Tracing course from 9/11 to the Trump presidency
Spencer Ackerman’s barnburner of a new book, “Reign of Terror,” reminded me of that moment in 2015 (remember then?) when Donald Trump descended his golden escalator to announce his long-shot candidacy for the highest office. Instead of starting with the usual heartwarming clichés about the country’s better angels, Trump came out swinging, declaring that the United States was in trouble: “When was the last time the U.S. won at anything?”
It certainly hadn’t been winning any of the wars it had been fighting for more than a decade. Ackerman contends that the American response to 9/11 made President Trump possible. The evidence for this blunt-force thesis is presented in “Reign of Terror” with an impressive combination of diligence and verve, deploying Ackerman’s deep stores of knowledge as a national security journalist to full effect. The result is a narrative of the last 20 years that is upsetting, discerning and brilliantly argued.
Ackerman, who has been a correspondent for outlets like Wired and
The Guardian, shows how Trump clearly understood something about the post9/11 era that the professional political class did not. Waging endless war yielded nothing so definitive as peace or victory, and instead simply fueled a “grotesque subtext” to which Trump proved to be remarkably attuned. He may have changed his positions on this or that conflict willy-nilly, but Trump, Ackerman writes, never wavered on one key point: “the perception of
nonwhites as marauders, even as conquerors, from hostile foreign civilizations.”
“Reign of Terror” begins with a prologue titled “The Worst Terrorist Attack in American History” — a phrase that for years had referred not to the
9/11 attacks but to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In the immediate aftermath, Muslims were blamed. Newspaper columnists started railing against foreigners and immigrants. The actual culprit, Timothy McVeigh, had been an avowed white supremacist, though you wouldn’t have necessarily known it from the media reports at the time, which kept emphasizing McVeigh’s “survivalism.”
McVeigh was sentenced to death after being tried in an open court before a jury of his peers. Ackerman invites us to contrast this respect for due process with how the entire machinery of the government transformed itself in response to the 9/11 attacks, with deadly wars, proliferating immigration restrictions and an elaborate apparatus dedicated to mass surveillance.“Reign of Terror” makes clear that what happened on Sept.
11, 2001, can only be called an atrocity. But Ackerman also suggests that instead of defining the enemy as the specific terrorist network responsible for the attacks, the George W. Bush administration resorted to “deliberate indecision.” White House lawyers pressed for maximum executive power, while Bush would insist that Muslims weren’t the enemy in one moment and then describe the war on terror as a “crusade” the next.
Ackerman guides us through the next two decades, showing how any prospect of national unity in response to 9/11 buckled under the incoherence of the wars that followed, which he says were “conceptually doomed” from the start. Their endlessness was a source of profound instability, as one conflict begat another. Ackerman shows how euphemisms became so far removed from the reality they tried to obscure that they were rhetorically useless — “targeted war” (i.e., war), “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture), “targeted killing” (i.e., drone strikes), “long-term nonreligious fasting” (i.e., hunger strikes).
Under Trump, there were even more drone strikes and less transparency. According to one study, Trump’s accelerated bombing campaign in Afghanistan increased civilian casualties by 330%.
Not to mention that the animus and cruelty that had been stoked for a decade and a half could be easily turned on immigrants closer to home. Trump, Ackerman writes, “had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: The terrorists were whomever you said they were.”