THE SET-UP: Today begins with the most ironic headline I’ve seen this week:
I guess it’s possible that someone at CBS News has a subversive sense of humor. But I doubt it. And perhaps I’d think differently if “torture” or “rendition” or “warrantless wiretapping” or “Guantanamo Bay” appeared in the story. They didn’t.
No, Gonzales is enjoying the same free pass the rest of W’s administration enjoys … the same Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free card even W enjoys. I guess you’ve gotta hand to W. He literally painted himself out of a corner. The warmonger is now a warm and cuddly friend of Michelle. Then again, I’ve always felt Oliver Stone and Josh Brolin nailed him in “W” … a slightly goofy people-pleaser who was better equipped to run Major League Baseball than he was to evaluate the bloodthirsty imperial aspirations of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the Neocons.
Yet, Cheney, too, has finally earned his free pass. Like all the major Neocons in the years after W left office, he’s turned Donald Trump into reputational redeemer.
Bill Krystal and David Frum pioneered the Never Trumper Triangulation Maneuver during Trump’s dismantling of their third Bush … the ill-fated Jeb! And Trump did that by weaponizing the “stupid wars” his brother launched according to the Neocons’ best laid plans.
It was a rebuke of the Neocon era.
The Neocons may have lost the 2016 primary, but they gained something perhaps more valuable … they found a savior. They’ve since turned Trump into their personal Jesus. And he has, in effect, helped cleanse them of their sins by offering a fairly simple path to redemption.
They just had to denounce him and condemn him, and do it both loudly and often. And it had to be done on the Washington Post’s Op-Ed page, on network news Sunday shows and on MSNBC.
And so they did … Robert Kagan and Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin and even the much-maligned John Bolton … they’ve all denounced Trump. Instead of expressing love for their enemy, they enjoyed a newly-found love from the enemies of their new enemy.
It’s a process that reached its apotheosis on Friday when Darth Vader (a.k.a. Dick Cheney) endorsed Democrats’ Princess Leia (a.k.a. Kamala Harris) for Emperor. Now he’s been redeemed, too, by the cleansing power of Never Trumpism … perhaps not for all, but, it seems, for most. And yes, it’s all as ethically convoluted as it sounds. But it works.
Then again, the willingness to “move on” from the past is a strong force in American culture and politics. In fact, a hard look at our collective conscience might reveal the true beneficiary of those free passes we’ve handed out — us.
TITLE: America’s long war on terror and its impact
https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/americas-long-war-on-terror-and-its-impact-1.104077655
EXCERPT: This week may be a good time to ask, in the cold light of hindsight, 23 years after the fact, how America had chosen to turn with that turning point on Sept. 11, 2001 and how it had allowed, as it went on to do, a corrosive poison to be secreted into the bloodstream of its body politic as well as the psyche of its public.
The place to go for an answer to this seminal question is the recently released Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, by Richard Beck, a senior staff writer for N+1, a now celebrated culture magazine launched in 2004 by four Harvard alumni “intellectual entrepreneurs”.
Beck, who, like everyone of his generation, has spent his entire adult life living in the shadow of 9/11, has written a book that is, as one reviewer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin put it, “a devastating inquiry into the new world that day created”.
It also happens to be a groundbreaking history of how that very day triggered America’s obsessive, decades-long Global War on Terror, a war that, Beck convincingly explains, had so impacted American culture as to shape every aspect of American life, from Americans’ resources of feeling about ‘the other’ — be that other a Muslim fellow American or a Mexican immigrant — to the election of a man like Donald Trump as president of the United States.
As the American government sent its troops abroad to fight terrorists, who were everywhere yet nowhere, its citizens at home, Beck reminds us, became suspicious of their own fellow Americans who lived next door to them on the block, sat next to them on a plane or toiled next to them in the workplace — essentially because these folks did not look like them.
When Beck describes the nastiness that settled at crucial nerve-ends of political, social and cultural life in America at the time — the abrupt drawing of the curtains on the morning of American ideals, as it were — he only confirms to those of us who lived through the era what it truly was like.
And it was not pretty, for it was that very nastiness, which in no time had swept through the nation like a plague — a nastiness characterised by bigotry, xenophobia and nativism that lingered on right through to our time — that ultimately made Trump’s presidency a fact of life.
Homeland is a book that plunges one, and immersively so, into a kind of heart of darkness, into the sinister mutations in American life and the psychosis that gripped the national mood at a time not too distant in the past.
