Le Monde , September 13, 2001.
With the highly symbolic collapse of the Trade Towers and the partial destruction of the Pentagon, two great illusions went up in smoke on Tuesday, September 11. The illusion of an American sanctuary impervious to military or terrorist attacks threatening its vital centers. Above all, the illusion of a new global balance under the control of the American superpower. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many have lived in the euphoric feeling that the Western world had triumphed over its last adversary and that its values—democracy, the market economy—had definitively won. This was to forget that we live sitting on a volcano: that of the incredible inequality of wealth between the countries of the North and the countries of the South, that of resentment and the aftermath of the colonial era, that of the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the legitimate feeling of revolt that inhabits many Arabs in solidarity with the Palestinians. Have we therefore entered into the Third World War, as we read almost everywhere, between the Christian Western bloc and the Muslim Arab bloc? It seems to me more accurate today to speak of a merciless conflict between almost all the states of the world and Islamist terrorist networks that are all the more radical as they feel increasingly isolated within the Muslim world itself, all of whose states – with the exception of Iraq – condemned the attacks of September 11. Should we also recall that the country that suffers most, along with Israel, from the barbarity of Islamist terrorism is a country with a very large Muslim majority: Algeria, whose population suffers daily from the atrocious attacks of the GIA. The big question that arises now, and which could profoundly alter the current balance of the world, is the nature and scale of the American response. A targeted military response that would eliminate those primarily responsible for the attacks and would be accompanied by an intense diplomatic effort vis-à-vis the Arab countries, particularly the Palestinians, would reduce the risk of new, equally deadly attacks. But an overly brutal and disproportionate response, which would also be accompanied by the Palestinians abandoning the Sharon government's totally repressive policies, would have a disastrous effect: it would unite the various Arab countries against the United States, and only then would we be able to talk about the danger of a generalized conflict between the West and the Muslim world. This is obviously what the perpetrators of these attacks are hoping for. Let us not, therefore, fall into a third illusion today: that of a military response capable of eradicating evil from the earth and protecting us from any new major terrorist threat. When he speaks of a great crusade "of the forces of good against the forces of evil," G. Bush uses the same naive and Manichean language as that of Ayatollah Khomeini or Bin Laden. Since we are talking about a struggle of civilization against barbarism, let us prove that we are civilized, that is, capable of going beyond a feeling of legitimate anger in the face of such atrocity and a desire for blind revenge to analyze the root causes of the problem, also agreeing to question a profoundly unjust model of development. As long as we do not attack the root of the evil, we will always be threatened by suicide bombers who have nothing to lose, who vow – not without reason – a mortal hatred for the West, convinced that their action serves God and will earn them the paradise of the righteous.
Le Monde, September 13, 2001.