Introduction

To rejoice in the death of one’s enemies often seems as American as apple pie. As one of the few liberal democracies that still maintains the active use and threat of the death penalty, the United States has, despite contestation, held aloft a notion of justice that stretches back centuries: An eye for an eye. As September 11^th and the decade following have indicated, this Babylonian justice can as easily explain the criminal justice system as the predominant American approach to countering terrorism around the world: an eye (or as many eyes as necessary) for an eye. American counter-terrorism takes as a near-universal truth that violent force is the best response to terror. It employed that approach in a series of countries and conflict zones across the globe. And, as has been made all too clear during this same time period, the academic field of terrorism studies has often uncritically condoned and provided intellectual justification for this approach:

The notion of suppressive violence as the only effective response to terror has become not merely a mantra of contemporary terrorism studies but an orthodoxy – movement away from which indicates one has refused to accept a series of agreed-upon notions about terrorism. This discourse, and the knowledge/power relations that it establishes, “is reproduced, often with little deviation from the central assumptions and narratives, continuously in the field’s journals, conferences, and in literally thousands of publications every year by academics and think tanks” (Jackson 2009). This was as true during the Bush years as during the presidency of Obama: his speech following Osama’s death indicated that terrorists would be ferreted out and “defeated” wherever they might appear.

The targeted killing of Osama bin Laden seems to represent the apex of these orthodox notions about countering terrorism. It was an assassination – a method with which the United States has a deep and intricate relationship – aimed at demolishing and demoralizing Al Qaeda by eliminating the symbolic head of global terrorism. Or so we believed. As news headlines and official proclamations have made all too clear, however, global terrorism lives on. The mantra of a broad spectrum of political commentators and foreign policy “specialists” is that we are still all at danger. Bin Laden, then, far from the true leader of global terrorism, seems to be little more than a grand signifier of that threat, which now extinguished, must find new opportunities – new signifiers – to come into existence. Vis-à-vis Shakespeare, it is often catastrophic to weigh an “enemy more mighty than he seems.” Does placing such emphasis on a single individual not run the risk of underestimating the impact and power of those who are not household names, but nonetheless wear the mantle of jihad?

And in a parallel sense, has this focus on bin Laden not distracted the United States from the great devastation its own post-9/11 actions have caused to the world? As the United States make steps forward, it appears that the Global War on Terrorism always takes a few steps backward with each instantiation of violence aimed at creating peace. The invasion of Afghanistan established a new mission for terrorists and Osama’s assassination was followed by a series of devastating attacks in Pakistan. Is there not, then, something missed by these repeated attempts to eliminate all signs of “evil” from the world? Walter Davis calls all these efforts violent attempts at catharsis: to overcome the pain and trauma of terrorism, we attempt to kill our way to a new meaning; to kill the guilt and trauma inside ourselves. This paper, through a critical relation to Davis’ text, Death’s Dream Kingdom, and an investigation into the historical relation between state terrorism and non-state terrorism, argues that the bin Laden killing provides a critical opportunity to reformulate our relationship to the trauma of terrorism and begin to think the possibility of a counter-terrorism that does not endlessly recreate the very violence it tries to destroy. The danger in killing flies with a sledgehammer in the context of counter-terrorism is that it reinforces an autoimmune response that locks terrorism and counter-terrorism into a vicious, self-reproducing cycle. Our task, then, is not to end counter-terrorism, but to try to slow it down until we can get it back under control.

The Kiss of Death

A series of news headlines on May 12, 2011 carried essentially the same message: the secret trove of information recovered from Osama bin Laden’s Abottobad hideout revealed that he was obsessed with the United States. A Foreign Policy blog entry sums this up succinctly:

What makes this story and the flood of bin Laden-themed news so strangely comedic is that they reveal how equally obsessed with bin Laden the national security industry, the government, and the American public were and still are. Immediately following bin Laden’s death, a humdrum arose from commentators asking the “tough” questions: now that Osama is dead, isn’t our work in the Middle East and Central Asia finished? Shouldn’t we finally put an end to the war in Afghanistan, which has at last seen the results it lacked for so long? All this suggests the sickening possibility that America invaded two sovereign nations primarily to kill one individual – like an exterminator who fumigates an entire household to remove ants from the pantry. If two “overseas military engagements” and thousands of American and Middle Eastern casualties for the purpose of finding and destroying one man isn’t an “obsession,” what is? Why would bin Laden not have been obsessed with an America that was doing everything in its capacity – and expanding that capacity when it hit a limit – to eliminate him. And yet, as press release after press release indicates, the American public and the media seem repeatedly shocked that Osama was even interested in attacking us. It’s reminiscent of a quote from, of all people, comedian David Cross:

