IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM

Farah Karimi

How Our World Has Become

Increasingly Unfree Since 9/11

Nieuw Amsterdam

© 2021 Farah Karimi

All rights reserved

Text editing Carolien Zilverberg

Cover design Nico Richter

Cartography Marcel Groenen / Macareves

Author’s photo © Quintalle Nix

ISBN 978 90 468 2950 9

www.nieuwamsterdam.nl

For Kian, my grandson

‘I want to understand.’

Hannah Arendt

You, who shall resurface following the flood

In which we have perished,

Contemplate —

When you speak of our weaknesses,

Also the dark time

That you have escaped.

For we went forth, changing our country more frequently

than our shoes

Through the class warfare, despairing

That there was only injustice and no outrage.

And yet we knew:

Even the hatred of squalor

Distorts one’s features.

Even anger against injustice

Makes the voice grow hoarse. We

Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness

Could not ourselves be gentle.

But you, when at last the time comes

That man can aid his fellow man,

Should think upon us

With leniency.

Bertolt Brecht, An die Nachgeborenen

translation by Scott Horton

Contents

Preface

I US Presidential Election

II Threat of a new war in the Middle East

III The US wants peace with the Taliban

V A political prisoner is released

V Life in Iraq after Saddam Hussein

VI Refugees and the War on Terror

Letter to Kian

Appendix: Jihadist attacks in Western Europe, US, Canada and Australia between 9/11 and May 1, 2021

Words of gratitude

Preface

Today people in their twenties only know 9/11 from the history books, from documentaries and films, and perhaps the stories of their parents.

Today people in their twenties only know one world - one in which our government regularly warns its citizens with risk analyses of attacks and threat levels. We have five levels in the Netherlands: minimal, limited, significant, substantial and critical. In recent years, the Dutch authorities assessed the threat level as ‘significant’ and sometimes as ‘substantial’. Welcome to the post-September 11 world.

Today those in their twenties actually live in wartime and imagine themselves still in peacetime. Since 9/11, Dutch military personnel have been continuously active in wars and missions intended to fight terror and protect us here in the Netherlands.

On the sunny autumn morning of September 11, 2001, at a quarter to nine, as New Yorkers prepared for an ordinary workday, two American passenger jet airliners flew directly towards the two iconic buildings of the World Trade Center and crashed into the Twin Towers. Minutes later, the images went around the world. The collapse of the Twin Towers, the immense cloud of dust that obstructed the view, people who walked through the streets in dismay and the image that is burned into my retina: people jumping to their deaths from the higher floors of the World Trade Center buildings.

I know exactly where I was at that moment and what I was doing.

In the Netherlands, it was already a quarter to three in the afternoon. In the Dutch parliament, my workplace at the time, weekly question time was underway. The news of the attacks spread like wildfire between and among us. While my colleagues and I in the members’ restaurant behind the plenary hall watched the images on the TV screen in horror and disbelief, It became clear that two other hijacked planes were on their way to Washington DC. America was under attack!

For the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 – the beginning of the Second World War for the Americans – the United States was attacked on its own territory by a foreign enemy. And in highly symbolic places: the World Trade Center located in the heart of the financial district on Wall Street, in New York City, the center of capitalist power; and the Pentagon, the center of US military power. The fourth hijacked plane that was possibly on its way to the White House or Capitol, the political center of power, crashed in a field just outside Pittsburgh.

It was not an act of war perpetrated by an enemy state, which hit the US quite unexpectedly. More than 3,000 people were killed that day. It would soon become apparent that the economic, political and military centers of power had been carefully chosen by a group of fanatics. Young men felt called by their religious belief to carry out this terrorist attack on the superpower America to punish it for its policies and actions against Islamic countries. They were prompted to do so by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy sheik from Saudi Arabia who found his calling in a holy war against infidels. It was his conviction that the US humiliated Muslims, occupied their lands, and with its support to kings, emirs and dictators, it contributed to the tyranny and degradation of the true Islamic faith. Al Qaeda, ‘the base’, was Bin Laden’s organization.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a war broke out that continues in full force to this day. Some call it the Global War on Terror, others the Holy Jihad. After twenty years, this war has many ugly faces, hundreds of thousands of innocent victims and no winners, but many profiteers.

