Mind-Munitions

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The New World Information Disorder
sever its ties with Russia; the CIS was arguably even looser as an
association of nation-states than the British Commonwealth of
Nations. For invaded nations like Afghanistan, Soviet troop withdrawal
created a power vacuum that was to be filled by the Taliban
who were to later haunt the United States. So talk of the ‘triumph’
of the West in the Cold War was soon tempered with anxiety about
what would happen next to a world which had experienced – even,
by comparison, ‘enjoyed’ – the certainties of a bi-polar order in
which enemies and friends could be clearly identified.
Change bred all sorts of new doubts and anxieties. For example,
would the forces of nationalism resurface or would they crumble
under the pressure of internationalism, especially now that ‘globalization’
had become a new buzz-word linking the concerns of all
nations to describe such universal concerns as environmental
issues, global warming, pollution, the spread of AIDS and drugs,
and nuclear proliferation? Or would the Islamic crescent now
replace the hammer and sickle as the West’s bogeyman? Samuel
Huntington wrote of a possible ‘clash of civilisations’ while other
scholars, who had failed to anticipate the end of the Cold War,
groped around to explain the new international circumstances.
‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ was a phenomenon that had been appearing
more and more in the western media throughout the 1980s and
it was usually connected, in an almost Pavlovian reaction, with international
terrorism. However, in the two decades prior to the
September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington,
this appeared to be only an episodic or random problem. It
had framed the western media coverage of the 1979 Iranian
revolution, the American bombing of Libya in 1986, Lebanon
throughout the 1980s, and the downing of Pan Am 107 over
Lockerbie in 1988. These parameters had made the ‘accidental’
shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by the USS Vincennes
less of an atrocity than the ‘deliberate’ Soviet interception of
Korean Air Lines flight 007. So when President Bush Snr talked
about a ‘New World Order’ at the start of the 1990s, no one was
quite sure what it meant but it did at least appear to signify a point
of departure from the East–West tensions and nuclear
confrontation of the recent past. Something different was certainly
happening, as developments in South Africa and, later, Northern
Ireland seemed to reveal. But whether it consisted of Order or
Chaos remained to be seen.