While killing bin Laden could have prodded the United States to “grow up” a little bit, instead the American public seems intent upon celebrating and fetishizing the death in its most minute details: we want to see the house; we want 3D models; we want to see pictures of the body; we want to know about his pornography. This was not limited to a particular socioeconomic or racial group: at Harvard University after bin Laden’s killing, hundreds of the brightest students in America paused their exam preparations to run around, wave flags, and scream savagely “America!” and “We got him!” Even further, the popular video game Counter Strike was updated shortly with a map of Osama bin Laden’s compound: we want to play video games where we can act out the role of the Seals who killed him. Many Americans aren’t satisfied that bin Laden is dead because they missed the chance to do the job themselves. This has played out clearly in the glorification of the Navy Seal unit that got “lucky” enough to do the job. Even the dog that took part in the mission has become a hero:

Western society has made heroes of successful warriors from Ancient Greece through the American Revolution and up to the war in Iraq. The SEAL Team fits squarely within that tradition: just a few Americans of incredible ability who dutifully did exactly what was asked of them. They knew their mission would be dangerous, but they were willing to give themselves up to a higher cause. And because of this, they earn a certain level of narrative honor. Spanos locates the beginning of this tradition in the Aeneid:

But it seems counterintuitive that a culture seeking to bring democratic peace to the world still revels so deeply in the success of violence. There have, of course, been those on both sides of the political spectrum who chide the celebration of bin Laden’s death, but the great psychological satisfaction derived from successful revenge was widely felt. A CNN opinion poll taken immediately after the news broke confirms this: 37% of respondents were “thrilled” at bin Laden’s death, while 42% were just “happy” (CNN). As a younger friend of mine said a few days following: “he was like every American’s psychotic uncle at the family reunion.” This broader cultural response to his death makes one thing painfully clearly: we didn’t kill bin Laden enough. In the face of his demise, the “civilized” American public became a mob like the creatures at “The Dawn of Humanity” in 2001: A Space Odyssey who have just discovered the power of the hand-held weapon: beating their enemy to death and beyond, over and over again, each individual gleefully rejoicing in the opportunity to experience violence for the first time. It’s no longer the death that they’re after, but personal involvement in continuing the violence.

So, in one move the public shows its bloodthirsty face, while in a parallel maneuver it falls back upon the easy and familiar trope of depicting itself as a nation of innocents who were the victims of an omnicidal maniac with inexplicable motives. Obama’s speech on the night of bin Laden’s demise makes that point clear:

This is not to say that those who died on September 11 were guilty and deserving of the fate that would befall them – though it does raise the question of whom Obama considers “guilty” in the United States. Instead, it is to argue that the record of the last decade paints a clear picture, not of inexplicable, one-sided belligerence against the United States by one actor, but of an Ahabian “war” between a country with a violent history and dirty conscience and an omnicidal group whose motives and logic are quite clear. It was, and still is, a “war” or a series of “wars” (if the term applies when the United States has made no actual declaration since World War II) that have caused tremendous economic turmoil and moved America’s focus permanently away from the possibility of a peace dividend. The “war on terror” in all its ambiguity made that dividend unimaginable: terror can never be exterminated, so the war will never end. Funds, then, will always need to be maintained for the near future. In all the recent fiscal debates in Congress, money for various overseas engagements remains sacrosanct and untouched, even as it eats a larger and larger chunk of federal spending. This was made clear at the end of the discussions over what funding should be cut to pave the way for a debt ceiling increase.

The focus on bin Laden, however, has allowed the United States to disavow its role in the violence of the world. First, in a literal way, coverage of bin Laden’s end shifted public attention from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a focus on minor successes and dangers in Pakistan. Second, in a metaphorical sense, it moved the debate over the war on terror away from justifications and towards justice – less a battle between two actors, more the fair-minded police of the world doling out punishment where it is due. The public directly participated in this as members of a jury that could finally rejoice in having done its job properly. The social networking website, Twitter, indicates this perfectly: immense numbers of jubilant tweets from around the United States (and the world) followed the news of bin Laden’s demise. After all, “We got the fucker!” Bin Laden’s death gave the American public another chance to decide in what light it would see itself. Just as the period following 9/11, our decision was to play the part of the unjustly wronged – a role that America plays so well. Time and time again our hand is “forced” into righting the problems of the world – and we blame external entities when we don’t get the results we hoped for. This feeling of wrong arises, precisely, because the United States refuses to understand the possibility of resistance to the world it has attempted to create in its image:

Our response to 9/11 was one of pure outrage – not unjustified: no one should argue that the events of September the 11th were not tragic on a colossal scale – but it was an outrage that rejected self-reflection. It morphed into a monstrous resentment that led America to strike out at the world like an angry child: we don’t mind pushing over chairs in the world’s kitchen when things are not going our way. If we can’t have our toys: no one can. Does such a simplistic analogy make light of the events of 9/11 and absolve murders? In fact, I think quite the opposite: taking September 11 seriously compels us to place a critical lens on the actions of the United States. And not just the United States, but states themselves in all their manifold forms. The focus on the actions of singular individuals like bin Laden (the “terrorists”) plays an important role in forgetting the even more critical role that state agents have played in promoting and using terror around the globe:

State terrorism is, statistically, many times more destructive than the terrorism the general public typically contemplates: asymmetric actors with religious/cultural motives. Why does that matter? Precisely because the focus on bin Laden allowed state terrorism to land on Free Parking while bin Laden went to jail. The anger, outrage, and confusion following 9/11 were corporealized in bin Laden. He became more than a man: he morphed into the metaphorical embodiment of pure, irredeemable evil. To eliminate bin Laden, then, would be to extinguish the world’s quintessential manifestation of evil. This explains the monumental sense of relief following his death: relief at the possibility, albeit utopian, that evil had finally been extinguished. The impossibility of this metaphor, however, becomes equally clear in the indication that the war on terror will continue even without bin Laden. Newscasters and foreign policy analysts pore over the documents and intelligence procured from his compound in Pakistan, pronouncing that Osama was hardly the manager of Al Qaeda that many expected: he was more of an ideas man, while operational control was handled by deputies elsewhere. Is it not the case, then, that bin Laden, far from embodying absolute evil, merely represented, as a stand-in for all the myriad uncertainty and fear of terror, many of the possibilities of terror around the globe?

One thing that becomes increasingly clear from the uncertainty about Osama’s relative weight in Al Qaeda’s operations is that the narratives and stories academics and policymakers tell about terrorism have critical implications for how institutions and individuals respond to real events. Bin Laden, painted as the mastermind of global terrorism became a discursive trope in the discourse of war, justice, and safety in American politics. He was operationalized in election cycles and elsewhere whenever discussions of terrorism occurred; catching bin Laden became the critical indicator progress in the GWOT. “No foreign policy activity can develop in a vacuum,” because they all rely on particular discourses that both provide justification for and help frame the issues for “domestic and international audiences. What is more important than the discourse in which the foreign policy choice is implanted, are the discursive strategies used to formulate this discourse” (Yanik 2009). With regards to terrorism, Joseba Zulaika argues that the industry created around forecasting future terrorist events in many cases converts predictions of terror into self-fulfilling prophecy:

Timothy McVeigh’s plot was largely a result of media discourse on terrorism; the same could be said of Sheikh Omar. Did America ask for it? Not by intent, but the power of the terror discourse in creating the conditions for terrorism makes clear the importance of criticizing those narratives, and demanding from them a self-reflectiveness that has been remarkably absent from the post-Osama media coverage. As the narrative of Osama’s life, importance, and now death have been brought so forcefully and importantly into the public sphere, does the glorification narrative told of his death not play back into the very problems it sought to solve?

Invisible Violence and Becoming-Terrorist

After bin Laden’s death, terror warnings were raised for United States citizens around the globe. Almost everyone has long-since ceased to care about the color levels, but we were certainly in a red zone – the meaning of which has long since lost any impact on day-to-day activities. The logic behind the warnings is simple: we killed bin Laden, so his followers will be looking for revenge. What seems so peculiar is that these news alerts are a shockingly clear-headed acceptance on the part of the United States government of how our violent actions spawn more of the very violence they attempt to remedy. Borges’ mirror allegory, relayed by Baudrillard, is an important one because it acknowledges the ways in which actors in conflict “reflect” the actions of their others: it could be said clearly that both state and non-state terrorism often operate on a tit-for-tat basis. Terrorist attacks are usually done for impact, yes, but also in response to a perceived wrong. The Baader-Meinhof cell was predominately concerned with the American war in Vietnam, bin Laden with US military action in the Middle East and support for Israel, Al Qaeda Iraq for the violence done during the Second Iraq War – the examples could go on. Yet as interest in bin Laden’s death fades slowly away, as it undoubtedly will, so too will our reflectiveness on the impact of American violence on the world. It will become just another background to our “normal lives” – an epistemic wallpaper of sorts. After all: the war on terror – which is now taboo to refer to in those terms – will go on, with or without Osama. And this lack of reflectiveness has dramatic impacts that should not go unconsidered:

These “casualties” are meant to be nothing more than necessary accidents: yet it is precisely the “necessary accidents” of a history of state terrorism that need to be interrogated most forcefully. For Paul Virilio, these accidents, magnified on a globalized scale, have become defining features of the 21^st century experience: “There is an increasingly present cumulative reality related to a sudden globalization in which accidents and terrorist attacks have merged to become an anonymous undeclared war” (Virilio 2002). Counter-terrorism is, as even its clearest supporters will admit, an imperfect science: “We see these cycles renewed with every Predator drone that takes out the wrong target, with every wrong door that gets broken down in pursuit of the ‘bad guys.’ When war becomes the first rather than the last means to achieve security in the new global disorder, what one technologically can do begins to dominate what one legally, ethically, and pragmatically should do” (Der Derian 2010). When we become complacent and forgetful of the violence wrought by state terrorism alongside non-state terrorism, we elide over these “accidents.” And while it is undoubtedly important to not lose track of the macro-level violence – in critical theory as well as policy analysis, fields that share much more in common than is often thought – instances of micro-level violence that are easily lost and ignored are critically important. Not only because we lose track of the role that states play in clear instances of state terrorism – Dresden, Hiroshima, Cambodia, etc. – but because we also begin to ignore state terrorism with vaguer origins and intentions. We run the risk of theorizing our situation as one in which “normality is reduced to a harmonic stasis, continuously interrupted by sudden outbursts of inexplicable violence” (Policante 2010). Žižek made this argument forcefully in Violence:

While the clear forms of violence – subjective violence done by an identifiable actor – are often most noticeable, it is frequently those more insidious and more invisible forms of violence – objective violence – that cause the most suffering:

To bring the spotlight of analysis back to the state and its relation to terror is to firmly state that these instances of violence – with culprits both identifiable and not – all too often have origins in the state.

The immediate response of many commentators, particularly on the right but also the left, to the arguments that the United States is bringing violence alongside its supposed “democratic ideals” is that our mission is a civilizing one: democracy does not come easy, but it is a gift that will ensure peace for centuries. A great deal of historical evidence about the viability of the democratic peace theory indicates that it does not usher in peace wherever it appears. Peace theory has difficulty explaining numerous violent conflicts between democracies: the Spanish-American War, Continuation War, Paquisha War, French-Thai War, Finnish-UK War, and the Kargil War are just a few (Nisley 2008). The fact that there is no time span or data sample for democratic peace theory amplifies the lack of verifiability behind it. Far from establishing non-violence, it often increases the likelihood of conflict, especially in transition:

Yet commentators remain tied to the idea that wherever American democracy raises its head, peace and stability ensues. Why? There is a tendency to assume that the American experience is universally applicable and the same as the experience of other states and individuals. As this paper has argued, there is a parallel national tendency (bordering on an obsession) to employ violently cathartic responses to trouble. Again and again, the government, with the people’s backing, seeks violent revenge for trauma, partly under the general idea that it is American interests and actions that are the primary drivers of international events:

With Osama’s killing, the Obama administration risks giving him exactly what he and the terrorists of the world wanted: the violence that drives their terroristic responses ever farther. A related issue seems to be the question of whether anyone in the United States government truly expected or planned to capture bin Laden. The evidence points to the contrary: that the highest-skilled military unit in the United States military could not safely apprehend an old man who was unarmed seems dubious at best. So it was most likely a targeted killing – fitting in squarely to the US counter-terror rubric of killing our way to meaning. But do we really expect to scare the terrorists into submission? In a contest of terror, the liberal, democratic system seems, at least hopefully, handcuffed and permanently one step behind.

Obama has admitted that the war on terror is far from over. How could it ever end? At what benchmark could victory finally be declared? For a while it seemed that capturing bin Laden was that benchmark, but we’re now past it with no signs of slowing. It seems quite the opposite: we’ve only sped up. Will we begin to slow down when violence has disappeared? A laudable goal, perhaps, but unlikely. Where will the “Mission Accomplished” banners for the Global War on Terror fly from? The failure of violence in bringing about the stability and end the United States so desperately craves calls into question the strategies that were employed to bring bin Laden to justice. This is where Critical Terror Studies stages its most crucial intervention: conventional Terrorism Studies have, for a long time, merely acted as institutional and intellectual support for the policies of the status quo:

Yet again and again, failure after failure, we continue to believe that more violence will end terror. It would be a mistake to act as if the United States has not repeatedly made benchmarks in the war on terror: jubilant news stories greeted the success of drone attacks in killing Al Qaeda deputies, zealous senators shout about the success of our overseas torture facilities in helping to pull out critical secrets; and now, to top them all off, Osama bin Laden is dead. Yet as we pass each landmark in the war against terror, what and who we are fighting gets fuzzier.. New cells emerge out of the sands of war – very literally in the case of Iraq – and new enemies rise up against America’s overstretch of global law – in the form of rival states and actors. Perhaps, then, Gandhi’s message is pertinent here: “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” Perhaps a critical approach to terrorism must found itself in an objection to the immediate violence of counter-terrorism. Violence of even the best intentions has the tendency of begetting more violence, and often in terrifyingly escalatory ways. The American violence of the War on Terror is not, however, violence without intention: that intention is clear enough. The United States seeks to root out terrorism wherever its nasty head appears: to kill our way towards a meaning that we so often feel we’ve lost (Vietnam Syndrome, Gulf War Syndrome, etc.).

