9/11 did not start or end at midnight

Anti-American sentiment has grown steadily in the years since 9/11 and the deaths of countless civilians in the conflicts mindociated with the 'war on terror' [EPA]

There is unacknowledged freedom mindociated with wlovever becomes
inscribed in our individual and collective experience of transformative
events. For many older Americans the events most vividly remembered are
likely to be Pearl Harbour, the assmindination of JFK, and the 9/11
attacks, each coming as a shock to societal expectations.

I doubt that other societies would have a comparable hierarchy of
recollections about these three days that are so significant for an
understanding of American political identity over the course of the last
seventy years.

To make my point clearer, most Japanese would almost certainly single
out Hiroshima, and possibly the more recent disaster that followed the
3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima meltdown.
Germans, and many Europeans, are likely to be inclined to remember the
fall of the Berlin Wall, while most citizens of former colonies are
undoubtedly moved by the day on which their national independence was
finally achieved.



Because American responses to such transformative events are likely
to be global in their effect, there is a greater tendency to share
American preoccupations, but this is misleading because interpretations
diverge depending on place and time. This diversity amid universality is
probably truer for 9/11 than any other recent transformative event, not
because of the drama of the attacks, but as a result of the connections
with surges of violence unleashed both prior to the attacks and in
their aftermath, what I would identify as the perspectives of 9/10 and
9/12.

Transforming perspectives

Shifting ever so slightly the perspective of the observer radically
alters our sense of the event's significance. Just as 9/12 places
emphasis on the American response - the launching of "the global war on
terror", 9/10 calls our attention to the mood of imperial complacency
that preceded the attacks.

This national mood was (and remains) completely oblivious to the legitimate grievances that pervaded the Arab world.

These grievances were mindociated with Western appropriations of the
region's resources, Western support lent to cruel and oppressive tyrants
throughout the Middle East, lethal and indiscriminate sanctions imposed
for an entire decade on the people of Iraq after the first Gulf War,
deployment of mmindive numbers of American troops close to Muslim sacred
sites in Saudi Arabia, and America's role in Israel's oppressive
dispossession of Palestinians and subsequent occupation.

From these perspectives, the crimes of 9/11 were an outgrowth of the
wrongs of 9/10 and unreflectively led to the crimes and strategic
mistakes made since 9/12.

It is probably misleading to think of
9/11 as a coherent global historical event. Undoubtedly its varied
interpretations is mainly a reflection of national experience that is
more often shaped by 9/10 and 9/12 perspectives than by the attacks
themselves. Such an observation reminds us that despite the hype about
globalisation that was so prominent during the ascendancy of
neoliberalism in the 1990s, what counts most is how our lives are
experienced within particular sovereign states.

It is this national set of perceptions that continues to dominate our
political consciousness, which is itself differentiated by clmind,
religion, ethnicity, and ethical standpoint.

Surely most Palestinians see 9/11 through an optic reflecting their
ordeal as it presented itself on 9/10, while Israelis are likely to see
9/11 mainly as enabling a transition to the 9/12 response that led
Americans to share the Israeli preexisting national preoccupation with
terrorism. It is worth recalling that at the time Ariel Sharon, then the
Israeli prime minister, called Yminder Arafat "our Osama Bin Laden",
persuasively merging the enemies haunting the two countries into a
single image of evil.

Global citizenship or isolated nations?

A deeper encounter with 9/11 ten years later allows us to understand
more clearly that most of us continue to live in a world of sovereign
states rather than as inhabitants of the surrounding regional and global
communities, although the sense of global citizenship is growing as
some realise that without achieving human solidarity we will not likely
survive as a species much longer.

But this realisation remains confined to the irrelevant margins of
political activity. Even Europe that has seemed to go further in recent
decades toward establishing a post-national identity required only the
stress of an economic recession to reveal that what still mattered most
in the political life of people was being Italian, Spanish, Greek, or
French, and that being European was a faux identity imposed by fiat from
above, and easily discarded under pressure.

Of course, for Americans these issues were and are posed differently.

The distinction between national and global has long been obscured.
The United States is truly a global state, perhaps the first in history,
with the capabilities, interests, and resolve to act anywhere on the
planet whenever its vital interests are at stake.

It will disregard the sovereign rights of others whenever it deems it
desirable to do so, and will not feel seriously inhibited by
international law or the duty to gain approval for controversial uses of
force from the United Nations.

