Guerra Infinita: Funções Ocultas - História Contemporânea (2024)

Prévia do material em texto

Endless War?Hidden Functions of the ‘War onTerror’David KeenPluto PressLondon • Ann Arbor, MIKeen00_prelims.qxd 13/02/2006 15:57 Page iiiFirst published 2006 by Pluto Press345 Archway Road, London N6 5AAand 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106www.plutobooks.comCopyright © David Keen 2006The right of David Keen to be identified as the author of this work has beenasserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 0 7453 2416 9 hardbackISBN 0 7453 2417 7 paperbackLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Curran Publishing Services, NorwichPrinted and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham andEastbourne, EnglandKeen00_prelims.qxd 13/02/2006 15:57 Page ivContentsAcknowledgements vii1. Introduction 1Aims and argument of the book 12. Fuel on the fire: predictably counterproductive tactics in the ‘war on terror’ 8Two models of terrorism 8Violence for a safer world? 11The doctrine of pre-emption 19Fuelling anger 23Anger in the targeted countries 25Anger outside the targeted countries 31Concluding remarks 483. War systems: local and global 51Introduction 51Insurgency and terror 54‘Counter-insurgency’ and ‘counter-terror’ 57Concluding remarks 804. Elusive enemies and the need for certainty 84Economic insecurity and the search for certainty 91Concluding remarks 955. The new witch-hunt: finding and removing the sourceof evil 96Devils and details: the neglect of reconstruction 107Concluding remarks 1136. The retreat from evidence-based thinking 115Concluding remarks 127Keen00_prelims.qxd 13/02/2006 15:57 Page v7. Action as propaganda 131‘Just world thinking’: might is right 132Making your predictions and assertions come true 137Concluding remarks 1438. Warding off the shame of powerlessness 145Violence as power 146Dependence and omnipotence 150Piggybacking US power 1579. Shame, purity and violence 160America ‘goes soft’: weakness, emasculation andimpurity 160Resisting those who ‘blame America’ for 9/11 170Counter-terror and the proliferation of enemies 177Conclusion 18710. Culture and magic 190US history and sense of mission 190Magic, consumerism and advertising 194Intellectuals 20111. Conclusion 210Notes 220Bibliography 270Index 279[ vi ]CONTENTSKeen00_prelims.qxd 13/02/2006 15:57 Page viAcknowledgementsAt LSE, I would especially like to thank Sue Redgrave, DrucillaDaley and Stephanie Davies, as well as Teddy Brett, Tim Allen andDennis Rodgers. I thank James Putzel in particular for helping tofund the research via the Crisis States Research Centre at DESTIN,LSE. For valuable episodes of intellectual exchange and input, Iwould particularly like to thank Clive Hall, Mark Duffield,Edward Balke, Freda Bear, Zoe Marriage, Thi Minh Ngo, AdekeyeAdebajo, Mats Berdal and the late Dominique Jacquin-Berdal. At Pluto, I warmly thank Debjani Roy, Robert Webb, JulieStoll, Melanie Patrick and most especially Anne Beech, as well asLiz Orme for the cover design. Big thanks, too, to Chris Carr atCurran Publishing, and to Stuart McLaren for meticulous copy-editing and Susan Curran for the index. And also to Joe Raedle forthe cover photograph. A huge thank-you to all my friends, and to mum, auntie Anneand the best sister in the world. My greatest debt is to my belovedwife Vivian for her constant love, kindness and support – and forher judicious advice and her faith in me throughout this project. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of DominiqueJacquin-Berdal. Her passing in January 2006 is a major loss toscholarship and to all who had the privilege to know her.[ vii ]Keen00_prelims.qxd 15/02/2006 12:28 Page vii1 IntroductionAims and argument of the bookCurrent tactics in the ‘war on terror’ are predictably counterproduc-tive. These tactics have included the use of military offensives tocombat terrorism: notably in the attack on Afghanistan, the attack onIraq and the heavy handed suppression of resistance and use ofcollective punishment inside Iraq. Torture has been used in Iraq,Afghanistan, Cuba and a range of other countries, and the Britishgovernment has taken the radical step of telling its diplomats they canuse information obtained through torture (as long as the torture isdone in some country other than Britain).1 International law – andoften the whole concept of the rule of law – has increasingly been setaside. The counterproductive effects of such strategies are set out inChapter 2.During the Cold War (and also before), a militaristic state-basedframework suggested that you could sensibly respond to threatswith war or the threat of war. But this framework, always risky andcostly, is now hopelessly out of date. This is because of the dangersposed by elusive and often decentralised international terrornetworks, by a proliferation of powerful weapons around the world,and by a type of violence that is continuously fuelled by widespreadfeelings of humiliation and anger, notably among many Muslims.These feelings in extreme cases have created a willingness to takeinnocent lives and to lose one’s own life in the process. The problemof weapons proliferation has been deepened when suicide-killershave turned even non-weapons like planes and skyscrapers intoinstruments of death.In these circumstances, trying to apply the old militaristic model tothe problem of terrorism is like trying to destroy a liquid with asledgehammer or a virus with a bullet. The idea of a centralisedenemy and the focus on states – both more plausible during the ColdWar – have been disastrously retained.2 Attacks on states are nowparticularly redundant and counterproductive. The growing impor-tance of sub-national and transnational dynamics, as Carl Conettanotes, means resentments can’t be sealed neatly within the ‘black box’of the nation state.3 And a militaristic approach to terror, apart from[ 1 ]Keen01_cha01.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 1being directly counterproductive, has also taken attention andresources away from other, more promising, approaches to dealingwith terrorism.Since terror is fuelled by anger and since terror networks are quitedecentralised, trying to physically eliminate terror and terrorists is notgoing to work. This lesson should already be clear from civil wars.4Today more than ever, we need to understand why non-state actorsparticipate in violence and how abusive counter-terror or counter-insurgency operations tend to fuel the fire of violence.Although it has become clear to most observers, including diplomaticand intelligence officials, that militaristic and abusive actions are provingcounterproductive, they have nevertheless been adhered to (and oftenwith renewed enthusiasm and ferocity). Why is this? Simply condemn-ing the tactics or pointing out that they are counterproductive providesno answers here; indeed, it deepens the puzzle. The bulk of statementsabout the ‘war on terror’ are concerned either with justifying recentactions (the approach of the US and UK governments and the US ‘neo-conservatives’), dismissing abuses as ‘mistakes’ or ‘failings’ (broadly, aliberal perspective), or (usually from the left) condemning the US-ledcoalition’s behaviour as immoral and counterproductive. However,trying to explain why these counterproductive tactics have been adoptedand retained is a rather different task, and may ultimately help in chal-lenging them. Since the US-led approach has not been based on facts somuch as on faith and power, it has exhibited a certain immunity toconventional empirical challenges; it is therefore particularly importantto explore its inner logic and the (deluded) beliefs thatNewsweek interviewedthree Iraqi resistance fighters in the summer of 2003 and noted, ‘Thefighters seemed able to move openly in Amriyah [some 30 miles east ofBaghdad], without fear that anyone might report them to the Ameri-cans’.135 The resistance fighters added that they had 5,000 armed fight-ers and were angry with US forces for the deaths, on 29 April 2003, of18 parents and children protesting the military occupation of theirprimary school in Fallujah. This was an incident that transformed thethreat to US soldiers, who had been largely safe in Fallujah and otherENDLESS WAR?[ 26 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 26cities north of Baghdad.136 The US military claimed US soldiers werereturning fire on gunmen in the crowd, but Human Rights Watch foundno ‘conclusive evidence’ of bullet damage on the school where USsoldiers were based.137 When four security contractors were killed andmutilated in Fallujah on 31 March 2004, there was massive retaliationby US marines against the city, killing perhaps 600–700. US command-ers claimed nearly all were legitimate targets, but local doctors saidmost were women, children and the elderly. US-led forces attackedagain in November 2004 and one week into the siege a BBC reporterput the unofficial death toll at 2,000. An estimated 36,000 homes weredestroyed in the devastated city.138Abuses by interrogators have been very widespread in Afghanistan,with many of those arrested having few provable connections to anyoutlawed organization. US officials have been torturing prisoners notonly at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but also at Bagram in Afghanistan andGuantanamo in Cuba.139 The CIA has been flying suspects to prisons inEgypt, Jordan and Syria where they have been tortured.140 In Iraq,arrests scooped up insurgents and non-insurgents alike, mimicking theindiscriminate choice of Iraq as a target in the first place. In an alarm-ing admission, coalition forces’ military intelligence officers estimatedthat between 70 and 90 per cent of those deprived of their liberty in Iraqhad been arrested by mistake.141 Mark Danner commented that giventhe paramount need for good intelligence, ‘arresting and imprisoningthousands of civilians in murkily defined “cordon and capture” raids isa blatantly self-defeating tactic.’142 Ill-treatment following capture inmany parts of Iraq was documented by the ICRC (InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross).143 With coalition forces’ casualties mount-ing, there was pressure to ‘break’ the prisoners and extract informa-tion.144 Well before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Newsweek reported:As many as 8,000 people have disappeared since Saddam’sregime collapsed, and many relatives are searching for answersabout their fate. More than 5,000 are in U.S. custody. … Thosewho have been detained are nearly always held incommuni-cado, without access to lawyers or even the right to contacttheir families. In most cases their loved ones can’t find outwhere they are. … Conditions are primitive. … A frequentpunishment is to make men kneel outside in the sun, whereafternoon temperatures exceed 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Thoseunder interrogation are subject to sleep deprivation, loudmusic and other methods the military believes stop short ofFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 27 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 27torture. Authorities even held a suspect’s wife and children ashostages until he turned himself in, which he did. … [O]ne RedCross delegate says [of the US authorities], ‘What they’re doingis completely illegal, and they know it.’145These atrocities – and especially those at Abu Ghraib – have fuelledanger in many Arab and Muslim countries as well as encouraging largenumbers of young men to take up arms across the Sunni belt of Iraq.146Atrocities by armed groups inside Iraq sometimes dramatised the linkswith US abuses: several captives were beheaded when dressed in aGuantanamo-style orange jump-suit. Abu Ghraib in particular musthave seemed to confirm extremists’ propaganda that depicted theWestern world as sexually immoral and decadent. Importantly, theshame extended far beyond those who were directly humiliated. Afterthe Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, an Iraqi woman in her mid-twenties –living in Baghdad and known on her website as ‘Riverbend’ – noted,‘We burn with shame and anger at frustration at not being able to dosomething.’147 One Iraqi civilian commented in April 2004, ‘Anyonewho does not fight will have a spot of shame on their face for genera-tions’.148 A young commander of Sunni insurgents, Abu Theeb, saidthat after the invasion of Iraq:I roamed the streets with a dagger in my pocket. I was tooashamed to come back home and see my family while Baghdadwas under the occupation, dead bodies and bullet shells every-where. … When the infidel conquers your home, it’s like seeingyour women raped in front of your eyes and like your religionbeing insulted every day.149Referring to ‘the trauma of occupation’, Scilla Elworthy commented, ‘Incultures where the concept of honour is profound, those who humiliateand dehumanize do so at their peril’.150 A young man at Fallujah toldjournalist Mark Danner in November 2003:For Fallujans it is a shame to have foreigners break down theirdoors. It is a shame for them to have foreigners stop and searchtheir women. It is a shame for the foreigners to put a bag overtheir heads, to make a man lie on the ground with your shoe onhis neck. This is a great shame, you understand? This is a greatshame for the whole tribe. It is the duty of that man, and of thattribe, to get revenge on this soldier – to kill that man. TheirENDLESS WAR?[ 28 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 28duty is to attack them, to wash the shame. The shame is a stain,a dirty thing; they have to wash it. No sleep – we cannot sleepuntil we have revenge. They have to kill soldiers.151A fourth problem with the proclaimed project of separating ‘military’and ‘humanitarian’ spheres is that the US-led coalition has repeatedlybeen tempted to manipulate the humanitarian project so as to boostthe military enterprise (and this in turn has reinforced the determi-nation of some local actors to disrupt the humanitarian project). Thecredibility of the USA’s ‘humanitarian’ project was not helped byprevious actions and inactions. Western interest in Afghanistan hadwaned in the 1990s with the end of the Soviet occupation and thenthe rise of the Taliban. Humanitarian needs were severely neglected,and by mid-2001 widespread famine conditions existed, with a deficitof over one million tons of food.152 In Iraq, sanctions had killedperhaps 500,000 children under five in the 1990s.153 While the eventsof 9/11 freed up humanitarian resources, the military and politicalmotivations were hard to miss.Bush and Blair tried to use humanitarian aid to show that they werehostile only to the Afghan and Iraqi regimes and had only good inten-tions towards civilians. However, civilian deaths were certain: not leastbecause of the tactic of high-altitude bombing. Some way had to befound to sugar the kill. As Bush put it when planning the Afghan war,‘Can we have the first bombs we drop be food?’154 Some of this aid wasindeed dropped from a great height, and may have exposed recipients todangers from mines.155 For the most part, the US media seems to haveenthusiastically embraced this feed-as-you-bleed approach. Yet the ideathat people will love you because you drop food as well as bombs isperhaps a strange one; the parallel is not exact, but it is not entirely clear,for example, that Osama bin Laden would have been forgiven fordestroying the World Trade Center had he decided simultaneously todrop food packages on the homeless of Chicago.156On 29 October 2001, Bush told his inner circle of security advisers inthe US National Security Council:We also need a public relations campaign focused around theTaliban. We need a donors’ conference [a conferenceof food aiddonor countries], someone who will organize it as an offset toRamadan [due in mid-November]. We need – how to get thecoalition something to hang its hat on when we continue thebombing during Ramadan. We need to have humanitarian helpFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 29 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 29during Ramadan, the likes of which Afghanistan has neverseen. We also need a political initiative in this time period.157With bombing planned for Ramadan, Bush added a note of culturalsensitivity: the United States should ease up on strikes during prayertime.158 Bush was ready to take this ‘sensitivity’ even further. At aNational Security Council meeting on 31 October, he said, ‘We need ahumanitarian donors’ conference as we head into Ramadan. We oughtto be calling on the Taliban to let trucks pass. And if they don’t, that willviolate the principles of Islam.’159In Afghanistan, food was useful not only in legitimising violence butalso as cover for military missions: a dual purpose also served by human-itarian aid in earlier conflicts in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan.160 On 6October 2001, there was a meeting of the National Security Council, witha video link to Bush at the Camp David retreat. Secretary of DefenceDonald Rumsfeld worried that bombers would be noticed leavingMissouri, and that since there were still 15 or more hours before theyarrived, the enemy might get valuable early warning of the comingattack. Bush replied, ‘Let them go. Try some disinformation.’ Rumsfeldin turn responded, ‘We’ll tell people they are full of food.’ 161 On theground, US soldiers in Afghanistan were soon to link relief distributionsto provision of information about the Taliban and al-Qaida.162The blurring of military and humanitarian agendas seems to haveconfused some key players who were instinctively distrustful of therush to war with Iraq. Most notably, Clare Short, a prominent critic ofBlair’s approach to war with Iraq, recalls that she nevertheless held onto her position as International Development Secretary during theattack on Iraq – in large part because she felt she was needed to lead theUK humanitarian and reconstruction effort.163Harnessing humanitarian operations to political agendas createdmajor problems for NGOs. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) did notaccept NATO funds and this helped it to operate, but many others inAfghanistan were taking USAID money while still wanting to be seenas neutral humanitarians.164 Despite MSF’s stance, the Talibanclaimed responsibility for the murder of five MSF workers in June2004, and a Taliban spokesman stated that ‘international aid workerswere working for the policy of America’.165 In July 2004, MSFannounced it was withdrawing from Afghanistan after 24 years.166Bush said humanitarian aid to Iraq was ‘an opportunity to change theimage of the United States’,167 while US Secretary of State Colin Powellcalled for NGOs to act as ‘a force multiplier to us … an important part ofENDLESS WAR?[ 30 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 30our combat team’.168 Journalist Peter Stothard, who spent 30 days withBlair from 10 March 2003 during the Iraq crisis, commented, ‘LabourMPs like “a Kofi plan”. “We’d better Kofi this” means we had betterobscure this bit of military planning with a good coat of humanitarianwaffle.’169 UN and NGO staff quickly became a target in occupied Iraq.Atrocities included the capture and killing of Margaret Hassan, directorof CARE International in Iraq. There was a widespread perception thatall assistance to Iraq was part of the US political agenda.170Anger outside the targeted countriesOutside Afghanistan and Iraq, the ‘war on terror’ has also been stokingup anger, especially among Muslims. The US and UK governmentshave repeatedly stressed that they have nothing against Muslims as awhole. Yet a State Department list of 26 countries whose nationals pres-ent an elevated security risk within the United States had 25 Muslimcountries (and North Korea).171 How does that look if you are Muslim?The violent side-effects of violence can be wide-ranging. For example,the attack of Afghanistan seems to have stirred up conflicts inIsrael/Palestine and Kashmir, with India moving troops to the Line ofControl in the latter.172Anger has been directed both at the main Western protagonists ofthe ‘war on terror’ and at regimes collaborating in this ‘war’. Indeed,the ‘war on terror’ has often meant that hostility towards the West andthe USA in particular has been ‘added on’ to what was previouslyhostility towards one’s own government.Anger at the WestThe strength of those using terror against their own regimes should notbe taken for granted, and neither should the vehemence of their anti-American ideology. Michael Mann has suggested that ‘al-Qaedaconsists of Arab exiles too weak to take on their own states.’173 Further,many of those lumped in by the United States as ‘al-Qaida’ are essen-tially national terrorists (Chechen, Kashmiri, Pakistani, Indonesian etc.)Mann asks an important question, ‘Why should any of these nationalterrorists consider themselves enemies of the US?’174 He concludes,‘Jihadis … alienate most people through extreme violence, as they didin the early 1990s in Algeria and Egypt. Islamism and jihadis weredeclining from the mid-1990s. But then US actions began to revivethem.’175FUEL ON THE FIRE[ 31 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 31In Indonesia, even after the attack on Afghanistan, 61 per cent ofthose surveyed reported that they viewed the United States favourably;but by August 2004, after the attack on Iraq, this had fallen to only 15per cent.176 The Iraq war has had the effect of hardening anti-US senti-ments throughout Arab and Muslim worlds.177 Feargal Keane, awidely-travelled journalist, commented on the 2003 Iraq war, ‘If thereis a silent Arab majority – or even minority – who believes this war is agood thing, I have yet to find it.’178 Top US counter-terrorism expertRichard Clarke noted, ‘Nothing America could have done would haveprovided al-Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups [with] abetter recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-richArab country.’179Acts of terror naturally prompt the astonished and horrified reaction,‘Why on earth would anyone do this?’ Incomprehension is almostmandatory. But we now understand quite a lot about the making of aterrorist and the role that world events may play in this process. Indi-vidual personality disorders seem to be no more common among terror-ists than non-terrorists.180 Everything we know suggests that a perceivedabuse of American power (including attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq)has helped to push significant numbers of people along the path of angerand alienation that can produce a terrorist.181 The Soviet occupation ofAfghanistan had earlier set a benchmark for the production of resistanceand, later, terror.Now that interventions have increasingly been seen through theprism of locally controlled media, this process has been reinforced. Thetelevision station al-Jazeera (with an estimated 35 million viewers evenbefore the 2003 war) has provided a credible alternative to CNN’scoverage of international conflicts, and during the 2003 attack on Iraq,al-Jazeera showed footage of Iraqi casualties several times an hour.182After the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, photos were shown on someArab TV channels every few minutes. The potential mobilising powerof images is suggested by the tactics of extremist groups: for example,at the Finsbury Park mosque in London, extremists have sometimesused footage of abuses against Muslims (including in Bosnia) to cementthe loyalty of their followers and even to prepare them for fighting.Of course, recent counter-terrorism wars do not arrive in a vacuum:they come in the context of a long historical experience of colonialismand institutionalised humiliation in Arab and Muslim countries.Thecolonial experience has shaped perceptions not just in the Middle Eastbut also, for example, in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Partof the humiliation of colonialism came when the Muslim UmmaENDLESS WAR?[ 32 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 32(community) was divided into nation states by the West.183 BernardLewis notes that, ‘Muslims … tend to see not a nation subdivided intoreligious groups but a religion subdivided into nations.’184 Indepen-dence did not necessarily solve the problem: for example, the influen-tial Egyptian Islamic extremist Sayyid Qutb saw nationalism as ausurpation of God’s sovereignty, putting reverence for the nation andthe people where God alone should be.185Humiliation has been repeatedly stressed by terrorists as somethingthey wish to redress. A bin Laden videotape of 7 October 2001 noted the‘humiliation and disgrace’ that Islam had suffered ‘for more thaneighty years’186 The figure seems to hark back to the decline and fall ofthe Ottoman Caliphate after the First World War. Speaking of the terror-ists who killed 24 US servicemen in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, binLaden said they had ‘washed away a great part of the shame that hasenveloped us.’187 After her research on terrorists from various faiths,Jessica Stern noted, ‘While the terrorists I met described a variety ofgrievances, almost every one talked about humiliation.’188 While Islamis often seen – particularly in the West – as legitimising a violent reac-tion to grievances and humiliation, it can also be seen as tempering thisreaction. Fuad Nahdi, publisher of the Muslim magazine Q-News,commented, ‘The humiliation of the Arab world has been much worsethan what the Germans went through. Thank god we have not seen aHitler in the Arab world, largely because of Islam.’189The attack on Iraq in 2003 looked to many in the region and beyondlike a process of recolonisation. The longer the coalition forces stay, themore this impression will be confirmed. While Saddam’s demise broughtwidespread relief in Iraq and Kuwait in particular, the assertion of West-ern power and the continued occupation has reopened many historicalwounds in the Arab world: not least the humiliating defeat of Egypt,Syria and Jordan by Israel in 1967, a defeat that led to Israel’s occupationof Sinai and the Golan Heights. The managing editor of the Cairo-basedal-Ahram Weekly, Hani Shukrallah, commented:The sense of humiliation born out of June 1967 was perhaps themost shattering of all in proportion to the immense hopes ofemancipation and restored national dignity that the wave ofpan-Arab nationalism, led and symbolised by Nasser’s leader-ship, had come to trigger.190Linked to this, of course, has been the widespread anger at abuses ofPalestinians by Israel, a country strongly supported by the UnitedFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 33 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 33States – anger that can only be stoked up by everyday frustrations atrepressive regimes in the Arab world. Radical Islamists have oftenequated the US occupation of Iraq with Israel’s policies towards thePalestinians.191One man whose family have for generations been keepers of an ancientMuslim shrine at Kerbala, Iraq, commented, ‘If you compare the twocountries – Iraq and the US – their power [the US] is greater, so peoplehave to believe that there can be a stronger force, and that force is God.’192After noting the enthusiastic reception of the news that an old Iraqi manhad shot down a US Apache helicopter during the ‘major combat’ phaseof the Iraq war, al-Ahram’s Hani Shukrallah suggested that such resistancegave a sense of pride and humanity to many in the Arab world:for the Arabs, as galling and bitter as the sense of injured dignityhas been and continues to be, it has also been disabling, creatinga situation and mindset in which their choices seemed to belimited to either suicidal vengeance or abject and bitter hopeless-ness. It remains to be seen whether the war in Iraq will put theArab masses on a new trajectory, one in which they fight to win,rather than just to die while maintaining some sense of their basichuman dignity. But whatever the course of the war in the comingdays or weeks, for the moment the Arab masses have two thingsgoing for them: They are not mice, and they are not alone.193Any sense of empowerment, however, was fleeting in the face of theoverwhelming force of the United States. Humiliation during the war hastaken many forms. In April 2003, senior Guardian journalist JonathanSteele observed that in Jordan, ‘Many cite a photo, shown on severalfront pages, which they found a shocking symbol of the looming occu-pation. It showed three Iraqi women in long black robes and veils beingbody searched by an American soldier.’194 Sheik Khaled el-Guindi, amoderate imam in Cairo, commented, ‘Most of the pictures we see are ofIraqi heads stepped on by American Army boots. It is no longer just anoccupation, but a humiliation’.195 Of course, the Abu Ghraib atrocitiesadded greatly to the sense of humiliation. Musdah Mulia, a progressivescholar in Indonesia, observed, ‘Moderates are finding it more difficultto discuss issues like human rights and democracy when photos ofAmericans torturing Iraqis keep appearing’.196The atrocities of 9/11 produced a need to retaliate, and this was natu-ral enough. The phenomenon of ‘killing to wipe one’s eyes’ – of makingsomeone else mourn instead of oneself – is familiar to anthropologists.197ENDLESS WAR?[ 34 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 349/11 saw thousands of innocent people slaughtered in cold blood, andwhile some Americans urged restraint (including many relatives of the9/11 victims),198 many members of the public as well as government offi-cials and media reporters stressed that the USA should respond withmilitary strikes. Yet it is precisely this impulse to retaliate which shouldshow us why a ‘war on terror’ cannot be won.199 Why would otherpeople not feel similar emotions and impulses when they are attacked,when their innocent people are bombed or shot in the name of somebodyelse’s ‘justice’?If in addition it is stated publicly and repeatedly that the ‘war onterror’ will make the world a safer place (as the US and UK govern-ments have done), does this not reinforce the message that you do notbelieve your victims – and there are always innocent victims – are thesame as you, with the same emotions, including the same all-too-human desire to retaliate? To your victims, your very confidence inyour own violence as a solution proclaims your racism and your failureto recognise their humanity. Paradoxically, those who have been repeat-edly insulted and systematically dehumanised may demand revenge inpart to remind themselves and their oppressors that they are human(‘they are not mice’), that they do exist.200 This mechanism is hard tograsp because such ‘brutal’ acts of revenge – as the adjective implies –inevitably make the perpetrators seem less than human.In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Shylock explains his seem-ingly inhuman desire to mutilate Antonio (who owes him money)precisely as a manifestation of his own humanity in a context whereothers have dehumanised him:He hath disgraced me … laughed at my losses … and what’shis reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jewhands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? … Ifyou prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we notlaugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us,shall we not revenge?Similar sentiments can be found among civil-war rebels. During SierraLeone’s war, the main political pamphlet of the rebel RevolutionaryUnited Front (RUF) stated that the military government ‘behaves as ifwe are despicable aliens from another planet and not SierraLeoneans.’201 Significantly, after the joint army–rebel coup of May 1997,the RUF broadcast an ‘Apology to the Nation’. Itincluded the state-ment, ‘We did not take to the bush because we wanted to be barbarians,FUEL ON THE FIRE[ 35 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 35not because we wanted to be inhuman, but because we wanted to state our humanhood’.202 Meanwhile, government soldiers increasinglyconformed to the insult that they had become rebels or ‘sobels’. Andagain, at the level of global terrorism, a tape apparently from bin Ladenasked, ‘Under what grace are your victims innocent and ours dust, andunder which doctrine is your blood blood and our blood water?’203 InAfghanistan, a pro-Western military commander named Haji Muham-mad Zaman, said, ‘Why are they hitting civilians? This is very bad.Hundreds have been killed and injured. It is like a crime againsthumanity. Aren’t we human?’204While Shylock presents his violent revenge as a manifestation of hishumanity, he is also ready to adopt the inhuman persona he has beensaddled with, ‘Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause; But,since I am a dog, beware my fangs.’ One of the sickening pictures fromAbu Ghraib prison was of a prisoner being pulled along on a leash. Itis hard to imagine a more dehumanising – or incendiary – image.Demonising and infantilising people can have much the same effectas dehumanising them. This is part of the problem with labels like ‘axisof evil’. In April 2002, North Korea in effect challenged Bush to stopcalling it part of the ‘axis of evil’, agreeing to resume dialogue with theUnited States on the condition that it was not ‘slandered’ again.205 Bushhas also tried to infantilise North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, referringto him as a ‘pygmy’ and a ‘spoiled child at the dinner table’.206Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist who grew up in the French Caribbeanisland of Martinique and then went on to work in an Algerian hospitalduring the Algerian war for independence, pointed to a feeling of non-existence among those subjected to colonialism, the result of not beingtreated as human beings. His radical solution was expressed in TheWretched of the Earth, first published in 1961, ‘At the level of individuals,violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferioritycomplex and from his despair and inaction, it makes him fearless andrestores his self-respect.’207 We do not have to approve of this line ofthought or action to see that it makes a good deal of psychological sense.The idea that violence could alleviate a feeling of non-existence was alsoput forward by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, firstpublished in 1951. Arendt stressed that what she called ‘totalitarianterrorism’ was different from earlier revolutionary terrorism:It was no longer a matter of calculated policy which saw interrorist acts the only means to eliminate certain outstandingpersonalities who, because of their policies or position, hadENDLESS WAR?[ 36 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 36become the symbol of oppression. What proved to be attractivewas that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy throughwhich to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, akind of political expressionism which used bombs to expressoneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given toresounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the priceof life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one’s exis-tence on the normal strata of society. … What the mob wanted,and what Goebbels expressed with great precision, was accessto history even at the price of destruction.208Some variation of Fanon’s ‘feeling of non-existence’ would be unsur-prising in the case of Palestine, where Israeli Prime Minister GoldaMeir famously asserted in 1969, ‘There is no such thing as a Palestinianpeople. ... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took theircountry. They didn’t exist.’209 A similar idea was expressed in the older,infamous slogan coined in 1901 by the writer Israel Zangwill in relationto what is now Israel, ‘A land without a people for a people without aland’.In certain social contexts, participation in terrorism may bring kudosand recognition for the perpetrator and his family. This has often beenthe case in Palestine.210 In Pakistan, thousands will attend the funeral ofa boy who has ‘martyred’ himself in terror attacks in Kashmir. Thefather of one such ‘martyr’ said that poor families became celebritiesafter losing a son, and that everyone began to treat them with morerespect.211If Fanon understood how humiliation feeds violence, this mecha-nism has also been explored by American psychiatrist James Gilligan(on whom more in Chapter 4) and by Mark Juergensmeyer in his book,Terror in the Mind of God. Juergensmeyer observed that for a wide rangeof religious terrorists (including in the paramilitary Palestinian organi-zation, Hamas) remedying dishonour and humiliation seems to havebeen of central importance.212 Juergensmeyer went on, ‘I do not thinkthat economic or social despair lead automatically to violence, sincevirtually everyone on the planet has experienced some sort of economicand social hardship in his or her life.’213 The most important factor, heconcluded from his case-studies, was:the intimacy with which the humiliation is experienced and thedegree to which it is regarded as a threat to one’s personalhonour and respectability. These can create the conditions for aFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 37 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 37desperate need for empowerment, which, when no otheroptions appear to be open, are symbolically and violentlyexpressed.214Preaching rights that you do not uphold has long been a source ofanger and violence. Hannah Arendt understood that rage comes morefrom hypocrisy than from simple injustice.215 Somewhat similarly,Evelin Lindner – who worked as a psychological counsellor inGermany and the Middle East and who did research on humiliationand violence in Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi – concluded that:Deprivation is not in itself necessarily perceived as a form ofsuffering that calls for action. However, deprivation that isperceived as an illegitimate violation of ideals of equality anddignity is perceived as a humiliation that has to be respondedto with profound sincerity. … Feelings of humiliation are trig-gered when those – often referred to as the West – who preachhuman rights and the inclusion of every human being within aglobal ‘us’, are at the same time perceived as violating theirown preaching. This is called ‘double standards’.216Again, the implication in these ‘double standards’ is that the victim isnot considered entirely human. After all, if human rights exist and areheralded and yet a particular group is repeatedly abused, does it notfollow that the system is implicitly labelling them as not human?217What conclusion can logically be drawn from the proclamations thathumans have rights and the reality of holding individuals incommuni-cado, indefinitely and in cages at Guantanamo and other camps? WhenAfief Safieh (the representative of the Palestinian authority in the UK)expressed his anger at Israeli government indifference to Palestinianvictims, he added, ‘I don’t belong to a species that have children of alesser God’.218Demonising the enemy can also be counterproductive in makinghim more alluring. The ‘war on terror’ has apparently increased theallure and mystique of bin Laden. The New York Times reported that ‘theAfghan conflict seems to have confirmed Osama bin Laden as a folkhero’.219 There is no doubt that bin Laden now has a cult followingamong many people in the Arab and Muslim world.220 For example, inSaudi Arabia, according to a 2004 poll, 49 per cent of the populationsympathised with the aims of bin Laden.221 Many British governmentofficials, including senior military figures, believe that AmericanENDLESS WAR?[ 38 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 38demonisation of bin Laden over the years has encouraged manypeoplein the Arab world to regard him as an icon.222In his brief but insightful history of banditry, British historian EricHobsbawm described the thin line between outright criminals and‘social rebels’ (on the lines of Robin Hood) whose crimes are taken asblows against the system. Hobsbawm referred to a category of banditshe called ‘the avengers’. These were bandits who carried out spectacu-lar acts of terror, often but not always against the powerful, and whoproved, Hobsbawm observed, that ‘even the poor and weak can beterrible’.223 Of course, bin Laden was never poor, but many have stillcome to see him as symbolising the political strength of the weak.Saddam Hussein was another figure who attracted followers in theMiddle East by conspicuously standing up to the United States from aposition of weakness: for some at least, his status as ‘hero’ was strongenough even to outweigh abuses against hundreds of thousands ofpeople – nearly all of them Muslims – within Iraq.In the manner of colonial and other repressive governments in thepast, the US government sought to pin rebellion in Iraq on ‘externalelements’. Whilst this seriously underplayed the preponderance ofIraqis in the resistance, Iraq has indeed become something of a magnetfor militants elsewhere in the Middle East. It has offered a chance toescape surveillance in the militants’ own countries and a chance to fightjihad against identifiable and accessible targets. American forces in Iraqhave arrested Egyptians, Palestinians, Tunisians, Yemenis andLebanese. Sunni Muslims of bin Laden’s Salafi persuasion were seen inFallujah. Shia Muslims from the Lebanese Hizbollah were reported bythe British Army to be active in Basra. London-based Saudi dissidentSaad al-Fagih said efforts to crack down on terrorism in Saudi Arabiacould be driving jihadis across the border into Iraq, ‘If a young man isconfronted with no choice but to end up in a small cell being torturedand the other option is to flee to Iraq, Iraq is a good option. It’s an idealplace and there’s an ideal enemy.’224The process by which people have been radicalised to the point ofbecoming terrorists is one that has played out differently in differentcountries; but it seems to have some common elements. Very often, angerat injustice in one’s own society has interacted with anger at interna-tional events. Among those feeling angry at injustices at home have beenfirst and second generation immigrants in Western societies. The ‘war onterror’ has tended to deepen this double-anger: not only by increasinggrievances at Western foreign policy but also by reinforcing domesticoppression in many countries around the world and by boostingFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 39 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 39discrimination and anti-Muslim prejudice in the West. Particularly in theUnited States, part of the Western reaction to 9/11 has been increasedsuspicion of ‘internal enemies’ (see Chapter 9). It is important to under-stand the factors that encourage Muslims in the West to see themselvesas part – or not part – of Western societies. Such factors – especially theinteraction of anger at one’s own society and anger at internationalevents – are well illustrated by the case of Zacarius Moussaoui (whoeventually pleaded guilty to helping al-Qaida carry out the 9/11 hijack-ings). The story told by his brother, Abd Samad, is worth recounting insome detail.225As a boy, Zacarius showed no particular signs of ‘evil’. Abd Samaddescribes his brother as ‘an ideal younger brother. He was smart, cleverand kind – a really nice boy.’ They were born in France to Moroccanimmigrant parents. Their parents were divorced when they were little,and their mother put them in an orphanage. The brothers joined a gangon a housing estate in Narbonne in southern France. They were rivalswith a gang from a neighbouring estate which had nearly all whitepeople. Zacarius made some middle-class friends at secondary schoolbut requested a move to a vocational school to be a mechanic. AbdSamad comments, ‘I realised that he quite simply lacked self-confidencebecause of his social roots. The son of a Moroccan cleaning woman in themidst of sons of company directors? So he switched schools and joinedme at the vocational college. In no time he realised he had made amistake.’ The boys’ mother and stepfather moved to a smart area ofNarbonne. ‘We were the only north Africans in the area. We went fromone swimming pool to another, tried our hand at tennis and even, some-times, pony-riding … thanks to Zacarius who was quickly accepted inthis circle.’ However, Abd Samad remembered being cut off from northAfrican culture:Aicha [the boys’ mother] never talked to us in Arabic. So wefelt discriminated against even among the north Africancommunity, because we didn’t speak its language. … Nor didshe teach us anything about Arab customs, or Muslim culture.Zac and I asked her several times how you prayed and why. Iwas 25 when I went into a mosque for the first time, in Mont-pellier. I think the first mosque Zacarias went into was inBritain [as an adult].226The boys did not feel accepted in the West either – they were betweentwo worlds, ‘We didn’t feel French, and we realised as much every timeENDLESS WAR?[ 40 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 40we came up against racism’. At school, the boys were repeatedly askedwhy they were not eating pork. When they said it was because theywere Muslims, Abd Samad remembers the reply was, ‘Oh for heaven’ssake! Can’t you Muslim people be like everybody else?’ Zacarius had awhite girlfriend. He got into a fight at a club and while being hit, heheard, ‘Had it with these niggers! They’re even taking our women.’ Ofcourse, not everyone chooses to react to such incidents with violence;indeed, Abd Samad’s account suggests the brothers reacted very differ-ently to similar circumstances, ‘When Zacarius was faced with humili-ation, he reacted differently from me. He locked himself away in hissuffering, nurtured it, it gnawed away at him quietly.’ Zacarius seemedto his brother to be quickly discouraged in looking for work, and quickto suspect racism if refused. But racism was a fact, Abd Samad recalls,and some bosses were quite frank, saying ‘I don’t want any Arabs.’The 1991 Gulf War seems to have been important in further radicalis-ing Zacarius Moussaoui. At the time, he was studying engineering atPerpignan in southern France. During the war, classes split into pro- andanti-American factions – as Abd Samad saw it, between those cheeringbombing and those ‘who were touched by the plight of Iraqi civilians’.Abd Samad recalls, ‘We had the feeling that the France that sent in troopsto fight alongside the Americans was not our France. I think it was at thatmoment that Zacarius started to feel that he belonged to the ‘Blacks’,whereas people of French extraction were ‘Whites’.’ Zacarius had newfriends. He hardly spent time with born-and-bred French and his newfriends cultivated an attitude of rebellion, ‘They were forever denigratingpoliticians and intellectuals – French ones in particular.’Zacarius then went to South Bank University in London. He said theEnglish were tolerant only on the surface. Abd Samad had started topractice Islam, but Zacarius showed no interest. Zacarius wanted to getrich and asked his girlfriend to go to England with him. Abd Samadrecalls, ‘Zacarius was deeply wounded by her refusal to follow him.’ Thebrothers’ sister said that Zacarius came to her saying, ‘Abd Samad and[his wife] Fouzia are doing tawassul, they’re heathens. Be on your guardwith them, but whatever else happens don’t say anything to them.’ (ForSunni Muslims, tawassul involves asking Allah for a favour, invoking thename of a prophet or saint. It is rejected by Wahhabis [a Sunni reformmovement originating in Arabia].) Abd Samad heard that his brother hadbehaved strangely during a visit to Morocco, ‘Everything for himwasforbidden (haram), but he was contradictory. He would forbid others tosmoke and yet he’d go to a corner of the building to smoke cigarettes.’227Abd Samad describes the recruiting techniques of the extremists: FUEL ON THE FIRE[ 41 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 41‘Recruiters’ invariably proceed in the same way. First of all,they pick out young people who have been estranged fromtheir families, the strong moral anchors that are their father,mother, brothers and sisters, even friends.After several months exclusively with an extremist group, the recruitis ready to go for training in a camp: Once in the camp, it is easy, as in any sect, to make him lose hisbearings. He is made to go hungry, belittled and set tasks hecan’t complete, but told that others before him have succeededand gone on to ‘great things’. Abd Samad comments: Because he is ‘incompetent’, the only thing he can do to help thecause is to give his life to it. And this will also prove to others that,at the end, he met their expectations. He is now ripe for suicide.228The story of Zacarius Moussaoui shows how an individual can turnagainst the West when a feeling of attraction to Western ways feeds intoan identity crisis. Simple antipathy does not capture the whole story.The way that hostility towards the West in particular can co-exist withan attraction to Western culture was noted by reporter John Burns in aperceptive article just after 9/11. Burns wrote that:When the Taliban began their rule in Afghanistan in 1996 byhanging television sets from trees and outlawing music andfilms, they were at the extreme edge of an uneasiness that iswidespread in traditional societies that have begun to feelinundated by Western, and particularly American, culture.229The lure of America – and long visa queues outside US embassies –found a counterpart in anti-American feelings, in disappointment atrejection, and often in resentment arising from harsh conditions in theUnited States itself:Often, in discussions with Islamic militants, anger over Israelor Iraq or Bosnia spills over into a recounting of more personalexperiences, sometimes trifling, sometimes not, in whichencounters with America – time spent working in menial jobsENDLESS WAR?[ 42 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 42or studying in the United States, or a brush with United Statesimmigration authorities – stirred resentments that became atrigger for antagonism.230Writer Jonathan Raban gives an account of a strain of terrorist thoughtthat has reacted violently to a Western decadence that has proven, veryoften, all too tempting.231 Evidence that some terrorists have beentempted by ‘Western decadence’ is plentiful. For example, the Kuwaiti-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – said to be al-Qaida’s ‘number 3’ andarrested in Rawalpindi in early 2001 – was a frequent visitor to the red-light district in Manila when he lived in the Philippines, and had areputation as a womaniser.232 Zaid Jarrah, who crashed US Airlinesflight 93 in Pennsylvania on 9/11, was a gregarious party boy fromLebanon.233 The attractions of the ‘high life’ may also fuel resentmentsmore directly: one 17-year-old Palestinian, whose attempt to carry outa suicide bombing had failed, commented, ‘Our life is worthless. …Israelis enjoy their life. They go out at night, they have cafes and night-clubs. They travel all over the world. They go to America and Britain.We can’t even leave Palestine.’234When Juergensmeyer interviewed Mahmoud Abouhalima, an Egypt-ian and one of the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World TradeCenter, Abouhalima stressed the deceitful character of many contempo-rary politicians claiming to be Muslim but following secular codes ofconduct.235 In 1981, at a time when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat wasrounding up Muslim activists like Abouhalima, the young man decidedto go to Germany on a tourist visa. There he married a German nurse,and when they broke up, another woman. During his initial years inGermany, Abouhalima recalled, he lived a ‘life of corruption – girls,drugs, you name it’. ‘He went through the outward signs of Islamicreverence – daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan – but hehad left the real Islam behind.’ Then he ‘got bored’ and returned to acommitted religious life. His (second) wife became a Muslim.236 In 1988,Abouhalima joined the Muslim struggle in Afghanistan, though heclaimed it was only in a non-military capacity.237An analysis by the veteran journalist Maruf Khwaja illuminatessome of the pressures that are created by conflicting demands on youngMuslims, particularly in the West. He notes that Islam is demanding interms of the expected rituals and sacrifices, and detects in Britain:[a] widening generation gap within Muslim families – mani-fested in the loss of parental control and decline in the moralFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 43 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 43authority of the family elder, and in the imposition of dracon-ian restrictions (particularly on female dependents). … Muslimyoung people, after all, want to do what their secular friendsdo – have nights out, go clubbing, have boyfriends or girl-friends. … The young resent the fact that in the traditionalMuslim home all the things that attract them – music, dance,cinema, television, even many kinds of hobby and sport – aretaboo, cardinal sins, regarded as Satanic.238People react to these processes in very different ways. But for a verysmall minority, a violent rejection of all things Western seems to be anattractive option.239Knitting together diverse grievancesThe Bush administration tends to stress that international terrorists ‘hateAmerica’ and that they ‘hate our freedoms’. We have seen how a varietyof US government actions have indeed fuelled anger and terror, but thereis also an element of inverted narcissism in the ‘they hate us’ analysis.Many of the grievances harboured by terrorists have historically beendirected at local regimes. US actions become relevant, first, because theyhave often bolstered undemocratic and unpopular regimes and, second,because they have relatively recently encouraged a coalescing of diversegrievances under an anti-American or anti-Western ideological umbrella.In fact, the ‘war on terror’ has played a key role in knitting diverse griev-ances together into an anti-American agenda. Even in West Africa, Muslimpopulations express increasing opposition to US policy in the Middle East,and a corresponding increase in fundamentalist proselytisation.240 Al-Qaida, in effect, has capitalised on a range of essentially local struggles,including Islamic groups using terror against their own governments – forexample, in the Philippines, Uzbekistan and Algeria. The ‘war on terror’has also given additional licence for domestic repression, and, as Timemagazine noted, one factor intensifying the terror of radical Islamists hasbeen opposition to crackdowns on militancy carried out by governmentslike those of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.241Hugh Roberts stresses that al-Qaida is a synthesis, sealed in 1998, ofWahhabi activism (bin Laden and company) and Egyptian extremism(centred on Ayman al-Zawahiri), with both wings embracing anti-Americanism rather recently. Egyptian extremists have traditionallyfocused their hostility on the Egyptian state. For his part, bin Laden wasallied with the Americans over the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, andENDLESS WAR?[ 44 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 44Wahhabism focused on non-US enemies. Wahhabism took on an anti-American aspect with the large-scale US military presence in Saudi Arabia(home of Mecca) during and after the first Gulf War.242 Also underpinningresentments in Saudi Arabia (which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers of 11September as well as bin Laden himself) has been a major social andeconomic crisis, with an estimated 35 per cent of Saudi youth being unem-ployed.243Rapid population growth has produced a situation where halfthe country is under 18. Debt repayments have escalated, fuelled by costlymilitary purchases, an expensive welfare system, and generally moderateoil prices (one of the main benefits to the United States of its alliance withthe Saudis). Said Aburish has written of a permanent uprising.244 There hasbeen widespread anger at the Saudi regime and, by extension, at USsupport for it. 245Hugh Roberts stresses that, insofar as Algerian jihadis have hadforeign targets at all, they have usually had France in their sights –notably in the 1993–96 period. This choice of target reflected the colo-nial experience, French resistance to decolonisation, and a profoundinterference by French governments in Algerian politics from the 1980s.Attacks on foreigners have not been directed at Americans. Yet hostil-ity to US policies has been gaining ground in Algeria (as also in Tunisiaand Morocco, where France has again been the traditional enemy); atthe extreme, Algeria’s GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat)has ties to al-Qaida and its anti-American ideology has been strength-ened. One key factor in the rise of (violent and non-violent) radicalismin Algeria, Roberts suggests, has been the subversion of the authority(moral, intellectual, social) of the ulema (the Muslim legal scholars),with religious radicals going back to a more rudimentary version ofIslam. A second factor – as in Saudi Arabia and Egypt – has been USforeign policy, notably the wars with Iraq. Significantly, in Algeria the9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism gave a new lease of life to awaning domestic military campaign. By the spring of 2001, the Alger-ian military had been very much in the dock for a variety of abuses.Roberts argues that the most pressing need in Algeria is constructing astate (including an army) that is bound by the rule of law. Yet with 9/11,the Algerian army has been able to secure a rehabilitation and say, ineffect, to the Americans, ‘Thank you, at last, for joining us in the waragainst terrorism!’ At the same time, the rehabiliation of the Algerianstate has also been assisted by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s initia-tives in retiring generals associated with Algeria’s 1990s ‘dirty war’.246In Afghanistan, too, anti-American sentiment is neither natural nor oflong standing. Jason Burke notes that, ‘The Taliban used to be wary ofFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 45 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 45Osama bin Laden and his brand of hard-line internationalised militancy.Their project was limited to Afghanistan and they bore no ill-feeling toAmerica or the West.’ All that has changed, however.247In an important study that chimes with Roberts’ and Burke’s analysis,Fawaz Gerges notes that jihadi movements have tended to focus hostil-ity on the ‘near enemy’ (governments in Algeria, Egypt and so on) ratherthan the ‘far enemy’ (the USA and its Western allies). These movementswere largely in retreat through the 1990s: ordinary Muslims tended torecoil from their excesses, and meanwhile national security services hadweakened the jihadis, who were also reeling from poor financial manage-ment and internal divisions. In many ways the al-Qaida focus on attack-ing America represented a desperate attempt to reignite flagging jihadimovements by provoking US retaliation, with Egyptian leader al-Zawahiri failing to convince key henchmen that the ‘far enemy’ was awise focus for attacks. The power of bin Laden – though given a greatdeal of emphasis in the 9/11 Commission report – was by no meansabsolute. However, US-led retaliation for 9/11 – and the Iraq war inparticular – has succeeded in doing just what bin Laden had hoped.248 Asal-Qaida commander Seif al-Adl put it, ‘The Americans took the bait andfell into our trap’.249In the Philippines, Islamist extremists have been given a boost by the‘war on terror’, as James Putzel shows.250 Despite the US vilification ofthe Islamist rebel movement Abu Sayyaf, the crisis in the Philippines iscomplex, and again cannot be reduced to the ‘evil’ of a few terrorists.Responding to pressure on land in the Philippines’ major agriculturalregions, and to a militant peasantry, the Philippine government encour-aged mass resettlement. The Muslim population of Mindenau, fully 76per cent in 1903, was down to 20 per cent from the 1960s. Muslims inMindenau and the Sulu archipelago have found themselves in a perma-nent minority, with little prospect of remedying their poverty throughdemocratic means. To maintain its rule over Mindenau, Putzel suggests,the state relied on a Christian settler elite, a tiny Muslim elite and privatearmed forces. These processes helped to create Abu Sayyaf and thearmed movement in Mindenau. The government military campaignagainst the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front (based in Mindenau andneighbouring islands) in 2000 was ruthless and helped the rebels to gainsupport.In this context, 9/11 gave the government of the Philippines an oppor-tunity to secure direct assistance from the United States in bringingMindenau under control. In early 2002, the first of some 660 US troopswent into combat – something that violated the Philippine constitution.251ENDLESS WAR?[ 46 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 46In February 2003, the Bush administration announced that these troopswould be joined by an additional 3,000.252 The US intervention hastended further to unite Muslims in Mindenau in opposition to that inter-vention.253 In fact, a revived Abu Sayyaf has now gained considerablesupport among the local population.254 US involvement may help Islamicmilitants to seize the nationalist mantle.255Whereas the Muslims are a minority in the Philippines, they are amajority in Indonesia and Malaysia. This means that the Indonesian andMalaysian governments need to keep more distance from US foreignpolicy. Even so, Indonesia has found the ‘war on terror’ useful in relationto armed separatists in Aceh and Irian Jaya.256 In the major military offen-sive against Aceh in May 2003, the Indonesian government seems to havebeen emboldened by 9/11.257In Uzbekistan, repression linked to a terror crackdown has fed intoextremism. Police use of torture has been routine, something acknowl-edged by the US State Department. The British ambassador to Uzbek-istan, Craig Murray, said, ‘The intense repression here combined withthe inequality of wealth and absence of reform will create the Islamicfundamentalism that the regime is trying to quash.’258 Torture has beenused to provide (almost entirely bogus) information to the CIA andBritain’s MI6: information that links elements of the Uzbek oppositionwith Islamist terrorism and al-Qaida.259Pakistan also shows clearly some of the radicalising tendencies of the‘war on terror’. While Iraq was attacked on the basis of weapons of massdestruction it did not possess, Pakistan does have the nuclear bomb – andthe US-led ‘war on terror’ has threatened to put this armoury into thehands of religious extremists. The Bush/Blair response to 9/11 hasalready given a powerful shot in the arm to religious revivalism inPakistan. One Guardian journalist reported in May 2003:In the months that followed September 11, a tide of Islamicrevivalism swept through Pakistan. Anger at American foreignpolicy is deeply and universally felt. For many it began withthe US-led campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan andthe recognition in the months that followed that Washingtonand London have neglected their promises of reconstruction inthe country they bombed. It is being fuelled again by increas-ingly overt FBI raids across Pakistan in the search for al-Qaidasuspects and, inevitably and overwhelmingly, by the war inIraq. In Pakistani eyes, American foreign policy is targeting thereligion of Islam. Will Pakistan be next? It is the question onFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 47 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 47everybody’s lips. Suddenly, the Islamic parties no longer seemto be on the margins of society but triumphantly riding a newwave of national bitterness and frustration.260Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s popularity in Pakistanfoundered when he gave his support for the attack on Afghanistan, notleast because people from the Pashtun ethnic group in Pakistan saw thefall of Pashtun power in Afghanistan.261 This drop in support wasparticularly intense in North West Frontier Province (NWFP). IsabelHilton notes that:In the NWFP, Musharraf’s support of the US was taken asbetrayal, and nothing has altered the conviction that theAfghan war was a war against Islam. … On the ground, in theNWFP and in southern Afghanistan, armed confrontationscontinue between Pashtun fighters on both sides of the borderand US-led forces who are still trying to subdue what theycharacterise as al-Qaida and Taliban resistance.262Conservative religious parties have gained partial control not only ofNWFP but also of Baluchistan, another province to which many Talibanand al-Qaida operatives fled from Afghanistan.’263Concluding remarksThe ‘war on terror’ has not only been actively counterproductive; it hasalso taken attention and resources away from a range of issues thathave to be tackled if terrorism is to be minimised. Part of this has beena neglect of US homeland security. In this sense, it is part of an atten-tion deficit disorder. (George W. Bush said in his first pre-electiondebate with Kerry, ‘The best way to protect our homeland is to stay onthe offence.’) Another part of the attention deficit was allowing theescape of bin Laden and neglecting the reconstruction of Afghanistanwhile concentrating on the planned attack on Iraq (see Chapter 3).264Alongside the focus on Iraq there has been a significant neglect ofnuclear proliferation. The bizarre incentive that the Iraq attack createsfor covert nuclear arms programmes has been mentioned. If anything,this is made worse by new US enthusiasm for so-called ‘mini-nukes’(designed to attack buried nuclear, chemical or biological threats) aswell as by the expressed willingness of the United States and the UK toengage in ‘first use’.265 Unlike in the Cold War, the Pentagon nowENDLESS WAR?[ 48 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 48contemplates ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons against countries that maynot have nuclear weapons themselves.266 The ‘war on terror’ alsodistracts from the need to render secure the fissile material that alreadyexists. As Peter Singer notes:Probably the most effective action that can be taken to preventterrorists from getting hold of nuclear weapons is to ensurethat all fissile material, whether from weapons programs likethose of Russia or Pakistan, or from nuclear power programs,is rendered harmless, or safely stored and protected.267Yet the Bush administration first tried to eliminate this programme forthe former Soviet Union, and then severely under-funded it.268 Russiahas perhaps 1,000 metric tonnes of weapons-grade uranium or pluto-nium.269 More than three-quarters of its supplies are not properlysecured.270 Richard Norton-Taylor observed that in Russia:more than 20,000 nuclear warheads sit in 120 separate storagesites. A single artillery shell of nerve agents is small enough to fitinto a briefcase and contains enough lethal doses to kill 100,000people. The US is blocking funds to secure Russian stores whileit spends billions sending tens of thousands of troops to the Gulf,with British support, to topple a dictator who presents no existing threat to American or British security.271One final point is worth mentioning. Anger resulting from the ‘war onterror’ may yet feed into terrorism by individual Americans (especiallysoldiers). A key role in the second worst terrorist attack on the US, the1995 Oklahoma bombing, was played by a 1991 Gulf War veteran horri-fied by the killing of civilians in that war. Gore Vidal comments, ‘At theclose of the [1991] war, a very popular war, McVeigh had learned thathe did not like the taste of killing innocent people. He spat into the sandat the thought of being forced to hurt others who did not hate him anymore than he them.’272 At first glance, this is pretty hard to square withthe fact that McVeigh later killed a large number of innocent people.But the Gulf War experience does seem to have helped propel McVeighdown a bizarre and violent path. It encouraged a belief that the USgovernment was waging war on civilians (a view subsequently rein-forced by the deaths of cult-members at Waco, Texas, in 1993, after USfederal agents attacked – a tragedy that McVeigh journeyed to witness).The anger of many American soldiers at the way they were misled intoFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 49 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 49the Iraq war is not to be underestimated.273 Violence begets violence: weoften do not know how until afterwards.If the idea of a war on terror is so counterproductive, how then arewe to explain the persistence and appeal of such counterproductivetactics? Chapter 3 will consider self-interested elements, looking partic-ularly at ‘war systems’. Some will hold that explanations based on self-interest are less plausible than so-called ‘cock-up’ theory: the idea thatwe are in the hands of a bunch of idiots – led by the archetypal ‘fool onthe Hill’ – who are making a series of horrendous mistakes. The latterpossibility is not discounted. However, it is important to investigate thepsychological functions of failing tactics, and how the magical thinkingbehind these tactics is made to appear plausible. This is attempted fromChapter 4 onwards.ENDLESS WAR?[ 50 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 503 War Systems: Local and GlobalIntroductionTo understand the ‘war on terror’, we need to look more closely at thenotion of ‘war’. We may think we know what war is, but do we?Many contemporary civil wars can be better understood as systemsthan as contests. The normal assumption is that the aim is to ‘win’ – aposition that assumes that there are ‘two sides’ with aims that areessentially military and set ‘at the top’. However, the aims in a warare likely to be numerous, with many of the most important actorsbeing more interested in manipulating (and perhaps even prolonging)a declared war than they are in gaining a military victory. In contem-porary civil wars in Africa and elsewhere, both government and rebelforces have repeatedly engaged in attacks on civilian populations thathave predictably radicalised these populations and have predictablyattracted support for the enemy. There have also been many instancesof soldiers selling arms to ‘the other side’ as well as various otherforms of co-operation between ostensible enemies; an example of thelatter came in May 1997 when there was a joint military coup bySierra Leonean soldiers and rebels who had ostensibly been fightingeach other for most of the previous six years. Within a frameworkfocused on ‘winning’, these behaviours seem incomprehensible orirrational (or perhaps appear to be ‘mistakes’). However, aims otherthan winning have often been important in civil wars. They include:carrying out abuses under the cover of war, enjoying a feeling ofpower, making money, and even creating or preserving some kind of‘state of emergency’ so as to ward off democracy or provide cover forthe suppression of political opposition.1 When it comes to war, inother words, winning is not everything; it may be the taking part thatcounts. Indeed, as Orwell saw in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,certain kinds of regimes may thrive off enemies and perpetual war.The irrationality of counterproductive tactics, in short, may be moreapparent than real, and even an endless war may not be endless in thesense of lacking aims or functions.Michel Foucault gave some advice to those who might wish tounderstand the internment of dissidents – which herefers to as theGulag – in the former Soviet Union. He emphasised the importance of:[ 51 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 51Refusing to restrict one’s questioning to the level of causes. Ifone begins by asking for the ‘cause’ of the Gulag (Russia’sretarded development, the transformation of the party into abureaucracy, the specific economic difficulties of the USSR),one makes the Gulag appear as a sort of disease or abscess, aninfection, degeneration or involution. This is to think of theGulag only negatively, a dysfunctioning to be rectified – amaternity illness of the country which is painfully giving birthto socialism. The Gulag question has to be posed in positiveterms. The problem of causes must not be dissociated from thatof function: what use is the Gulag, what functions does itassure, in what strategies is it integrated?2Foucault also stressed that power shapes knowledge, and vice versa;when it came to any set of social practices, he wanted to know who hadbeen given the right to speak what counted as the truth. His approach to theGulag and to power/knowledge are both useful in relation to civilwars. First, the problem of the causes of these wars should indeed notbe dissociated from that of function. Second, in analysing civil war, wecan also usefully ask who has been given the right to speak what countsas the truth; whose interpretations, conversely, have been marginalisedand disqualified; and what practical purposes have been served by thelanguage and definitions adopted? In civil wars, while both ‘sides’have often portrayed the conflict as a battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’,civilians (if they are consulted at all) have frequently pointed tosystems of collusion and to motivations that have very little to do withmilitary victory.3Part of the key to understanding these systems is rejecting the temp-tation to take the fault-lines of conflict at face value. What are thesystems of collusion obscured by ‘war’? What are the hidden conflicts(for example, class conflict, conflict between armed and unarmedgroups, conflict between men and women, between young and old)that are obscured when officials and journalists portray civil war as abattle between two or more armed groups? Which groups effectivelyrise above the law in the context of a conflict and which fall below thelaw? While conflict is an undeniable reality, we need to keep a veryopen mind about the nature – and the functions – of any particularconflict.Experience with civil wars and local wars should impress on us thedangers of simplistically dividing the world into good and evil, thosewho are ‘with us’ and those who are ‘against us’. It is not just that aENDLESS WAR?[ 52 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 52complex world will always resist such oversimplifications. It is alsothat we need to understand the reasons for violence, including extremeviolence and terror directed at civilians. What is more, many civilconflicts teach us that it is precisely the initial or apparent legitimacy ofa particular struggle that may provide the space, opportunity andimpunity for abuses that will not be denounced or corrected; the moststriking examples of ‘legitimised abuse’ seem to arise when legitimacyis derived from being the victim of a genocide (as in the case of Israeland its oppression of the Palestinians; Rwanda and its exploitation ofthe Democratic Republic of Congo; and even Serbia, where suffering atthe hands of Croatian Ustashe in the Second World War fed into the1990s persecution of Bosnians and Kosovan Albanians).This chapter brings some insights from civil wars into an under-standing of the global ‘war on terror’: significantly, the global ‘war onterror’ and contemporary civil wars share many of the same dynamics.Some of these similarities seem to be inherent in the idea of ‘war’ itselfand the legitimacy it habitually bestows on very varied kinds ofviolence.4 Other similarities reflect the fact that similar global forceshave helped to shape both contemporary civil wars and the current‘war on terror’.The advantages of bringing an understanding of civil wars to bear onthe ‘war on terror’ are underlined by the fact that the global ‘war onterror’ is itself made up of civil wars to quite a large extent: for example,in Colombia, the Philippines, Chechnya, Afghanistan and, increasingly,Iraq. Aggressive approaches to the problem of ‘terror’ in relativelylocalised wars have often created opportunities for lucrative abuse (forexample, by paramilitaries in Colombia or Russian generals and soldiersbenefiting from looting, kidnapping, taxing, salary diversion and oilextraction in Chechnya); aggressive approaches also tend to prolong theconflict that legitimises these abuses. Presenting civil wars within theframework of a global ‘war on terror’ has often encouraged additionaldemonisation of rebels and additional resources for counter-insurgency,making a resolution more difficult.Of course, one should not fall into the trap of insisting that dynamicsin the ‘war on terror’ are exactly the same as those in civil wars (whichthemselves vary greatly). For one thing, a global war immediately runsinto problems of sovereignty. For another, the fact that counter-terror isbeing waged in large part by major and well-resourced democraciesproduces a significant difference from counter-insurgencies waged byunder-resourced autocracies: not least, perhaps, in heightening the needto carry public opinion. Even so, there are valuable lessons to be learnedWAR SYSTEMS[ 53 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 53from combating ‘terror’ in the context of a civil conflict. The main focusin this chapter will be on experience with counter-insurgency and someof the implications for global counter-terror operations. But first it isimportant to examine some similarities between insurgency and terrornetworks.Insurgency and terrorContemporary insurgencies and terror networks have some significantcommon characteristics – many of them linked to the nature of contem-porary globalisation. The first is decentralisation: factions have tendedto proliferate and chains of command have often been weak. Thismakes it all the more difficult to isolate a fixed and finite group of rebelsor terrorists whose elimination will ‘solve the problem’, not leastbecause any such elimination would likely be followed by the emer-gence of more armed rebels or terrorists.5 The tendency for factions tobe numerous and for chains of command to be weak reflects, in part,the proliferation of cheap weaponry in the global market. Also signifi-cant has been the increasingly free circulation of information, of a rangeof primary commodities, and of money itself.6 The access which terror/rebel organisations have enjoyed to lucrative global markets (as withal-Qaida and diamonds in East and then West Africa)7 not only adds tothe difficulty of destroying them; it simultaneously encourages rela-tively decentralised patterns of command by helping diverse groups togain access to weapons and to build organisational capability. Weakstates and underpaid officials have tended to be poorly positioned toconfront rebel or terror networks that are tied into global tradingnetworks. Nor are the sums of money required necessarily huge: it maynot be very expensive to acquire a few bombs to put on some trains orbuses, for example.Also encouraging weak lines of command has been a tendency forrebel/terror movements to try to take advantage of a wide range ofgrievances, many of them only tangentially related to the expressedgoals of the various movements. In Sierra Leone, rebels took advantageof the grievances of politically sidelined chiefs, marginalised traders,ousted government officials and even underpaid government soldiers.Yet members of these groups rarely subscribed to RUF (RevolutionaryUnited Front) ideology or even submitted to RUF commands. Many ofthe grievances feedingrebellion were primarily local, reflecting in partthe way colonial and post-independence governments had ruledthrough a kind of ‘decentralised despotism’ (to use MahmoodENDLESS WAR?[ 54 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 54Mamdani’s phrase), a mode of rule that tended to defuse any incipientnational politics and to channel grievances in the direction of localchiefs in particular.8 In a civil war, local grievances are most likely toacquire some kind of coherent anti-government tone in circumstanceswhere there are major abuses within the government’s counter-insur-gency operations. Within international terror networks, we can see acombination of an anti-American agenda (very strong in al-Qaida prop-aganda) and a very wide variety of local grievances against specificgovernments – grievances that do not necessarily have much to do withanti-American feelings.9 Hugh Roberts has stressed that anti-Americanfeelings are neither natural nor or long-standing in countries such asAlgeria and Egypt, but that aggressive US actions tend to superimposean American enemy on top of local grievances.10 Jason Burke has drawnattention to the loose and shifting hierarchies among very diverse mili-tant Islamic groups involved in terrorism, and to the fact that bin Ladenhas often exerted weak or non-existent control over many of thesegroups. Burke comments, ‘Some “Islamic terrorists” share most of binLaden’s aims, some share a few, some share none. The hundreds ofgroups, cells, movements, even individuals, lumped together under therubric “Islamic terrorism” are enormously diverse.’11 As noted, thedispersal of al-Qaida after the attack on Afghanistan tended to reinforcethe decentralization of violence. Burke points out that crackdowns onterrorist leadership have frequently encouraged a more decentralisedviolence and an increasing focus on ‘soft targets’.12 In both civil andglobal wars, abusive counter-insurgency/counter-terror tends to knittogether the diverse grievances of those whose targets might otherwisebe resolutely local.A third important similarity between insurgencies and terrornetworks has been the key role of anger (an anger exacerbated by abusivecounter-insurgency). In recent civil wars and in terrorism, some of theanger – which seems to be particularly strong among young men – comesfrom a sense of exclusion that is linked to globalisation: human rightshave been proclaimed and desirable lifestyles publicised, whilst theharsh reality is that economic, social and political rights have fallen short(either for the rebellious individuals or for groups they identify with).13Perhaps significantly, rebellion in Sierra Leone has been most commonamong the semi-educated, those whose expectations have been raisedand horizons widened beyond what a rock-bottom economy canprovide.14 Terrorists, too, have normally had some education: as one manwho has defended British Muslims convicted of terrorist offences inYemen commented, ‘These are intelligent and semi-integrated people.’15WAR SYSTEMS[ 55 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 55Those living in a democracy (like those who carried out the July 2005London bombings) may be in a better position than many, but their anger(whatever the cause) would seem self-evident, and the expectation thatrights will be observed is perhaps heightened by living in the West withits pervasive talk of rights and freedoms.A fourth important similarity between rebel and terror networks isthat, in an age when media visibility is crucial in projecting your power,these networks have frequently shown an interest in taking responsi-bility for atrocities, whether or not they have actually carried them out.This can help to create an exaggerated image of coherence and power.Atrocities may ‘advertise’ the ability of terror groups to stand up to agreater power.16 In Sierra Leone the rebel RUF – often rather uninter-ested in holding territory – boosted its image of power and brutality byclaiming ‘credit’ for a wide range of atrocities against civilians whenmany of these were actually carried out by government soldiers. Some-what similarly, an analysis of al-Qaida in Time magazine noted inDecember 2003:Since the invasion [of Iraq], the number and frequency ofattacks have risen dramatically. It serves al-Qaeda’s propa-ganda purposes to make people believe it is behind everyoutrage – even if like-minded groups are acting on their own.Investigators suspect bin Laden’s outfit had a direct hand inthe May bombings in Saudi Arabia and the August suicideassault on Indonesia. But Moroccan and French security offi-cials say the synchronized bombings in Morocco in May [2003]were primarily a freelance affair.17Considerable autonomy has also been attributed to those responsiblefor the Madrid bombings of March 2004,18 and similarly to those whocarried out the London bombings of July 2005.19 Jason Burke stressesthat bin Laden has been ambiguous about his own responsibility foratrocities, but adds that he does have an interest in enhancing theimportance of his own role in Islamic militancy.20A fifth similarity between rebel and terror networks is the desire onthe part of some insurgents to create a brutal response which will bringthem additional recruits, while simultaneously confirming the insur-gents’ propaganda about the callous nature of the enemy or even of theworld in general. As Hannah Arendt observed in relation to totalitarianterror in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, action may constitute themost effective propaganda – not least by making your enemy resembleENDLESS WAR?[ 56 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 56the image in your verbal (or visual) propaganda. (This is discussedfurther in Chapter 7.) Frantz Fanon believed that anti-colonial terrorcould provoke retaliation that would expose the true, brutal nature ofcolonialism (especially of French colonialism in Algeria);21 in this way,terror would attract recruits to rebellion. Bin Laden is widely held to betrying to create a kind of ‘clash of civilisations’ that will make Muslimsas a whole ‘realise’ the true enemy. Again, we have seen variations ofthis before. In Guatemala during the 1980s, guerrillas were aware thatbrutal counter-insurgency could bring them new recruits. For example,the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) used a tactic that evangelicalmissionaries called ‘provoked repression’. This included planting flagsin a village at night to force villagers to choose between retaining theflags (and perhaps attracting government retaliation) and uprootingthem (which would identify them to the guerrillas as governmentsupporters).22 In Liberia, Charles Taylor’s 1989 rebellion gainedstrength by provoking massive retaliation against certain ethnic groupson the part of Samuel Doe’s brutal regime.23 Escalating violence andmaking your propaganda come true may have a less calculatingelement: Paul Richards stresses that some of Sierra Leone’s rebels weretrying to reduce the world to ruins in line with their view that theworld was inherently corrupt and rotten.24A sixth important similarity between rebel and terror networks isthat actions by them which tend to widen and prolong the conflict maybring immediate benefits that outweigh any concern with ‘winning’.The exercise of power-through-violence may bring immediate satisfac-tions, especially where the perpetrator feels a deep sense of powerless-ness or shame. There is also the possibility that rebel/terror networkswill evolve profitable trading mechanisms that begin to become an endin themselves – helping to cement the desire to keep a conflict going.25How far this has gone with al-Qaida is unclear, but there is someevidence of profiteering.26‘Counter-insurgency’ and ‘counter-terror’If contemporary insurgency and terror have some important similarities,so too do contemporary counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. Thefirst is the prevalence of counterproductivesustain it.All this becomes more urgent because George W. Bush has oftenstressed that the ‘war on terror’ is both wide-ranging and ongoing.Bush told West Point military cadets in June 2002 that the United Statesmust be prepared to take the ‘war on terror’ to up to 60 countries ifweapons of mass destruction were to be kept out of the hands of terror-ists. 5 Iran has been a particular target for belligerent talk, and Bushdescribed Iran in February 2005 as ‘the world’s primary state sponsorof terror’.6 For his part, Tony Blair responded in October 2005 to theIranian President’s admittedly outrageous call for Israel to be ‘wipedoff the map’: ‘If they carry on like this, the question people will beasking us is – when are you going to do something about Iran? Can youimagine a state like that with an attitude like that having nuclearweapons?’7Chapter 3 looks for political and economic explanations for thecurrent counterproductive tactics. It is suggested that the global ‘war onENDLESS WAR?[ 2 ]Keen01_cha01.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 2terror’ is a system conferring important benefits, where the aim is not neces-sarily to win. If the ‘war on terror’ is an endless war in the sense of aperpetual war, it does not appear to be an endless war in the sense thatit lacks any goal or purpose. The suspicion that the ‘war on terror’ mayhave hidden functions is heightened by the succession of ‘wars’ of onekind or another in which the United States has declared its involvementsince the Second World War. Whilst taking off from the analysis of Chom-sky and others, the discussion here draws on my previous analysis ofcivil war as a system: where militarily and politically counterproductivetactics have been commonplace and where (contrary to common belief)the aim has not necessarily been military victory. A variety of civil warshave shown the militarily counterproductive nature (and the hiddenpolitical, economic and psychological functions) of indiscriminatecounter-terror.Chapters 4–9 explore the psychological functions of predictablycounterproductive actions in the ‘war on terror’, and the psychologicalfactors that have shaped the changing – and often arbitrary – definitionof the ‘enemy’. The book suggests that the search for magical andpsychologically satisfying solutions has interacted with old-fashionedmilitaristic paradigms in profoundly damaging ways. Again, the inten-tion is to examine not only why such counterproductive behavioursand unhelpful definitions of the enemy were originally adopted butalso why they have been maintained. The book looks at the appeal ofdoomed tactics not only for leaders but also for large sections of theelectorate. It emphasises the mismatch between psychologically satis-fying solutions (eliminating ‘the evil ones’) and solutions that mightactually work.Part of the aim is to go beyond condemnation of the United States andits allies and to throw light on the thought-patterns that underpin thewar on terror. Since these embody dangerous fallacies, it is important toexamine their origins and assumptions, their appeal, and how they aremade to appear plausible. Here, the analysis draws on Michel Foucault’sinsights, especially his discussion of how practices that may seem (tomany) unobjectionable and obvious nevertheless embody assumptionsthat at a later point in history (or if we highlight a previously excludedset of voices or step outside the ‘charmed circle’ of policy-makers) mayappear highly irrational.8 The analysis also draws on a number of otherauthors who are not usually discussed in the context of the ‘war onterror’, including the psychiatrist James Gilligan, the philosopherHannah Arendt, the sociologist Susan Faludi and historians KeithThomas and Omer Bartov.INTRODUCTION[ 3 ]Keen01_cha01.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 3Chapters 4–7 suggest that the ‘war on terror’ has provided a sense ofsafety and certainty that has repeatedly ‘trumped’ a more rational andrealistic sense of what is likely to promote lasting physical security.There has been a re-birth of what I will call magical thinking, some-thing that produces plausible (but spurious) answers to the problem ofexplaining suffering and plausible (but spurious) answers to the proj-ect of minimising future suffering. Magical thinking boils down to thehope that we can order the world to our liking by mere force of will orby actions that have no logical connection to the problem we seek tosolve. Part of this has been a repeated resort to scapegoating – to awitch-hunt that finds someone, anyone, on whom blame can be heaped.Scapegoating can be a way to deal with trauma and bewilderment;9 butit provides only a temporary solution to the problem of identifying(and destroying) the enemy, and there is always a danger that theprocess will be repeated. The attack on Iraq followed that onAfghanistan, and even after the Iraq debacle there is still an appetite insome quarters of the US government for attacking Iran and NorthKorea in particular. Scapegoating is replicated not only within Westerncountries but also within countries targeted in ‘counter-terror’ opera-tions: most notably, whilst targeting Iraq had provided an identifiableand accessible victim, the occupation of Iraq meant that ‘the enemy’became once more elusive; this seems to have encouraged the targetingof more accessible enemies, including prisoners.Bizarre systems (including witch-hunts) can be made to appearreasonable, logical, unavoidable and incontrovertible – at least for aperiod. In other words, magic can be made to look reasonable andrational, helping to explain how populations could be so readilymobilised into a project that is so counterproductive in terms of theexpressed aim of defeating terrorism. This is partly because dissentersrisk being labelled as ‘enemies’, partly because we often take punish-ment as evidence of guilt (‘just world thinking’), and partly becauseenemies can be made to resemble one’s pre-existing (and distorted)image of them. Hannah Arendt’s idea of ‘action-as-propaganda’ is used(in Chapter 7) to explain how abusive actions have come to acquire –particularly for many Bush supporters in the United States – an air oflegitimacy and inevitability.Part of the psychological function of counterproductive tactics is thatthey have helped to ward off feelings of shame and powerlessness. Thisis analysed in Chapters 8–9. Warding off shame involves finding otherswho will confirm you in your illusions and reassure you that your behav-iour (however irrational and immoral it may appear to most people inENDLESS WAR?[ 4 ]Keen01_cha01.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 4the world) is really rational and moral after all. If and when these othersrefuse to confirm your illusions and to sanction your definition ofenemies, they too are likely to become part of an ever-expanding cate-gory of ‘enemies’. The USA’s dangerous project of serial persecution hasbeen consistently backed by the UK as well as getting sporadic supportfrom whoever else can be flattered, bribed, cajoled or coerced intocompliance. It is precisely the irrationality of this potentially endlessendeavour – somewhere between Bush magic and the Blair witch proj-ect – that creates the necessity of orchestrating and bullying approval.Warding off shame and powerlessness has also involved an attempt tocombat elements of apparent weakness and impurity – both in USforeign policy and in policies aimed at ‘moral regeneration’ at home.This response has important historical precedents.Chapter 10 discusses a number of discourses that seem to have fedinto predictably counterproductive tactics. Foucault suggests in I, PierreRiviere that a crime cannot usefully be considered in isolation from thetexts, including religious texts, in which the perpetrator and his societyare immersed. Writers like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger tend toportray discourse as merely a smokescreen for power. They seetactics. The second is thatviolence (including extreme, indiscriminate and counterproductiveviolence) has often had functions for a diverse coalition creating it. Inother words, it has often served a range of practical and psychologicalpurposes even as it fails in its proclaimed aim of defeating or reducingWAR SYSTEMS[ 57 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 57terror. In many ways, fuelling opposition and sustaining conflict canactually be regarded as a policy success.27Counterproductive tacticsCounterproductive tactics have taken three main forms: killing civilians, letting the enemy escape, and trading with the enemy.Both counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism have frequentlyincluded the killing of civilians. Those responding to rebellion/terrorcan opt for a precise operation that carefully targets rebels/terrorists, inwhich case ordinary people are relatively unlikely to be alienated andradicalised. In its purest form, this option involves simply bringing indi-vidual rebels or terrorists to justice via appropriate legal channels. At theother extreme, those responding to rebellion/terror can opt for a policyof intimidating or attacking a much wider group. This is likely to radi-calise many people, generating additional enemies rather than reducingtheir number. In Chapter 2, we saw the counterproductive effects of the‘war on terror’ in fuelling anger and terror: notably, as a result of thekilling of civilians. This is also a vital lesson from civil wars: abusiveviolence creates the enemies it claims to be trying to defeat.Lessons from the decolonisation experience seem to have beenforgotten. As US terrorism ‘tsar’ Richard Clarke noted when he saw theportrayal of French anti-insurgency in Algeria in the film The Battle ofAlgiers: ‘After the known terrorist leaders were arrested, time passed,and new, unknown terrorists emerged.’28 Much more recently, Algerianarmy officer Habib Souaidia has documented how the Algerian Army’sbrutal and self-serving ‘counter-terrorism’ tactics have swelled theranks of the terrorists there.29Part of what has characterised contemporary civil wars has been theavoidance of outright battles against a strong enemy and a simultane-ous tendency to pick on easy targets, notably civilians. This has at leastsomething to do with the weakness of many of the states experiencingcivil war, and in particular the failure of these states to establish amonopoly of legitimate violence. In some ways, this contemporarypattern echoes patterns of medieval warfare in Europe, a period beforestrong European states were established. The conflicts in both Sudanand Sierra Leone included apparently irrational attacks on hithertouncommitted civilians, which predictably radicalised them andstrengthened the enemy.30 In Sudan, northern Sudanese militia raids ona variety of groups from the mid-1980s prompted those groups to affil-iate with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army.31 Rebellion spreadENDLESS WAR?[ 58 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 58as previously neutral sections of the southern Sudanese Dinka, forexample, were drawn into the struggle by indiscriminate attacks.32 InSierra Leone, too, nothing helped the insurgency quite so much as theabusive and indiscriminate nature of the counter-insurgency. Ironically,it was the Blair administration – and in particular the UK’s Departmentfor International Development – that played the leading role in reiningin abusive counter-insurgency in Sierra Leone by innovative work instrengthening and reforming the army and police force. Yet a key lesson– that reining in abuses by the counter-insurgency is vital – does notseem to have been extended to the global ‘war on terror’. Drawing thewrong lessons from Sierra Leone has been encouraged by the wide-spread impression that the British brought peace to Sierra Leone bydefeating the vicious RUF rebels – apparently a boost to the idea thatyou can somehow physically eliminate evil. In fact, British forces neverdirectly engaged with the RUF. Any weakening was done by Guineanforces and local civil defence fighters. The importance of the Britishcontribution lay more in sending a signal of strength and resolutionwhile simultaneously reforming the abusive army.Abusive counter-insurgency that fuels disorder and rebellion is byno means a purely African phenomenon. Examining the US-backedcounter-insurgency in Guatemala in the 1980s, historian David Stollobserved:The army’s violence backfired. Instead of suppressing the guer-rillas, it multiplied a small band of outsiders into a liberationarmy, mostly Indians drawn from local communities. By theend of 1980, government atrocities seemed to have alienatedthe entire Ixil population [Mayans living in Guatemala’sQuiche region].33In Colombia, we have seen a variation of this pattern. Here, the govern-ment has adopted a strategy of encouraging defections and of destroyingthe rebel FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in particularareas.34 However, the paramilitaries that form part of the counter-terrorapparatus have routinely abused and killed civilians, turning many civil-ians against the government and sometimes even pushing them towardsthe rebels. Isabel Hilton has noted, ‘The Colombian security services havehad a long-term strategy of civilian terror and sabotage of negotiationwith the guerrillas’.35 A key instrument deployed against the FARC hasbeen the destruction of the crops that sustain it (a tactic increasinglyemphasised in Afghanistan too). Yet these crops also sustain largeWAR SYSTEMS[ 59 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 59numbers of Colombian peasant cultivators, and the coca-eradicationproject has itself created significant new recruits for the rebels. Plans forthe economic and social transformation of coca areas have been largelyshelved, and in any case they pale in comparison to plans for social trans-formation (including land reform) under the 1960s scheme known asAlliance for Progress; instead, the focus has been on building up thearmy.36 As in the global ‘war on terror’, the underlying assumption seemsto be that there exists a limited number of deranged or evil individualswhose eradication will solve the problem. Again, there seems to be littlesense of history: little sense of how individuals have come to join theFARC, for example, and little sense of the grievances that have led peopleto embrace the risks of combat.37In Chechnya, the Russian military adopted tactics, especially bomb-ing and other forms of violence against civilians, that proved militarilycounterproductive, helping to generate resistance and to increase thestrength of Islamic militancy.38 As David Hearst observed, ‘Chechenswere not very observant Muslims when the republic declared its inde-pendence in 1991. … Russia’s assault [first in 1994–96] had the effect ofincreasing both the Islamic and the fundamentalist nature of theChechen resistance.’39 Noting the increasing importance of fundamen-talism in the Chechen resistance, Anatole Lieven notes, ‘We all praywhen under fire.’40 Russian abuses helped precipitate a terrorist attackon a Moscow theatre in October 2002, which itself drew a violentresponse when Russian troops stormed the theatre.41In October 2003, it was revealed that Israel’s army chief Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya’alon had acknowledged in an off-the-record briefingthat the government’s hard-line treatment of Palestinian civilians wasstrengthening ‘terror organisations’.42 Israel’s assassination of its lead-ers has only prompted Hamas into new atrocities.43 Indeed, Hamas’swork in clinics, universities and mosques has helped to create a degreeof mass loyalty that cannot be countered by Israeli elimination of lead-ership.44 Conversely, since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon,security along Israel’s northern border has improved.45A perverse variation of the killing of civilians in counter-insurgencyhas involved soldiers impersonating rebel groups. This bizarre patternhas been observed in Sierra Leone, Algeria and also, it appears,Russia.46 In Algeria, the GIA [Armed Islamic Group] rebels became, ineffect, a weapon for discrediting Islam and persecuting members of theFIS (Islamic Salvation Front), the Islamic political party that won theaborted 1991 elections.47 In a detailed review, Gordon Campbell notedin 2004:ENDLESS WAR?[ 60 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 60The details of French/Algerian collusion with the GIA are …disturbing. It is not simply that Algerian death squads wouldimpersonate the GIA and carry out massacres or create localmilitias – the so-called Patriotes – to do likewise. In recent years,firm evidence has begun to emerge from Algerian militarysources and leading academics that the dreaded GIA has been –perhaps from the outset and certainly under [Djamel] Zitouni’sbloody leadership – a dummy, or ‘screen’ organisation managedby French/Algerian counter-intelligence.48Even within industrialised societies, violent counter-terror that killscivilians has sometimes been marked, and has consistently been coun-terproductive. Northern Ireland is a case in point. As Irish novelistRonan Bennett put it, ‘Bloody Sunday propelled thousands of youngmen and women to take up the gun.’49 The counterproductive violenceextended to abuse of prisoners. Britain’s harsh internment policy in the1970s, including use of torture, tended to radicalise the population.50A second aspect of the counterproductive tactics has been a tendencyto allow key rebels and terrorists to escape capture, despite the verysignificant inequality of resources between the demonised rebels/terror-ists and the forces ranged against them. Of course, even where suchcapture is seriously attempted, it can be very difficult. All the same, it isremarkable how little concerted effort is sometimes put into this task.In many civil wars, a persistent failure to capture or even seriouslyto confront rebel groups has frequently led to suspicions that warfarehas too many benefits for it to be allowed to end. During civil wars insuch diverse countries as Guatemala, Uganda and Sierra Leone, rela-tively small groups of rebels have been able to survive and even growin strength in the face of much larger counter-insurgency forces. InUganda and Sierra Leone, a large proportion of rebels have been chil-dren; yet these rebel groups have survived over long periods, oftengaining in strength in the midst of almost universal condemnation. Thishas led some local analysts to question whether the respective govern-ments really wanted to bring their civil wars to an end.51 In Peru,government soldiers sometimes released captured Shining Path guer-rillas, something that tended to perpetuate insecurity in areas wheresome soldiers were making money from drugs. In the Philippines,senior officers in the army have been accused by their own soldiers ofhelping convicted terrorists to escape.52In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, some 800,000 Tutsis and moderateHutus were killed. Aided by a French government-sponsoredWAR SYSTEMS[ 61 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 61‘humanitarian’ intervention known as ‘Operation Turquoise’, manyof the perpetrators fled to neighbouring Zaire, now the DemocraticRepublic of Congo (DRC). After the Rwandan genocide, the new,Tutsi-dominated government felt understandably threatened by theseperpetrators, who were using relief aid to regroup and to plan moremass killings. Rwandan troops were sent to DRC to confront the‘Interahamwe’ militias responsible for genocide. However, manydiplomats, fighters, aid workers and refugees reported that Rwandansoldiers were now increasingly collaborating with their supposedenemies. They appeared to be stalling on the disarmament of theInterahamwe and making little effort to engage the Interahamwe inbattle. In 2002, one Rwandan-trained rebel fighter said his orderswere no longer to pursue the Interahamwe, adding, ‘Rwanda camehere to fight the Interahamwe but its objectives have changed. Thesedays, we only pretend to fight them – it’s all politics.’53 In April 2002,the International Rescue Committee estimated that some 4.7 millionpeople had died as a direct result of the DRC war.54In terms of the global ‘war on terror’, Michael Scheuer, a senior USintelligence official involved in the hunt for bin Laden, reports that theUnited States had up to a dozen serious chances to kill or capture binLaden in the year from May 1998.55 After 9/11, the Taliban’s offer tohand bin Laden to a neutral country (if the United States presentedevidence of his involvement in 9/11) was rejected. Despite the UStargeting of al-Qaida camps in the 2001 attack, bin Laden famouslywent free. Virtually all leading military analysts say the US governmentshould have used more American troops to capture bin Laden, ratherthan relying on Afghan proxies.56 There was no attempt by US forces toseal the border with Pakistan during operations against bin Laden andal-Qaida in late November 2001,57 and Scheuer said the United Statesmissed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora inthe Afghan mountains in December 2001 when General Tommy Franksrelied on unreliable surrogates rather than his own troops.58 Subse-quently, the planning and execution of the Iraq adventure took atten-tion and manpower – including Arabic speakers – from the hunt foral-Qaida.59Within Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, seen as a key US ally,proved much more interested in taking Kabul than capturing bin Laden.Meanwhile, Pakistan barely pretended to close its borders to assist thiscapture.60 In fact, former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Afghanistan,Gary Schroen, has argued that a fundamentalist strain within the armyand the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) has undermined the desire of theENDLESS WAR?[ 62 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 62Pakistani authorities to capture bin Laden.61 Experts have suggestedMusharraf agreed with the United States after the Afghan war that hewould not seriously go after bin Laden, because he feared inciting trou-ble in his own country as well as increased terror attacks on Westerntargets abroad.62 Certainly, the popularity of bin Laden among many inPakistan means capture would create problems for Musharraf.63The point is not that Bush did not want to capture bin Laden: such aturn of events would certainly have given a boost to Bush’s electoralchances in 2004. However, first, the US government had other prioritiesthat took attention and resources from this enterprise; and, second, thecounter-terror was a collaborative effort in which the aims reflected thepriorities of many parties beyond Washington. As former Labourgovernment adviser David Clark pointed out, a successful counter-insurgency tends to have a military campaign aimed at the perpetratorsof violence and a political campaign designed to isolate them; thecurrent ‘war on terror’ has neither.64A third element in the counterproductive tactics has been the pursuitof some kind of business relationship between ostensible enemies. Inmany civil conflicts, there has been significant trading with the enemy,including selling arms to the other side, not only in Chechnya but alsoin Sierra Leone, Cambodia and the Congo, where Rwandan troopswere observed selling arms to Interahamwe militiamen.65 Governmentsoldiers in the Philippines have protested at their own senior officerswho they say are responsible for several bombings and for sellingweapons and ammunition to rebel forces.66 The clearest example of‘trading with the enemy’ in the context of the ‘war on terror’ is also acivil war: the conflict in Chechnya. During the first war of 1994–96, theRussian Army frequently sold arms to rebels.67 Shamil Basayev, whorose to become the most powerful Chechen warlord, boasted that hegot 90 per cent of his arms fromRussian troops. Even the leader of theArab fighters in Chechnya, Amir Khattab, was able to get money fromthe Russian ‘enemy’ as well as from Chechen allies. The Russian Armyreportedly valued him as a provocateur to destroy the Chechen cause,and he did indeed help to provoke massive Russian destruction ofChechens from 1999 by leading a Chechen attack on Russian Dagestanin that year.68Even the briefest acquaintance with history should be enough to tellus that the current definition of enemies and ‘evils’ is contingent onimportant financial as well as political calculations. One of the para-doxes of the ‘war on terror’ is that the strong trading relationshipbetween the United States and Saudi Arabia (including large-scaleWAR SYSTEMS[ 63 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 63arms sales to the Saudis) has stood in the way of effective diplomaticpressure on the Saudis to stop the kind of inculcation of violent ideolo-gies that helped produce the perpetrators of 9/11. The links arepersonal too.69 Dick Cheney’s former company Halliburton did morethan US$174 million of business developing oil fields and other projectsfor the Saudis. Condoleezza Rice was formerly on the board of direc-tors of Chevron, which does a lot of business with the Saudis. GeorgeBush the elder has worked as a senior adviser for the Carlyle Group,which has a stake in US defence firms hired to equip and train theSaudi military.70We know that members of bin Laden’s family were speedily hustledout of the United States after 9/11.71 Saudi funds have supportedjihadists in Bosnia and Chechnya,72 and the Saudis did not seriouslystart to root out al-Qaida until the truck bomb attacks in Riyadh inNovember 2003.73 Despite the so-called ‘financial war on terror’, theSaudis were slow to co-operate with US officials in hunting for theintermediaries helping to finance terrorists,74 and they also balked atfreezing the assets of organisations linked to bin Laden (though collab-oration in private may have been more than either side will admit).75 Ofcourse, the targeting of the ‘state backers’ of 9/11 conspicuouslyexcluded Saudi Arabia.Some of those who have been vilified in the ‘war on terror’ – notablySaddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden – are characters that the Westhelped to arm and make powerful in the first place,76 though of courseproviding arms to someone who becomes your enemy is not as strangeas the phenomenon (observed in civil wars) where parties may providearms to someone who is already their enemy.Functions for a diverse coalitionIn both the ‘war on terror’ and civil wars, counterproductive tactics inthe counter-terror have had important functions for diverse groupsshaping counter-terror. These functions have been economic and polit-ical (discussed in this chapter) and also psychological (dealt with insubsequent chapters). In failing to achieve the expressed goal of defeat-ing or even weakening insurgency or terror, key actors have neverthe-less succeeded in realising other (more hidden and often more valued)goals.In both civil wars and the current global ‘war on terror’, we can see anabundance of opportunities for political, economic and psychological‘pay-offs’ among actors collaborating – or claiming to collaborate – withENDLESS WAR?[ 64 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 64a particular war effort but not necessarily sharing the aim of eliminatingthe named terror. Part of this is because both counter-insurgency andglobal counter-terror operate through a kind of licensing or harnessingof violence by diverse groups. (As noted, this also applies to insur-gency/terror to some extent.) The licensing and harnessing of diverseviolence within the counter-terror means that the aims of the ‘counter-insurgency’ or ‘counter-terror’ are very diverse (although certain parties,for example the United States in the case of the ‘war on terror’, haveclearly had a disproportionate influence in shaping these aims). AsFoucault observed, power is not simply located ‘at the top’ of any givensystem but is dispersed (albeit very unevenly) through societies andthrough systems of intervention. Significantly, the limits to US power ona global stage tend to create strategies that mimic the strategies ofgovernments pursuing counter-insurgency within weak states. The ‘waron terror’ represents an aggregation of aims within shifting coalitionsthat collaborate for a variety of reasons and that claim to be participatingin this ‘war’. While the benefits for US corporate interests and the USmilitary are extremely important (as stressed by Chomsky and Pilger, forexample), pinning everything on Washington can take attention awayfrom important domestic dynamics within countries around the world.77The beneficiaries of the ‘war on terror’ are located not only in the UnitedStates and the UK but also in a variety of dubious regimes whose co-operation has been sought and offered. Given this conglomeration ofbenefits, the desire to defeat terror cannot necessarily be taken forgranted – whether in Western capitals or at a local level (for example, theoften-collusive behaviour of Russian troops in Chechnya where Russiangenerals have made a lot of money). Crucially, as in civil wars, demoni-sation of a particular enemy creates space for abuses by those who claimto be fighting this pariah. The Cold War pattern of impunity for one’sfriends is being reinvented for the ‘war on terror’.Though there is some loss of control of the aims of counter-terror, thedispersal of violence through a complex coalition may also have certainbenefits for those who are ‘at the top’ of this system. In both civil warsand the global ‘war on terror’, the licensing of violence (by governmentswho encourage ‘tribal violence’ as part of a counter-insurgency, by coali-tion partners involving private firms in the running of Iraq and its jails,by Washington in using third-party states for torture or the NorthernAlliance for deposing the Taliban) has the advantage that it creates manyopportunities for ‘deniability’ when abuses are revealed. It minimises theviolence that is directly inflicted by the dominant power, and it reducesthe exposure to violence of the dominant power’s own forces.WAR SYSTEMS[ 65 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 65ENDLESS WAR?[ 66 ]Economic functions of civil warsMilitarily and politically counterproductive attacks on civilians inSudan and Sierra Leone have been mentioned. If the aim of war issimply to win, such actions make little sense. But perpetuating thesecivil wars has brought important economic benefits. In Sudan, mili-tary factions and allied traders and herders have enriched themselvesfrom raiding, from land-grabs, and from the price distortions accom-panying and fuelling famine. Persistently counterproductive tacticshave helped to keep the war system going.78 In Sierra Leone, rebelslost political support as a result of vicious attacks on civilians, butthese attacks nevertheless served to underwrite a system of resource-extraction, notably through creating a partial depopulation ofdiamond-rich areas. Abuses by Sierra Leonean government soldiers,whilst also eroding political support, often had similar economicfunctions. In Uganda, aid workers have reported army officers sellingsupplies to the LRA and benefiting from inflating the numbers on thepayroll; ending war would end these benefits.79The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from themid-1990s shows clearly the economic functions of violence as wellas the limits to any desire to defeat the ‘enemy’. The ostensible huntfor the Interahamwe ‘genocidaires’ (or genocide perpetrators)served as cover for the Rwandan Army’s desire to strip minerals.80While the DRC is a very poor country, it is extremely rich in naturalresources, and over time these became an important factor in Rwan-dan calculations as well as those of Uganda and Zimbabwe, coun-triesthat also became embroiled in the conflict. There is evidence ofUgandan commanders actually inciting violence between rebelgroups, apparently so as to remain in regions rich in gold andcoltan.81 With the number of conventional battles between rivalarmies falling, more and more energy was spent on economicexploitation. Actual fighting in the DRC has often been concentratedin areas rich in cobalt, copper and diamonds.82 In these circum-stances, the enemy Hutu militiamen came to be seen not simply as athreat but as a useful threat. In collaborating with their supposedenemies, Rwandan soldiers were cynically prolonging their stay inDRC.83 Promising steps towards peace have proved fragile, and inNovember 2004 Rwanda sent troops across the border into DRC,claiming to pursue the Hutu extremist Democratic Liberation Forcesof Rwanda (linked to the 1994 genocide).84 This sinister process is notentirely dissimilar to dynamics in Sierra Leone where the RUF wasKeen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 66sometimes maintained as a useful threat that justified profiteeringby parties other than the RUF.In Central America, civil wars had a more obviously ideologicaldimension. In Guatemala, however, many observers became suspi-cious that the wider agendas of economic accumulation and thesuppression of democratic forces meant the government did not wantto end the war; even after the 1996 peace agreement, the GuatemalanArmy was able to disguise its own involvement in organised smug-gling rackets under the cover of anti-narcotics operations andsuppressing ‘subversives’.85Economic functions of the ‘war on terror’The ‘war on terror’ has important economic functions. Rather in thesame manner as counterproductive tactics in civil wars, counterpro-ductive tactics in the ‘war on terror’ have helped to perpetuate anumber of (often hidden) economic benefits – by helping to prolongand deepen the conflict. This does not mean that this is the intention.However, the persistence of counterproductive tactics over timesuggests, first, the evolution of a system that is functional in importantways, and, second, at the very least, a lack of desire to dismantle orreform this system. Vested interests have subtly undermined andcorrupted the drive against terrorism itself.The uses of global ‘wars’ are not new: the terror of the Cold Warnurtured and sustained a lucrative military-industrial complex in theUnited States (not to mention its Communist variant in the SovietUnion). In the White House cabinet room in 1947, Republican SenatorArthur Vandenburg told President Harry Truman that he could havethe militarised economy he wanted, but only if he first ‘scared the hellout of the American people’ in relation to the Soviet threat.86 The ColdWar is over, but the spending spree is not. In fact, the US militarybudget (in constant dollars) is near the peacetime average for the ColdWar period of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s.87 Pentagon spending rose byabout a third even between 2003 and 2004.88 The history of conflict inKorea and Iraq appears to have created institutional interests in the USmilitary in sustaining spending in these areas in particular – feedinginto the felt need for a ‘two war’ capability.89 The current Pentagonbudget of some $400 billion represents nearly twice the defence spend-ing of the rest of the world’s military powers combined.90 The Pentagonrequested $419 billion for 2006.The three largest US weapons makers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing andWAR SYSTEMS[ 67 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 67Raytheon – receive over $30 billion per year in Pentagon contracts,91 andthere is a cosy relationship between the defence industry and many topgovernment officials. For example, James Roche held several top posi-tions with defence giant Northrop Grumman before becoming air forcesecretary, and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, acted as aconsultant to the same company. Ronald Sugar, chief executive ofNorthrop Grumman, said in 2003 that he saw ‘very significant growth insales and earnings’ as a result of hikes in budgets.92How can all this be justified in the context of massive world povertyand the high and growing levels of poverty within the United Statesitself? The answer, to a large extent, has been through continuedconflict, whether the enemy has been Communism, ‘rogue states’,‘Islamic fundamentalism’, ‘drugs’ or, most recently, ‘terror’. The ‘waron terror’ represents a new application of an old doctrine: the doctrineof endless war. Even in the post-Second World War ‘peace’, war hasbeen not so much the exception as the rule. The United States has inter-vened militarily in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Libya, Panama, Iraq,Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq again, not to mention proxy wars inAngola, Mozambique and Nicaragua or the support for abusivegovernments in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, the Philippines andelsewhere.93 As Noam Chomsky notes, the war on terror has not somuch been declared as re-declared (and by some of the same people): thefirst declaration occurred when Ronald Reagan came into the Presi-dency and announced a war on state-supported terrorism in theMiddle East and Central America.An almost tangible sense of relief at the emergence of a new enemywas expressed by Vice-President Dick Cheney in a speech to the Councilof Foreign Relations in February 2002:When America’s great enemy suddenly disappeared, manywondered what new direction our foreign policy would take.We spoke, as always, of long-term problems and regional crisesthroughout the world, but there was no single, immediate,global threat that any roomful of experts could agree upon. Allof that changed five months ago. The threat is known and ourrole is clear now.94The anti-terrorism agenda appears to have been fused with the agendaof modernising US military capabilities, making it hard to question theproject of weapons modernization.95 In what could be seen as a cruelapplication of a martial arts principle, it was the United State’s ownENDLESS WAR?[ 68 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 68strength – its skyscrapers and its planes – that was turned against it on9/11. But if high-tech weapons systems were not the problem on thatday, they have repeatedly been hailed as part of the solution. Evenbefore 9/11, Bush and Rumsfeld were telling Americans that deterrencedidn’t work in the age of terror and rogue states, and that therefore theyneeded a missile shield.96 Some three-quarters of the additional militaryfunding since Bush took office is not directly related to fighting terror-ism, and includes spending on the missile shield.97 The new enthusiasmfor ‘mini-nukes’ is also part of the new weapons bonanza.Also forming part of the military–industrial complex in the UnitedStates are the large American firms carving out big bucks from recon-struction, particularly in Iraq. The biggest contract for reconstruction inIraq – potentially worth US$680 million (or £415 million) – went to theBechtel conglomerate, which has close ties to the Bush administrationand makes substantial donations to the Republican Party and its candi-dates.98 Halliburton, headed from 1995 to August 2000 by Cheney (whoretains stock options), was awarded the main contract for restoringIraq’s oil industry; the contract was awarded without competitivetendering and Halliburton has been charging coalition authorities overthe odds for oil.99 In all, Halliburton’s Iraq contracts up until October2004 were worth US$9 billion.100 In a move that suggests the evolutionof a profitable system based on destruction-and-reconstruction, theBush administration created in August 2004 an ‘Office of the Coordina-tor for Reconstruction and Stabilization’, with a mandate to draw updetailed ‘post-conflict’ plans for up to 25 countries that were not, as yet,in conflict.101As with the ‘modernisation’ of the military, the priority of gainingaccess to oil has effectivelybeen fused with the anti-terrorism agenda,making it hard – as Michael Klare points out – to question the oilmotive.102 Oil has certainly been a factor in the USA’s choice of enemiesduring the ‘war on terror’, influencing the choice of who will not beattacked as well as who will. To say that the attacks on Afghanistan andIraq were part of a ‘war for oil’ would be a major oversimplification.There is no doubt, however, that the US government has been anxiousto expand oil imports and to reduce its reliance on the Saudis; nor isthere any doubt that Afghanistan and Iraq have played a significantrole in this strategy. The Bush administration’s close links with the oilindustry have been noted. In May 2001, the report of the Cheney-headed National Energy Policy Development Group (often called the‘Cheney report’) predicted that US oil imports would need to rise from10.4 million barrels a day to 16.7 million barrels a day by 2020. TheWAR SYSTEMS[ 69 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 69United States was projected to import 66 per cent of its petroleum by2020, up from 52 per cent in 2001,103 and the Cheney report called on theWhite House to make the pursuit of imports ‘a priority of our trade andforeign policy’ and to go for more geographical diversity in sourcing.104At present, the United States leans heavily on Venezuela and SaudiArabia for crude imports, but political turmoil in Venezuela virtuallyhalted its oil exports to the USA while some investment and oil special-ists have come to see Saudi Arabia as an unreliable political ‘powder-keg’.105 Of course, the major role of Saudi nationals in 9/11 madecontinued reliance on the Saudis all the more uncomfortable.106From around the mid-1990s, the desire to use Afghanistan as an oilpipeline became a major consideration in US foreign policy. Top USofficials have increasingly been mindful of the Caspian basin’s vastreserves of fossil fuel (oil and natural gas). In a speech to oil indus-trialists in 1998, Cheney observed, ‘I cannot think of a time when wehave had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategicallysignificant as the Caspian.’107 But how were these reserves going to betransported to market? Funnelling them through Russia or Azerbai-jan would greatly increase Russia’s control over the Central Asianrepublics. Channelling oil and gas through Iran would go against theUS policy of trying to isolate Iran. Going through China would giveChina a strategic boost and would in any case be a long way roundand expensive. That left a pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistanand India as the strongly favoured option. Among those involved innegotiating for the pipeline under President Clinton were DickCheney, representing nine oil companies, and Condoleezza Rice, thena director of Chevron-Texaco with special responsibility for Pakistanand Central Asia.108 After the fall of the Taliban, there were extendednegotiations aimed at getting a pipeline from Turkmenistan toPakistan via Afghanistan (a long-standing project of California-basedcompany UNOCAL), with future President Karzai as a top UNOCALadviser, but insecurity continued to hamper the plan.109 John Maresca,formerly of UNOCAL, became US Ambassador to Afghanistan.Meanwhile, US interest in Uzbekistan has been fuelled directly by oilas well, perhaps, as by the need for a base for operations inAfghanistan.110What was the importance of oil in the Iraq attack? According to BobWoodward, ‘Before the [9/11] attacks, the Pentagon had been workingfor months on developing a military option for Iraq.’111 Richard Clarkeremembered that just after the 9/11 attacks:ENDLESS WAR?