RNothing is finished. The trauma of September 11, 2001 is still being felt. Nothing is forgotten, no closed chapter, no new era on the horizon. The United States’ response to the massive aggression it suffered that day shaped the Greater Middle East: From the Arab world to Afghanistan, “9/11” always metastasizes. But, perhaps even more, “the event of September 11, 2001” – the attacks and the aftershock – is one of the keys to America today.
The tragedy is still alive, like a virus resistant to antibiotics and the test of time. There is a link between that cursed day and the Donald Trump adventure. There is a connection between the destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center of New York (2,977 killed in atrocious conditions) and the assault given to the Congress of the United States, in Washington, on January 6.
The pitiful departure of the Americans from Afghanistan and, against a backdrop of renewed Islamist terrorism, the victorious return of the Taliban to Kabul are also part of the shock wave of the 9/11 event.
To the unprecedented act of war perpetrated by Al-Qaida against the United States, President George W. Bush chooses to respond with war. It was not obvious. The nature of the conflict with Osama bin Laden was arguably a different kind of counterattack. One of America’s most experienced strategists, General Brent Scowcroft (1925-2020), who served four years as senior President Bush’s security adviser (1988-1992), leaned for another line.
In the British weekly The New European (September 2-8), journalist Lionel Barber, former boss of Financial Times, report this conversation : “Scowcroft told me at the time that the most effective response would be an intelligence operation to hunt down [et neutraliser] The Terrorists. “ It was necessary to rely on the allies of the United States and exercise “Maximum pressure” on countries which, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, served as a refuge for jihadist groups.
The complexity of the world erased
We know what it was like: the war in Afghanistan and, even more so, the war in Iraq, both of which have diminished the stature of the United States – even if American territory has never known, since then, no other attack of the magnitude of that of 2001. It does not matter here the reasons, various and complex, which motivated the choice of the war. Bush places this militarization of the response in a Manichean framework: we are with the United States or against the United States. The enormity of the attacks erases all the complexity of the world.
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