Le Monde Diplomatique has translated excerpts from the anthology 9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (2006). David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott. The text is from Ola Tunanders article "The War on Terror and Pax Americana":
TERRORISM PROVOKES the institutions of the democratic state and strengthens the need for a security that leaves no room for political freedom of choice. Terrorism, in other words, becomes a tool for limiting the public sphere, and for "securifying" what was earlier a part of the democratic and legislative process. What was earlier a political choice is now presented as a matter of life and death, with no alternatives present. And in the same way that the individual looks to the state for protection from terrorism, the smaller nation will look to the hegemonic superpower - at this stage, the USA - for guarantees for their security. In this way, terrorism has become the road to Pax Americana. It's become the road to a way of conducting politics, outside of the arena of the democratic state, in order to limit the operation room of the democratic state. Terrorism has become a form of politics outside of the law - conducted by the superpowers, by the states themselves, by critics of both, be they islamists, nationalists or socialists. [Griffin and Scott, page 4.]
THE EVENTS OF September 11, 2001, were used to launch the War on Terror and to highlight the role of military force. Ongoing terrorist attacks forced a number of other states to permit US counter-terrorism operations to take up residence within their own state borders. The CIA was granted access to one country after another, because local security services were not viewed as having appropriate capacities. The USA thereby took the stage to weed out regimes harbouring terrorists and to protect its allies from an elusive terrorist enemy seen to be threatening the civilian order, and state after state was turned into a US "protectorate." A new pattern was emerging. The USA's superior military strength and intelligence hegemony could only be translated into power and real global strength if there were ongoing conflicts - wars and terrorist attacks - that threatened the multipolar power structure of the economic-political world order. The vision of a unipolar Pax Americana, clearly expressed in the document put out in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, presupposes ongoing military conflicts or terrorist attacks that are able to define the global system in primarily military-political terms.
WE MIGHT THUS DRAW the following tentative conclusions: first, the kinds of indiscriminate bombings we experience today were frequently used during the Cold War, not by "regular terrorists" but by factions of the state - the "sovereign" or the "deep state" - to create fear, to discredit an opponent, and to justify emergency measures that would force the public to trade freedom for security in accordance with the strategy of tension; second, during the Cold War this kind of terrorism was used particularly by the USA to create a paranoid security climate, to control other states domestically, and to keep the US sphere of interest intact; third, military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq had been proposed by central actors in the Bush administration prior to 9/11, campaigns that would have been difficult to justify without a major attack on the USA; fourth, the neoconservative proposal for establishing a Pax Americana presupposed a militarized world order that only could be justified by a major military or terrorist attack able to replace the civilian multipolar system with a unipolar one, with the USA "at the apex of the industrial West"; and fifth, the events of 9/11 and similar attacks have apparently been used on a global scale to introduce such a Pax Americana, because US intelligence and military forces are the only ones able to intervene worldwide to protect others from a major terrorist threat.
BOTH US-INSTIGATED terrorism and Islamist anti-US terrorism function as supplementary instruments for raising the level of violence, which in practical terms replaces a more civilian multipolar system with a more militarized unipolar world order. With the exposure of these two forms of terrorism as dual vehicles for establishing a Pax Americana, each would lose its legitimacy.
It follows then, that any possibility of transcending the era of terrorism would seem to presuppose the exposure of the US intelligence game together with the role of Islamist terrorism in this game.