Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Saving Baghdad was nonnegotiable for the military and the intelligence agencies. But by now, doing so exposed a conspicuous weakness: The Security State’s actions to avert disaster kept the War on Terror perpetually on the precipice of disaster. The Security State escalated to maintain, a position that kept it from achieving any finality, let alone one that could pass for victory. It failed to appreciate two factors. First, maintenance of the Forever War incubated even worse enemies than the ones the war sought to destroy. Second, maintenance strengthened the audacity of those who considered the Security State and liberals the crucial obstacle to attaining victory. Flynn would soon recast his humiliation at Clapper’s hands as martyrdom for “the stand I took on radical Islamism and the expansion of al Qaeda and its associated movements.”

  Conservatives, unwilling to propose outright reinvasion, reached instead for a framework for understanding ISIS that would double as an indictment of Obama for being too weak to fight it. The civilizational subtext of the War on Terror now became explicit. To conservatives, ISIS’s unspeakable brutality confirmed the barbarism of Islam that liberals refused to admit. In fact, ISIS itself had so few Islamic credentials that it tried to buy Maqdisi’s and Abu Qatada’s support. Yet a rising portion of the American right became convinced that the ISIS Caliphate proved they had been right all along in warning that Islam licensed terrorism. Hawkishness was now no longer something the right advocated against people overseas, but against a perceived foreign invader at home. It helped that Obama called ISIS “not Islamic,” thereby demonstrating to conservatives what position they had to adopt in response. “As we sit here this morning, in the face of radical Islam,” Petraeus’s army mentor and surge architect Jack Keane testified in January 2015, “U.S. policymakers refuse to accurately name the movement as radical Islam.” Leaders of the Security State avoided the argument over “Radical Islamic Terror.” They considered arguments over apportioning blame to Islam both vulgar and outside their mandate—a domestic political question, one that the Constitution kept outside the purview of generals and intelligence chieftains. Functionally, that meant dismissing the vulnerability of American Muslims to a toxic and dangerous atmosphere as someone else’s problem, no matter how much the war they waged and protected was jeopardizing the lives and freedom of their Muslim neighbors.

  Early in the evening of February 10, 2015, Deah Barakat, a twenty-three-year-old University of North Carolina dental student, answered his door to a neighbor in their condominium complex, Craig Hicks. Hicks raised his .357 and murdered Barakat with multiple shots. He entered the Barakat home to then kill Yusor Abu-Salha, Barakat’s wife, and Yusor’s sister Razan. Hicks, who turned himself in, claimed he snapped after seeing a car parked in his spot. At their funeral Yusor and Razan’s father, Mohammad, stated, “We have no doubt why they died.” A professor of Islamic studies who taught Barakat at N.C. State told The New Yorker, “Muslim Americans have [a systematic feeling of insecurity] vis à vis a certain sector of the society that is becoming more vocal and increasingly comfortable expressing not just its dislike for Islam but its profound distrust.”

  The year of the North Carolina slayings would see a 67 percent rise in hate crimes against Muslims. Yet when the Security State interacted with American Muslim communities, it was not for their protection. The Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism program was a “community-based” initiative of Obama’s designed to be a showcase for humane, vigilant, Sustainable domestic counterterrorism. Its name was deliberately agnostic as to whose violent extremism was the issue, but its overwhelming focus was on U.S. Muslim communities. American Muslims seethed at the euphemisms of the War on Terror, but from the opposite position of the right’s, since those euphemisms obscured the precariousness of their lives. Federal prosecutors, FBI liaisons, and Homeland Security officials swore their community empowerment meetings weren’t actually the intelligence-gathering enterprises that internal FBI documents called opportunities to “strengthen our investigative, intelligence gathering and collaborative abilities to be proactive in countering violent extremism.” Through CVE, the Sustainable War on Terror didn’t need to label anyone as a Radical Islamist Terrorist to justify treating them that way. When Obama held a scheduled CVE summit at the White House days after the slayings, an administration official assured The Guardian, “This is not an intelligence-gathering summit.” Meanwhile, denunciations of ISIS by American Muslim leaders were so fervent that a September 2014 press conference condemning what one called the “Anti-Islamic State” actually featured a prominent appearance from the Department of Homeland Security’s CVE chief.

