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Introduction
The initial response of the Bush administration to 9/11 was to frame it as a transformative event that changed everything. As President Bush (2001) puts it in an address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September: 'All of this was brought upon us in a single day - and night fell on a different world'. Such a response assumed that the traumatic events of 9/11 had come out of a clear blue sky. While this diagnosis of 9/11 helped rally a shell-shocked American people, it had significant prescriptive implications and substantive consequences for the development of US policy and America's international position.
By effectively denying that the United States had little or no impact on the international circumstances that led to 9/11, the Bush leadership felt free to declare war on terror and emphasize the notion of US primacy in this transnational struggle. Bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ensued and these conflicts cost billions of dollars and were financed largely from borrowing, which, in turn, contributed to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. Although the Obama administration has been able to improve the relative position of the United States in both security and economic terms since 2009, it has not been able to shake-off the narrative, articulated by Paul Kennedy and others during the Bush years, that the United States remains a superpower in long-term decline (Kennedy, 2007; Solman, 2010; Layne et al , 2012, pp. 410-411).
But there was nothing preordained about this trajectory. 9/11 was always a symptom, rather than a cause, of a new global environment. This environment had been radically changing since the end of the Cold War. This article locates the origins of 9/11 in the increasingly globalized security context of the early post-Cold War period. In particular, the article seeks to illuminate the causal connection between the disastrous US-UN humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1992-1993 and the emergence of a permissive security environment that ultimately made the events of 11 September possible.
It is argued here that the Somali crisis was a defining moment for US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. It generated the Somalia Syndrome in Washington - a risk-averse approach to intervention in civil conflicts, especially if such involvement ran the...