Teaching Terror: Reflections on the Anniversary of 9/11
By Edwin Daniel Jacob, George Mason University
Another anniversary of 9/11 has passed. Yet our analysis of this event remains as underdeveloped now as it was in 2001. This short intervention offers critical reflections on what constituted 9/11 and its aftermath and concludes by providing suggestions for its critical pedagogical presentation in the classroom.
9/11 put the Middle East on the map. Prior to this century’s Pearl Harbor, acts of jihadi terror (with the exception of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) were confined to America’s overseas assets. Attacks in the nineties and early 2000s — from the 1992 Yemen Hotel Bombings and the 1993 car bomb in Riyadh to the coordinated attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 — gave American policy makers, media pundits, and the population at large the sense that modern political terrorism was a minor nuisance. This all changed, however, when the twenty-first century began on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Al-Qaeda’s seminal attack caused a seismic shift in American foreign policy. Wars were launched while newly fashioned (immoral and legally suspect) counterterror practices were introduced to thwart the nebulous threat that did not emanate from the nation state as in times past. 9/11 marked something new, namely, an attack on the American homeland in response to its post-Cold War foreign policy in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden justified the attack in his 1998 fatwa by pointing to American military presence in the Holy Land following the Gulf War, its subsequent plunder of Iraq, and its support of Israel. Back at home, however, debate over foreign policy made way for acceptance of clichés like “they hate us for our freedom.” Negotiating was off the table as the United States prepared for war. But this would prove to be a conflict of a new kind. Combating transnational terrorism combined “traditional” wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, with asymmetric actions that skirted sovereignty in Pakistan, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Strategic thinking, meanwhile, steadily gave way to interchangeable short-sighted tactics to address the ever-present specter of terrorism.
America’s Global War on Terror has been treated far too uncritically in the general discourse from the Hill to the media to the academy. The Iraq War, for example, was not a mere “war for oil.” It was rather the opening salvo in a bid to assert hegemony in the region: the neo-conservative policy goal since the end of the Cold War. 9/11 simply provided the ideological preconditions to sell such a venture. America’s inability to seize Iraq as a base of operations for broader military action in the region, however, not only devastated Iraq — and sullied whatever international good will the US inherited from 9/11 — but also toppled the traditional tripolar balance of political power in the Persian Gulf. With Iraq out of the equation, a twenty-first century sectarian cold war between (Sunni) Saudi Arabia and a newly emboldened (Shia) erupted. This has manifested itself in the litany of proxy wars fought between the two from Syria to Yemen. Destabilization of the region also provided fuel for the rise of ISIS, the fervent offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) that occupied key swaths across the levant following the Arab Spring.
Global security discontents facing the world today can be readily traced back to America’s geopolitical determinations following 9/11. Yet personal experience from teaching roughly two dozen undergraduate classes across the social sciences — in international relations, political theory, and American politics — has revealed an appalling lack of knowledge about 9/11. That event and the Iraq War are obviously being taught in ahistorical terms that rely on patriotism over substance. 9/11 is thus either “when those terrorists hit us” or when “we came together as a country.” Little attention is paid to American imperialism in the leadup to 9/11 or how the Iraq War upended the region let alone the ideological composition of George W. Bush’s neo-conservative foreign policy team.
Platitudes and symbolic political gestures in the classroom surrounding how 9/11 is being taught only reinforce American exceptionalism, embrace the double standard in world affairs, and produce confusion over threats to global security. A healthy dose of history in general and critical inquiry in particular can go a long way toward rehabilitating this situation. Films like Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Burn! (1969) and Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) provide frameworks for interpreting terrorism and counterterrorism as well as colonialism and imperialism. In my experience, such films foster interest and critical engagement with pressing American security demands. Paired with practical sources, such as the Project for a New American Century’s seminal pre-9/11 report, John Yoo’s infamous “torture memos,” and the Afghanistan Papers, a different pedagogic approach can far better illuminate America’s post-Cold War bids for hegemony under the banner of combatting terrorism at home and abroad.
Edwin Daniel Jacob is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. His most recent work — American Security and the Global War on Terror — was published in Routledge’s Emerging Technologies, Ethics, and International Affairs series in 2020. Find it here.