[ 70 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 70I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld andWolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this nationaltragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the begin-ning of the administration, indeed well before, they had beenpressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon hadbeen telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraqsome time in 2002.112Oil was not the only motive here, but it was significant. Iraq exportssome 1.5 million barrels a day but experts say that by 2008 it couldexport 6 million barrels a day.113 Even Christopher Hitchens, whostrongly defended the war on Iraq, observed, ‘The recuperation of theIraqi oil industry represents the end of the Saudi monopoly, and weknow that there are many Wolfowitzians who yearn for this but cannotprudently say so in public’.114 The Bush administration has said it aimsto reverse the historic nationalisation of Iraqi oil before it has finishedwith ‘reconstruction’.115If oil has helped make some countries vulnerable, it has alsoprotected others. As noted, Saudi Arabia was the origin of 15 out of 19hijackers on 11 September 2001, and yet there was no retaliation againstthe Saudis. This reflects Saudi Arabia’s status as a key US ally and theUSA’s heavy dependence on Saudi oil. Saudis’ role in 9/11 may havebrought home the urgency of finding alternative US bases in Iraq.116An often forgotten part of the war industry is the pro-war mediamachine. This has not only promoted war but has also profited from thispromotion. Rupert Murdoch exploited and fuelled the war-fever overIraq with pro-war editorial positions. His 140 tabloid newspapers aroundthe world were selling 40 million a week.117 Murdoch’s hyper-patrioticFox news channel showed bombers heading for Baghdad to the accom-paniment of the US national anthem. With far fewer correspondents inthe Middle East than its competitors,118 Fox still won the ratings war inthe United States. MSNBC, third behind Fox and CNN, had a 350 percent rise in viewers during the Iraq war,119 which of course means morerevenue from advertising. A Los Angeles Times survey in April 2003 found70 per cent of Americans were getting most of their information from all-news cable channels like Fox, CNN and MSNBC, with only 18 per centrelying on the traditional nightly news.120 Public relations businesses alsobenefited. For example, the Rendon Group got $397,000 to handle PRaspects of the US military strikes in Afghanistan.121The economic benefits of the ‘war on terror’ extend well beyond theUnited States. For example, those controlling Russia’s war budget haveWAR SYSTEMS[ 71 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 71benefited from a Chechen conflict that has now been incorporated intothe framework of the ‘war on terror’. In 2001, the Russian government’saccounting board found nearly $45 million missing from the budget.Most of it was soldiers’ salaries.122 The profits from selling arms toChechen rebels have been mentioned. In Colombia, paramilitaries andtheir wealthy backers have profited from a civil war – again now offi-cially part of the ‘war on terror’ – in which the rebel FARC and ELN(National Liberation Army) have been the declared enemies but in whichthe majority of (rebel and paramilitary) attacks have been on civilians.Economic benefits have also sometimes extended even to ordinarypeople in poor countries. One mechanism runs parallel to the petty rival-ries that have fuelled violence in civil wars and even in many witch-hunts: at least two prisoners at Guantanamo Bay believe they werepicked up by the Americans after being falsely denounced as terrorists byrivals looking to take over their property in the Afghan town of Khost,near the border with Pakistan.123 Given that American troops have beenanxious to show they have captured enemy personnel, the potential forsuch misindentification is considerable.Political functions of civil warsIn addition to their economic functions, civil wars have also had politi-cal functions which go well beyond (and even work against) the goal ofwinning. The political functions of violence – even militarily counter-productive violence – have included the pay-off from uniting a countryaround a common and clearlyidentified enemy. A second function hasoften been the legitimisation of the military’s interference in politics. Athird (and often related) function in civil conflicts has been warding offthe threat of democracy, for example, by creating or maintaining a ‘stateof emergency’. Part of the aim here has often been to facilitate and legit-imise the intimidation of a wider group of non-rebels under the cover of‘war’: maintaining conflict can be useful in the suppression of freespeech, unions and democratic forces.124In Sierra Leone’s eleven-year war, some politicians and military offi-cers seem to have encouraged and even helped the rebels in the beliefthat a ‘state of emergency’ was useful in warding off democracy. InRwanda, a small elite within the Hutu orchestrated a genocide whenfaced with the threat of democracy arising from the 1993 Arusha peaceagreement.125 In Colombia, as Naomi Klein observes:the government’s war against leftist guerrillas has long beenENDLESS WAR?[ 72 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 72used as cover to murder anyone with leftist ties, whether unionactivists or indigenous farmers. But things have got worsesince President Alvaro Uribe took office in August 2002 on aWoT [War on Terror] platform.126Consider also the case of Guatemala. One analyst of the US-backedcounter-insurgency in Guatemala in the 1980s commented:Most observers are in agreement that the purpose of theGuatemalan army’s counter-insurgency campaign was asmuch to teach the Indian population a psychological lesson asto wipe out a guerrilla movement that, at its height, had prob-ably no more than 3,500 trained people in arms. In essence, thepurpose of the campaign was to generate an attitude of terrorand fear – what we might term a ‘culture of fear’ – in the Indianpopulation, to ensure that never again would it support or allyitself with a Marxist guerrilla movement.127The Guatemalan rebel movement got new recruits as a result of thistactic. But democratic forces were suppressed, the war system was main-tained and the United States continued to bask in its self-image as thedefender of freedom against (tenacious) Communist rebels. Violenceagainst certain ‘delinquent’ groups is routine even today in Guatemala,and police action has frequently been arbitrary, failing to target theexpressed enemy but succeeding in intimidating a much wider group. Inthis respect, the current system resembles the preceding counter-insur-gency;128 indeed, there is a logic to failing counter-terror operations thatto some extent transcends conventional distinctions between crime andcivil war (and between civil war and the global ‘war on terror’). SergioMorales, who has carried out a detailed study of crime and young peoplein Guatemala City, told me in 2002:The logic of the strategy towards youth – during the conflict, itwas to get young people onto drugs, so they wouldn’t partici-pate in politics. The military introduced it on purpose. Andthey made young people participate in religious meetings. Atleast 20 young people are assassinated weekly in the city, now.The authorities say they are delinquents, but we have doubt,because when they catch the guys, when we see police catchingmaras [marabuntas, or gangs], these young people are oftenkilled. They [the young people] use these hand-made pistols orWAR SYSTEMS[ 73 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 73other small weapons and must be killed with big calibres – notwhat the gangs use. The police authorities use AK47s. And theway of killing – four to six guys in a cafeteria or a store, andthey kill everyone. The police don’t make a good investigation.They keep saying they are delinquents and it isn’t important.The final objective is to keep young people afraid, so they don’tparticipate. It’s striking how many of the victims are girls –maybe 20–25 per cent women – young women, often veryyoung like 13. People are often killed in a horrible way, withelements of torture – a manifestation of the [earlier] counter-insurgency project. There’s a strong discourse against youth, anopen discourse against youth, especially those who dressstrangely and have tattoos. …129 There’s an ideologicalconstruction where mara is equal to delinquent. The govern-ment is always talking about security, and they need to createthe impression they have been taking action. If there aren’tenough of them – criminals, gangs – you create some. So youmake it appear as if you are countering it.This statement uncannily echoes several aspects of the global ‘war onterror’. First, the attempt to divert political radicalism into religion hasresonance in the United States as well as in many Muslim countries.130Second, the proper gathering of evidence has been set aside in the ‘waron terror’ (as we shall see in Chapter 6 in particular). Indeed, killingwithout proper legal process or proper investigation has been turnedinto official US doctrine: ‘They keep saying those are delinquents [read‘terrorists’] and it isn’t important.’ Third, the clumsy and violentcounter-terror demonstrates that its authors are taking action, and thekudos is bizarrely increased by failure: ‘If there aren’t enough of them– criminals, gangs – you create some.’ Fourth, and perhaps most impor-tantly in terms of the functions of the violence, the indiscriminatenature of the violence is in some sense functional: it maximises fear andis seen as a deterrent to political particpation.131In terms of domestic or regional wars, abusive rulers like SlobodanMilosevic and Saddam Hussein have long understood the economic andpolitical advantages of perpetual conflict, including the perceived needfor a strong leader (that is, the need for them). Though often seen in theWest as a dictator, Milosevic was not unsuccessful in elections (thoughthese were compromised by state media control and intimidation).132When I was in Belgrade in 1999, many of those I spoke with argued thatMilosevic and his cronies had actually courted international sanctions,ENDLESS WAR?[ 74 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 74and that these sanctions had helped him both politically and economi-cally. First, they reinforced a sense of siege in Serbia, a sense that ‘theworld was against them’. In these circumstances, Milosevic was able toput himself forward with some success as a strong leader who wouldvigorously defend the interests of the Serbs. As one UN official withlong-term involvement in humanitarian aid to the region commented,‘Milosevic’s strategy is to create conflict and offer a solution – protec-tion’.133 Second, the sanctions significantly increased price differencesbetween Serbia and surrounding countries. While this damaged themajority of Serbs, it created very profitable opportunities for the cliquearound Milosevic who were able to bypass the sanctions and to benefitfrom these enhanced price differences. In this sense, Milosevic’s politicaland economic system in Serbia was arguably based on two kinds ofethnic war: first, periodic warfare with a variety of ‘ethnic groups’ and,second, a ‘wider war’ – the stand-off between Serbia and much of theinternational community, itself largely the result of Milosevic’s localwars. Many believe that Milosevic fell from power, in large part, becausehe ran out of plausible wars.The Chechen conflict is another where violence has served political aswell as economic functions. When Vladimir Putin (then serving as ActingPresident after Yeltsin’s retirement) conducted the second vicious war inChechnya from 1999, it boosted his popularity and helped him to winRussia’s presidential election in March 2000. This war was billed asRussia’s own ‘war on terror’ after Chechen terrorists were alleged tohave killed more than 300 in a series of bombings of blocks of flats inRussia. In September 2004, Putin cited the threat of terrorism – andBeslan in particular– when proposing to appoint local officials himselfand more generally to centralise power in the Kremlin.134Political functions of the ‘war on terror’In the period before 9/11, Bush seems to have been less worried aboutal-Qaida than he was about Al Gore. Bush received fewer votes in the2000 election than his Democratic rival, and at the time of the attacks onNew York and Washington, Bush’s standing in the opinion polls was atits lowest point since his inauguration, with only 50 per cent of respon-dents giving him a positive rating. Within two days of the attacks, thefigure had shot up to 82 per cent. By 13–14 March 2003, the figure hadslipped back to 53 per cent, but on 18 March Bush declared war withIraq and his rating shot up to 68 per cent.135 Sidney Blumenthalcommented in February 2005, ‘The more terrorism dominates theWAR SYSTEMS[ 75 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 75media, the higher his ratings; and whenever terrorism declines, hebegins to sink.’136Bush certainly seems to have watched the polls. When Bush’sratings rose from 55 per cent to 84–90 per cent in the month after 9/11,his strategic adviser Karl Rove (hailed by many as architect of Bush’svictories in 2000 and 2004) took the polling information to Bush andexplained that history suggested they had 30 to 40 weeks before pollsreturned to normal. Woodward recalls: ‘”Don’t waste my time with it”,Bush told Rove, pretending to have no interest but looking at the data.… [T]he president carefully monitored his political standing’.137 Thehead of Fox News, Roger Ailes, told Rove that support would dissipateif the public did not see Bush acting harshly, and the message was dulypassed on to the president.138After a 2004 campaign in which the ‘war on terror’ was a key issue,Bush won significantly more comfortably than he had in 2000. Theoverriding message of the preceding Republican convention was thatAmerica was at war and it could not trust the Democrats to be resolutein fighting this war. The tactic seems to have worked reasonably well.In addition to boosts in popularity, the ‘war on terror’ has facilitatedthe intimidation of domestic opponents and a degree of suppression ofdissent (something dealt with more fully in Chapter 9). The arbitraryand unpredictable nature of much of the counter-terror seems to beactively useful here, and torture too has played a part. The climate offear was well conveyed by Naomi Klein, who described how commu-nity leaders kept silent at an event honouring Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who had been taken from New York to Syria and heldfor ten months while being periodically beaten. Klein commented:Some speakers were unable even to mention the honouredguest by name, as if he had something they could catch. Andperhaps they were right: the tenuous ‘evidence’ – later discred-ited – that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by asso-ciation. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful softwareengineer and family man, who is safe?139Commenting on a new disrespect for law, Kenneth Roth, ExecutiveDirector of Human Rights Watch, observed in early 2004, ‘The Bushadministration has used war rhetoric precisely to give itself theextraordinary powers enjoyed by a wartime government to detain oreven kill suspects without trial’.140 America’s founding fathers hadmade explicit their concern that war would increase the president’sENDLESS WAR?[ 76 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 76power and that the executive was the most prone to war – a key reasonfor their vesting the power of war in the legislature, which provedcompliant after 9/11. The founding fathers had understood that publicfear, in Al Gore’s words, ‘can trigger the temptation of those whogovern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promisesstrength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear’.141Certainly, counter-terror legislation has also exhibited a tendency toseep into other spheres, and not just in the United States. In 2003,special powers under the UK’s 2000 Terrorism Act were used againstdemonstrators at a London arms fair.142 Just a few days after Britain’sHome Secretary David Blunkett proposed lowering the standard ofproof in terrorist cases in February 2004, Blair posited the same changefor drug trafficking and other organised crime.143 In September 2005, an82 year-old party member, Walter Wolfgang, was manhandled andthrown out of the Labour Party conference after heckling Foreign Secre-tary Jack Straw as the minister defended Britain’s role in Iraq; the oldman was prevented under anti-terrorist powers from re-entering thehall.144 Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar banned the Basquepolitical party Batasuna, even though no direct link had been estab-lished with terrorist acts; he also banned Basque human rights groupsand the Basque language newspaper.145An important part of the political function of the ‘war on terror’ hasbeen the way it legitimises political intimidation by a range of alliesbeyond the Bush/Blair/Aznar axis. In effect, the ‘war on terror’ hasgiven a license to internal repression in countries supporting this war.This was discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to the anger generated by the‘war on terror’. As in many civil wars, demonising one party has createdspace for the (hidden) abuses of others. As Michael Mann observes,labelling opponents as ‘al-Qaida’ ‘allows repressive governments to dowhat they want with limited international criticism’.146The war on terrorism has given opportunities for Israel to presentits own actions as part of a joint worldwide struggle against terror-ism, and Rumsfeld and Cheney have argued that consistency in fight-ing terrorism requires support for Sharon.147 Human Rights Watch’sAsia Director Brad Adams said, ‘The worldwide campaign againstterrorism has given Beijing the perfect excuse to crack down harderthan ever in Xinjang [north-west China]’ where some 8 millionUighurs, a Turkic-speaking group, live.148 In India, anti-terrorist legis-lation has facilitated abuses against minority groups and politicalopponents.149 Even abuses in the former Yugoslavia have been retro-spectively justified as ‘anti-terrorism’. Certainly, the ‘war on terror’WAR SYSTEMS[ 77 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 77has been a major threat to Musharraf’s regime in Pakistan, notablybecause of opposition to the US-led attack on neighbouringAfghanistan. But in compensation, Pakistan got $600 million in cash,help in rescheduling debt, the lifting of earlier US sanctions linked tonuclear weapons tests, a lack of scrutiny for its nuclear programmesand the shielding of rogue nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan fromUS investigators.150 The autocrat Musharraf has been able to presenthimself as a pillar of freedom.In the Philippines, labelling opponents as ‘al-Qaida’ has fuelledrepression.151 This has included intimidation of trade unions, the appar-ent targets of President Gloria Arroyo’s denunciation of ‘those whoterrorise factories that provide jobs’.152In Colombia, the war against drugs allowed brutal counter-insurgency to delegitimise its enemies as ‘narco-guerrillas’, and manyColombian observers believe the global ‘war on terror’ has fed intoabuses there. In June 2002, the rebel group FARC was placed on theUSA’s list of foreign terrorist organisations, and FARC has been directlytargeted as part of the Plan Colombia and the ‘war on terror’. 9/11encouraged the United States to loosen restrictions on the use of fund-ing to confront guerrillas (as opposed to drug control operations), andin general the USA encouraged the Colombian government to hardenits stance in relation to the FARC and the ELN rebels.153 Importantly,there has been increased room for manoeuvre for Colombia’s paramil-itaries, who have carried out numerous and severe human rightsabuses, often maintaining close ties with Colombian military units.154Western criticism of Russian brutality in Chechnya has been notori-ouslymuted.155 Arab fighters have been involved there since 1998, butMichael Mann observed in 2003, ‘Russia exaggerates the links betweenChechen rebels and al-Qaeda to get American blessing for state terror-ism.’156 We have seen how terrorists – like rebels in civil wars – mayhave an interest in exaggerating the prevalence and coherence of theinsurgency/terror network; such exaggerations may also be peddledby the coalition that makes up the ‘counter-terror’, a coalition that mayfind this threat useful in important ways. In February 2002, the UnitedStates agreed to blacklist three Chechen rebel groups, a long-standingRussian request.157Uzbekistan, which provided a base for operations in Afghanistanand which has received large quantities of US aid, has been anotherdubious bedfellow in the ‘war on terror’. In May 2003, there were some6,500 political prisoners. The United States hardly protested.158 In May2005, Uzbek government troops killed 500 protestors.159 Suppression ofENDLESS WAR?[ 78 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 78the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan – a weak movement thought tohave been crippled by the coalition operations in Afghanistan – hasbeen used to justify repression of Islamists more generally. Somereforms were implemented – for example, registering a human rightsgroup and a new newspaper – but the local representative of HumanRights Watch said these were basically window-dressing to get militaryfunding through the US Congress’s ethical laws.160 The Uzbekistansecurity service has cracked down on Hizb-ut-Tahrir (meaning ‘theparty of liberation’), an Islamist group (later banned in the UK by TonyBlair). Another group targeted has been the Muslim group Akramiya,whose ideology seems more based on economics than religiousdogma.161 Uzbekistan’s Ferghana valley has been a base for anotherIslamist group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (ISU), which theUSA and UK say has links with al-Qaida. Significantly, as in Algeriaand in Iraq, a democratic vote could lead to an Islamist governmentunfavourable to the United States.162Some of the local functions of the ‘war on terror’ are subtle, but noless damaging for that. While not directly participating in the ‘war onterror’, some of the countries involved in destabilising the DemocraticRepublic of Congo – notably Rwanda and Uganda – have benefitedfrom being labelled (not least by the UK government) as among the‘good guys’ in Africa. Rwanda’s biggest ally and backer has beenBritain, which has given considerable financial aid to Rwanda andwhich for a long time said little or nothing about these abuses. Ugandaand Rwanda, already favoured by the USA and UK, were part of theramshackle ‘coalition of the willing’ recruited to support the Iraq warin 2003.163 Perhaps we are seeing a potentially dangerous comingtogether of two ideas: one is the war against terrorism, which (rein-venting a Cold War discourse) involves deciding who is with us andwho is against us. Another is what appears to be an increasing fashionfor concentrating aid on countries deemed to have good governance (atleast within their own borders).Any war carries the need to win allies and with it the implicationthat abuses by these allies will be tolerated. The war against Commu-nism gave valuable leeway to the Sudan government, for example, inwaging a vicious war in southern Sudan and in manufacturingfamine there. After increased hostility in the 1990s, there has been apartial rapprochement between Washington and Khartoum, withincreased co-operation over intelligence for the ‘war on terror’ (andWashington showing renewed interest in Sudan’s oil). The effectshave been ambiguous: on the one hand, the partial détente hasWAR SYSTEMS[ 79 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 79encouraged the Sudan government to accede to a peace in the south;on the other, the rapprochement seems to have fed into a weak inter-national stance in relation to government-sponsored abuses in Darfur,western Sudan. On top of this, in May 2005 Amnesty General Secre-tary Irene Khan said the United States had been unable to garnersupport in Africa for military intervention (for example, in Sudan) atleast partly because it had spent its ‘moral currency’ in Iraq.164 Tellingthe Sudan government to observe human rights was not made anyeasier by Abu Ghraib.Concluding remarksAlthough we have often been told that 11 September 2001 was ‘the daythat changed the world’, most of us know that extreme terror was notinvented on that day. There are important lessons to be learned fromattempts to combat the use of terror within a range of civil wars, andcounter-terrorism can draw important lessons from counter-insurgency.One crucial lesson has been that proliferating weapons and deep-seatedanger at political and economic exclusion have fuelled conflicts thatcannot be adequately understood, or addressed, as the struggle betweentwo teams: let alone between good and evil. A second is that patterns ofviolence and terror are profoundly shaped by the nature of the responseto them: counter-insurgency has all-too-often attracted new recruits to anotherwise-weak rebellion. Most importantly, rebels – like terrorists –cannot sensibly be treated as a distinct and finite group that can be phys-ically eliminated by violence. And focusing exclusively on somedemonised group – however vicious and violent it may be – creates spacefor abuses by diverse actors who claim to be opposing this group.In Sierra Leone, violence against civilians by government soldiersimpeded efforts to win hearts and minds in the war against the Revo-lutionary United Front (RUF). The conceptualisation of Sierra Leone’swar as a struggle between two teams (one good, one bad) was deeplydamaging. Identifying the RUF as the source of all evil – a commonposition not only in the Sierra Leonean government but among inter-national donors – actually created space for terror: first, it served todistract attention from underlying grievances that fuelled the country’sterror; and second, it distracted attention from abuses by the variouscounter-insurgency forces. Similar problems surround the attributionof terror to ‘evil’ or ‘an evil ideology’.Ultimately, whether in Africa’s neglected conflicts, in Central Amer-ica or in the higher-profile attacks of 9/11, lasting security can onlyENDLESS WAR?[ 80 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 80come from defusing, rather than deepening, the underlying anger. Inthe long term, this implies development and fostering democracy bypeaceful means. In the short term, it implies not making things worsethrough violence and indiscriminate counter-terror. A basic medicalprinciple must urgently be applied to counter-terrorism: ‘First, do noharm.’While the idea of a ‘war on terror’ legitimises violence with the labelof war, the status of ‘prisoners of war’ has been denied to ‘the otherside’. Thus, we are invited to believe that this is simultaneously a warand not a war. This mirrors the schizophrenic official discourse in manycivil wars where the state habitually delegitimises rebel violence as‘criminal’,165 while legitimising its own violence as ‘war’ (and usuallyfavouring a military rather than a policing response). At the same time,the terrorists have taken the idea that this is indeed a war and used it,for example, to legitimise attacks on civilian contractors in Iraq andother civilians in terror attacks around the world.The so-called ‘war on terror’ has quickly become a pernicious system.The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic have famil-iarised us with the importance of securing complicity in violence. Bothmen cemented their own power by encouraging collaborators into theirown petty corruption or other crimes. In other words, loyalty andcomplicity were cemented by crime. Local leaders’ participation in the‘war on terror’ may help silence any criticisms they might have of USinitiativesin this ‘war’ or reservations they might have about US impe-rialism. Meanwhile, US officials have sometimes been reluctant to criti-cise abusive detentions in countries around the world, seeing themselves as on thin ice in relation to detentions in US facilities.166One question that arises from Chapters 2 and 3 is this. If the ‘war onterror’ (and its predictably counterproductive tactics) neverthelesshave important functions, does the counterproductive nature of thesetactics not nevertheless undermine the legitimacy of their creators? Inother words, isn’t consistent failure a bit of a problem?167The answer seems to be: not necessarily. Rewards may not bedependent on correct identification of a threat; and appearing to defeata common enemy may be more important than actually defeating it. Aswith humanitarian aid (where failure to deliver relief has sometimesbeen praised as not creating ‘aid dependency’ or even as promotingmigration and modernisation),168 ‘failure’ in the ‘war on terror’ hasoften been accommodated by redefining the objectives (and by definingthem rather vaguely in the first place). While this damages the inter-national credibility of the United States in particular,169 it can oftenWAR SYSTEMS[ 81 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 81bolster a crumbling image of success, particularly within the USA.When bin Laden proved elusive, Bush said part of his strategy was toget bin Laden ‘on the run’, so he couldn’t be ‘plotting and planning’.170On 21 October 2001, CIA Director George Tenet stated the objectives inAfghanistan were, first, the collapse of the Taliban, and, second, forOsama bin Laden to be ‘killed, captured or on the run’.171 In general, thefocus on bin Laden tended to recede in US government discourse, withoverthrowing the Taliban correspondingly elevated, and, later, over-throwing Saddam. For his part, Tony Blair stressed that one reason toattack Afghanistan was to rein in the drugs trade. But opium produc-tion has boomed since the Taliban was toppled,172 with Afghanwarlords (often backed by the West) bankrolled by a drugs boom.173The Taliban had actually managed to cut opium production dramati-cally, in part to encourage food production during a drought.Predictably, the expressed Western aim of controlling the drugs tradehas rather fallen from view. The Taliban’s oppression of women wasalso sometimes stressed as a justification for military intervention, butsexual violence has remained widespread and we do not hear muchabout this now.174 When weapons of mass destruction were not foundin Iraq, the aim of intervention was frequently redefined as freeing theIraqi people. Very early on, Rumsfeld had set the tone for shifting objec-tives: just after the 9/11 attacks, he was asked what would constitutevictory in the war on terrorism, and he replied that victory would bepersuading the American people that the war would not be ‘over in amonth or a year or even five years’.175 Winning, in other words, was notwinning; and if winning the war on terrorism was unlikely (given inparticular the counterproductive effects of counter-terrorism), then thevery definition of winning could neatly be changed.Redefining civilians as enemies is part of what makes clumsycounter-terror so counterproductive. However, it can also help inpresenting an ‘image’ of success. One British soldier stationed inAfghanistan said, ‘if you carry a gun, as half Afghan men do, and pointit at one of the coalition special forces, you will inevitably die quicklyand once you’ve been shot, you are al-Qaida/Taliban by definition’.176There is evidence that US officers in Iraq have been rewarded for enter-ing into battles rather than for holding back and winning hearts andminds. US Staff Sergeant Camilo Meija, who led his squad on manydangerous missions in Iraq, said, ‘You had a bunch of officers who hadbeen in the military for 20 to 25 years and who had no combat experi-ence. They were looking for fights so they could have it on theirresume. No commander ever said, “I am doing this to get medals”, butENDLESS WAR?[ 82 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 82it was pretty obvious.’ Meija’s commanding officer disagrees with thecharge, but the Pentagon admitted morale has been perilously low inIraq, with three-quarters of the troops believing their superior officershad little concern for their well-being.177Again, some of these dynamics are familiar from other wars. InSierra Leone, civilians were sometimes ‘counted’ as rebels whensoldiers tried to prove they had done a good job. This included thekilling of small children.178 In Vietnam, Michael Bernhardt, a US soldierwho tried to oppose atrocities including the My Lai massacre, said thatin every encounter with a Vietnamese, you could decide whether:the person is a threat to the security of yourself and your unit,or not a threat. The person is a threat and you decide to kill theperson and that’s a correct action. … Or the person is not athreat, and you can kill the person. The trouble is, the outcomelooks the same as the correct action. It doesn’t look any differ-ent, and it’s not scored any differently. And you need the score.The individual soldier needs the score, the commanding officerneeds the score, the battalion commander and the divisioncommanders need the score. So what else is going to happen?179Sometimes it seems that everyone wants a piece of the ‘war on terror’.Even DVD manufacturers have railed against piracy on the grounds –poorly supported with evidence – that it was funding terrorists.180 Inthe UK, the Blair government tried to ‘tie in’ its domestic disorderagenda to the ‘war on terror’: as Times columnist Simon Jenkinsobserved, ‘Security is used neatly to link the world of al-Qaeda, bomb-ings and beheadings to a harmless drunk rolling down the neighbour-hood street’.181 One of the urgent tasks today is to be vigilant aboutwhat kinds of diverse agendas are being hitched onto the bandwagonof ‘counter-terrorism’. Many are much more dangerous than the driveagainst piracy or drunken behaviour, and many are actively fuellingthe terror itself.WAR SYSTEMS[ 83 ]Keen03_cha03.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 834 Elusive Enemies and the Needfor CertaintyAlthough the current tactics in the ‘war on terror’ are fuelling the angerthat in turn fuels terrorism, the ‘war on terror’ nevertheless has heldout the (false) promise of certainty and safety in an increasingly fright-ening world. Whether in launching their international attacks or indealing with insurgency within Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush and Blairhave acted on the basis that there exists a discrete and finite group ofterrorists and state backers who can usefully and legitimately be elimi-nated. Whilst counterproductive in reducing terror, this approach hasthe advantage, above all, of identifying an enemy in circumstanceswhere the threat is both diverse and obscure.Bush and his team have consistently pushed certainty as itself apromoter of safety. For example, in his first pre-election debate in 2004,Bush observed: ‘People know where I stand. People out there listeningknow what I believe, and that’s how best it is to keep the peace’.1 In the2004 presidential campaign Bush’s rival John Kerry, by contrast, wasrepeatedly depicted as vacillating and confused, and hence a source ofdanger. On top of the insistence on the connection between certaintyand safety, there may also have been a (secondary) concern withcertainty as a part of prosperity. In November 2002, Bush found plansfor further tax cuts were running into the problem of a stagnant anduncertain economy amidst all the talk of war with Iraq; he told hisadvisers, ‘Until we get rid of Saddam Hussein, we won’t get rid ofuncertainty.’2 In a rallying speech to the UK parliament on 18 March2003 on the brink of the Iraq war, Blair noted, ‘the world is ever moreinterdependent. Stock markets and economies rise and falltogether.Confidence is the key to prosperity. Insecurity spreads like contagion.So people crave stability and order.’3For most Americans, the feeling of vulnerability seems to have beenheightened by the high degree of immunity to war that they had previ-ously enjoyed. There has been no war on mainland American soil sincethe Civil War ended in 1865. (The United States did once come directlyunder attack – by Japanese forces at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in Decem-ber 1941 – a profound shock that precipitated US participation in theSecond World War and, arguably, culminated in the obliteration inAugust 1945 of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.4) While[ 84 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 84fear was certainly intense during the Cold War, the stand-off with theSoviet Union was precisely that: both sides, for the most part, stood offfrom actual fighting. When there were wars, these were usually fought byproxy: casualties, in effect, were exported to the developing world. Apartial exception was war in Vietnam, which killed large numbers ofAmericans. But this seems only to have reinforced the feeling that Amer-ican lives were sacrosanct. In the early 1980s, when I was living in Texas(where George W. was to become governor), I remember a strange feel-ing of invulnerability, a feeling that you were very far away from theproblems of the rest of the world (not to mention the rest of America). Inthis environment, the Reagan administration’s madcap ‘Star Wars’scheme (for knocking incoming missiles out of the sky) had an oddlyplausible ring to it – as if missiles were indeed no more than baseballswhich could be quickly dispatched by a former film-star president witha particularly big bat.One day in September 2001 dramatically destroyed this cumulativesense of immunity, and subsequent official measures (for example,colour codes for different levels of terror alert) have only heightenedthe sense of dread. An article in Time magazine just over a month afterthe 9/11 attacks vividly expressed the new climate of fear when it said,‘Everybody finds himself caught on the frontlines’.5 In addition, therewas a profound sense of disorientation. Keeping the peace during theCold War was based largely on the principle of deterrence: anyonecontemplating a war had to reckon with the threat of large-scale retali-ation. The principle of deterrence has also infused domestic lawenforcement, with firearms possession, widespread incarceration andfrequent use of the death sentence all seen as deterring criminals in theUnited States.6 However, deterrence will not work with suicide terror-ists. Part of this is because the terrorist is elusive and frequently escapespunishment. Highly mobile and un-uniformed, the terrorist oftenblends into the host society.7 He or she may draw sustenance from acriminal underworld that constantly adapts to surveillance andattempted suppression. Very frequently, the terrorist is elusive even indeath, with the worst perpetrators often escaping interrogation orpunishment because they have committed suicide in the course of theircrimes. This presents another problem for those who believe in deter-rence: the terrorist may actively wish to die. Can anyone, for example,have appeared so visibly elated at a death sentence as the Bali bomber,Amrozi bin Nurhaysim, a smiling car mechanic from East Java? InSeptember 2002, Bush himself stated in the USA’s National SecurityStrategy:ELUSIVE ENEMIES[ 85 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 85Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terror-ist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and thetargeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdomin death and whose most potent protection is statelessness.8One timeless rule of war would appear to be this: when the enemy iselusive, more accessible enemies must be found. In Liberia’s civil war,Bishop W. Nah Dixon of the Pentecostal Church said of abusive govern-ment soldiers, ‘Incapable of facing the enemy on the battlefield, [they]turned against innocent civilians …, killing them on suspicion of abet-ting and hiding the rebels’.9 A similar problem emerged in SierraLeone.10 It seems retribution will always find its victims, and explana-tion for suffering will find its object. Just after 9/11, Bush declared,‘Somebody is going to pay’.11 He told King Abdullah of Jordan, ‘There’sa certain amount of blood-lust, but we won’t let it drive our reaction. …We’re steady, clear-eyed and patient, but pretty soon we’ll have to startdisplaying scalps.’12 As Rene Girard has noted, ‘When unappeased,violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature thatexcited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because itis vulnerable and close at hand.’13 A similar mechanism is highlightedin a different context by American psychiatrist James Gilligan, whoshows how violent criminals have repeatedly vented their fury at pasthumiliations on those who are unfortunate enough to be close at handand to have somehow reawakened past humiliations (a perspectivediscussed more fully in Chapter 9).After 9/11, Osama bin Laden, widely held to be the architect of theSeptember atrocities, was proving elusive. The old habit of makingthreats against states itself fed into the identification of an accessibletarget. Vice-President Dick Cheney revealed some of the underlying‘logic’ when he said, ‘To the extent we define our task broadly, includ-ing those who support terrorism, then we get at states. And it’s easierto find them than it is to find bin Laden.’14 Rushing to war withAfghanistan was not justified. For one thing, as noted, steps werereportedly being taken by Pakistan and the Taliban after 9/11 to allowthe extradition of bin Laden himself from Afghanistan; of course, thismay not have worked, but a deadline for extradition could have beenset. In any case, the 19 hijackers (none of them Afghan) trained for theirmission in Europe and the United States, not Afghanistan.15 Yet keyleaders could not seem to let go of that tried and (strangely) trustedsolution: war. Enemies still had to be identified, and a military responsehad to be exhibited.ENDLESS WAR?