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Pull Out of the War on Terror
In foreign policy, candidate Obama promised change - and as president he has largely delivered. On Russia, Iran, Cuba, Europe, China, change has taken place, sometimes dramatically so. But he has found it much more difficult to escape his predecessor's legacy with respect to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Although the Obama administration discourages the use of this term and in some areas - the Guantánamo closure, the turning away from coercive interrogations - has stepped back from inherited practices, in other areas it remains captive to the GWOT mindset.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the burgeoning engagement in Afghanistan, and by extension Pakistan. High official after high official justifies these enormous resource expenditures in terms of some variant of "9/11 changed everything." U.S. defense policy is now geared almost exclusively to a counter-insurgency posture designed to prevent a new 9/11.
The only way to head off these misadventures before they become unstoppable national enterprises is to mount a full frontal attack on the crass ignorance inherent in the GWOT concept.
Why is this? Simply put, GWOT thinking has deep roots. Although liberals do not like to be reminded of it, many of the controversial provisions of the 2001 USA Patriot Act were already proposed in the 1996 Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act, passed under Bill Clinton following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. After the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the 2000 attack on the Cole, Osama bin Laden entered the public discourse.
Following 9/11, the GWOT made its formal appearance as the dominant organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy, claiming an iconographic status on a par with foundation myths of manifest destiny and the frontier nation. Like many durable stories, the GWOT narrative contained archetypes of good and evil, an epic battle, and the promise of a triumphal end for the forces of Virtue.
There is a technical term for this phenomenon. The GWOT acted as what, in the language of semiotics, is called a "floating signifier," able to be attached at will to a wide range of actions and policies. The Bush administration organized the al-Qaida 9/11 perpetrators and Saddam Hussein into seamless chapters in the same account. The GWOT narrative led directly to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to justifying torture and to disregard treaty obligations under the laws of war.
The GWOT story gathered wide public support across the political, professional and cultural spectrum. Distinguished academics from the country's most prestigious universities provided intellectual grounding; Washington think tanks supplied policy assessments that, while often decrying tactical mistakes, confirmed the larger effort; and the mainstream media either cheered the war or muted their criticism in the face of caustic charges that the media were unpatriotic.
As is also characteristic of stories that strike a deep chord, the global war on terror expanded beyond its original authors. Other countries told their own versions of the tale, even if these were in fact referring to longstanding local conflicts or contests over national identity, political franchise, or resources. The world's leaders also adopted the GWOT story. When they were recently in Washington, Presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan sounded like GWOT spokesmen.
Against this background, it is thus easy to see that technical, incremental change of the sort the Obama administration has embarked on will be insufficient to undo the prevailing narrative or the intellectual and operational climate it breeds.
Instead, what is needed is an attack on the central fallacy at the heart of the current narrative, namely that a fantastically complex world can be reduced to a single storyline. The war in Iraq was justified on the basis of a baleful conflation of al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Today, a similar mistake threatens in Afghanistan, where - contrary to the underlying facts - a tacit conflation of the Taliban and al-Qaida justifies the expansion of the U.S. civil and military presence in the country. Seen through the GWOT lens, this makes sense. By any other measure, it is a gross distortion. Although General Petraeus recently acknowledged that al-Qaida no longer has a presence in Afghanistan, a shadowy presumption that it does, or might, continues to cast the indigenous Afghan insurgent movement as an existential threat to the United States - thus turning what is in essence a local problem into a global challenge.
In short, the GWOT narrative is constructed on ignorance. Something of the sort underlay the Cold War tendency to see the hand of Moscow or Beijing behind every movement that seemed opposed to U.S. interests. The GWOT projects an equally flawed pattern onto al-Qaida. Unless the Obama administration wants to repeat history, it should reject the concept of a Global War on Terrorism once and for all - along with all the pathologies it breeds.
Knowledge is the best antidote to fear.
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8 Comments so far
Show AllSwat the GWOT!
-- U.S. defense policy is now geared almost exclusively to a counter-insurgency posture designed to prevent a new 9/11. --
The most important piece of the puzzle is still ignored, despite my repeated efforts to bring this to everyone's attention.
