SUNDAY marked the 21st anniversary of a terrible tragedy in the United States, when close to 3,000 people were killed in what has come to be called the "9/11 terror attacks" on the World Trade Centre. Remembrance of loved ones who lost their lives is a way of dealing with the pain of such grief.
As one mourner told an American media outlet, "It may be 21 years, but to us it seems like just yesterday." Such is the way of loss of loved ones.
But ideologues in Washington nurse the pain in other ways. It's a 21-year-old story of pretext and politics. One example is former president George W. Bush's "war on terror", an undercover operation to force US values on the Muslim world. To Bush and all the presidents who followed him, the Muslim world must want what the Americans want. This is studied ignorance.
Diktats never built a united world. They never will. Look at the US. It doesn't even follow its own dictates. It wants the world to charge and sentence war criminals, but not its citizens and those of its allies. We saw how the US under the administration of former president Donald Trump reacted to the International Criminal Court, an organ of the Rome Statute, when it sought to investigate American soldiers for alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan.
The chief prosecutor and other senior officers of the ICC were not only denied entry into the US, they became a subject of sanctions. The message from Washington is this: the ICC is to sentence those from Africa and the Muslim world. Law and order doesn't get promoted this way. Some argue Bush is history as such the Muslim world shouldn't be so worried. Yes and no.
Yes, he is no longer in the White House and residing some distance away in Texas. But let's not forget the Washington ideologues who have inherited his DNA. President after president regurgitates, in some form or the other, Bush's threat: be like us or else... Let's not forget, too, Bush has some friends in London and other European capitals who are only too willing to help turn the Muslim world into little Americas.
He has made this world a very dangerous place. Joe Biden is no different. Last year, he warned everyone seeking to harm America: "We will hunt you down and make you pay. That will never stop today, tomorrow, ever." Make them pay by invasion and not by charging them in court? Biden is even proud of ordering the extra-judicial killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul last month as he declared in his remembrance remarks on Sunday.
Whatever happened to international law? If al-Zawahiri is guilty, surely American laws are well-equipped to make him pay for his crimes. Having peddled the Rome Statute to the rest of the world, it is odd for the US to exempt itself and its allies.
American values, Mr president? How many Afghanistans and Iraqs do we need? Bush on steroids, Biden? If Bush is truly history, his war on terror and all that it meant must be part of that history. Don't be a threat. Be an example, America.