The reaction that followed the attacks from the US was the beginning of an era during which other countries have been attacked and occupied. Regimes have been driven out and replaced. Unprecedented border and security checks have been put in place. New Anti-Terrorism laws gave police, intelligence and security services far-reaching powers to spy on their own citizens. The Internet has become the domain in which a propaganda war is raging on both sides. It offers the jihadists a platform to recruit fighters, to preach hatred and to plant their ideas about the holy war in the hearts and minds of young Muslims worldwide.

Populist political movements have sprung up and grown to the point where they are now conducting a sustained campaign of hatred and discrimination against Muslims in particular, as well as against migrants, refugees and different-looking people in general all in the name of the ‘War on Terror’. Political and social polarization, which seems ineradicable, is the scourge of our time. For weaponry for military interventions alone, and for the expansion of civil and military intelligence services, many billions of euros have been spent. The social costs cannot be quantified. The consequences of the Global War on Terror and the Holy Jihad have many dimensions. The damage done to human rights and international law by secret torture sites and infamous prisons like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib is one of the most painful chapters of this war.

The list of terrorist attacks carried out in the name of jihad is long. The vast majority of these attacks took place in the cities of Islamic countries. Also, almost all major European cities have now been rocked by terrorist attacks: Madrid, London, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels. Thousands of innocent people, especially in Islamic countries, but also in the West, have been murdered. Young, promising Muslims who rightfully could have dreamed of a bright future, have fallen prey to Islamic jihad, transformed into murderers and criminals who were willing to leave hearth and home and join the jihadists, to wage war in Syria, or to carry out attacks in Brussels, Paris or elsewhere. They sometimes radicalize on their own, inspired through propaganda on the internet and commit attacks as a loner.

In 2001, as a member of parliament, I was actively involved in the debates that erupted immediately after the attacks. How to respond was the dominant question. And how should we explain this? Nobody can feel safe fighting an elusive enemy. An enemy who has no country, no government, and no formal army. An enemy who recruits and strikes people based on an idea, a certain philosophy, a religion. Arming yourself and waging a fight against such an enemy is anything but easy. Finding an explanation could help prevent it from getting worse - I hoped anyway.

A superpower that is shown to be vulnerable is not without danger. All conventional and unconventional instruments for warfare against an elusive terrorist organization were available to the US and its allies. Their actions and reactions – especially the war rhetoric (because it always starts with words), threats of war, regime change and military interventions – dramatically changed the world and especially the Middle East.

What have twenty years of war on terror yielded? How have the consequences of 9/11 affected people’s lives?

What does a period of twenty years in history mean to a country, to a continent or to humanity as a whole? More than a footnote? Sometimes two decades can prove extremely significant for changes in the course of history. You need more historical distance for that: whether certain years have ushered in a new era, or where a tipping point was can only be established at a later date. But in a human life twenty years is a long time. The millennials, regardless of where they were born and raised, have had to deal with the impact and consequences of those attacks. Someone in his or her twenties in the US who may have voted for the first time in the presidential elections in November 2020, is now witnessing a new president who wants to bring an end to the longest war of the US: President Biden announced in his speech on April 14, 2021 the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, exactly twenty years after the attacks. Symbols matter. In his speech Biden spoke of young Americans in their twenties serving in Afghanistan whose fathers had also served there. That two generations of soldiers can reminisce about one and the same war is exceptional-and nothing to be proud of.

As a politician and later as director of the development and humanitarian organization Oxfam Novib, I have often been confronted with the Global War on Terror.