  The Security State continued to fear blame for missing the next attack, and it noted with great alarm that ISIS’s appeal to disaffected Muslim youth in the United States far surpassed anything al-Qaeda had been able to manage. Its influence was especially conspicuous online. Through Twitter, Skype, and Telegram, Americans, especially alienated youths, found themselves in conversations with ISIS members or supporters who, as one radicalization manual instructed, shared their joys and sadnesses. Like fascists and cultists everywhere, ISIS justified violence by stoking feelings of cultural and religious besiegement by outsiders. They dissuaded new followers from exposing themselves to mainstream Islam. The community ISIS offered could feel profound. “I [now] actually have brothers and sisters. I’m crying,” a woman in her early twenties from rural Washington State tweeted after her ISIS friends convinced her to convert. Radicalization over the internet was something the FBI knew how to leverage and exploit. Its agents and informants infiltrated platforms popular with ISIS, built relationships, and through them facilitated arrestable offenses by their new screen pals. “We’re not going to wait for the person to mobilize on his own timeline,” explained the bureau’s counterterrorism chief, Michael B. Steinbach.

  The FBI was by now in the hands of James Comey, nominated by Obama for his Republican pedigree and his reputation for integrity after the 2004 surveillance-law showdown at John Ashcroft’s bedside. Snowden revealed that Comey and his allies had not stopped the domestic internet surveillance that, for years, they implied they had obstructed; they were now only lawyering it better. Comey displayed no interest in learning what might compel a young American to kill for ISIS. He compared ISIS’s social-media presence to a “devil sitting on the shoulder saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill’ all day long.”

  For all Comey’s dedication to surveillance, he had no answer for psychopaths like Omar Mateen, who swore vengeance for the slain Muslims of the War on Terror and murdered forty-nine people at Orlando’s Pulse LGBT nightclub in 2016. When Comey could not solve his security problems, he exploited them. In an age of mass surveillance he knew intimately, he had the audacity to claim that cell phone encryption created an unreasonable “darkness” for the FBI and called on the tech firms to build him a back door. When technologists informed him that creating one would jeopardize everyone’s digital security, Comey replied that with that attitude, Americans wouldn’t have gotten to the moon. He found an opportunity through a locked iPhone belonging to an ISIS-loyal married couple who killed fourteen in a mass shooting in San Bernardino in December 2014. Comey took a shocked Apple to court to compel them to jailbreak not just the couple’s phone, but effectively everyone’s. Before a judge could rule, the FBI admitted that it was able to purchase a commercially available software exploit that unlocked the phone, a feat Comey had earlier insisted was impossible.

  European nativists used ISIS to spark panic over Islam. Millions of refugees from Syria, Libya, and elsewhere were desperately fleeing ISIS. Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had already taken in millions of Iraqis. Now people sought to cross the Mediterranean for Europe. Geert Wilders and Anders Breivik had already provided a framework for understanding the exodus: those fleeing ISIS were no different from ISIS themselves, conquering Europe through the civilization jihad. The potency of their critique in a time of widening wealth inequality and political
exhaustion made liberal governments across the continent buckle.

  Exposing the impotence of the established order was a specialty of ISIS. On November 13, 2015, it atypically launched an al-Qaeda-style multilocation attack on six targets across Paris. It was an unspeakable atrocity, involving at least five suicide bombers, that slaughtered 130 and wounded 494 at, among other places, an Eagles of Death Metal show at the Bataclan, where ISIS took hostages. Authorities immediately described one ISIS killer who had accompanied migrants from Syria. Another was from south of Paris, which only strengthened the vitriol of those on the right who saw their Islamic minorities as a public menace. But the reality of the migration crisis was the anguish of the father of young Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy who drowned in the Mediterranean as his family fled ISIS.

