Chronic. Twenty years ago, the towers of the World Trade Center were shot down by planes. The worst attack in history would lead the United States and some of its allies to launch into the world war against terrorism and the “axis of evil”. For the US neoconservatives, the attack provided proof of the theses put forward by Samuel Huntington in 1996: the “clash of civilizations” became the new framework for reading the world. The work was their bedside book, just as the opuses published by Milton Friedman in the 1960s and 1970s were those of the Reaganians of the 1980s.
Also listen September 11: the deadlock of twenty years of American wars against terrorism
Unfortunately, we now know that the United States’ desire for revenge has only exacerbated identity conflicts. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, with great blows of state lies about weapons of mass destruction, only undermined the credibility of “democracies”. With the images of US soldiers holding prisoners in Abu Ghraib on a leash, there is no longer a need for recruiting agents for jihadists. The unrestrained use of force, the arrogance of the US Army and the enormous civilian casualties among the Iraqi population (at least 100,000 recognized dead) did the rest and contributed powerfully to the decomposition of Iraqi-Syrian territory. and the rise of the Islamic State. The terrible failure in Afghanistan, with the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021, after twenty years of Western occupation, symbolically concludes this sad sequence.
Prosperity goals
To truly emerge from September 11, a new reading of the world is necessary: it is time to abandon the notion of “war of civilizations” and to replace it with those of co-development and global justice. This requires explicit and verifiable objectives of shared prosperity and the definition of a new economic model, sustainable and equitable, in which each region of the planet can find its place. Everyone now agrees: the military occupation of a country only strengthens the most radical and reactionary segments and can do nothing for the good. The risk is that the military-authoritarian vision will be replaced by a form of isolationist withdrawal and economic illusion: the free movement of goods and capital will suffice to disseminate wealth. It would be forgetting the highly hierarchical nature of the global economic system and the fact that each country does not fight on an equal footing.
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