Several events in 2020 prompted me to ask myself: has the world become a safer and freer place in the past two decades? Where do we stand in the war on terror? Are there winners? Who are the losers? In my work over the past years, I have met many people who stood up against oppression and at the risk of their own freedom and security in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and other Arab countries, aimed to build a democratic and constitutional society. Their struggles, their lives and their futures were influenced by the choices western countries made.

The War on Terror touched all aspects of everyday life of people worldwide. The anti-radicalization programs of the municipalities of Amsterdam and The Hague were just as much part of this as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When laws are put in place to prevent the financing of terrorist organizations, they also have the side effect of preventing aid organizations from transferring funds to certain countries. The detention without legal process of a suspected terrorist in Guantanamo Bay is just as much a part of the War on Terror as are the lists of people and organizations that are labeled as terrorists, without it being clear how they were designated as such. Killing Osama bin Laden is part of the War on Terror, but so is the bombing of Hawija in Iraq in 2015 by Dutch F16s, in which seventy civilians were killed. The War on Terror permeates all aspects of our lives, is expressed in many ways and knows many targets and fronts. After twenty years there has been no end to Islamic terrorism. On the contrary, the danger of attacks is still real and present. In addition, the terrorism of right-wing extremists, such as in Norway and New Zealand, has increased.

Where do you start, if you want to think about twenty years of War on Terror since 9/11? I do not have the ambition or pretension to be exhaustive. The starting point for this book is my own direct political and humanitarian experiences and the stories of (young) residents, human rights defenders, activists, friends and refugees who bear the scars of the War on Terror and the Holy Jihad.

At the beginning of August 2020, I read the news about the release of the last 400 Taliban prisoners convicted by the Afghan government. This happened at the urging of President Trump, who in February 2020 had made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw American and NATO troops from Afghanistan. After the prisoner release, peace negotiations could begin between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

At that time, I imagined that on September 11, 2021, the Taliban could be formally back in the government of Afghanistan with the approval and recognition of the international community. This would be a very unexpected outcome of twenty years of war in Afghanistan. What would such an Afghanistan look like? What freedoms could women have then? Wasn’t the war in Afghanistan about the extermination of Al Qaeda and the terror that had found its way from that country to the rest of the world? Terror has not left Afghanistan, in fact, nowadays there are groups in addition to Al Qaeda such as IS which are active. What was the bloodshed in the Afghan wars for? Why have many billions of dollars in military and civilian spending gone to Afghanistan? A publication in the ‘Costs of War’ project of the Watson Institute of Brown University and the Pardee Center of Boston University of 16 May 2021 speaks of 241,000 deaths as a result of this war. Of these, there were 71,344 civilians, 2,442 US military, 78,314 Afghan military and police officers and 84,191 Taliban and other fighters. The figures are estimates and possibly significantly higher. The report estimates the financial costs for the United States alone at more than 2,000 billion dollars. And what does this mean for the Afghan women and men who for the past twenty years have believed in the promise of freedom and democracy and have committed themselves to building a peaceful country? How big will the new wave of refugees from Afghanistan become? Will European countries be willing to receive them generously?

I have been intensively involved with Afghanistan in various positions. In 2007 I worked for the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) in Kabul for three months. As director of Oxfam Novib, I committed myself with heart and soul full of conviction to a better future for the Afghans. And now? How do the people I have come to know and respect in the last two decades assess these developments?

2020 already started very dramatically: the first days of January I had to hold my breath, with the rest of the world, because another war in the Middle East was imminent. Ghassem Soleimani, general of the Quds Brigade responsible for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s operations in the region, was extremely powerful and popular with the population. He was killed by US missiles in Baghdad on January 3. An explosive situation arose: two arch-enemies were diametrically opposed: the US with its erratic President Trump and the Islamic Republic of Iran, isolated and made a pariah state due to US sanctions and slipping ever deeper into economic and political recession. I was born, educated and raised in Iran. I love the country, its people, its language and culture. I have relatives who live there and don’t want to see bombs fall there.

