Empires of the Mind by Robert Gildea

Author:Robert Gildea [Gildea, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781107159587
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

8

Hubris and Nemesis: Iraq, the Colonial Fracture and Global Economic Crisis

At 8.45 a.m. on Tuesday 11 September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center of New York City. At 9.03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, flew into the Pentagon while a fourth, in which the passengers fought back against the terrorists, came down in a field in Pennsyvlania. These targets represented the financial centre of global capitalism and the nerve centre of US military power. The towers collapsed at 9.59 and 10.28 a.m. respectively. In the four attacks 3,000 people were killed and 6,000 injured. The core group of attackers belonged to the ‘Hamburg cell’ of Middle Eastern activists who had gone to study at the Hamburg Technical Institute in 1992–6, trained in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden in 1999, and went on to the United States in June 2000. The pilots of the deadly planes were Mohammed Atta, born in Cairo in 1968, Marwan al-Shehhi, born in Beirut in 1975, and Ziad Jarrah, born in the United Arab Emirates in 1978. ‘Muscle’ to control the passengers was provided by veterans from Saudi Arabia who had fought in Bosnia such as Khalid al-Mihdhar, born in 1975, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, born in 1976.1

The events of 9/11 were followed by four overlapping crises that shook the first decade of the twenty-first century. First, the displacement of liberal or humanitarian interventionism by new ambitions of empire, masquerading as a War on Terror which set aside all rules and provoked blowback from the regions invaded. Second, the alienation of immigrant communities at home by the pursuit of pseudo-colonial wars and the demonisation of Muslims as terrorists, so that some young immigrants came to identify less with the host community but with former oppressed colonial peoples or with global Islam. Third, a crisis of global capitalism, as global financial flows in pursuit of ever greater profits became unsustainable. The burst of the financial bubble in 2008 provoked economic recession, fiscal crisis and austerity, and inflicted pain on populations from the developing world and Europe to the United States. Fourth, increased and defensive nationalisms triggered a renewed crisis over Europe, this time over the proposed European constitution of 2004. This was rejected in a French referendum of 2005, which excused Britain from having to hold its own referendum, but only postponed her crisis by ten years.

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