“War on Terror” Led to Iran War, Gaza Genocide, and ICE Repression

Por Amy Goodman — Truthout

Trump posed as a “war on terror” critic, but he just waged it more violently and expansively, says Spencer Ackerman.

Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation .

“The ‘war on terror’ was always a construct to be waged, never quite to be ended.” We discuss the origins and impacts of the global “war on terror,” launched by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., with Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. “We saw, beginning at the very outset of the ‘war on terror,’ our leaders told us to understand 9/11 as an assault of a foreign civilization, one that had nothing to do with the consequences of American extractive and exploitative foreign policy in the Muslim world or its support for Israel.”

Ackerman says the “war on terror” and its repercussions have extended past U.S. ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to its current war on Iran, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the development of extensive surveillance architecture and state repression of Muslim minority groups around the world. “A whole lot of regimes around the world, rising powers looking for their own advantage, saw what the United States was constructing and realized they wanted that for themselves,” he says.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue to discuss the global legacy of the 9/11 attacks, we turn now to look at the devastating impacts of the decadeslong so-called war on terror, a series of wars launched in the name of those killed on September 11th, 2001. Just nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush declared the beginning of a war that would come to define the next 25 years of foreign policy. This is President Bush speaking before a joint session of Congress on September 20th, 2001.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. … From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush declaring the start of the so-called war on terror, September 20th, 2001.

We go now to Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning journalist and author of the book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the Forever Wars newsletter. His latest article the War on Terror went global and backfired on the United States for Zeteo is headlined “How the ‘War on Terror’ Went Global — and Backfired on the United States.”

Why don’t you explain that, Spencer?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Thank you, Amy. Good morning. Good morning, Nermeen. Really appreciate you having me on the show.

The “war on terror” was always a construct to be waged, never quite to be ended, that involved a tremendous violent exertion of American power as a demonstration effect to — on the theory that it would ward off the next 9/11. A whole lot of regimes around the world, rising powers looking for their own advantage, saw what the United States was constructing and realized they wanted that for themselves.

Eventually, that would be Vladimir Putin rejecting U.S. unipolar hegemony and deciding that much as the United States in Iraq wanted the ability to attack its adversaries before they had a chance to, you know, allegedly attack them, so, too, Russia would reserve that right for itself. We see that most recently in Ukraine.

In China, they looked at the Muslims of their Xinjiang province and decided they wanted to construct the same sort of panopticon and repressive apparatus of surveillance and reeducation. In their sense, we didn’t have that part here, but certainly the surveillance and the law enforcement repression of Muslims inside the United States.

And in Israel, they looked at the United States as going on an open-ended war against what, certainly subtextually, to very many, was on Islam, and said to themselves, “Finally, the United States is going to act the way we seek to act against the Palestinians.” And the long legacy of that is on display in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Spencer, you write in that same piece about going yourself to Israel in December 2001. If you could talk about what happened during that visit and what you were told by the people you spoke to?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Indeed. In 2001, in December, I went on a junket by the American Jewish Committee for college student journalists like myself. What we heard from Israelis of a variety of different stripes was that, finally, the United States understands what Israel has experienced. And they didn’t understand that — they certainly didn’t interpret that to us student journalists in any material sense — emerging from any historical context of the dispossession and land theft, over generations, of the Palestinian people, but instead interpreted Israeli history as the manifestation of 9/11, that this had been a religious conflict that admitted of no material solution and, accordingly, had no diplomatic settlement, the implication being that much as the United States was seeing itself justified as waging an open-ended war against Islam, so, too, the United States must support Israel in waging an open-ended conflict against Palestinians, that were defined by often the Islamic faith, erasing Palestinian Christian and other secular identities, but overwhelmingly a war not to be limited by American pressure.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Spencer, if you could talk about how 9/11 — the effects of 9/11 continue to reverberate today? Talk about the election of Trump and how it’s connected to 9/11 and what followed, as well as now another war of attrition in Iran.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Most certainly. We saw, beginning at the very outset of the “war on terror,” our leaders told us to understand 9/11 as an assault of a foreign civilization, one that had nothing to do with the consequences of American extractive and exploitative foreign policy in the Muslim world or its support for Israel. It was given that interpretation — it gave that interpretation to us in order to not question what U.S. foreign policy had been and what it was about to become.

Then it was a disaster. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became nightmares, and they were easy for a demagogue to attribute to the weakness of American elites that sought to limit this war against what they had already said was a marauding, rapacious and irrational foreign civilization. A great deal of its believers were already inside the United States, and that would justify a campaign of repression inside the United States against them and against other immigrants.

From the start, a nativist strain in American politics said that immigration was the handmaiden of terrorism and that the institutions that sought to restrict that response to evicting those immigrants, campaigns of surveillance and deportation, were essentially no better than the handmaidens of terrorism themselves, all of which contributed a great deal. It was almost like a hollowing out of American institutional capacity to inhibit nativism, that opened the door to people like Donald Trump.

And with all of the Trump and MAGA movement’s rhetoric of violence, it was, I would argue, inevitable that while they postured themselves as critics of the “war on terror,” they would simply wage it more violently and more expansively. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in Iran right now, and it’s what we’re seeing on our streets with ICE, a creation of 9/11, that is acting essentially like a death squad.

AMY GOODMAN: And in the last 20 seconds, President Trump now says, at his “Trumpapalooza” midterm national convention in Dallas, that the war will end right after the midterm elections. Your final comment, Spencer Ackerman?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Over the 25 years of the “war on terror,” various presidents have portrayed to the United States like they can control the consequences of the overwhelming violence they have unleashed. They’ve never been able to do so. They won’t be able to do so now.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning, National Magazine Award-winning reporter, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, also author of Forever Wars newsletter, speaking to us from Brooklyn, New York.

Independent media is a pillar of democracy and a powerful force for justice. We rely on reader support. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation to Truthout if you can.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Nermeen Shaikh is a broadcast news producer and weekly co-host at Democracy Now! in New York City. She worked in research and nongovernmental organizations before joining Democracy Now! She has a masters of philosophy from Cambridge University and is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power (Columbia University Press).

Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.

Truthout is a nonprofit, independent and funded by readers like you. While you’re here, please consider a donation of a few dollars to support our work.

Fonte: Truthout