It seems apt to write something about the event five years ago that has shaped our reality.  The attacks on the World Trade Centre have completely restructured our priorities, outlook, and prejudices.  Relations between liberal democratic states, cemented during years of opposition to communism, have been re-evaluated; some have been strengthened, some fractured.  

On September 12 2001, America rode high on a wave of solidarity.  People across the free world declared their outrage and sympathy for an attack that struck into the heart of the American consciousness.  The architect of the attacks was identified, and in unison the western world supported the military operation to find him.  The world had a new spectre.  

In the twentieth century the united liberal democracies had seen off three great evils.  Hitler's Third Reich posed a real threat to the stability of Europe (not least its Jewish population); likewise in the East, Imperial Japan was framed as a demonic menace that must be stopped.  After the victories of 1945, the world woke up to a new reality, as the ideologically incongruent Soviet and American Empires began to carve up the world between them.  Half a century of small bloody conflicts disguised a greater struggle between two economic and political models.  Less than two decades ago, one of these ideologies collapsed ushering in, or so we thought, an era of peace and prosperity like which had never been known.

This era of peace and prosperity, which will forever be linked to work of Francis Fukuyama, came crashing down along with the Twin Towers.  The hopes of many, that blood would never again be spilt in western cities, was dashed as the hatred that had been fermented in faraway lands, came home in an event which not only rocked the world in 2001, but also sent shockwaves through history to the present.  9/11 - rightly or wrongly - has become the single most significant event of this new century, and possibly the most significant single event since Hiroshima (with the slow paralysis of the Soviet Union occurring in stages).

Back in 2001 I was a young management trainee with little interest in politics.  Living in the south of England away from my family and my then partner, I worked long hours and was consumed by my career.  Things change.  On September 11th, I was sitting having a coffee with some drivers, when another driver walked in and said that on the radio he'd heard that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York.  Naturally in the context of a pre-9/11 world, we assumed it was a horrific accident.  We had no comprehension that something so audacious and ambitious was in the minds of those who hated us.  Yes, of course a building could be bombed, after all a previous bomb attempt on the WTC had occurred before, but to hijack a passenger liner and fly it into a New York skyscraper?  That's beyond belief.

Naturally when the second plane crashed into the other tower, the thoughts of an accidental tragedy began to dissipate.  Something had happened, something deliberate, something planned.  I was home by the time the intense heat melted the steel structure, causing both towers to collapse into a fiery heap that will forever be known as Ground Zero.

I suppose it was impossible to know what it all meant.  It was hard to watch the rolling news channels and decipher the facts from the conjecture and understandable emotional fallout.  The name of Osama bin Laden, our new spectre, was uttered before long.  The man responsible for the failed attack on the WTC had returned to finish the job, and to cement his position atop the CIA Most Wanted list.  A new hero for the angry Islamic World had arisen, a talisman who would take on the behemoth that is the Great Satan: The United States of America.

In what was surely the first salvo in the medias war on Islam, images of Muslims across the world celebrating the attacks were plastered across the airwaves.  Burning flags, effigies, and mobs chanting their support for bin Laden, exposed the deep hatred that had fermented in the Mid East and beyond.  Americans were shocked and appalled that great swathes of the Islamic World harboured such resentment and hate towards their country.  Many argued that a great `Clash of Civilisations' had been exposed.

The forty-third president of the United States was a bumbling, almost comedic character in early 2001.  In a short presidency characterised by verbal gaffs and long holidays, the MBA President, as he was framed by Karl Rove in 2000, seemed to be happy to let his first term float by in a Coolidgesque era of apathy, only waking from his slumber to draw his cheque every month.  9/11 took us all by surprise, but for the golf-loving Bush the Younger; it interrupted the greatest vacation of his life.

When finally Air Force One was grounded, having spirited a petrified President across the length and breadth of America several times, George W. Bush finally swung round to Ground Zero to feed off the aura surrounding Ruddy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York who had risen to the crisis that had befallen his great city.  Bush promised to eradicate the evil that had visited America's shores, and chase bin Laden to the ends of the Earth.  The President, emboldened by a united American public and a sympathetic international community, began to formulate his response.  The world watched and waited.

A lot has happened in the past five years.  We have crushed the regime in Afghanistan, only to see the remnants of the Taliban regroup and begin a counterattack in the south of the country.  We have fought a war of choice in Iraq, disposing a stable - if malevolent - regime, and have replaced it with unbridled chaos and violence.  The world has been littered with instances of terrorist attacks by various Islamic groups inspired by, if not directly linked to, Al-Qaida.  The Middle East Peace Process is dead, with Israel acting without restraint against its neighbours.  And Osama bin Laden remains at large, only emerging in grainy videos to taunt the west and solidify his support.

