Le Monde , September 13, 2001.
With the highly symbolic collapse of the Commerce Towers and the partial destruction of the Pentagon, two great illusions went up in smoke on Tuesday, September 11th. The illusion of an American sanctuary impervious to military or terrorist attacks threatening its vital centers. And above all, the illusion of a new world order under the control of the American superpower. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many had indeed been living with the euphoric feeling that the Western world had triumphed over its last adversary and that its values—democracy and the market economy—had definitively prevailed. This was to forget that we are living on a volcano: the volcano of the incredible inequality of wealth between the countries of the North and the countries of the South, the volcano of resentment and the lingering effects of the colonial era, the volcano of the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the legitimate sense of revolt felt by many Arabs in solidarity with the Palestinians. Have we, therefore, entered into World War III, as is being claimed almost everywhere, between the Christian Western bloc and the Muslim Arab bloc? It seems more accurate to speak today of a merciless conflict between virtually all the world's states and Islamist terrorist networks, all the more radical as they feel increasingly isolated within the Muslim world itself, whose states—with the exception of Iraq—condemned the attacks of September 11. It is also worth recalling 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 endures daily the atrocious attacks of the GIA. The major question now, and one that could profoundly alter the current global balance, is the nature and scope of the American response. A targeted military response that eliminates the main perpetrators of the attacks and is accompanied by an intense diplomatic effort toward Arab countries, particularly the Palestinians, would mitigate the risk of further deadly attacks. But a response that is too brutal and disproportionate, coupled with abandoning the Palestinians to the Sharon government's totally repressive policies, would have a disastrous effect: it would reunite the various Arab countries against the United States, and only then could we speak of the danger of a generalized conflict between the West and the Muslim world. This is obviously what the perpetrators of these attacks hope for. Let us not fall into a third illusion today: that of a military response capable of eradicating evil on earth and protecting us from any new large-scale 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 Ayatollah Khomeini or Bin Laden. Since we are talking about a battle of civilization against barbarism, let us prove that we are civilized, that is to say, capable of moving beyond a legitimate anger at such atrocity and a blind desire for revenge to analyze the root causes of the problem, and also accepting the need to question a profoundly unjust development model. As long as we fail to address the root of the evil, we will always be threatened by suicide bombers who have nothing to lose, who harbor—not without reason—a deadly hatred for the West, convinced that their act serves God and will earn them a place in the paradise of the righteous.
Le Monde, September 13, 2001.