In the same way that the War on Terrorism contains a strongly symbolic component, its killing is not directed at a present terrorism of identifiable actors: 9/11 made clear that to be prepared for terrorism meant to eliminate terrorism before it could exist. The population at large became potentially guilty: of harboring terroristic intentions, terrorists, or just conspicuous use of cell phones. And thus, if whole swaths of the population are all at risk of becoming-terrorist, the goal of successful counter-terrorism is to ensure that domestic actors don’t become real terrorists, a focus that has become ever more prevalent since 9/11. Given the difficulty in pinpointing the threat – what it looks like, where it might appear – we have all in a very real sense become potential terrorists. The task of the State is not to stop the already existing terrorist forces from acting, but to stop the not-yet-present terrorist inside all of us from surfacing (Vaughan-Williams 2009: 120). Derrida calls the problem of terrorism and the responses to it one of autoimmunity:

Indeed, in our obsessive attempts to eliminate the “evil” in the world – first the Soviets, which caused us to arm and train bin Laden and his followers, and later the terrorists, the unintended results of which we are yet to discover – we have laid the foundations for a globalized becoming-terrorist in places beyond our expectations. A becoming-terrorist of not just the “Islamic extremists” but all those whose lives have been hopelessly, perhaps needlessly, perturbed and ruined because of post-9/11 American interventionism. Our frenzied autoimmune response to terrorism has locked the United States into an endless succession of terroristic violence.

State Terrorism Assemblages

Instead of this attempt to fill the voids of meaning with violence, 9/11 might have provided us an opportunity to reflect upon this history of United States conflict. It would be short-sighted to ignore a historical record of mistakes (like the coup d’état in Iran in the 1950s that set the stages for the fundamentalist government that we now see as the greatest threat to stability in the Middle East). Walter Davis writes in his book Death’s Dream Kingdom that:

That there were pre-Hiroshima acts of state terrorism seems clear enough: one immediately thinks of the Holocaust, the fire bombings of Tokyo, and bombing of Dresden. Thus Davis’s move to locate a broader societal psychology inside the effects of Hiroshima seems overly simplistic. For state terrorism is clearly not a monolith – it is instead the creation of many distinct and connected instances of state violence, large and small, widespread and highly localized. It is co-constitutive of, and developed on a roughly parallel track with, the anti-state violence that has assumed the mantle of “Terrorism” in contemporary discourse. Thus, Davis’ unicausal and historicized understanding of the trauma of state terrorism runs a risk of over-determining the historicity of terrorism itself. Unlike Davis, I want to locate this inescapable trauma not in a single historical event, but in the multiplicity of violence created by the United States around the globe and across history. Instead of following Davis in pinpointing a single historical situation, I want to begin to understand the trauma of Hiroshima, symbolic of, but inseparable from, the trauma of state terrorism, as a series of strains and links, each adding onto a larger body. To theorize state terrorism in this way leads us away from seeing it as a product of a specific time or place, but as a body, cancerous in many ways, spreading its tendrils and infecting the various apparatuses of government and society. State terrorism is an assemblage in the Deleuzian sense – it is composed precisely of “states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs” (Deleuze). Trying to locate the “origins” of a traumatic relation to state terrorism may be an error.  To see state terrorism as an assemblage is to see it as an interrelation of bodies and actions, of enunciations, and crucially of terroritorializations and deterritorializations. Adrian Parr locates a critique of Davis in precisely this Deleuzian vain:

To theorize state terrorism and its traumatic attachments and affects as an assemblage, then, allows us to decouple state terrorism from the distinctly historical and subjective relations that Davis sees, and to expose ourselves to a wider appreciation of the affectual relations created by this trauma, as well as the series of bodies and territorializations/deterritorializations that are constitutive of state terrorism. This was already Deleuze’s critical task in A Thousand Plateaus. The power of the notion of assemblages is to move questions away from the behavior of individual subjects to the connective tissues that underwrite these behaviors: to ask what it is that makes heterogeneous elements stick.

