Ian Lustick | When the response is the catastrophe

The attacks on 9/11 were a tremendous insult to our collective psyche and to an American belief in our country’s absolute international security. Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives on that day, producing tens of billions of dollars of direct and indirect loses to our economy and devastating effects on the families and friends of those killed by the al Qaeda terrorists. But as heavy as those losses were, they are much less serious than the damage inflicted on our country by its own reaction to those attacks.

In response to 9/11, the U.S. government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq was defined as the “central front in the War on Terror.” Nearly 5,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq; another 32,000 have been mutilated. The deaths of another 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been documented along with thousands of casualties of U.S. allies. According to Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Iraq War alone cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion. The war deeply divided the country, distracted it from urgent economic and social problems and inflicted incalculable damage to American credibility and prestige abroad.

The War in Afghanistan has cost more than $800 billion, has inflicted more than 1,700 fatalities on American military personnel and drags on with no satisfying end in sight. Millions of American families torn or bankrupted by prolonged and repeated deployments cast a pall of sadness and desperation in towns and cities across the country. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted on a whirlwind of unnecessary, even hysterical and certainly annoying “counter-terrorism” measures.Added to all these insults delivered to the American body politic by the War on Terror is the reduction in our privacy and restrictions on our civil liberties associated with the “Patriot” Act’s techniques of blanket surveillance and incarceration of “suspects.”

In many ways the War on Terror resembles the Spanish Flu. This great pandemic of 1918 killed 50 million human beings. Shockingly, young, healthy and productive people died in larger numbers than the old, sick or weak. Why? Scientists now know that what inflicted most of this damage was not the disease itself, but the disproportionate and overwhelming immune reaction it triggered in those it infected. Just as al Qaeda used American planes to destroy the twin towers and then goaded Americans into a self-destructive, out-of-scale reaction, so did the Spanish flu turn its victims’ own strength against them.

But we should be careful not to accept this analogy too completely. The overextension of American power, including wars in the Middle East and South Asia that have inflamed the hearts of millions of Muslims, was a part of Osama bin Laden’s plan. As one of his top lieutenants, Saif al-Adel, put it, “The Americans took the bait and fell into our trap.” But this plan did not have to work. American leaders could have used the unity that rose in our country in response to the attacks to build and burnish an American society whose commitments to freedom and a better life for all its people could have protected our security without serving the long-run interest of the jihadis in draining our resources and alienating the Muslim world from western influence. Instead, a powerful and well-positioned cabal of neoconservative politicians, ideologues and bureaucrats seized the moment to capture the mind and imagination of a weak and ill-informed president. Determined since the mid-1990s to launch a war against Iraq and then other members of the “Axis of Evil,” the members of this group sought, in their own words, to establish conservative rule in the United States for a century by replacing the socio-economic agenda of the Bill Clinton years with what they called a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy — a “heroic” campaign to “destroy monsters” around the world and establish “benevolent hegemony” of U.S. power through the sustained and unilateral use of overwhelming military force.

To mount this campaign they launched what they thought would be a quick, glorious and profitable war in Iraq. But to mobilize support for this war they needed to mobilize the fury and fear Americans felt in reaction to 9/11. Since Iraq was not behind the attacks, they achieved their objective by declaring a worldwide and essentially permanent “War on Terror” in which every country not actively “with us” would be considered “against us,” and thus subject to preemptive attack. The War in Iraq quickly became politically toxic. But the War on Terror promoted to make the War in Iraq possible took on a life of its own as businesses, politicians, the media, Hollywood and even universities trumpeted the hair-raising slogans associated with it and found ways to feed in the vast trough of counter-terrorism and homeland security expenditures.

We are making progress. Ten years later, many Americans have learned the bitter truth of how overblown has been the “terrorist threat” and how wasteful and destructive has been the War on Terror. We no longer hear government officials using the rhetoric of permanent war. Al Qaeda is on the ropes. Bin Laden is dead. Terrorists still threaten us and always will. Therefore we must remain vigilant, not by means of a “war,” but by using our legal institutions, our normal law enforcement mechanisms and covert resources when absolutely necessary. We must learn that the only potential enemy powerful enough to seriously hurt us is ourselves. If we do not learn that lesson, another al Qaeda-type attack could once again result in the kind of crippling, self-induced catastrophe we have known as the War on Terror.

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