EDITORIAL - 9/11 and the struggle for America's soul

It's now 10 years since Osama bin Laden's attacks on America, which is still feeling aftershocks from the events. But it is unclear whether the United States, and for that matter, the rest of the world, have extracted any fundamental lessons from the events of that September Tuesday and their aftermath.

For while bin Laden, after nearly a decade on the run in hermit-like existence, is now dispatched to a watery grave by American soldiers, he probably, before his too-late demise, felt some satisfaction about the situation the US, and the West in general, found themselves in.

Bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror network framed their quarrel with America as a clash of civilisations: Islam attempting to prevent its corruption and colonisation by imperial Christendom, represented, primarily, by the United States. Al-Qaida was helped by a foreign policy that was too heavily skewed in favour of Israel against the Palestinians.

But whatever may have been America's faults in the years preceding 9/11, the far more fundamental problem was a toxic mix of bin Laden's megalomaniacal belief in himself as Islam's healer, and his extremist concept of that religion. His attacks on America, therefore, were jihad ordained by Allah.

It was important that bin Laden and his fellow jihadists be held accountable for their crimes, and for America, and any state similarly attacked, to protect its homeland. The United States and its key allies, especially Britain, bungled too large a portion of the plot.

Aftershocks still being felt

Taking out bin Laden and al-Qaida need not have meant a long-term presence in Afghanistan - of little real strategic advantage and with the absence of a clear exit strategy. But worse was the invasion of Iraq on manufactured evidence about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaida, and to satisfy the neocon ideology of regime change.

More than 6,000 American service people and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been killed in these wars that have cost Americans over US$1.4 trillion - and climbing. And here is where some of the aftershocks of 9/11 are being felt.

This spending and other unquantified costs from the wars contributed substantially to America's ballooning fiscal deficit. Indeed, war spending eliminated a fiscal cushion when the housing crisis morphed into a global financial crisis and recession, from which the US is still struggling to recover.

What America's leaders perhaps didn't really internalise in the wake of 9/11 - although the idea was mouthed often - was that the real power of the US was not vested in symbols like the twin towers and the Pentagon, but in a larger idea on which the country was built: its sense of freedom, can-do spirit, the ideal of equality and tolerance. It is when these are eroded that the bin Ladens of the world win.

This is where we have concern: the signs of a deepening pettiness and growing intolerance in America. That trend is evidenced in the politics, where it appears to be better to defeat President Obama than for America to win, and it is loud in the rhetoric of the Tea Party and fellow travellers who want to 'take back our country' from Mr Obama.

A decade later, America, perhaps, needs to reclaim its soul.