OSAMA & BUSH - Partners In TERROR . 5 year of 9/11

Five years after 9/11, fear and suspicion have emerged as the governing metaphor for urban existence. While the San Francisco-bound United Airlines flight was diverted to Dallas as a precaution yesterday the 5th anniversary of 9/11, security agencies opened up New York’s Pennsylvania Station in a short while after conducting a security sweep.

The anniversary of the attacks in which almost 3,000 people were killed within minutes dawned on the United States and a world almost unrecognizable in the last half-decade—with cities around the globe pock-marked by terror acts, whether in idyllic Bali or in London, in Mumbai or Delhi. The claws of terror seem to have dug in everywhere with seeming impunity.

With each new attack, the question of whether Bush’s 'war on terror' is the best prescription has arisen once again, along with questions about the West waging a war on Islam. All the while, people continue to look fearfully over their shoulders.

Even as the bouquets were placed at Ground Zero and the names of the dead read out, the debate reared its head yet again. In Australia, one of Bush’s key allies in the 'war on terror', Prime Minister John Howard, on Monday urged moderate Muslims to be more critical of terrorism, clearly indicating terrorism was directly linked to being Islamic.

"We shouldn’t pussyfoot around. No decent, genuine Muslim would support terrorism," Howard told an Australian daily. "We are not attacking Muslims generally but you have to call terrorism for what it is—it’s a movement that invokes in a totally blasphemous and illegitimate way the sanction of Islam to justify what it does."

The Chinese state media focused more on the US responses to 9/11. "It’s fair to say that September 11 changed the US. But what really changed the world was the erroneous US response...especially the war in Iraq," an editorial in the People’s Daily argued.

The major concern was about the kind of world Bush and his coalition were going to leave behind with their scorched earth war against Osama bin Laden. The left-leaning French newspaper Liberation said Bush had squandered the goodwill engendered by the attacks and had made the world a more dangerous place.

"The Bush administration has succeeded in destroying the huge pool of compassion and solidarity which gripped the world after September 11," said the paper. "Bush’s 'leadership' in the 'war on terror' has been disastrous."

Many Arab newspapers said the US-led ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq had pushed the world closer to a clash of civilisations between the West and the Muslim world.

The Bush administration defended the new world determined by a color-coded terror alert system where people can’t even carry hair gel onto airplanes. "There has not been another attack on the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said on TV. "And that’s not an accident." But there have been serial bombings elsewhere in the world, from London to Madrid to Mumbai.