Book Festival authors reflect on the consequences of 9/11

Writer and documentary film maker Dominic Streatfeild was at the Book Festival to discuss his latest work A History of the World since 9/11. Streatfeild claimed that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are being fought in the name of ‘democracy’, have merely intensified the mistrust between Middle-Eastern Islamist societies and the West, and that the damage to Iraq’s infrastructure, the high number of civilian casualties and the ensuing civil war have caused irrevocable harm to the relationship between Britain and America and the Arab nations.

Streatfeild’s views were backed up by the American former CIA intelligence officer Michael Scheuer who, in a separate Book Festival event, said that America, in its endeavour to ‘clone itself’ in terms of values, policies and rights, by ‘occupying’ the Middle-East, has played straight into the hands of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, strengthening insurgency in Arab nations by confirming their fears that the West is intrinsically opposed to Islam.

Scheuer said ‘we are faced with a problem, largely of our own making’, and that ‘we are much worse off today than we were on September the 11th 2001’.