Yet, the leader of the free world, the MBA President, still insists he is man best equipped to tackle this threat.   One could argue that the spectre of OBL and Al-Qaida serves a purpose for the rightwing administration in The White House.  As once they distorted reality to provide the basis for an aggressive and illegal war in Iraq, they now deliberately blur all conflicts into the entirely subjective `Global War on Terror,' or should I say the `Struggle against extremism?'  I can be so 'off-message' sometimes.

9/11 should have been a warning.  From our gutless acquiescence of Israeli apartheid in the occupied territories, to our support of undemocratic regimes in the Islamic World, we have helped ferment the discord that has allowed caliphists such as bin Laden, to find sanctuary and support; first in the Near-East, and now in East Africa.  Yet when this anger and resentment manifested itself in an outrageous attack on New York we played straight into their hands.  We launched a war on their lands, ignored even more Israeli aggression, and got into bed with hated undemocratic leaders such as Mubarak and Musharraf.  We proved to the Arab Street what bin Laden and his murderous clan had always claimed, that the West is riddled with hypocrisy and is fighting a crusade against Islam.  TV channels, such as Al Jazeera, had no shortage of footage of severed limbs, charred babies, and hooded detainees to enrage their audience.  We like to say that the most important battle in any war is the battle for the hearts and minds.  In this battle Radical Islam won a stunning victory in their heartlands.  Since 9/11, Osama bin Laden's stock has risen and risen.

But what now?  What can be done to avoid a real and cataclysmic Clash of Civilisations?  The answer from the neoconservatives is to open another front in the Global War on Terror, with an attack on Iran.  The irony, it seems, is never lost on them.  Momentum, if not public opinion and military capacity, is with them.  Now, while their willing supplicant remains in The White House, is the time to fulfil their dream of a new Middle East.  But they failed in Iraq and they will fail in Iran.  Violence feeds violence, and our misguided attempts to intervene and reshape the Middle East have consistently blown up in our faces.  

Now, five years after the war began (although for the caliphists, the war been raging for decades), we must face up to the truth that only prosperity in the Islamic World will defuse the anger and hatred.  We must work to provide the momentum for change and economic development.  Societies that provide jobs and purpose do not slip into anarchy.  Across the Middle East and into central Asia, poverty and unemployment are rife.  If a fraction of the cost of the War in Terror had been spent developing infrastructure and democratic institutions in the region, we would not be in the mire we are now.

We have been let down by our leaders.  As Gore Vidal argued this morning on Radio Four's Today programme, a rightwing junta has hijacked the American Republic, using fear to destroy democratic checks and balances and to curb freedoms.  It has used the anger and outrage of 9/11 to wage a war of profit in Iraq and to justify Israel's disproportionate aggression in Lebanon.  We are no safer for the actions of our leaders; in fact, we are now manifestly unsafe. Equally, by slavishly following Bush's lead, Tony Blair has provided Bush with the political support he needed to goose the American people into swallowing his sophistry in the build up to the invasion of Iraq.

Our political leaders must realise that conventional military means cannot crush a threat that exists in the very hearts of our enemies.  

Terrorism inspired by a perverse interpretation of the Qur'an, is not a war on the west per se, but a war within Islam that is fought between those who have embraced an enlightened future for Islam, and those who seek to plunge it into darkness.  It is a battle between progressives who understand the value and impotence of integration with the non-Muslim world, and conservatives who demand, at the point of a sword, religious orthodoxy, oppression, and isolation.  By being drawn into this fight, the west is providing evidence that the soul of Islam is under threat from the west, and that only a strict, regressive version of Islam can resist it; we can then be characterised as the enemy, not an ally.  We are providing the radical conservatives with the ammunition they need to poison the minds of young people.  Young men who have no real future in a society that cannot offer them a job or a real purpose, disillusioned men who will always be prey to preachers of hate.  Yet rather than help create an environment where opportunities exist, we leave these societies to fester and feud.

We need a new post 9/11 generation of politicians.  Statesmen who understand the threats we face and are sophisticated enough to understand the complexity of this new world.  Our current leaders are nothing but relics of the cold war.  There is not a threat that they believe can't be neutralised by conventional arms.  We are led by simplistic and witless men who have failed on every count to rise to the occasion.  We have been exploited and we have been failed.  

This political failure is the single greatest insult to those who perished five years ago.

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