Things would certainly be different now if al-Qaeda hijackers had been caught before they carried out 9/11, or if George W. Bush had not been awarded victory by the U.S. Supreme Court after the 2000 election.
What we are living with now is a runaway fluke.
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When history is hijackedby Gwynne Dyer, syndicated columnist
Jan. 4, 2004
History normally runs on rails, with one development following another in fairly obvious succession. Colorful personalities and dramatic events abound, and it may seem like a roller-coaster ride at times, but 20 years later the outcome is about what you would have expected at the start.
Once in a while, however, history goes right off the rails — and this may be one of those times. We'll probably know for certain by the end of this year.
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Two years ago we were being told that 9/11 had changed everything, but that was media hype. In reality, 9/11 changed nothing except Americans' mistaken belief that they were invulnerable to foreign threats, and normally the terrorist threat would have faded into the background in a year or so, to be replaced in the headlines by some trendy new problem. But a hijack has occurred, and the course of history really may have changed. That would be bad.
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The war on terror is a huge distraction from the real priorities that face the world.
The human population has tripled in the last 60 years. Even if it never doubles again, that puts enormous pressure on resources and the environment.
The pressure is mounting even faster because many of those who have been poor (including most Asians) are rapidly industrializing and raising their consumption levels.
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Meanwhile, those who are left out of the prosperity, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, become ever more desperate and resentful. The tightly interconnected wealth-producing machine that is the globalized economy is tremendously vulnerable to environmental catastrophes, political shocks, or even financial mismanagement. There is a full agenda that needs our undivided attention if we are to get through the next half-century without a big blowup.
Until recently, things were looking hopeful, because the biggest obstacles to global action on these issues had been removed one after another. The Cold War ended, and the great powers began to cooperate. Democracy spread around the world by nonviolent means, and, with the help of globalized mass media, something that you could call world public opinion began to emerge. Complex multilateral deals were made on difficult issues such as trade and climate change.
During the '90s, the way the world worked was changing fast enough that we seemed to have a chance of making it through the first half of the 21st century without a big smash and a massive dieback of the human population. Bad things happened in small, out-of-the way places like Bosnia and Rwanda, but the broad trend was reassuring. It still is, but broad trends have been dislocated by relatively local events in the past.
China was not doomed to go into centuries of isolation and stagnation in the early 15th century just as its immense wealth, technological prowess and oceangoing fleets had positioned it to dominate the planet. Europe didn't have to throw away a century of relative peace and rapidly rising prosperity in the needless cataclysm of World War I. If the emperor Zhu Di's favorite concubine had not been killed by the lightning strike that burned down the Forbidden City in 1421, or if Gavrilo Princip had gone home after a failed attempt to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, everything might have been different.
Things would certainly be different now if al-Qaeda hijackers had been caught before they carried out 9/11, or if George W. Bush had not been awarded victory by the U.S. Supreme Court after the 2000 election. What we are living with now is a runaway fluke.
A small band of Islamist fanatics is trying to provoke a global confrontation between the West and Islam as a way of levering themselves into power in Muslim countries, and a U.S. administration dominated by neoconservative ideologues is using this threat to justify their project for global American hegemony through military power. Neither is likely to succeed, but between them they could wreck both the institutions and the spirit of multilateral cooperation that were going to ease our way through the real crises that are forthcoming.
By this time next year, we will know whether the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq has succeeded or failed, and whether Bush has been reelected or defeated. Without the neocons in Washington to inflate their importance, the Islamist terrorists would dwindle to a minor policy problem, and normal service would be resumed on the important global issues.
Decisive years are generally something you would prefer to avoid, but this is going to be one.
Published by
The Philadelphia Inquirer
This material is copyrighted by its original publisher.
It is reprinted by Unknown News without permission, solely for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting, in accordance with the Fair Use Guidelines of copyright material under § 107 of U.S.C. Title 17.
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