Gwynne Dyer : If Sept. 11 attacks hadn't happened

If Sept. 11 attacks hadn't happened

Terrorist threat would still exist, but not as major problem, justification for 'global war'

By Gwynne Dyer | September 7, 2006

Almost five years since Sept. 11, we are still being told that the world has changed forever. But the terrorist attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, was a low-probability event that could just as easily not have happened. The often careless and sometimes incompetent hijackers might have been caught before boarding those planes, and there were not 10 other plots of similar magnitude stacked up behind them. Would the world really be all that different now if there had been no Sept. 11 attacks?

There would have been no invasion of Afghanistan, and probably no second term for President Bush, whose main political asset for the past five years has been his claim to be leading the United States in a global war on terror. Deprived of the opportunity to posture as a heroic war leader in the mold of Winston Churchill or Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bush would have had great difficulty in convincing the American public that his first-term achievements merited a second kick at the can.

Would Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and company have succeeded in invading Iraq anyway? That was high on their agenda from the moment they took office, but without the Sept. 11 attacks eight months later, they would have had great difficulty in convincing the American public that invading Iraq, a country on the other side of the world that posed no threat to the United States, was a good idea. Whereas after Sept. 11, it was easy to sell the project to geographically challenged Americans: Maybe no Iraqis were involved in Sept. 11, but they're all Arabs, aren't they?

So no Afghanistan, no Iraq - and probably no Israeli attack on Lebanon either, because that was pre-planned in concert with the United States. Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of three others in a cross-border raid in late June was a major provocation, but the Bush administration had already signed off on an all-out Israeli air assault to destroy Hezbollah months before. All they needed was a suitable excuse, which Hezbollah duly provided. But assume no Bush second term, and that also doesn't happen.

Without Sept. 11, there would still be a "terrorist threat," of course, because there is always some terrorism. It's rarely a big enough threat to justify expanding police powers, let alone waging a "global war" against it, but the fluke success of the Sept. 11 attacks created the illusion that terrorism was a major problem. Various special interests climbed aboard the bandwagon, and off we all went.

That is a pity, because without Sept. 11, there would have been no governments justifying torture in the name of fighting terrorism, no "special renditions," no camps such as Guantanamo. Tens of thousands of people killed in the various invasions of the past five years would still be alive, and Western countries with large Muslim minorities would not now face a potential terrorist backlash at home from their own disaffected young Muslims. The United States would not be seen by most of the world as a rogue state. But that's as far as the damage goes.

Economically, Sept. 11 and its aftermath have had almost no discernible long-term impact: Even the soaring price of oil is mostly due to rising demand in Asia, not to military events in the Middle East. The lack of decisive action on climate change is largely due to Bush policies that were already in place before Sept. 11. And strategically, the relations between the great powers have not yet been gravely damaged by the U.S. response to Sept. 11. There may even be a hidden benefit in the concept of a "war on terror."

It is a profoundly dishonest concept, since it is actually directed mainly against Muslim groups that have grievances against the various great powers: Chechens against Russia, Muslim Uyghurs against China, Kashmiri Muslims and their Pakistani cousins against India, practically everybody in the Arab world and Iran against the United States and Britain. The terrorists' methods are reprehensible, but their grievances are often real. However, the determination of the great powers to oppose not only their methods but also their goals is also real. That gives them a common enemy and a shared strategy.

The main risk at this point in history is that the great powers will drift back into some kind of alliance confrontation. Key resources are getting scarcer, the climate is changing, and the rise of China and India means that the pecking order of the great powers is due to change again in the relatively near future. Any strategic analyst worth his salt, given those preconditions, could draw you up a dozen different scenarios of disaster by lunchtime.

Avoiding that disaster at the expense of the world's much-abused Muslims is not an acceptable option, but it appears to be the preferred solution of the moment. And that, five years on, is the principal legacy of Sept. 11.

• Gwynne Dyer, an independent journalist, writes from London. He can be reached at gwynnedyer@gmail.com.