Reckoning With Failure in the War on Terror
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Donald Trump's ascendancy to the presidency, as Max Blumenthal points out in
his insightful book "The Management of Savagery: How America's National
Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump," was
made possible not only by massive social inequality and concentration of
wealth and political power in the hands of the oligarchic elites but by the
national security state's disastrous and prolonged military interventions
overseas.
From the CIA's funneling of over a billion dollars to Islamic militants in
the 1970s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union to the billion dollars
spent on training and equipping the radical jihadists currently fighting in
Syria, the United States has repeatedly empowered extremists who have filled
the vacuums of failed states it created. The extremists have turned with a
vengeance on their sponsors. Washington's fueling of these conflicts was
directly responsible for the rise of figures such as Ayman al-Zawahiriand
Osama bin Laden and ultimately laid the groundwork for the 9/11 attacks. It
also spawned the rabid Islamophobia in Europe and the United States that
defines Trump's racist worldview and has been successfully used to justify
the eradication of basic civil liberties and democratic rights.
The misguided interventions by the national security apparatus have resulted
in hundreds of thousands of deaths, over 5 million desperate refugees
fleeing to Europe, the destruction of entire cities, the squandering of some
$5 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money, rampant corruption and criminality. The
mandarins of national security, rather than blunt the rise of radical
jihadism, have ensured its spread across the globe. The architects of this
imperial folly have a symbiotic relationship with those they profess to
hate. The two radical extremes-the interventionists in the national security
apparatus and the radical jihadists-play off of each other to countenance
ever-greater acts of savagery. The more perfidious your enemy, the more your
own extremism is justified. We are locked in a macabre dance with the
killers we created and empowered, matching war crime for war crime, torture
for torture and murder for murder. This unrestrained violence has a dark
momentum that escapes management and control. It exacerbates the very
insecurity it claims to be attempting to eliminate by constantly creating
legions of new enemies.
"Drone strikes take out a few bad guys to be sure, but they also kill a
large number of innocent civilians," Nabeel Khoury, a former U.S. deputy
chief of mission in Yemen argues. "Given Yemen's tribal structure, the U.S.
generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP [al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula] operative killed by drones."
The binary view of the world imagined by right-wing ideologues such as
Richard Pipesduring the Cold War, defined as a battle to the death against
godless communism, has been reimagined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and American neocons such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Fred
Fleitz, Robert Kagan, Steve Bannon, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and
Donald Rumsfeld and leaders of the Christian right including Gary Bauerand
William Bennettto become a battle to the death between the "barbarity" of
Islam and the "civilized" ethic of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a
rebranding of the Cold War, so useful to the retrograde forces of capitalism
in crushing popular dissent and so profitable to the arms industry. Its most
prominent voices are a bizarre collection of neofascist ideologues and quack
conspiracy theorists such as Bannon, Sean Hannity, Stephen Miller and Pam
Geller, who claims that Barack Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.
This ideology, like the ideology of anti-communism, erases not only history
but context. Those who oppose us are removed from the realm of the rational.
They are seen as incomprehensible. Their hate has no justification. They are
human embodiments of evil that must be eradicated. They despise us for our
"values" or because they are driven by a perverted form of Islam. The
failure, as Blumenthal writes, to place these conflicts in context, to
examine our own complicity in fueling a justifiable anger, even rage, dooms
us to perpetual misunderstanding and perpetual warfare. Our response is to
employ greater and greater levels of violence that only expand the extremism
at home and abroad. This demented project, as Blumenthal writes, collapses
"the fragile space where multi-confessional societies survive." It
bifurcates political space into competing forms of extremism between the
jihadists and the counter-jihadists. It creates a strange and even
comforting "mutually reinforcing symbiosis" that depends "on a constantly
escalating sense of antagonism."
