American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived. Had the inept Abdulmutallab actually succeeded, the death toll would not have equaled the 324 traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008; while the destruction of four Flight 253s from terrorism would not have equaled New York State’s 2008 traffic death toll of 1,231 (341 of whom, or 51 more than those on Flight 253, were classified as “alcohol-impaired fatalities”).

  Had the twenty-three-year-old Nigerian set off his bomb, it would have been a nightmare for the people on board, and if it actually succeeded in taking the plane down, a tragedy for those who knew them. It would certainly have represented a safety and security issue, but it would not have been a national emergency, nor a national-security crisis.

  And yet here’s the strange thing: thanks to what didn’t happen on Flight 253, the media essentially went mad, 24/7. Newspaper coverage of the failed plot and its ramifications actually grew for two full weeks after the incident until it had achieved something like full-spectrum dominance, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the days after Christmas, more than half the news links in blogs related to Flight 253. At the same time, the Republican criticism machine (and the media universe that goes with it) ramped up on the subject of the Obama administration’s terror wimpiness; the global air transport system plunked down millions of dollars on new technology that evidently will not find underwear bombs; the homeland security-industrial complex had a field day; and fear, that adrenaline rush from hell, was further embedded in the American way of life.

  Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so much.

  The few Americans who, since 2001, have died from anything that could be called a terror attack in the United States—whether the thirteen killed at Fort Hood or the soldier murdered outside an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas—were far outnumbered by the thirty-two dead in a 2007 mass killing at Virginia Tech, not to speak of the relatively regular moments when workers or former workers “go postal.” Since September 11, terror in the United States has rated above fatalities from shark attacks and not much else. Since the economic meltdown of 2008, it has, in fact, been left in the shade by violent deaths that stem from reactions to job loss, foreclosure, inability to pay the rent, and so on.

  This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely convulsed by, and that can’t seem to get enough of, fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.

  Institutionalizing Fear Inc.

  The attacks of September 11, 2001, brought the fear of terrorism into the American bedroom via the TV screen. That fear was used with remarkable effectiveness by the Bush administration, which color-coded terror for its own ends.

  Today, any possible or actual terror attack, any threat no matter how far-fetched, amateurish, poorly executed, or ineffective, raises a national alarm, always seeming to add to the power of the imperial presidency and threatening to open new “fronts” in the now-unnamed global war. The latest is in Yemen, thanks in part to that young Nigerian who was evidently armed with explosives by a home-grown organization of a few hundred men that goes by the name al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

  The fear of terrorism has, by now, been institutionalized in our society—quite literally so—even if the thing we’re afraid of has, on the scale of human problems, something of the will-o’-the-wisp about it. For those who remember their cold war fiction, it’s more specter than SPECTRE.

  That fear has been embedded in what once was an un-American word, more easily associated with Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany: “homeland.” It has replaced “country,” “land,” and “nation” in the language of the terror-mongers. “The homeland” is the place that terrorism, and nothing but terrorism, can violate. In 2002, that terror-embedded word got its own official government agency: the Department of Homeland Security, our second “defense” department, which has a 2010 budget of $39.4 billion (while overall “homeland security” spending in the 2010 budget reached $70.2 billion). Around it has grown up a little-attended-to homeland-security complex with its own interests, businesses, associations, and lobbyists (including jostling crowds of ex-politicians and ex-government bureaucrats).

  As a result, more than eight years after 9/11, an amorphous state of mind has manifested itself in the actual state as a kind of Fear Inc. A number of factors have clearly gone into the creation of Fear Inc. and now ensure that fear is the drug constantly shot into the American body politic. These would include:

  The imperial presidency: The Bush administration used fear not only to promote its wars and its Global War on Terror, but also to unchain the commander in chief of an already imperial presidency from a host of restraints. The dangers of terror and of al-Qaeda, which became the global bogeyman, and the various proposed responses to it, including kidnapping (“extraordinary rendition”), secret imprisonment, and torture, turned out to be the royal road to the American unconscious and so to a presidency determined, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others liked to say, to take the gloves off. It remains so and, as a result, under Barack Obama, the imperial presidency only seems to gain ground. Under the pressure of the Flight 253 incident, for instance, the Obama administration has adopted the Bush administration’s position that a president, under certain circumstances, has the authority to order the assassination of an American citizen abroad. In this case, New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, who has been linked to the 9/11 plotters, the Fort Hood killer, and Abdulmutallab. The Bush administration opened the door to this possibility and now a Democratic president may be stepping through.

