Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  As a constituency grew on the right that considered Islam synonymous with terrorism, its members came to consider themselves political martyrs of the War on Terror, suffering the censorship of a necessary truth by the nation’s internal enemies. After CBS Radio rejected an ad promoting a 2005 anti-Islam conference, one of its speakers announced that he would reveal what the network was afraid of airing. “I will show how jihad violence—in the words of terrorists themselves, including Osama bin Laden—gains its impetus from core elements of Islamic theology mandating against unbelievers and call upon sincere moderate Muslims to confront and repudiate these elements of Islam,” vowed an activist named Robert Spencer, who would become influential in the precincts of the right that were contemptuous of Bush’s conception of Islam as a “religion of peace.” They would create an activist infrastructure of Islamophobia, which doubled as a lucrative industry in enterprises as diversified as media and law-enforcement contracting. If Muslims objected to such things as mass roundups, this infrastructure considered it proof that American Islam had something to hide.

  Victory required suppressing not only Islam but the liberalism that kept the borders “open,” the courts available to terror suspects, and the culture from equating Islam with terrorism within respectable discourse. Triumph over the left or liberals—two different political traditions that the right often conflated—took on the imperative of national survival, a posture familiar from the right’s approach to the Cold War. While the Security State was the instrument of the War on Terror, it could also become an obstacle to the war’s interests; and even it, too, could be brought to heel. The right would also need to police itself for insufficient commitment to the war or any misconception of the enemy. After all, defeat, as Ashcroft warned, threatened civilization.

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  CONSERVATIVES EMERGED from the Cold War triumphant. Sometimes the story they told had the Soviet Union collapsing from the inherent weaknesses of communism, particularly measured against the dynamism of capitalism and the allure of bourgeois freedoms. At other times the United States attributed it to the wisdom and strength of generations of conservative theorists, activists, academics, polemicists, and politicians who confronted the Soviets. Either way, the most important geopolitical fact of the late twentieth century was that the United States had vanquished its rival. Conservative scholars in the West portrayed that victory as the final vindication of the social, economic, and political order they favored.

  They believed as fervently that they had achieved that victory despite the liberals. Now identified with the Democratic Party, liberals had opted for containment instead of rollback during the Truman administration, minimized the threat of domestic Communist infiltration and socialist indoctrination, and stumbled into two stalemated wars. Then the liberals capitulated to the even more shameful radicals further to their left by turning against Vietnam and subsequent proxy conflicts. Lacking convictions of their own, liberals—particularly the richer they were—preferred to laugh at ignorant, bigoted right-wingers too obtuse to know that their patriotism was embarrassing. Yet it was the man at whom they sneered the most, sometimes as a buffoon and at other times as a madman, who won the Cold War. Now, in the place of Ronald Reagan, there was George W. Bush.

  Bush was the overindulged grandson of a senator and son of a president. Yankee money that had relocated to Texas for personal and political fortunes yielded a frivolous, loutish man-child who drank to the point of embarrassment until he was forty. In 1968, when his father was Houston’s congressman, Bush secured a comission in the Texas Air National Guard, sparing him from Vietnam. He went on to become a relative failure in the oil business. But in 1986 the Reverend Billy Graham paid a visit to the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, that awakened Bush spiritually. It awakened his political ambitions as well. Bush channeled them into a Christian-inflected conservative politics more natural to Reagan than to his father. Once he convinced evangelicals he was one of them, he provided them a viable pathway to the White House and received their enthusiastic support.

  Bush seemed, not least to himself, an example of the rewards of faith. Aides and deputies frequently ascribed to him absolute certainty, to the point of indifference to evidence and distrust of those who sought it. His first treasury secretary wrote in a memoir that Bush would simply stop paying attention during policy discussions. EPA chief Whitman recalled that she would be “accused of disloyalty” by asking if there were “any facts to support our case,” before retracting her comments. Bush’s instincts had gotten him the presidency—through a bitter legal victory secured by five GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices—and they would get him through it. His spokesman, Ari Fleischer, demonstrated Bush’s approach to those who undermined certainty in the War on Terror within weeks of the attacks. The provocateur comedian Bill Maher had said the hijackers, whatever else they were, weren’t cowards. Asked about it at a White House briefing, Fleischer said Maher’s “terrible” comments were a reminder “to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.”

  To a broader national audience Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” defined itself against Buchanan’s culture war. Buchanan’s distaste for post–Cold War foreign adventurism—having won that conflict, his war was now at home—likewise clashed with how Republican leaders, including Bush, understood American global responsibilities. One such conception “endeavor[ed] to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” So stated a draft strategy document written in 1992 for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney by his undersecretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Their alliance helped define national security conservatism. The neoconservative wing, to which Wolfowitz belonged, furnished the rationale for American global power that people like Cheney, from the Nixonite wing, sought to wield. Cheney believed that the United States had to treat even the least likely “one-percent chance” scenarios of terrorist danger as certainties, reported journalist Ron Suskind, a conviction that opened the aperture of military response. At National Review, the magazine operating as the center of conservative intellectual gravity, board member Neal B. Freeman recalled that the consensus was to respond to 9/11 “with disproportionate force and to disproportionate effect.” Any objection to invading and occupying Afghanistan was “no more than quiddity.”

