Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  As unsubtle as Kelly was about his opposition to closing Guantanamo, Obama had put himself in a position in which he would pay a high price for firing the general. Opposing Kelly wasn’t worth it to Obama. He could truthfully argue that the episode made it even more urgent that he repatriate most of the 166 detainees present during the strike. But he conceded that emptying Guantanamo would mean circumnavigating Kelly, and that ensured that Obama would leave office with 41 people still in Guantanamo. The right had triumphed in a battle it hadn’t prioritized before Obama’s election. While Kelly might have been more caustic than most Security Staters, he kept Obama in check on Guantanamo, which suited their purposes.

  The fight over Guantanamo Bay revealed a certain exhaustion with the War on Terror. Inertia played a bigger role in keeping Guantanamo open than passion did. The right was fighting against Obama more than it was fighting for Guantanamo. Whatever partial victory Obama might claim, he had to grind it out, and it would be nothing satisfactory to anyone concerned with justice. The exhaustion extended beyond Guantanamo, too. In 2015 a respected consortium of pro-peace physicians, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), translated into English a War on Terror “body count” from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Its findings were staggering, far higher than competing epidemiological studies. The wars, “directly or indirectly,” had led to the deaths of 1 million Iraqis, 220,000 Afghans, and 80,000 Pakistanis in the first twelve years after 9/11. IPPNW explained that lower estimates had been the result of poor available data and political timidity in establishing casualty models. Its goal in presenting these figures was not merely accuracy but to force accountability. Yet American media largely ignored IPPNW’s conclusions. By 2015 the various difficulties in determining death tolls—from a lack of official data to political controversies over calculating it—had functionally obliterated the truth about the lethality of the U.S. wars. Accepting any of the various estimates, like accepting definitions of the enemy, was effectively a political act.

  Exhaustion also had the perverse effect of substituting an attribution of collective guilt for a pursuit of war. That showed itself in Boston. In April 2013, during the Boston Marathon, the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, children of a Chechen-Kyrgyz asylee, detonated two bombs they rigged from pressure cookers. Three people were killed and 264 were injured in a long-predicted terror attack at a civic sporting event. Obama praised Boston’s resilience—symbolized by the Red Sox’s David Ortiz’s “this is our fuckin’ city” speech—in his National Defense University speech, as a path to argue that the U.S. didn’t need to respond with further repressive measures. James Clapper, at an intelligence sector breakfast in northern Virginia, expressed irritation with the suggestion that Boston was an intelligence failure. Anyone who expected the intelligence agencies to have anticipated and found two young immigrant men before they committed such an atrocity was really calling for a more intrusive Security State, Clapper said, weeks before Snowden proved how intrusive that Security State truly was.

  Since the Tsarnaevs acted on their own, any politician inclined to treat Boston as another 9/11 didn’t have a country or an organization to bomb or invade in retaliation. But once Obama and the Security State aligned on a subdued reaction to Boston, the right interpreted it as another surrender. They found unlikely allies in Russia, which had notified the FBI before the bombings that the Tsarnaevs were potentially dangerous. A congressional fact-finding delegation to Moscow (bizarrely featuring the actor Steven Seagal) resulted in a statement of purpose from its right-wing members. “If Americans and Russia can conquer space together, we can defeat radical Islam together,” said Representative Steve King of Iowa. Robert Spencer blamed the “see-no-jihad, hear-no-jihad FBI” for purging the Islamophobic training material. In Washington, Lindsey Graham and others reminded Clapper and the Security State that “we’re at war with radical Islamists and we need to up our game.” But now the Ground Zero Mosque generation was in Congress, and it made Graham look timid.

  A Kansan Tea Partier, West Pointer, and businessman animated by a political Christianity, Mike Pompeo had been a reliable demagogue throughout his brief congressional career. He had made the Benghazi crusade his own. Returning from a trip to Guantanamo during the hunger strike, Pompeo quipped, “They look to me like a lot of them have put on weight.” But in June, responding to the marathon attack, Pompeo took to the House floor for a career-defining speech.