  Again, the American right looked to Europe as a harbinger. With ISIS overwhelming the continent, by gun and by refugee, Islam was on the attack again, enabled by useful-idiot liberals and their treasonous, neutered, useless security barons. For the American right it was the second front in a civilizational war; Obama’s allegedly open borders were the first front, through which migrants from Mexico and Central America entered at will. By 2015 the nationalist news site Breitbart was pronouncing it to be one big war. Citing unnamed private security contractors, it reported on a “Muslim prayer rug” (which looked like nothing so much as a torn red-and-white checked Adidas shirt) supposedly found on the southern border. The sheer absurdity of the claim was less important than what it revealed about a white nativist appetite for a narrative of besiegement, replacement, abandonment, and betrayal. Jeff Sessions and his immigration adviser, the Duke University anti–“radical Islam” activist Stephen Miller, went to find proof. Along with the Texan provocateur Senator Ted Cruz, they demanded the administration disclose the “immigration histories” of anyone tied to the now-frequent ISIS shootings. The overwhelming majority of people accused of ISIS-era terrorism were either U.S. citizens or in the country legally. Around this time, according to emails later obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Miller was recommending that Breitbart journalists “point out the parallels” in the immigration debate that he thought vindicated the French white supremacist novel The Camp of the Saints. Cruz, soon to run for president, would later declare, “The front line with ISIS isn’t just in Iraq and Syria, it’s in Kennedy Airport and the Rio Grande.”

  Whatever bulwark Security State grandees thought their institutions offered against such demagoguery, John Kelly, in his marine uniform, made the same points. He opined frequently on the security of the southern border, even though NORTHCOM, not SOUTHCOM, is the military command with border jurisdiction. In 2014, as the right sought to capitalize on fears around an Ebola outbreak in western Africa, Kelly warned that immigrants could bring the virus up through the United States–Mexico border. An outbreak would mean a “mass migration of Central Americans into the United States.” The following March he speculated in Senate testimony that Central American criminal networks could “unwittingly, or even wittingly” help move “terrorist operatives or weapons of mass destruction toward our borders.” Kelly quickly added that there was no evidence of any of this happening but warned that migrants from “Somalia, Bangladesh, Lebanon and Pakistan” were entering the United States from the south, and that Iran was building its influence in Central America.

  Everything Obama did with regard to ISIS followed a grim pattern. He showed much deference to the Security State—he was in no position not to; they had wanted a residual force in Iraq—but acted more slowly than they wanted. For convenience, he jettisoned core principles. At the National Defense University in 2013, the president said he looked forward to the expiration of the 2001 AUMF. Not a year later he was relying on it for the most frictionless path into the ISIS war—and after launching an air war without congressional authorization. By treating ISIS as indistinct from al-Qaeda, he erased the most salient fact about ISIS. The absurdity reminded one of the CIA’s Zarqawi targeters, Nada Bakos, of the “same distinction we had to make prior to the Iraq war” when the Cheneyites rendered al-Qaeda indistinguishable from Saddam. Few congressional Democrats objected, and even fewer Republicans. Bernie Sanders was “very strongly opposed to sending combat troops back into Iraq or to Syria” but noted correctly that Obama had the authority he needed for air strikes. Sanders called for a vote on any return to war. It never happened. Once again the AUMF’s power proved irresistible. A fallback legal justification for the return to war in Iraq was, of all things, the unrepealed 2002 authorization to oust Saddam.

  By, With, and Through, a supposedly Sustainable approach to ISIS, kept the Security State and Obama aligned. Austin was replaced at CENTCOM with the JSOC veteran Joe Votel. Votel and his various theater commanders directed a war heavy on air strikes, reconstituting the Iraqi army, Special Operations raids, and other indicators of a reluctant undertaking. Unlike the 2003–2011 Iraq occupation, northeastern Syria became a central battlefield for a small contingent of U.S. forces. McGurk and Allen styled themselves coordinators and special envoys, not occupation administrators. But a core aspect of the war was deeply un-Sustainable. Without a U.S.-trained Syrian force, America had to sponsor an existing one—in this case a determined military from the Kurdish region of Rojava, in northeast Syria. To the alarm of neighboring NATO ally Turkey, the United States committed itself to a separatist force.