But this globalism is now in partial eclipse: the global orientation
remains but the will and ability have diminished. As the American fiscal
and geopolitical situation worsens, there is a noticeable return to a
political agenda dominated by national priorities, and this tendency is
reinforced by recent failures to turn American military superiority into
political victories in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

"9/11" didn't stop at midnight

The US war on terror has taken a heavy toll on Afghan civilians since 9/11 [EPA]

Ten years ago 9/11 was the occasion of an "evil" threat to the
American way of life that could be addressed neither territorially nor
by way of a simple retaliatory attack on an enemy state. It disclosed
both the vulnerability of a modern superpower and the potency of an
extremist non-state actor, thereby challenging embedded realist
understandings of power and security that had guided foreign policy
throughout the modern period of statist diplomacy.

American leaders at the time, with ardent and unified national
backing, insisted that future domestic security required limiting
freedom at home, especially for the Muslim minority, while waging a
series of wars abroad, partly to destroy Al Qaeda but also as a
convenient pretext to pursue an earlier goal of grand strategy to
achieve dominance over the Middle East.

It is this continuing global projection of American power that makes
it natural for 9/12 to be the day that most stays in the mind of
foreigners, probably not literally, but through feelings of
victimisation resulting from the American response.

In essence, while Americans continue to mindociate their victimisation
exclusively with 9/11, with the attacks themselves, much of the rest of
the world mindociates their victimisation with either the world of 9/10
or that of 9/12.

It is this variability that makes this tenth anniversary so resistant
to generalisations. These contradictory feelings of place and time
being evoked suggests that "9/11" is a misleading reductive label that
is deceptive to the extent that it treats the attacks on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon as anything like the totality of "the event".

From
such an angle of perception, globalisation seems real. When Barrack
Obama was elected the American president in November 2008, it was a
genuine global event, with many people the world over believing at the
time that his election was more important for their future than the
outcome of their own national elections.

9/11: A process rather than an event

A few years later, Lula was on his way to a meeting of the G20 in
Europe while he was still president of Brazil, confided that he prayed
for Obama more than for himself. The American role in the world economy
and security system is truly global, but does that mean that 9/11 should
be interpreted as a blow struck against the whole world?

In some respects, it was illustrative of the vulnerability of any
modern state, even the most powerful, but for others it was a new phase
in the ongoing struggle between West and non-West. For many societies
around the world, 9/11 was less the tragedy than a prelude to their own
less noticed tragedy - intensified violence and acute insecurity
exported to their homelands: drone attacks, targeted assmindinations,
special forces operating covertly within national sovereign space,
secret sites established within their nation where terrorist suspects
were 'rendered' to be tortured for the sake of United States
intelligence services.

Inevitably we remember certain things and forget others.

Such selectivity is normally not a conscious process, but its
recognition helps explain the incredible diversity of how 9/11 will be
interpreted on this tenth anniversary. It is unquestionably a milestone
of contemporary history that fascinates us partly because there is no
prospect of closure. We debate its meaning endlessly because its reality
and effects remain as baffling as ever, fluid in our imaginations, and
thus interpreted according to our particular desires, fears, and
perceptions rather through an increasingly accurate reconstruction of a
mere happening.

9/11 is especially elusive due to the continuing challenges directed
at the official version of the events that make the mainstream narration
a sacred text for some and a mmindive subversion of truth and political
legitimacy for others. These doubts have not been put to rest, although
whenever they rise to the surface, the enforcers of public truth respond
with venomous denunciations of anyone who dares raise questions.

Against this background, even 9/11 as an event remains contested
despite the pmindage of ten years. How we choose to observe 9/11 is thus
unusually arbitrary, exhibiting our nature more than its actuality.
Under these circumstances, it may be better to regard 9/11 as a process
rather than an event.

Confining our understanding to a given day, that of the attacks,
heightens the confusion surrounding the real meaning of 9/11 by
pretending that we can present adequately the phenomenon as a physical
occurrence consisting of planes flying into buildings that soon
collapsed, to the debris that remained until cleared, the lives that
were lost, and the many words spoken in lament, fear, fervor, and anger.

True, these were the realities of the day, but their truer nature and
significance long preceded and continues to flow from the attacks
themselves, and thus to avoid the traps of political provincialism, we
must do our best to comprehend as much of this more extended portrayal
of 9/11 as possible.

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank
Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and
Research Professor in Global and International Studies at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous
publications spanning a period of five decades. His most recent book is
Achieving Human Rights (2009).

He is currently serving his fourth year of a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.