Aujourd-hui sommes-nous tous les Americains?
"I hope their lights stay off, I hope they sweat buckets without their air-conditioning. Let them live for just 24 hours the way the people of Baghdad live every fucking day."
So said a friend of mine back in 2003 when I told him there had been a major power cut in New York. He is no jihadist, certainly not a Muslim, nor a man of any religious belief, but rather a white Englishman with family in the States. But even with the Iraqi debacle in its early stages, my friend expressed his animus towards the US in such terms.
Perhaps cocooned by their ask-no-questions media, the average non-passport holding American is unaware of the sheer depth of hatred that exists towards their country around the world. And not just in the Islamic world, which has been the target of America’s wrath since 9-11, but in white, nominally Christian, Europe, in East Asia, in Africa and South America, the US is now more than ever seen as an arrogant bully.
It could have been so different. With a wiser leadership Americans could have isolated and degraded those who wish to kill them. Instead a small cabal of neo-conservative extremists drunk on power and childish fantasies has squandered the international goodwill which existed after that murderous day five years ago and made their country an international pariah.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al railroaded their frightened country into a disastrous conflict in Iraq whose cost in blood and treasure will be paid by Americans long after these fools have shuffled off to luxurious retirements. Exploiting the dead of that September morning they deceived the American public into supporting a war against a country with no more responsibility for 9-11 than Iceland or Paraguay. Instead of striking a blow against terrorism, Bush’s war in Iraq has given al-Qaida a three-year advert for jihad with no end in sight.
The US Army, lauded in some quarters as a new Roman Empire after the fall of Kabul, has been beaten, and beaten badly, by an insurrection centred on just a fifth of the Iraqi population. Other targets for regime change, not least Iran and North Korea, have taken note of this and openly mock the paper tiger.
The images of 9-11 remain seared in the memories of most of humanity, the terrible moments before the second jet hit the World Trade Center, the grotesque fireball, the desperate people jumping to their deaths to escape the heat, the awful, almost stately collapse of the towers.
But next to these images of innocent civilians being murdered by religious fascists who valued no human life, not even their own, there are other iconic snapshots of the past five years - the orange-clad inmates of Guantanamo internment camp, the fireballs over Baghdad, the Abu Ghraib prisoner on a lead and just recently the dead of Lebanon.
Five years on, it is obvious that Bin Laden is winning. Apart from anything else, he is still alive and at large, an achievement in itself. He wanted a war of civilisations and Bush was stupid enough to give him one. With each passing day world opinion drifts more towards him than to Bush.
On the conventional battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, the US is losing. In the struggle for hearts and minds too, America is taking a pasting as Bush, easily the most idiotic man ever elected to the White House, acts as al-Qaida’s finest recruiting sergeant.
In the process all of us, American or not, have become less safe. These last five years have been bad. The next five will be worse.