The methods used on a wary public by the national security state, especially
the FBI and the intelligence agencies, to justify and advance these wars are
increasingly unsavory. Muslims, many suffering from emotional and mental
disabilities, are baited by law enforcement into "terrorist" plots that few
of them could have conceived or organized on their own. The highly
publicized arrests and quashing of these nascent "terrorist plots"
exaggerate the presence of radical jihadists within the country. They keep
fear at a fever pitch among the U.S. population. Trevor Aaronson, the author
of "Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terror," found that
nearly half of all terror prosecutions between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2010
involved informants, including some with criminal backgrounds who were paid
as much as $100,000 by the FBI. Aaronson noted that during the last year of
the George W. Bush administration the government did not prosecute anyone
arrested in a terrorist "sting." But such stings exploded under Barack
Obama, a tactic that Blumenthal writes was "designed to cast his
administration as just as tough on terror as any Republican"-the Obama
administration "announced an arrest resulting from a terrorism sting every
sixty days." This suggested, Aaronson writes, "that there are a lot of
ineffective terrorists in the United States, or that the FBI has become
effective at creating the very enemy it is hunting."
The longer and more confusing the "war on terror" becomes, nearly two
decades on, the more irrational our national discourse becomes. The paranoid
and racist narratives of the far right have poisoned the mainstream
dialogue. These racist tropes are repeated by the White House, members of
Congress and the press.
"Islamophobia had become the language of a wounded empire, the guttural roar
of its malevolent violence turned back from the sands of Iraq and the
mountain passes of Afghanistan, and leveled against the mosque down the
turnpike, the hijabiin the checkout line, the Sikh behind the cash
register-the neighbors who looked like The Enemy," Blumenthal writes.
Far-right parties are riding this rampant Islamophobia, fueled by the
catastrophic failures in the Middle East, to power in Germany, Italy,
France, Britain, Sweden, Poland and Hungary. This toxic hatred is also a
central theme of the Trump administration, which demonizes Muslims,
especially Muslim refugees, and seeks to bar them from entering the United
States.
The arrival of millions of Muslim refugees in Europe from states such as
Libya, Syria (which alone has produced a million refugees in Europe), Iraq
and Afghanistan has dramatically bolstered the appeal of European
neofascists. Nearly 73 percent of those who voted in Britain for the nation
to leave the European Union cited the arrival of immigrants as their most
important reason for supporting the referendum.
The radical jihadists have long expressed a desire to extinguish democratic
space in the West. They are aware that the curtailment of civil liberties,
evisceration of democratic institutions, especially the judicial system, and
overt hatred of Muslims push Muslims in the West into their arms. Such
conditions also increase the military blunders of the United States and its
allies abroad, providing jihadists with a steady supply of new recruits and
failed states from which they can operate. Their strategy is working. In the
year before the 2016 presidential election, violence against Muslims in the
United States soared, including shootings and arson attacks on mosques.
Public disapproval of Muslims, according to opinion polls, is at a record
high.
The Democratic Party, signing on to the forever crusade by the national
security state in the name of humanitarian intervention, is as complicit.
The Obama administration not only accelerated the sting operations in the
United States against supposed terrorists but, in its foreign operations,
increased the use of militarized drones, sent more troops to Afghanistan and
foolishly toppled the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya to create yet
another failed state and safe haven for jihadists.
The radical jihadists, in an irony not lost on Blumenthal, are often
deliberately armed and empowered by the U.S. national security apparatus,
along with Israel, as a way to pressure and topple regimes deemed
antagonistic to Israel and the United States. Obama's secretary of state,
John Kerry, in audio leaked from a closed meeting with Syrian opposition
activists, admitted that the U.S. had used Islamic State as a tool for
pressuring the Syrian government. He also acknowledged that Washington's
complicity in the growth of IS in Syria was the major cause for Russian
intervention there.
In a 2016 op-edtitled "The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic
Mistake," Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic
Studies, argued that "[t]he West should seek the further weakening of
Islamic State, but not its destruction." He said the West should exploit IS
as a "useful tool" in the fight against Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah. "A
weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS," Inbar
concluded. Inbar went on to argue for prolonging the conflict in Syria,
saying that extended sectarian bloodshed would produce "positive change."