I do not want to reject Davis completely, however. What he indicates so clearly is our fundamental role in the creation and continuation of terror on a global scale, and the American ability to repeatedly forget. Bush was clearest on his feelings about history: who needs it? The wars that followed 9/11 were, in many ways, attempts to evacuate the guilt for our history of violence – perhaps most clearly exemplified in the horrors of Hiroshima – but also in a laundry list of overseas contingency operations and military conflicts, in the genocide against the Native American peoples, in our own bloody civil wars. Again and again, American foreign policy finds its “wars on terror” that are said to hold out the possibility of resolving the unspoken anxiety about our past, present, and future. But that anxiety – always-already growing larger, making further connections, spreading – cannot be resolved so easily, and certainly not through violence. For Puar, “after considering the connection between trauma and remembrance it becomes apparent that it is not so much a matter of deciding upon whether or not one memory is more accurate than another; rather we need to begin to address the authenticity conditioning the truth of memory and it is this authenticity wherein lies the utopian force of traumatic memory” (Parr 2008). Contra Davis, the focus on memory in particular historical moments creates a memory fanaticism of sorts:

It is this fantasy of images and memory that Terrorism Studies in particular is guilty of: “The problem … is the deterritorializing force of the raw material of memory that is turned into common property through the endless repetition of the same images and memory connections…. When trauma in all its concrete actuality is unavailable the drives find investment in the image, producing images of gratification” (Parr 2008). As Jackson makes so clear, it endlessly repeats and re-uses justifications so that they form a self-propelling machine of thought. The images of glorification – Bush on the carrier, “Mission Accomplished” – have a particularly privileged role in the way the media and public relate to terrorism and counter-terrorism. So perhaps, as James Der Derian makes clear, September 11 was “not so much the cause as the occasion for a transformation that had its beginnings much earlier in the art of warfare, the politics of identity, and the information revolution” (Der Derian 2010). If we are to engage state terrorism as an assemblage, not localizable to particular historical moments, but instead made up of connections, affects, bodies, and enunciations, it’s clear that “overcoming” that trauma is not possible and that attempting to kill our way towards meaning beyond that trauma is futile. The adventurist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made evident that an external quest to eliminate terrorism would serve only to overstretch capacity, not to eliminate every possible instantiation of it. I caution against viewing the relationship of the United States to terrorism in what might be the predominant, postmodern straw man lens of “the American West is the cause of all violence in the world.” That viewpoint is naïve and ignores the role that individuals play and the ways singular decisions can have snowballing impacts on global events. It mirrors, in many ways, the neoconservative view of American hegemony – the two positions differ only in their perspective on the positivity of the results. But it is even more naïve to expect that the continued violence by our counter-terrorism forces across the globe, by our secret detention and torture facilities, and by neoliberal economic policies that target the poor will ever create a meaningful peace. It is autoimmunity that makes the body most vulnerable.

“We Got the Fucker!”

On the eve of the Gulf War, French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote that the Gulf War would not happen. Baudrillard was mocked for his predictions about First Gulf War when it became obvious that there was in fact a ground invasion happening in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq. Yet even after the war, Baudrillard stuck to his story: the Gulf War did not happen. Commentators on both sides of the spectrum ridiculed the philosopher for what they saw as a denial of reality — of course the Gulf War happened: tanks were on the ground, planes flew across the sky, and soldiers stomped through the desert. Critics immediately jumped onto Baudrillard’s vocabulary to prove that he had become lost in a world of images; that his concept of the simulacra had caused him to refuse reality entirely. Yet that response fails to give Baudrillard the credit he deserves as a theorist:

For Baudrillard did not reject the reality of the conflict: the Gulf War did happen physically. But was it a war? No. It was a massacre in the desert that attempted to create meaning for American foreign policy; to give it a new goal; to provide an escape from the desert of meaning inside ourselves. It attempted all of those things and succeeded at none. Yet this search for meaning is one that still continues today: it continues in the image of the global war on terrorism, in the wars fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere in events large and small across the globe. This is, precisely, the lesson one should gain from Baudrillard’s criticism of the Gulf War:

Contemporary war and intervention are both driven, and simultaneously undermined, by a narcissistic search for meaning and purpose. From the 1991 Gulf War, through the pursuit of armed humanitarianism in the Balkans and elsewhere, to the latest ‘non-events’ of the war on terror, the Western military has been sent into action against fake enemies whose defeat, it was hoped, could prove that the West must be engaged in a meaningful and important mission. Ultimately, as suggested above, these attempts have been unsuccessful: even their supporters have been unable to convince themselves that such wars are fully ‘real’. Instead what is revealed is the West’s own internal conflict, sense of vulnerability and self-doubt. (Hammond 2008)

We are at war: that much may be acknowledged. But what if so much of the time the enemy that we are really fighting is ourselves? The state terrorism assemblage that haunts the War on Terrorism will not be so easily forgotten, nor will violence ever excuse the lives lost from state terrorism or counter-terrorism. When Terrorism Studies, the media, and the government play with the fantasy of 9/11 – repeating its images, reinforcing its lessons, insisting upon violence as the necessary response – we become locked onto the path of continued violence and we forget about the trauma of state terrorism.

