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians in my name? No thanks.

And I would certainly not have wanted my death to become the justification for the eradication of age-old liberties fundamental to Western civilisation.

Such as the right for every prisoner to have a trial, access to a lawyer, and an open justice system - now happily jettisoned by Bush.