What Has Changed Since 9/11?

Right now, I'm doing pretty much what I was doing exactly seven years ago on September 11. Before the attacks on New York and Washington, I was sitting at my desk at home in Cairo, writing a feature story, catching up on my kid's day at school, wondering what's for dinner. The Middle East wasn't a picnic before 9/11--in fact, it's been a mess since well before I first arrived in 1983--but outside the war zones the region had its normal rhythms and routines. Life goes on. Much has changed in seven years, but I would say that a great deal has remained the same, too. Here are some top-of-my-head musings on a 9/11 anniversary:

The War on Terrorism launched after 9/11 has turned out to be an empty phrase.

After 9/11, Bush identified Bin Laden as a leader of Islamic terrorists and set out to get him "dead or alive" and eradicate radical Islam. Bin Laden's sensational attacks and Bush's hyper response suggested to some that Islamic extremism had morphed into a threat of epic proportions. Bin Laden was our era's Hitler, and 9/11 was another Pearl Harbor that presaged a possible Third World War. Broadly speaking, the threat did not live up to those early impressions. Al-Qaeda and its imitators did manage to stage further albeit much smaller attacks in the next seven years. But it's hardly been a blitz. Egypt, for example, has suffered less violence since 9/11 than it did in the seven preceding years. Palestinian killing against Israel has been much worse, but it is related to a 100-year local conflict, not the global jihad that Bin Laden self-proclaimed in 1996. Nor has al-Qaeda transformed itself into anything approaching a mass political movement that could take over governments, win elections, field armies, collect the trash. The U.S., the Israelis and Arab governments had in fact been battling terrorism of all kinds for years before 9/11. Throughout the Middle East, those police and intelligence operations are pretty much still going on the way they were before, whatever they care to label it nowadays.

The big change related to 9/11 is the overthrow of an Arab dictator, Saddam Hussein, by Western military forces, and a U.S. military occupation of a Middle East nation with 100,000-plus troops.

The Iraq war is related to 9/11 in the sense that Bush used the attacks as the pretext for invading in 2003. History will be the ultimate judge, but the immediate report card is mixed. Inside Iraq, the fall of Saddam has given Iraqis, especially Kurds and Shiites, a real chance at political participation. But the vacuum left by Saddam's ouster led to a bloody civil war and opened the door to the interference of other forces including Iran, al-Qaeda and even NATO ally Turkey. The possible gains won by the removal of a regional bully and domestic tyrant may be lost by the fragmentation of Iraq and the ripple effect of that throughout the Middle East.

For Iran's ayatullahs, 9/11 was a gift from God.

While Iran's ambitions and influence were already well established, Bush's toppling of Saddam and the earlier elimination of the Taliban government in Afghanistan opened the door for a vast expansion of Iran's role in the region. For the first time, Islamic Iran is calling many of the shots in Iraq, a country that had invaded it in 1980 when Saddam was in power. Tehran's influence in Iran in some ways is greater than Washington's, and without the Iraqi strongman around, the Arab Gulf states must pay greater tribute to Iran. Iran's influence extends all the way to the Mediterranean, in the form of support for Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. Iran's drive to become a nuclear power suggest that the world may have to learn to live with Iran as a dominant regional superpower or go to war to prevent that from happening.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq did not herald the start of democratization and the end of Islamic fundamentalism as Bush had hoped.

The post-9/11 pressure on Middle East nations clearly opened some political space for opponents of authoritarian regimes. But thus far only Islamist parties and groups with fairly regressive political and social views have benefitted from the opening. In general, authoritarian regimes still rule, perhaps a little less comfortably than they once did, but they still rule.

The only unambiguously positive change that is related to 9/11 is the extraordinary boom in the Gulf countries.

Riding in part on the spike in oil revenues related to the region's rising instability, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and to a lesser extent Bahrain have mounted massive projects for developing world-class businesses, tourism facilities and educational opportunities. They have effectively made the Gulf the center of a new, promising Middle East, showing other states what can be done if you shun conflict, open your economy and pour your cash into development that benefits your people.

The mishandling of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute may be the most unpardonable disaster related to 9/11.

To Bush, already allergic to Arab-Israeli peacemaking before September 11, Arafat became the Palestinian Bin Laden and thus an enemy in America's war on terrorism. Years of mishandling of the conflict by all parties well before Bush took office thus resulted in the near total collapse of peace hopes on Bush's post-9/11 watch. Looking at the region today, it's hard to avoid the feeling that if Bush had poured as much men and women and money into achieving Israeli-Arab peace as he did in bringing down one Arab dictator (who, turned out not to have any nukes or ties with al-Qaeda), the Middle Easy could have been much better off by now.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Will things be better or worse in another seven years? Honestly, I'm an optimist. Unlike seven years ago, at least on this September 11 I'll have time for a quiet dinner. My kid? She just went to meet her friends at McDonald's.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo