Episode 14: Insecure

Spencer Ackerman on How the War on Terror Destabilized America

Although President Biden has ended the war in Afghanistan, America’s twenty-year global war on terror has not yet drawn to a close. Initiated by the Bush administration, and waged in various forms under four presidents, the war on terror has shaped not just US foreign policy, but many aspects of American life. This week, the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Mark Hannah is joined by Spencer Ackerman, whose new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump contends that the Trump administration was no aberration. Charting the war on terror through the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, Ackerman shows how this war inflamed America’s nativist impulses and spurred authoritarian tools of domestic surveillance.

To listen to more episodes or learn more about None Of The Above, go to www.noneoftheabovepodcast.org. To learn more about the Eurasia Group Foundation, please visit www.egfound.org and subscribe to our newsletter.

Spencer Ackerman is the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the Substack, Forever Wars. He is also a contributing editor at the Daily Beast, where he was a senior national correspondent from 2017 to 2021.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

October 12, 2021

SPENCER ACKERMAN: The war on terror is a doorway to all of this nativist, racist, violent history that's with America from the beginning and manifests itself through the 9/11 era.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. We've talked at length on this show about the war and America's withdrawal from it. But this is our first episode looking back now that the war has officially come to an end. But as our guest today reminds us, the Afghanistan war can't be understood in a vacuum. It's part of a larger set of values, laws, and policies U.S. presidents have deployed since the attacks on September 11 twenty years ago. While America's longest war might be over, is the war on terror? And all that it gave rise to? For that, we're going to turn to Spencer Ackerman. From Iraq to Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the halls of power in Washington, Spencer has reported for twenty years from the frontlines of the war on terror. He's now out with a book that has gotten much praise entitled Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Donald Trump.

ACKERMAN: Remember, the first part of the subtitle is how the 9/11 era destabilized America. The front half of the book—I think the whole book—is about showing—less arguing than demonstrating in a narrative way—that all the impulses we would see Trump practice, the agenda we would see Trump promote, and the style we would see Trump embody—all of this is present in inchoate ways from the very start of the war on terror. And that's what the book is about.

HANNAH: For Spencer, ending what he sees as this disastrous period of American foreign policy is not quite as simple as winding down America's longest war or removing combat troops from the Middle East. What Spencer reminds us is that the war on terror helped build a system shot through with xenophobia, which has quietly provided a foundation for the worst tendencies of American politics today. Dismantling this structure requires understanding how Americans butt in so fully. A big piece of that story are the journalists who helped rationalize the wars that were waged

ACKERMAN: Throughout that early phase of the war on terror, even as I was covering it as a young reporter, a whole lot—even when I thought I was being critical of the assumptions of the war on terror, which are often simply accelerations of very deep-taught American assumptions in general—that America has the right to interfere around the world, the right to be a global policeman, and even in some cases, the obligation on behalf of humanity to sort out what is and is not civilizational behavior—I didn't realize I had bought into all of that. But it turned out I had.

HANNAH: While Spencer came to advocate for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror at large, many notable publications continued to endorse and give voice to the logic, which would come to both prop up the forever wars abroad and give justification for the ballooning security apparatus at home.

ACKERMAN: After 9/11, elite American journalism enlisted in the war on terror. I saw up close how the journalistic paragons of liberalism, even if they had some reservations over the Iraq invasion—all of them take up the cause of the war on terror, accept its premises, accept its justifications, and can be horrified selectively by its outrages. But the scandals are treated as deviations, not manifestations of this thing itself, which is seen as virtuous. And that's why it's so jarring when we see figures like Friedman or Packer or go down the line. This is really something that existed not just among right wing intellectuals but among centrist and liberal intellectuals, all of which are treated as respectable. They are talking in very casual ways about inflicting mass brutality and very often do not see themselves as complicit with that project. This is an enterprise that the Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates—in an incredibly analytically conservative way—as having killed over 900,000 people, as having created tens of millions of refugees. And so, when you go back and read a quote like Tom Friedman saying we need to drain the swamps of the Middle East after a period in which Donald Trump says something extremely similar about the places Tom Friedman lives, it is extremely hard not to draw that very resonant connection. And it's resonant precisely because we see how this same impulse exists not just among the vulgar but among respectable.

HANNAH: But that's so at odds with where the public has stood. We at the Eurasia Group Foundation just came out with a survey which shows Americans are by and large wary of military force. They're not keen on war. And that seemed to be the case back then too, when the wars were in their early years. Public support for the Iraq invasion after 9/11 was high, no doubt, but starting around 2003 and 2004, public opinion started to change, and the widespread support politicians initially had for the war started to fall drastically.

