VIEW POINT: Ten years on

They were all there, US' present and past leaders including President Obama, the former self-proclaimed 'war president' George W. Bush, former president Bill Clinton, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, at an elaborate ceremony to mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity that claimed the lives of 2,735 people at the World Trade Center and 231 others at the Pentagon and aboard the three terrorist hijacked planes.
In its own clever way, the ceremony was also meant to justify the wars America has been waging in three Muslim countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. When 9/11 happened, America and its friends elsewhere declared 'the world has changed'. The Superpower had come under attack and it was going to react in world changing ways, went the argument. It did not matter if the rest of the world had nothing to do with that tragic event. The anger and the hurt were understandable. But the motive behind the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was not merely to bring the real perpetrators to justice. Washington could have easily done that by finding out their address in Afghanistan and bombing them out of existence with Pentagon's 'precision' and 'smart' bombs. It was looking for a new enemy in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse and the Cold War's end. Its military industrial complex needed conflict to fetch profits that are unmatched by any other industry.
Also, the neo-cons ruling the country at the time saw that as an opportunity to reorder the Middle East - a stated objective as articulated by secretary of state Condoleezza Rice at the time of Iraq invasion - to seize control of Iraqi oil and secure Israel's self-designed security interests. Soon afterwards, using false pretexts they went into Iraq. So started death and destruction in our three countries.
Ten years on, the prediction of change has proved to be right, though in unpredicted ways. The Superpower stands vanquished in both Afghanistan and Iraq, effectively changing its image of invincibility. The Middle East, as it relates to the war, has changed also. Instead of the US re-ordering the political landscape to suit its purposes, its nemesis, Iran, has emerged as a bigger and stronger player in the region.
The wars have thoroughly exposed Western claims to be protectors and promoters of human rights. Memory of suffocation to death of scores of prisoners while being transported to jails in Afghanistan still sends shivers down spines of all civilised people. Horror stories abound also of prisoner torture at the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The notorious Abu Ghuraib prison where thousands of innocent Iraqis were herded in, and subjected to torture by America's occupation soldiers, in some cases to the point of death, is yet another horrific memory of the Iraq war. A hooded prisoner standing atop a box in Abu Ghuraib, dubbed 'Statue of Liberty' by the Iraqis, has become an enduring image of America's 'Enduring Freedom' project. Then there is the case of Guantanamo Bay prison, where hundreds of detainees were kept without trial for nearly a decade on mere suspicion. The neo-con war monger former vice president Dick Cheney's relentless justification of prisoner torture shows the inhumanity of which America' leaders are capable.
Back in the US homeland, some of the changes are minor, other big but indirect. Ordinary Americans as well as foreign visitors have to face the small inconvenience of taking off shoes and going through security checks at airports. There has been some curtailment of civil liberties as well. More important, as a recent issue of The Economist notes, the ultimate cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars, including interest payments and veterans' care, is up to $4 trillion "equivalent to the country's cumulative budget deficits for the six years from 2005 to 2010." What that means in real terms for the American people was on display recently when the country came to the brink of default. The issue generated a lot of heat and dust as the government and Republican Party leadership in Congress engaged in political wrangling over deficit reduction strategy. Consequently, the Superpower had to face a humiliating credit downgrade from its top ranking of AAA to AA+.
Needless to say, the wars justified on the basis of 9/11 attacks, brought the most devastating changes in our part of the world. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq continue to bleed; their economies are in ruins. More than 40,000 Pakistanis have lost their lives. No one has kept casualty count for Afghanistan. Conservative estimates put the number of Afghan war dead at around 100,000. As far back as 2006, The Lancet, one of the oldest and much respected scientific medical journals, based in London, carried out a survey of the Iraqi deaths and established the count at 654,965 - 2.5 percent of the country's entire population. And of course countless people have been injured and maimed. Remember the little boy the Western media showed soon after the 'Shock and Awe' began in Iraq? A bomb that struck his home in Baghdad had killed his parents and siblings, and cut both his arms. That face has stuck in our minds because we saw the image on television screens. There are innumerable others like him in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, who have lost their near and dear ones in the wars they neither instigated nor participated in. Those injured and maimed will never be able to live normal lives. Their dreams and ambitions lie shattered forever by the wars and the mindless violence they generated in the form of suicide bombings. Hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan still wander as refugees in neighbouring countries.
Less than three thousand victims of 9/11 terrorist attacks on America mourned last Sunday by the high and the mighty of that land were killed by a few fanatical 'non-state actors'. They and their allies in other 'civilised' nations of the West have killed close to a million innocent people and caused life-long disabilities to many, many others. Some of the victims of 9/11 may not have wanted any of this to happen. Those who staged million marches in Britain and the US to stop the wars never forgot to carry the one placard that said, 'Not in Our Name.'
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