At the same time, the domestic situation is hopeless and the regime merciless. In the past five years alone, two major protest movements have been brutally crushed. At one time, the reformists in Iran harbored hope for change. When the 9/11 attacks hit America, a reformist president happened to be in power, the ever-friendly, smiling President Khatami. The reformers also had a majority in parliament. Where has this reform movement gone? What happened to the large group of change-minded people that had emerged from the system itself?

2020 was also the year of the American elections. Who sits in the White House is of great importance not only to American citizens but also to the rest of the world. Even though we cannot vote for the US president, we will always experience the consequences of his decisions. More in Tehran than in Paris, in Kabul more than in Amsterdam, but we will all feel the consequences. I decided to accept the potential risks of traveling during the Covid pandemic and to participate in the [election] observation mission of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE PA).

News, personal messages and messages that reach me from Afghanistan, Iran, Bahrain, Iraq and other hot spots form the basis of this book. I am looking for coherence, interpretation and connections between the events. At political dealings that not only trigger the expected but also unexpected reactions and often makes a new situation more complex and hopeless. Why does the War on Terror often lead to the opposite of what was originally intended? There are not fewer terrorists, but more. Freedom is more limited. We are further away from peace and stability than we were twenty years ago.

Politics, especially when based on an ideology, is full of wishful thinking. The neoconservatives in the US had been busy for years modelling how to shape the world through military interventions and the overthrow of ruling regimes so that American hegemony could be secured for generations. President George W. Bush, who ruled the White House during the attacks on the Twin Towers just months after a controversial election victory over his Democratic rival Al Gore, was surrounded by leading neocons: Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs and later UN Ambassador John Bolton. They were adherents of the domino theory: ‘If we intervene in a country like Iraq, driving out the dictator Saddam Hussein and bringing democracy to the country, the rest of the Middle East will follow. Then democracies will come to power in Tehran, Cairo and Riyadh.’

This linear theory has cost many human lives. In the meantime, the ‘butterfly effect’ from chaos theory seems to offer a much better explanation. American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz used this metaphor in 1961 to depict the interplay of events in an open system: The wing beat of a butterfly in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas months later, he argued. Look at the 9/11 attacks and the response to them and you’ll see what Lorenz meant.

The US president makes a deal with the Taliban and drives the Afghan women to despair. President Bush’s State of the Union speech on January 29, 2002 strengthens the power of Ayatollah Khamenei, the spiritual leader, and the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. A presentation by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State at the UN Security Council in early 2003 transforms Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into a leading terrorist leader, laying the foundations for the Islamic State caliphate. The intervention in Iraq in 2003 contributed to the European refugee crisis of 2015.

Short-term policies pay little attention to the long-term impact. Politicians refuse to face the consequences of their decisions and to take responsibility for these choices. It is precisely this longterm awareness that needs to be strengthened if we really want to learn from our mistakes. For a better future for the young generation, for our children and our grandchildren.

People – courageous, hopeful, combative, devastated, traumatized and vulnerable in the post-9/11 era. This book is about them, their stories and their voices.

I

US Presidential Election

We arrived in Milwaukee on a flight from Washington via a layover in Chicago. Traveling during a pandemic remains a challenge: The plane from Chicago to Milwaukee was completely full and did not feel good despite the face masks. When I decided to sign up for this election observation mission of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE (OSCE PA) in the USA, I knew it would be an exceptional experience for several reasons. Not only was it a historic election that affected the whole world, it was also special to be on the road during a global pandemic.

Of course, I had my hesitations and reservations about this venture. The US’s handling of the Covid pandemic under President Trump’s leadership was, to put it mildly, not undisputed. He regularly opposed the advice of the experts, such as renowned immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Trump downplayed the danger of the pandemic, left the approach largely up to the individual states and sometimes gave highly dubious recommendations of measures against Corona, such as injections of disinfectant. He also continued to organize and host crowded gatherings at the White House and elsewhere in the country, which contributed to the spread of the virus. Needless to say, the US was not a country people wanted to travel to. After four years of Trump, the tensions and polarization in the world were so high that these elections were rightly called historic.

