Ten Years On, Are We Any Wiser?

Tenth anniversary of 9/11 has been marked by an attack on the Israeli Embassy at Cairo. It might have looked a second 9/11 to many Israeli-backing Americans. But they should try to find out why Israel has become such a target, just as the Americans should have tried to think about why it was they who were attacked ten years ago? If the Americans had done it, ten years on, we would find ourselves in a different world.
The US have not done so because President Bush gave the war-cry, 'Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists'. A sheer dichotomy, where neutrality is impossible, persuasion has no place, all the Muslims of the Middle East origin have been looked at with suspicion, the dictators like the Musharraffs and the Mubaraks have come under the US umbrella in the name of anti-terrorism so that they can reinforce their position vis-a-vis their own people. No reasonable and less violent alternative to the Afghan and the Iraqi invasion has been seriously examined. As the consequence, while mourning over the death of thousands of 9/11 victims, we have to face the fact that more than 200,000 have lost their lives in these two and related operations, with all the wrath and desperation aroused by it.
The weapons of mass destruction, which should have been the only excuse for invading Iraq at all, have been nowhere to be seen, and one is naturally tempted to the conclusion that the US and Britain wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein, to 'regime change', to acclaim themselves to be the defenders of democracy, to lessen the threat to Israel, and to incorporate Iraq into the global market economy.
Still why was it that there was very little of critical attitude in the US journalism at the time. I vividly remember that a newspaper of New York Times' calibre, while invasion was unfolding, put the names and photos of more than a dozen of its correspondents and indicated where each of them was located every morning. Some were proudly marching in Army tanks. Have they had any serious reflection upon it?
Not only the issues of terrorism, invasion, democratization and dictatorship were not discussed. Those of poverty, corruption, joblessness, drawbacks of globalization were not, either. The recent Anna Hazare's fast in India is one answer to such questions. Already at the time of the Atlanta Olympics, it was said that the tourists' visit to the fashionable quarters of the city did little to spill the benefits over to the back streets.
It is said that there are 14 million jobless in the US, and President Obama's recent Job Speech said the US would 'win the race to the top'. She may very well do so. But the point is she cannot do it apart from simultaneous efforts to make the world less armed, less violent, less military alliance-bound, less poor and less jobless.
Here we have to come back to the beginning, and ask again why Israeli Embassy has been attacked, and that by a people who so courageously and persistently stuck to the non-violent means in their anti-Mubarak struggle. Here I would only say this much. If the US vetoes the expected Palestinian application to a UN membership, it would be another historic mistake in the US Middle East policy, showing that, a decade on, she has hardly learnt anything.