Jonathan Freedland: Global politics in the decade of radicalism
[Jonathan Freedland is the Guardian's policy editor and has been a columnist for the paper since 1997.]
The historian Eric Hobsbawm declared the 20th to be the "short century", an era that ran from the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. It's possible that the chroniclers of the future will make a similar judgment on the noughties, branding this the "short decade" – one that began on 11 September 2001 and drew to a close when Barack Obama took the presidential oath on 20 January 2009.
For this was the era defined by what the American president called "the war on terror". That conflict, begun so spectacularly with the felling of the twin towers, came to dominate every aspect of world affairs in the first decade of the 21st century. It spawned two wars, separated the United States from some of its oldest allies, fatally hobbled the premiership of a British prime minister and reconfigured the liberal left, on both sides of the Atlantic. And it left an uncounted number of people – perhaps in the hundreds of thousands – dead.
Unusually for a historic turning point, this was one that could be seen without the benefit of distance or the passage of time. By the evening of 11 September, it had become a commonplace to say the world would never be the same again. The Guardian's front page showed an image of the World Trade Centre, holed and belching great billows of clouds, below four simple words: "A declaration of war."
And so it proved to be. Al-Qaida's grandiosity, its desire to be granted the status of an equal adversary, was fulfilled when George W Bush treated the 11 September attacks as the opening salvo in a fully-fledged war. Within less than a month, the bombs were falling on Afghanistan, the place al-Qaida had made its own.
By then, the new era had begun. Suddenly the long decade that had just ended – spanning from the fall of the wall in 1989 until 10 September 2001 – began to look like a rare respite, the only time since 1939 when the free world had not been locked in a titanic struggle against a vast and terrifying enemy. Starting on 9/11, the noughties saw normal service resumed.
Now we were in a Clash of Civilisations, with "radical Islam" replacing fascism and Soviet communism as the west's designated global enemy. Even those conflicts with only the slimmest connection to the battle against al-Qaida were squeezed into the "war on terror". In Russia, Vladimir Putin said he was fighting terror in Chechnya; in Israel, Ariel Sharon insisted he was engaged in the same struggle as his buddy Bush, with Hamas and the ailing Yasser Arafat standing in for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. India tried to say the same about the Pakistani militants in Kashmir...
Read entire article at Guardian.co.uk
The historian Eric Hobsbawm declared the 20th to be the "short century", an era that ran from the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. It's possible that the chroniclers of the future will make a similar judgment on the noughties, branding this the "short decade" – one that began on 11 September 2001 and drew to a close when Barack Obama took the presidential oath on 20 January 2009.
For this was the era defined by what the American president called "the war on terror". That conflict, begun so spectacularly with the felling of the twin towers, came to dominate every aspect of world affairs in the first decade of the 21st century. It spawned two wars, separated the United States from some of its oldest allies, fatally hobbled the premiership of a British prime minister and reconfigured the liberal left, on both sides of the Atlantic. And it left an uncounted number of people – perhaps in the hundreds of thousands – dead.
Unusually for a historic turning point, this was one that could be seen without the benefit of distance or the passage of time. By the evening of 11 September, it had become a commonplace to say the world would never be the same again. The Guardian's front page showed an image of the World Trade Centre, holed and belching great billows of clouds, below four simple words: "A declaration of war."
And so it proved to be. Al-Qaida's grandiosity, its desire to be granted the status of an equal adversary, was fulfilled when George W Bush treated the 11 September attacks as the opening salvo in a fully-fledged war. Within less than a month, the bombs were falling on Afghanistan, the place al-Qaida had made its own.
By then, the new era had begun. Suddenly the long decade that had just ended – spanning from the fall of the wall in 1989 until 10 September 2001 – began to look like a rare respite, the only time since 1939 when the free world had not been locked in a titanic struggle against a vast and terrifying enemy. Starting on 9/11, the noughties saw normal service resumed.
Now we were in a Clash of Civilisations, with "radical Islam" replacing fascism and Soviet communism as the west's designated global enemy. Even those conflicts with only the slimmest connection to the battle against al-Qaida were squeezed into the "war on terror". In Russia, Vladimir Putin said he was fighting terror in Chechnya; in Israel, Ariel Sharon insisted he was engaged in the same struggle as his buddy Bush, with Hamas and the ailing Yasser Arafat standing in for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. India tried to say the same about the Pakistani militants in Kashmir...