Earlier in 2016, Israel's former Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon had said
similarly, "In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I
choose the Islamic State."
Israel seeks to create buffer zones between itself and Hezbollah in southern
Lebanon. It sees its neighbor Syria, because of its alliance with Iran, as a
mortal enemy. The solution has been to cripple these traditional enemies by
temporarily empowering radical Sunni jihadists and al-Qaida. There are
numerous reports of Israel, along with the United States, using its aircraft
and military in Syria to aid the very jihadists Washington and Jerusalem
claim to want to wipe from the face of the earth.
This intractable morass, Blumenthal argues, led directly to the demonization
of Russia. Trump's anti-interventionist rhetoric, however disingenuous,
triggered what Blumenthal calls "a wild hysteria" among the foreign policy
elites. Trump calls the invasion of Iraq a mistake. He questions the arming
of Syrian jihadists and deployment of U.S. forces in Syria. He is critical
of NATO. At the same time, he has called for better relations with Russia.
"Joining with the dead-enders of Hillary Clinton's campaign, who were
desperate to deflect from their crushing loss, the mandarins of the national
security state worked their media contacts to generate the narrative of
Trump-Russia collusion," Blumenthal writes. "Out of the postelection despair
of liberals and national security elites, the furor of Russiagate was born.
This national outrage substituted Russia for ISIS as the country's new folk
devil and painted Trump as Russian president Vladimir Putin's Manchurian
candidate."
"Almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of liberals were showing up at
postelection rallies with placards depicting Trump in Russian garb and
surrounded by Soviet hammer-and-sickle symbols," Blumenthal writes. The FBI
and the intelligence community, organizations that have long spied upon and
harassed the left and often liberals, became folk heroes. NATO, which was
the instrument used to destabilize the Middle East and heighten tensions
with Russia because of its expansion in Eastern Europe, became sacrosanct.
"In its obsession with Moscow's supposed meddling, the Democratic Party
elite eagerly rehabilitated the Bush-era neoconservatives, welcoming PNAC
[Project for the New American Century] founder William Kristol and 'axis of
evil' author David Fruminto the ranks of the so-called 'resistance,' "
Blumenthal writes. "The Center for American Progress, the semiofficial think
tank of the Democratic Party, consolidated the liberal-neocon alliance by
forging a formal working partnership with the American Enterprise Institute,
the nest of the Iraq war neocons, to 'stand up to Russia.' "
Those in the alternative media who question the Russia narrative and
chronical the imperial disasters are in this new version of the Cold War
branded as agents of a foreign power and hit with algorithmsfrom Google,
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to deflect viewers from reading or listening
to their critiques. Politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Labour Party
leader Jeremy Corbyn, who push back against the war lust are smeared with
the same nefarious charge. It is, as Blumenthal writes, a desperate bid by
the war industry and the interventionists to mask the greatest strategic
blunder in American history, one that signals the end of American hegemony.
"In the face of their own failure, America's national security elites had
successfully engineered a new Cold War, wagering that the reignited conflict
would preserve their management of savagery abroad and postpone the terrible
reckoning they deserved at home," Blumenthal concludes.
The corporate state, its legitimacy in tatters, seeks to make us afraid in
order to maintain its control over the economic, political and military
institutions. It needs mortal enemies, manufactured or real, at home or
abroad, to justify its existence and mask its mismanagement and corruption.
This narrative of fear is what Antonio Gramscicalled a "legitimation
doctrine." It is not about making us safe-indeed the policies the state
pursues make us less secure-but about getting us to surrender to the will of
the elites. The more inequality and injustice grow, the more the
legitimation doctrine will be used to keep us cowed and compliant. The
doctrine means that the enemies of the United States will never be
destroyed, but will mutate and expand; they are too useful to be allowed to
disappear. It means that the primary language of the state will be fear. The
longer the national security state plays this game, the more a fascist
America is assured.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
Chris Hedges