  The 24/7 media moment: 24/7 blitz coverage was once reserved for the deaths of presidents (as in the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and public events of agreed-upon import. In 1994, however, it became the coin of the media realm for any event bizarre enough, sensational enough, celebrity-based enough to glue eyeballs. That June, O. J. Simpson engaged in his infamous low-speed car “chase” through Orange County followed by more than twenty news helicopters while ninety-five million viewers tuned in and thousands more gathered at highway overpasses to watch. No one’s ever looked back. Of course, in a traditional media world that’s shedding foreign and domestic bureaus and axing hordes of reporters, radically downsizing newsrooms and shrinking papers to next to nothing, the advantages of focusing reportorial energies on just one thing at a time are obvious. Those 24/7 energies are now regularly focused on the fear of terrorism and events that contribute to it, like the plot to down Flight 253.

  The Republican criticism machine and the media that go with it: Once upon a time, even successful Republican administrations didn’t have their own megaphone. That’s why, in the Vietnam era, the Nixon administration battled the New York Times so fiercely (and—my own guess—that played a part in forcing the creation of the first “op-ed” page in 1970, which allowed administration figures like Vice President Spiro Agnew and ex-Nixon speechwriter William Safire to gain a voice at the paper). By the George W. Bush era, the struggle had abated. The Times and papers like it only had to be pacified or cut out of the loop, since from TV to talk radio, publishing to publicity, the Republicans had their own megaphone ready at hand. This is, by now, a machine chockablock full of politicians and ex-politicians, publishers, pundits, military “experts,” journalists, shock jocks, and the like (categories that have a tendency to blend into each other). It adds up to a seamless web of promotion, publicity, and din. It’s capable of gearing up on no notice and going on until a subject—none more popular than t
errorism and Democratic spinelessness in the face of it—is temporarily flogged to death. It ensures that any failed terror attack, no matter how hopeless or pathetic, will be in the headlines and in public consciousness. It circulates constant fantasies about possible future apocalyptic terror attacks with atomic weaponry or other weapons of mass destruction. (And in all of the above, of course, it is helped by a host of tagalong pundits and experts, news shows, and news reports from the more liberal side of the aisle.)

  The Democrats who don’t dare: It’s remarkable that the sharpest president we’ve had in a while didn’t dare get up in front of the American people after Flight 253 landed and tell everyone to calm down. He didn’t, in fact, have a single intelligent thing to say about the event. He certainly didn’t remind Americans that, whatever happened to Flight 253, they stood in far more danger heading out of their driveways behind the wheel or pulling into a bar on the way home for a beer or two. Instead, the Obama administration essentially abjectly apologized, insisted it would focus yet more effort and money on making America safe from air terrorism, widened a new front in the Global War on Terror in Yemen (speeding extra money and U.S. advisers that way), and when the din from its critics didn’t end, “pushed back,” as Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote, by claiming “that they were handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did.” It’s striking when a Democratic administration finds safety in the claim that it’s acting like a Republican one, that it’s following the path to the imperial presidency already cleared by George W. Bush. Fear does that to you, and the fear of terror has been institutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of society.

  9/11 Never Ends

  Fear has a way of reordering human worlds. That only a relatively small number of determined fanatics with extraordinarily limited access to American soil keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvious. What the fear machine produces is the dark underside of the charming Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, “A View of the World from 9th Avenue,” in which Manhattan looms vast as the rest of the planet fades into near nothingness.

  When you see the world “from 9th Avenue,” or from an all-al-Qaeda-all-the-time “news” channel, you see it phantasmagorically. It’s out of all realistic shape and proportion, which means you naturally make stupid decisions. You become incapable of sorting out what matters and what doesn’t, what’s primary and what’s secondary. You become, in short, manipulable.

  This is our situation today.

  People always wonder: What would the impact of a second 9/11-style attack be on this country? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pinprick terror events blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up to a second, third, fourth, fifth 9/11 when it comes to American consciousness.

  So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Republicans go postal, the media morphs into its 24/7 national security disaster mode, the pundits register red on the terror-news scale, the president defends himself by reaffirming that he is doing just what the Bush administration would have done, the homeland security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust devil and say:

  Hold onto your underpants, this is not a national emergency.