  He accused “Islamic leaders across America” not only of silence after the Tsarnaevs’ attack but of being, through their silence, “potentially complicit in these acts, and, more importantly still, in those that may well follow.” It was beside the point that Islamic leaders across America had condemned the bombings. The head of the California chapter of the maligned CAIR had said that anyone “who claims an Islamic basis for such a heinous crime is no more faithful to the teachings of Islam than a KKK member who claims a biblical basis in committing bigoted crimes.” Pompeo’s point was to dictate what those Islamic leaders “must say.” And by 2013 it was par for the course on the right to view Obama as a step removed from terror itself. “Is the Boston killer eligible for Obama Care to bring him back to health?” tweeted Donald Trump.

  That was too uncouth for a Security State that wanted to avoid involvement in a culture war it knew was a destabilizing force. Even as the GOP moved further in that direction, the Security State looked instead to the reliability of its Republican allies in positions of power, like Mike Rogers at the House Intelligence Committee, who laced into Snowden. Richard Burr, Rogers’s counterpart in the Senate, was another bulwark. Once the 2014 election gave the Republicans Senate control, Burr, now the Intelligence Committee chair, ensured the suppression of Feinstein’s CIA torture report. Feinstein had sent the unseen classified version of the full report to the security agencies as a measure to prevent them from ever again embracing torture. Burr demanded the copies back, ensuring no one could ever obtain and release the report through the Freedom of Information Act, from which Congress is exempt. Obama rejected Burr’s request, but the agencies refused to even take the torture report out of its packaging. The Justice Department used Burr’s request to thwart FOIA lawsuits for the report. Burr was not merely undermining his colleagues; he was assuring Brennan and the CIA that they no longer had to worry about their overseers imposing an end to impunity.

  There was another obstacle to the Security State’s quest for stability. Much as Obama rewarded Kelly with SOUTHCOM, in 2012, he made one of McChrystal’s and Petraeus’s key deputies head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a military intelligence backwater. Mike Flynn had transformed the Joint Special Operations Command into an intelligence heavyweight and wanted to do the same for the DIA. Yet his erratic personality and questionable hold on reality—his staff used to label his misstatements “Flynn facts”—alarmed his subordinates and his superiors. Improbably, he traveled to Moscow. The same month King’s delegation visited to learn about the Tsarnaevs, the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence giant, gave Flynn an unprecedented welcome to its headquarters. It was a “great trip” to talk “a lot about the way the world’s unfolding,” Flynn would remember.

  Flynn was ousted by April 2014, but there would be no stability dividend for the Security State. A catastrophe was on the horizon, one that ought to have demonstrated conclusively the futility of the war and the danger of waging it.

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  THE SECURITY STATE WAS NOT alone in longing for stability in the War on Terror. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi had once been in the elite tier of theologians who justified violence. He had called the Saudi royal family un-Islamic when bin Laden was still pledging them his service. For his part, bin Laden thought Maqdisi went too far. Maqdisi was al-Qaeda through and through, but had mentored Zarqawi in a Jordanian prison. For three decades, Maqdisi had been a legend in jihadist circles. Then, suddenly, he became a relic.

  Like the
rest of al-Qaeda, Maqdisi set his own obsolescence into motion. His legacy was Zarqawi, creator of the most nihilistic, most relevant, and least controllable al-Qaeda franchise. Al-Qaeda in Iraq rebranded as an even more extreme outfit but found its real opportunity for rebirth once it entered the Syrian jihad under its third commander, the hardened fighter Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Baghdadi had been a prisoner of the U.S. occupation. Camp Bucca’s commanding officer recalled that Baghdadi had told him, “I’ll see you guys in New York.” For chief theologian, Baghdadi chose another Maqdisi protege, Turki al-Binali. These religious extremists were more hard-line than orthodox. The Iraqis who joined them were often former Baathists, religious novices mostly interested in sanctification for their revenge fantasies. Their theology was heavy on declaring other Muslims to be un-Islamic and therefore permissible to kill or dominate.

