Remember the flypaper theory? Even in the blood-flush days of 2001, it seemed a bit naïve as a counterterrorist military strategy — that the United States could simply choose to “fight them over there” rather than enduring an ongoing series of attacks “over here.”.
But from the vantage of most Americans, this is more or less how the global war on terror actually played out: a growing map of elective and sometimes disastrous military engagements abroad, accompanied by pretty quiet years for terrorism on U.S. soil, at least to judge by the horrific standards set by Sept. 11 itself.
You might’ve been thinking about this distressing chapter of our imperial history a few weeks ago, around the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, with your social media feed briefly taken over by recollections and reflections of the attacks themselves. I was thinking about it while reading Richard Beck’s rich and memorable new history, “Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life.” Dick Cheney had just publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president and rebuked Donald Trump, a once unthinkable development that seemed to mark a few tectonic shifts — perhaps the most partisan figure of the war on terror era suggesting that the greater threat to the Republic was now internal rather than external and on the right rather than the left. Cheney’s endorsement was quickly followed by one from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who authorized the use of torture by the U.S. military and helped design and defend a domestic surveillance program, as well, and was now all in for the Democratic ticket.
Not that long ago, endorsements like these would have been rebuffed by Democrats as valentines from warmongers. But today it’s common for Americans to worry more about the so-called security theater of airport check-ins than about the acts of terrorism that inspired it, while the forever war that once seemed to extend so ominously into the future and intrude so conspicuously into our private lives has already faded from cultural memory, like a fever dream. For many years, American policymakers and intellectuals seemed excited to treat the new conflict as the closest thing their generation was likely to get to World War II, with all its existential clarity. But corner people on the street these days and ask them whatever happened to the war on terror, and they’re liable to respond with a shrug and a comment like, “I guess we won, huh?”
Globally, the costs have been immense. In total, the wars launched and led by the United States in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, have either directly or indirectly lead to the deaths of between 4.5 million and 4.7 million people, according to a remarkable database maintained by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Of those, more than 940,000 were killed directly in the wars. And of those direct military deaths, more than 402,000 were civilians — nearly 140 times as many noncombatants abroad as died in the initial attacks. Another 38 million were displaced or made into refugees. In just Iraq and Afghanistan, The New Yorker recently estimated, American troops may have been responsible for as many as 800 incidents of alleged war crimes.
The fervor of the war on terror faded long before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan marked its effective end. But the renewed militarism that kicked off in 2001 has generally proceeded — perhaps in anticipation of a successor confrontation, this time with China, to follow the one we’ve now moved past, focused on radical Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. Both are terms Americans hardly even hear anymore, though violent extremism has lately exploded across Africa’s Sahel, where the United States has lately been withdrawing its troops.
Just since 2015, the United States has added more than $300 billion to its annual defense budget. That’s about enough additional money each year, the Watson Institute calculated in 2023, to pay the full cost of universal pre-K, two years of community college for all students and health insurance for every single uninsured American.
As scrupulous policy wonks will often point out, military spending has actually fallen as a share of G.D.P. in recent decades, and so by certain measures the country has been growing steadily less martial over time. But in absolute terms the expenditure remains enormous, and more than half of all federal discretionary expenditure still goes to defense in one form or another, the Watson report calculated. Approximately half of that spending — nearly a quarter of the federal total — then goes out the door to military contractors, who grew to outnumber American troops for a majority of the country’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And yet for all that carnage abroad, all that spending at home and all that human capital devoted to the continual operation of the American war machine, the initial cause has so much faded into background noise that over the last few years, U.S. military entanglements in Ukraine and Gaza sometimes seem to Americans like sudden ruptures with a peaceable recent past.
This strange normalization is the subject of “Homeland,” which traces the shadow of Sept. 11 and the wars it produced, so open ended they seemed quickly to dissipate in the national consciousness. When over a half-century ago the country spent about a decade mired in conflict in Southeast Asia, shipping millions of soldiers there in what seemed like an endless and increasingly unwinnable war, it profoundly shaped American politics and culture not just in the present but also for a generation to follow. Beginning in 2001, the country spent two decades mired in new, quixotic seeming conflicts, sending millions of troops abroad to Central Asia and the Mideast. But the domestic meaning of the military adventuring of this generation — the “end of history” generation — remains far more nebulous. “Floating in and out of awareness,” Beck writes, “the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, a kind of water that people noticed just every so often even though they spent their lives swimming in it.”