I wanted to witness this event. The 2020 elections, in and of itself, had become the focus of the campaign. Trump proclaimed early on that it was unthinkable that he would lose. If the elections showed that he had lost, then that simply meant fraud, in his view. An international election observation mission was therefore more important than ever.

I signed up as a participant in the observation mission to Wisconsin, a so-called swing state. In 2016 Trump had won and now the Democrats hoped to win the state.

We stayed at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center, an Art Deco hotel built in 1927 that had clearly seen better days. There are great empty spaces wherever you go. The large lobby on the first floor, with gold-colored columns on marble bases and large, comfortable black leather seats, remained empty even in the evening and radiated an unbearable sadness. The hotel has 729 rooms and it seemed that apart from our nine-member delegation (myself, two MEPs from Sweden, two from Austria, and one each from Andorra, Finland and Hungary, plus an employee from the OSCE PA secretariat) there were hardly any other guests present. There was no breakfast, no room service, no restaurant. Covid had hit Wisconsin hard.

In the early morning of Election Day, I succeeded in getting a cup of coffee from the Starbucks around the corner, which would close its doors again at one o’clock in the afternoon. At 7 a.m., Wisconsin polling stations opened. We set out in teams of two parliamentarians. My teammate is from Hungary and much to my relief he belongs to the opposition in that country. He shares my thoughts about Victor Orbán and that makes it possible for us to talk during the day about the situation and worrying developments in Hungary. Before our arrival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, we were extensively briefed about the elections for two days in Washington. The election observation missions of the OSCE PA are always carried out in collaboration with ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights). A group of ODIHR observers, the so-called long-term observers, have been in the country for two months and will stay longer than we do. The whole process, from campaign financing, campaign meetings, reporting in the media to postal voting and all other related subjects, is observed and included in the final report of the international monitoring mission. The ODIHR experts and long-term observers shared their findings until then with us. Furthermore, many American officials, scientists, representatives of NGOs, politicians and journalists spoke.

US elections are held by individual states, each organized according to its own laws and regulations. Some states allow people to start voting early. It is also possible to vote by mail, a procedure that had not yet been applied in a number of states until now. In fact, it concerns fifty different elections: even though the State Department in the federal government invited the international monitoring mission, it is ultimately up to the states whether they want to admit the observers or not. And many states don’t. Our teams will primarily have access in the states with the Democratic governors.

As many pundits and analysts have noted, this election is a referendum on Donald Trump, who has divided America since his election. After four years of polarization, it’s now up to the American voters to pass judgment on this.

When we leave our hotel in Milwaukee at 6: 30 am, it is still dark and empty on the streets. But we want to be present before seven at one of the polling stations to witness the opening. The two long-term observers of ODIHR in Wisconsin, with whom, upon our arrival at the hotel, we discussed the particularities of Wisconsin, have divided the polling stations amongst our teams.

My Hungarian partner and I asked the driver of our rental car to take us to the first polling station on our list. It is located in the middle of a park in a neighborhood mainly inhabited by African-Americans. The sun is rising, but it is still quite cold. A line of people walks through the park. Upon arrival, just before seven, we show our IDs to the president of the polling station, an African-American who is busy with the preparations. Her team consists of six volunteers. She’s never heard of the OSCE, but that’s no problem. Under Wisconsin electoral law, anyone who can identify themselves must be allowed access to the polling station and be able to observe what is happening there. After our details are registered, we are assigned a seat next to two other observers, one from the Democratic party and the other from the Republican. In addition to volunteers and employees of non-governmental organizations, representatives of the parties often make use of the right of observation.

Actually, this polling station, barely four by five meters, is much too small to be able to maintain enough distance in this time of Covid. The volunteers sit behind the tables to check IDs and registration lists. Everyone wears a face mask and the employees are separated from the voters, albeit sitting shoulder to shoulder, by plexiglass. Abundant use is made of disinfectant. Every pen, every polling booth is cleaned immediately after use. There is an atmosphere that is somewhere between excitement, cheerfulness and tension.