  Baghdadi’s growing army, a confederation of factions, provided al-Qaeda with most of its strength in Syria. But he bristled at the Pakistan-based command’s persistent disrespect. In 2013, after Zawahiri ruled against him in a power struggle, Baghdadi did the unthinkable: he not only split from al-Qaeda but his forces fought it, eventually ousting al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front from five hundred crucial miles of border crossing into Turkey. Then, in a historic turn, Baghdadi marched his estimated six to ten thousand soldiers back into his native Iraq. As his army entered Mosul in June 2014, the U.S.-built Iraqi army, central to every American exit strategy, fled. Baghdadi used Iraq’s second city to declare the fulfillment of a jihadist fantasy: the caliphate had returned, reborn as what Baghdadi now called the Islamic State, or ISIS. As its bulldozers erased the border barriers between Iraq and Syria, the so-called Islamic State portrayed itself as an avenger of Islam against the imperialist Sykes–Picot Agreement that had shaped the modern Middle East after World War I. “All Muslims,” in turn, had to obey Baghdadi. “The legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations, becomes null by the expansion of the khalifah’s authority and arrival of its troops to their areas,” declared spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani.

  Maqdisi had devoted his life to the restoration of the caliphate. But with its fetishized violence, especially gendered violence, and punitive theocracy, this was a perversion of how even he understood it—however familiar the ISIS Caliphate would have been to Grandpa Millar of Elohim City. It was obvious, even to the apologists for 9/11, that the Islamic State was not Islamic. ISIS were “deviants,” declared Maqdisi as he waged a flame war against Binali. Committed jihadis were apoplectic that a cynical thug had crowned himself leader of global Islam. “The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world,” said a member of a rival Syrian jihadist militia. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.” Maqdisi’s friend and fellow al-Qaeda luminary, Abu Qatada, explained that Salafist theologians were there to spark the revolution that more qualified men would inherit: “We cannot run governments. We can’t even run a nursery school, let alone a caliphate.” Like bin Laden, Maqdisi and Abu Qatada believed global Islam wasn’t ready to establish a caliphate, least of all one created by “thugs and gangsters [who] have no religious credentials.”

  ISIS didn’t disagree. “If you think people will accept the Islamic project [voluntarily], you’re wrong,” one militant stated. “They have to be forced at first. The other groups think that they can convince people and win them over but they’re wrong.” Yet ISIS recognized the dilemma posed by declaring a caliphate that lacked religious legitimacy in the eyes of even the most hardcore jihadists. Binali first tried to bribe Maqdisi and Abu Qatada into supporting ISIS. When that didn’t work, ISIS denounced them as “stooges” of the West and “misleading scholars.” Out of necessity, it adopted the absurd critique that eminent jihadist theologians were no more than tools of apostate regimes. Abu Ali al-Anbari, a high-ranking cleric in ISIS, lectured extensively on what the author Hassan Hassan described as “the illegitimacy of institutions in Muslim countries, including mosques and courts.” When Maqdisi gestured at reconciliation, ISIS texted him a file whose password was “Maqdisi the pimp, the sole of the tyrant’s shoe, son of the English whore.”

  Al-Qaeda, like the Marquis de Lafayette, lost control of its revolution. At its height it commanded dozens of adherents with Western passports; Baghdadi attracted thousands of such individuals. The 9/11 hijackers included men with advanced degrees. ISIS’s recruits included people for whom, as a relative told journalist Mike Giglio, it was the only way to afford a family. Like many an eclipsed radical, Maqdisi was rattled to the point of disillusionment. Al-Qaeda had birthed a jihad “of spite,” he reflected to The Guardian. Now that the revolution was in the hands of the thugs of ISIS, even 9/11 seemed discredited. “The actions in New York and Washington, no matter how great they appeared to be—the bottom line is they were spiteful.”