  A geopolitical complication arose. Obama’s unheeded position that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had to step down became untenable in the fall of 2015, when Vladimir Putin intervened militarily on Assad’s behalf. Obama, only half-committed to Syria, was disinclined to risk U.S.–Russian air combat. Putin and Obama had irrevocably fallen out in 2014 after the Russian client in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, lost power to a NATO-backed regime in Kiev. Soon afterward Russian military intelligence sent a handful of young Russians to explore the United States, and particularly its political and media cultures. It already had an ideologically protean English-language state news channel, RT, that postured as a venue for outsider voices marginalized in the American press. Now Moscow launched its first military campaign outside its traditional sphere of influence since Afghanistan in the 1980s—to checkmate Washington. Since 9/11 the Security State had often pined for the imagined simplicity and honor of great power competition while lamenting the messiness of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. In Syria those paths converged, on Moscow’s terms.

  The Security State also aligned with Obama in working to alleviate the enormous migration burden ISIS had sparked. European allies would tell McGurk and Allen that they needed the United States to admit its share of refugees, something it had never done during the Iraq occupation. In 2015 Obama agreed to accept 85,000 refugees, up from 70,000 the previous year, and the next year’s admissions included 12,500 Syrians. It was largely the work of Brennan’s deputy Avril Haines, who, returning to the White House from the CIA, framed it as a counterterrorism measure “contradicting [extremists’] message.” There was no objection from the Security State, but it was out of touch with an empowered nativism. By late 2015, thirty-one state governors, all but one Republicans, refused to resettle Syrians. “Texas will not accept any Syrian refugees & I demand the U.S. act similarly,” tweeted Texas governor Greg Abbott. This accelerating trend was about to find its champion.

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  EVERY REPUBLICAN NATIONAL LEADER since 9/11 had backed the harshest possible prosecution of the War on Terror. Even Mitt Romney pledged to double Guantanamo. Those relatively few prominent Republicans who did object to the war, like senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, did so on the respectable grounds that it was costing America freedom and wealth. They were openly disdained by the ascendant McCains of the party. Rand Paul’s father, Ron, sought the presidency on an antiwar platform, but he was even more marginal, despite an enthusiastic following on the far right.

  Handling the party’s nativists was a more delicate proposit
ion for GOP leaders. Romney and McCain, uncomfortable fits in nativist circles, compensated by advocating “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants or releasing “complete the danged fence” ads, to say nothing of proposing that the nativist Sarah Palin should be a heartbeat from the presidency. No Republican since 9/11 had been able to combine nativism with antipathy to the futility of the War on Terror and seize control of the party. It occurred to few to try. Then, in June 2015, Donald Trump descended his escalator at Trump Tower.

  In his infamous announcement speech, the one claiming Mexicans were rapists and criminals invading a supine America, Trump demonstrated just how effortlessly 9/11 politics amplified nativism. His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself. That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness: “We don’t win anymore.” Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation.

  It was a heretical sentiment to hear from someone seeking the GOP nomination. Every major Republican figure had spent the past fifteen years explaining away the failures of the war or insisting that it was a noble endeavor. Trump called it dumb. His America was suffering unacceptable civilizational insults. “We have nothing” to show for the war, he said, and certainly not the spoils of war that Trump believed were due America. “Islamic terrorism” had seized “the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should have taken.” The war was a glitch in the matrix of American exceptionalism, and Trump offered a reboot.

  But except for the Afghanistan war, which he considered particularly stupid, Trump was no abolitionist. “I want to have the strongest military we’ve ever had, and we need it now more than ever,” he stated. He threatened to sink Iranian boat swarms, even as Iran was aligned with the United States against ISIS in Iraq, engaged in the ground combat Obama desperately sought to avoid. Then there was ISIS, at home as well as abroad. Trump pointed specifically to ISIS’s spoils: the twenty-three hundred Humvees they drove out of Mosul. “The enemy took them,” he complained, pledging that “nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump.” His latest position on Iraq was that it was dumb to get in, dumb to get out, and now the United States had to win, whatever that ultimately meant.