Partly, this was coded in dissonant messaging from the start, he suggests. “On the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, Americans woke up to the message, delivered by news anchors, politicians, celebrities, pundits, professional athletes, signs in storefront windows and homemade banners strung across porches and fire escapes that Sept. 11 had ‘changed everything,’” Beck writes. Even Hunter S. Thompson, writing on ESPN.com’s Page 2, got in on the millenarianism: “Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives,” he wrote the day after the attacks. One week later, in a column that now circulates annually among millennials trying to remember the mood of those days, Thompson was even more elegiac: “The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks.”
“At the same time,” Beck writes, “Americans heard a different message, one delivered by the same people as the first: Don’t worry, Sept. 11 won’t change anything at all.” Everyone from George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani to Joe Biden and Barack Obama, he points out, emphasized that any changes to American life would represent victories for the terrorists, even as many federal functionaries, from John Yoo to Eric Holder, simultaneously argued that the ethics of military engagement would have to be reimagined to address the threat. And they implied, at least, that the country and its military was capable of sustaining an open-ended global conflict without much immediate cost to the average citizen. “Maybe the only healthy response to this kind of self-contradictory public messaging is to tune out the whole situation and hope for the best,” Beck writes. “A lot of people did just that.”
But an awful lot did change, Beck says, in both ostentatious and subterranean ways. The attacks introduced a new spirit of vulnerability and shame to what had been just a few days before a much more blithely imperious nation, and the wars that followed were often humbling, as well. At the level of public rhetoric and foreign policy, a conventional performance of disinterested statesmanship gave way to a more self-interested and sometimes impulsive militarism. In the aftermath of the attacks, thanks in part to Bush’s interfaith diplomacy, the country’s support for Muslim Americans actually appeared to grow. But the wars that followed, Beck suggests, flamed new waves of xenophobia which made the health and security of the country seem suddenly far more precarious. We watched as federal agents infiltrated American mosques and local police departments grew more militarized, partly with equipment shipped back from the war’s front lines. We noted growing suspicion and skepticism about American leadership abroad, and clocked a new elite impunity and an unapologetic looseness around the rule of law at home. To this day, it is striking how many champions of the invasion of Iraq in particular remain in positions of authority and status, not just in politics and policy but in the media and commentariat, as well.
Beck’s central assertion, the one around which he bundles the many micro-observations of the book, is that it was the war on terror, and the distrust it unleashed, that produced the rise of Donald Trump, his takeover of the Republican Party and, eventually, the White House.
This argument is not exactly uncharted territory — a similar thread runs through Spencer Ackerman’s “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” for instance. And it wasn’t so long ago that the war loomed large enough to swing 2004 in one direction (toward Bush rather than John Kerry) and 2008 in the other (toward Barack Obama, against both Hillary Clinton and John McCain). Or that the distant horror of ISIS in Iraq and Syria was used, in the run-up to the 2016 election, to argue for crackdowns at our southern border, where crossings were lower than they’d been for decades.
But almost a decade later, the country seems preoccupied with a very different set of stories about itself and its place in the world. These days, when Americans talk about the country’s recent political history, they tend to focus on a another set of narrative beats, themselves now quite familiar: the financial crisis and the slow recovery that followed; the shock election of Trump, the right-wing backlash it revealed and the left-wing backlash it produced; and the test of Covid as a sort of screen onto which partisans of various stripes could project their preferred stories about the country’s brokenness. When the conversations deepen, they sometimes reach another set of talking points — perhaps globalization, deindustrialization and the China shock; perhaps income inequality; perhaps the diploma divide, social media and social justice. But they rarely get as far back as Sept. 11, when the country embarked on an open-ended, undeclared global military adventure, targeting a largely undefined and shape-shifting enemy, which treated national borders as merely suggestive and produced a global reputational blowback of a generational scale.
Maybe this is a simple matter of national attention span, that public memory and public arguments rarely sit in the sun for long before draining back into the cultural groundwater. Probably, it tells us something about the way the war itself was presented and sold — at first as an existential necessity, yes, but relatively soon after as something unfolding more out of sight and out of mind, supervised simply by the Pentagon and almost as much to the side of American life as the police actions and extralegal coups of previous decades.
But the two-decade war was no small thing, leaving no small mark on American life and the shape of geopolitics this century. That the country seems so comfortable memory-holing it is another sign of just how strong our tilt toward forgetfulness, how numbing the narcissism of our domestic politics, and how expansive our capacity for normalization really is.
The post When We Try to Explain the Rise of Trump, We Don’t Look Back Far Enough appeared first on New York Times.