9/11 to Libya western foreign policy comes full circle

Today marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and Muslims will once again be under the spotlight.

All major TV channels have got special features marking the event, attempting a decade on to make some sense of the events of 9/11 and what has transpired since. Those in the US and the rest of the Western world will not be unique in wondering how it all came to this; those in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other places will ponder the same.

The testimony of survivors from New York or the families of the dead will give some insight into how the events have affected ordinary Americans.

Although a whole decade has passed since the events in New York real answers are not only entwined somewhere in history but are just as apparent in the here and now.

The last few weeks have seen the global political situation dramatically altered by the sudden capitulation of the Gaddafi regime – a regime which the US and the rest of the Western world supported during its reign of terror on its own people.

With the fall of the Gaddafi regime the true extent of American collusion with Libya is only starting to be revealed.  Amongst these are the rendition and torturing of the liberator of Tripoli AbdelHakim Belhaj, who was abducted along with his pregnant wife and sent to Libya for torturing. All this on the orders of the CIA who at the time saw Gadhafi as exactly the kind of man they could do business with in their ‘War on Terror’.

Immediately after the events of 9/11 Dick Cheney the then Vice President of America told a TV interviewer that he was quite willing to deal with people with ‘blood on their hands’ in order to enact revenge for 9/11.

The irony of Cheney’s statement can only be truly appreciated in the wake of the Arab Spring; the bloody hands of Ben Ali , Mubarak, Assad, Saleh and even Gaddafi all had American backing for decades.

Now the western world would dearly love to be credited for the uprisings.

The key to understanding the events of 9/11 is getting to grips with the global context. With the Americans still backing the Saudi royal family as well the royal family in Bahrain it is clear that no lessons have been learnt from 9/11.

If the bombing of Afghanistan was about making the world and America a safer place then the objective has clearly not been met. All that subsequent American regimes have done is to create more foreign policy grievances.