  SIX

  Obama’s War

  How Safe Do You Want to Be?

  Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they appear from a world almost beyond our imagining, and always they concern death—so many lives snuffed out so regularly for years now. Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They’re so repetitive that, once you’ve started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away.

  Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs—so many “insurgents,” or “terrorists,” or “foreign militants,” or “anti-Afghan forces” killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area insists that those dead “terrorists” or “militants” were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral. (A recent study of the death-dealing weapons of the Iraq war, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that air strikes are notoriously good at taking out civilians. Eighty-five percent of the deaths from air strikes in Iraq were, the study estimated, women and children, and of all methods, including suicide and car bombs, airpower “killed the most civilians per event.”)

  Then come the standard-issue denials from U.S. military officials or coalition spokespeople: those killed were insurgents, and the intelligence information on which the strike or raid had been based was accurate. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step. Admittedly, there’s been some change in the assertion/repeated denial/investigation pattern instituted by American forces. Now, assertion and denial are sometimes followed relatively quickly by acknowledgment, apology, and payment. Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. This new tactic has been a response to rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of civilians in U.S. raids and air strikes. But like the denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended to make everything go away, while our war itself—those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down in the middle of the night—continues.

  Consider just one incident that went almost uncovered in the U.S. media. According to an Agence France-Presse account, in a raid in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, the U.S. military first reported a small success: four “armed militants” killed. It took next to no time, however, for those four militants to morph into the family of an Afghan National Army artillery commander named Awal Khan. As it happened, Khan himself was on duty in another province at the time. According to the report, the tally of the slain, some of whom may have gone to the roof of their house to defend themselves against armed men they evidently believed to be robbers or bandits, included Awal Khan’s “schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, who worked for a government department. Another daughter was wounded.” The report continues, “After the shooting, the pregnant wife of Khan’s cousin, who lived next door, went outside her home and was shot five times in the abdomen.” She survived, but her fetus, “hit by bullets,” didn’t. Khan’s wife worked at a school supported by the international aid organization CARE, which issued a statement strongly condemning the raid and demanding that “international military forces operating in Afghanistan are held accountable for their actions and avoid all attacks on innocent civilians in the country.”

  In accordance with its new policy, the United States issued an apology:Further inquiries into the Coalition and [Afghan National Security Forces] ANSF operation in Khost earlier today suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported.… Coalition and Afghan forces do not believe that this family was involved with militant activities and that they were defending their home against an unknown threat.… “We deeply regret the tragic loss of life in this precious family. Words alone cannot begin to express our regret and sympathy and we will ensure the surviving family members are properly cared for,” said Brig. Gen. Michael A. Ryan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.

  A U.S. military spokesman added, “There will undoubtedly be some financial assistance and other types of assistance [to the survivors].”

  But the family quite reasonably wanted more than a press-release apology
. The grieving husband, father, and brother said, “I want the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them,” adding, “[T]he Afghan government should resign if it could not protect its people.” Afghan president Hamid Karzai, as he has done many times during past incidents, repeatedly demanded an explanation for the deaths and asked that such raids and air strikes be drastically curtailed.

  What Your Safety Is Worth

  All of this, however, is little more than a shadow play against which the ongoing war continues to be relentlessly prosecuted. In Afghanistan, and increasingly in Pakistan, civilian deaths are inseparable from this war. Though they may be referred to as “collateral damage,” increasingly in all wars, and certainly in counterinsurgency campaigns involving air power, the killing of civilians lies at the heart of the matter, while the killing of soldiers might be thought of as the true collateral activity.

  Pretending that these “mistakes” will cease or be ameliorated as long as the war is being prosecuted is little short of folly. After all, “mistake” after “mistake” continues to be made. The first Afghan wedding party was obliterated in late December 2001, when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan revelers with only 2 survivors. At least 4 more have been blown away since then. And count on it, there will be others.

  A UN survey tallied up 2,118 civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2008, a striking rise over the previous year’s figure, of which 828 were ascribed to U.S., NATO, and Afghan Army actions rather than to suicide bombers or Taliban guerrillas. Given the difficulty of counting the dead in wartime, any figures like these are likely to be significant undercounts.

  By now, we’ve filled up endless “towers” with dead Afghan civilians. And that’s clearly not going to change, apologies or not, especially when U.S. forces are “surging” into the southern and eastern parts of the country, while the CIA’s drone war on the Pakistani border expands.