PART 5: THE POLITICAL AFTERMATH
The September 11 attacks demanded a dramatic response. Some fundamental shift in the way the US dealt with the rest of the world. But what?
Most Americans, who had largely tuned out of foreign policy since the end of the cold war a decade earlier, had no idea. Enter the neoconservatives.
The small group of foreign policy experts had for decades laboured in relative obscurity in think-tanks and as government advisers. These former Democrats - one leading neocon defined himself as 'a liberal who's been mugged by reality' - have long argued that the US is a nation with a unique calling to bring democracy to the rest of the world. By force if necessary.
The neocons are especially devoted to the safety of Israel and neutralising perceived threats to it. Throughout the 1990s they argued vociferously - but, for the most part, to deaf ears - that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to Middle East peace and needed to be overthrown.
In the aftermath of September 11, they seized the opportunity to promote the 'democratisation' of the Middle East as protection against future 9/11s. They would soon wield influence far beyond their numbers, orchestrate the invasion of Iraq, and become the subject of conspiracy theories around the world.
'9/11 was a welcome development - not that the neoconservatives engineered it, but now that 9/11 had come, it created a wonderful opportunity to unleash the foreign policy agenda they had formulated,' said Claes Ryn, a professor at the Catholic University of America and a leading expert on the neoconservative movement.
