Stop the War on Terror, We Want to Get Off

Right about now seems like the right time to contend with the following analysis from Tom Engelhardt:

Despite the several thousand Americans who died on September 11, 2001, the dangers of terrorism rate above shark attacks but not much else in American life. Even more remarkably, the national security state has been built on a foundation of almost total failure. Think of failure, in fact, as the spark that repeatedly sets the further expansion of its apparatus in motion, funds it, and allows it to thrive.

It works something like this: start with the fact that, on September 10, 2001, global jihadism was a microscopic movement on this planet. Since 9/11, under the pressure of American military power, it has exploded geographically, while the number of jihadist organizations has multiplied, and the number of people joining such groups has regularly and repeatedly increased, a growth rate that seems to correlate with the efforts of Washington to destroy terrorism and its infrastructure. In other words, the Global War on Terror has been and remains a global war for the production of terror. And terror groups know it.

It was Osama bin Laden’s greatest insight and is now a commonplace that drawing Washington into military action against you increases your credibility in the world that matters to you and so makes recruiting easier. At the same time, American actions, from invasions to drone strikes, and their “collateral damage,” create pools of people desperate for revenge. If you want to thrive and grow, in other words, you need the U.S. as an enemy. … This has, in other words, proved to be a deeply symbiotic and mutually profitable relationship.

From the point of view of the national security state, each failure, each little disaster, acts as another shot of fear in the American body politic, and the response to failure is predictable: never less of what doesn’t work, but more. More money, more bodies hired, more new outfits formed, more elaborate defenses, more offensive weaponry. Each failure with its accompanying jolt of fear (and often hysteria) predictably results in further funding for the national security state to develop newer, even more elaborate versions of what it’s been doing these last 13 years. Failure, in other words, is the key to success.

There’s something about this analysis that seems too pat. For example, U.S. policies have no doubt been a catalyst for the seismic shifts in Arab countries over the last decade, but they don’t fully explain them. Nor is it clear that all of this discord could have been avoided somehow simply by small changes in this country’s foreign relations that would have been unambiguously positive. Trying to unravel America’s postwar role in the Arabian peninsula and figure out which parts were unnecessarily obnoxious and disrespectful and which parts were sound geopolitical and economic strategies isn’t a straightforward endeavor.

It’s too simple to explain the rise in jihadism as a product of the effort to tamp down jihadism.

Having said that, it’s a problem that the bulk of Engelhardt’s analysis seems to be unassailable.

Failure never leads to a reevaluation, but always to a doubling or tripling down. And we’ve reached the point where this ferris wheel will spin on forever until it gathers enough speed that the whole thing flies off into pieces.

At some point, we need to say, “Stop the War on Terror, we want to get off.”