Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  “The FBI told me that I’m a ‘casualty of war.’ What war?” Hassoun said. “I’m sitting here in my house, in peace, in my community. Why are you bringing garbage from outside to throw it in my yard? ‘Because we can.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  PATRIOTIC VENGEANCE FUELED the War on Terror. But the nightmare of the Iraqi civil war, combined with the jingoistic lies and denials that produced it, led to varieties of disillusionment. For the Security State, and the military in particular, failure was as unacceptable as it was inexplicable. For the right, it was explicable in terms of ungrateful Muslims who were unworthy of American sacrifice. Among liberals and leftists, it became a demand to be done with Iraq, one that the Democrats exploited to win control of Congress in 2006. But the Democratic agenda did not include withdrawal from Iraq, let alone abolition of the War on Terror.

  Instead elites, in and out of uniform, recast the overall War on Terror not as Bush’s theological crusade, but as a technocratic, salvageable struggle, guided by the hard-won rationality of its veterans and practitioners. The language of emergency persisted, and for the first time, it was acceptable to openly discuss failure—but the prospect of failure became an argument for rebooting the war through escalating it, not for abandoning its wreckage. Such technocratic attitudes were respectable among those who either loathed or regretted Bush, but they led to avoidance of a central contradiction. The longer the Forever War persisted, the more it fostered its nativist undercurrent, one that would never trust technocrats. However distrustful of the nativists the technocrats were, they would not accept that in a war fueled by outraged patriotism, their relationship to the nativists was symbiotic.

  Reconciling the Democratic Party with those of its voters who had rejected Iraq turned out to be easy. The party simply acted as if it had not embraced the war, a path rendered politically safe after Representative Jack Murtha, a white working-class Vietnam veteran, called for withdrawal. But withdrawal was too controversial for the party as a whole. Biden proposed a compromise that flattered American exceptionalism: a soft partition of Iraq along its ethnic and religious fractures. It ironically united warring Arab Iraqis in opposition to Washington’s latest imperialist fantasy.

  Another option appeared in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar. Working through Iraqi forces and the city’s political leadership, a cavalry regiment under the command of Colonel H. R. McMaster took the city from the insurgency and, through presence patrols, held it. It was a proof of concept for David Petraeus. Along with Jim Mattis, several like-minded officers with Iraq experience, and neoconservative think-tankers—all of whom had long believed a better war was possible—Petraeus contended that salvaging the situation depended on reversing the occupation’s indifference to Iraqis. Iraqis’ allegiances, to the U.S. or to the insurgents, would be decisive. That, they argued, required escalating the war, not scaling it back. Soldiers and marines would have to unite with Iraqi mentees to clear and hold territory, ostensibly on behalf of the besieged Iraqis, through everything from artillery strikes and patrols to diplomatic outreach to local leaders and simultaneous aid distribution. Bush, out of options and presented with an opportunity to reboot, appointed Petraeus his war commander. So began the “surge” of 2007–2008.

  The surge was a compromise between the right and the Security State, with elements to entice liberals, particularly those Democrats rich enough to view the war as an abstraction, discomfited with both the status quo and withdrawal. The counterinsurgents were a network of cerebral officers who believed themselves to have been marginalized by an ignorant military establishment. They had won esteem in liberal publications for their willingness to forthrightly state that the United States was losing the war. It helped that however bellicose they were, they were not bloodthirsty. Petraeus, a professorial soldier attracted to “the paradoxes of counterinsurgency,” advised that some of his forces’ best weapons “do not shoot,” tactical success “guarantees nothing,” and a “high level of violence often benefits insurgents.” In Baghdad he instructed his forces neither to torture captives nor to condone those who did. To the left, however, the surge offered nothing beyond a lifeline for a fundamentally immoral war. It empowered Iraqi police, often combatants in the civil war themselves, to crowd their jails with members of an opposing sect. “Just because they sympathize with a militia doesn’t mean they can’t do their job,” said the U.S.-backed commander of police in Baghdad’s Shiite neighborhood of Hurriyeh.

