Search Results

This chapter explores how the release of “Love and Theft” coincided with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how it strongly affected the album's immediate reception. This association was particularly strong due to the lyrical and thematic content of the album, which somehow seemed to “fit” the events of 9/11—fit them so well, in fact, that it led some reviewers to ascribe Bob Dylan with a prophetic quality. The connection between art and 9/11 has been a subject of lively debate ever since the terrorist attacks. Much of this debate has centered around the question of how “post-9/11 art” can help reflect on, or help deal with, the trauma of the 9/11 events.

This chapter reviews an evolution in the construction of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following the 9/11 attacks in the United States. It covers the epidemiology of post-9/11 PTSD and the emergence of a novel variation, “PTSD of the virtual kind.” In addition, the efforts to conceptualize resilience and to attract financial and institutional support for assessing and promoting resilience are explored. PTSD has an inner logic—a memory logic that is specific to PTSD and an evolutionary logic that is shared with other anxiety disorders. It is observed that the 9/11 events displayed continuing anxiety, and justified a program of political and military responses—the “War on Terrorism.” PTSD of the virtual kind is a historical development of a “form of life” that began to form towards the end of the nineteenth century and that has been progressively revised in connection with episodes of world historical violence.

George W. Bush regarded economic globalization and democratic enlargement as insufficient to contain Iraq, Iran, and other “rogue states.” As a result, he stocked his administration with hard-line Cold Warriors whose strategy for handling regional troublemakers like Saddam Hussein came straight out of Eisenhower’s America—rollback. When Al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. homeland on 11 September 2001, the Bush administration unleashed a “global war on terror,” expanding the Cold War national security state and embracing preventive war as the surest guarantees against a second 9/11. In the process, the new “green threat” of radical Islam replaced the old “red threat” of international communism. The initial testing ground for the Bush Doctrine was Iraq, where an American blitzkrieg rapidly morphed into a brutal low-intensity war against insurgents which blackened America’s reputation and strengthened the hand of Muslim extremists. Although Bush #43 made exporting “freedom” a key goal during his second term, by early 2009 rogue state rollback had backfired in the Middle East.

This chapter investigates the diplomacy of sympathy in the context of the responses of the Russian Federation (RF) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Following the attacks, both the RF and PRC not only yielded to a U.S. presence on their inner flanks, they proactively facilitated it. They also provided other forms of aid and assistance without seeking to lock in any concrete concessions in return. Such behavior defies expectations that great powers should seek to hinder the military encroachment of other great powers into their neighborhoods. It also defies the traditional expectation of statecraft that states should bargain for advantage wherever possible. The chapter argues that the choices and behavior of RF and PRC officials at the time—including their statements and symbolic gestures—only make sense when understood as part of a strong diplomacy of sympathy strategy, one aimed at seizing the opportunity of the moment to reboot relations with the United States and reframe their own domestic struggles as part of a larger fight against terrorism.

This chapter notes that the attacks of September 11, 2001, led to the designation of property damaged in the attacks as “sacred” by officials and others. This new designation was applied both to real property and to souvenirs of the attacks. Some of the objects in question were unremarkable, often nothing more than rubble. However, for those who possessed them, they seemed to have transcended such banal categorizations. This chapter examines the form of value created through destruction. It asks who lays claim to that value, to what purposes it is directed, how it attaches to material objects and land, and whether it overwhelms the usual legal understandings of property and ownership or can be subordinated to them.

Can the control of a government by religious extremists be a legitimate, if not legal, reason for an international military intervention in a country? This is one of the key issues behind the US military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, and keeping the country safe from the Taliban is one of the reasons for the America’s continued military presence there. This essay examines the assumptions behind that logic, and looks at the possibility of the evolution of authoritarian religious regimes into forms of government that are compatible with democracy and human rights.

This chapter provides a brief discussion of the historical antecedents of privacy rights. Against this backdrop, it then examines how multiple policy players or stakeholders became involved in the battle between liberty and safety. The institutional model of policy making applies here. In particular, it illustrates how the federal government developed a series of byzantine, convoluted laws and secret edicts in the form of policy drifts that it claimed would help win the war on terror and bring some sense of safety and security to the American people.

This chapter describes and analyzes the ‘high value detainees’ (HVD) model of quasi-legalized torture in the USA's war on terror following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Initially its legal basis consisted of documents by the executive's legal advisers and executive orders, which combined classifying certain war on terror detainees as having no legal rights, either under US or international law — a very narrow definition of torture — and a view that the President's constitutionally granted powers as armed forces Commander-in-Chief during war are unlimited, including the power to order torture. Later executive orders, legislation, and court rulings modified the model, but as of 2007 US courts were still unwilling to exclude the possibility of torture or detainees during urgent interrogations being lawful. Methods, including enforced disappearances, waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, painful positions, violence, intimidation, and humiliation were used far beyond even what instructions allowed.

This chapter delves into how Afghanistan postwar planning unfolded from September 2001 through March 2002. It does so by relying on a similar approach to that used in Chapter 1 – by analyzing the postwar planning that took place, how the Bush administration grappled with the three fundamental tasks, and why the planning unfolded in this way. While the Afghanistan planning had a few positive attributes, on the whole it had serious deficiencies and sidestepped crucial trade-offs. This wobbly foundation made a hard situation even harder, and increased the odds of a precarious outcome. A look at each of these aspects helps shed light on our troubled planning for postwar Afghanistan, why we came up short, and how we might have done better.

