Once the attacks of September 11 occurred, there were great claims that "everything would be different" and that "the world had changed." The West was forced to confront an unknown ideology, hidden in geographically distant caves from which a previously unknown bearded man and fanatic launched incomprehensible diatribes about crusaders and Jews.
A couple of years later, I titled my book “The Global Jihad, Terrorism of the 21st Century”, which had come to stay, although few knew what that word meant, which began to be heard repeatedly in the West.
On one hand, the United States had to dramatically reorient its foreign policy; on the other, many analysts had to begin studying an unknown phenomenon that exceeded them. However, twenty-five years after that criminal event, it is necessary to evaluate certain questions.
Did the world really change politically on that date and because of that unexpected event? The answer is: No. Everything that happened afterward was clear that it was going to occur; only the uninformed or ignorant about the Middle East could think differently, and many not only continue to think that way but say it without blushing.
Another question, no less important, is: What magnitude did Usama bin Laden's historical legacy have? The answer is: not much.
In my opinion, if we draw a timeline and from a historical perspective add another twenty-five years to the already elapsed ones, in what would be half a century, Al-Qaeda will be seen as merely a bump in history or a doctrinal deviation within the Islamic Arab world.
Bin Laden was lucky that day and carried out a certainly devastating attack. He did it for the media, and there is no doubt that he succeeded. He forced the United States to react with all its available conventional power; President George W. Bush had no alternative, intervened in Iraq, and unwittingly turned Western anti-Americanism into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Although the form of that radical Islam represented by Al-Qaeda in those days attracted a minority of violent Muslims eager to bring jihad to the West, it never represented a dominant social trend in the Middle East, beyond the real existence of "pockets of hate" towards the United States within Islam. The broader and more devastating story that emerged and took shape at the end of that decade for the Arab world was the staggering failure of the Arab Spring, not the success of an attack of the magnitude that the hit on the Twin Towers embodied.
European public opinion and even American citizens themselves did not understand what had happened, beyond horror and amazement, and thought that the world had changed after September 11.
The attacks on the World Trade Center involved the murder of more than 3,000 human beings, although official figures today still indicate the number of 2,977 people, in what constituted a nihilistic act that could have taken the lives of 10 or 100 times more victims, but to the Muslims who carried out the attack, the number of victims was not relevant, the more the better, what was truly important for the Islamic world and that led to weeks of celebrations, was the blow inflicted at the very heart of the "Great Satan."
The threat of the use of weapons of mass destruction had existed for a long time, but until that moment, no one seemed evil enough to use them that way. In the days following the attacks, every reflective person began to understand how vulnerable modern technological societies were, which did signify a significant change in the West.
However, it turned out that once the international intelligence and security community focused on the problem of the jihadist terrorism embodied by Al-Qaeda and its satellite groups pivoting within its ideas, it was then possible to mount some defense against the scourge.
The fact that there have been no subsequent attacks on U.S. soil was not due to a lack of attempts; many were discovered, neutralized, and aborted before they could be carried out. The truth is that twenty-five years after that mass crime, the truly terrifying possibility remains the access of terrorists to nuclear or biological weapons, but the path to these capabilities is not so easy for groups like the remnants of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the terrorist groups that orbit around Islamist ideology.
Usama bin Laden
The real problem was political; democratic societies tend to react fearfully and exaggeratedly to the threat of terrorism. It would have been very difficult for any U.S. administration of any political color to tell the public the truth after September 11, namely, that Western civilization was not facing an existential threat from Al-Qaeda but the dawn of a long military, police, and intelligence agency struggle.
The Bush administration did the opposite; it elevated the "war on terrorism" to the level of the struggles of the 20th century against fascism and communism and justified its intervention in Iraq for various reasons. However, by neglecting Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran and occupying Iraq, it turned those countries into magnets for recruiting new terrorists.
September 11 generated many theories directed at the Muslim Arab world within the framework of an aborted global trend towards democracy.
Thus, today we can clearly see in this present that this region configured an area where the Bush administration was right: there was no cultural or religious obstacle to the dissemination of democratic ideas in the Middle East; it only had to arise through the initiative of its peoples and not as a gift from a foreign power, but considering what happened in the failed Arab Springs, they should be assisted against their dictatorial (secular or theocratic) governments. Even if democracy did not emerge quickly in places like Egypt and Tunisia, the popular mobilizations we have seen signal a key and unifying social trend that is much more powerful than anything Bin Laden or Zawahiri (who are no longer in this world) could gather.
September 11 will have more legacies. Al-Qaeda, its remnants, and affiliates continue to operate and may still succeed in bringing down a plane or exploding a car bomb in a shopping mall. Pakistan, with its arsenal of nuclear weapons, is the most terrifying place where Al-Qaeda has been trying to reestablish itself for years; if successful, Pakistan would be the most dangerous part of the Islamic world, even more so than Iran, where trends have gone in the wrong direction due to the devastation of the ongoing war with the U.S. and Israel, which have weakened the regime, and although the course of that war may turn unfavorable for Tehran, beyond the damage it may cause to its enemies before the war ends.
In Western countries, distrust towards Muslims has grown since September 11, 2001, as demonstrated within the United States by the controversy during the final years of President Obama's administration over what was termed the "Ground Zero" mosque; the same is happening with the rise of anti-immigrant populist parties in Europe. Muslim community and religious leaders around the world have clearly not helped. Whenever firmness in their denunciations against terrorist groups whose operatives are Muslims was needed, all that was heard from them is that "these people do not represent Islam" and "they are not the true Islam." Very little, very simplistic, and lacking all intellectual richness has been the contribution of these Islamic leaders to prevent the already difficult integration of Muslim immigrant communities with the deepened distrust of Americans and their acceptance by countries that historically welcomed them without prejudice in Europe, which now manifest greater rejection of those migratory currents.
Since September 11, 2001, the most important global historical fact has been the rise of the noisy minorities of political Islam and their preeminence over the entire Islamic faith of the silent majority of Muslims who practice their religion in peace. That has been the most negative impact, whose development will almost certainly be felt in 50 years or more. Will anyone remember Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda at that time? That is a different matter, improbable, and undoubtedly irrelevant.
In political terms, nearly ten years later, in May 2011, a U.S. special operations team eliminated Usama bin Laden in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The operation was carried out under the direct order of President Barack Obama; this grotesque and amateur decision avoided a formal trial that would have meant a legal televised trial for the whole world, with all the rigorous procedural guarantees for the accused, in what would have been an act of historical and reparative justice for thousands of families and for the victims themselves; the outcome of the sentence and the penalty would not have changed but would have been very different, as President Obama denied Americans with that order to eliminate the terrorist immediately without facing a public judicial process, wasting the legal and media opportunity to "completely delegitimize the ideology of global jihadism by listening to the criminal and to his unjustifiable arguments."
The president Obama caused much harm with that immediate justice decision in the fight against terrorism; Bin Laden could have been taken alive and if arrested, he would have had to face a formal court (similar to the Nuremberg Trials or the trial against Saddam Hussein) and a public trial was the only tool capable of delegitimizing the jihadist narrative before the Islamic world itself, exposing the leader's crimes and demystifying his figure. By ordering to kill him directly, Obama prevented, with supine ignorance, him from being held accountable to the law and the doctrinal and argumentative basis of jihadism he symbolized was destroyed, and he wasted the opportunity to help Muslims around the world who attend their mosques to profess their faith in peace and harmony.
*Prof. George Chaya, is a Senior Advisor on Middle Eastern Affairs USA National Security expert OSINT based in Washington DC. Advisor for FHO -Fórum for the Western Hemisphere-
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