  There were several conceptual lacunae at the heart of the surge. Petraeus’s highly regarded counterinsurgency field manual did not substantively address the inflammatory relationship between foreign occupation and insurgency. It viewed local politics as the key to a sustainable outcome, but imposed unsustainable conditions by necessity. The contradictions were reconciled by, of all forces, al-Qaeda.

  Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s brutality proved the Americans weren’t the only ones capable of catastrophic miscalculation. Abu Wail, the religious leader of an Iraqi jihadist group that once had sheltered Zarqawi, explained to a British special operator, “You’re a force of occupation, and don’t try to tell me differently.” But while the United States was unwelcome, he continued, “we have come to the conclusion that you do not threaten our way of life, al-Qaeda does.” That created an opening for Petraeus, who paid former Sunni insurgents from Anbar tribes to form the Sons of Iraq, an anti-al-Qaeda militia. The so-called Anbar Awakening bought Petraeus time, and he bought it in turn for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Petraeus embraced. But Maliki, a sectarian Shia, considered the Sons a threat. Petraeus and the rest of the occupation forces decided that was a problem for another day.

  That pointed to the biggest lacuna of all: whether success in the surge meant that the United States could finally withdraw afterward, or whether it meant it would have to stay, at lower force levels, in perpetuity. A senior military official involved reflected that the counterinsurgents’ priority was to avert a disaster, which effectively meant remaining: “We weren’t ready to throw in the towel.” Perpetuity better suited American exceptionalism. When, in 2008, Maliki’s government and the Bush administration reached a deal to withdraw forces by 2011, their “understanding” was that a follow-on accord would defer the departure. “Korea was cited,” recalled Emma Sky, who advised Petraeus’s deputy, Odierno. The surge would not end the war, only secure a long-term American outpost in the Mideast, akin to the one on the Korean peninsula.

  A cult of Petraeus emerged. By the summer of 2007 Petraeus, whom journalists portrayed as supremely competent, produced data showing violence declining where before it had only accelerated. The fact that post-surge violence was still high—five hundred Iraqi civilians were being killed each month in the summer of 2008—was considered less important than the promise of Petraeus’s trend, particularly since U.S. troop deaths had also dropped markedly. Like Bush, Petraeus could be dismissive of contrary intelligence. He clashed with CIA officials whose August 2007 assessment of Iraq—that the surge would bring only a “modest” drop in violence, but that no political reconciliation would follow to make it durable—he considered too pessimistic. Still, Petraeus was careful to avoid the word “victory,” which he considered both overly simplistic and an overpromise that could come back to haunt him. To maintain political support Petraeus had to portray his strategy as advancing toward a goal that, asymptotically, it would never reach. It led him into absurdities, such as a quip to Congress that “at the end of the day, nothing succeeds like a little bit of significant progress.”

  Petraeus’s approach compelled him to display a public respect for Iraqis that sat uncomfortably with the right’s frequent contempt for them. He referred to the father of his chief Iraqi Shiite adversary as “the martyr Sadr.” His attitude conflicted with GOP legislators’ insistence that, as one put it, “we’re at war with Islamic jihadists,” but since Petraeus was saving the Iraq war—and perhaps their political fortunes—the
y were disinclined to press the point. The cultural contradictions of counterinsurgency were less glaring than the central political fact that Petraeus had, for the first time, made support for the war seem rigorous and opposition to it fanatical. But they would reemerge in the presidential election, as a wave of resurgent progressivism empowered a symbol of unlikely antiwar hope whom the right would consider an abomination.