ACKERMAN: Yeah, this is always an elite enterprise. This is not something the American grassroots demanded. There are periods in which there are sky-high public opinion polls for various aspects of the war on terror, particularly the early phase of the Iraq invasion in the months after 9/11. All of that is the product of elite throttling of how to perceive 9/11 and the enterprise going forward, an enterprise that's described as being quick and decisive, even while simultaneously treating it in definition—calling it this Kennedy-esque, long war—as a virtue, but always in that contradiction something victorious, something that will ultimately be cheap. The Iraq invasion was supposed to have paid for itself. All of that deceit is necessary to get those numbers as high as they are, and under sustained pressure by how disastrous the wars are, they fall rather precipitously and reveal that at the heart of it there is a constituency for the war on terror, as originally conceived within Washington. And it exists within Washington and within the defense industry and within elite journalism and intellectual opinion-making. But it doesn't exist beyond those extremely narrow warrens. But because of the interests at stake, all of that dissatisfaction, whether it's on the left or on the right—which manifest themselves differently, it's worth remembering—can be washed away. And we see how the war on terror is a symptom of how undemocratic and unrepresentative American foreign policy is.

HANNAH: So, you don't just put the blame on the Bush Administration, Spencer. You also lay some blame at the feet of the Obama Administration. But hasn't Barack Obama also been the target of some of this nativist and racist attack, which is fueled by the culture of the war on terror? That's certainly what you write about in the book. How do you reconcile those things?

ACKERMAN: Sure, Barack Obama is simultaneously a target of the politics of the war on terror and the steward of the war on terror. And it is in that contradiction that we have to understand the Obama Administration's relationship with the war on terror, which is that Obama feels the war on terror has produced some disastrous results and some immoral practices. What really offends him is the Iraq war and torture, and outside of that, he believes if he wraps the war on terror in a bill of bureaucratic process, it can be made more lawful and sustainable.

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ACKERMAN: This is a decision that has really profound consequences both at home and abroad. One of the ways I thought could make the consequences most vivid is I spoke to a man named Qureshi Faheem. Qureshi was a victim of Barack Obama's very first drone strike when he was a thirteen-year-old boy. And that strike, like so many after, left him in a coma for forty days, permanently maimed. He lost an eye. And it turned out when he emerged from this coma, he was one of his family's primary breadwinners at thirteen because several of his older male relatives had been killed in the strike. And so, the rest of his life was going to be making his mangled body perform whatever work he can find in order to provide for his family as a teenager. And he said Barack Obama should be considered a tyrant.

At home, it does exactly what the Bush Administration's war on terror does. It acts as an engine of repression. Because it is Obama and because it's the Democratic Party, it's treated as somehow less threatening to democracy than it is. But it's under Obama that the war on terror really becomes permanent, and liberals start using the mechanisms of the war on terror for purposes that targeted communities, seen as different only stylistically. Obama has a program called Countering Violent Extremism that puts Muslim communities’ interactions with the government on a continued and intensified securitized footing, in which their rights are treated as conditional. It denies that it is an intelligence gathering program, which the internal documentation I have previously published describes it as.

There is also another important element, which is that to end the war on terror, you have to actually abolish the authorities and the transformation of the American security infrastructure after 9/11. And no one is ending the forever wars without abolishing those. By keeping all of these tools, it's Barack Obama who truly ensures they’re there in a circumstance he never envisions—but should have—which is that a person like Donald Trump becomes president of the United States and then takes over those tools.

HANNAH: To Spencer, President Trump was the ultimate beneficiary of the war on terror. It ceded the xenophobic elements of our culture, which Trump would come to exploit, and gave Trump the tools and precedence to feed his worst impulses.

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ACKERMAN: The war on terror is a doorway to all of this nativist, racist, violent history that's with America from the beginning and manifests itself through the 9/11 era in this atmosphere of patriotic emergency. From an operational perspective, the 9/11 era—the war on terror—is a series of sledgehammers to institutions that are supposedly protecting American freedom here at home. All the post-9/11 transformations of the security infrastructure have that in common—they are loosening restrictions in law, in custom, and in practice to enable a security architecture that surveils more people than was possible a generation before, allows for indefinite detention, allows for torture, allows for secret watch-listing of people—not just no-fly zones, but watch lists that someone can be placed on and not have any meaningful way to remove themselves from. The transformation of immigration into a counterterrorism context in which immigration is not a process to make more Americans, but a process that threatens those Americans who are already here, and down the line, all of which create authoritarian tools and possibilities.

While the politics of the war on terror is a hysterical, deceitful, civilizational focus in which the targets of the war on terror are not the specific terrorist organization that attacks the United States on 9/11, but something much broader—something that is not necessarily all of Islam, but is definably Islamic in all of these vague, hazy, and convenient ways. And it is never a practice that is truly agnostic about whose terrorism is the issue here. We see how—this is also a kind of subplot of the book that accelerates towards the end when it becomes maximally like visible and relevant—white terror is exempted throughout the war on terror. The community responses American law enforcement and intelligence visit upon American Muslims is never something white American communities have to live in fear of.

HANNAH: Walk us through that. You're saying essentially that the policies and politics of the war on terror really validated and gave rise to nativism, to white supremacy, and to white terrorism.

ACKERMAN: What I see is how the structures Trump rides to power and the culture of 9/11 he exploits must always leave out people like Timothy McVeigh and must always turn their gaze away from white people's political violence. And white people's political violence does two things here. First, it's the oldest, most historically rooted American terrorism there is.

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ACKERMAN: Second, the practitioners of that violence consider themselves exactly what they call themselves—patriots. They're not overthrowing an American order or a rule of law. They are using violence to restore something truly American.

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ACKERMAN: This is the way in which Donald Trump mixes and mingles within this milieu. Ultimately, their goals are extremely similar.

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ACKERMAN: This is why you see Trump say things about the Charlottesville white supremacists who marched with tiki torches chanting that Jews will not replace them. This is why you see Trump telling the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by and so forth. They see themselves as part of the same project. They are useful to Trump's project. Trump is useful to their project.

One of the most important features within the war on terror is not just operational and not just programmatic, but culture. That culture is impunity—who enjoys it, who has to suffer as a result from it. This manifests itself not only in vulgar ways, like Trump expresses, but in respectable ways, like how there is never any accountability for any of these mass violations of the law and the Constitution. The CIA enjoys impunity over torture. The NSA enjoys impunity over decimating the Fourth Amendment through bulk surveillance. It is that sort of impunity we see white supremacy exhibit time and time again, but especially after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It is because of that impunity and because of that a-historicity throughout the war on terror that you see this cycle repeat itself.

HANNAH: Even though America's longest war has come to an end, the effects of the twenty-year war on terror are still on full display. Just look at the response to the events on January 6.

ACKERMAN: It is telling that we in the United States don't have a meaningful political response to January 6. What we have is a security response. We have a response in which the FBI and the Justice Department are going after those who answered the call to stop the steal, not a political response that addresses those who sounded the call to stop the steal.

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ACKERMAN: There is overwhelming political sympathy within Congress right now for that much deeper phenomenon, and that much deeper phenomenon is what we started out talking about—very rooted in American history. That is the politics of white violence and white suspension of the rule of law to produce outcomes that advance perceived white interests. That is always going to be an exception to expansions of carceral, coercive, and violent state authority because of the nature of what America is, regardless of what America tells itself about what it is. As long as there is a security response instead of a political response to a political problem, we will again refuse to learn one of the most important lessons of the war on terror, which is that to use security solutions against a political problem is a chronicle of a tragedy foretold.

HANNAH: We've made it past President Trump, at least for now. But while Joe Biden ran very much in opposition to Trump, he also ran as a return to the kind of era of Barack Obama in many ways, which, as we've discussed, was another link along the chain which led us to where we are today. So, Spencer, what is your feeling? Is Joe Biden going to be able to change the sort of security logic which the war on terror has built up over the past two decades? And is that something he's even trying to do?

ACKERMAN: There is vastly more continuity than departure from the Biden Administration's approach to the war on terror to the Obama Administration's approach. What's very striking is that simultaneously, with Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan while using the rhetoric of abolition of the forever wars, in the same breath he reserves the right to use the new euphemism for drone strikes—which is over the horizon capabilities—against Afghanistan as he sees fit. And much like Obama considered himself better positioned to withdraw from Iraq by escalating in Afghanistan, so too do we see Biden talking about the mutating counterterrorism challenges of tomorrow—which are in Africa and Southeast Asia—that, in his argument, ought not to be weighed down by the dead hand of the counterterrorism challenges of twenty years ago, which he sees as jettison-able from Afghanistan. That points to a recipe for stopping the degree to which Biden will end endless wars. It will just be less conspicuous and presumably less resource intensive. It will certainly have less high-level attention from the White House, which will allow tremendous leeway to both the CIA and the military as they launch these operations. And that's also a continuity with Trump, regardless of how each man would probably not like to see that continuity in one another. And so, that's the measure of the degree to which someone is in fact ending endless wars or ending the 9/11 era, rather than just cynically declaring those areas to be over.

HANNAH: I want to end by asking you what you think people can do about all of this—people and listeners who are concerned with this legacy and this trajectory of American politics and history. If these cycles of violence and impunity are so ingrained in American society and culture and laws, is there anything to be done?

ACKERMAN: I think there is one way to end the war on terror, and that is through organizing. Elite politics produce and sustain the war on terror. American politics in its resting state is not particularly very democratic. However, it must still, as a formal matter, be responsive to a significant enough organized movement that demands a binary choice from its political figures between maintaining their power and maintaining the war on terror. And that is not just the sort of thing that can meaningfully abolish and then redress all the disasters of the war on terror. But it's the only thing in American history that has ever moved American history in a direction toward justice and solidarity.

HANNAH: Spencer, it was a real pleasure having you on. Listeners, if you haven't already, check out Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thanks go out to our producer Caroline Gray and our associate producer and editor Luke Taylor. Our music and mixing was done by Zubin Hensler. If you enjoyed what you've heard, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and catch you next time.

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