Last Saturday marked three years since catastrophic attacks launched on American soil catapulted terrorism and war back into the centre of the international consciousness. It also marked the end of a week where the numbers of US war dead in Iraq hit 1,000.

The US government has also been accused of a singular "failure of imagination" by a bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 attacks. The commission has also underlined the spurious links between the hijackers and Saddam Hussein were used as the pretext for an invasion of Iraq.

In July, the 9/11 Commission released a 567-page report narrating the events leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, coupled with a blow-by-blow account of systemic failures in US security, immigration, intelligence and governance apparatus.

The commissioners contended that this allowed terrorists to penetrate the US and hijack commercial aircraft for use as weapons. That the hijackers did this at a mere cost of between US$400,000 and US$500,000 is all the more startling.

The report presents itself in part as a crisis of American nationalism, it comes bound in the red, white and blue of the American flag. It speaks the language of bipartisan unity at a time of domestic tension as the presidential elections approach in November.

This has also led it to apportion blame to both Clinton and Bush Jr administrations, and as Richard Posner has suggested, makes its recommendations the possible result of political horse-trading.

By closely aligning itself with the families of the 9/11 victims the commission has acquired a tremendous moral authority, although whether this translates into sound national security policy is an altogether separate question.

'No link'

Its central and most contentious point is that the US government failed to imagine this scenario and to respond to the warning signs was the signal failure above all others. Now that the unimaginable has happened the challenge is to revamp the entire apparatus of security and government in order to prevent the unimaginable from happening again. It is a tall order.

Bureaucracies almost never perform to expectations. The temptation to extend culpability for failure from the privileged vantage point of hindsight is hard to resist, and the commission has not held itself back from crossing this line.

Although President George W Bush signed the commission into existence, he was less than speedy in following its recommendations. In spite of his attempts to capitalise on the 9/11 tragedy and present himself as the candidate for national security and war on the enemy, Bush has had to be forced to follow through.

The most recent decision was to revamp the national intelligence agencies, including placing a national intelligence director in control of his budget, and reforming congressional oversight on intelligence.

The rest of the commission's recommendations have been introduced via a bill into Congress this week, a similar effort is ongoing in the Senate. What is of principal concern for the rest of the world is that the 9/11 commission's recommendations were not confined to domestic reform.

Its recommendations are billed as "a global strategy". In a fateful leap the report delimits the scope of US national security with the claim that "the American homeland is the planet" (p 362).

The lesson of 9/11 has been understood as the need to consider attacks on American interests anywhere in the world as attacks on American soil itself. The enemy is defined not a terrorism in general, but Islamist terrorism specifically.

The report dwells little on any legitimate causes for resentment against the global exercise of American power. At one pole it sets up Osama bin Laden and like-minded cohorts as intolerant fanatics who "can only be destroyed or utterly isolated".

At the other lies the Muslim world which has "fallen behind the West politically, economically, and militarily for the past three centuries". It contains an impressionable pool of "disaffected young Muslims" open to such a radical message.

The resentment of America and the West even by leaders of "relatively successful Muslim states" is illustrated by a footnote example of our own (former Malaysian premier) Dr Mahathir Mohamad's appeal to the OIC to unite against an international Jewish conspiracy.

According to the report the cures for the ills faced by the Muslim world must come from within, although the US stands to help. What is striking for the outside reader is that whilst the 9/11 commission has engaged in an exacting and minute scrutiny of the domestic factors behind the tragedy, it has not applied that same scrutiny to US foreign policy of the last three decades.

It has thus failed to appreciate the role of US political, military and economic interventions in the fate of other countries, particularly in the Muslim world, has played in generating the opposition it now faces. Although to do this may mean the US being confronted with discomforting accounts of its own moral lapses.

How the dramatic provocation to international sensibilities that was the invasion of Iraq stands in regards to this strategy is not touched upon. The commission itself has stated that they do not see any link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

More than war

Now that the planet is set up as the American homeland the moral and political justification easily brought into existence for attacks launched against terrorists and their organisations. The commission advocates more than just a war on terrorism.

Long-term success "demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defence". Welcome back to the Cold War.

Likely terrorist hotbeds for the future are identified as:

Southeast Asia, from Thailand to the southern Philippines to Indonesia

Western Pakistan and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region

Southern or western Afghanistan

The Arabian Peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and the nearby Horn of Africa, including Somalia and extending southwest into Kenya

West Africa, including Nigeria and Mali

European cities with expatriate Muslim communities, especially cities in central and eastern Europe where security force and border controls are less effective

In other words, the entire region of Asean and beyond, the African and Asian continents, will be the theatre of war and counter-terrorism in the coming decades.

Kuala Lumpur itself figures prominently in the 9/11 report's narrative as the meeting and planning point for several hijackers assisted by Indonesian-born Hambali.

Whether the US can successfully mobilise the machinery of war and counter-terrorism through its overseas military bases and by pressuring Muslim governments to assist is anyone's guess. It is certain to entail great tragedy on all sides if the Cold War teaches us anything.

Unintended consequences are already beginning to emerge. Following the terrible bomb blasts in Russia last week, the Putin government has said it will strike at anti-Russian terrorists anywhere in the world. It is a menacing echo of American foreign policy since 2001.

The Putin government has no redeeming moral position for its conduct towards Chechnya, will it be the first of many repressive states to usher in a world of territorial invasions to perpetuate unjust regimes?

For Malaysians, the 9/11 report is worth reading because it outlines an effort to shape their future. However, this writer is less than optimistic about any potential positive result.

Unless the global political momentum for genuine peace becomes decisive, we are facing a future written in war.

YIN SHAO LOONG is a doctoral student at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School University, New York