This chapter addresses the wider issue that a moral agent facing a ticking bomb situation (TBS) should consider: whether ultimately a decision to torture the terrorist or not should be determined by consequences or by absolute moral prohibitions. First, the consequences of not torturing in the scenario and the planned terrorist attack occurring are described, illustrated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. Then the two prominent moral-philosophical views clashing over the morality of action, including in such extreme emergencies, are outlined: on the one hand consequentialism (or utilitarianism), advocated by the likes of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and determining the morality of actions by their consequences; on the other deontology, whose main advocate was Immanuel Kant, which emphasizes duties to oneself and others, and stipulates that certain types of acts must be prohibited absolutely (‘no-go areas’).

This chapter considers the end of the Cold War as well as its implications for the September 11 attacks in 2001, roughly a decade after the Cold War ended. While studying the Cold War, the chapter illustrates how memory and values as well as fear and power shaped the behavior of human agents. Throughout that struggle, the divergent lessons of World War II pulsated through policymaking circles in Moscow and Washington. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world drew upon the lessons they had learned from their divergent national experiences as those experiences had become embedded in their respective national memories. For policymakers in Washington, memories of the Cold War and dreams of human freedom tempted the use of excessive power with tragic consequences. Memory, culture, and values played a key role in shaping the evolution of U.S. national security policy.

This chapter describes the September 11, 2001 US terror attacks, the July 7, 2005 London terror bombings, and the sequelae of government action. It describes the perversion of leadership in the US from arrest without probable cause to indefinite detention without charge and outright torture, the creation of a legal ‘black hole’ (Guantanamo), and the presumption of guilt with a pronouncement by President Bush that the Guantanamo detainees represent the ‘worst of the worst’. The UK Blair government implemented the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act which provided for arrest of aliens upon suspicion and indefinite detention at Belmarsh Prison. The war crimes of abuse and torture were officially sanctioned at the highest level of government in the US, approved by a compliant Department of Justice which perverted both its responsibilities and the law, and the UK acquiesced. The US took off the gloves and the UK held them.

The second chapter offers historical perspectives on the charge of relativism recurrently lodged against challenges to traditional claims of absolute, objective and/or universal truth. It begins by examining a set of current denunciations of “postmodern relativism" that involve, respectively, historians' treatments of the Holocaust and journalistic responses to the 9/11 attacks. It goes on to discuss the work of several important intellectual historians, who, along with various avant-garde artists, critics and writers, were identified with relativism in the Modernist period. It concludes with the suggestion that the “relativism” denounced in these and comparable cases (e. g., constructivist science studies, multiculturalist literary theory or cosmopolitan political theory) is a phantom heresy, with claims and implications (quietism, pessimism, solipsism, the equality of everything, etc.) that are maintained by nobody and not logically implied but invoked by anti-relativists to protect dubious orthodoxy under siege.

This chapter analyzes the impact of the overarching by-product of the major foundations' efforts—the economic order based on capitalist globalization—in the post-Cold War era and beyond. Major foundations remain supportive of existing international organizations and new organizations more suited to global conditions, with the likes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The Ford Foundation awards monetary grants to the World Bank for funding a microfinancing consultative group—a project that eases the loaning process in mainstream commercial banks. Another is the support of the Rockefeller Foundation to IMF's global programs, without which the world would return to the economic crises of the 1930s. Although they focused on the global sources for solutions to domestic problems, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, dealt a temporary blow to the trend. Nonetheless, the chapter follows the foundation-led globalization as this eventually spurred the emergence of the democratic peace theory (DPT).

The reasoning behind the Bush administration's strategy in fighting terrorism, also known as the Bush Doctrine, rests primarily on the belief that preemptive rather than reactive force is necessary in the US's fight against terror—as was highlighted by the events of September 11, 2001—and that a democratic regime change is needed in the Middle East, where a culture of tyranny and radicalism exists. This book contends that the Bush Doctrine is based on the principles of moral democratic realism, which is supported by two major premises: that preserving the vitality and integrity of a free society remains the fundamental goal of American foreign policy; and that the country's strategy should be guided by the virtue of prudence by not merely choosing the right ends but also the right means to achieve them.

As de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah aided the Taliban, a hard line Islamic fundamentalist party in Afghanistan, created by Pakistan in 1994 during the civil war. Assisted by Islamabad and Riyadh, the Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996. In their spring and summer 1998 offensives, they seized more territory. During their capture of Mazare Sharif, eleven diplomats from Iran’s consulate “disappeared”. The subsequent tensions between Iran and the Taliban escalated to the point when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards carried out military exercises near the Afghan border. Thus pressured, the Taliban handed over the Iranian diplomats’ corpses. President Khatami was quick to condemn the 9/11 attacks masterminded by Osama bin Laden based in Afghanistan. In contrast, the widely shared view of senior Saudi princes was that 9/11 was part of the Zionist conspiracy to get Washington fired up to launch a worldwide campaign against Islamic terrorism. Iran clandestinely supplied intelligence on the Taliban on the eve of Washington’s anti-Taliban campaign in October 2001. Yet in January 2002, President George W. Bush included Iran along with Iraq in his “Axis of Evil.” Ignoring Abdullah’s opposition to aggression against any Arab country, Bush ordered invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003.

The introduction introduces key themes of the book: myths of national identity challenged by the Vietnam War, Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine shootings, and the 9/11 attacks; the conflation of heroes and victims in the memorials to these national tragedies rather than an exploration of the events themselves; the relationship of the Holocaust to the key memorials discussed; and the failure to acknowledge distinctions among categories of victims. It also includes a summary of the pertinent literature and the content of each chapter.