At seven o’clock, after the chairman announces in a loud voice “Hear, hear, the polling station is opened,” the first voter, in his twenties, with a big grin, enters and is greeted with hearty applause. He follows the standard procedure: he shows his ID, his name is checked against the electoral roll and then he gets his ballot. An employee kept track of the number of voters by keeping a tally of numbers in pink. The ballot paper is filled in manually and then scanned by a device above the ballot box. The ballot then ends up in the ballot box. Voter number 1 goes through this procedure visibly enjoying himself and happily leaves the polling station with his hands up. And so the voting continues in this room.

We visit eleven other polling stations, in which we on average stay for 30 to 45 minutes. We observe the process, ask questions and refrain from commenting. Some of our polling stations are located in Washington County, a predominantly Republican region. German Town and Jackson are located northwest of Milwaukee and are in a predominantly agricultural area. The polling stations are located in spacious locations such as churches and schools, with due observance of the necessary distance and hygiene measures. What is immediately noticeable: employees and volunteers as well as the voters are, unlike in Milwaukee, all white. The average age of the employees is also at least ten or fifteen years higher. The chairman of the polling station in German Town is a woman in her 70s. She is visibly pleased with the high turnout and expects it to be over 90 percent by the end of the day.

Wherever we step on this sunny November day, we are generally welcomed. As the day progresses, the influx of voters decreases. At polling stations that we visit at the end of the afternoon and the beginning of the evening, someone occasionally comes in. Around eight o’clock, before the polls close, we return to the first polling station, where we witnessed the opening. The park is now completely dark. There are no more lines of people. In fact, there is no one outside at all. Upon entering we are warmly greeted by the employees who were there in the morning. Of the observers, only the representative of the Democratic party is present, a friendly older man from Chicago. When asked, he tells us that everything went well. The representative of the Republican party had already left early in the afternoon, he says. He meaningfully adds that “everything goes by the book here. She could discover no major fraud, while that is what she came for.” I refrain from commenting.

Employees prepare for the closure of the polling station. A few minutes before eight o’clock a young woman enters the room who discovers that she does not have her ID with her. She apparently lives nearby and runs home, the question is whether she will make it back on time. She does, arriving at the very last minute, just before the polling station president announces the closure, she scans her ballot. Everyone is relieved. Every vote counts in these elections.

Just like the first voter, this last voter of the day also gets a warm round of applause. With the push of a button the results of this polling station roll from the printer. The print is not much different from a supermarket receipt. The result is pinned to the wall. An overwhelming majority of the vote, more than 70 percent, goes to Biden.

Three things are put side by side for a double check: the number of voters registered by the scanning device, the number of ballot papers in the ballot box and the number of voters tallied manually. These three numbers must match and that is the case in this polling place. After a day that started very early, tired but satisfied, the team collects their materials and begin to seal everything up.

My fellow observer and I decide to go back to our hotel. We are curious about the experiences of the other teams. Through an app from OSCE PA we were kept in contact all day with all other teams across the United States. We saw pictures and stories coming through and almost everywhere the picture was the same: the day passed in an orderly and pleasant manner. There were no significant problems reported. Through media and also during our briefings we were warned of possible violent actions in the vicinity of polling stations. Trump had called on his supporters to keep a close eye on polling stations and voters because there would be plenty of fraud. We have seen no sign of that anywhere.

