 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. It is 10 years since 9-11 and the question has perhaps been asked but we will ask it again. Has the world indeed changed since 9-11? If so, how? And if not, in what ways? To discuss these, we have with us today Professor Ajaz Ahmad, well-known commentator on international affairs. Ajaz, has the world changed? Great many ways, yes. Starting with the semantics. If instead of 9-11, you simply said to entire bombings, it would have very different resonance. Let me put it this way. The world has changed a great deal, not because of what that particular group of terrorists did. Although they accomplished something quite unique, it is the most successful concentrated act of private terror in history. State terrorism has created that kind of, you know, those number of deaths and so on, but this is the only time that private terror has been able to do that. And they did it in a country which has not known foreign aggression of any kind on its soil since 1812, quite, almost 200 years. So therefore for the American population, it really was very traumatic. Now, how do you deal with trauma? Either you accentuate that trauma and use it for your own purposes or you start a healing process. On the 12th morning, Condoleezza Rice, who was the National Security Advisor at that time, collected her team and said, how can we use these opportunities? So it became an opportunity for the United States to change the world, instead of using, treating it for what it was, which is to say a crime against humanity and a matter of international law in which the entire state system of the world would have cooperated with the United States in apprehending the culprits and bringing them to justice. Instead of doing that, they unleashed a war on terror as they called it and by the 22nd of September, President George Bush described it as an endless task, a task that never ends and that it's a war that will be fought over 40 or 60 countries. I think one of the factors in it, I think the decisive moment is actually 1989 to 1991, that is to say the collapse of the Soviet Union. They now were in a position, they were sort of, you know, drunk on this fact that they had become the only power in the world. And they were going to reverse. So do you see this as a continuity, if you like, of the neo-conservative doctrine, which was advocated by Paul Wolfowitz and others, that this was the occasion to intervene substantively in West Asia and to bring about a transformation in the US presence? Colin Powell, who was the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who was the National Security Advisor, Rumsfeld, who was the Defense Secretary, the main team that executed this policy were not the neo-cons. The neo-cons worked under them. So the agenda is actually much larger of empire to which, yes, Wolfowitz and others, those people gave a certain content. And their unique contribution led by Dick Cheney, who was the Vice President of Bush, was to align US policy entirely with the Israeli policy in West Asia. Among other things, immediately after 9-11, Israel was given a carte blanche to treat any Palestinian as a terrorist. Any idea of Palestinian liberation movement as a terrorist action, to carry out what they call targeted killings, that is to say political assassination of any and all leaders that they wish to assassinate and so on. And a good deal of what was done in West Asia was partly in coordination with the Israeli policy. So in that sense, as part of this new form, which we have seen emerging after 9-11, do you think this has really catalyzed this new clash of civilizations? Let me put it this way. The clash of civilization phrase came from Bernard Lewis originally, who is the Dean of Zionist Scholarship in the United States. And the phrase, it actually came in the early 80s and then Huntington made it, picked it up and gave it far greater prominence. So this idea of the clash of civilizations is much older. And if you look at the original one, basically the target of these clash of civilizations are the Middle East, the Muslim people, Islamic civilization and confusion. Yes. So it has always been a camouflage for oil and China. So this was the new opportunity that 9-11 provided. Now the result now is that Islam, Muslims as a category exactly became the target. Both inside the United States increasingly. That's right. You know, over 120,000 Muslims living in the United States, many of them citizens, are openly on the list of surveillance of the intelligence agency. In Europe, of course, we've seen immense Islamophobia. Islamophobia today is in Europe, here anti-Semitism used to be. Exactly. In the past. Same kind of Islamophobia there in the United States, great flip to the Christian right. So turn very much towards the right and very much towards certain kind of the Christian right in the United States. Which in fact brings me to my next question. This shift to the right that we have seen manifesting as Islamophobia, xenophobia also has manifested in this new extreme security paranoia in attack on civil liberties in the name of enhancing security. And that's been another pronounced shift to the right in the US as well as Europe and in many of our own countries in the South as well. I would be very wary of words like paranoia because they indicate some kind of a psychological condition or you know and so on. I think these are very, very calculated policy decisions. I think the kind of extreme class warfare that they're waging internally the kind of fear and mass psychosis that need to generate all the time constantly are incompatible with democratic procedures of rational deliberation. So this creation of irrationalism is a very deliberate act and the suppression of civil liberties is very much a part of that. In that sense, I would say it is just simply a far greater, far more lethal version of McCarthy's in so far as the United States is concerned. And I fear that it is only going to increase in the United States as a state-generated mass pathology. It is not that the people in charge of the state are pathologists. They are creating a pathology for which the mass media plays the key role. Do you think these outcomes that we have seen were part of the responses that the terrorist groups expected to happen or is this an opportunity created by the US and its allies which may not have been part of the calculations? Well, their fantasy always was that and they said so from the beginning. I mean certainly some of it doesn't say from the beginning that I'm going to bankrupt the United States through my kind of warfare I'm going to bankrupt the United States. So that certainly was a part of their fantasy. Fact of the matter is that nothing that they wanted has happened that way. Yes, for example after 9-11 the United States at least has never known a significant director of terror. Quite. Even in Europe, one bombing in England, one in Spain and that's about it. That's right. So their failure as terrorists is conspicuous. Can I turn lastly then to the situation we have today in West Asia, the uprisings that we have seen. If you look at the dream of Osama bin Laden and the others, it was to turn West Asia into a cauldron of uprising against the United States and Western democracy and so on. What's happening now seems to be going in another direction altogether. The notable feature of these uprisings is that they're not anti-periodists. Yes, precisely. Second, as the dust settles, the main beneficiaries seem to be ikhwanul muslimin and groupings of that kind. In cooperation with the Osama regime, it is not those young people in Tahirir Square who became 15 days of fame sort of a thing. The beneficiaries are them. I think the success of the jihadis which the Americans handed over to them, and I don't think Americans are really very upset about it either, is that it certainly increased the number of gun-torting jihadis certainly and they're a headache for the United States. Although in Libya they're fighting on the side of the United States. At least temporarily. Well, I don't know how temporary it is. My sense is that there's going to be a split among them. Some will continue to be with the United States and so on. But much more alarming, islamism as a political strain has increased exponentially in all the muslim countries, not in its jihadi form, but in what is called moderate, which is a very alarming development. A historic shift is taking place in Turkey. It's a very alarming shift in which after 80 years of kamalist secularism, there is a sort of a passive revolution going on in Turkey to islamicize the one truly secular muslim society. From Turkey to Pakistan, Pakistan to Morocco, islamism as a political current has become dominant. Thank you very much Ajaz for this wide-ranging discussion.