Warblog: Armchair Generals of the War on Terror

By Bjørn Stærk

The "warbloggers" who emerged after the September 11 attacks believed that the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq could trigger a humanistic and democratic reformation of the Islamic world. They were wrong, but not alone. Their optimism reflected an old and powerful Western fantasy: That liberal democracy is natural, inevitable, and appealing to all people everywhere.

Seen through the eyes of one of the original warbloggers, this is the story of the amateurs who wanted to prove that they were just as good as the professionals. And they were: Just as bad at predicting the outcome of the War on Terror as the Bush administration, and just as lazy as the mainstream media.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bjørn Stærk
• Release date: Oct 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310378690

Bjørn Stærk

I work as a software developer, have a column at the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, and have published two books in Norwegian:Ytringsfrihet - Pro et contraOppdra folket - Hvordan svensker og nordmenn snakker om innvandring

Book preview

Warblog

Armchair generals of the War on Terror

By Bjørn Stærk

Copyright 2014 Bjørn Stærk

Table of Contents

I. Warbloggers in flight

II. The creative destruction of Iraq

III. The fog of bullshit

IV. Fall of the warblog

V. Epilogue

About Bjørn Stærk

I. Warbloggers in flight

Remember, remember 11 September

Murderous monsters in flight

Reject their dark game

And let Liberty's flame

Burn prouder and ever more bright

- Geoffrey Barto, warblog poet

Dear God, the poetry! There was warblog poetry. Forgive us. But let’s rewind.

We’re standing outside a café in Oslo, strangers on our way home from work, glued to the ground by burning skyscrapers on a TV screen. Some place called the World Trade Center. I’ve never heard of it. The images don’t convey the size of the thing. I’m not sure what I’m looking at. It’s a center, but also a tower? Or is it a center with towers? Does it have something to do with the World Trade Organization? I’m trying to figure this out. And then one of the towers falls.

Did I watch that live, or just imagine it later?

I return to my home, a barren cellar apartment. I moved in just weeks ago. I’m 22, with a new job, and a new life. I don’t have a TV yet, or Internet, or even much furniture.

Those first few days in September 2001 are awful. Nobody knows how many people have died in the attacks. Figures of tens of thousands are passed around. Only gradually does the number come down to 3000. I cry myself to sleep. What kind of world is this?

I install a TV set and an internet connection a week later. During crisis, people seek to connect themselves to a kind of collective now, where we can experience the crisis as a community. We used to do this by gathering in a public place and exchanging rumors, or by reading the same newspapers at the same time in the morning. Then live broadcast media took over. Radio, and then TV. If the September 11 attacks had happened only a few years earlier, in, say, 1998, it would have been a traditional media story. TV would have given us the instant coverage, and the next morning’s newspapers would have given us the commentary that made sense of it all.

The TV journalist makes you feel like you’re there. The newspaper pundits make you think you understand what’s going on. That’s how it has been for decades. The fall of Communism, the first Iraq war, the wars in Yugoslavia. It happened on TV, and was explained to us in print.

And the news media looked at this situation and saw that it was good.

But that was the 1980s and 90s. Other people’s decades. This is 2001. Now there are options.

The Internet at the turn of the decade is an unfinished, chaotic place, filled with unconnected portals and home pages, a world of islands without bridges or boats to connect them. You read HTML For Dummies and made a home page, but it’s dead, and nobody can find it.

In 2001, the first blogs are changing all that. They’re building new pathways for the Internet. The tools are primitive, but revolutionary. Even the simplest ideas change everything. Somebody has the bright idea of doing a kind of online journal where the newest entries are at the top of the page, and, suddenly, blogs are born. Visiting a home page used to feel like visiting somebody’s home and finding that they’ve printed a list of their favorite movies and hung it on the wall – sad and embarrassing. But now in 2001, when I visit my favorite new blogs, I feel like I’m placing my head into a stream of never-ending newness. Here’s one that just gathers links to news stories about the newborn War on Terror. How convenient! Here’s another that has opinions I somewhat agree with. Interesting! And if I follow this link I end up over there, which takes me to this other weird site, which writes about something else entirely.

Instead of listening to one authoritative story about the September 11 attacks, I get to feel the ripples that are spreading through the world. I find calm analysis and raw emotion. I read well-researched news stories, but also the tale of some guy who ran and hid in a store in Manhattan while the great dust cloud passed by, and blogged about it just a few hours later.

There’s more in the air than just new technology. There’s a sense that the old experts have failed. This attack came out of nowhere! The experts were supposed to prepare us for this, and they didn’t. Now there’s a vacuum of authority, and into that vacuum flows a million new amateur experts.

I’m sucked along with it. I log on to Blogger, and create a warblog.

*

Saturday, September 22, 2001

[..]

I was just about to sign a treaty of non-aggression with reality, (you stay out of my business, and I'll stay out of yours), when the rules changed, and being irrelevant was no longer a morally acceptable option. If I stay silent now, at the dawn of a strange, unpredictable future, then my beliefs are hollow, and all those years I spent figuring it all out were wasted.

Something changed on September 11th, 2001. At first I thought it was the world. Now I realize that the world is what it has always been, with a few brief exceptions, chaotic and bloody. Neither has my political philosophy seen any reason to update its principles. A few more buckets in an ocean of blood won't sink the product of 10 000 years of human history.

It is, mostly, I who have changed, and the way I apply my beliefs to the world. How much, I don't know, but I am curious to find out. [..]

*

13 years later, I want to travel back in time and shake the person who wrote that. The tone annoys me. I want to delete half, and tone the rest down. Or delete all of it, and pretend I never wrote it.

I wouldn’t put it like this today. In fact, I wouldn’t have written it at all.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? Only the young can be honestly shocked. Later you get too many ideas. The patterns in your head become so strong that you can fit any new event into them. You may say this is shocking! but what you really mean is this confirms everything I believe in! Even if a black swan event does shock you, you’ve learned the art of making yourself believe that you knew it all along. Why, you probably even predicted it, that’s how clever you are.

You need to be young to look at a new thing and say: Yes, this is new to me. I did not expect this. This changes how I look at the world. Or at least, you need to be young to admit it. Show me an older person who can admit that an event took them by surprise, and that they’re now reevaluating what they believe in. Show me that person. I want to learn their secret.

Whether we admitted it or not, September 11 changed a lot of us. It sent people in new directions. It didn’t just force them there, the way an economic crisis may force you into a job you’re not happy with. It gave them the motivation to seek out those directions on their own, and pursue them with all their energy.

One of those directions, not the most important and not the most harmful, was the warblog.

A warblog, in the original meaning of the word, was a hawkish political blog that covered and supported the War on Terror. Many warbloggers were on the political right, but not everyone. A typical warblogger admired Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell more