Tom Engelhardt: The United States of Fear

When George W. Bush and his cronies decided to sally forth and smite the Greater Middle East, they exulted that they were finally “taking the gloves off.” And so they were: aggressive war, torture, abuse, secret imprisonment, souped-up surveillance, slaughter, drone wars: there was no end to it. When those gloves came off, other people suffered first. But wasn’t it predictable—since wars have a nasty habit of coming home—that, in the end, other things would come off, and sooner or later they would be on you: your hat, your shoes, your belt, your clothes, and of course, your job, your world?

The imposition of more draconian safety and security methods is, of course, being considered for buses, trains, and boats. Can trucks, taxis, cars, and bikes be far behind? After all, once begun, there can, by definition, be no end to the search for perfect security. And what happens when the first terrorist with a suppository bomb is found aboard one of our planes? After all, such weapons already exist.

You must have a friend who’s extremely critical of everyone else but utterly opaque when it comes to himself. Well, that’s this country, too.

Here’s a singular fact to absorb: we now know that a bunch of Yemeni al-Qaeda adherents have a far better hit on just who we are, psychologically speaking, and what makes us tick than we do. They have a more accurate profile of us than our leading intelligence profilers undoubtedly do of them. In November 2010 they released an online magazine laying out just how much the two U.S.-bound cargo-bay bombs that caused panic cost them: a mere $4,200 and the efforts of “less than six brothers” over three months. They even gave their plot a name, Operation Hemorrhage (and what they imagined hemorrhaging, it seems, was not American blood, but treasure).

Now, they’re laughing at us for claiming the operation failed because, reportedly thanks to a tip from Saudi intelligence, those bombs didn’t go off. “This supposedly ‘foiled plot,’” they wrote, “will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. That is what we call leverage.” They are, they claim, planning to use the “security phobia that is sweeping America” not to cause major casualties, but to blow a hole in the U.S. economy. “We knew that cargo planes are staffed by only a pilot and a copilot, so our objective was not to cause maximum casualties but to cause maximum losses to the American economy.”

This is a new definition of asymmetrical warfare. The terrorists never have to strike an actual target. It’s not even incumbent upon them to build a bomb that works. Just about anything will do. To be successful, they only have to repeatedly send things in our direction, inciting the Pavlovian reaction from the U.S. national security state, causing it to further tighten its grip (or grope) at yet greater taxpayer expense.

In a sense, both the American national security state and al-Qaeda are building their strength and prestige as our lives grow more constrained and our treasure vanishes.

So you wanna be safer? I mean, actually safer? Here’s a simple formula for beginning to improve American safety and security at every level. End our trillion-dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Begin to shut down our global empire of bases. Stop building grotesque embassy-citadels abroad (one even has a decorative moat!). End our overseas war-stimulus packages and bring some of that money home. In short, stop going out of our way to tick off foreigners and then pouring our treasure into an American war machine intent on pursuing a generational global war against them.

Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan War until hell freezes over, keep the odd base or two in Iraq, dig into the Persian Gulf region, send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk, and make sure those drones aren’t far behind. In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we’re eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we’re in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization. Insist that a single percent of risk is 1 percent too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel other­wise be dealt with punitively if they won’t shut up.

It’s a formula for leaving you naked in airports, while increasing the oppressive power of the state. And here’s the dirty, little, distinctly Orwellian secret: the national security state can’t do without those Yemeni terrorists, as well as our homegrown variety (and vice versa). All of them profit from a world of war. You don’t, however. And on that score, what happens in an airport line should be the least of your worries.

The national security state is eager to cop a feel. As long as we don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse and, in the end, our world will genuinely be in danger.

Is the Libyan war legal? Was Osama bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? Each of these questions would seem to call out for debate, for answers. Or perhaps not.

Now you couldn’t call me a legal scholar. I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in sixty-seven years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial). Still, I feel at least as capable of responding to such questions as any constitutional law professor. My answer: they are irrelevant. Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don’t begin to come to grips with twenty-first-century American realities. In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as symptoms of nostalgia for a long-lost republic. At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society.

It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. If, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a postlegal state. If so, Is it legal is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.

Of course, when it came to a range of potential Bush-era crimes—the use of torture, the running of offshore “black sites,” the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists to lands where they would be tortured, illegal domestic spying and wiretapping, and the launching of wars of aggression—it’s hardly news that no one of the slightest significance has ever been brought to justice. On taking office, President Barack Obama offered a clear formula for dealing with this issue. He insisted that Americans should “look forward, not backward” and so turn the page on the whole period. Then he set his Justice Department to work on other matters—such as defending (and in some cases expanding) Bush-era positions on executive power. But honestly, did anyone anywhere doubt that no Bush-era official would ever be brought to trial here for such crimes?

Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a thief caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, become a university professor, and appear regularly on Sunday talk shows.