The seeds of the present war were not sown during 9/11, but half a century before and were nurtured by US policies.
"These deaths will haunt us as long as we live…"
I hope so.
It would be nice to believe that the President of the United States, or any other leader, is actually haunted by the deaths of civilians at the hands of the military he commands.
In this case, the President was referring to civilians killed by American drone strikes in the Middle East and Central Asia. It is impossible to know the precise number – critics put the estimate at 1,000 or even higher – and until now the US government has attempted to minimise the number by claiming most of the dead were combatants, based on the rationale that any military-age male hit by a drone was most likely a combatant and thus a legitimate target.
This is not the way you clear away ghosts.
Indeed, if the President has been haunted by civilian deaths, many of the ghosts are of the men he executed merely because they possessed a certain "signature" – the way they looked or where they were at a specific moment. Imagine the uproar if the President was targeting young black or hispanic men for harassment or arrest, never mind termination, merely because of the clothes they were wearing or corner they were hanging out on (or because they responded to someone being blown up down the block or were even at a funeral of an alleged gang member, all of which has happened to civilian victims of US drone strikes).
Of course, the President would never do that. But young Muslim men living in what to Americans are "the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth"; well, maybe all those strikes haunt him enough to want to process them with his fellow Americans to help clear the air, and even his conscience. But they do not seem to be haunting him enough for him to end the practice.
If the President's speech on May 23 at the National Defense University reflected an unusual and very public expression of ambivalence about policies that are still being pursued by his administration, the ambivalence remains largely at the level of rhetoric rather than policy. The "appropriate balance between our need for security and preserving those freedoms that make us who we are", which the President declares he is trying to strike, is one that can only be achieved by understanding precisely who the "we" are that the administration's actions are trying to "secure", and then determining whether this "we" actually represents the American people and whether its security is in fact the goal – or at the least, a likely outcome – of his policies.
Twilight histories
"And so our nation went to war."
If the President is haunted by his actions, a core reason is likely because he has not, and indeed cannot, provide the proper historical context for understanding the present policies and why they seem to be producing such animosity abroad and, increasingly, concern inside the US. While the President traces the present moment back "over two centuries", and reminds his listeners that Americans have always been "deeply ambivalent about war", he refuses to shine light on the decades of US policy that contributed to the present dynamics of the "war on terror".
Inside Story Americas – How effective are US drone strikes?
Instead, he merely refers to the "long, twilight struggle of the Cold War" as part of the "price [that] must be paid for freedom". But was the Cold War really a "twilight war"? Tell that to the roughly 95,000 American soldiers killed in Korea and Vietnam, not to mention the millions of Koreans and Southeast Asians killed by American forces. Or to the – literally – countless people killed, governments overthrown and conflicts stoked in proxy wars across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and, finally, Afghanistan.
If these were all twilight wars, what does the President consider to be war in the light of day?
Does President Obama really not understand that when he describes a "group of terrorists [coming] to kill as many civilians as they could", people around the world are more likely to think of al-Qaeda than the US? To say this in no way diminishes the evil of al-Qaeda and Muslim terrorism; far from it. Rather, it points to the reality that the seeds of the present war were not sown at the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11. They were planted half a century before and were nurtured (whether carelessly or deliberately is another matter) by US policies that for decades put terror in the hearts of people around the world.
That other countries – the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Mao's China, and on and on – also pursued and supported oppression, violence and terror at home and abroad does not change the reality that terrorism has been a core tool in the arsenal of US strategic policies, whether diplomatic or kinetic, for as long as it has been a "great power". Indeed, if we consider the crucial role played by the cleansing and near extermination of Native Americans and of slavery in the first centuries of American history, the use of large scale violence against civilians to advance the interests of elites is at the core of America's political and cultural DNA.
Of course, that does not make the US "exceptional" (as its leaders are so fond of saying). It makes it all-too normal a country. But when every leader in memory has defined the US as "exceptional" for precisely the opposite reasons to what in actuality makes it normal, the cognitive dissonance makes it nearly impossible for Americans to come to grips with the root causes of the present global conflict in which it is enmeshed.
Roots of the 'war on terror'
This is why, when the President argues that "And so our nation went to war. We have now been at war for well over a decade. I won't review the full history…" he won't review the full history because he simply cannot review the full history. To provide a full, or even a fuller, historical accounting of the roots of the "war on terror" and how they impact current US policies, would be to reveal the moral bankruptcy of the very policies Obama is, quite literally, sworn to uphold.
When he next argues that "these threats don't arise in a vacuum", the President ironically can only sustain this claim by creating an ideological vacuum in which to contextualise it. Thus he argues that:
"Most, though not all, of the terrorism we face is fuelled by a common ideology – a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West, and that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is justified in pursuit of a larger cause. Of course, this ideology is based on a lie, for the United States is not at war with Islam; and this ideology is rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, who are the most frequent victims of terrorist acts."
Of course the US is not at war with "Islam"; that is a straw man argument Obama, like his predecessor, is fond of deploying. But it is at war with millions of Muslims. What is more important here is that Obama, like Bush before him, is lying here: Most Muslim terrorism is not simply the product of a groundless and irrational ideology; it is a direct response to US and broader "Western" policies that either have directly oppressed, harmed and killed millions of people across the Muslim world, or supported governments that do so.
– Al Jazeera
