A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  A History of the World Since 9/11

  Also by Dominic Streatfeild

  Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography

  Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control

  A History of the World Since 9/11

  DOMINIC STREATFEILD

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books,

  an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Dominic Streatfeild, 2011

  The moral right of Dominic Streatfeild to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

  without the prior permission of both the copyright owner

  and the above publisher of this book.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 9 781 84354 766 2

  eISBN: 978 085789 306 2

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For Jojo

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Rage

  2 For Those Who Come across the Seas

  3 The Wedding Party

  4 Groupthink 7075-T6

  5 Stuff Happens

  6 The Egyptian

  7 Friends in Low Places

  8 The Muslim Disease

  Epilogue

  Suggested Reading

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Introduction

  At first glance Turkish Airlines flight TK1202’s passengers appear ordinary enough: football fans, perhaps, attending an away game. But there are signs. Eastern European accents. G-Shock watches. Crew cuts. When the men lean forward to open their tray tables their T-shirts ride up their arms, revealing tattoos: daggers, wings, numbers. Not football fans. As the aircraft makes its final approach, they point out of the windows at a Disneyesque palace in the middle of an artificial lake. ‘Slayer!’ they grin, giving each other the thumbs-up. ‘Camp Slayer!’

  Inside the terminal building Kellogg, Brown & Root contractors mill about.

  ‘No cellphones!’ barks a sergeant. ‘Those checkpoint guys see you with something electrical, they gonna think you detonating something.’

  A brief burst of activity ensues as 150 cargo-panted Americans frantically disentangle themselves from various electrical appliances and stow them in their flight bags. iPods and phones safely out of sight, they form a straggly line to wait for their armoured buses and security details.

  We don’t have an armoured bus or a security detail.

  ‘We can get them,’ Haider, my fixer, says. ‘But they’ll mark us out as a target.’

  Instead, we borrow a battered Hyundai.

  Beyond the airport’s security perimeter the scale of the destruction becomes apparent. Everything appears to have been shelled. Every building, every wall, broken; in their place, rusty rebar cables contorted like palsied fingers. And rubble. Here are the state courts, burned; there’s the old parliament building, wrecked. Government ministries are identifiable by the blast barriers protecting them: the more important the ministry, the higher the walls. The entire city is coated with a layer of fine concrete dust.

  As we move into town, Haider points out sites of interest: the Ministry of X – bombed in 2004; the Department of Y – blown up a year later.

  ‘It was around here somewhere, wasn’t it?’ he asks the driver.

  A couple of years ago, the pair pulled over to help two men lying on the pavement. Perhaps they were wounded?

  They weren’t. Their heads had been sawn off.

  Everywhere, garbage. Tons of it. Orange peel, shattered photocopiers, plastic water bottles, old drinks cans. On every corner watchtowers, concertina wire, sandbags; light machine guns peeping through camouflage netting, armoured personnel carriers. Iraqi troops in sunglasses, berets perched on their heads like soufflés in that crazy Saddam-style. Checkpoints beautified with plastic flowers. Beside them, signs:

  STOP

  USE OF LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED

  DO NOT ENTER OR YOU MAY BE SHOT

  Baghdad, 2009. Crucible of human civilization. Gateway to democracy in the Middle East.

  Historians like to break up human progress into bite-sized pieces. It’s a useful technique: segregated and labelled, historical eras offer prisms through which to view the past, making it easier to comprehend. Typically, they’re bookmarked by inventions: the wheel, the steam engine, the atom bomb. Intellectual movements fit nicely, too: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Modernism. Each innovation provides a paradigm shift, ushering in a way of thinking previously inconceivable but, after its emergence, unignorable.

  Occasionally, waypoints are provided by momentous events. A happening of sufficient magnitude (the argument goes) jars the historical process decisively severing the connection between past and future, sweeping away the old and paving the way for the new. The Flood in Genesis, the birth of Christ, the attack on Pearl Harbor – all ‘watershed’ moments. Bookmarking such events not only provides useful academic waypoints, it also offers another important service: reassurance. With the sweeping away of the old comes trepidation. The birth of a ‘new era’ provides a link to the past: there have been epochal events before. Things have changed rapidly, and not always for the better. We have survived them. We will again.

  The impact of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46 a.m. on 11 September 2001 was immediately labelled a watershed event. Seventy-six minutes later, after both the South Tower and the Pentagon had been hit, United Airlines Flight 93’s calamitous descent into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, marked the end of the attacks – and the start of a still-ongoing attempt to define what, exactly, they meant.

  Certainly, the strikes were unprecedented. For George W. Bush, they marked a change of political eras ‘as sharp and clear as Pearl Harbor’. Secretary of State Colin Powell agreed. ‘Not only is the Cold War over,’ he explained, ‘the post-Cold War period is also over.’

