On September 10 2001, most people thought the Taleban was a pop group. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was still smoking his cigars and quaffing Chivas Regal. His sons were busy raping women and torturing opponents. George Galloway, British MP for Baghdad North, was championing their cause in the house of commons. Osama bin Laden was just a disgruntled Arab languishing in a cave somewhere in...Mongolia (wasn’t it?). And as for president George W Bush, well, he just wasn’t very interested in foreign policy at all.

Significantly, the so-called special relationship between UK and the US was dormant. Perhaps this explains why former British prime minister Tony Blair offered such unqualified support – some would say subservience –  after the attacks.

Blair had been perceived as a close ally of former president Bill Clinton. No doubt, Blair had been hoping for an Al Gore victory in 2000. Commentators tend to forget that there was tangible coolness between Bush and Blair at their first meeting at Camp David in February 2001. "You have charmed me, prime minister," Bush said to his visitor at the news conference. The implication was that Blair had to "charm" Bush to win him over because the British leader was out of favour in Washington. All Blair could say was that they used the same toothpaste.

9/11, of course, changed everything. The empire had been attacked. And America immediately sought, expected and received support from its oldest ally – the UK. 

Why do they hate us?
Although official responses to the attacks in Western capitals were all sympathetic – "We’re all Americans, now" was the popular refrain – the man on the street, particularly in the Muslim world, reacted differently. The US ambassador to the UK was even heckled on Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political programme, by a London-based studio audience.

Several authors, notably Tariq Ali in his book the Clash of Fundamentalisms, sought to rationalise American unpopularity: US  military muscle (perversely, also, criticism of American "insularity" and Joe Public’s ignorance of the repercussions of US foreign policy), hatred for America’s global superpower status, envy of American "freedom" and its role as the dynamo of world capitalism –  the global franchises that have encroached beyond their natural frontiers: McDonalds, Starbucks, KFC and their ilk being the most obvious examples.

In the UK, hatred of perceived American support for IRA terrorism overseas may have triggered some schadenfreude of the "now you know what it’s like" basis.

In particular, the "gorilla in the room" was America’s perceived unconditional backing for Israel and the power of its so called lobby – powerful organisations like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and supposedly influential Jewish neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

The seeds of this had been germinating for some time. In the 1980s at Speakers’ Corner in London, the place where rabble-rousers go to vent their spleen, rabid anti-Americanism had been fomenting for years. Arabs were incensed at what they saw as US unconditional support for Israel.

Others went further. On the internet, a Palestinian-American named "Dr" Hesham Tillawi has a TV show in which he interviews various unsavoury characters, including Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis. Tillawi’s repeated claim is that America, like Palestine, is a "Zionist-occupied zone" and that only if America is delivered from Zionist "control" will Palestinians be freed from their "persecutors". With such views propagated openly on the internet, perhaps it’s no surprise that terrorists targeted America. 

Tillawi also cites various examples of Hollywood’s anti-Arab bias. He highlights the Delta Force (1986), a movie in which Arab terrorists hijack an aircraft full of Israelis and fly them to Beirut.

In a memorable scene a terrorist baits one of the hostages: 
"One day. I’ll drive a truck into the White House," says the terrorist. 
"The place is heavily guarded. You’ll never get near the place. Don’t kid yourself," replies the hostage.

Back in 1986, you see, they didn’t figure on a plane and they didn’t reckon on the World Trade Centre. 

Fear of ‘out there’
"Do you think that behaving like animals will win you the sympathy of the world?" asks an Israeli of an Arab terrorist group in Steven Spielberg’s film Munich.

"People will ask why we’re reduced to behaving like animals," replies the terrorist.

Why would people would commit suicide by flying a plane into the financial centre of New York?  In some quarters the attacks became another stick for the liberal intelligentsia to beat Israel. Conspiracy theories abounded. Some Arabs persist in believing that Israel was behind the attacks. Some wondered if the Bush administration had planned it to push through authoritarian surveillance measures. Even intellectual leftist dissident Noam Chomsky denounces such speculation as nonsense, but this hasn’t deterred a growing number of such "conspiracy" websites on the internet.

Naturally, leftist opinion blamed Bush, forgetting that the attacks had been planned long before. Journalists wrote supposedly "controversial" articles attacking the US; in fact, Bush-bashing was de rigueur among enlightened liberal opinion. Outrageously, some even mocked the twin towers’ victims as yuppies who had got their just desserts.

For Bush, however, terrorism gave meaning to his presidency. Not too long after 9/11 and the overthrow of the Taleban in Afghanistan, Bush raised the spectre of Saddam, linking him to bin Laden. The French were criticised as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for their opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

One of 9/11’s most unfortunate legacies would be that the world fell into two camps, either for or against America. Rational voices were drowned out. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 divided public opinion more than any other conflict since Vietnam. And for that we have bin Laden to thank just as much as Bush, because without 9/11 it’s unlikely Bush could have got away with it.