Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

part the American public and its political class were unconcerned. The
Clinton Administration was headed by a man who was genuinely interested
in ideas, and who might have produced a viable new strategic doctrine, but
events conspired to deny him the opportunity – the real challenges to the US
were faced by his predecessor and successor, and Clinton was never tested
by a genuine national crisis.
Such a crisis emerged in an hour or two on the morning of 11 September
2001 in New York City, Washington, DC, and a field in Pennsylvania. The
fall of the towers of the World Trade Center marked the beginning of the
real twenty-first century in much the same way that the real twentieth century
began, comparatively later, with the guns of August 1914. The phoney
peace of the 1990s came to an end and academic debates about the role of
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Understanding International Relations

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the US in world affairs left the classroom and entered the public consciousness
of the US and the world. Sorting out the significance of 9/11 is not easy
because it genuinely changed so much that it is difficult to know where to
begin – perhaps the answer is to begin with the act itself, its character and
antecedents.
It is fashionable to decry the use of the term terrorism – well-meaning
people often assert that a terrorist is simply a freedom fighter of whom one
disapproves – but this defeatism is, I think, quite wrong. Terrorism does
have a meaning; at root it means the deliberate targeting of the innocent
whether carried out by state or non-state actors, and for whatever reason.
‘Deliberate’ is important here, because in war the innocent always suffer,
but they are not always deliberately targeted; when they are, this is a policy
of terror. On this definition, 9/11 was not simply an act of terror but the
most destructive single act of terror since the Second World War. To put it
in perspective, the final death toll of around 3,000 is just under the casual-
ties (on both sides) of the IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland over a thirty-
year period, and 50 per cent higher than the casualties on both sides of the
first two years of the Al Aqsa Intifada in Palestine since 2000 – all this in an
hour or two. The attack on the Pentagon in Washington could be described
as an attack on a military target (although the civilians on the aircraft were
clearly the victims of terror) but the World Trade Center was a civilian
target through and through and the people who died there were truly innocent
victims by any definition.
However, naming an act ‘terrorist’ does not remove the necessity to
analyse and explain its causes. In fact, much of this book has been about the
factors in the world which led to Al Qaeda’s assault on the US. The process
of globalization described in Chapter 9 created the reaction in terms of iden-
tity politics described in Chapter 10 – a politics that, in the case of radical
Islam, the US implicitly promoted in the 1980s as a way of undermining
Soviet power in Afghanistan and destabilizing the USSR. Globalization is, as
its name would suggest, a genuinely global phenomenon, but the driving
force behind globalization – global capitalism – is still largely domiciled in
the United States, and, as this chapter has outlined, the growth of American
power to unprecedented levels in absolute and comparative terms is tied up
with the same process. In attacking America, and, especially, the World
Trade Center, the symbolic heart of global capitalism, the terrorists were
bringing the fight to what they took to be the belly of the beast, the centre of
the US empire. Interestingly, a great many citizens of the less advantaged