[ 86 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 86When policy-makers were planning war in Afghanistan, the targetcountry stood in pleasing contrast to the terrorist. Whilst the terroristwas invisible and elusive, Afghanistan was right there on the map with‘Afghanistan’ conveniently stamped on top of it: an identifiable,immovable enemy. The same was true of Iraq, which was in some waysconsidered a more desirable target: for one thing, as top US counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke recalls, Rumsfeld complained in thewake of 9/11 that there were no decent targets for bombing inAfghanistan and that the administration should consider bombingIraq, which he said had better targets.16However, for American soldiers and their allies fighting inside thesecountries, the situation was once again reversed, and the enemy tendedonce again to become elusive, intangible and terrifying. Violence inAfghanistan and Iraq took on elements of a civil war between insurgentsand Western-supported forces, and as in many purely internal wars,soldiers were soon seeking accessible and identifiable targets. In fact,targeting the enemy spilled over all too easily into killing civilians. Amer-ican Sergeant First Class John Meadows commented on his experience inIraq: You can’t distinguish between who’s trying to kill you andwho’s not. Like the only way to get through shit like that wasto concentrate on getting through it by killing as many peopleas you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killingthem first and getting home.17US Marine Michael Hoffman wrote of his Iraq experience, ‘When yourenemy is unclear, everyone becomes your enemy.’18 This way of oper-ating may even have been reinforced by the evident lack ofdistorted media coverage of the ‘war on terror’ as a pretty directexpression of US war-mongers’ interests and as strongly reflecting USgovernment propaganda in particular. Sheldon Rampton and JohnStauber have also produced important analysis along these lines. Butthis is only part of the story. David Miller – in the introduction to hisedited collection, Tell Me Lies – touches on an important qualification tothe emphasis on ‘lies’ in the book’s title: ‘members of the elite come tobelieve their own lies,’ he writes, ‘and seem unable to break free of theoperating assumptions of the system … they come to believe that theworld seen through the distorting lens of their own self interest is howthe world really is’.10 The point is not elaborated in much detail, but itis important to try to examine the nature of these ‘operating assump-tions’ and where they come from. As Foucault noted, officials may insome sense be trapped by dominant rhetoric, including their own.Whilst often self-serving, misconceptions also spring from a particularculture and a particular tradition, which help to sustain them in the faceof mounting evidence that they are not working. Paradoxically, belief inthese ‘operating assumptions’ seems to be strengthened by evidence oftheir falsity, and an interesting question is this: what kind of evidencewould it take to convince Bush and Blair that they are wrong?The question of intentions is a difficult one.11 Were the counter-productive effects of the ‘war on terror’ foreseen or even desired? It isINTRODUCTION[ 5 ]Keen01_cha01.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 5hard to give a definitive answer. But I would like to draw on Foucaultagain and suggest that key leaders in the ‘war on terror’ have beentrapped within systems of language and thought that are at once a partof a shared culture and also (as they surround themselves with thosesharing similar views) partially of their own making.12 This helps toexplain how the irrational can come to seem rational. Meanwhile, thepractical political and economic benefits accruing from perpetual warhave helped to ensure that challenges from within the dominantnations and their local allies are insufficient to shake up the cosy anderroneous ‘truths’ that have underpinned the current counterproduc-tive approach. Although Bush, Blair and other close allies surely do notwant the ‘war on terror’ to fail, it would seem that other priorities takeprecedence and help to cloud their awareness of what works and whatdoesn’t. It is notable that, even once the (foreseeable) counterproduc-tive effects become clear, they are still adhered to. Counterproductivetactics have become part of a dysfunctional system that not only yieldscertain benefits but also has a (fallacious) internal logic.Revealingly, the idea that bad things are the responsibility of a few‘evil individuals’ has informed both the tactics in the ‘war on terror’and the official US response to revealed abuses like those at AbuGhraib, which were dismissed as the work of a few ‘bad apples’. Theuse of torture in third-party countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt andSaudi Arabia13 has also helped to preserve the idea that bad things arethe responsibility of ‘them’ and not ‘us’. These denials of responsibilityare part of a persistent tendency to exaggerate the decentralization ofviolence in relation to one’s own ‘side’. Alongside this has been anenduring habit of underplaying the decentralization of violence amongone’s ‘enemies’ (the terrorists). Thus, abuses in the ‘counter-terror’system (if admitted) are said to reflect a ‘breakdown’ in the chain ofcommand, while the enemy’s abuses are held to reflect a ruthless impo-sition of command. This neatly sidesteps responsibilities in the West aswell as the widespread anger that informs terrorism (and Westernnations’ part in fuelling this anger). Not dissimilarly, during the ColdWar, abuses in countries friendly to the West (if they were admitted atall) were frequently depicted as aberrations or the result of loose chainsof command. A classic example was the dismissal of government-spon-sored famine in Western-backed Sudan as the result of ‘ancient ethnichatreds’.14 At the same time, abuses in Communist-backed countrieswere seen as demonstrating the essence of an abusive and rigidlyimposed Communist ideology. Of course, the Soviet Union could alsoplay this game in reverse.ENDLESS WAR?[ 6 ]Keen01_cha01.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 6Part of my work on civil conflicts has involved extensive study ofhumanitarian aid: for example, in Sudan and Sierra Leone.15 Whenthings have gone wrong with humanitarian operations (for example,relief is not delivered), this has usually either been disguised ordismissed as arising from ‘mistakes’ or ‘failures’. But such ‘failures’have typically been actively produced by a range of interests affectingrelief distribution at all levels and by a range of discourses (for exam-ple, the idea that relief induces ‘dependency’ in the recipients) whichhave helped to sustain counterproductive policies and to lend themlegitimacy. As Edward Clay and Bernard Schaffer (themselves influ-enced by Foucault) say in relation to ineffective development projects:The … important question is not why public policy ‘fails’. Itdoes not always necessarily or completely do so. The formula-tion expresses an odd reification. Public policy is, after all, whatit does. The point is to explain what that is, and then see if thatexplanation can itself be an instrument for change andimprovement.Chapter 10 also suggests that the ‘war on terror’ appeals for many ofthe same reasons that consumerism appeals. The ‘war on terror’ hasbeen sold with tried-and-trusted advertising techniques. And likeconsumerism, it feeds on its own failure; crucially, failure sustains thedemand that is necessary for constant renewal, whether of consumeristfantasies or of the fantasies behind the ‘war on terror’. In the case of the‘war on terror’, the key demand sustained by failure is the demand forsafety. All that is needed to sustain this dishonest and counterproduc-tive system, as with the false promises of advertising, is that we quicklyforget that the solution we were recently offered and readily ‘boughtinto’ (attacking Afghanistan, attacking Iraq) has not magically met ourneed for security. Here, much of the media has been complicit in helping us to forget. This book is intended as an aid in not forgetting.INTRODUCTION[ 7 ]Keen01_cha01.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 72 Fuel on the Fire: PredictablyCounterproductive Tactics inthe ‘War on Terror’Two models of terrorismUS President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have beenvery clear, repeatedly proclaiming that America and its friends must‘wage war on terrorism’, that they must ‘hunt down the terrorists’ anddestroy them. In his State of the Union speech in January 2002, Bushsummoned all nations to ‘eliminate the terrorist parasites who threatentheir countries and our own’. After the bombings in Riyadh, SaudiArabia, in May 2003, Cheney advised an audience in Washington ‘torecognise the fact that the only way to deal with this threat ultimately isto destroy it. There’s no treaty can solve this problem, there’s no peaceagreement, no policy of containment. … [W]e have to go find the terror-ists.’1 The idea is that evil must be physically eliminated. As Bush put it,‘our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks andrid the world of evil’;2 or again, ‘This will be a monumental strugglebetween good and evil. But good will prevail.’3 Peter Singer’s research,published in 2004, found that Bush had referred to evil in 319 differentspeeches, and had usually used the word as a noun, a force in the world,rather than simply as an adjective describing certain acts.4The US-led approach to terror rests on the assumption that terroristsare a discrete group of evil individuals who can be isolatedlinksbetween Iraq and 9/11: Hoffman observed:‘War for oil’ is a term the troops in Iraq know well. That isthe only reason left for this war, leaving those on the groundwith only one reason to fight – get home alive. When thiskind of desperation sinks in, it is easy to make the personacross from you less than human, easier to do horrible thingsto them.Communication problems added to the difficulty of distinguishingcombatants from non-combatants,19 as did the fact that insurgents oftenwore no uniform.20 In the event, no target proved more accessible orELUSIVE ENEMIES[ 87 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 87more tempting than the prisoner, and many of the prisoners inAfghanistan and Iraq had no link to the respective insurrections.21When considering the reflexes of Bush/Blair and of soldiers on theground, it is worth remembering the position of US soldiers facing theirown elusive enemy in Vietnam: a Viet Cong force that was adept atusing both the forest and Vietnamese civilians as cover. Former GI GregOlsen told the writer Susan Faludi, ‘We did a lot of walking in thejungle, but never once did we have a confrontation with a mass enemythat we could see.’ Most of the casualties in Olsen’s division had beeninflicted by booby traps and land mines. The US Army’s LieutenantWilliam Calley played a key role in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam,carried out by members of Charlie Company, Americal Division. Hisatrocities seem to have arisen in part from his attempts to ‘solve’ theproblem of the ever-elusive Viet Cong (VC). He wrote later:At last it dawned on me – these people, they’re all the VC. … Irealise there are Americans who say, ‘How do you really knowit?’ Well, I was there. I made decisions. I needed answers, andI didn’t have a more logical one.22Calley also stated:My duty in our whole area was to find, to close with, and todestroy the VC. I had now found the VC. Everyone there wasVC. The old men, the children, the babies were all VC or wouldbe VC in about three years. And inside of VC women, I guessthere were a thousand little VC now.23At one point, Calley threw a two-year-old Vietnamese child back intoan irrigation ditch where civilians were being shot. Faludi commentedperceptively in her book Stiffed, ‘the killing of civilians was not simplya primal rampage in an out-of-control realm; it was also an attempt toreimpose an expected framework, no matter how ridiculous the fit … the menwould have their mission, one way or another.’24 It is fair to point out thatBush and Blair made some efforts to minimise civilian casualties. Evenso, the largely indiscriminate nature of their choice of targets – as wellas the tendency for violence to spill over from targeting rebels to target-ing ‘rebel suspects’ to targeting civilians – echoes the determination ofCalley and co. to ‘have their mission, one way or another’. The desireto find an enemy came first: resistance to this neo-imperial projectstepped obligingly into the vacuum and supplied one.ENDLESS WAR?[ 88 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 88Identifying an enemy – even if the choice is arbitrary – seems to offerthe cognitive satisfaction of certainty in uncertain times, as HannahArendt made clear in her study, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In one ofthe pre-election debates with Bush in 2004, presidential candidate JohnKerry made a telling comment. ‘It’s one thing to be certain,’ he said,‘but you can be certain and be wrong.’ Yet Hannah Arendt stressed thatfor those leaders wishing to attract a mass following, the point was notbe right, it was to be certain.Arendt suggested that part of the appeal of fascism was that theidentification of a clearly identified enemy – while frightening – wasless frightening and less disorienting than a world in which thesource of insecurity remained obscure. In Germany, the fascist projectinvolved taking those ‘enemies’ who were ‘already amongst us’,labelling them, separating them and eventually eliminating them.Significantly, Nazi propaganda tried to heighten fear of and hostilitytowards the Jews by playing on the fact that, very often, they couldnot be easily distinguished from non-Jews. Thus, dehumanisinglanguage was linked with the statement, intended to shock andfrighten, that they look just like us!25 No group identified more deeplywith German culture than the Jews; no national minority was moresuccessfully assimilated. And yet this did not save the Jews. In fact,assimilation was successfully redefined by the Nazis as pollution andinfection, and the implication drawn that the pollutant or infectionshould be eliminated.The terrorist, too, is also seen as all the more threatening because he(or she) cannot easily be identified, separated out and labelled. Veryoften, he is already amongst us. He may be attending our college orflying school, or sitting next to us on the tube.26 How tempting, then, tofind a way of separating out the terrorist, identifying him on a map,and attacking him! At the same time, this displacement from elusiveterrorist to identifiable ‘state backer’ has the (dubious) advantage ofhelping to keep the old doctrine of deterrence alive. As Harvard lawprofessor Alan Dershowitz commented:a desire for martyrdom need not eliminate all possibilities ofdeterring the act by threatening severe punishment. It merelyrequires that the severe punishment be directed against some-one, or something, other than the potential martyr himself –such as his cause, or those who harbor him.27In other words, deterrence is dead; long live deterrence! So far fromELUSIVE ENEMIES[ 89 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 89thinking of innovative solutions to an emerging problem, policy-makershave defined the problem of terrorism in such a way that it invites the oldsolution of war. The terrorist threat is very complex, with diverse andoften decentralised security threats springing from complicated politicaland cultural processes. All the more tempting, then, to achieve some kindof cognitive certainty by lumping everything together into a neat (butultimately meaningless) category labelled ‘evil’. One manifestation ofthis ‘lumping’ tendency was Bush’s notion of an ‘axis of evil’, whichevoked the Second World War axis of Germany, Italy and Japan as well asimplying, erroneously, that Iraq, Iran and North Korea were collaborat-ing with each other.28 (The listing of evil enemies does not always runsmoothly. Rumsfeld observed helpfully in early 2003, ‘There are fourcountries that will never support us, never – Cuba, Libya and Germany.’‘What’s the fourth?’ somebody asked. ‘I forget the fourth.’29) Thetendency to ‘lump’ was again exemplified during Bush’s first pre-electiondebate with John Kerry, when the president blended the 9/11 attackersand the Iraqi resistance with the militants who attacked a school inBeslan, Russia:This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideol-ogy of hate, and that’s what they are, this is a group of killerswho will not only kill here but kill children in Russia, that willattack unmercifully in Iraq hoping to shake our will. We have aduty to defeat this enemy. … The best way to defeat them … isto constantly stay on the offensive.At some level, Bush really does seem to lump all his enemiestogether, hence in part the muddled response to 9/11 and the discon-nect between problem and solution. For Bush, the profound uncer-tainty and disorientation arising from 9/11 demanded action. Thekey question was not whether anyone thought it would work butwhether anyone had a better idea. Action was venerated for its ownsake, and Bush told West Point military cadets in mid-2002, ‘In theworld we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.’30US government terrorism ‘tsar’ Richard Clarke observed that Bushfelt he needed to ‘do something big’ to respond to 9/11.31 Remember-ing the scepticism of Secretary of State Colin Powell,Woodwardreported, ‘Powell realised that his arguments begged the question ofwell, what would you do? He knew that Bush liked, in fact insistedon, solutions.’32 Bush, it seems, would have his mission, one way orthe other.ENDLESS WAR?[ 90 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 90Economic insecurity and the search for certaintyIn the close-fought US Presidential campaign of 2004, it seemed that theeconomic and social insecurity associated with the Bush regime mightcontribute to a Kerry victory. No such victory occurred, and perhapsHannah Arendt provided part of the clue when she suggested that in anearlier era economic and social insecurity had fed not only into radicalconsciousness and protest but also into a more supine yearning for leader-ship, for certainty, and for the kind of ‘respect’ one may get fromidentifying strongly with a powerful nation or ethnic group. According toArendt, the Nazis’ vilification of the Jews served to encapsulate and rendermanageable a range of fears about modernity and economic insecurity.33The Nazis offered an explanation for economic insecurity and defeat in theGreat War, and large numbers of ordinary people rushed to embrace it. Inthis case, the identification of a named threat seems to have stood in forother fears whose source was much harder to label or locate. Arendt sawincreasingly atomised individuals in interwar Germany who faced aworld they could not control or predict, a world where sources of incomeand self-respect were under threat. This had given rise to a ‘self-centredbitterness’,34 with anti-Semitism holding out the prospect of restoring self-respect.35 Referring to economic disasters like unemployment and loss ofsavings in hyper-inflation, Arendt noted, ‘The fact that with monotonousbut abstract uniformity the same fate had befallen a mass of individualsdid not prevent their judging themselves in terms of individual failure orthe world in terms of specific injustice’.36 She added:From the viewpoint of an organization which functions accord-ing to the principle that whoever is not included is excluded,whoever is not with me is against me, the world at large losesall nuances, differentiations and pluralistic aspects which hadin any event become confusing and unbearable to the men whohad lost their place and their orientation in it.37Mark Juergensmeyer makes a related point when he notes, ‘To live in astate of war is to live in a world in which individuals know who theyare, why they have suffered, [and] by whose hand they have beenhumiliated.’38 In Germany, economic insecurity and the resultingdissatisfactions had also apparently reinforced elites’ determination tochannel resentment away from economic issues and towards foreignenemies and cultural issues: in this sense, the foreign enemy couldusefully stand in for the class enemy.39ELUSIVE ENEMIES[ 91 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 91Of course, the United States has not faced an economic crisis on thescale of interwar Germany. Even so, the ‘them and us’ certaintiesprojected by the Bush administration do seem to have gained in allureas a result of conditions of extreme economic and social uncertaintyand inequality, misfortunes which this administration has simultane-ously promoted. Meanwhile, inequality and insecurity have helped toprovide the necessary manpower, as poverty has fed powerfully intomilitary recruitment, particularly in the southern states and amongracial minorities.40The United States is a profoundly unequal society, where the richest1 per cent hold more than 38 per cent of the national wealth and wherelife expectancy is lower than any other major industrialised nation.41 In2001, a total of 9 million people in the United States were classed by thecountry’s agriculture department as experiencing ‘real hunger’, withfully 31 million food insecure. Poverty and inequality have been gettingworse under the Bush administration as recession has deepened andwelfare reform has put a time limit on social security payments – hence,in part, the rise of a peculiarly America institution, the drive-throughsoup-kitchen.42In the 1990s, millions of ordinary Americans pursued the fairy-taleof rags-to-riches through the stock market, boosting share prices. Capi-tal gains taxes were cut, adding to the windfalls. When prices started totumble from 1999, corporate executives – helped by the deregulation ofoil, energy and financial institutions – were often quick to pull out theirmoney even as they advised ordinary shareholders and local employ-ees to keep investing.43 Enron – a major sponsor of the Bush family –was only the most spectacular example of defrauding investors. Withthe Enron debacle and other corporate scandals getting increasedmedia attention by the end of 2001, Karl Rove worried that there couldbe a fall-out for Bush and Cheney.44 The potential for a popular back-lash was all the greater since US middle-class wealth had generallybeen stagnating and Americans were was increasingly taking onconsumer debt they could barely manage.45Instead of any kind of retribution or political backlash, the rich got ahuge tax cut courtesy of George W. Bush.46 In 2001 the Bush adminis-tration presided over a total tax cut (income and estates tax) of $1.35trillion (to take effect over ten years). About two years later, another bigcut was pushed through.47 All this added up to a great escape for Amer-ica’s elite, the kind of people Bush was addressing at a fundraisingdinner when he acknowledged, ‘This is an impressive crowd – thehaves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you ENDLESS WAR?[ 92 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 92my base.’48 Michael Moore, who has a particular feel for the class dimensions of the ‘war on terror’, has written:Perhaps the biggest success in the War on Terror has been itsability to distract the nation from the Corporate War on Us. Inthe two years since the attacks of 9/11, American businesseshave been on a punch-drunk rampage that has left millions ofaverage Americans with their savings gone, their pensionslooted, their hopes for a comfortable future for their familiesdiminished or extinguished.49Thomas Frank provides a revealing case-study of how economic inse-curity has fed into support for Bush and for right-wing politicians moregenerally. Frank documents the devastation in the middle Americanstate of Kansas and highlights the paradox that a state where farminghas been ravaged by free-market reforms has been solidly behindGeorge W. Bush. Significantly, some of the poorest areas of Kansas havebeen the strongest supporters of hard-line Republicans. At the turn ofthe twentieth century, a powerful radical politics had flourished inKansas, with strong support for unions, for anti-trust legislation and forpublic ownership. But these old remedies today mean little to mostpeople in the state. Indeed, Frank argues that the old hostility towardscorporations has been displaced onto hostility towards a range of ‘out-groups’ and towards the forces (science, evolution, secularism, plural-ism) that seem to undermine old and comfortable certainties.50These forces are often seen as residing in the cities and in the coastalstrips of the United States. Simon Schama has argued very eloquentlythat there are effectively ‘two nations’ in the United States: in ‘GodlyMiddle America’, Republicans have tended to dominate. The ‘WorldlyAmerica’ of immigrant-rich big cities and coastal areas is moreoutward-looking, culturally and commercially, and seen by many inGodly America as a source of corruption, impurity and promiscuity.Godly America is about the farm, the church, the barracks (places thatare fenced and consecrated) and about making over space in its ownimage, Schama suggests, whilst Worldly America is about finding waysto share a crowded space.51In Kansas, five or six huge agribusinesses have come to dominate thefarming sector, charging high prices to the consumer. Meanwhile, farm-ers – having lost the combination of price subsidies and acreage set-asideschemes originating in the 1930s ‘New Deal’ – have tried to stem the dropin incomes by increasing production, pushing prices still lower. FarmersELUSIVE ENEMIES[ 93 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 93getting reduced payments from agro-conglomerates have been forced totake loans from the conglomerates’ banks: assuming mortgages, suffer-ing foreclosures and selling land to agribusinesses.52 Contributing to lowwages in agribusiness has been a large-scale use of immigrant labour inthe meatpacking industry and frequent relocation of plants to remoteareas. Both have undermined unionised labour.53 It is not hard to seehow this can feed into hostility towards ‘out-groups’, as in California,where guest workers have faced increasing deportation hearings as theeconomy turned sour.54 Meanwhile, US companies have become skilledat playing towns and states off against each other, always looking for thebiggest tax breaks, and Thomas Frank reports from Kansas that this hashelped create a major revenue crisis for local government. One town soldits state school on e-Bay. Meanwhile, megastore chain Wal-mart hasbadly damaged local retail businesses.55 Given the prominent idea inAmerica that ‘everyone can make it if they only try hard enough’, thereis inevitably plenty of scope for what Arendt referred to as judgingoneself ‘in terms of individual failure’.56The resulting bitterness and insecurity have fuelled what Frank callsthe ‘backlash’ politics of the Republican right, a politics that favours‘tough’ foreign policy while stressing a diverse range of mostly culturalissues. Adherents of this politics are in favour of capital punishment andagainst a whole range of domestic ‘threats’ such as water fluoridation,gay marriage, stem-cell research, evolutionary theory, gun-control,gangsta rap and teen drug-use. Frank points to a surge of popularity forthe religious right since the 1980s and a dramatic switch of opinion onabortion in particular. Influenced by Karl Rove more than anyone, theBush administration adopted the tactic of mobilising its domesticsupporters with a clear ideological stance and good organisation.57In her 1999 book, Stiffed, Susan Faludi considered some of theeconomic insecurity that also worries Frank, highlighting its corrosiveeffects on traditional masculine roles that centre on protecting andproviding. She wrote of ‘the search for someone to blame for thepremature death of masculine promise,’58 and she elaborated:What began in the 1950s as an intemperate pursuit of Commu-nists in the government bureaucracy, in the defence industries,in labor unions, the schools, the media, and Hollywood, wouldeventually become a hunt for a shape-shifting enemy who couldtake the form of women at the office, or gays in the military, oryoung black men on the street, or illegal aliens on the border, andfrom there become a surreal ‘combat’ with nonexistent blackENDLESS WAR?[ 94 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 94helicopters, one-world government, and goose-stepping UNpeacekeeping thugs massing on imaginary horizons.59The desire to find some kind of an enemy was already in place, in otherwords. The terrorist, perhaps the ultimate shape-shifter, stepped intoan existing template. And the displacement of aggression from theterrorist to his (alleged and imagined) shadowy supporters mimickedthe rapid and arbitrary pre-9/11 shifts in the definition of enemies.Concluding remarksPart of the function of the ‘war on terror’, then, is that it provides asense of certainty and safety in a world where security threats do notconform to old models based on deterrence and on states, a worldwhere economic insecurity has been exacerbated by market liberalisa-tion and the erosion of social welfare. The search for certainty feeds notonly into Bush-style fundamentalism, but also into fundamentalismwithin the Islamic world. As Scilla Elworthy observed in relation to theoccupation of Iraq in particular, ‘In an atmosphere of chaos and humil-iation, fundamentalism offers a firm philosophy which can give theimpression of certainty in an uncertain world.’60 The work of a numberof analysts – Girard, Gilligan and Arendt in particular – teaches us thatenmity can be quickly displaced onto those who are close at hand,vulnerable and ‘available’ for victimisation. Again, this is relevant notonly in relation to the ‘war on terror’ but in relation to terrorists, whoface the problem that their principal enemies – presumably Bush andBlair prominent among them – are well protected, and who have gener-ally preferred to attack more accessible targets. The lack of discrimina-tion, precision or judicial procedure within the ‘war on terror’ opensthe way for a kind of a modern-day witch-hunt, a phenomenon towhich we now turn.ELUSIVE ENEMIES[ 95 ]Keen04_cha04.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 955 The New Witch-Hunt: Findingand Removing the Source ofEvilIf a calamity happens, how are we going to explain it? In his classic studyReligion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas noted that when sufferingis not explicable within existing frameworks, human beings have tendedto resort to magical thinking: in other words, to turn to solutions with nological or scientific connection to the problem. The limits of medicalknowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example,created a powerful impulse to explain illness through ‘witchcraft’.Thomas wrote, ‘In the seventeenth century … doctors were quite unableto treat or diagnose most contemporary illnesses. … Nowhere was theinadequacy of contemporary medical technique more apparent than inits handling of the threat presented by the plague.’1 The situation was sobad that one leading British physician Thomas Sydenham, was led toremark that many poor men owed their lives to an inability to affordconventional medical treatment.2 No explanation was available fordeaths that are today attributed to heart disease or cancer, and theabsence of germ theory made many kinds of infection utterly inexplica-ble.3 Indeed, Keith Thomas notes that it was ‘generally believed that theinability of learned physicians to identify the cause of their patient’ssufferings was a strong indication of witchcraft’.4Belief in witchcraft remains widespread in many parts of the worldwhere alternative explanations (and medical expertise in particular) arerelatively inaccessible. Moreover, even in those parts of the worldwhere modern, scientific frameworks have gained a strong hold, theseframeworks often cannot answer the question, ‘Why me? Why did I getsick at that particular time and place, and not some other person whowas perhaps exposed to the same source of infection?’5Significantly, witch-hunts have usually intensified in periods ofupheaval and anxiety.6 The English Civil War of the 1640s saw a surgein accusations of witchcraft, as people sought scapegoats and explana-tions for widespread suffering. Ongoing civil war in Uganda has alsoseen a proliferation of witchcraft accusations.7 In Sierra Leone, variousmilitary factions have sometimes blamed military setbacks on witch-craft.8 More generally, Chabal and Daloz’s study of sub-Saharan Africa[ 96 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 96suggested that the greater the disorder, the greater may be the tempta-tion to invoke some form of magical counter-measures and perhaps topursue a reinvigoration of occult customs.9In the West, we often imagine that such superstitions are behind us.But Michel Foucault, for one, reminded us to seek out the ‘irrationali-ties’ of the present as well as the past. Today, in the face of the ‘disease’of contemporary terrorism and the increased disorientation and anxi-ety after 9/11, severe shortcomings in explanatory frameworks havehelped to create politicaland intellectual space for explanations andprescriptions that are once more leading us into the realms of the super-stitious and the persecutory. In many ways, we see a return to magicalthinking: the belief and hope that we can re-order the world to ourliking by mere force of will or by actions that have no logical connec-tion to the problem we are addressing. Such thinking – as EdwardEvans-Pritchard showed in relation to the Azande people in Sudan –may often exist alongside more scientific frameworks.Most of us have at times adopted behaviour that we feel may makeus safer but that bears little or no logical connection to actual threats:avoiding cracks in the pavement, for example. Situations of extremefear and powerlessness seem to bring out this propensity for magicalthinking, however secular or rational our normal outlook. Some of uscross our fingers when our plane hits turbulence; naturally, if the planedoes not crash, we may at some level believe that our superstitiousbehaviour somehow ‘worked’. At the level of individual psychology, itseems to be this mechanism that reinforces obsessive compulsive disor-ders: we keep on doing what we do (however bizarre) because it seemsto have helped in warding off whatever it is that we fear.10 The samecould perhaps be said for the Cold War nuclear arms build-up: it wascrazy, but somehow as long as no one pressed the button, it seemed tomany to be ‘working’.The personalities of both Bush and Blair have apparentlycontributed to the latest wave of magical thinking. US analyst Joe Kleinsaid of Bush, ‘The President seems to believe that wishing will make itso’.11 Novelist Doris Lessing said of Blair, ‘He believes in magic. That ifyou say a thing, it is true.’12 Commenting specifically on Blair and thesupposed Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’, Polly Toynbee observedthat the British Prime Minister:is so easily carried away by the persuasiveness of his ownwords and the force of his own arguments that you can hearhim mesmerise himself. … There is an almost childish blurringTHE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 97 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 97between the wish and the fact: if he says something stronglyenough, his words can magic it into truth.13While personalities have played a role, the resort to magical thinking alsofollows a well-worn historical path. The search for someone ‘evil’, some-one who can be blamed, someone whose removal will produce a saferworld, is characteristic of a long sequence of witch-hunts. This has some-times served to get leaders ‘off the hook’. In the early modern era,plagues often prompted a witch-hunt. Anne Barstow comments, ‘Bycondemning women to ritual violence, the leaders escaped the Christ-role that would dictate that they sacrifice themselves in order to remedythe problem’.14 Of course, it was natural that Bush, Condoleezza Rice andcompany came under considerable pressure to explain why they hadfailed to prevent the 9/11 atrocities.15 Inevitably, this added to the pressure to find some external or internal actors to blame.The disconnect between problem and solution that is manifest in theleap from 9/11 to attacking Iraq was also a characteristic of the witch-hunt; and as with the collective hysteria in seventeenth-century Salemin North America,16 for example, a strain of superstitious, paranoid andquasi-religious thinking has interacted damagingly with moremundane aims (like economic gain).If magical thinking thrives on the absence of credible explanations,it is striking how existing approaches to conflict analysis leave a hugegap when it comes to explaining something like 9/11. For one thing,there has been relatively little mainstream discussion of why hostilityto America might be strong in some quarters (see Chapter 9). Thismeans that many Americans have been genuinely bemused about 9/11and correspondingly predisposed to accept the explanation (and, byextension, the solution) that has been offered by their government.Deficiencies in conflict studies may also be part of the problem. Thefield has been partially appropriated by economics, as in the attempts toexplain violence as a manifestation of ‘greed’ (an approach made promi-nent by Paul Collier at the World Bank and one to which I have alsocontributed). This kind of ‘rational actor’ framework has some advan-tages (especially in countering the notion of violence-as-chaos) but doesnot do a very good job with the anger that feeds violence nor with peoplewho might want to die.17 It also runs the risk of reinforcing the blinkersof those with little sense of history and little willingness to listen tohistorical grievances,18 perhaps contributing to deficiencies in under-standing how people became violent and the role of counter-insurgencyand counter-terror in this process.ENDLESS WAR?[ 98 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 98Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ framework, which atleast addresses some cultural dimensions of conflict, is nevertheless verymuch a part of the problem. In particular, it assumes rather than explainscultural antipathies, and, in so doing, tends to reinforce them. The samegoes for the still-common (and related) explanation of war as ‘ethnic’ or‘tribal’. Meanwhile, ‘politics’ has been too often appropriated by a formof ‘political science’ that relies heavily on the deployment of numbers,often trampling marginal voices in an army of figures. Even human-rights reports, which can clearly play a very constructive role, can alsocontribute to a culture that tends simply to condemn violence rather thanseeking to understand it: a culture of naming, blaming and shaming.Words like ‘brutal’ and ‘inhumane’ – though part of an attempt to conveythe severity of violence – routinely take violence away from the sphereof the human and the explicable, whilst tending to dehumanise theperpetrators and increasing the shame that can fuel atrocity (seediscussion of James Gilligan in Chapter 9).Perhaps the greatest problems lie with the discipline most ofteninvoked to explain major international conflicts: namely, internationalrelations. The end of the Cold War brought three major problems for thediscipline. The first was the failure to predict this turn of events; in partic-ular the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union – the single biggestevent in the field – came as a near-total surprise.19 Second, the predomi-nance of civil wars as the Cold War thawed created major problems fora discipline emphasising relationships between states. Third, the rise ofterrorism as the major perceived threat at the turn of the twenty-firstcentury represented the ascendance of an activity in which non-stateactors have been critical. These problems all highlighted the importanceof areas in which international relations has traditionally been weak:understanding the relationship between states and civil society, under-standing the values and priorities of ordinary people and understandingthe nature of decentralised violence.20 As Mark Duffield has observed,Western policy-makers have switched from a centralised enemy (theSoviet Union) to a decentralised one; yet state-based strategies haveproved persistent.21 It seems significant that some key actors in Bush’s‘war on terror’, like Rumsfeld, were groomed under Reagan. The empha-sis on state-based solutions and on hierarchies also fits with the addictionto ‘war’ as a solution for security problems.Whatever the limitations of existing frameworks for understandingviolence, magical thinking cannot afford to advertise itself as such. Theold magical cures and beliefs studied by Keith Thomas generallywrapped themselves in some kind of religious or scientific plausibility.THE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 99 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 99And today, while there may again be no logical connection between theproblem and the favoured solution, this disconnect is obscured bymany means, both subtle andunsubtle. Whether the witch-hunt is oldor new, we need to understand how magical and irrational beliefs aremade to seem somehow rational and legitimate, how, in Foucault’sterms, they are ‘made to function as true’.The aim in a witch-hunt has been not simply to eliminate somenamed and accessible evil; it has also been to generate legitimacy forthis dubious activity. Past experience suggests that where evidence in awitch-hunt was lacking, the persecutors attempted to legitimise theiractivities by getting the accused to condemn themselves: one possiblesource of ‘proof’ has been a confession, and the greater the suspicionthat an accusation is not well-founded, the more a repressive systemseems to require a confession to legitimise it. In witch-hunts, a womanaccused of witchcraft could often save herself only by ‘admitting’ shewas a witch. Keith Thomas said of suspected witches in pre-modernEurope, ‘If the witch confessed, that settled the issue; if she refused todo so, she was adding perjury to her other sins.’22 Confessions have alsobeen important when witch-hunts have taken the form of mass perse-cution by totalitarian regimes. As Hannah Arendt noted, confessionswere much favoured in the Soviet system as a way of legitimising themass persecution of dissidents.23Today, our self-appointed witch-finder generals – mostly besuitedrather than in uniform – presume to locate the contemporary source ofevil and set out to provide the world with ‘proof’. At the individuallevel, torture has again been routinely used to extract information thatmight incriminate the suspect or third parties.24 While torture was usedduring the Cold War (for example, in Vietnam), a new shamelessnesshas attached to the practice, legitimized by new definitions and laws.25Bush made clear that Saddam’s only way to avoid war was to give a‘full and complete’ declaration of the illicit weapons of mass destruc-tion, which he did not in fact possess. UN weapons inspector Hans Blixhimself compared the aborted weapons inspection in Iraq to a witch-hunt; and when US officials rejected the idea that Iraq could meet spec-ified ‘benchmarks’ so as to show willingness to co-operate withinspectors and disarm (a path favoured by Germany and Russia andbeing considered by the UK), Blix understood the US position to be,‘The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; test-ing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt.’26John Wolf, Assistant Secretary of State for Non-proliferation, said thatthe necessary ‘dramatic change’ in Iraq’s position on weapons of massENDLESS WAR?[ 100 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 100destruction (WMD) ‘would have necessitated that it admit openly, notunder pressure, that it had and has WMD and WMD programs’.27 Sincepressure does not come much more intense than the threat of war, thisoption was clearly not available, even if Iraq had been willing to ‘admit’to WMD that it did not have. A UK proposal setting out some bench-marks (against which Iraq’s disarmament performance could be meas-ured) also required Saddam to confess that Iraq had in the past tried toconceal its weapons of mass destruction (which were said to include, aswith any self-respecting witch, an array of noxious chemicals).28 Blixcommented, ‘Requiring humiliation, I thought, would be a sure way ofgetting the emperor of Mesopotamia to reject the idea of a declaration.Perhaps this was the intention?’29It is only fair to point out that the belief that Iraq had some WMDwas quite widely shared, including by the French and German govern-ments, reflecting genuine gaps in information as well, perhaps, as adegree of collective hysteria or ‘group-think’. But significantly noteveryone drew the same policy conclusions from their suspicions.Possession of WMD does not in itself constitute a threat to the UnitedStates, and means were in place for intrusive inspections to deal withany that did exist in Iraq.30 As war with Iraq loomed, the French inparticular pressed for two separate UN resolutions: the first would befor a new round of inspections; then, if there was any serious breach,that would be debated by the Security Council, which would then needto pass a second resolution if war was eventually to be authorised.However, in mid-to-late 2002 Secretary of State Powell thought Vice-President Cheney was terrified that the diplomatic route to the Iraqweapons crisis might head off war.31 Powell noted that Cheney had ‘thefever’ – an ‘unhealthy fixation’ with nailing the connection between al-Qaida and Iraq.32 In October 2002, the head of the National SecurityAgency, Michael Hayden, told his employees that given the weather inIraq and the requirement that US forces would have to wear chemicalprotective gear (itself necessitated, in a further circularity, by thepresumed WMD), ‘You can’t start a war in Iraq later than March.You’ve got to do it in January, February or March.’ Cheney insisted thatafter a UN resolution for a new round of inspections, Saddam shouldhave to submit a declaration of all his WMD. Bob Woodwardcomments, ‘It was designed more or less as a trap for Saddam. Hewould claim he had no WMD and that lie would be grounds for war.Or Saddam would confess he had WMD, proving he had lied for 12years.’33 The point, clearly, was not to find a way to avoid war but tofind a way to go to war.THE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 101 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 101As the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ failed to materialise, there wasmuch talk of Saddam concealing them, destroying them or shippingthem abroad. The US and UK governments argued that Saddam mayhave destroyed his own weapons on the eve of war.34 Italian PrimeMinister Silvio Berlusconi observed, ‘If I was in the position of Presi-dent Saddam Hussein, I would have made these arms vanish, either bydestroying them or sending them out of the country’.35 Keith Thomascommented on more ancient witch-hunts, ‘If she were searched for theDevil’s mark, her body was certain to offer some suitable mole orexcrescence; if not, then she must have cut it off, or perhaps concealedit by magic; it was known that these marks could mysteriously comeand go’.36 Does that ring any bells in Downing Street, the White Houseor the Palazzo Chigi?Magical thinking has been invoked at least three times. First, there isa mystical focus on ill-will, which is presumed to be dangerous in itself.Alarmingly, the contemporary US official discourse on terrorism, and onthe pre-emption of threats more generally, includes the presumption thatyou can know who is intending to do you harm and, more contentiouslystill, that you can address major (past) setbacks like 9/11 by linking themto evil intentions, notably, the evil intentions of a Saddam Hussein. Thisis in line with the persecution of witches (continuing in many parts of theworld), where already occurring setbacks have habitually been attrib-uted to evil intentions. Second, there has been a failure to discern – oreven interest oneself in – causal relationships lying beyond an egocentricuniverse: thus, Iraq and al-Qaida can be assumed to be in league becauseit is convenient to do so, and because they are said to have a sharedhostility to the United States; anti-Americanism is frequently seen as anormal or natural state of affairs (‘they hate us and envy us’), marginal-ising the possibility that many people’s main grievance (before theviolent counter-terror gathered steam) has been with their own govern-ment; and, more generally, the need for evidence on cause and effect hasbeen routinely denigrated (see Chapters 6 and 7). A third element ofmagical thinking has been that eliminating designated evil individualswill somehow miraculously solve complex social and political problems;the causal process by which terrorists are made and replaced has notbeen taken seriously. What this all amounts to is a peculiarly double-edged egotism:one minute, ‘we’ (meaning, principally, the UnitedStates) are at the centre of a world which ‘will never be the same again’and in which everybody hates/envies/wants-to-be us; the next minute,awareness of self seems to disappear and almost no account is taken ofthe effects that US-led actions will have in enraging others.ENDLESS WAR?[ 102 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 102The focus on evil intentions, of course, raises the question of whogives themselves the right to presume to know these thoughts andintentions. To judge evil intentions you may need access to some secretoccult powers, and it is here that the mystique of ‘secret intelligence’proved so useful in lending spurious legitimacy to the witch-hunt.Richard Norton-Taylor comments, ‘It seems that in his determination togo to war, Mr Blair believed his trump card would be the publication of“secret intelligence”, a kind of exotic substance that, he hoped, whenreleased, would convince even the most sceptical’. 37 We now know justhow flawed and dishonest this approach was. In any case, the occult isnot always a source of wisdom: as former UK Foreign SecretaryDouglas Hurd said, ‘There is nothing particularly truthful about areport simply because it is a secret one. People sometimes get excitedbecause a report is secret and they think that therefore it has someparticular validity. It is not always so in my experience.’38The focus on pre-emption and on the intentions of Saddam andothers also prompts comparison with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and his imaginary regime’s prohibition of ‘thought-crimes’. As inOrwell’s novel, you can today be punished for what you thought orintended or are presumed to have intended, rather than for what youhave actually done.39 During the Cold War, whilst the United Statesflirted with the idea of a ‘first strike’, the dominant idea was thatnuclear weapons would be used only if there was an attack (and thattheir function lay in deterring an attack). Current policy is based on theidea of pre-emptive attacks, and this even includes the possibility thatnuclear weapons will be used against non-nuclear powers.Saddam had an appalling human-rights record: my own research innorthern Iraq was enough to tell me that.40 However, Saddam’s gassingof the Kurds in 1988 did not prompt any significant reaction by theWest. When violence is justified in terms of what someone is about to do,a profoundly dangerous step has been taken. Indeed, propagandaabout ‘What they are about to do to us’ is a hallmark of regimes prepar-ing for genocide: the destruction of a social group (the Jews in Germanyand Nazi-occupied Europe, the Tutsis in Rwanda) can arguably only beachieved if large numbers of people can be convinced that this group isabout to destroy them.41The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews can itself be seen as a twentieth-century witch-hunt, whose magical solution for Germany’s ills proveddeeply alluring and even convincing despite lacking any basis in real-ity. The business of isolating the evil ones and eliminating them has notonly informed the fascist project; it has also featured prominently in theTHE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 103 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 103paranoid Communism that Solzhenitsyn suffered and that led him towarn against trying to isolate and destroy the ‘evil people’.Past experience suggests that where a person is presumed to intendyou harm, this may be related to your own bad conscience in relationto that person.42 Keith Thomas links many witchcraft accusations withprior refusal of charity requested by the accused. For example, inEngland:It was no accident that Ruth Osborne, who was lynched forwitchcraft by a Hertfordshire mob in 1751, had been previouslyrefused buttermilk by the farmer whose subsequent mysteri-ous illness provoked the accusation against her. The majority ofother informal witch accusations recorded in the eighteenth,nineteenth and even twentieth centuries conform to the sameold special pattern of charity evaded, followed by misfortuneincurred.43Could it be that an element of bad conscience has similarly fed into aperception of evil Iraqi intentions towards the West and thereby toWestern hostility towards Iraq? What more massive refusal of assis-tance could there be than the international sanctions which killedperhaps 500,000 children in Iraq in the 1990s, sanctions that thoseresponsible for children’s welfare had repeatedly tried to get lifted? Ofcourse, these deaths could be blamed on Saddam’s regime, which didindeed share the responsibility.44 Even so, the logic, at one level, isimpeccable: since we have been harming them, we may presume thatthey intend to harm us; and when harm does happen to us (9/11), whothen are we going to blame?45 Afghanistan, too, may have been a sourceof bad conscience (see Chapter 9). Related to all this is the possibilitythat persecution reflects assumed envy. Research on German witch-hunts in particular suggests that old women were typically the targetsand were frequently assumed to harbour ill-will as a result of envytowards younger and still-fertile women.46 It is of course possible to gettoo carried away with such comparisons; but it is striking how domi-nant has been the discourse that terrorists attack because of the envythey feel for Western lifestyles and for Western freedom in particular.47As early as 1948, the influential US State Department analyst GeorgeKennan wrote a memo making clear that America’s disproportionatewealth would attract ‘envy and resentment’ (and that the real task wasto maintain economic disparities by dispensing ‘with all sentimentalityand day-dreaming’).48 Some element of guilt about extreme globalENDLESS WAR?[ 104 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 104inequality may be feeding today’s variants of this discourse: given thescarcity of understanding about terrorism and its causes, presumedenvy steps in readily as both explanation for misfortune and (implicit)justification for persecutory violence.Also notable in recent decades, as in a witch-hunt against the elderlyor women or any isolated individual, has been the weakness of thosewho are claimed to embody the greatest threat; as Arundhati Roy wasprompted to observe by the 2003 attack on Iraq, ‘We once againwitnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country wasabout to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in asuccession of countries – earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya,Grenada, Panama)’.49 Of course, weakness has the very practical advan-tage that the target cannot easily hit back. One is reminded that duringthe Cold War, the two superpower governments – who seemed to findthe perpetuation of (limited) conflict to be both politically and economi-cally useful – were concerned to avoid direct (and suicidal) militaryconfrontation with each other, but nevertheless created havoc amongmany less powerful nations through proxy wars. Neither then nor todaydo we see US attacks on Moscow on the grounds that the Russians have‘weapons of mass destruction’, for obvious reasons. Instead, we have abully’s focus on easy targets who cannot easily hit back.Drawing on Rene Girard, British anthropologist Tim Allen hassuggested, controversially, that witch-hunts may, in some circum-stances, serve some kind of positive function in focusing communityhostilities onto a single individual and helping a society escape a cycleof revenge.50 It is an interesting idea, and Girard himself stated, ‘therites of sacrifice serve to polarize the community’s aggressive impulsesand redirect them toward victims that may be actual or putative,animate or inanimate, but that are always incapable of propagatingfurther vengeance’.51 Whether we agree that this is in any way ‘functional’ for society, Girard’s reflections on the law are worth noting:He who exacts his own vengeance is said to ‘take the law intohis own hands’.There is no difference of principle betweenprivate and public vengeance, but on the social level, the differ-ence is enormous. Under the public system, an act ofvengeance is no longer avenged; the process is terminated, thedanger of escalation averted.52Following this logic, in circumstances where there is some kind of gener-alised consent to a war (to a degree, the 1991 Gulf War), the potential forTHE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 105 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 105fuelling future violence will be far less than where the war is seen as anact of private vengeance (Iraq 2003), which may itself be revenged.Evidence from witch-hunts past and present suggests that they oper-ate within closed systems of thought that make them difficult to chal-lenge. When the killing or banishment of a witch does not eliminate aparticular problem, the conclusion is usually not that the witch-huntwas ill-conceived but that more witches must be found. Similarly, whenthe persecution of a larger group runs into problems or proves coun-terproductive, a common response has been to redouble one’s efforts,to intensify the witch-hunt. This is well mapped by Robert Robins andJerrold Post in their book, Political Paranoia, notably in relation topurges by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.53 We can see hints of this impulsewhen terror attacks have occurred in various countries in the wake ofthe attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. Such terror bombingsindicate, at the very least, that the punitive action has not eliminatedthe problem. But the conclusion in official circles is typically not thatthe counter-terror was ill-conceived or ineffective; rather, it is that wemust reinforce the existing strategy and perhaps widen the pursuit ofculprits. Time will tell whether Iraq’s fellow members in the ‘axis ofevil’ – Iran and North Korea – are also to be attacked in the name ofprevention.Significantly, the ‘war on terror’ was not the first time that interna-tional interventions were based on the (comforting) belief that elimi-nating evil individuals would provide the key to safety. In the early1990s, US attempts to relieve famine in Somalia foundered on acomplex war whose political and economic agendas were quicklyboiled down by the US government to the alleged ‘evil’ of one GeneralMohamed Aideed. Aideed was the subject of the US government’s‘most wanted’ posters and the target of a botched US raid in 1993 thatled to the deaths of as many as 1,000 Somalis in the fire fight. At theturn of the twenty-first century, the complex problems of West Africawere often neatly and dangerously simplified into the ‘evil’ of LiberianPresident Charles Taylor – a profoundly destructive force, to be sure,but hardly the only problem in a region where corruption and weakstates have repeatedly fed into brutal rebellion and equally brutalcounter-insurgency. In relation to Liberia, Alex Vines, head of the Africaprogramme at London’s Royal Institute for International Affairs, saidin mid-2003, ‘Some on the Security Council seem to believe regimechange is desirable but lack any vision of what happens once Taylor isgone’.54 More recently, the United States focused a lot of hopes in theMiddle East on removing Yasser Arafat, but the International CrisisENDLESS WAR?[ 106 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 106Group (ICG) noted wisely, ‘Defects in Palestinian democracy did notcause the Israeli–Palestine conflict any more than addressing them willresolve it’.55 The personification of evil has long been a tempting and perilous solution to complexity.Devils and details: the neglect of reconstructionThe Bush administration has persistently proved more interested indevils than details, more concerned with removing the evil ones thanwith the painstaking business of reconstruction. Indeed, putting toomuch faith in the elimination of evil individuals has encouraged greatnaivety in relation to what happens next. Like the Communists andKarl Marx himself, who analysed the shortcomings of capitalism with-out saying much about its replacement, today’s neo-imperialists haverarely considered the nature of the state after the bad guys have beenbanished. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge observe, ‘Therewas a straightforward contradiction between the pessimism of theneocons’ diagnosis (the world is a much more dangerous place thanyou think) and the optimism of their trust in transformation.’56 It is thefocus on evil leaders that largely explains this contradiction. With allthe focus on bin Laden and the Taliban, reconstruction in Afghanistanwas apparently little more than an afterthought. Bob Woodwardreported on a US National Security Council meeting on 4 October 2001,three days before Afghanistan was attacked:As for post-Taliban Afghanistan, [Paul] Wolfowitz and[Condoleezza] Rice talked about getting other countries to putup money for rebuilding. ‘Who will run the country?’ Bushasked. We should have addressed that, Rice thought. Her mostawful moments were when the president thought of somethingthat the principals, particularly she, should have anticipated.No one had a real answer, but Rice was beginning to under-stand that that was the critical question. Where were theyheaded?57As usual, Woodward seems at least half blind to the outrageous natureof the conversations he is documenting. (This may help to explain howhe was able to get the invaluable information in the first place, andindeed the Bush administration seemed generally happy with hiswork.)58 In the event, reconstruction was under-funded, and impededby drastically falling media coverage. The collapse of the TalibanTHE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 107 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 107unleashed centrifugal forces and gave a boost to warlordism, ethnicpolitics, banditry and opium production.59 The US government wasreluctant to provide or allow peacekeeping troops, fearing they mightbecome targets or restrict US freedom of action against the Taliban andal-Qaida.60As a detailed and informative study for the Project on DefenseAlternatives (based in Cambridge, Massachusetts) observed, ‘The rushinto a large and ambitious military operation precluded makingadequate arrangements for the post-war political environment andhumanitarian needs.’61 Neglect of reconstruction created anger at whatsome Afghans called ‘a second desertion’ by the West, after the earlierabandonment when the Soviets were defeated.James Dobbins, who was Bush’s special envoy for Afghanistan andits first representative in liberated Kabul, said the outcome inAfghanistan was shaped by the US government decision to avoidpeacekeeping activities, to oppose anyone else playing this role outsideKabul, and to avoid engaging in counter-narcotics activities.62 The aimof the US-led coalition force in Afghanistan was to hunt down theTaliban and al-Qaida, not to provide security for the Afghan people.63Richard Haass, the Director of Policy Planning for the State Depart-ment, said in late December 2001, ‘We don’t want to get involved in theintrusive nation-building which would be resented by Afghans or resis-ted by them ultimately.’64 (One might think that bombing would also be‘intrusive’, but it went ahead nonetheless.) As war with Iraq loomedcloser, another factor impeding the security presence in Afghanistanwas the practice of holding back troops for use in Iraq.65The ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan was followed by a US-approved ‘Transitional Administration’, depending heavily on the Tajikand Uzbek ethnic minorities. This produced a sense of exclusion amongmany Pashtun in the south, creating a fertile climate in which theTaliban, al-Qaida elements and warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyarwere able to operate.66 Like the Iraqi Army in 1993, the Taliban disap-peared quickly but resurfaced to create problems later. An April 2003report by British aid agencies working in Afghanistan observed:The indications are thatthe Taliban and other radical elementshave succeeded in their efforts to undermine the reconstructionprocess in the south of the country, at least, with the withdrawalof the aid community from effective programming in that area.This inevitably risks further alienating the Pushtun populationfrom the transitional government and raises questions about theENDLESS WAR?[ 108 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 108future integrity of Afghanistan as a nation state. The US-ledcoalition forces appear powerless to reverse this trend and thereare strong indications that they may be reinforcing it.67Most of the power in President Hamid Karzai’s US-approved govern-ment seemed to rest with former Northern Alliance commanders – likethe Tajik defence minister Mohammed Fahim, who opposed admittingother ethnic groups to his army. Karzai used aid money to try to buythe support of regional warlords, while the warlords – and not centralgovernment – benefited from taxing trade routes.68 This gave rise tosome pretty strange bedfellows for the West, as Isabel Hilton observed:The British have been shipping cash to Hazrat Ali, the headof Afghanistan’s eastern military command and the warlordof Nangahar, who worked with the US at Tora Bora. His menspecialize in arresting people on the pretext that they areTaliban supporters and torturing them until their familiespay up.69A consortium of British aid agencies noted in April 2003, ‘Resentmentmay also be generated over the support given by the US-led coalitionforces to particular local power holders whose power base might other-wise be tenuous’.70 Certainly, many abuses have been carried out byarmed militia, regional commanders and police.71Under Karzai, the authority of the central government did notextend much beyond the capital, Kabul. The reach and size of the newAfghan Army grew only slowly.72 The International Security AssistanceForce (ISAF), with no US troops, was restricted to the capital.73 Onemajor impediment seems to have been that US Defence SecretaryRumsfeld, busy planning the war with Iraq, did not want men tieddown in peacekeeping.74In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, destruction was more carefully plannedthan reconstruction. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the failure to ensureessential services under a new regime added force to insurgency.Despite promises of massive assistance made before the war,75 theUnited States was reluctant to embrace the intellectual and financialchallenge of Iraqi reconstruction, but also unwilling to allow a majorrole for the UN or the European Union. As Giles Foden put it in mid-2003, ‘the careless approach to civil administration and humanitarianrelief in post-war Iraq has compounded the impression that opposingevil does not, for Bush and his cohorts, mean the same thing as doingTHE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 109 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 109good’.76 Blair also gave little sign of having thought through Iraqis’reception for the invasion/occupation.77Post-Saddam Iraq has paid heavily for the tendency to reduce everyproblem to the evil of Saddam and his fellow Ba’athists. The hierarchicalorganisation that is the US military has tended to imagine the enemy inits own image, that is, as a hierarchical organisation which will be fatallyweakened by the elimination of key leaders. In late 1993, military strategist Jon Arquilla said of the hunt for Saddam in Iraq, ‘We are a hierarchy and we like to fight hierarchies. We think if we cut off the head,we can end this.’78 Saddam’s removal was supplemented by the rapiddismantling of the Ba’athist state: again, an identifiable body of appar-ently evil individuals whose removal would ostensibly make everyonesafer. In effect, Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer firedthe entire senior civil service,79 and up to 30,000 Ba’ath Party officialswere automatically excluded from office (a policy later partiallyreversed).80 Even more dangerously, an army of some 400,000 Iraqisoldiers was demobilised without any re-employment programme orpensions. While these state structures had certainly proved profoundlyabusive, attempting to eliminate them overnight had the effect ofcompounding insecurity, starting with widespread looting in the imme-diate aftermath of the US-led attack. Dismantling an entire state in amatter of weeks, though it might fit neatly with a neo-liberal agenda aswell as with the impulse to demonise a finite group of enemies, repre-sents a pretty dangerous enterprise. (The flooding of Louisiana in 2005,and information on the previous neglect of levees, of emergency planning and the free-for-all building on wetlands were soon to remindAmericans, in a manner more damaging for Bush, of the dangers of aRepublican ideology that seemed to have little faith even in the idea ofgovernment.81) In Iraq, the dangers from angry ex-officials themselveswere compounded when the damage to services gave a boost to insur-gency and, in particular, the Shi’ite religious activism that so worried theUnited States. As the International Crisis Group (ICG) observed:In the immediate aftermath of the war, the virtual absence of aneffective central authority in a society in which 60 per cent ofthe population relied on the state for its daily bread promptedmany who might not otherwise have done so to turn to theclergy for help. Shi’ite activists provided welfare services,health care and law and order. Without an effective policeforce, vigilantes designated by religious leaders patrolled thestreets and administered hospitals and universities.82ENDLESS WAR?[ 110 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 110THE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 111 ]Moqtada al-Sadr and his ‘Mahdi army’ were guarding factories fromlooters (and even helping to direct traffic) until Bremer provoked Sadrinto armed conflict by shutting his newspaper and arresting and killinghis deputies.83Plentiful warnings on the consequences of wholesale sackingswere ignored. Although the Pentagon tended to favour a purge ofthose tainted by the Ba’ath Party and Saddam, the US State Depart-ment wanted to keep the government apparatus largely intact, at leastuntil elections could be held.84 The State Department also predictedthe widespread looting which duly occurred.85 At the end of May2003, Ramiro Lopes de Silva, the UN’s most senior humanitarian offi-cial in Iraq, warned that the sudden decision to demobilise a massivearmy without any re-employment or pensions could generate a ‘lowintensity conflict’ in the countryside, particularly given the tightenedsecurity in the capital.86 These sackings did indeed prove a significantfactor in the post-occupation insurgency. An American special forcesofficer stationed in Baghdad said that after the dissolution of theArmy, ‘I had my guys coming up to me and saying, “Does Bremerrealize that there are four hundred thousand of these guys out thereand they all have guns?” So did these decisions contribute to theinsurgency? Unequivocally, yes.’87Iraq’s police force was another problem, as was the failure to dealwith unemployment. Andrew Balthazor, for ten months the seniorintelligence officer for part of Baghdad, noted in August 2004 that theformer Iraqi police had been engaged far too late in the reconstruction,that unemployment had foolishly not been made a priority and that‘idle hands are dangerous’.88The working assumption of the US government in particular hasbeen that if you remove Saddam (the heart of the problem), a democ-racy would naturally grow up in its place. But Saddam loyalists proveda significant force and were joined by nationalists driven by desire forindependence and security, and by Islamists wanting to return politicalIslam to Iraq.89 There are reasons why democracy was absent in Iraqthrough the twentieth century (not least the artificiality of colonialborders and the artificially bolstered power of Sunni allies), and manyof these reasons persist. Removinga totalitarian regime creates avacuum, to be sure; democracy may have a chance, but it is only one ofthe political systems which could fill that vacuum. A truly democraticIraq, moreover, could eventually put in power the kind of Islamistgovernment that the West doesn’t like (and helped forestall in Algeria).Part of the problem with the United States’s aggressive Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 111‘democratisation’ programme has been the marginalisation of special-ists.90 In 2002, the US Defense Department announced the closing of theArmy’s Peacekeeping Institute (PKI), the only government agencydevoted to studying how to get peace in failed states or post-conflictsituations.91 In April 2003, the Observer quoted a senior former diplomatin Baghdad as saying, ‘There are no serious Arabists left in the [US]government now; only those who have been telling the White Housewhat it wants to hear. The dragons have taken over.’92 When it came todecisions by the US authority in Iraq, State Department Arab specialistswere marginalised while most decisions were made by Pentagonappointees reporting to Rumsfeld.93 The Pentagon was warned by USdiplomats, soldiers and peacekeeping experts not only that post-warchaos in Iraq was likely but that a substantial military police force wouldbe needed to control it. Yet, once again, these warnings were ignored.This was despite precedents like the US invasion of Panama in 1989,when much of the damage to Panama City occurred after combat oper-ations were over.94Apart from the crude attempt to dismantle the Iraqi state, anotherkey problem was the corruption and inefficiency within the externalreconstruction effort itself. By the time the occupation was officiallydeclared ‘over’ in mid-2004, the US government had spent only 2 percent of the $18.4 billion obtained from Congress for the reconstructionof Iraq, a White House budget office report revealed. The US govern-ment blamed insecurity.95 Iraqi oil revenues also went missing. Aspecial report to the US Congress found that lack of adequate controlsand transparency meant, ‘there was no assurance that the funds [some8.8 billion dollars out of a total reconstruction fund of 20 billion raisedfrom oil revenues under the occupation] were used for the purposesmandated by the UN Security Council’.96 Halliburton had won key ‘nobid’ contracts, and US senior intelligence officer Andrew Balthazor saidthat the use of no-bid contractors made things worse ‘by driving out ordiscouraging some international and non-US NGOs who were workingthe same areas that contractors like Bechtel were hired to fix’.97 Hiringthe cheap labour of rural Iraqis had annoyed urban unemployed Iraqisand Balthazor observed, further:CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] was as much ourenemy over there as the people planting roadside bombs andshooting weapons at us. Several times they put US profit orCPA control as more important than security for either Iraqisor the US troops over there. CPA was mostly staffed by youngENDLESS WAR?[ 112 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 112Republicans who want to put CPA/Iraq on their resume sothey won’t be left out of the Party.98In a detailed review of the CPA in September 2004, Peter Galbraithnoted that, ‘Republican political connections counted for far more thanprofessional competence, relevant international experience, or knowl-edge of Iraq.’99 Experienced professionals had sometimes been replacedby Republican political cronies. (This phenomenon also appears tohave helped to undermine the Federal Emergency ManagementAgency in the run-up to the US Hurricane Katrina disaster; as PaulKrugman points out, if you don’t believe government can do any good,why not help your friends to a share of the pie?100) In Iraq, the slow andmisdirected US spending through the CPA (labelled by some Iraqis as‘Cannot Provide Anything’) had left unemployment at around 50 percent,101 fuelling Iraqi bitterness. The marginalisation of popular Shi’itepoliticians by the CPA had made it easier for Moqtada al-Sadr toportray the transitional government as an instrument of Americanoccupation. Iraq’s Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi responded as al-Sadr had hoped, authorising US Marines to attack Shi’ite insurgents inNajaf’s holy centre, leaving hundreds dead and producing new recruitsfor al-Sadr. Meanwhile, the CPA Iraqi Army was not, for the most part,a serious force. An exception was the 36th Iraqi National Guard battal-ion (with its mostly Kurdish militiamen), which was used againstFallujah and Najaf, thereby intensifying Shi’ite–Kurdish tensions.102Concluding remarksThe focus on removing identifiable evil individuals has led, then, to aneglect of complex reconstruction issues, and has fed into solutions thathave little or no connection to the problems posed by terrorism, withaccessibility favoured over logic.Significantly, the witch-hunt reflex seems almost infinitely extend-able. For one thing, the identification of foreign enemies has usuallygone hand-in-hand with the identification of some ‘fifth column’ athome, a phenomenon explored in Chapter 9. Moreover, as we haveseen, political persecution has flourished in a wide range of countriessigned up to the ‘war on terror’.Witch-hunts may also be useful in attempts to accommodaterevealed abuses by ‘one’s own side’. In responding to Abu Ghraib (justas in the original ‘war on terror’), it has proved convenient to invokethe idea that bad things are the responsibility of a few ‘evil individuals’,THE NEW WITCH-HUNT[ 113 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 113a few ‘bad apples’. For example, Bush was anxious to deny that thistorture reflected anything like official policy or that it was mirrored byabuses in Cuba and Afghanistan.103 In the UK the Sun newspaper washappy to label Lynndie England with the banner headline ‘Witch!’.104In reality, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not just individual acts ofsadism by a few ‘evil’ individuals; they were also the products of fear,racism and signals from the top. Bush decided on 7 February 2002 thatthe protection of the Geneva Convention would be withheld both fromal-Qaida and the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, a particular problemgiven the subsequent efforts to bring Guantanamo techniques to AbuGhraib.105 Justice Department and Defense Department lawyers arguedthat Americans could torture prisoners and avoid criminal charges.106Rumsfeld in December 2003 approved interrogation techniques includ-ing the use of hoods, the removal of clothing and the ‘use of detainees’individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress’.107 (Herescinded this, reportedly after vigorous opposition from Navylawyers.) Tellingly, the idea that evil can be physically eliminated hascharacterised the response to Abu Ghraib as well as the ‘war on terror’:Bush’s principal response to Abu Ghraib was to suggest tearing theprison down (though he neglected to provide for it in his budget).108While the emphasis on ‘a few evil individuals’ characterises theresponse both to abuses by the enemy and to abuses by one’s own side,there has been a marked difference in terms of the degree to which theviolence is seen as decentralised. Specifically, alongside the exaggera-tion of the decentralisation of violence in one’s own operations (‘therewere no orders to abuse’), there has existed a pretty systematic under-estimation of the degree to which the enemy’s violence is decentralised.The dangers here are two-fold: first, that this way of thinking and talk-ing perpetuates abuses by one’s own side; and, second, that it rein-forces counterproductive strategies based on eliminating a few key‘evil’ individuals or regimes.ENDLESS WAR?[ 114 ]Keen05_cha05.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 1146 The Retreat from Evidence-Based ThinkingIn August 2004, the London-based Economist magazine noted, ‘Mr Bushhas got the big foreign-policy decisions right… on the evidence thatpresented itself at the time, he rightly decided to invade Iraq’.1 Butevidence did not simply ‘present itself’: it was sought out, interpreted,highlighted, distorted and sometimes ignored.2It is worth examining in more detail the extraordinary approach ofthe Bush administration to ‘evidence’, notably in relation to Iraq.A conventional approach to crime involves searching for evidenceabout who was responsible, establishing proof of responsibility andthen punishing those found guilty. But this procedure was set aside inrelation to the heinous crimes of 9/11. First, the choice of Iraq as atarget to a large extent preceded 9/11: in effect, the guilt preceded thecrime. Second, there was (as noted) no evidence linking Iraq with9/11. Third, there was in the George W. Bush administration asurprisingly explicit rejection of the need for evidence or proof.3While deception of the public is certainly an important part of thestory, what is less well documented is the extent to which key policy-makers adopted (and sometimes openly expressed) the idea that youdo not need evidence on which to base something as serious (andincendiary) as a war. Donald Rumsfeld came close to acknowledgingthis with his statement that, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence ofabsence of weapons of mass destruction’.4 In general, evidencebecame something you marshalled (and distorted) to support aposition you had already adopted, and remarkably little shameseemed to attach to this procedure. At least in terms of the expressedjustifications for war like WMD and links to al-Qaida, the wagers ofthe ‘war on terror’ have been proceeding on a no-need-to-know basis.The Bush administration’s approach to security was presaged in thewake of the 1991 Gulf War in the form of a draft document, written byPaul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby and leaked in spring 1992. Wolfowitzand Libby were analysts at the Pentagon at the time, with Dick Cheneyas their boss. The paper called for US pre-eminence over Eurasia(Europe and Asia) by preventing the rise of any potentially hostilepower, and it advocated a policy of pre-emption against statessuspected of developing weapons of mass destruction.5 In 1997, a[ 115 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 115group of conservative thinkers headed by William Kristol set up theProject for the New American Century, with a ‘statement of principles’that called for new defence spending and stressed that America mustmeet any challenges to its pre-eminence. Among the signatories wereBush’s brother Jeb, Dick Cheney and Cheney’s chief of staff LewisLibby.6 We now know that there was a longstanding – and more specific– neo-con plan to topple Saddam7 (though Bush’s team had not both-ered to inform the electorate in the run-up to the 2000 elections). InJanuary 1998, the Project for a New American Century group organiseda ‘letter to President Clinton on Iraq’, urging the president to removeSaddam Hussein from power. Additional signatories included DonaldRumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, who became deputy toColin Powell at the State Department, and Richard Perle, later chair ofthe Defense Policy Board.8 With the election of George W. Bush, Cheneybecame Vice-President, Wolfowitz was appointed as Deputy DefenseSecretary and Libby as Cheney’s chief of staff and national securityadviser.9 George W. Bush’s election – and even more so 9/11 itself –proved a significant opportunity for a group of men who had beenpowerful under Reagan but then largely marginalised under Bushsenior and Clinton.10 Rumsfeld had been special envoy to Iraq underReagan and Defense Secretary under Ford in 1975–77, when he hadplayed on fears of burgeoning Soviet power to increase the power ofthe military at the expense of the CIA. He returned to the Pentagon inJanuary 2001 as Defense Secretary.One might expect that foreign policy officials would accumulateevidence on possible threats, and then choose an appropriate response.But Iraq was a case where several senior US officials seem first to havedecided on the threat and then to have gathered evidence to fit theirtheory. Significantly, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reported thatgetting rid of Saddam Hussein was a priority for Bush and his innercircle from the beginning of his administration.11 He also noted thatdiscussions focused on how to get rid of Saddam and not why, or evenwhy now.12 In the case of Iraq, there was nothing new in the allegationsthat it had weapons of mass destruction: Iraq’s weapons programmehad been contained for a decade (after the West had played a key rolein building up this weapons industry).13 Investigative journalistSeymour Hersh wrote that according to a Pentagon adviser whoworked with the Pentagon’s ‘Office of Special Plans’:Special Plans was created [in the wake of 9/11] in order to findevidence of what [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] WolfowitzENDLESS WAR?[ 116 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 116and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed tobe true – that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, andthat Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, andpossibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and,potentially, the United States.14(Alarmingly, the Office of Special Plans was later to become involved inco-ordinating information on the threat from Iran.15) In the UK, theOffice of Special Plans may have found a counterpart in ‘OperationRockingham’, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within theMinistry of Defence in 1991 and apparently involved later in ‘cherrypicking’ intelligence that would prove an active Iraqi WMDprogramme.16In March 2001, Richard Perle, then chairman of the Pentagon’sDefense Policy Board, told a Senate Foreign Relations sub-committeethat Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, adding:How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think wereally know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s alwaysfurther than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we thinkabout this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate.17This statement is not entirely without logic: in a fast-moving world it isquite possible that some states have weapons that others don’t knowabout. But this approach is nonetheless deeply dangerous. It threatensto usher in a world where ‘pre-emptive’ war can be launched on ahunch. Asked about the evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida(and particularly about the alleged meeting in Prague betweensuspected 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and Iraqi officials),Wolfowitz replied, ‘I think the premise of a policy has to be, we can’tafford to wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.’18 Such statementsexhibit an explicit rejection of the world of evidence in favour of conjec-ture, a frank willingness to embrace a truth that cannot be demon-strated. He also stressed that he could not go into details because theinformation was ‘classified’.19 Bob Woodward reported that Wolfowitz,‘subscribed to Rumsfeld’s notion that lack of evidence did not meansomething did not exist’.20 This logic was applied both to the existenceof Iraqi WMD and the alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaida. Assess-ing the threat from Iraq and the rights and wrongs of attacking Iraq,Richard Perle noted, ‘We cannot know for sure. But on which sidewould it be better to err?’21 In other words, if we do not know whetherTHE RETREAT FROM EVIDENCE-BASED THINKING[ 117 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 117there is a threat, it is better to attack anyway, just in case, or ‘when indoubt, hit out’. Yet as the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel deMontaigne said of the Inquisition, ‘it is rating one’s conjectures at avery high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them’.22 In rela-tion to the Iraq crisis, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill later observedthat the newly emphasised policy of pre-emption created a hugeweight of responsibilityand elimi-nated. The approach has often been underpinned, as in Bush’s refer-ence to parasites, by dehumanising language that may flash a warninglight in the mind of any student of fascism.5 The ‘destroy-the-evil-ones’approach took tangible form in Bush’s desk at the Oval Office, where9/11 prompted him to keep a file of the 22 most wanted terrorists, ‘hisown personal scorecard for the war’, as ‘Watergate’ reporter Bob Wood-ward put it.6 Bush would put an X through the picture of those whowere not still ‘at large’. 7 (In the State Department’s website showing the‘most wanted’ terrorists,8 Osama bin Laden is helpfully described asapproximately 160 pounds in weight, thin, with an ‘olive’ skin. He isbelieved to be in Afghanistan, we learn, is left-handed, and walks with[ 8 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 8a cane. A US$25 million reward is offered for information leading to hisapprehension or conviction. The website adds cautiously, ‘Should beconsidered armed and dangerous’). Israel has a similar rogue’s galleryof wanted terrorists, and the Bush model is very much in line with thatof Israeli hardliners like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, with whom the neo-cons have had a great deal of sympathy.The idea that you can effectively isolate and eliminate ‘the evilones’ was eloquently criticised during the Cold War by the dissidentRussian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who suffered persecutionby a Soviet Communist regime that had its own project of isolatingand eliminating evil:If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil peoplesomewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it werenecessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroythem. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through theheart of every human being.9While Solzhenitsyn was lauded by the West when Communism was theenemy, his wisdom is now in danger of being forgotten. Although theBush administration’s model of combating terrorism has gained ascen-dance, there is an alternative (and more accurate) model that places terror-ist thinking at the extreme end of a continuum. According to thisalternative model, terrorists are not an entirely discrete, isolated or finitegroup but rather a group whose numbers can always be swelled (ordiminished) – depending crucially on the way the threat of terrorism ishandled. In this approach, the key is to undermine support for terroristsand to tackle the process by which some of those sympathising withterrorist aims or grievances may themselves embrace or facilitate violence.Paradoxically, certain kinds of liberal and ‘politically correct’ think-ing may feed into the (superficial) plausibility of the model portrayingterrorists as a distinct group. Not least because of the need to try toprotect the increasingly precarious human rights of Muslims in theWest, many liberals find it necessary to repeat that terrorists are a smallminority whose views are emphatically rejected by the majority ofMuslims. This way of speaking, while perhaps accurate in relation to9/11 and in many ways constructive, tends nevertheless to distractattention from widespread feelings of indignation among Muslims atthe ‘war on terror’. Polls suggest that large numbers of British Muslims,for example, now view the ‘war on terror’ as a war on Islam.10 A poll ofBritish Muslims in March 2004 found that 13 per cent believe thatFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 9 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 9‘further attacks by al-Qaeda or similar organizations on the USA’would be justified.’11Even if we focus on the al-Qaida network itself, the problem cannot bereduced to a few individuals. The demise of more hierarchical organiza-tions like Shining Path in Peru may have clouded the picture and encour-aged false optimism. In a debate with John Kerry on 30 September 2004,Bush noted that ‘75 per cent of known al Qaida leaders have been broughtto justice.’12 Yet al-Qaida was estimated in May 2003 to have more than18,000 members in up to 90 countries.13 They cannot all be killed orcaptured, and even if they could, the process would inevitably be impre-cise and would predictably produce replacements. As an InternationalInstitute for Strategic Studies report put it, ‘If the minions were killed orcaught, their spectacular demise in the name of Islam’ would moveothers to take their place.14 The case of Sayyid Qutb, often credited as thefather of Islamic fundamentalism, showed how this could work: he was arelatively obscure writer before the Egyptian government executed him.15Ethnicity, as British anthropologist David Turton eloquently argues, maybe a result of conflict as much as a cause of it. This would seem to be trueof the extreme ethnic identity of ‘holy warrior’.If al-Qaida cannot be physically eliminated, neither can the Iraqi resist-ance (often dumped under a general heading of ‘the terrorists’ by theBush administration). Some 24,000 Iraqi resistance fighters were detainedor killed between May 2003 and August 2004, according to estimates bythe Washington-based Brookings Institution.16 Yet the number of Iraqiresistance fighters actually rose from 5,000 in November 2003 to 20,000 inSeptember 2004, the Pentagon reported, and the Deputy Commander ofthe Coalition forces in Iraq, General Andrew Graham, told Time magazinein early September 2004 that he thought the real number was 40–50,000.Significantly, the alternative model for combating terrorism is in linewith much current thinking on the disarmament of more conventionalmilitary factions: we have learned that even disarming a particulargroup will not be enough for peace if the conditions turning civiliansinto fighters persist, particularly since decentralised violence is encour-aged by proliferating weapons and by opportunities for exploitingglobal markets.17 Al-Qaida itself has benefited from diamond-tradingnetworks, including in West Africa, and shifted its focus from East toWest Africa as controls in the East tightened in the wake of the 1998bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.18 A significantdegree of local initiative – and indeed local fund-raising – has been built into the structure of the organisation. The targeting of theleadership has in many ways reinforced this decentralisation.19ENDLESS WAR?[ 10 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 10Violence for a safer world?We were sold the war in Iraq as part of the ‘war on terror’. This wasa war that would supposedly make the world safer in the wake of9/11. Iraq was supporting terrorism and Saddam’s ‘weapons of massdestruction’ were an immediate threat: they might either be deployeddirectly or passed to terrorists. Spreading democracy would itselfpromote security – if only on the logic that democratic countries areless likely to go to war. Yet the reasoning in all this was profoundlyflawed, and a detailed investigation in 2004 by James Fallows foundthat nearly all US national security professionals saw the Bushadministration’s response to 9/11 as a catastrophe.20 Eight flawsstand out.First, there is no evidence of any significant connection betweenSaddam and al-Qaida (let alone 9/11). Indeed, al-Qaida seems tohave been strongly opposed to Saddam’s regime, and Osama binLaden denounced Saddam as an ‘infidel’. The administration ofGeorge W. Bush tried hard to prove a connection between al-Qaidaand Saddam Hussein, but failed.21 Questioned by British parliamen-tarians on 21 January 2003, Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted thatno evidence had been found of any links between al-Qaida andSaddam Hussein – something his intelligence agencies had told himrepeatedly.22 Bush also eventually admitted, ‘We’ve had no evidencethat Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th’.23A second major flaw with the project of making the world safer byattacking Iraq was that, despite the best investigations of American andBritish personnel inside occupied Iraq, no weapons of mass destructionwereto be right, but that politics in the United Stateswas no longer about being right; it was about winning.23 Perhaps thebest way to de-legitimise something is to equate it with something trulyhorrible, like, say, nuclear war. This is exactly what Bush did with thenotion of proof, declaring in October 2002, ‘we cannot wait for the finalproof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroomcloud’.24In any case, proof took second place to what was ‘doable’. BobWoodward reported that Wolfowitz’s position in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was that:Attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. He worried about100,000 American troops bogged down in mountain fighting inAfghanistan six months from then. In contrast, Iraq was a brit-tle, oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable.He estimated there was a 10–50 per cent chance Saddam wasinvolved in the September 11 terrorist attacks.25How these figures were arrived at is anybody’s guess, since there is noevidence linking Saddam to 9/11. Such decision-by-guesswork wouldbe unacceptable as a basis for punishing an individual, let alonelaunching a full-scale war. If we are bandying figures about, why notgo for a 10–90 per cent chance, or even 0–100 per cent? The latter wouldpleasingly cover all eventualities.If the idea of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt is a centralpillar of the law, the setting aside of notions of proof is in line withthe United States’s willingness to set aside international law, whetherlaunching a war opposed by the majority of the UN Security Councilor ignoring the Geneva Conventions on holding so-called ‘enemycombatant’ prisoners without trial or access to lawyers (at the UScamps in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and insideIraq). The rounding up of Muslim terrorist suspects has often beenarbitrary: in many ways, this practice of acting and then hoping theevidence comes to light embodies the same operating principle as theattack on Iraq.26ENDLESS WAR?[ 118 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 118The drastic step of setting aside the notion of proof appears to havebeen given a veneer of intellectual credibility by officials and analystswho drew on the work of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago,including Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol.27 Strauss’s formerdoctoral student Abram Shulsky became Director of the Pentagon’sOffice of Special Plans and together with Gary Schmitt (a member ofthe Project for the New American Century) he published an article in1999 called, ‘Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which WeDo Not Mean Nous)’. Seymour Hersh observes:Echoing one of Strauss’s major themes, Shulsky and Schmittcriticize America’s intelligence community for its failure toappreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with,its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof [my emphasis],and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment.28Hersh quotes a former CIA expert who spent the past decade immersedin Iraqi-exile affairs and who said of the Pentagon’s Special Planspeople, ‘They see themselves as outsiders. There’s a high degree ofparanoia. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of theangels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.’29Leo Strauss argued that good politicians should reassert the absolutemoral values that would unite society. He was worried by relativism:the idea that nothing could be said to be absolutely or objectively true.Religion had a vital political function in ensuring social order – whatPlato called a ‘noble lie’. Indeed, although Strauss is widely held tohave been an atheist, religion was seen as useful because it ‘breedsdeference to the ruling class’.30 This ambivalence mirrored Strauss’sdiscussion of Niccolò Machiavelli’s view that a ruling prince should notbe religious but ought to appear so, since a religious populace wasnecessary for social order.31 Also important for Strauss and those heinfluenced seems to have been the idea of concealing things frompeople incapable of understanding them.32 It was not hard to imaginehow this way of thinking could feed into the elevation of ‘faith’ and thedistortion of evidence. Nor it is difficult to see a synergy between thisway of thinking and the Republican ‘backlash’ – as analysed byThomas Frank – which diverted economic and social discontent intoanger over diverse ‘moral issues’.Signals from the top encouraged the production of inaccurate andbiased information. As Paul O’Neill, who was asked to resign from hispost of Treasury Secretary in December 2002, put it:THE RETREAT FROM EVIDENCE-BASED THINKING[ 119 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 119If you operate in a certain way – by saying this is how I wantto justify what I’ve already decided to do, and I don’t care howyou pull it off – you guarantee that you’ll get faulty, one-sidedinformation. … You don’t have to issue an edict, or twist arms,or be overt.33The use of a general signal from the top on the kind of evidence thatwas required had some similarities with signals sent out in relation totorture and coalition soldiers’ abuses: Mark Danner quotes a lawyer forone of those accused of abuses in Iraq, Staff Sergeant Ivan Fredericks:The story is not necessarily that there was a direct order. Every-body is far too subtle and smart for that. … Realistically, there isa description of an activity, a suggestion that it may be helpfuland encouragement that this is exactly what we needed.34Direct pressure to distort evidence on WMD was also used. UN chiefweapons inspector Hans Blix accused the Bush administration of leaningon his inspectors to produce more damning language in their reports.35MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove told a Downing Street meeting in July2002 that in the United States ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixedaround the policy’.36 Robert Dreyfuss reported in December 2002:The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on theagency [the CIA] to produce intelligence reports more support-ive of the war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. …Morale inside the US national-security apparatus is said to below, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured tojustify the push for war.37The CIA’s past failings did not help in resisting this pressure. The CIAhad lost credibility for failing to anticipate or prevent 9/11. For exam-ple, those al-Qaida operatives it was tracking were never put on theimmigration service watch list.38 This was only the latest in a series oferrors by the CIA – not only its failure to foresee the Soviet collapse butits failure to provide warning of the terrorist attacks on the World TradeCenter in 1993, on US military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, on USembassies in East Africa in 1998, and on the USS Cole in 2000. Thenthere was the CIA’s failure even to notice India’s underground nucleartesting in 1998.39 Where information is weak and predictions inade-quate, exaggerating threats was likely to be bureaucratically safer thanENDLESS WAR?[ 120 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 120underplaying them. According to Mel Goodman of the Center for Inter-national Policy, ‘Since 1998, CIA analysis of Third World missileprograms has taken on a worst-case flavor, exaggerating the nationalsecurity threat to the United States and politicising the intelligence datain the process’.40 Somewhat similarly, John Kampfner suggests thatboth US and UK intelligence, having failed to make sufficiently specificwarnings about 9/11, did not want to be caught out on Saddam.41Intelligence agencies’ ability to report the truth also seems to havebeen undermined by competition between them. To put it crudely, ifyou did not provide the required answer, somebody else would. TheBush administration seems to have preferred the analysis of Iraqsupplied by the Iraqi National Congress (or INC, an opposition group)to that comingfrom the CIA. Yet the INC’s intelligence-gathering abil-ities were minimal. Indeed, former CIA official and counter-terrorismexpert Vincent Cannistraro said the INC made no distinction betweenintelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors tosay what INC head Ahmad Chalabi wanted said.42Proving a pre-existing theory was helped by the highly selectivepicking of facts. General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq’sweapons programmes, defected to Jordan in August 1995, togetherwith his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamel. These defections and theprovision of evidence by these two men were cited by Bush as themoment when Saddam’s regime:was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirtythousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents.… This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that hasnever been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.43This was certainly frightening information. But the full record ofHussein Kamel’s interview with UN inspectors shows that he also saidthat Iraq’s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, manufac-tured before the 1992 Gulf War, had been destroyed, and that in manycases this was in response to ongoing inspections.44On 7 September 2002, Bush cited an International Atomic EnergyAgency [IAEA] report from ‘when the inspectors first went into Iraq’which he said had noted that Iraq was six months from developingnuclear weapons. Bush added, ‘I don’t know what more evidence weneed’. Yet the IAEA itself made it clear that it had made no such state-ment.45 In Bush’s 12 September 2002 address to the UN, the US Presi-dent cited Iraqi purchase of aluminium tubes which he said were ‘usedTHE RETREAT FROM EVIDENCE-BASED THINKING[ 121 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 121to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons’. But the IAEA was soon report-ing that the size of the tubes meant they were ill-suited for uranium-enrichment and that they were identical to those previously used byIraq to make conventional artillery rockets. Despite the IAEA’s rebuttalin January 2003, Powell repeated the aluminium tubes charge in hisspeech to the UN on 5 February.46 The CIA had warned in 2001 thatdocuments purporting to show Iraq had attempted to buy 500 tons ofuranium from Niger were fakes. Yet these documents were cited byBush in his spring 2003 State of the Union address.47 On 7 October 2002,Bush made a speech warning that Iraq had a growing fleet ofunmanned aircraft which could be fitted with chemical or biologicalweapons and used ‘for missions targeting the United States’. But inreality the aircraft did not have the range to reach the United States.48And so it goes on.Britain’s September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s WMD was heavilymassaged. Early drafts were called ‘Iraq’s Programme for WMD’, butthe published dossier was called ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction’.Tony Blair’s foreword said Saddam’s military planning allowed forsome of his WMD ‘to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to usethem’. Yet the initial draft made clear that Saddam could not launch anuclear attack on the UK; this was deleted. Chemical and biologicalweapons, reported by intelligence, were only battlefield ones. Thedossier gave the impression that these were long-range and pressreports on these lines were never corrected.49 Bush twice cited the 45-minute claim in the British dossier,50 but CIA boss George Tenetprivately referred to the ‘they-can-attack-in-45-minutes shit’.51A British government dossier released at the end of January 2003,cited by Powell in his 5 February 2003 address to the UN SecurityCouncil as a ‘fine paper’, was actually plagiarised – most of it from apaper by a postgraduate student, which itself drew largely on informa-tion that was more than ten years old.52 According to a July 2003 reportfrom the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee, ‘it appears likely that therewas only limited access to reliable human intelligence in Iraq and thatas a consequence the United Kingdom may have been heavily relianton US technical intelligence, on defectors and on exiles with an agendaof their own’.53When it comes to following one’s hunches (rather than an evidence-based procedure), the doctrine of ‘preventive self-defence’ has offered agreat deal of scope. The doctrine’s great advantage is that the chosenenemy does not actually have to have done anything. Donald Rumsfeldin particular argued that the demise of traditional enemies and theENDLESS WAR?[ 122 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 122heightened terrorist threat demand a new kind of security policy based,in his semi-mystical formulation, on the need to ‘deter and defeat adver-saries that have not yet emerged to challenge us’.54 Similarly, PresidentBush told West Point military cadets in mid-2002, ‘We must take thebattle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threatsbefore they emerge’.55 The present and future, as Brian Massumi hassuggested, were dangerously elided.56 Bush was asked on ABC Televi-sion about ‘the hard fact that there were weapons of mass destruction, asopposed to the possibility that [Saddam] might move to acquire thoseweapons’. Bush replied, ‘What’s the difference?’57 Further obscurity wasthrown on the WMD issue by Rumsfeld’s memorable statement that:There are things we know that we know. There are knownunknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know wedon’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There arethings we don’t know we don’t know. … Each year, wediscover a few more of these unknown unknowns.58Rumsfeld saw the ‘unknown unknowns’ as the real killers.59 We werenow being plunged deep into the murky world of Steven Spielberg’sfilm Minority Report with its ‘pre-crime’ police division seeking to elim-inate criminals before they can commit their crimes. Significantly, therehave been moves to extend the doctrine of pre-emption into the domes-tic sphere, as when the then British Home Secretary suggested in early2004 that those who might become suicide bombers should be incar-cerated before they can do anything bad, and that they could be triedon a lower standard of proof in secret courts.60 The new doctrine of pre-emption insists that we would be much better off if we could interveneto stop aggression before it happens rather than the present, ‘too-late-by-half’ tactic of trying to punish perpetrators once a crime has takenplace (also known as the law). Of course, the new fashion does raisesmall problems in terms of how we know what crimes or acts of aggres-sion are about to happen, who is about to do them, who will make thedecision to intervene and ‘prevent’, and how to deal with the anger ofthose who experience or witness a wrongful accusation.There are some indications that, for the Bush administration, the aimwas less to study reality (and then base behaviour on it) that to createreality. In the summer of 2002, journalist and author Ron Suskind metwith one of Bush’s senior advisers, who was unhappy with an articleSuskind had written about the administration’s media relations. Theadviser commented that:THE RETREAT FROM EVIDENCE-BASED THINKING[ 123 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 123guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based commu-nity,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutionsemerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ Inodded and murmured something about enlightenment prin-ciples and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way theworld really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empirenow, and when we act, we create our own reality. And whileyou’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll actagain, creating other new realities, which you can study too,and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors …and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’61Linked to the denigration of evidence and the celebration ofself-made‘reality’ has been a tendency for leaders to sanctify their own ‘instincts’,what one writer called ‘Almighty Gut’.62 The redundancy of Cold Wardoctrines and the confusion and fear around 9/11 seem to have helpedto elevate ‘instinct’ as the new benchmark for policy. George Bushspoke repeatedly of his instincts. ‘I’m not a textbook player. I’m a gutplayer.’63 Bob Woodward commented, ‘It’s pretty clear that Bush’s roleas politician, president and commander in chief is driven by a secularfaith in his instincts – his natural and spontaneous judgments. Hisinstincts are almost his second religion.’64 Palestinian Prime MinisterAbu Mazen recalls that Bush told him, ‘God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them: then he instructed me to strike at Saddam,which I did; and now I am determined to solve the problem in theMiddle East. If you help me, I will act.’65 If this were a serial killerspeaking (or perhaps bin Laden himself), the dangers of acting on‘God’s voice’ would be particularly hard to miss. As philosopher PeterSinger points out:If everything depends on faith, then why should terrorists nothave faith that their particular version of Islam is right? Whyshould they not ‘learn’ from an eminent religious teacher thatGod wants them to destroy the greatest power standing againstan Islamic way of life?For his part, Tony Blair declared simply, ‘Leadership comes by instinct’.66After his month with Blair, journalist Peter Stothard said of the PrimeMinister, ‘He has great faith in his powers of personal intuition’.67 Blairalso seems to have persuaded others by banishing self-doubt. In mid-March 2003, he threw everything into convincing the House ofENDLESS WAR?[ 124 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 124Commons (and especially his own party) that war was justified. Stothardcommented:After all the editing upstairs, he says little more than that thefuture cannot be known before it happens – with which all cansurely agree. But the piling of argument on argument is brutal.Logic, however, will only take him so far. Those whom he winsover, he wins by showing so powerfully his confidence that he isright. To many of his critics such certainty is the way of madness.68Clare Short stressed that Blair’s highly personalised style of decision-making undermined the formulation of a considered policy on Iraq.69 TheCabinet committee known as Defence and Overseas Policy was supposedto supervise foreign policy strategy, but it never met on the Iraq crisis.Moreover, the Iraq debacle had symbolised, for Short, a wider collapse ofcollective decision-making.70 The late Robin Cook confirmed this picture:There is never a paper offering different options for the cabinetto choose between. The result is that the British cabinet is nolonger a forum in which decisions are taken, but in which deci-sions are endorsed. … The real problem was that Blair made itonly too clear that his mind was made up [on the need for warwith Iraq] – and his cabinet had no collective experience oftrying to make the prime minister change his mind.71Significantly, Blair was the first British prime minister who did not owehis status as party leader to his parliamentary colleagues. Elected by avote among party members, he could afford to make enemies amonghis own MPs.72 Stothard noted, further:Some have decided that he is already mad, made so by too longin power, too many admirers, too many enemies and too littlelistening carefully to either friends or foes. The isolation ofDowning Street, even friends say, has changed the warm, open,accommodating young MP and lawyer they used to know. Theman who could always talk around an issue is now taking oneview and holding it like a creed. Others stress the actor in TonyBlair, the promising courtroom barrister, the somewhat lesspromising imitator of rock stars. They say that he is feigning hispeculiar mad certainty, that he needs something to hide hisobedience to American orders.73THE RETREAT FROM EVIDENCE-BASED THINKING[ 125 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 125Significantly, Blair’s faith in himself as a persuader was not matched byhis ability to persuade foreign leaders. He underestimated the convic-tions of the Russians, the French and the Germans and he also turnedout to have little influence over Bush.74Religion played a part in all this veneration of instinct. Though a natu-ral political ally for Democrat President Clinton, Labour leader TonyBlair seemed at first to have very little in common with the RepublicanGeorge W. Bush,75 and Blair seems to have been particularly anxious tofind some common ground.76 When Bush was quizzed on what he hadin common with Blair, the US President replied, ‘We both use Colgatetoothpaste and we both like physical exercise’77 – perhaps not the mostpromising basis for an alliance to build a new world order. One signifi-cant thing the two men have had in common, however, is a strong beliefin Christianity.78 Bush attributes his recovery from ‘the devil drink’ to hisreligious faith, and at a private meeting with Amish farmers in LancasterCounty, Pennsylvania, in 2004, Bush was reported to have said, ‘I trustGod speaks through me.’79 For his part, Blair has a very evident mission-ary zeal.80 Banishing doubt through faith seems to fit with certainselected – many would say distorted – elements of Christian teaching: thedemand for proof will only take you so far; there is always a need forfaith, a belief in things unseen. Indeed, doubt may be seen as calling fora renewal of faith. Yet as a basis for policy, this is woefully inept.In the end, leaders citing God’s authority or approval are logicallycommitted to the dubious claim that their God is superior or theiraccess to His will is purer. Bush said he experienced almost no doubtthat he was doing the right thing. He said he didn’t read the editorialpages.81 Blair, too, was reported to read little.82 Bob Woodward recallsthat towards the end of October 2001, when US bombing ofAfghanistan did not seem to be dislodging the Taliban:Rice believed the president would tolerate debate, wouldlisten, but anyone who wanted debate had to have a goodargument, and preferably a solution or at least a proposed fix.It was clear that no one at the table had a better idea.83Bush has shown an increasing intolerance for anyone in his adminis-tration or in Congress who has expressed doubt or asked him to explainhis positions. Even asking for facts to support the administration casecould lead to accusations of disloyalty. Open debate has been seen asencouraging doubt, which undercuts faith.84ENDLESS WAR?[ 126 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 126Concluding remarksThe delusional arrogance of the Bush administration is revealed notjust by the rejection and distortion of evidence but by the (surprisinglyexplicit) rejection of the need for evidence. Given Bush’s apparent intel-lectual limitations, this kind of approach may have been comforting.Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reported that the Bush administrationwas dominated by ideologies based around pre-emption and the inher-ent value of tax cuts,85 adding: ‘Ideology is a lot easier, because youdon’t have to know anything or search for anything. You know theanswer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.’86Certainly, George W. Bush’s immunity to evidence has been verypersistent. In his first pre-election debate with Kerry in October 2004,Bush said, ‘Saddam had no intention of disarming.’ Yet it was publicknowledge by this point that no weapons of mass destruction hadbeen, or were likely to be, found. Clearly, at some level Bush had not –even then – faced the reality that Saddam had no WMD.At times, Bush has seemed genuinely confused. He gives the impres-sion of being a very muddled thinker, and of seeking to replace thismuddle with false certainties. Yet because these false certainties do not intheend make sense or match empirical realities, the muddle iscompounded (and so too, presumably, the search for certainty). In thesame debate with Kerry, the president remarked, ‘Of course we’re afterSaddam Hussein, I mean bin Laden.’ When Bush was asked whether theIraq experience made it more likely or less likely that he would take theUnited States into another pre-emptive military action, he replied, ‘Iwould hope I never had to. … But the enemy attacked us and I have asolemn duty to protect the American people.’ Bush was then challengedby Kerry, who pointed out that it was not Saddam that attacked Amer-ica but Osama bin Laden, to which Bush replied, ‘Of course I know thatOsama bin Laden attacked us. I know that!’ False certainties must beconstantly propped up with action, a theme revisited in Chapter 7.Bush and Blair were informed – by those in a position to know – thatattacking Iraq was likely to increase terrorism by stoking up anger.Despite all this evidence and advice, Bush and Blair went ahead with theattack on Iraq; hence, in part, the conclusion that they have embraced akind of irrationalism. The message Tony Blair was getting from seniorWhitehall officials charged with combating Islamic extremists was thatthe threat posed by Islamic extremists was much greater than that posedby Saddam, and that this threat would intensify when the United Statesand the UK attacked Iraq.87 The UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee,THE RETREAT FROM EVIDENCE-BASED THINKING[ 127 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 127which had produced the September 2002 dossier hyping the threat ofWMD, assessed in February 2002 that the threat from al-Qaida and asso-ciated groups would be heightened by military action against Iraq.88In the United States, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser toBush senior during the 1991 Gulf War, said on TV in August 2002 thatan attack on Iraq could turn the Middle East into a ‘cauldron and thusdestroy the war on terrorism’.89 Particularly prominent in warning of abacklash against the ‘war on terror’ was Colin Powell. Bob Woodwardreports that at a meeting with Bush and Rice at Bush’s residence:Powell told Bush that as he was getting his head around theIraq question, he needed to think about the broader issues, allthe consequences of war. … Powell said the president had toconsider what a military operation against Iraq would do in theArab world. Cauldron was the right word. He dealt with theleaders and foreign ministers in these countries as secretary ofstate. The entire region could be destabilized – friendly regimesin Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan could be put in jeopardy oroverthrown. Anger and frustration at America abounded. Warcould change everything in the Middle East.90Successive terrorist attacks were not taken as evidence that the UnitedStates was on the wrong path. In fact, Wolfowitz showed he was quitecapable of using them to draw the opposite conclusion: to show the ever-elusive connection between Iraq and al-Qaida. Woodward reports thatWolfowitz ‘thought it more than a coincidence that al Qaeda, which hadbeen relatively inactive since 9/11, had resumed activity [including theBali bombing] after the president had gone to the U.N. and threatenedunilateral action against Iraq’.91 Assessing whether the ‘war on terror’ is‘working’ has also seen the sidelining of evidence-based thinking. Forexample, uncomfortable think-tank data on the efficacy of the ‘war onterror’ has been suppressed by the US government.92The lesson seems to be that once faith takes hold, evidence willprove whatever you want it to. Yet religious faith does not have to leadin this delusional direction. Christian author and activist Jim Wallisused to be invited to the White House in the early days of the Bushadministration. He told Ron Suskind:If you’re penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repen-tance and accountability and help us reach for somethinghigher than ourselves. … Real faith, you see, leads us to deeperENDLESS WAR?[ 128 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 128reflection and not – not ever – to the thing we as humans sovery much want.Asked what that was, he replied, ‘Easy certainty’.93One final aspect of the disconnect between problem and chosen solu-tion is worth mentioning. To some extent, the impression of madness andarbitrary behaviour may have been cultivated on purpose. ProminentNew York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said a key problem was thatterrorists and those harbouring them thought Americans were soft,adding that Bush’s team was right ‘to be as crazy as some of ourenemies’.94 Arbitrary behaviour can also intimidate third parties, andSaddam Hussein himself understood that the very arbitrariness of offi-cial violence could usefully reinforce feelings of terror among those hewished to intimidate.95 While there were many reasons for attacking Iraq,British playwright David Hare touched on an important truth when hecommented:The intention to destroy the credibility of the United Nationsand its right to try and defuse situations of danger to life, is nota byproduct of recent American policy. It is its very purpose.Bush chose Iraq not because it would make sense but becauseit wouldn’t. … The thinness of the justification for this war is,in fact, its very point. As is the arbitrariness of the target.96On 19 December 2001, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a neo-con close to RichardPerle and the Iraqi National Congress,97 wrote in the Wall Street Journal:If we really intend to extinguish the hope that has fueled therise of al Qaeda and the violent anti-Americanism throughoutthe Middle East, we have no choice but to reinstill in our foesand friends the fear and respect that attaches to any greatpower. … Only a war against Saddam Hussein will decisivelyrestore the awe that protects American interests abroad andcitizens at home. We’ve been running from this fight for tenyears.98As Stanley Cohen observes in relation to states that terrorise their ownpeople, ‘The culture of state terror is neither secret nor openly acknowl-edged. … Fear inside depends on knowledge and uncertainty: who willbe picked up next?’99 Where the targeting of individuals is also arbi-trary (as with the shooting of the young Brazilian man, Jean Charles deTHE RETREAT FROM EVIDENCE-BASED THINKING[ 129 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 129Menezes, at Stockwell tube station after the attempted 21 July 2005London bombings), this again will tend to maximise the fear. This maynot be intentional, but it does keep everyone on edge. Charles deMontesquieu in his De l’esprit des lois (published in 1748) pointed outthat witchcraft accusations rest on reputation rather than actions,‘Consequently, a citizen is always in danger, since the best conduct inthe world, the purest morals, and the fulfilling of all social duties are noguarantee that an individual will not be suspected of committing thesecrimes’.100Declaring one’s indifference to evidence, then, is rather more thanfoolishness; it is an assertion of total power and, at some level, anattempt to intimidate. The following chapter looks at how the use ofarbitrary power may create a degree of plausibility around nonsensicalbeliefs.ENDLESS WAR?[ 130 ]Keen06_cha06.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 1307 Action as PropagandaIn the ‘war on terror’, extreme and unlawful violence has been used tomake violence seem legitimate and necessary, a disturbing example ofwhat Hannah Arendt called ‘action-as-propaganda’. Explaining thisterm, Arendt referred to ‘the advantages of a propaganda thatconstantly ”adds the power of organization” to the feeble and unreli-able voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur ofthe moment, whatever it says’.1 For Arendt, factual propaganda actu-ally worked better even than Joseph Goebbels’ rhetoric. AlthoughArendt focused on the way action-as-propaganda could persuadeothers, theconcept can also help to explain how abuses sometimeslegitimise themselves in the eyes of key perpetrators.We have noted already the allure of certainty in uncertain times, thedesire for simple solutions and tangible targets. Action-as-propagandacan reinforce an oddly reassuring feeling of certainty, helping to bendreality into line with a distorted and propagandistic image of the world.It also distorts our perceptions of this reality so that the gap betweenpublic perception and official propaganda is further diminished.Arendt’s concept helps us to understand how the wagers of the ‘war onterror’ have in effect taken something irrational (a magical solution tothe problem of terror) and through their actions made it appear tomany people (and, crucially, large sections of the American electorate)to be both rational and plausible.In their daily lives people are buffeted around by chance, and themassive economic and social disruption in the United States has fuelleda sense of insecurity and uncertainty which 9/11 compounded. Arendtunderstood how our desire for certainty and predictability could feedinto abusive ideologies. ‘What the masses refuse to recognize’, shewrote, ‘is the fortuitousness that pervades reality.’2 Consistency,however constructed, was deeply alluring:Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and totalarbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid,fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the massesprobably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay forit with individual sacrifices – and this not because they arestrong or wicked, but because in the general disaster thisescape gains them a minimum of self-respect.3[ 131 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 131Arendt saw how this respect could come from denigrating – or evenattacking – others, and how this aggression could, in addition, generate(spurious) legitimacy for itself. Part of the source of this ‘legitimacy’was what has been called ‘just world thinking’, where people in effectassume that punishment implies a crime, and where this assumptionserves to protect them from the fear of a totally arbitrary world.4 Signif-icantly, ‘just world thinking’ may be more tempting as the world – andaccusations – become more arbitrary: thus, the more irrational theactions of the Bush administration, for example, the greater may be thefelt need to reassure oneself that ‘there must be a reason’ for the selection of victims (and therefore that ‘we’ are safe).Arendt suggested that another means by which violence couldgenerate its own legitimacy was by allowing leaders to make their ownpredictions come true: first, when people came to resemble a distortedand propagandistic image of them (as sub-human or disease-ridden,for example); second, when alleged historical laws about the triumphof a particular group or idea were ‘revealed’ as accurate; and third,when humanitarian ideals were similarly ‘revealed’ as an unrealisticirrelevance. Again, these ideas will prove relevant in relation to the‘war on terror’.