  Around the world the media reiterated the global significance of the event, most famously Le Monde. ‘Today,’ stated the French newspaper, ‘we are all Americans.’ Perhaps Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department, put it most pithily: ‘History starts today’

  Intuitively, all of these statements made perfect sense. The magnitude – and audacity – of the 9/11 attacks were staggering. All, however, was not as it seemed.

  For politicians, as for historians, predictively labelling eras is a hazardous procedure: history is littered with declarations of new eras that have somehow failed to materialize. In the aftermath of the attacks it seemed reasonable to assume that 11 September would trigger a new way of thinking.

  Did it?

  In a hundred years, when schoolchildren discover what happened at the start of the twenty-first century, what will they think? Will they see the photographs of the collapsing towers, turn the page and forget them? Or will they learn that history stopped, then restarted in some new, fundamentally different direction?

  Will 9/11 be a chapter or a footnote?

  Things that work in Baghdad: nothing. The wate
r is brown. The power cuts out ten times a day. The phones are disconnected. Mobile networks and Internet connections function intermittently. Transport and sewage: broken. In the hotel restaurant a mournful waiter sits alone watching TV. No coffee. No food. No customers. Duct tape over the windows prevents glass shards from flying into the room in the event of a detonation outside.

  Only the Black Hawks appear unaffected. They pass overhead every few minutes: one, in the lead, keeping an eye on the city; the second higher, a hundred metres behind, keeping an eye on the first. Above, surveillance aircraft watch over the helicopters and, above them, satellites look down on all of us.

  We drive to the Green Zone to pick up press passes. There are no plastic flowers. Entry is via a labyrinth of concrete blast walls manned by foreign contractors. On the outside, Ugandans. Further in, Peruvians. Here, too, everyone watches someone else’s back. Somewhere in the middle of all this, protected by the Ugandans and the Peruvians, is the US military.

  ‘Shouldn’t the American army be protecting itself?’ asks Haider. ‘Isn’t that the point of an army?’

  The Ugandans and the Peruvians are cheaper. That’s why they’re on the outside, where most car bombs go off. Searches. X-rays. Frisks. Body scans.

  WELCOME TO THE GREEN ZONE

  NO PHOTOGRAPHY

  NO CELLPHONES

  In the press centre we are interrogated. Where are we from? Who are we interviewing? Who are we working for? We fill in forms, hand over passports and credentials. We are fingerprinted and photographed from a variety of angles, then told to return in a few days. We are not allowed to wander around. We trace our way back through the concrete maze, climb into our Hyundai and go home.

  Outside the hotel at night, bursts of automatic gunfire. Who’s shooting? What are they shooting at? No one knows. The shots whistle past. In the distance, too far away to hear, an explosion lights up the sky. The power cuts out. A generator starts. The lights go back on. The Black Hawks pass overhead.

  Understandably, the first post-9/11 reaction was shock. Why had the United States been targeted? How had this happened? Could it happen again? Within days, however, this sense of insecurity was overwhelmed by a counter-wave of certainty. America had been attacked because it was free. The perpetrators were cowards. They were evil. We would get them.

  Almost from the beginning, another ingredient was present, too: idealism.

  ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux,’ Tony Blair told the Labour Party Conference three weeks after the attacks. ‘Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.’

  The slate had been wiped clean; now was the time to make a few changes. Now was the time to implement the policies we had always wanted, but never had the chance. In this sense, what 9/11 really offered policymakers was an opportunity. Rereading speeches of the time, the repeated use of this word is striking: ‘opportunity’. America had been struck. Innocence had been lost. What could be salvaged? What could we gain?

  This equation – uncertainty, certainty, opportunity – paved the way for everything that happened next. Administration spokesmen announced that the United States was working on the dark side; that the gloves were coming off. Now was not the time to err on the side of caution. If the goal was the greater good and the dissemination of freedom, how could that be wrong? In the light of 9/11 and the need to protect its citizens from the ‘existential threat’ of Osama bin Laden, the United States could have made a rational-sounding case for almost any policy decision.

  It did.

  In short order, America and her allies invaded Afghanistan, then moved on to Iraq. In the process, international alliances – NATO, the United Nations – were sidelined. Inside the country, civil liberties were curtailed. US citizens were incarcerated without trial or access to lawyers. Telephone lines and Internet hubs were tapped. Dissent was quashed. Outside it, suspects were kidnapped, ‘rendered’, then tortured and – in some cases – murdered.

  To those of a cynical disposition, it was the rhetoric that gave the game away. Once the administration got the hang of it, there was no incongruity in referring to hunger-striking prisoners as engaging in acts of ‘voluntary starvation’, suicide attempts as ‘manipulative, self-injurious behaviour’ – or even, in one famous case, ‘asymmetric warfare’. It was entirely reasonable to assert that the Coalition of the Willing held a majority in the United Nations; that the invasion of Iraq was not only legal but necessary.