How do we respond to bin Laden’s death? That question, I think, prefigures that there is a “correct” answer. Bin Laden is dead, and even Al Qaeda has been forced to admit it. But will his death usher in peace? No. The outlook for the future looks as bleak as before, even if we have been able to rid ourselves of one of the great symbolic figures of evil of the 21st century. A Baudrillard interview shortly before his death is once again relevant:

Killing Osama may have eliminated one of the prime physical manifestations of terror, but it could not resolve the symbolic aspect of terrorism in its multi-dimensionality – in many ways, it could not kill, and seriously underestimated the power of, the state terrorism assemblage. In a discussion with British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the comedian Jon Stewart makes a very similar point:

Are we condemned to living with violence? If human history is any indication, the answer is, in some sense, yes: terrorism qua resistance to power will never be entirely eliminated. It is a natural response to predominance that has appeared again and again throughout history. However, we can change the ways we respond to terrorism so as to mitigate the impact and possibility. That process begins in taking responsibility for the violence of state terrorism, in beginning to trace a disparate series of affective connections between the many historical and social occurrences of terrorism: in short, it requires slowing down counter-terrorism. Slowing down counter-terrorism not in the sense of some technical manipulation of strategy and technology, but instead in evaluating alternate possibilities for counter-terrorism. Not letting “soft power” do the work that “hard power” is currently doing – but in many ways critically embracing the traumatic history of state terrorism. To insist upon continuing on a path of violence will never take us where we want to go. Yes, “We killed the fucker!” but along the way we’ve killed thousands of “innocents” just like those who died on 9/11.   How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died? Meanwhile, the state terrorism assemblage keeps growing.

There is no way that a sentence that starts with “While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway…” is going to end up anywhere that any civilized person wants to be.

(on a Jerusalem Post article here, via Robert Farley @ Lawyers Guns and Money)

In a 1939 radio address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated that “repetition does not transform a lie into truth.” Nearly seventy years later, it is miraculous how his words seem tailor-made to rebuke the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq. Before the invasion, the American people were told repeatedly that Iraq represented a direct danger to our interests — Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (not really), Saddam had strong connections with al Qaeda (ouch, wrong again) — and 933 other Bush administration lies and canards (Jumping Jesuits, Batman!). Sorry George, we aren’t studying for a Graves test; repetition doesn’t work like that. As if Bush would know anyways. The last time he studied something he was trying to understand the deeper meaning of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

In 2003, swept up in post-911 patriotic fervor, citizens of the United States were willing to accept any drastic steps deemed necessary to defeat the “terrorists.” Billed as the Pepto-Bismol for world stability, Iraq was that step. Five years later, we’ve created more terrorists than ever existed before, we are faltering in our mission in Afghanistan, and increasingly Iraq looks like a colossal imbroglio from which we will never escape. I may differ from the “loyal Bushies” and other right-leaning acolytes, but I refuse to accept that supporting a blatantly colonial war in a country that Ms. South Carolina couldn’t even point out on a map is representative of “American” ideals. Considering the loss of American lives that President Bush’s project has wrought, the only appropriate American stance on the war in Iraq is to stand firmly against it. I, therefore, agree with leading Democrats (and many Republicans) for a phased withdrawal from Iraq. Let’s elaborate, shall we?

So What’s the Plan?

A friend told me that the problem with the Iraq war is that there is no clear exit. I agree, anonymous friend. We are lost in the consequences of American superiority: in our innocence and beliefs in America’s exceptionalism inculcated since kindergarten, we are lost in a pre-Vietnam confidence in our own power. There will be no easy exit strategy. True. But there will also be no clear victory. At what point can we declare that “we” have won? When Iraq becomes the 51st state? We are in over our heads as a nation; and sadly, no action in Iraq will foster a miraculous hegira back to glory, nor will they win us allies and supporters around the world. We need to stop kidding ourselves – Iraq will never be the secular nation we are attempting to create, because religion and Islam are too important to its culture and history. Thus, the best strategy is withdrawal. As the expression goes, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  Let’s get going. Barack Obama proposes a 16-month full withdrawal from Iraq. But let’s clear up a common misconception about such a withdrawal – we aren’t abandoning the Iraqis in a torrent without an umbrella. The Obama plan mandates soldiers to stay in Iraq and to protect embassies and diplomats. If al Qaeda should attempt to create a stronghold in Iraq once we are gone, U.S. forces stationed in Iraq will carry out strikes on their terrorist positions. “But Brad,” you say in an insouciant voice. “Why would we want to take our soldiers out of Iraq?” Fearless reader, I’m glad you asked….