We leave the hotel after a quick snack. More than 90 million eligible voters in the US had already voted by mail before this day. In Milwaukee, postal voting counting of mail-in ballots takes place centrally. Shortly before midnight, we arrive at the counting location, which was within walking distance from our hotel. Inside a large L-shaped hall, it is very busy. Before we are allowed to enter the hall, we must report to the entrance. Two young women greet us cheerfully. After our registration, we have to wait. There are already many observers walking around, Democrats and Republicans as well as representatives from American NGOs. After about twenty minutes we are allowed to enter the hall. There are dozens of tables, each with two people sitting opposite each other. At some of the tables there are baskets full of envelopes. These envelopes are placed on the table, opened and checked to see if the sender is registered as a voter and that everything has been completed according to the rules. Then they are passed on, their validity is checked and finally, they are scanned and counted. A large number of photojournalists and cameramen hold their lenses focused on the people and process in the hall and we observers are allowed to walk between the tables to watch the process.

After almost two hours we leave the hall and on our way to the elevator we are interviewed by a local journalist. The young woman is happy with our presence but also surprised. She always thought that international election observers only go to African countries or developing countries and not to America.

Milwaukee announced their results around five o’clock the morning after the election, after a night spent counting the mailin ballots. Biden was declared the winner. In the aftermath of the elections, Republicans demanded a manual recount of votes in the state of Wisconsin. Biden remained the winner even after the recount.

Election Day in the US could rightly be labeled a celebration of democracy. In all polling stations we heard that the turnout was much higher than normal, the participation of American citizens was unprecedented. Not only the turnout, also the number of volunteers was crucial on this day. Because of the pandemic, Wisconsin had kept a thousand more volunteers on hand in case others might suddenly drop out. The people of the United States had decided to protect their own voice.

My Election Day experience was in stark contrast with the feelings I had from the previous three days in Washington DC. Seeing the hermetically sealed White House was very confrontational. During my first morning walk on Saturday November 1, I could not believe my eyes. The city was empty. No shop was open. Many offices and shops were boarded up with wooden planks and groups of men were rushing to build protection for more glass doors and screen windows of buildings. A man in his forties explained to me that these were preventive measures because everyone was afraid of possible riots. This came on top of the Covid pandemic measures that had already driven people off the streets. When I saw a big rat disappear at that moment behind the planks with which a bank was being boarded up, my imagination ran wild. A feeling of unease crept over me, like I was in a war or disaster zone.

I let all the impressions sink in and increasingly, I understood the meaning of this being a ‘historic election.’ I have visited the US very often, for work but also privately, as I have an American brother a sister-in-law, and two American nephews. Because of the 1979 revolution in Iran and the coming to power of the ayatollahs, many like me had to leave the country. I eventually ended up in the Netherlands, my brother in the US. He married an American woman; I married a German man. I became a citizen of the Netherlands and a convinced European and he became a critical citizen of the US.

I was last in the US when Barack Obama was president. Even then, there was already political polarization. Obama was paralyzed by the opposition of Congress. Washington DC, which on the eve of the 2020 elections looked like it was preparing for an invasion of foreign legions, was a victim of the increasingly intense polarization of the previous years.

Two days after the elections I flew back to the Netherlands. At that time, no news organization had declared a winner. The counting of the votes continued in some states. Because millions of votes by mail had been cast, the counting took much longer than usual, and these mail-in votes were in the majority for the Democrats. Thus, it could happen that even in states where Trump won the in-person vote on Election Day, the victory would ultimately go to Biden.

I was only home for a few hours on November 7 – and in self-quarantine – when CNN first declared Joe Biden and his vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, the winners of the election after the results in Pennsylvania became known. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all three swing states, were won by Biden while four years ago in these same states, the majority voted for Trump.

