Max Rodenbeck asks "How Terrible Is It?" in the newest NY Review of Books, reviewing two recent National Security Strategies and three book: this one by Harvard prof. Louise Richardson, Winning the Un-War by Carlos Peña, and Overblown by John Mueller.
Five years after George Bush launched America on a global crusade to "rid the world of evil," it is safe to say that the tide has turned. No, America is not winning, although some argue that it might be politic, at this juncture, to declare victory.[1] Nor is America necessarily losing, as others have asserted. What has happened instead is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.
This is not surprising. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for Americans to notice.
Rodenbeck’s review is some of the best, most basic criticism of this long rhetorical war that I have read in a while. The hollow foreign policy views that the US government publishes in National Security Strategies are easy fodder for rational disagreement: that a nuclear Iran would never actually strike the US "because it would risk annihilation in response," that "America poses a far greater threat to Iran than Iran does to the United States;" and that "perversely, it is this threat, more than anything else right now, that bolsters Iran’s oppressive and unpopular government." Or that Iraq and Afghanistan are "no more a ‘war on terror’ than were the American invasions of Grenada and Panama."
Rodenbeck summarizes many of the key points of Richardson’s terror scholarship. Here are two:
1. Terrorism is anything but new. Violence by nonstate actors against civilians to achieve political aims has been going on for a long, long time. The biblical Zealots known as the Sicarii used it against the Romans, as well as against fellow Jews, in the vain hope of provoking the Imperium to so extreme a response that they would foment a mass uprising. Following the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, the German radical Karl Heinzen published a tract, simply titled Murder, which advocated selective homicide as a spark to general revolt. Various groups soon put such ideas into practice. The Clerkenwell bombing of 1867, carried out by the Fenians, an Irish nationalist group, prompted a surge of hysteria in London reminiscent of the response provoked by September 11.
So, in later decades, did the wave of anarchist terrorism that swept Europe and the United States. Revolutionaries assassinated seven heads of state between 1881 and 1914. Paris suffered bomb attacks no fewer than eleven times between 1892 and 1894. In the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, Menachem Begin’s Irgun organization slaughtered scores of Palestinian civilians and British soldiers. The Israeli leader went on to share a Nobel Peace Prize.
11. Armies, in fact, often create more problems than they solve. When Britain sent its army into Northern Ireland in 1969 in response to the Troubles, it took just two years for the majority of Catholics, who were at first relieved by their presence, to turn against them. The turnaround for the US in Iraq was far shorter. During the seven months between September 2003 and April 2004, as Charles Peña reminds us in Winning the Un-War, the proportion of Iraqis saying that attacks on foreign troops were somewhat or fully justified leapt from 8 percent to 61 percent. This was exactly the period when a sudden surge in attacks on US forces, following the initial post-invasion calm, prompted vigorous counterinsurgency measures. That is all the time it took, it seems, for Iraqis to decide they did not like being searched, beaten up, shot at, jailed, and humiliated by American troops, whatever the reasons given. Recent polls show some 61 percent of Iraqis still approve of attacking the Americans, and 78 percent believe the US presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing."