  Objectors could easily be placated with a false dichotomy (‘either we act on asylum seekers or let them all in and hang the consequences’; ‘either we invade Iraq now or let Saddam hand nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda’). A little verbal dexterity was necessary, but, then, the world had changed. Old rules, drafted in a more innocent time, were no longer sufficient – not with Bin Laden on the prowl. They had to be changed, or at least reinterpreted. The law was, after all, a fluid thing.

  Haki Mohammed detests Americans.

  ‘I hate them,’ he announces nonchalantly, exhaling a plume of cigarette smoke at the ceiling fan.

  He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. Three years ago US troops kicked down his door, searched his house and accused his family of being terrorists. They had been misinformed: actually Haki was a security guard whose job was to protect one of Baghdad’s leading hotels. Although he spoke little English, he managed to come up with a phrase he thought might placate the soldiers.

  ‘We are not terrorists,’ he told the NCO in charge of the raid.

  The soldier, who had heard this kind of thing before, clubbed him in the face with a rifle butt, breaking his front teeth. When Haki showed him his official identity card, the soldier didn’t appear overly concerned.

  ‘He said, “Oh, sorry,” then he left.’ The Iraqi stubs his cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray. ‘We didn’t believe them from the beginning,’ he says. Then as an afterthought: ‘I hate the British, too.’

  Outside, on the streets, no one makes eye contact. No one wants to talk. In the ministries, workers need permission from supervisors, supervisors need permission from directorates. Directorates need permission from someone else we never manage to locate. ‘We’ll call you back,’ they all croon. ‘We’ll come by the hotel and see you.’ Then they vanish.

  ‘Do many journalists come here to interview you?’ I ask the head of one directorate.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘None. And, if I’d known you were coming, I’d have told you not to: it’s too dangerous, driving around Baghdad like that.’

  Well, now we’re here, I suggest, perhaps we could talk?

  ‘I think,’ interrupts an assistant, ‘it would be better if you came back tomorrow’

  Back into the Hyundai.

  In the evenings we sit on the hotel balcony drinking bottled water, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. Journalism in Iraq is like being stuck in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, where the end reveal is that the protagonist is in hell, reliving the same day again and again. Iraq is Groundhog Day, with guns. But then, in Baghdad, the only thing worse than nothing happening is something happening.

  No coffee in the hotel, no water in the taps, no staff in the restaurant, no guests in the rooms. No power in the plug sockets, no return calls. No photography. No cell phones. Use of lethal force authorized. Do not enter or you may be shot.

  There’s a school of thought that views terrorism as an act of provocation. Violence is involved, of course; civilians die. According to this theory, though, the actual deaths themselves are incidental. The true aim of the terrorist atrocity is not the carnage it creates. The real objective is to push the target into a reaction – preferably an overreaction – that might conceivably further the protagonists’ goals.

  Admittedly, atrocities committed by al-Qaeda are different. The organization seems to relish the prospect of civilian casualties: if they’re not Muslims, they have no right to life. Ignoring this homicidal ignorance for a moment, however, t
he organization’s goals are broadly similar to those of other, more conventional, terror groups: disruption. Fear. Publicity. Recruitment.

  Seen in this light, 9/11 was not simply an atrocity but a political act with a political goal. Al-Qaeda’s aim in striking America was not to kill a few thousand financial workers but a more insidious prodding: Bin Laden wanted to provoke the United States. He was out to wake a sleeping giant. Results were immediately gratifying.

  Initially, war was declared on the terrorists responsible. Shortly afterwards, it was expanded to include terrorists everywhere, even those who had not been involved. Finally, war was launched against anybody who might become – at some point in the future – a terrorist. Extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures. The ‘War on Terror’ was, according to George W. Bush, a ‘new and different war . . . on all fronts’. It required a ‘new and different type of mentality’.

  ‘[The war] may never end,’ Vice-President Dick Cheney admitted to a journalist days after the attacks. ‘At least, not in our lifetime.’

  For the first time in the alliance’s history, NATO invoked Article 5 of its founding charter – an attack on one was an attack on all – and joined the fray. Nations that declined to assist in the struggle were themselves classified as hostile.

  The President’s ruminations on the theme led him further into the trap.

  ‘Our responsibility to history is already clear,’ he announced on 14 September: ‘to rid the world of evil’. A two-bit organization in a Third World country had succeeded in provoking the most powerful nation on earth, and her allies, into war.

  Somewhere, in a cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border, a tall, bearded Saudi was hugging himself with glee.

  Nearly a decade on, Iraq remains the true monument to 9/11. That’s why we’re here. For two weeks, we hunt government ministers, military-types and Sahwa – former insurgents now providing security for their own districts. The only guys who actually want to talk are the latter: having been granted amnesty from prosecution for previous crimes, they have nothing to lose. Then, a catastrophe.