Then, when America sent soldiers around the globe chasing after phantom terrorists, subjecting them, along with other men who turned out to be innocent folks who did not know one end of a gun from another, to “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Abu Ghraib, in Baghdad, Iraq; at the Salt Pit in Bagram, Afghanistan; and at CIA Black Sites in various countries around the world, it paid a price in the erosion of democracy and the subversion of its ideals at home.
Beck does not explore how this wretched global war on terror impacted the lives of people overseas, for clearly that was outside the purview of Homeland. But that impact was no less than mind-boggling.
Beck may not have told us about all that death caused and all that suffering endured but he did tell us this: “History is something you have to try to understand even as you live through it”.
We hear you, brother.
TITLE: The War on Terror Was Not a Morality Tale
https://warontherocks.com/2024/09/the-war-on-terror-was-not-a-morality-tale/
EXCERPT: Homeland is a moral critique as well as a history. Those lines blur throughout the book, to its detriment. Beck is obviously right about the objectionable moral nature of much of the War on Terror. But this book is morally as well as historically simplistic. Beck portrays a binary of rapacious American imperialists oppressing Muslims at home and abroad, declaring: “Wars are sustained by rage and that rage seeks an object. In the War on Terror, that object was Muslims.” He contends that in the American imagination, Muslims were either “victims to be saved or barbarians to be eliminated.”
A true moral reckoning, however, requires wrestling with complexity and contradiction. There were successes in this conflict, albeit ones that could have been achieved without disasters like Iraq. There were no major, externally directed attacks on U.S. soil, al-Qaeda has been severely degraded as an operational organization, and, in Afghanistan at least, there were improvements to quality of life, women’s rights, and representative government. These were tenuous gains, as Beck argues elsewhere, but they are dead now with the Taliban’s victory.
As writers like Anand Gopal, Elliot Ackerman, and Carter Malkasian have demonstrated, these conflicts featured a bewildering array of behavior that defies simple moral boxes. Muslims played many roles: brutal Islamist extremists seeking domination, religious parties contesting for power, women, activists, and civic leaders for whom these wars meant both destabilization and opportunities for a better life. Literally millions of Muslims backed, if not led, efforts to prevent groups like the Taliban, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Islamic State from seizing power. Americans also ran the gamut from sincere believers in helping Muslims build free, stable societies to outright racists. Such ambiguity is nowhere in this book.
Moreover, in his moralizing argument, Beck rarely considers the uncertainty, pressures, and imperfect options that beset policymakers. This is most evident in his critique of President Barack Obama. Like other critics, Beck faults Obama for continuing the War on Terror and even expanding it, as in the 2009 Afghan surge. He excoriates Obama’s drone strike program, calling for the criminal prosecution of those who conducted this campaign.
Beck, however, makes little effort to consider the scale of the global terrorist threat when Obama took office. International terrorism had metastasized into groups ranging from the Afghan-Pakistani border to Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, and Iraq. Figures like Faisal Shahzad and Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab received training in Pakistan and Yemen before attempting mass casualty attacks on U.S. soil. The propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki was influencing dozens of jihadists while acting as a de facto member of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden was still at large. For Obama to ignore these threats would have been not only strategically irresponsible but also politically disastrous in the event of a successful attack.
Drone and special operations forces provided a way to pursue these morphing threats at less cost to U.S. troops and civilians than conventional operations. This approach kept al-Qaeda and other groups off-balance and was reasonably accurate in terms of civilian versus combatant casualties. Obama’s use of drones also declined significantly in his second term, which Beck ignores. Moreover, the idea that this program’s personnel should be prosecuted for killing civilians effectively criminalizes any use of force that might hurt civilians.
Simply put, there was no clean way to fight this war, and Obama developed a more restrained and sustainable approach than Bush’s regime change strategy. He also had to react to events, as in his re-surging of U.S. forces to combat the Islamic State, a threat to security and human rights if there ever was one. Obama deserves criticism for much of his foreign policy, especially in Libya, but Beck’s critique is unmeasured.
TITLE: Twenty-three years after 9/11, Muslim victims of US violence deserve justice
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/9-11-anniversary-muslim-victims-us-violence-deserve-justice
EXCERPTS: The world that Muslims have come to understand under the guise of the war on terror is one marked by unabated and unaccountable state violence propelled by entrenched and rampant Islamophobia.
