THE AUSTRALIAN: TWO things have haunted me since 9/11. The first is the pain, the grief, the lives lost and families devastated, the sheer barbaric ingenuity of evil. The scar in our humanity is still unhealed.
The second is our failure to understand what Osama bin Laden was saying about the West. We did not hear the message then. I'm not sure we hear it now.
After the shock and grief subsided, two theories began to be heard. Firstly, this was an event of epoch-changing magnitude. The terms of international politics had been transformed. The Cold War was over. Another war had begun. The enemy was not the Soviet Union and communism. It was radical, political Islam.
The second was the opposite: 9/11 was terrifying and terrible but it changed nothing because acts of terror never do. The most important thing is not to overreact. Terror may bring dividends in local conflicts but it never succeeds in its larger political aims.
There is something to be said for both theories. But there is a third: why did al-Qa'ida attack the US? Because it believed it could. Because it thought the US was past its prime, no longer as lean and hungry as it believed it was.
Robert McNamara said the first rule in politics is to understand your enemy's psychology. As I struggled to understand 9/11 I began to suspect the answer lay in the events of 1989. That is when the narratives of the West and the rest began seriously to diverge.
In the West, 1989 was seen as the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Western narrative was triumphalist. It saw those events as heralding the victory of its values without a shot being fired. The free market and liberal democratic politics had won for the simplest of reasons. They delivered, while communism did not. They would now spread across the world. It was, said Francis Fukuyama, the beginning of the end of history. » | Jonathan Sacks* | THE TIMES | Monday, September 12, 2011
*Lord Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.
