Never-Ending War on Terror

By Alex Lubin

A concise primer to the political, cultural, and social consequences of the perpetual US global war on terror.

An entire generation of young adults has never known an America without the War on Terror. This book contends with the pervasive effects of post-9/11 policy and myth-making in every corner of American life. Never-Ending War on Terror is organized around five keywords that have come to define the cultural and political moment: homeland, security, privacy, torture, and drone. Alex Lubin synthesizes nearly two decades of United States war-making against terrorism by asking how the War on Terror has changed American politics and society, and how the War on Terror draws on historical myths about American national and imperial identity. From the PATRIOT Act to the hit show Homeland, from Edward Snowden to Guantanamo Bay, and from 9/11 memorials to Trumpism, this succinct book connects America's political economy and international relations to our contemporary culture at every turn.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520969773

Alex Lubin

Alex Lubin is Professor of African American Studies at Penn State University, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1956; Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary, and Never-Ending War on Terror. 

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Never-Ending War on Terror

AMERICAN STUDIES NOW: CRITICAL HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez

Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson

2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige

3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam

4. Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, by Sunaina Maira

5. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism, by Shelley Streeby

6. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby

7. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris

8. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan

9. Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question, by Lázaro Lima

10. A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, by L. H. Stallings

11. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, by Julie Sze

12. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century, by Naomi A. Paik

13. Never-Ending War on Terror, by Alex Lubin

Never-Ending War on Terror

Alex Lubin

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Alex Lubin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lubin, Alex, author.

Title: Never-ending war on terror / Alex Lubin.

Other titles: American studies now ; 13.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Series: American studies now : critical histories of the present ; 13 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020026460 (print) | LCCN 2020026461 (ebook) |ISBN 9780520297401 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520297418 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520969773 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: War on Terrorism, 2001–2009—Social aspects—United States. | War and society—United States—History—21st century.

Classification: LCC HV6432 .L76 2021 (print) | LCC HV6432 (ebook) |DDC 363.325/160973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026460

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026461

Manufactured in the United States of America

29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

Overview

An Introduction without a Beginning

1. Mourning in America

2. Privacy and Security

3. Liberal Torture

4. Extrajudicial Assassination by Drone

A Conclusion without an Ending

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary

Key Figures

Selected Bibliography

OVERVIEW

AN INTRODUCTION WITHOUT A BEGINNING

Although the US War on Terror is waged as a response to the events of 9 / 11, the war has a history before 9 / 11 that is rooted in the post–Cold War era of globalization. Like all wars, the US War on Terror is framed as defensive and necessary in ways that elide the contributions of US imperial violence to global and US inequality. In addition, the War on Terror relies on mourning and melancholy in order to justify the defense of a national formation that never was.

Settler Colonialism  •  Globalization  •  Melancholy

CHAPTER 1. MOURNING IN AMERICA

Following the events of 9 / 11, culture played a key role in making sense of the terrorist attacks. Central to the work of culture was linking US vulnerability to militarism and revising US history as an exceptional project rather than a violent one.

Homeland  •  The Uncanny  •  US / Israel Analogies

CHAPTER 2. PRIVACY AND SECURITY

Under a state of emergency, the United States expanded its capacity to violate Fourth Amendment norms of privacy in the name of national security. Moreover, increasingly militarized policing during the War on Terror has blurred the boundaries between domestic policing and global counterinsurgency warfare.

Policing  •  Surveillance  •  Counterinsurgency

CHAPTER 3. LIBERAL TORTURE

Under the War on Terror the law has been used to rationalize the use of torture to extract information. The torture program has been justified as lawful in order to confirm the US understanding of itself as respectful of the rule of law. The torture program defined any and all men captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan as enemy combatants undeserving of any national or international legal protection.

Torture  •  Lawfare  •  Enemy Combatants

CHAPTER 4. EXTRAJUDICIAL ASSASSINATION BY DRONE

In an effort to affirm the rule of law, the Obama presidential administration diverged from the use of torture and confinement in favor of an extrajudicial assassination program that included the targeting of US citizens. The drone program has driven some to join terrorist organizations that target the United States and has become a recent subject of rebellion and resistance against the US War on Terror.

Kill List  •  Extrajudicial Killing  •  Remote-Controlled Warfare

A CONCLUSION WITHOUT AN ENDING

Although the War on Terror is a response to contemporary historical and political conditions, it is a continuation of a long feature of US settler colonial culture in which the mourning of a lost nation that never existed becomes the pretext for state-sanctioned violence. The costs of war go well beyond economic considerations and must account for the immiseration of millions of people across the expanding geographies of the war. Moreover, the War on Terror is a normative part of everyday life in the United States and informs domestic policing.

War Profiteering  •  Global Solidarity

An Introduction without a Beginning

How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?

Howard Zinn¹

In January 2017 Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to US president Donald Trump and admitted purveyor of alternative facts, invoked the memory of a Bowling Green massacre as a rationale for the Trump administration’s purportedly more muscular approach to fighting terrorism. Included in this new approach was a proposed travel ban on most Muslims seeking to visit or immigrate to the United States. Conway justified the administration’s anti-Muslim federal policies by claiming that Islam was consonant with terrorism, as evidenced by incidents like those at Bowling Green, Kentucky. Moreover, citing the Obama administration’s Muslim registry as precedent for the Trump administration’s proposed ban, she argued that Trump’s proposal was a reasonable response to the events in Bowling Green. [T]wo Iraqi nationals came to this country, she claimed, "joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills and come back here, and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers’ lives away² . . . Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered."³

Conway’s story ignored important facts while creating outright lies. While focused on the fantasy of Muslim terrorists, Conway ignored several examples of domestic acts of terrorism perpetrated by white nationalists; acts that generated very few policy responses, much less travel restrictions. There were no policy re--alignments and remedies proposed to address the rise of domestic terrorism; indeed, in recent history the Trump administration praised members of alt-right organizations who chanted Jews will not replace us in the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally as good people. Similarly, Conway’s fabrication failed to recognize that the relatively few recent acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims within the United States involved US citizens who had little or no connection to the Middle East. Therefore, a travel ban based on Islamic religious affiliation would do very little to curb acts of domestic terrorism, whether perpetrated by white nationalists or Muslim Americans. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of Conway’s argument was its outright falsity; there was no Bowling Green massacre, at least not as she described it.

Although Conway would later admit that she misspoke about an alleged massacre in Bowling Green, Kentucky, her statement echoed several other lies perpetrated by presidential administrations to justify a never-ending war on terror. These lies frequently point to phantom terrorist activity on the part of Muslims—always presumed to have connections to the Middle East, despite the fact that the largest number of Muslims in the world reside outside of the Middle East—to justify an enduring national commitment to the War on Terror as well as to the global expansion of the battlefield to places not involved in any violent attacks on the United States.

Wars are frequently waged in the name of vanquishing alleged crimes that never took place. The US entry into the Korean war was based on the unsubstantiated claim that the Soviet Union had inspired North Korean aggression against South Korea. Yet there was no evidence of Soviet influence, and moreover, the evidence suggests that the South had initiated the civil war in Korea. In 1964, in an effort to justify US engagement in the Vietnam War, President Johnson claimed that US ships had been attacked, unprovoked, in the Gulf of Tonkin. The desire to vanquish this false attack drew the United States deeply into the Vietnam War, and forever impacted the lives of millions of Vietnamese as well as American soldiers drafted into the conflict. The Korean and Vietnamese lies make Kellyanne Conway’s alternative fact seem rather inconsequential.

While the Bowling Green example is an especially brazen lie, it is not the only, nor most consequential, lie told to justify the current War on Terror. The 2003 targeting of Iraq as part of the War on Terror was based on the lie that Saddam Hussein’s military had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Hussein had aided the terrorist group al-Qaeda by providing logistical support to, and territory for, training. Neither of the rationales for the Iraq invasion was true, although each was accepted as truthful for far longer than the Trump administration’s Bowling Green lie. And the consequences of the Iraq lie have been far more tragic, not only for Americans who have died in Iraq, but for the entire Iraqi society that has been transformed forever by the US military invasion and continued occupation. Some estimates place the Iraqi war dead (accounting not only for direct violence but also indirect forms of violence from sanctions) at around 1 million people, while the number of displaced Iraqis is perhaps even greater.⁴ But the US purveyors of the Iraq lie never faced serious consequences; in fact, in a strange twist of fate, the perpetrators of the 2003 Iraq-WMD lie, such as former George W. Bush administration official David Frum, are now talking heads for left-leaning media, often lobbing the most blistering attacks on the Trump administration’s fabrications. The War on Terror has become so normative that there are now pitched political battles between those who lied for the purportedly noble goals of defeating Saddam Hussein and those who lied to discriminate against global Islam in general. Within this discursive echo chamber, there is very little analysis of what constitutes the War on Terror, nor of whether it was ever based on legitimate goals in the first place.

For the last decade I have taught the course The US War on Terror to undergraduate students at a large public university in the United States and at an elite private university in Beirut, Lebanon. Although the student demographics of these two institutions of higher education could not be more different, I have noticed some strikingly similar student attitudes toward the War on Terror. For most of my students, especially those attending college right after high school, the War on Terror is a fixed reality of everyday life, something that has been a persistent feature during their lifetime and something that will forever endure. These students