The war on America by America
Following Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans united behind President Bush’s“War on Terror,’’ boosting his approval rating past 90%. Michael Morrell, who would serve as acting director of the CIA, considered it “the greatwarofourtime.”
In “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” journalist Spencer Ackerman provides an indepth examination of the national security policy of the United States in the 20 years since 9/11. George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Ackerman argues, turned “The War on Terror” into a “Forever War,” which, “if left alone, will produce neitherpeace nor victory.”
Unapologetically partisan and polemical, “Reign of Terror” is Ackerman’s take-noprisoners attack on policies of the “Security State” that have eroded democracy and human rights at home and abroad. “How like America it is,” he asserts, “not to recognize that the true threat was counterterrorism, not terrorism.” And once the U.S. governmentwas willing to cage a child in Guantanamo, “it was willing to do anything to anyone, in a boundaryless war.” Trump, he writes, gratuitously, is “an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers – Outer Borough White Racist, Wealth Vampire, DignityFree Media Striver and Landlord.”
That said, Ackerman provides detailed documentation of his claim that the legacy of the War on Terror isn’t limited to disastrous foreign military deployments; it has built an “entrenched architecture” of surveillance, secrecy, detention, deportation, torture, nativism, and immigration suppression.The NSA, Ackerman reminds us, collects in bulk Americans’ international communications, from phone records to email, as well as domestic calls. And, as former NSA Director Michael Hayden put it, “We kill people based on metadata.” The CIA lied to Congress about the scale, scope and efficacy of its torture program. The agency controlled the narrative of secret drone strikes, including the identification of targets and “collateral deaths.” And deportations, which escalated substantially under Obama, included individuals who overstayed visas, were arrested for minor offenses, and splitfamilies apart.
Indeed, although Ackerman is sharply critical of Bush and Trump, he maintains that liberal Democrats, including Obama, did not challenge and often enabled the War on Terror. As a candidate and as president, he acknowledges, Obama “correctly diagnosed the unapologetic hysteria at the heart of post-9/11 America.” But he viewed the Forever War as “inseparable from the politics of fear that underlay it and that in turn reinforced” and left intact “its machinery, its authorities, and its material impact on human beings.” Obama and his liberal colleagues called “the War on Terror something else, reconciled themselves to a diminished ‘sustainable’ version, and postured as if that was as goodas ending the war.”
“Reign of Terror” also lays out the ways in which the War on Terror amplified Islamophobia, xenophobia and white supremacy. Although America experienced very few incidents of domestic “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” Ackerman points out that Sarah Palin “sparked,” and Trump “stoked” the lie that Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim and reframed the permanent national security emergency as a struggle to preserve the “Real America.” Twelve state legislatures passed “anti-sharia” laws during Obama’s presidency. White nativists insisted that Muslims were entering the United States through the southern border, an absurd claim, according to Ackerman, that revealed their appetite “for a narrative of besiegement, abandonment and betrayal.” An appetite that was fed by the protests of Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists following the death of George Floyd. “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists,” asked U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., “can we hunt them down like we do thosein the Middle East?”
Ackerman clearly agrees with U. S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that “there is a straight line from the decision to reorient U.S. national security strategy to place migrant children in cages on our southern border.”
The War on Terror, Ackerman concludes, made it possible for many Americans to believe that a “white man with a flag and a gun,” who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, intent on making his country great again, “was not a terrorist … he was a counterterrorist.” Until it is understood as a reign of terror and abolished, he warns, The War on Terror “will propel itself toward greater domestic destabilization.”