  The split between neoconservatives and nativists represented competing conceptions of American exceptionalism. Both were inclined to civilizational explanations for 9/11. Neoconservativism held that the attacks revealed the cultural and political pathologies afflicting Arab and Muslim societies. Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, a guiding light to neoconservatives, blamed 9/11 on what he called the Arab world’s “failure of modernity.” The neoconservatives treated the legacy of Western imperialism and contemporary American hegemony as tiresome alibis deflecting from what they insisted was the core issue: Islam’s failure to be civilized. The true interests of Muslims, they continued, aligned with those of the United States. Essayist Max Boot wrote that the “state-building” functions that would be the result of long-term U.S. occupation of Muslim lands was “a service that we should extend to the oppressed people of Afghanistan.”

  Nativists viewed the War on Terror less in terms of America transforming the world than in terms of stopping the world from transforming America. In 2002 Buchanan’s new flagship, The American Conservative, published an article warning that “the deconstruction of America is well underway.” That was how its author, Roger McGrath, judged the arrival of Somali Muslim refugees in Lewiston, Maine. While America “send[s] our boys overseas to fight and die, ostensibly to protect the United States,” its elites flooded America with foreigners. “We are under no obligation to destroy the ethnic, religious, and cultural traditions that have built this country,” he wrote. A line of respectability separated Boot and Lewis from McGrath and pundits like Ann Coulter, who wrote that the War on Ter
ror required the United States to “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” National Review fired Coulter for that piece, while Lewis published his musings about Islamic pathology in The New Yorker.

  Meanwhile, millions of evangelical Christians were imbibing a message from their religious leaders that Islam had launched something like a counter-crusade. The leaders of the most politically potent religious organizations in America, people with enormous influence in the Republican Party, filled the definitional vacuum at the heart of Bush’s War on Terror.

  When the Southern Baptist Convention met in St. Louis in June 2002, its former president, the hugely influential Jacksonville preacher Jerry Vines, cited a book published that year that the Hofstra sociologist Richard Cimino placed among the most popular in a new evangelical literature blaming Islam for 9/11. In Unveiling Islam, two self-described “ex-Muslims,” Ergun and Emir Caner, argued that an “essential and indispensable tenet” of the religion was violence. Al-Qaeda was “following the teachings of Islam to the letter.” For good measure, the Caners denied Islam its status as an Abrahamic faith by attributing paganism to the prophet Muhammad. As if to anticipate the inevitable objections, they claimed the godless culture of America would reject these truths, as Christians had by now long expected. But “essential to an effective witness” was defending the truth of Christianity against the falsity of Islam, even though it was “neither popular nor welcome [in a] politically correct, politically charged, postmodern culture.” At the convention in St. Louis, Vines denounced Muhammad as a “demon-obsessed pedophile.” Islam was something distinct from and inferior to Christianity, Vines preached: “And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah, either. Jehovah’s not going to turn you into a terrorist.”

  Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, also denied Islam’s place in the Abrahamic family, saying, “It is a different God, and I believe a very evil and a very wicked religion.” Focus on the Family’s founder, James Dobson, warned that Islam’s sharia codes stood in opposition to the “Judeo-Christian” bequest of freedom. “If the Islamic law were the law of this land,” the influential Dobson explained, “there would not be that freedom. And if you don’t believe that, look at the countries where Islamic law rules.” Reverend Jerry Falwell told 60 Minutes in 2002 that the prophet Muhammad “was a terrorist,” a slur that would become ubiquitous in anti-Islam circles. Falwell’s influence ensured that his remarks had international consequences: a protest against his disrespect in India escalated into a riot that killed eight people and wounded ninety. CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper defended Falwell’s right to “be a bigot” while noting, “What really concerns us is the lack of reaction by mainstream religious and political leaders, who say nothing when these bigots voice these attacks.”

  It did not escape evangelical attention that a significant number of Taliban prisoners had been Christian missionaries. That fed the anxiety that globally, as Christianity Today put it, the Gospels might be “outpaced by Islam.” A February 2002 editorial argued that security “in our post–September 11 world” necessitated “respectful and courageous” attempts at converting Muslims. While wide majorities of evangelical leaders in 2003 told BeliefNet pollers that protecting American Muslims’ civil rights was very important, 70 percent also called Islam a “religion of violence.” There was a tendency to consider criticism of such views to be religious persecution, as when it emerged that Rumsfeld’s deputy undersecretary for intelligence, Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, said of a Muslim opponent, “I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” Boykin was never in danger of losing his position, but a Christianity Today headline defending him preemptively asked: “Should Christians Be Banned from the Military?”