  * * *

  —

  BY VIRTUE OF HIS BACKGROUND, Barack Obama had greater potential than any rival American politician to see the War on Terror through the eyes of those it terrorized. He had spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, where he became familiar with the exploitation of foreign and Islamic cultures by imperial powers. Through his father, a Kenyan economist, Obama could trace his lineage to a part of east Africa that became a U.S. battlefield when Bush backed a 2006 Ethiopian invasion to oust Somalia’s jihadist Islamic Courts Union. As a professor of constitutional law and as a Black man in America, Obama had the legal scholarship and the personal experience to understand how 9/11 had inflamed white supremacy and how that anger would manifest. But also by virtue of who he was—prone to interpretive nuance, allergic to ideology, liberal—Obama was disinclined to take an abolitionist approach to the War on Terror.

  The Iraq war was an insult to the public’s intelligence, “a dumb war,” Obama famously said as an Illinois state senator at an October 2002 antiwar rally. But being Obama, he challenged the rally’s premise, contrasting dumb wars he couldn’t support with necessary wars he accepted—conflicts waged “in the name of a larger freedom,” like the Civil War and the Second World War. Into that category Obama placed the War on Terror. Beholding the horror of 9/11, he said, “I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance,” providing a clue to how he understood the ever-undefined enemy. He viewed Iraq, “a war based not on reason but on passion,” as a distraction from the imperative of fighting terrorism. Attendees of an antiwar demonstration witnessed the unlikely spectacle of a politician demanding Bush “finish the fight with bin Laden and al-Qaeda,” through “effective, coordinated intelligence” and a “homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.” Whatever his background, and whatever the presumptions white Americans held about it, Obama viewed the War on Terror in a manner that the right would deny he ever truly could: within the American exceptionalist consensus.

  Asked years later why Obama didn’t also consider the War on Terror to be a dumb war, his close adviser Ben Rhodes answered, “Because he thought a legitimate threat from al-Qaeda [had emerged], requiring a military response.”

  Torture repulsed Obama more than any other aspect of the war. He told Condoleezza Rice that the reason she resisted “defin[ing] torture too much” was so the Bush administration could have “a little bit of wiggle room” to brutalize people while claiming that they hadn’t. On another occasion he warned that “a system in which we’re tolerating torture or abuse or depriving anybody that we have detained [of] some basic rights” could come around on captured U.S. service members. By contrast, Hillary Clinton, in October 2006, said she could support a “very, very narrow exception” for torture under the law “within very, very limited circumstances.” Obama voted against the 2006 law creating military tribunals for accused terrorists, citing “the innocent people we may have accidentally rounded up and mistaken for terrorists, people who may stay in prison for the rest of their lives.”

  He was otherwise flexible. When the Times revealed parts of STELLARWIND, Obama advocated not the end of dragnet surveillance but instead increased oversight through “some mechanism, the court, the Senate Intelligence Committee, that, in a secret way, is making sure the executive branch is not going off on tangents.” During a November 2006 speech in Chicago, one of his first on foreign policy, Obama backed a “phased redeployment” out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, a war “backsliding into chaos.” Swapping one war for the other was by now Democratic catechism, the result of politicians signaling that their opposition to Iraq was no omnibus reconsideration of U.S. bellicosity. Another of Obama’s 2006 foreign policy speeches offered the mildest of rebukes to American exceptionalism: America needed to be “more modest” about its ability to impose “democracy” through military force.

  Not only was Obama among the most popular politicians in America, he was so untainted by any association with the Iraq war that he could channel some of the anger progressives had at Democrats who backed it. In September 2007, as Obama challenged Clinton for her presumed Democratic presidential nomination, Petraeus arrived in Washington for dramatic marathon congressional testimony. Months before, Senate Democrats, Clinton and Obama among them, had come just short of passing a motion disapproving the surge; Lieberman helped Republicans thwart it. As Petraeus prepared an onslaught of statistics to portray the war effort as having turned around, the antiwar activist group MoveOn asked if he would “Betray Us” by injecting hope into a hopeless enterprise. Democrats lined up to dissociate themselves from an attack on a respected general. Petraeus was happy to frame the debate around the integrity of this or that statistic, since it made him look cerebral and his questioners petty.