The actions that the US took in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to "combat terrorism" - from legislating unfettered warfare across the globe through the Authorisation of the Use of Military Force joint resolution and passing the Patriot Act to giving broad surveillance powers to the government, launching a war on Afghanistan, and signing a military order that authorised military commissions with different standards of rules for those detained in brutal prisons from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites.
These violent measures have only escalated in the last 23 years of the war on terror. From militarism and warfare to draconian immigration policies, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture, this war has almost exclusively targeted Muslims.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen - four Muslim-majority countries - the war on terror has led to a death toll of between 4.5 and 4.7 million people.
As horrifying as this level of violence has been, it doesn't even begin to account for the violence that has otherwise been buried deeper than the victims of the US empire.
The New Yorker's "In the Dark" podcast, for example, recently assembled a database of the largest known collection of war crimes investigations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 11 September 2001. The database includes nearly 800 incidents, with the reporting concluding that "the military delivers neither transparency nor justice".
Unsurprisingly, the US government has offered no meaningful remedies to the catastrophic violence that Muslims have endured at its hands, nor put any systems or mechanisms of accountability in place to acknowledge and reckon with a war whose entire foundation was built on the demonisation and criminalisation of a religious community.
Last year, on the sixth annual International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, the State Department released a statement claiming that the US "stands with the global community of victims, families, survivors, and communities who have been impacted by the scourge of terrorism" and "will never forget the victims of terrorism or stop our pursuit of justice and peace".
The US, however, has not only forgotten the victims of its catastrophic and unabashed state violence but swept them so far under the rug that there is almost no possibility of justice for Muslims.
Where any remedies do exist - for example, if someone is killed by the US in a combat zone - US laws effectively preclude noncitizens from the eligibility to make a claim or receive any compensation for wrongful deaths that occur outside of the country.
In [some] cases where the US military kills civilians, a commander can opt to pay what are called solatia or condolence payments. These payments are not only minuscule - ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars - but they are also expressly made without the military acknowledging any wrongdoing.
One exception to this rule was when the US killed an Afghan family of 10 members, including seven children. The Pentagon eventually issued an apology, with Austin insisting that "no military works harder than ours to avoid civilian casualties. When we have reason to believe we have taken innocent life, we investigate it and, if true, we admit it."
However, not only does the US - the military in this case - have limited accountability measures to address civilian deaths, but Austin's statement perpetuates the facade that there are mechanisms in place and that the killing of these Afghan civilians was an exception to otherwise careful military operations.
Moreover, what the war on terror has consistently demonstrated is that the US only acknowledges wrongdoing when it cannot plausibly deny its violence (the war crimes at Abu Ghraib are emblematic of this rule). While survivors among the Afghan family were relocated to the US, the government has yet to provide any monetary compensation despite pledging to.
The exclusion of Muslims from any justice framework after 9/11 is a direct result of the US's unabashed commitment to state violence that has been justified through the criminalisation, demonisation, and dehumanisation of Muslims.
Constructions of Muslims as inherently predisposed to violence, irrationally angry, and barbaric, among others, have specifically served to position Muslims solely as perpetrators and never as victims deserving of any sympathy.
Coupled with these often harmful representations, another barrier to leveraging victim claims is the absence of a viable, legible, and rhetorical frame through which collective action to hold the state accountable and articulate a demand for justice can be mobilised.
As sociologists William K Carroll and Robert S Ratner write in their article "Master Frames and Counter-Hegemony: Political Sensibilities in Contemporary Social Movements", "Collective action frames form part of the discursive politics of any struggle against established hegemony.”
Part of this rhetorical frame involves a re-constitution of the collective memory of the war on terror as it has been waged thus far while centring the Muslims who have been victimized in its wake.
What exists now in the form of the collective memory of the war on terror has been driven by state narratives and complicit media entities that have not only justified the violence against Muslims by promoting singular interpretations but also erased their stories and relegated them to the history books, despite the ongoing brutality.
If there will ever be justice for Muslims, then their stories must become part of the collective memory.
SEE ALSO:
How 9/11 Changed – and Didn’t Change – Afghanistan
https://thediplomat.com/2024/09/how-9-11-changed-and-didnt-change-afghanistan/
23 Years After 9/11, Are We Any Safer?
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/9-11-23-years-later