Conjuring Up a Battlefront in the War on Terror
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Description
On September 11, 2001, a multinational team of hijackers struck the United States. In response, after “running out of targets” in Afghanistan, the United States invaded Iraq. To explain this swivel of the cannon, commentators often draw a sharp distinction between mere pretexts and the real reasons for the Iraq war. To bring along the American electorate, the administration initially drew on two powerful impulses, retaliation and self-protection. Many Americans supported the United States' invasion of Iraq, first, to avenge the 9/11 attack, and, second, to prevent the United States from being struck without warning by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) delivered by stealth to U.S. shores. When the feebleness of these two reasons for the war became evident, the administration switched to a “humanitarian” justification for the invasion, stressing America's moral obligation to overthrow a malignant dictator who had tortured and gassed his own people. To this purely humanitarian consideration, the invasion's apologists added a complicated theory about the contribution that an Arab democracy, imposed by American might, would make to U.S. security. Because the original rationales were so flimsy and the backstop rationales were so far-fetched, some critics have assumed that the real reasons for the war must lie elsewhere, in secret plans, such as setting up permanent military installations to facilitate swift access to Gulf oil infrastructures in case of a fundamentalist power grab in Saudi Arabia or deposing Saddam Hussein to improve the security position of Israel. But what if 9/11 itself had a decisive psychological impact on the interagency coalition that took the United States into war? The distinction between secret schemes to promote unspoken interests and official rationalizations designed to gull the public has a lot to be said in its favor. But a sharp appearance/reality dichotomy is probably too schematic in this case. More generally, the cynical use of disinformation provides no proof of underlying rationality. There is no reason why a successful manipulator cannot also be psychologically disturbed. Even a purveyor of bogus intelligence can sometimes commit himself to risky action on the basis of supposed evidence that he has not bothered to double-check simply because it neatly corroborates his preconceptions. In other words, the real motivations for the Iraq war may have resembled the public justifications more than is commonly believed. The former, too, may have included a sincerely held conviction that invading Iraq was an “appropriate” response to 9/11. The hawks' hidden thinking may have been just as clouded by fixation, autism, escapism, and tunnel vision as the rationales they improvised for public consumption. This would not be especially surprising, since immense power has never freed its wielders from hallucination.
Source Publication
World Order After Leninism
Source Editors/Authors
Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Morjé Howard, Rudra Sil
Publication Date
2006
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Conjuring Up a Battlefront in the War on Terror" (2006). Faculty Chapters. 798.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/798