Public Law 107-40, the AUMF that Congress passed to allow Bush to get us into this mess.
-- the President is authorized to use...force against those...he determines planned, authorized, committed,
or aided the terrorist attacks...in order to prevent
any future acts of international terrorism against the United States... --
Can it be any plainer? The US military has a mission to prevent future terrorism, because Congress said so. The military is looking for future terrorists and then killing them before they become terrorists.
America will remain stuck in this insane Stupid War until Congress takes steps to atone for the ongoing catastrophe that they set in motion.
in the words of Jack Webb, as Sgt. Friday, "just the facts, ma'am..."
Stop distorting truth via analysis-noise, and prosecute crimes...somebody blew up the World Trade Centers on 911...that was a crime...several...GWOT, like DARE, is many things, but legitimate is not one of them...stop all this other crap (moving in, taking over, killing and raping) in other countries, stop even discussing this other crap, bring all our agents wherever back home, treat them as necessary, and investigate the crime that took place on 911...really...
It's all part of the ugly hand of capitalism - we need greater and greater oppression to keep the wealthy even wealthier. Thus, we need that constant war.
Apparently no mention of "western values" in latest Bin Laden speech. The right will say we can't trust what he says, but if he thought he could mobilize his troops with such rhetoric, wouldn't he use it?
I fully agree that GWOT rhetoric, and policy formulation based upon GWOT assumptions, should be dumped into the ashcan of history alongside "better dead than Red." The big problem is that the mindset, practices, and related slogans continue to survive because they have domestic partisan utility.
Fear mongering works. Just ask Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Look at how fast 94 members of the United States Senate turned tail and ran for cover the moment the spectre of a jihadist Willie Horton let loose from super-max into their constituents' neighborhood was conjured up by the right wing spinmeisters.
Rather than trying to attack the "central fallacy" of the global war on terror as these authors define it ("that a fantastically complex world can be reduced to a single storyline"), isn't it perhaps a better tactic to openly acknlowedge that international terrorism is a genuine, real world threat?
What should be emphasized is that 9/11 was a criminal conspiracy to commit murder - not an act of war. We do not want to dignify a crime against humanity by calling jihad an act of military martyrdom. Cross that threshold, and suddenly it becomes inherently counter-productive to use hi tech military forces and/or torture to disrupt or deter non-state actor terrorist entities like al Qaeda that should be dealt with collectively by the international criminal justice system, rather than unilaterally by the Pentagon.
Bill from Saginaw
The authors of this piece believe that "U.S. defense policy is now geared almost exclusively to a counter-insurgency posture desired to prevent another 9/1." As Dubet at June 4 at 11:38 am correctly observes "just the facts, ma'am." Clarke and Zalman decide to conveniently skirt the events of 9/11 itself. If they had actually decided to look at the issue, they would have discovered strong evidence that there was more of a problem that day with domestic enemies than there were foreign.
The writers' main point is well taken however as the GWOT, first under Bush the younger and now Obama, is certainly a sham. Perhaps the most telling evidence for this assertion is probably the fact that, since both Obama and Bush have led many Americans to believe that the presence of the terrorists is supposed to be ubiquitous, one would have thought that they would have made their ire known against the neoconservatves and now the members of the Obama administration by assassinating at least some members of those groups. As far as I can determine no one in the mainstream media has reported the deaths of any prominent neoconservative which should have been rather easy to do in an open society like the United States. Yet the terrorists have failed to kill anyone such as a Bill O'Reilly or a Sean Hannity or an Ann Coulter or, for that matter, any Democrat or Republican who are all, for the most part, backing this bogus war on terrorism. But yet Obama, like Bush, would have us believe that, as with the communists in the 1940s and 1950s and even well into the Cold War, there is a terrorist lurking under every American bed in this country. And, as it happened in the fear crazed times of the Cold War, the corporate media and the average American have once again given in to the fear mongering and propaganda of those who control the reins of power in the United States.