But anyone who thought that this swing state sweep would have ended the presidential election would have been seriously mistaken. The drama that unfolded in the days and weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021 was not only embarrassing and astonishing, it was especially frightening and worrying. Ultimately, the constitutional institutions in the US have demonstrated their resilience and value. All attempts, intimidation and lies from Trump and his aides – like the former mayor of New York Rudi Giuliani, whom we often saw under Trump acting as his personal lawyer – directed towards governors and courts to move the result in favor of Trump failed spectacularly. Finally, Trump made his most anti-democratic move yet. He encouraged a large crowd of his supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It was more than two months after the elections and was the culmination of a long and complex electoral process in the US. At a joint meeting of the House of Representatives and Senate, the US representatives confirmed the election results of the Electoral College, the assembly of electoral votes from all states. That was the moment when the supporters of Trump, right-wing extremist groups, fanatics and conspiracy theorists, who are deeply attached to their right to bear arms, stormed the Capitol, the Senate and the House of Representatives. They wanted to force the assembly to choose another president than the one chosen by the people. I followed the debate in the Senate when CNN broadcast the first images of the invading crowd. Then the journalist reporting announced that the Capitol was in lockdown. The images were shocking: the Senators and Representatives took shelter under tables, ran in panic through the corridors and were then evacuated by the few Capitol Police officers present. Like many others worldwide, I was glued to the screen and following live to witness the effects of populism. An anti-democratic mob that believes the Big Lie (the elections have been stolen!) of the Great Leader (Trump) and tries to forcibly claim power. We saw fascism in action. Terrifying!

Is there a relationship between Trump’s election in 2016, his ‘alternative facts’ (lies) based presidency, his attempts to sideline the functioning of democratic institutions up to and including the storming of the Capitol - with 9/11 and how the US has reacted to that? I am convinced that the answer to this is yes.

What is certain is the boost that populist political movements – with their anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and anti-immigrant rhetoric and politics – have had since 9/11. We know the examples in Europe (the Front National in France, the FPÖ in Austria, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium etc.) and in our own Netherlands (PVV and FvD). Also, Trump’s campaign in 2016 focused on keeping migrants out (by building a wall on the border with Mexico) as well as Muslims. The latter, to regard Muslims as anti-democratic terrorists that threaten security and freedom in the West, is a direct result of 9/11.

Trump’s first official act as US president was telling. One day in the White House and he signed the so-called Muslim ban: people from the Islamic countries Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen were no longer allowed to enter the US. Trump ordered this ban to take effect immediately. The images of stranded Muslims at American airports went around the world. Grandparents who wanted to visit their children and grandchildren in the US and were not allowed to enter the country or students who were admitted to universities in the US and were sent back.

Another phenomenon is the lie-based politics under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, which had major consequences for the world and was deployed with impunity on the world stage, and which has been adopted by Trump on an even grander scale. At some point, the fact-checkers of major news media could no longer keep up with the sheer number of Trump’s lies. The price for Bush and Cheney’s lie — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — justifying the attack on Iraq in 2003 was paid by Iraqis and other peoples in the Middle East, as we will see later in this book. Bush and Cheney were also very adept at eroding the rule of law. They took those accused of terrorism to Guantanamo Bay, where they were denied a fair trial. Their ‘enhanced interrogations’ - a euphemism for torture, with waterboarding as the best-known method - against prisoners suspected of terrorism were introduced. We became familiar with the concept of ‘extraordinary rendition’: people suspected of terrorism were kidnapped by the CIA and other security forces and taken to a country where it was easier to interrogate them under torture. This could be, for example, a country like Pakistan. In short, the erosion of the US rule of law foundations after 9/11 was already a concern back then.

Julie Pace, the director of the Associated Press in Washington, tweeted on January 8, 2021, what Nancy Pelosi told Democrats: that the top military personnel had assured her that they had taken all steps necessary to prevent Trump from launching nuclear bombs. I wonder what this message actually says. That we should be afraid of an American president who could have an atomic bomb fired anywhere in the world for no reason? Where could that be? Of course, I immediately think of Iran. After all, the New York Times reported in November 2020, in the final months of Trump’s presidency, that he had asked his military advisers about possible military strike options on Iran. My second thought is that Pelosi wanted to reassure the Democrats. Trump won’t be able to just drop a nuclear bomb anywhere and cause death and destruction. Don’t worry! Military personnel will not carry out such an order. But it is unconstitutional for the military to limit the power of the president. What I’m saying is that apparently the superpower can always veer even further off the rails.