  Clinton, whose advisers were close to Petraeus, struggled to find a rationale beyond political necessity to oppose the surge, and so she treated Petraeus harshly. “A willing suspension of disbelief” was necessary to accept Petraeus’s account of the war, she charged. It was a more refined version of MoveOn’s point, and it stung Petraeus. His army mentor and an occasional Clinton adviser, Jack Keane, later said Clinton told him the following summer that the surge had worked. Obama was comparatively solicitous. The issue for him was that Iraq “continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake,” compounded with the absurdity that the “modest improvement” that Petraeus and his colleague Ambassador Ryan Crocker had made “is considered success.” Obama clarified that his objection wasn’t with “either of you gentlemen” but pointed instead to the reliance of the entire enterprise on a nonsectarian Iraqi government that simply did not exist. While Petraeus wouldn’t gain Clinton’s support because of expedience, for Obama it was never an option. But Obama’s depersonalization of the issue made his differences with the general respectful, permitting each to find areas where their agendas might converge.

  While Clinton campaigned on beginning a withdrawal within the first sixty days of her presidency, Obama proposed completing a withdrawal within sixteen months of his. “We will not have a permanent occupation and we will not have permanent bases,” he vowed, rejecting the notion of a residual force that most politicians’ withdrawal plans presumed. Then, reiterating a phrase he had tested in an earlier debate, Obama said he would not stop at ending the Iraq war, but at “end[ing] the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

  It was an electric line—“We’re having such a good time,” Clinton groused—as it captured the bitter fact that the war continued with the complicity of liberals, who were supposed to know better, who did know better. His campaign harnessed an unapologetic antiwar boldness beyond what any other national Democrat, for six long years, had been willing to adopt. It made Obama seem like a decisive break from the past. But, in an ill omen, he did not define what his hated mindset was. His advisers provided an answer: the politics of fear. “For a long time we’ve not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive,” a senior member of his brain trust explained.

  Years later, in his memoir A Promised Land, Obama mused on promising “a different kind of foreign policy than the sort we’d been practicing since 9/11,” that being one he attributed to “a certain mindset.” That mindset “saw threats around every corner, took a perverse pride in acting unilaterally, and considered military action as an almost routine means of addressing fore
ign policy challenges.” Obama correctly diagnosed the unapologetic hysteria at the heart of post-9/11 America. But it was conspicuous that he defined the sort of foreign policy he wanted to change in terms of its habits, rather than its machinery, its authorities, or its material impact on human beings.

  Obama was forthright that, in some form, the Forever War would continue. He spoke about escalating the Afghanistan war and pursuing bin Laden even to the point of unilaterally invading Pakistan. The idea of a war against a religion or a foreign culture appalled him. He spoke more specifically of al-Qaeda’s broad network as the appropriate target, a disputable contention, but a significant shift away from Bush’s metaphysical and ideological definitions. All that indicated that Obama saw the Forever War as somehow separable from the politics of fear that underlay it and that it in turn reinforced.

  Aspects of Obama’s coalescing war plans implied a large commitment. His campaign advisers spoke generically about “extremism” as a force they wished to confront by centering “dignity” in foreign policy. Not only would their “dignity promotion” alleviate poverty and respect foreigners’ identities, particularly Islamic ones, it would deny bin Laden a receptive audience, perhaps even regaining the United States some Muslim allies the Forever War cost it. The Obama team sounded reminiscent of the Petraeus team, and they had a member in common. “He took many of the [counterinsurgency] principles—the paradoxes, like how sometimes you’re less secure the more force is used—and looked at it from a more strategic perspective,” observed Sarah Sewall, a Harvard human rights expert whom Petraeus and Mattis consulted for the counterinsurgency field manual. “His policies deal with root causes but do not misconstrue root causes as a simple fix. He recognizes that you need to pursue a parallel anti-terrorism [course] in its traditional form along with this transformed approach to foreign policy.” The counterinsurgents’ Washington think tank, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), had figured it would be Clinton’s defense team in exile, as it backed only a cautious drawdown in Iraq, but it came to reconcile with Obama.