  If al-Qaeda was ISIS’s spurned father, the War on Terror was its mother. Washington’s compounding post-9/11 errors gave ISIS life and then opportunity. Zarqawi could not have created al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had the Bush administration not invaded. The occupation gave Zarqawi the chance to recruit followers who were hardened through fighting U.S. soldiers and marines. Baghdadi’s fury had grown in the U.S. prison at Camp Bucca. The surge empowered Nouri al-Maliki, who erased the gains of the Anbar Awakening by suppressing Sunni Iraqis, giving AQI its new lease on life. The American withdrawal from Iraq, however inevitable and prompted by the Iraqis, left behind a force that was no match for Baghdadi. The War on Terror led directly to an enemy that was more powerful and more nihilistic than the earlier generation of jihadis, and it was out for vengeance. ISIS dressed the Westerners it kidnapped and beheaded in orange jumpsuits like those worn by Guantanamo detainees. Others it placed in stress positions or waterboarded, in homage to the CIA. After more than a decade of occupation, bombing, surveillance, detention, and torture, it was ISIS, not the Security State, that threatened al-Qaeda’s existence. ISIS drove off from Mosul in twenty-three hundred U.S.-made Humvees, encapsulating the War on Terror’s legacy.

  Charles Lister of the Brookings Institution spoke for many when he called Baghdadi’s declaration of the Caliphate “likely the most significant development in international jihadism since 9/11.” But the response established during the surge held. The Security State’s reaction to the fall of Mosul was to return to war in Iraq, not to consider that the rise of the Caliphate resulted from nearly fifteen years of conflict. Obama, who had months earlier suggested ISIS was a “jayvee squad [in] Lakers uniforms,” conceded, “There will be some short-term, immediate things that need to be done militarily.” The pattern for the remainder of the Obama administration involved compelling the president to ratchet up participation in the war, which came as a bitter heartbreak to him. McCain and Graham argued that the calamity of the Caliphate was the result of Obama’s withdrawal, not the unprovoked invasion they championed in 2003. Fox News, in the wake of Benghazi, settled on this narrative.

  There was little liberal resistance. No one wished to defend a withdrawal that indisputably failed to secure Iraq from the Caliphate. Some pointed out that the Iraqis had insisted on the U.S. departure, but it made little difference. While conservatives found it easier to blame Obama personally, the president only exposed the untenability of the American position in Iraq. He had made boastful statements about “moving forward from a position of strength” when anticipating withdrawal in 2010. Now ISIS was marching south on Baghdad while besieging a Yazidi minority that fled up Mount Sinjar with their elders, children, and the infirm rather than be raped and owned by ISIS. With the entire enterprise in Iraq facing a Saigon moment, Obama united with the Security State to prevent it.

  There was consensus, in the Security State and on the right, that a 2003-style reinvasion was unthinkable. That left fighting a war on Sustainable terms. The United States would raid as necessary, detain minimally, surveil maximally, and use as a tentpole air strikes and “advisory” military missions that foregrounded local “partne
r” forces. It also reached a tacit accommodation to permit militias controlled by Iran external-security chief Qassem Soleimani to attack ISIS on the ground as U.S. warplanes harassed it above. To render the situation even more Sustainable, Obama leveraged two figures of Security State continuity, General John Allen and the longtime diplomat Brett McGurk, to coordinate a global coalition of nations that considered the Caliphate a disaster. The thin end of the wedge, the one that gave the emerging war a humanitarian cast, was stopping the agony atop Mount Sinjar. U.S. bombs began falling on Iraq again in August. The alignment of the ISIS era was born. Designed by General Martin Dempsey and known as By, With, and Through, it was a strategy of persistence and inconspicuousness. Put another way, an exhausted United States wanted the Iraqi military it had smashed, rebuilt, and bankrolled to fight its war for it.

  But Washington found the bill from its earlier mistakes had come due. There would be no Anbar Awakening–style Sunni tribal revolt, not after Maliki, with the aid of Joe Biden, had remained in power to persecute the Sunnis, not even after the U.S. pushed Maliki aside for Haider al-Abadi, who knew how to cultivate both Iran and America. In Syria, where the CIA could not find the absurdly named “moderate rebels” it wanted to support, a U.S. effort at building a Sunni force against ISIS failed spectacularly. CENTCOM’s General Lloyd Austin testified in September 2015 that he could count its membership on his hand after a year and $500 million. But once again, failure did not mean finality. It meant escalation.