Treating the perpetrators of 9/11 as criminals, not warriors, could have radically altered the the last decade

Treating the perpetrators of 9/11 as criminals, not warriors, could have radically altered the the last decade 201171893016171360_20

According to a Gallup poll, just 54 per cent of Americans favoured military action in response to 9/11 [GALLO/GETTY]

In
the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks a decade ago, the American
people responded with shock, grief and disbelief. Within about a month,
US planes were bombing Afghanistan, with only one ally - Britain -
flying beside them. A much broader coalition of countries expressed
support, but did not participate in dropping bombs. According to polls
at the time, 95 per cent of Americans approved.

Yet
a much earlier poll had shown considerably less unanimity for this
response. Conducted by the Gallup organisation, it found that only 54
per cent of Americans favoured military retaliation, compared to 30 per
cent who favoured a criminal justice response - extraditing the
terrorists responsible and putting them on trial. The remaining 16 per
cent were undecided.

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Given
the fact that the criminal justice option had almost no media exposure,
it seems quite likely that many more Americans would have supported it
if they heard it explained and defended by credible authorities.
Instead, the opposite happened - talk of a military response became
increasingly dominant. A count conducted by Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting found that op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post ran 44-2 in favour of war during the first three weeks after September 11.

Yet
that 30 per cent figure was part of an overwhelming worldwide
consensus. The Gallup poll was replicated in 34 other countries around
the world. The military response was favoured in only two - Israel and
India - both of which had decades-long experience with terrorists from
Muslim nations, and both of which had unsuccessfully launched
military response themselves, with disastrous results that mired them in
decades of fruitless violence. It was hardly surprising that within a
matter of months both these nations were embroiled in further conflicts
which, ironically, threatened to derail our own cherished "war on
terrorism". Everywhere else, landslide majorities favoured a
non-military response, ranging from 67 per cent to 88 per cent among
NATO/Western European nations, from 64 per cent to 83 per cent among
Eastern European nations, and from 83 per cent to 94 per cent in Latin
America.

Thus,
aside from the US, Israel and India, the overwhelming majority of
people around the world favoured treating this terrorist act as the
crime it was, rather than the act of war the terrorists wanted it to be.
In Pakistan, tellingly, 69 per cent supported extradition and trial,
while only 9 per cent supported military action. Was it any wonder,
then, that Pakistan has proven so problematic for the US over the past
decade? What did we expect?

In short, it's indisputable that Al Qaeda wanted war
with America. So why did we give it to them? They did not want to be
seen as criminal pariahs, universally despised by all of humanity. So
why didn't we treat them that way? Whenever there is suffering or
injustice in the world, there is an opportunity for scoundrels to
exploit it. By responding to bin Laden militarily, Bush did what bin
Laden could never do for himself - validated his fantasy of being a holy
warrior, rather than a fanatic mmind murderer. Thus, we vastly expanded
his scoundrel's capacity to exploit all the suffering and injustice in
the world, regardless of the fact that he himself only added to that
sad total.

Why? Why did we elevate bin Laden to the status of "warrior"?

One
answer is that we ourselves were too easily trapped in either/or ways
of thinking strikingly similar to bin Laden. We too confused justice and
retribution, we too believed we knew what was right, regardless of the
consequences, we too allowed ourselves to be carried away with our own
sense of anguish, grief and betrayal. This didn't mean that we were no
better than him - but the decade that followed has all too often made it
seem that way, as our death toll has grown to far overshadow his.

War
always holds that danger - that it will turn into an endless cycle in
which each side becomes progressively more savage and barbaric, making
an utter mockery of the high ideals invoked to go to war in the first
place. Our challenge was to avoid becoming monsters ourselves in the
process of defending ourselves from monsters. War is what monsters want.
It is what feeds them. It makes them whole. It turns their enemies into
monsters as well. And all too soon - as the Abu Ghraib photos showed -
that is precisely what happened to us.

But
we have the option of thinking differently, of seeing the patterns of
thought that partly trap us, and learning how to escape from them. This
does not mean giving up on seeking and attaining justice. Quite the
contrary. By learning to distinguish justice from retribution we vastly
increase our chances and our capacity for obtaining justice, and for
avoiding future suffering in an endless cycle of retribution.

