“The tragic events of September 11, 2001, changed more than Manhattan’s skyline; it profoundly altered our political and legal landscape as well,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his bestseller Kingdom of Fear. “Anyone who witnessed the desecration of those buildings and the heart-wrenching loss of life, who didn’t want to run out and rip someone a new asshole, doesn’t deserve the freedoms we still enjoy. However, anybody who thinks for one moment that giving up our freedoms is any way to preserve or protect those freedoms, is even more foolhardy.”
And that’s the thing. Everyone knows that fear can be irrational but many just resorted to the mantra “better safe than sorry.”
But are we safer?
In April 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate said the United States wasn’t. According to declassified portions of the report, the terrorist threat was in fact greater than it had been on September 10, 2001. This wasn’t the bleeding-heart-socialist-civil-rights-activists-American-Civil-Liberties-Union-leftist-media talking. This was an NIE, a federal government document written by the National Intelligence Council, approved by the Director of National Intelligence and based on raw, uncensored information collected by the sixteen American intelligence agencies. Of course, as the name states, the reports are “estimates.” But they are considered authoritative assessments and while typically bureaucratic or measured in tone, this one was blunt. Radical Islamic movements that aligned themselves with al Qaeda had not been quashed, but had metastasized and spread around the world. The report laid out the factors that were fuelling the movement: fear of Western domination leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness when coupled with entrenched grievances such as corruption and injustice; the faulty intelligence that led to the Iraq war; the slow pace of economic, social and political reform in Muslim nations; and the pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among Muslims and exploited by jihadists.
Two of the authors of a report issued by the 9/11 Commission (an independent, bipartisan committee created by congressional legislation to investigate the attacks) asked in a Washington Post editorial in 2007 how it was possible that the threat could remain so dire when billions had been spent, new laws enacted, wars fought.
“We face a rising tide of radicalization and rage in the Muslim world—a trend to which our own actions have contributed. The enduring threat is not Osama bin Laden but young Muslims with no jobs and no hope, who are angry with their own governments and increasingly see the United States as an enemy of Islam,” wrote the former commission chair Thomas H. Kean, and vice chair Lee H. Hamilton.
Kean and Hamilton wrote that the West had lost the struggle of ideas.
“We have not been persuasive in enlisting the energy and sympathy of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims against the extremist threat. That is not because of who we are: Polling data consistently show strong support in the Muslim world for American values, including our political system and respect for human rights, liberty and equality. Rather, U.S. policy choices have undermined support.” Military is essential, they wrote. “But if the only tool is a hammer, pretty soon every problem looks like a nail.”
Fear drove so much of what happened after 9/11, and many political leaders were the masters of stoking it. The world was suddenly viewed only through the terrorism prism. There was no middle ground. As Bush famously said on September 20, 2001, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
“If you lose where you’re going, you look back to where you’ve been.”
TRADITIONAL SOMALI SAYING
THERE MAY BE no country more cursed than Somalia, the archetypal failed state. Which is strange when you think that unlike so many other war-torn nations, Somalis share one language, religion, ethnicity and culture.
Somalia went into free fall in 1991 when warring clans deposed the military dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre and the incendiary fighting nurtured an entire generation on violence and poverty. Say Somalia and most think Black Hawk Down, three words that sum up the 1993 failed U.S. intervention that ingrained an image of a savage Somalia into the Western consciousness.
The U.S. Special Forces mission was an attempt to back a un humanitarian mission trying to quell the chaos that followed Barre’s ousting. What the U.S. administration did not appreciate in its attempt to capture Mohammed Farah Aideed, the ruthless warlord of the day, was Somalia’s fierce clan structure and nationalistic pride. Nothing unites Somalis more than fending off a foreign force, which is why a militia in flip flops and armed with rocket-propelled grenades managed to shoot America’s sturdy steel birds out of the sky and send its elite forces running for cover.
Black Hawk Down had always been my image of Somalia. Every time I walked down the newsroom corridor to my desk I saw the dusty, battered torso of U.S. Staff Sergeant William Cleveland. The Toronto Star’s Paul Watson risked his life to take that Pulitzer Prize– winning photo of Cleveland’s corpse as it was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by a cheering, dancing, frenzied mob on October 3, 1993. Paul would later write in his memoir, Where War Lives, that before he took the photo he “winced with each blow.”
Paul’s image of Cleveland, one of the eighteen American soldiers killed the day two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot out of the sky (and hundreds of Somalis were killed in the fighting), changed the course of history, prompting U.S. President Bill Clinton to pull American forces out of the region. When it was announced the following year that Paul had become the first Canadian journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize, colleagues paraded him around the newsroom on their shoulders. The Star later created commemorative pewter coins about the diameter of hockey pucks depicting Paul with a disproportionately enormous forehead. “A pall of stunned silence fell over the room,” Paul later told me, describing the moment when managers handed out the coins. “Then suddenly there was a single thunk of a coin hitting a plastic garbage bin, followed by another and then more, in a rippling wave of thunks as my oversized, memorialized forehead hit bottom across the Star.” When I joined the newspaper as a summer student a year later, reporters who still had the coins had stashed them in their desk drawers and the consensus seemed to be that money spent on a big party would have been a better idea.
After 1993, Somalia largely fell off the world’s radar as the fighting continued and thousands died of starvation and disease. The West became reluctant to get involved again, which brought disastrous consequences not just for Somalia but for the region. The Western world ignored the 1994 genocide in Rwanda until it was too late partly because of Black Hawk Down aftershocks and fears of becoming involved in African affairs. The little foreign help Somalia did receive throughout the 1990s came from Arab states, Saudi Arabia in particular, which helped fund schools and mosques and deliver humanitarian aid.
With 9/11 came fears that the Horn of Africa would harbour fleeing al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan as it had in the past. U.S. forces set up a military base in nearby Djibouti, and Somalia’s instability took on global significance. Conferences, summits, dialogues and reconciliation meetings were held in five-star hotels in neighbouring Kenya as un officials and diplomats met with Somali warlords, politicians, businessmen and clan power brokers to discuss a way out of the mess. The meetings would end with much hand-shaking and ten- or fifteen- or twenty-point plans of action, and there would be brief periods of optimism before greed, corruption, ineptitude or bureaucratic bungling would scuttle any chances of peace.
Somalia had fascinated me as an important terrorism footnote, and with the majority of foreign reporting after 9/11 focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Somalia was interesting for the simple reason that almost no one else was covering it. Somalia also held special