  Millions of Americans took their political cues from Bush and their spiritual ones from Vines, Falwell, Graham, and their anti-Islam colleagues. The discrepancy between their public messages led to a sense that Bush was hesitant to acknowledge a shared truth. A different president might not have been able to get away with such vagueness, but evangelicals trusted Bush. His language about “the terrorists” might have been euphemistic, but it included a critical word evangelicals needed to hear: “evil.” It touched off a national debate on the importance of “moral clarity,” itself a euphemism for asserting the blamelessness of America in any number of foreign policy atrocities. Bush ensured the War on Terror was framed in moral terms that appealed to religious conservatives, even while an undercurrent of conservatism chafed at Bush’s language and longed for him to define the enemy in terms of religion.

  Layered atop that was a secular conservative and centrist tendency to define Islam as a danger to cosmopolitanism. The Taliban’s violent misogyny served as an argument that Islam threatened women, which in turn became a cudgel to demand that feminists support the war or expose their hypocrisy. Overthrowing the Taliban, observed the neoconservative Weekly Standard, meant Bush would have “secured the feminists’ most worthy goal of the last several years.” The article luridly suggested that female genital mutilation might be the wages of Muslim immigration. Christopher Hitchens, a contrarian socialist polemicist, used the anti-cosmopolitanism of “fascism with an Islamic face” to break with the left. “What they abominate about ‘the West,’ to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state,” Hitchens wrote shortly after 9/11. The ideological defection of the insouciant Hitchens gave the War on Terror important validation: left-wing condemnation of dissent as indecent.

  Some heard these messages about Muslims and took matters into their own hands. Just before midnight on February 22, 2003, two eighteen-year-old brothers from Yorba Linda, California, Rashid and Mohamed Alam, drove to San Antonio Park to rendezvous with friends for a late-night movie. By the time they assembled, so did a convoy bearing twenty drunk white teenagers armed with baseball bats, screwdrivers, golf clubs, and beer bottles. At least one had a swastika tattoo. The Alams’ crew—Arab, Black, Filipino, and white—fled. Sixteen-year-old Michael Tineo saw the mob tackle Rashid and then form a circle around him to beat and stomp him for two minutes, yelling what the Orange County Register recorded as “slurs against Arabs” and, Michael remembered, “Nazi for Life.” Police found Rashid lying in the street, barely conscious, in a pool of his blood. Doctors repaired his jaw using a metal plate. The Orange County Muslim community took alarmed note that police did not announce arrests or a hate-crime investigation for nine days, during which activists requested FBI involvement. Rashid’s father, Ahmed, lamented not taking his sons’ accounts of schoolyard racism seriously. “When I see him now, I think it is my fault,” Ahmed anguished. “I should have named him Robert or John.”

  The Orange County chapter of CAIR stated that Rashid Alam’s near-fatal beating was the “direct result of the barrage of pro-war and anti-Islam rhetoric coming from right-wing and evangelical leaders.” These charges incensed the evangelical magazine World’s Bob Jones, who demanded that CAIR “explain the ‘direct’ link between evangelical leaders and a bunch of foul-mouthed teenagers.” In any event, Jones continued, in the War on Terror, CAIR “sometimes seems to have trouble deciding exactly which side it is on.” Jones lamented that evangelicals could “well understand the resentment Muslims feel when they are stereotyped as dangerous and anti-American,” but through its censorious ways, CAIR “chose to drive home a verbal wedge.”

  Evangelicals found uses for Bush’s vague conception of the enemy. In October 2002, rallying in Washington to support Israel’s violent suppression of the second Palestinian intifada, they portrayed Israel’s fight as indistinguishable from America’s. “We are in a war on terrorism,” said Gary Bauer, the conservative Christian activist. “We are trying to limit and lessen the number of terrorist nations. So under no circumstances should we create a new terrorist nati
on of Palestine.” Texas congressman Tom DeLay, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, bluntly asked the crowd if it wanted “Israel to look more like the Middle East, or do we want the rest of the Middle East to start looking more like Israel?” Seeking to cement its ties to an American community that enjoyed overwhelming political influence, Israel was happy to portray itself as the tip of the spear in the War on Terror. For decades GOP politicians had marveled at Israel’s ability to subjugate Muslims, often using euphemisms like DeLay’s. It didn’t matter that Bush had declared war on terrorist groups with global reach, which even the most aggressive Palestinian resistance was not. The Reverend Richard Cizik, a vice president of the forty-three-thousand-church-member National Association of Evangelicals, observed, “Evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire.’’

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  LATE IN JULY 2002, the State Department’s Mideast bureau warned Secretary of State Colin Powell that the United States would sow a “perfect storm” by overthrowing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. What became known as the “Perfect Storm memo” predicted a “horrible wave of bloodletting and private vengeance”; hostility to the U.S.-backed Iraqi government from the Shia clerisy in Najaf; and “U.S. troops com[ing] under attack, especially while patrolling at night, in Shia cities of the south, Baghdad, and the north central towns where Sunnis dominate.” Assistant Secretary Bill Burns emphasized that an occupation could last as long as a decade.