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June 18, 2008
It is interesting to look back on the writings about the significance of 9/11 written in 2001 about the significance of those events. Thus Paul Piccone in So, This is the Brave New World in Telos says that since the US sees itself engaged in a war, it has:
a right and a duty to mobilize; but since the enemy is only a criminal enterprise rooted nowhere in particular, but operating anywhere, the US need not bother, at least in the short run, with whatever happens to pass as international law concerning normal wars. President Bush has said as much in his various statements prefiguring intervention anywhere with whatever means necessary. What this means is: a) internationally, greater US world hegemony; b) domestically, a massive centralization of power; and c) operationally, considerably more space within which to pursue whatever course of action the US eventually chooses.
Piccone goes on to say that in rejecting outright the definition of the conflict as a “clash of civilizations” in favor of its more ambiguous formulation, the Bush administration has set the stage for pursuing ever more forcefully its traditional American foreign policy.
By reserving for itself the right of intervention into any country without having to respect national sovereignty, while at the same time remaining unaccountable to anyone but its own well-mediatized domestic constituency. This rejection of the terrorists’ definition of the new enmity lines in sharp civilizational
terms checkmates the American conservatives’ rush to condemn all Muslims — thus indirectly accepting the terrorists’ definition of the conflict. In isolating the perpetrators as pathological expressions of an anti-modern fundamentalism preventing the kind of economic rationalization (globalization) essential
for the development of the Third World (but also conducive to an ever greater US economic hegemony), it also isolates domestic isolationists calling for a US international disengagement, or at least for a substantially diminished presence abroad — the kind of presence necessary to pursue essential economic interestssuch as unhindered access to foreign energy sources.
Piccone then says that whatever war or wars will be waged are likely to be “no contests,” with the US and its allies smashing whatever they will define as the enemy and then moves on. Iraq was smashed and so were the Taliban --but the US is still fighting partisan wars seven years on.
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The life can not be done without the knowledge of the PHILOSOPHER, that is the life philosophically