Just Like Governor Spitzer’s Hookers, Iraq’s Been Costly

Every war requires an honest evaluation of the costs of battle in comparison to the benefits. From the first days of shock and awe to 2008 (Wait, the mission was accomplished in May 2003? Right?), more than 95,000 Iraqi civilians have died. And 4,031 American soldiers have lost their lives thousands of miles away from their families, friends, and homeland. We cannot eschew these statistics or their implications unless we are willing to complacently and naively hand over our lives (and those of Iraqis) to a government in Washington willing to “sacrifice” them on what now seems like a whim.

For those as concerned about money and our economy as about the loss of American lives, the economic costs of this war effort have been equally staggering. The Iraq war has cost the U.S. of A. nearly one trillion dollars. If you consider the impecunious state of the American economy and then imagine adding a booster shot of one trillion dollars back into our economy, the picture becomes clearer and a hell of a lot brighter.

Just Like the Pope at a Tech N9ne Concert, We Shouldn’t Be There

The U.S. invasion of Iraq must also be examined on the basis of international legality. The invasion not only violated the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, but also a majority of international laws. The United States scoffed in the face of The Hague and Geneva Conventions, “which clearly restrict the right of occupying powers to interfere in the internal affairs of an occupied people” (Arnove 68) and quickly assumed the undisputed distinction of “World’s Largest Hypocrite.” We scold China about its human rights abuses and tell the government of Darfur not to wage war against its own people,  while we occupy a sovereign nation in the name of their freedom and ignore a host of  international legal standards.

Just Like Tipsy, Trigger-Happy Security Guards, We’re Aren’t Making Anyone Safer

Recent studies suggest that the American occupation of Iraq has increased, rather than decreased, the number of terrorists (Arnove 76). While accomplishing the opposite of his plans may be a Bush trademark, as a nation, America does not have to continue down this path. Al Qaeda didn’t show up in Iraq until after the invasion, and any ostensible links between Saddam and bin Laden have been proven incorrect. Once George W. Bush leaves office, Osama bin Laden will no longer have an “old, neo-conservative president” to direct his hatred at, and Sunni fighters in Iraq will no longer seek intiqaam (revenge) for the destruction wrought on their families, friends, and property. Once we withdraw from Iraq, the terrorism and insurgency will slowly cease.

Many proponents of continuing the war argue that withdrawal will lead to a regional civil war. These people (who will not, by the way, be joining the army because they have “more important things to do”) obviously don’t read the newspapers. The longer our forces stay in Iraq, the more resistance our occupation breeds. As American forces leave, the predominately-Shiite government has the opportunity to rule without the stigma of being seen as “puppets” of foreign “infidels.” Sunnis would be more likely to meet with Shiite leaders and begin the needed reconciliation process (Nir Rosen). Some proponents of the war insist that al Qaeda would create a stronghold in the region if the U.S. were to withdraw. This is less likely than finding the Golden Ticket. Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups make up a numerically insignificant part of the insurgency. Often overlooked but crucially important is the fact that there are other Middle Eastern nations, and they can serve as regional watchdogs to keep Iraq in check. Iran, Syria, Egypt, and even Israel, all see a peaceful, militarily prostrate Iraq as beneficial to regional stability – and can invest in making sure that happens. Were Iraq to fall into civil turmoil, these nations would ensure minimal fallout. It’s in their vested interest to do so.

Just Like Nixon, You Can’t Cheat The System And Maintain Power

The war in Iraq has damaged our reputation as a nation and as a world power. Much of America’s influence in the international arena lies in what has been termed soft power. “[Soft power] is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies” (Joseph Nye). Iraq has permanently damaged America’s reserves of soft power. The impact is clear and visible to us all. A homeless man whom I asked for a quote for this article told me that the best way to win an election is to have the most friends. Wise words, sir. In an era where the United States must increasingly compete for the role of international “hegemon” in a global contest with a rapidly growing China and expanding European Union, friends become of the utmost importance. Iraq alienated not only Middle Eastern nations, but European and African nations as well. We must rebuild the trust of these nations to strike up lasting military, economic, and political ties. Withdrawing from Iraq is the first, and most critical, step in this process.