It is a strange and disturbing thing to notice that after 20 years, we do not have a neat and evocative phrase that can truthfully summarise what the United States has done to the world, and to itself, since 11 September 2001. The commonplace descriptor, used by the press and politicians, has been “The War on Terror”. Yet this is vague and euphemistic, as it is impossible to wage war on an emotion and even more difficult to declare victory in such a conflict.
Flushed with fervour, George Bush Jr initially wanted to describe his wartime actions as a “crusade”, but quickly backtracked, to the annoyance of his base. With the title of his 2011 book, the British foreign correspondent Jason Burke collected the various bombings, occupations and insurgencies under the banner of The 9/11 Wars, while “The Forever War” became popular as a means to convey the interminable emotional reality of what America’s renewed imperium represents. Yet both of these can only encapsulate what happened on foreign soil, and not what occurred within the borders of the world’s superpower.
The national security journalist Spencer Ackerman has a different suggestion: “If the United States is ever to recover from the destruction it unleashed not only on the world but on itself, and primarily on its most vulnerable, it must first understand the post-9/11 era as nothing other than a reign of terror.” This term reconfigures “terror” as something that was being inflicted as much as it was being “fought”. Moreover, it captures the kind of power developed by the Bush administration and inherited by its successors: a sacred consensus contemptful of any challenge.
A terse and vigorous primer on the last two decades, Ackerman’s new book maps the political and cultural trajectory of the Reign of Terror from September 2001 and Bush’s “shock and awe”, through Obama’s attempt to craft a “sustainable” war, up until the chaotic end of Trump’s presidency. The actions taken in the months and years after 9/11, he writes, “echoed the jihadism it sought to destroy: brutal, messianic, aggrieved, censorious, eschatological.” One might also add totalising, given that every institution of the state, all wings of the armed forces, the entire political and media class, sport, literature, music, television serials, cafeteria food, cut-price trinkets, bumper stickers, the judiciary and the education system were suborned to the vagaries of a conflict designed to be endless.
The all-seeing power of the NSA
Indeed, in the founding charters of the Reign of Terror – specifically the Patriot Act, defining the legal tools available to the state, and the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force, granting the president unlimited warmaking powers – no clear enemy was ever defined. “Precision was not something temporarily lost in the wake of [9/11],” Ackerman notes, “but was a fundamental obstacle to the emerging enterprise.” With these weapons in hand, the will to dominate was alluring, and for many of its victims, inescapable. Tucker Carlson, the rightwing shock-jock, ventriloquised many when he suggested that Iraqis, who had the singular bad taste to demand the freedom of their country, ought to “just shut the fuck up and obey”.
Between brief forays into the places which felt the weight of American might (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Mali and many others), Ackerman details the architecture of an internal regime of repression, roundups and the most penetrating digital panopticon ever built. Run by the NSA, the security state possessed (and still possesses) the capacity to collect any amount of information from anyone, anytime: “the first mathematically exponential violation of constitutional rights in American history,” as Ackerman puts it.
This surveillance behemoth was wedded to a regimented bureaucracy of assassinations and abductions, and a shadow regime of deniable “black sites” with their own trained-up torturers. “Being Muslim in public,” Ackerman writes, “was treated as a disreputable political act,” courtesy of the FBI and their vast network of informants, wiretaps, dragnets and legal threats. A programme of looting shifted $6 trillion to men in uniform and their auxiliary of mercenary “contractors”. And where did all of those tanks and armoured trucks, helicopters and grenade launchers later resurface? On American streets, often enough, to discipline protestors.
9/11 and the birth of the Trump administration
Throughout Reign of Terror, Ackerman makes a point of mentioning the figures who made their names in the 2000s and would later become superstars of the rolling controversies of the Trump years: Robert Mueller, James Comey, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Jim Mattis and so on. This is because the last third of Ackerman’s book makes the case that, by galvanising the Republican right and creating an unimpeachable administration of violence bolstered by liberal complicity, the Reign of Terror “produced” Trump’s presidency. “A war that never defined its enemy became an opportunity for the so-called MAGA coalition of white Americans to merge their grievances in an atmosphere of righteous emergency. That impulse unlocked a panoply of authoritarian possibilities.”
True, but not true enough. Missing from this analysis is the deep and morbid social crisis created by the Great Recession of 2007/08, which is under-examined in the book. Those “grievances” (real or imagined) were as much a product of the 9/11 era as they were the result of a class of Americans, badly hit by the economic crisis, feeling themselves to be increasingly precarious and alienated.
Nevertheless, Ackerman shrewdly observes that at critical moments when the Reign of Terror might have been calmed down or cut back, the Democratic Party and many of its supporters moved in the opposite direction, rushing to entrench the security state. When fears grew that Trump might enact a coup or anoint himself a dictator, when the worrying about the structural stability of American democracy reached its peak, who did they appeal to for redemption? The generals, the police, the intelligence “community”: in short, the Reign of Terror’s administrators who had done so much to threaten that democracy in the first instance.
There has been no reckoning, in other words. The machinery of the Terror was passed from Trump to Joe Biden fundamentally intact. We continue to live within the grip of what Ackerman stoutly calls “a perpetual-motion engine of death”.
This piece is from the New Humanist winter edition 2021. Subscribe today.