Escaping cycles of violence

This
had happened once before in our history. In Europe seven centuries ago,
retribution was virtually synonymous with justice. When one person
injured or killed another, justice required a response in kind. Cycles
of retaliation created murder rates up to a hundred times that of modern
Europe - rates comparable only to the worst of gang-infested
neighborhoods at the height of the early 1990s crack wars.

What
changed all that was an institutionalised shift in thinking. Instead of
seeing crimes of injury and murder as private matters calling out for
retribution, they were recast as public matters, crimes against the
whole society, calling out for justice. This shift in thinking and the
institutions to support it have dramatically increased the personal
security of countless millions over the centuries. It isn't perfect,
obviously. It hasn't completely eliminated murder and mayhem. But it has
produced a change so dramatic that it was truly inconceivable
beforehand. Crucial to this shift in thinking, institutions and results
was a seeming paradox: In order to secure the right to live in peace,
people gave up the privilege of taking their own revenge and acting as a
law unto themselves.

In
the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was a teachable moment: The same
was true about the possibility of eliminating war and the patterns of
thinking that lead us to war. As with the earlier elimination of private
vengeance, it would not be perfect, but it would still be incomparably
better than we could possibly imagine. It would not change human nature,
nor would it need to. It would not eliminate conflict, nor would it
need to. Rather, it would transform the conditions under which we live,
and the ways we deal with conflict. It would be a form of growing up,
growing out of one stage of development and into another.

Reflecting
on the terrifying dawn of the atomic age, which sprang from his own
theoretical discoveries, Albert Einstein wrote, "Everything has changed,
except for our ways of thinking. And thus we drift toward unimaginable
catastrophe." In the post-9/11 world, Einstein's words are more true
than ever. Job number one is to change our ways of thinking. Doing more
of what doesn't work will not help us. Doing what doesn't work more
efficiently or effectively won't help us. Minor variations in what
doesn't work won't help us either. To understand what will help us, we
must change our ways of thinking. And to do that, we must gain insight
into our ways of thinking, as well as insight into the ways of thinking
of others as well.

The road not taken - the justice option

Let's
start with a simple exercise. Imagine if we Americans had not rushed
into war against an enemy that hadn't even attacked us. Imagine if we
had not rushed into war at all.

Imagine
what could have been instead had we chosen the justice option -
treating the terrorists as the criminals they were, instead of the war
option, conferring on them the unwarranted dignity of warriors. On
September 25, 2001, Mary Robinson, the UN's High Commissioner for Human
Rights, announced that her office had determined
"that the events of the 11th of September undoubtedly constituted acts
of terrorism, but they also crossed a line" into the realm of "crimes
against humanity".

Robinson continued:

"The
significance of that is two-fold, I think. One, it immediately rallies
the whole global community. If these are crimes against humanity,
every country would owe a duty to work with the United Nations, work
with the United States, to bring the perpetrators to justice. Also, it
helps in many different ways to indicate that it is not acceptable that
that line has been crossed and that the world community working
together is going to prevent the kind of widespread scale of terrorism
against the civilian population that would amount to a crime against
humanity."

Tellingly, rather than embracing this message, and building on the world-wide obligation work
with us, the Bush Administration made it a priority to remove Robinson
from office. This was done precisely because she was an independent
voice who did not always rubber-stamp US positions - a fact which
obviously made her an even more effective ally, if we were at all
interested in the path of moral and political persuasion.

But
beyond the clear weight of international law on our side - and the
obligation Robinson highlighted - there was even more. There was a deep
feeling of shame, humiliation, and revulsion in the Muslim world that
the terrorist acts had dishonored and disgraced Islam. Such feelings
could easily have been mobilised to go far beyond what governments could
command - especially those oppressive governments allied with America
whose legitimacy many Muslims questioned or denied.

"The
events of the 11th of September undoubtedly constituted acts of
terrorism, but they also crossed a line [into the realm of] crimes
against humanity."

Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Imagine
if we had done the sensible thing - mobilising the worldwide horror at
9/11 to bring the perpetrators to justice and utterly discredit their
cause, without harming one single innocent along the way.

Imagine
what would have happened if the United States had gone to the United
Nations, embraced Robinson, and sought the creation of a special
tribunal to investigate and punish those responsible, in collaboration
with all the leading religious authorities in Islam. Imagine further if
those authorities had issued a fatwah - a religious edict - commanding full cooperation from every Muslim as their religious duty to remove a terrible stain on Islam. Imagine if this fatwah
called for every Muslim not just to pmindively cooperate, but to
actively come forward to tell everything they knew that could possibly
help in bringing those responsible to justice.

How could such a response have been resisted? Who could possibly resist the combination of religious duty commanded from within the very heart of Islam
and complete, merciful restraint by the injured party, who had almost
limitless power to respond with military force and violence? The answer
should be clear: only a handful of the most fanatical members of
al-Qaeda (not even a majority of those mindociated with it) could have
resisted.

The
trials, of course, would have taken much longer. And they would be even
more devastating. Families of innocent victims - Muslims as well as
Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews - would take centre stage in a
drama of moral condemnation recalling the Nuremberg Tribunals. Instead
of appearing as the wished to be seen - as heroic, idealistic figures,
battling an abstract evil against overwhelming odds - they would have
appeared as they are: as the blood-drenched murders of innocents. Such
trials would have utterly discredited the terrorists for generations to
come - if not forever - and created a significant opening for voices of
progressive reform within Islam.

It
would have been a spectacular victory for the rule of law, the
fellowship of faiths and America's moral superiority - foregoing
vengeance for justice. It would have utterly discredited bin Laden's
brand of extremism - not just the use of violence, but the underlying
ideology as well. It would have protected the US from any similar
attacks for at least a generation or more - plenty of time to seriously
deal with the underlying grievances bin Laden had exploited, and hoped
to continue exploiting until he reshaped the Islamic world to his
liking. Plenty of time for a long-term justice option, encompminding
social, political and economic justice for all. Plenty of time for
religious Muslims to reclaim their faith from its political hijackers.
And plenty of time for Christians and Jews to do the same.

Looking forward

Of
course, the moment for making such a choice is long gone. But
nonetheless, it's still important to recognise what that choice was -
disregarded though it may have been. The reason why is simple: history
is full of surprises. The Arab Spring is proof enough of that.

The
United States today remains deeply scarred by 9/11 - not so much by the
attack itself, but by our own self-defeating pattern of response. The
damage done by Bush's foolish and intemperate reaction has been
compounded by Obama's tacit blessing, his refusal to even consider a
desperately-needed investigation into how deeply the US has been led
astray into what Dick Cheney called "the dark side". Obama's glib
justification - a desire to "look forward, not backward" - is not just
juvenile, it's utterly childish.

The
Nuremberg Trials were based on the premise that the only way to move
forward was to look back, and learn the lessons of how people came to
mistake the darkness for the light. This same premise has been affirmed
again and again since then - most notably in South Africa's "Peace and
Reconciliation" process, a process that has since been emulated in other
countries as well.

Obama's
purported desire was to avoid political conflict, to promote a coming
together to deal with immediate problems. But this desire has been
thwarted at every turn. It's not surprising: Those who do evil,
believing it to be good, will never stop doing it until they are forced
to face a reckoning. Obama's unwillingness to force that reckoning is a
sign of profound moral failure - not just his own moral failure, but
America's. Until that reckoning is forced, the US will continue to be in
thrall to its dark side, not just in foreign affairs, but in all
things. The Tea Party, for example, is merely another form this dark
side has taken, as seen in their repeated political hostage-taking. And
the more we try to pretend that we can reason with that dark side,
compromise with and accommodate it, the more of a foothold it comes to
have inside each of us.

To fight the monsters, without becoming one of them. Ten years after 9/11, that is the challenge we face. As it always is.

Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly alternative community newsletter.

You can follow Paul on Twitter: @PaulHRosenberg