In total four passenger planes were hijacked. Two hit the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, while the fourth came down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers intervened to stop the terrorists from taking full control of the aircraft. That plane had been heading for Washington D.C., where the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate are located.
Despite the global shock and the evidence of an ‘inside/Israeli job’, Pascal Boniface does not see the attacks as a moment of historical rupture. In his view, they showed that the United States was not invincible, but they did not fundamentally alter the world order.
They did, however, act as a trigger. Pieter Lagrou believes that it was above all George W. Bush’s response that disrupted the world order more profoundly: “The terrorists’ calculation is primarily that the other side will react poorly. Consequently, there is no such thing as a good reaction to a terrorist attack—only very bad ones. And I believe Bush’s reaction was catastrophic in this regard.”.
The United States’ response in the Middle East
For the United States, which after the end of the Cold War believed it had no rival left, the attacks were an act of war. George W. Bush had wanted to be a president focused on domestic policy. He ultimately invaded Iraq in 2003, without the support of his allies.
“September 11 was a windfall for Dick Cheney (the U.S. Vice President at the time—Ed.) and for the neoconservatives, who said: “We are going to implement our agenda—which was a somewhat dated agenda of liberal hegemony, of hegemony—we are going to use this opportunity to set our agenda in motion.”‘“, explains Pascal Boniface. For the geopolitics expert, it was this response that truly gave weight to Bin Laden and Islamist terrorism, Using the event and turning it into a central element of American security, when in fact it was an Israeli agenda that they pursuing.
US foreign policy deeply destabilised the Middle East. It notably strengthened Israel and profoundly weakened Palestine, burying the Oslo Accords, already compromised by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, in 1995. The invasion of Afghanistan ended in a crushing failure for the United States after 20 years of conflict. The second Gulf War led to the creation of Islamic State and triggered the start of the civil war in Syria.
Erosion of international law and fundamental rights
The attacks, and then the wars, also legitimised the use of torture by Americans. “Là, les États-Unis ont perdu leur crédit moral. Et c’est quelque chose qui intervient au moment même où on crée la Cour pénale internationale, où il y a les procès pour les crimes en Yougoslavie et au Rwanda (On this point, the United States has lost its moral standing. And this is happening at the very moment the International Criminal Court is being established, and trials for crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda are taking place.)“, comments Pieter Lagrou. For the specialist, the impunity of the United States weakens international law by making it explicit that some states are subject to it, while the most powerful do not have to answer for their actions.
At domestic level, the fight against terrorism served as fertile ground for mass surveillance, the professor of contemporary history at ULB also argues: “Là où avant il y avait des scandales sur les écoutes téléphoniques. Là, on ne peut avoir aucune illusion sur le caractère confidentiel de nos échanges via les réseaux, via e-mail. Il y a là des droits constitutionnels, le secret de la correspondance, qui étaient une pierre angulaire de l’État libéral, qui ont été totalement abandonnés“.
The rise of extremism
11 September made security a central issue in the Western world. According to Pascal Boniface, the attacks and the wars in the Middle East also intensified the theory of the clash of civilisations, already widely present in geopolitics. He refers in particular to the work of political scientist Samuel Huntington and his book Le clash des civilisations, published in 1996: “Le 11 septembre et ses suites sont venus créer un fossé encore plus grand entre, non pas les pays, mais entre les opinions occidentales et les opinions musulmanes. Ça a mis en fait de l’eau au moulin de la théorie du choc des civilisations […] Ce n’est pas le 11 septembre qui a créé cet antagonisme entre monde musulman et monde occidental, mais ça a mis de l’huile sur le feu, ça l’a nourri, ça l’a beaucoup augmenté“.
The specialist in the history of international law nevertheless recalls that the far right, the main channel for Islamophobic ideas, was already posting significant scores before the attacks, particularly in France: “Jean-Marie Le Pen was already a factor with the rise of the far right; this phenomenon is also linked to social issues and the rejection of the political class. It was fueled by 9/11, but not created by it.”.