‘Just world thinking’: might is rightPart of the ‘proof’ that legitimises a witch-hunt is typically generatedby the witch-hunt itself. Confession-under-duress helps to make thepersecution more plausible, as we have seen. But punishment can itselfbe used to imply guilt. As Arendt observed in the context of the Naziholocaust, ‘Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald andAuschwitz with the plausible argument, “What crime must thesepeople have committed that such things were done to them!”’5 Takingone’s moral cues from a regime of punishment may seem a verysubservient attitude, but it is also part of how any human being growsup and learns about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – by noticing what is beingpunished and what is not.How, in the spring of 2003, did Americans and the British know thatIraq was the enemy? Why, because they were now at war with it! In asense, the guilt of Iraq was ‘proven’ by the fact that it was earmarkedfor punishment. More generally, the very extremity of a ‘counter-terror’response (ignoring the UN, invading Iraq, abusing human rights atGuantanamo and other US military bases, and so on) may be taken, atsome level, as evidence of the extremity of the targets’ guilt.ENDLESS WAR?[ 132 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 132Sociologist Stanley Cohen noted in 2001 that according to ‘just worldthinking’, victims ‘deserve to suffer because of what they did, musthave done, support doing, (or will do one day if we don’t act now)’6 –a formulation that uncannily anticipates the justifications made forattacking Iraq in 2003. The common inclination to infer guilt frompunishment seems to have helped the Bush administration to set asidenot only international law but a central tenet of law in general, thatguilt should be established before punishment is meted out.High levels of deference to government judgments have been impor-tant here, particularly in the United States: a sense that ‘our adminis-tration must know what it is doing’.7 Americans were repeatedly toldabout links between Iraq and 9/11. None of the evidence was good, butthe sales-pitch worked anyway. In an October 2002 opinion poll, 66 percent of Americans said that they believed Saddam Hussein wasinvolved in the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and 79 per centbelieved that Iraq already possessed, or was close to possessing,nuclear weapons.8 A poll in February 2003 suggested that 72 per cent ofAmericans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personallyinvolved in the 9/11 attacks.9The dubious virtues of action-as-propaganda seem to have beenwell understood by the Bush administration, with key officials hold-ing that a demonstration of power could be potent propaganda initself and that ‘might’ would soon, in effect, be seen to be ‘right’.Thus, Bush’s close adviser Karl Rove said of the war on terrorism,‘Everything will be measured by results. The victor is always right.History ascribes to the victor qualities that may not actually havebeen there. And similarly to the defeated.’10 (Hitler expressed a simi-lar sentiment, ‘I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war,no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be askedafterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting andwaging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.’11) In relation tothe attack on Iraq in 2003, one senior White House advisercommented, ‘The way to win international acceptance is to win.That’s diplomacy: winning.’12 Bush himself said:I believe in results. … I know the world is watching carefully,would be impressed and will be impressed with resultsachieved. … [W]e’re never going to get people all in agreementabout force and the use of force … but action – confident actionthat will yield positive results provides kind of a slipstreaminto which reluctant nations and leaders can get behind.13ACTION AS PROPAGANDA[ 133 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 133Remember also the Bush adviser’s chilling suggestion to journalist RonSuskind that, ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create ourown reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as youwill – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can studytoo.’ This is a path to madness, but a perversely persuasive one.In the run-up to war, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi was worriedabout Italian public opinion. But Bush told him in January 2003, ‘Youwatch, public opinion will change. We lead our publics.’14 Among inter-national actors, the willingness to follow Bush’s lead was not confinedto Blair, Berlusconi and Aznar. For example, British journalist PaulJohnson wrote in the Spectator that the world ‘needs hero states, to lookup to, to appeal to, to encourage and to follow’.15Hesitant officials and publics were confronted by the message thatwar with Iraq was ‘inevitable’. MSNBCcancelled a liberal programfeaturing Phil Donahue just before the war with Iraq, replacing it witha show called ‘Countdown: Iraq’.16 Phillip Knightley, an expert on warand the distortion of information, observed that, ‘Politicians, while call-ing for diplomacy, warn of military retaliation. The [Western] mediareports this as “We’re on the brink of war”, or “War is inevitable.”’17Colin Powell’s reservations seem to have been eroded by the momen-tum of events. In February 2001, Powell had declared of sanctionsagainst Iraq, ‘frankly they have worked. He [Saddam] has not devel-oped any significant capability with respect to weapons of massdestruction’;18 but by mid-2002, Condoleezza Rice was telling him thatopposing a decision to attack Iraq would be a waste of breath,19 and therush to war eventually saw Powell marshalling dubious evidencebefore the UN about the supposed threat posed by these weapons.The logic behind the general sense of ‘inevitability’ appears to havebeen this: the war is happening; are you going to be part of it or are yougoing to stand on the sidelines of history? This is by no means the firsttime that this technique has been brought to bear. For example, in the(very different) context of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, official Rwan-dan propaganda proclaimed, ‘The graves are already half full. Who willhelp us to fill them?’20, and the invitation to complete what had beenstarted was embellished with the strong hint that those who declinedmight not simply be bystanders but also, potentially, victims. Bushmade his own variation of this threat with his famous insistence that‘You are either with us or against us in the fight against terror.’While the then UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson had avoidedcommitting British troops to Vietnam, Tony Blair seemed ready to fallwithout resistance into the ‘slipstream’ that Bush referred to. In line withENDLESS WAR?[ 134 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 134Colin Powell’s analysis at the time, Blair told the House of Commons inNovember 2000, ‘We believe that the sanctions regime has effectivelycontained Saddam Hussein’.21 But Blair, too, seems to have beenpersuaded, in part, by the ‘inevitability’ of the war. A key moment camein Blair’s meeting with Bush in Texas in April 2002, which helpedconvince the British Prime Minister that Bush was set on war with Iraq.22Blair came back committed to supporting military action for regimechange in Iraq (reportedly on the understanding that efforts would bemade, first, to eliminate WMD through weapons inspections and,second, to form a coalition to shape public opinion).23 Blair’s preparationson returning to the UK included telling Chancellor Gordon Brown toredesign budget calculations to pay for a war.24 However, ‘inevitability’had a Janus-face for Blair: John Kampfner comments in his book, Blair’sWars, ‘Blair set about his immediate task of preparing the public for mili-tary action, while maintaining the front that it was “not inevitable”.’25 Atan early stage in the preparations for war, a public proclamation that warwas unavoidable would no doubt have smacked too much ofsubservience to Washington. But significantly, once US troops wereheaded for Iraq, Blair was ready to change tack and to use the idea ofinevitability and the momentum of events as a tool to persuade his ownpublic and party. Blair’s March 2003 speech to the House of Commonsincluded the passage, ‘This is a tough choice. But it is also a stark one: tostand British troops down and turn back; or to hold firm to the course wehave set.’26 Tony Blair worried about the damage that would be done inthe world by a unilateral American victory; on this logic, Britain wouldhave to go to war to avoid America going to war alone.27 Meanwhile,Blair subscribed to some of the confidence of Bush and Karl Rove thatvictory would generate its own support: Robin Cook recalled of Blair, ‘Inthe many conversations we had in the run-up to the war, he alwaysassumed that the [Iraq] war would end in victory, and that militarytriumph would silence the critics.’28In the domestic sphere, ‘winning’ had already proved a useful toolof persuasion and intimidation. Dissent within the Labour Party hadbeen stifled: first in the interests of winning power from the Tories andthen in the context of the legitimacy that winning bestowed. Kampfnerobserved that Blair ‘had dominated his party for a decade, his author-ity allowing him to push through foreign and domestic policies evenwhen they were at odds with his MPs and activists – even members ofhis own Cabinet’.29 As British writer Beatrix Campbell put it, ‘The partygave itself up to alchemists who proclaimed that they, alone, possessedwinning powers’.30 Of course, the free market ideology that Bush – andACTION AS PROPAGANDA[ 135 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 135to a large extent Blair – have espoused itself constitutes a kind of vener-ation of ‘winners’: only the fittest are meant to survive, and successimplicitly proves your vigour and virtue. For George Soros, the ‘socialDarwinism’ of market fundamentalism was a natural ally for religiousfundamentalism and both had been dangerously boosted in confidenceby the collapse of the Soviet system and the advance of globalisation.International law itself was increasingly sometimes expected to fallinto line with the ‘confident action’ that Bush felt would bringcompliance. David Frum and Richard Perle observed, ‘if the UNcannot or will not revise its rules in ways that establish beyond ques-tion the legality of the measures the United States must take to protectthe American people, then we should unashamedly and explicitlyreject the jurisdiction of these rules’.31 This is a very odd conception ofinternational law, to put it mildly. Just after the start of the attack onIraq, Perle eagerly anticipated, ‘As we sift the debris of the war toliberate Iraq, it will be important to preserve, the better to under-stand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety throughinternational law administered by international institutions.’32 WhileBush administration officials labelled the UN as weak and potentially‘irrelevant’, US policy had itself been critical in weakening the UN –not just over Iraq but also earlier. During the Cold War, the UnitedStates had persistently used its veto to stymie the UN Security Coun-cil.33 The US government had also repeatedly reneged on fundingcommitments, and infamously denied and ignored the 1994 Rwandangenocide. Undermining the UN through confident action may haveborne some fruit: public confidence in the UN fell sharply in the wakeof the attack on Iraq: not only in the United States but also in the UK,France and Germany;34 we do not know how lasting this effect will be,but in many ways the effect of near-unilateral action (and possiblypart of the intention) is that belief in ‘human rights’ and ‘internationallaw’ comes to look like the height of naivety. Again, it was Arendtwho had earlier seen this most clearly, arguing that factual propa-ganda worked partly because:the incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocentpeople was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarianmovements’ cynical claims that no such thing as inalienablehuman rights existed and that the affirmations of democraciesto the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardicein the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase‘human rights’ became for all concerned – victims, persecutors,ENDLESS WAR?[ 136 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 136and onlookers alike – the evidence of hopeless idealism orfumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.35Once the occupation of Iraq was underway, the hope that ‘might wouldbe seen to be right’ was also expressed in relation to the insurgency.One US officer involved in attacks on Fallujah stressed the role ofaggression followed by ‘psy-ops’, ‘always coming back tothe theme ofthe inevitability of the superior tribe’.36 Journalist Robert Kaplancommented from Iraq, ‘People in all cultures gravitate toward power.… The chieftain mentality is particularly prevalent in Iraq.’37Making your predictions and assertions come trueHannah Arendt saw the desire for predictability and consistency ascreating opportunities for totalitarian regimes to underline and bolstertheir own power by making their own predictions come true. Thiswould seem to be an alluring option for some democratic countries too;and with civil liberties increasingly infringed and a mass media largelycompliant, the distinction between totalitarian and democratic is notalways as clear as one might hope: Norman Mailer has said of theUnited States, ‘I think we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now.’38Conformity to lawsHannah Arendt observed that the broad mass of people ‘are predis-posed to all ideologies because they explain facts as mere examples oflaws and eliminate coincidences by inventing an all-embracingomnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of every accident’.39Further, in conditions of uncertainty people are likely to be attracted toan ideology that claims to be actively shaping history in line with somelong-term historical laws, thereby re-establishing some sense of control.In the case of the Nazis, the long-term historical law was a kind of racialDarwinism; for Soviet governments, it was the inevitable and scientifi-cally predicted triumph of the proletarian class.40 Arendt pointed outthat the Nazis spoke of soon-to-be-extinct races and the Soviet regimeof dying classes, and that the murderous actions of these totalitarianregimes helped underline their power and omniscience by makingthese predictions come true.41 Bush has not matched these earlier abom-inations; however, he is certainly keen to emphasise that he and theUnited States form part of a grand design that conforms with God’swishes and laws. In his January 2005 inauguration speech, BushACTION AS PROPAGANDA[ 137 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 137referred to freedom as a ‘force of history’, adding, ‘We can go forwardwith complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. …History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visibledirection, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.’42 Or again, liberty is‘the plan of heaven for humanity and the best hope for progress here onEarth’.43 This is rather more than saying, ‘God is on our side’; it is aninsistence that the direction of history is on our side and that we,through the ‘confident action’ Bush had earlier advocated, can provethis to be the case. Though purporting to be veneration of God, thisstance is ultimately a veneration of the self: a self whose confidence andviolence will ultimately gain the victory that secures approval fromother nations and simultaneously reaffirms God’s approval for thelonger-term transformative project. This capacity of ‘revealing God’sapproval’ suggests that ‘successful’ violence can serve a function ratherlike wealth for Max Weber’s Protestants.A comparable sense of confidence has sometimes been expressed byIslamic fundamentalists, for whom the triumph of Islam is held to be‘inevitable’, as was the triumph of socialism.44 To the extent that vari-ous fundamentalist belief systems see God as actively intervening inthe world, there will always be a temptation to see whatever action istaken as having received his blessing or as being his work.45 It is notsimply a question of who had God on his side but of who can demon-strate this through victory. Thus, violent counter-terror has been seenby its authors not only as blessed by God but also as countering theterrorists’ belief that they have God and history with them. In Septem-ber 2003, Bush noted that prior to 9/11 the terrorists had become‘convinced that the free nations were decadent and weak. And theygrew bolder, believing history was on their side.’ He added that the waron terror had reversed this pattern.46Mixed in with the idea of a grand design is the idea – mostcommonly expressed by America’s evangelical right – that war mightbring closer a predicted Apocalypse and the Second Coming of theMessiah.47 Even Blair has flirted with this imagery, ‘September 11 wasfor me a revelation. What had seemed inchoate came together. … Herewere terrorists prepared to bring about Armageddon.’48 A more secularversion of the ‘coming apocalypse’ thesis was expressed in SamuelHuntington’s prediction of an inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’ (on thisthesis, see Chapter 10). Bush and Blair have been careful to state thatthe ‘war on terror’ is specifically not a clash of cultures or a clash of religions. Yet through their aggressive actions they have helped giveplausibility to Huntington’s prediction.ENDLESS WAR?[ 138 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 138Once war had been declared, criticism of the Bush and Blair admin-istrations became much more difficult (see also Chapter 3). The imper-ative of ‘supporting our troops’ became dominant. Criticism of themilitary was particularly taboo, and the deaths of US soldiers in someways reinforced the difficulty of opposing the war. As Michael Mannput it, ‘Any criticism of the [Iraq] war was widely regarded, not just asunpatriotic, but also as disrespect for our dead.’49 After the killing of 21-year-old Jonathan Kephart in Iraq, local Baptist pastor David Food said,‘If I hear anything negative [about the Iraq war], I take it personally. Ifeel that they are saying it about John. It invalidates the sacrifice hemade.’50 In June 2005, with violence escalating in Iraq and the total ofUS troops killed rising relentlessly, Michael Ignatieff observed in theNew York Times magazine, ‘Thomas Jefferson’s dream [of freedom for allnations] must work. Its ultimate task in American life is to redeem loss,to rescue sacrifice from oblivion and futility and to give it shiningpurpose.’51 In other words, the sacrifice of US troops – which Ignatieffhad supported – must be made to be meaningful. There are uncom-fortable echoes here of the way an earlier violence helped to feed prop-aganda for more violence. Noting the common argument that USsoldiers in Vietnam were betrayed by a liberal elite, Thomas Frankobserved in 2004:This may be conservatism’s most striking cultural victory of all:the fifties-style patriotism that was once thought to have victim-ized the Vietnam generation is today thought to be a cause thatis sanctified by their death and suffering. What their blood callsout for is not skepticism but even blinder patriotism.52By such mechanisms does endless war renew itself. Significantly, JohnKerry chose not to make the Abu Ghraib scandal a part of hiscampaign for the Presidency in 2004.53 Criticisms of the Iraq warcould be presented as ‘demoralising’ the troops. Even Kerry’s tenta-tive criticisms of the Iraq war prompted Bush to comment (in the firstpre-election debate), ‘What kind of message does it say to our troopsin harm’s way: wrong war, wrong place, wrong time? That’s not amessage a commander-in-chief gives.’Colin Powell went so far as to import some of this logic into the pre-warperiod. On learning in mid-January 2003 from Bush that the president wascommitted to war, Powell said walking away would have been disloyal tothe president, the military and mostly to the several thousand who wouldbe going to war.54 Again, we see the bizarre logic engendered byACTION AS PROPAGANDA[ 139 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 139‘inevitability’: out of loyalty to our troops, we must back the policy thatputs them in harm’s way for no good reason. This kind of upside-downreasoning must have helped to confirm Bush’s belief that oppositionwould wilt in the face of ‘confident action’.If war could stifle dissent, holy war might do so in spades. Politicalcommentator George Monbiot pointed out that the US government’sreligiously tinged sense of ‘mission’ meant that disagreement was notsimply dissent; it was heresy. Of course, war may also reinforce reli-gious feelings. When battle is underway, it is clearly reassuring (andgives courage) to believe that God is on your side. This in turn canbolster the legitimacy of war.Making people resemble your propagandaHere is another example of action-as-propaganda from HannahArendt:The official SS newspaper, the Schwarze Korps, stated explicitly in1938 that if the world was not yet convinced that the Jews werethe scum of the earth, it soon would be when unidentifiablebeggars, without nationality, without money, and without pass-ports crossed their frontiers. ... A circular letter from the Ministryof Foreign Affairs to all German authorities abroad shortly afterthe November pogroms of 1938, stated, ‘The emigration move-ment of only about 100,000 Jews has already sufficed to awakenthe interest of many countries in the Jewish danger. … Germanyis very interested in maintaining the dispersal of Jewry. … [T]heinflux of Jews in all parts of the world invokes the opposition ofthe native population and thereby forms the best propaganda forthe German Jewish policy.’55How this worked out in practice is another issue, but the SS intentionhere was clear. More than this, the persecution of the Jews – confiningthem to disease-ridden ghettoes, numbering them, herding thembehind walls and fences in concentration camps, starving them andslaughtering them en masse – was a process that tended to takeaway most of the manifestations of a normal human life and in theprocess helped to create a dehumanised image that matched the Nazis’ dehumanising language.It is, of course, easy to see differences between the events Arendt isdiscussing and the current debacle. Even so, the ‘war on terror’ is aENDLESS WAR?[ 140 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 140classic example of turning ‘the other’ into a preconceived and negativeimage that has been entertained (and propagated) by the perpetratorsof violence. This applies to both sides of the conflict, since both sidesseem to share an interest in ‘proving’ their enemy to be just as brutal asthey had always insisted. In civil wars and global wars, violence tendsto create the enemies it claims to weaken or eliminate (Chapter 2), andso generates its own (spurious) legitimacy. Frantz Fanon (and after him,bin Laden) understood how terrorists themselves could take advantageof the phenomenon of ‘action-as-propaganda’: notably by usingviolence to bring out the underlying and previously part-hiddenbrutality of their opponent/oppressor. The Arabic word for ‘martyr’translates also as ‘witness’ – in other words, someone who by theiractions or speech makes a hidden truth clear to an audience.56 MarkJuergensmeyer has said of international terrorism:What the perpetrators of such acts of terror expect – and indeedwelcome – is a response as vicious as the acts themselves. Bygoading secular authorities into responding to terror with terror,they hope to accomplish two things. First, they want tangibleevidence for their claim that the secular enemy is a monster.Second, they hope to bring to the surface the great war: a war thatthey have told their potential supporters was hidden, but real.57One logic of terrorism is this: if America is not quite the evil imperial-ist of our propaganda and our imagination, let us help to make it so. Itworks on the other side too: in circumstances where the terrorist hasbeen portrayed as all around us and bent on our destruction, counter-productive actions that lead to a proliferation of angry enemies, whileleading us all towards lives of fear, at least bring the perverse cognitivesatisfaction (particularly for the leaders who chose this path) of know-ing, ‘Yes we are right, the enemy is indeed as powerful, pervasive anddangerous as we portrayed it; we must redouble our efforts.’ It is hardto imagine that Bush and Blair consciously wish to make thing worse;even so, they inhabit a world in which mad solutions generate (spuri-ous) legitimacy for themselves. Indeed, it seems ‘both sides’ in the ‘waron terror’ are busy nurturing their favourite nightmares. At the level ofcivil wars, we have seen how accusations that rebels were ‘Muslimfundamentalists’ can, over time, acquire an increasing degree of truth,as in Chechnya and the Philippines. Anti-American feeling in much ofthe world is often taken as a ‘given’; but this sentiment, as noted, is nota natural or even a long-standing one.58ACTION AS PROPAGANDA[ 141 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 141Billed erroneously as a key source of terrorism prior to the war, Iraq hasbecome so – a development that lends spurious credibility to the initialaccusation. The propaganda was made to become true, at the cost of muchdistortion and many lives. As John Kerry said when debating with Bush,‘The President just talked about Iraq as a center of the war on terror. Iraqwas not even close to the center of the war on terror before the Presidentinvaded it.’59 Even attacks on occupying forces have been quickly labelledas ‘terrorist’, and a common charge by the US command in Iraq has beenthat Iraqi fighters have been using terrorist tactics.60 However, attacks onoccupying soldiers are not terrorism: even the US State Department’s defi-nition of terrorism centres on the use of violence against civilians.61 Howdo you justify the devastation of an entire city – like Fallujah in November2004? First, you announce that it harbours ‘terrorists’; then when mostpeople flee in fear, you declare the city a free-fire zone on the grounds thatthe only people left behind must be the terrorists.62As well as creating enemies by deepening anger, violence can causedisplacement, thereby ‘contaminating’ new ‘targets’ with enemygroups. A paranoid state of mind interprets even the displacementresulting from its own violence as a conspiracy by evil governmentsintent on ‘harbouring’ terrorists. For example, one of the main allegedlinks between Saddam and bin Laden, the Jordanian Abu Masab al-Zargawi (whom Bush called the ‘best evidence’ for a connectionbetween Iraq and al-Qaida)63 appears to have sheltered in Baghdadafter fleeing the US-led attack on Afghanistan.64 Thus, one attackhelped justify the next. After Baghdad fell, al-Zargawi was then said tobe sheltering in Fallujah, something that was used to justify the devas-tation of that city in November 2004. Earlier, in May 2003, US officialshad turned up the heat on Iran, saying it was harbouring al-Qaida lead-ers and Saddam loyalists. Syria too was accused of harbouring IraqiBa’athists. But it was quite natural that the attacks on Afghanistan andIraq would displace into surrounding countries many of those whowere being explicitly targeted. Sir Andrew Green, UK Ambassador toSyria in 1991–94, commented, ‘The Syrian authorities cannot preventIraqis getting across a 400-mile desert border.’65 Syria has indeedbecome a source of jihadis for the Iraqi insurgency,66 but again this‘rogue’ status is a predictable consequence of the attack on Iraq, ratherthan confirmation that Syria is inherently anti-American or is part of anexpanded ‘axis of evil’. In 2005, US military officials were predictingthat the ‘vast ungoverned spaces’ of the Horn of Africa would play hostto al-Qaida fighters retreating from Iraq67 – a trend (or perception) thatcould bring more trouble for that region. Quite apart from the effects ofENDLESS WAR?[ 142 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 142displacement, insurgency in one occupied country creates opportuni-ties for accusing neighbours of complicity, and the desire to dissociateinsurgency from ‘ordinary Iraqis’ itself creates an incentive to highlightforeign interference. Accusations that Syria has been facilitating theflow of fighters into Iraq have certainly been persistent.68Another way in which violencecan make people resemble yourpropaganda is by creating a climate in which dehumanising images ofthe enemy are seen as legitimate or even necessary. On the cusp of the2003 attack on Iraq, MSNBC (Microsoft-NBC) added Michael Savage toits line-up. In their informative overview of media distortions, SheldonRampton and John Stauber comment that Savage:routinely refers to non-white countries as ‘turd world nations’and charges that the US ‘is being taken over by the freaks, thecripples, the perverts and the mental defectives.’ In one broad-cast, Savage justified ethnic slurs as a national security tool,‘We need racist stereotypes right now of our enemy in order toencourage our warriors to kill the enemy’.69Thus, it is war itself that may help to create the sense of an implacable andinhuman enemy. Meanwhile, abuses by coalition forces within Iraq havedehumanised the enemy not only by fuelling anger and violence but alsoby stripping people of their dignity. A report by the US Major GeneralGeorge Fay noted that general practices such as the extensive use ofnudity ‘likely contributed to an escalating “de-humanization” of thedetainees and set the stage for additional and more severe abuses tooccur’.70 Violence is often a process, in which initial abuses create spuri-ous legitimacy for worse atrocities.71 Part of the function of extremeviolence, moreover, is to convince the victims themselves that they arenot worthy of rights: for if they did have rights, why then are they beingso systematically attacked or dehumanised? General Janis Karpinski,suspended as head of a unit running prisons because of the Abu Ghraibscandal, said she was told by Major General Geoffrey Miller, formercommander of Guantanamo Bay camp, ‘This place [Abu Ghraib] must beGitmo-ised. … [T]hey are like dogs. If you allow them to believe they aremore than dogs, then you will have lost control.’72Concluding remarksRelying on ‘victory’ to generate legitimacy is of course a double-edgedsword. There may be limits to the plausibility of something that isACTION AS PROPAGANDA[ 143 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 143manifestly not working, and criticism of US government choicestended to surface and then intensify as the Iraq occupation ran intoincreasing difficulties. Hannah Arendt herself noted that Nazism as anideology collapsed very suddenly when defeat meant it could nolonger back its propaganda with imposing and successful actions.Moreover, those who claim that God is on their side may be particularlyvulnerable to a loss of popularity and prestige when defeat or stalemateimplies that God is more ambivalent.73 As war in Iraq drags on, popu-lar American enthusiasm is turning to disillusion. Taking the extremityand direction of response as evidence of both the severity and source ofthe problem is a mechanism that may not work for ever.All this can be compensated for in two ways, however. First, theappearance of victory may be sustainable for a significant period evenwhen the reality is pretty desperate. Presentation counts (somethingdiscussed in more detail in Chapter 10). Short-term and conspicuousvictories may be more important to the interveners than actually makinga positive impact on the problem. The benefits of action-as-propagandaderive not so much from winning as from appearing to win. For exam-ple, elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, for a time at least, perhaps pulledsome credible veneer of success from the general debacle – helpingtemporarily to disguise the deeper counterproductive effects of theattacks and the long-term security and governance problems in thesecountries.Second, even a lack of success may lend legitimacy to the insistencethat America and its allies must devote ever-greater energy to defeatingterrorism. Indeed, those waging war on terror seem to have an interestin insisting that they are simultaneously both winning and losing. Thisis a confusing message, to be sure; but a mixed message has the signif-icant advantage that it can never be disproved. Any form of evidence,any positive or negative turn of events, can be harnessed to the(ambiguous) official line. Each victory brings some new atrocity andsome new struggle in its wake: the toppling of the Taliban is followedby the bombing of Bali; the ousting of Saddam is followed by the bomb-ing of Madrid; elections in Iraq, but bombings in London. It wouldseem the task is never done: as Mark Duffield pithily puts it, ‘It isalways a case of one more massacre, of winning this endless war, andwe will be free.’ Just as we breathe a sigh of relief, we find some newanxiety catching in out throats. The war on terror is drawing to an end;long live the war on terror!ENDLESS WAR?[ 144 ]Keen07_cha07.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 1448 Warding off the Shame ofPowerlessnessThe tendency to blame bad things on a small and implicitly finite groupof evil people has been fed not only by a desire for safety and certaintybut also by a desire to ward off feelings of shame. The desire to defusethe threat of shame seems to have helped to shape terrorism as well ascounter-terrorism (as when Iraqi resistance was seen as washing awaythe shame of Fallujah or when bin Laden depicted terrorist violence aswashing away the shame of Western domination).Psychiatrist James Gilligan has suggested that people will go toextreme and violent lengths to ward off feelings of shame and humili-ation.1 The experience of working with and listening to some of Amer-ica’s most violent criminals convinced Gilligan that these individuals’past experiences had given them a heightened sensitivity to feelings ofshame and humiliation, and that when someone else was unluckyenough to arouse or reawaken these feelings, that person ran the risk ofbeing killed. Through killing (not uncommonly including attacks oneyes-that-see and tongues-that-talk), the murderer could temporarilyeliminate the threat of shame. Significantly, the target for violence wasusually not the source of the initial humiliation. This suggested a radi-cal disconnect between ‘solution’ and ‘problem’ – a key element ofmagical thinking more generally. Gilligan has argued that the desire toeliminate a source of shame and thereby keep a sense of personal worthhas often been a more powerful motivation even than self-preservation,leading violent criminals into self-destructive behaviour as well as theabuse of others.The atrocities of 9/11 and their aftermath seem to have broughtthree important threats of shame for the United States, with key actorsgoing to extreme – and often violent – lengths to ward off this threat.The first threat of shame (discussed in this chapter) arose from thesheer powerlessness of the 9/11 tragedy (and then, by extension, of USpersonnel deployed in response).The 9/11 attacks can be seen as a response to humiliation, a responsewhich was itself humiliating. The US-led response has involved passingon feelings of powerlessness and shame to others through a spectacu-lar assertion of US military power. As with Gilligan’s murderers, thesource of the initial humiliation was not readily to hand (not least[ 145 ]Keen08_cha08.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 145because the terrorists had committed suicide), and this set the scene fora disconnect between ‘solution’ and ‘problem’ that was every bit asstark as with the displaced violence highlighted by Gilligan. The cycle,as noted, is potentially endless, since those onto whom powerlessnessand shame are ‘offloaded’ will be (and are being) tempted to remedytheir own powerlessness and shame through their own feeling ofpower-through-violence, as they embrace terror attacks and simpleresistance to occupation. ‘Killing and torture’, as Eric Hobsbawm wrotein his study of bandits and rebels, ‘is the most primitive and personalassertion of ultimate power, and the weaker the rebel feels himself to beat bottom, the greater, we may suppose, the temptation to assertit’.2The attacks brought a second, more insidious threat of shame: thethreat arising from the suspicion, however dimly or reluctantly sensed,that 9/11 occurred because of something that those targeted (meaning,principally, Americans) had done or failed to do. Identifying the sourceof the violence as some finite external ‘evil’ seems to have offered amore palatable alternative. This process is discussed in Chapter 9.A third threat of shame (also considered in Chapter 9) has arisenfrom the violent reaction to 9/11, a reaction that prompted wide-spread condemnation of the United States (and to a large extent theUnited Kingdom) in countries around the world as well as consider-able antipathy to soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. Keyactors in the counter-terror reacted to this additional threat of shameby widening their circle of enemies and simultaneously narrowingtheir circle of trusted confidantes. The potentially wounding criticismof ‘friends’ could be neatly – but dangerously – warded off by exclud-ing them or, at the extreme, redefining them as ‘enemies’. Thisprocess helps to explain the vehemence of aggression against domes-tic and foreign critics of the ‘war on terror’ and also against manycivilians in those countries attacked.Violence as powerWhen news of abuses like Abu Ghraib leaked out, the revealed humilia-tions were generally dismissed by US officials as exceptional and unrep-resentative. There was also a more general debate about torture, withsome arguing that a degree of torture might be justified if it meant accessto information that could prevent a terror attack or otherwise help the‘war on terror’. But what if abuses are not just an aberration or a ruthlessattempt to ‘win’ but actually a central goal? What if humiliation is not theexception or even the means, but the point?ENDLESS WAR?[ 146 ]Keen08_cha08.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 146While violence is usually presented as serving some purposebeyond itself (for example, making the world safer or more just), weknow from many studies of war around the world that violencefrequently brings its own rewards: notably the immediate satisfactionof imposing one’s will and of reversing previous feelings of powerless-ness and humiliation. In this sense, the point of violence may be theviolence itself. While the rhetoric of mass violence tends to revolvearound ‘justice’, ‘prevention’ and defeating your enemy, the purpose ofthe violence may be much more immediate. This means that it maybecome surprisingly unimportant either to pick the right target or todefeat the proclaimed enemy.Contemporary West African wars have shown the immediate func-tions of violence. For example, analysts of the civil war in Liberia havestressed the thrill of exercising power through the barrel of a gun.3 Inneighbouring Sierra Leone, anyone interpreting violence as a means to along-term end ran up against the paradox that both rebels and soldierswere predictably alienating civilians through their attacks on civilians(see Chapter 3). However, if we see violence as an immediate assertionof power and an immediate response to powerlessness, much of thisviolence makes more sense. In line with Hobsbawm’s insights on the‘levelling’ functions of ‘social banditry’ more generally,4 violence inSierra Leone was often a way of achieving a crude and immediate level-ling down of society through destruction. In a sense, both status andvisibility were often inverted through violence: those who were poorand poorly regarded could become ‘big men’; and those who wereignored and forgotten could become front-page news. Important under-lying factors were the lack of status, jobs, voice and even marriageprospects for many youths prior to outright war.5 Meanwhile, govern-ment soldiers – endangered by a clever and elusive rebel group andsimultaneously neglected by their superiors – tended to vent their angerand frustration on those who could not defend themselves: civilians.6Although unpopular chiefs were sometimes attacked by rebels, therewas – as with Gilligan’s murderers – a marked readiness among abusivesoldiers and rebels alike to inflict violence and shame on those who werenot the source of the underlying grievances and humiliations.In her analysis of wars in early twentieth-century China, historianDiana Lary had earlier found strangely similar dynamics. She arguedthat the widespread brutality towards civilians sprang not from someinnate ‘evil’ in the soldiers but from their sense of powerlessness: thebeatings they received, the neglect of their welfare, the exposure todisease in terrible conditions and the powerlessness they had earlier feltWARDING OFF THE SHAME OF POWERLESSNESS[ 147 ]Keen08_cha08.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 147as civilians.7 Taking it out on those less powerful than themselves seemsto have been a response to this cumulative sense of powerlessness.8When it comes to America and American soldiers in recent years,there has been a sense of powerlessness at both the macro and microlevels. Caught by surprise on 11 September 2001, the world’s richestand most heavily armed government was conspicuously unable toprotect thousands of its own citizens; the hijacked planes broughtdown a towering twin-symbol of US wealth before knocking a massivehole in the very institution, the Pentagon, that was charged with thecountry’s defence.9 Osama bin Laden was able to gloat in a videoreleased by al-Jazeera, ‘Here is America struck by God Almighty in oneof its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed.’10Powerlessness can be experienced at a variety of levels, and even atthe local level it could feed into violence. Again, the elusiveness of anenemy prepared to carry out suicide attacks was a factor. Poor resourc-ing was also significant. We know that at Abu Ghraib, for example, theBush administration’s desire to limit troop commitments hadcontributed to severe under-resourcing, with a shortage of interpretersand interrogators and a prisoner-to-guard ratio as high as 75:1. Theprison also came under daily mortar attack. The resulting sense of siegeseems to have fed into the abuses there, including outright torture.11As with wartime violence more generally, torture is not adequatelyexplained as a means to some longer-term end. Certainly, part of theexpressed purpose of torture has been to get information. But we haveseen how many of those imprisoned and tortured by US soldiers havehad no connection to the Iraqi resistance. In any case, torture naturallyincites hostility and violence. From his extensive interviews with jihadisin the Middle East, Fawaz Gerges notes that ‘Arab/Muslim prisons,particularly their torture chambers, have served as incubators for gener-ations of jihadis.’12 Any ‘advantage’ in terms of information-gatheringwould seem to be more than outweighed, first, by the creation of moreenemies and, second, by a predictable diminution in access to informa-tion from ordinary Iraqis and others in the Muslim or Arab world.13 Infor-mation obtained through torture is anyway notoriously unreliable.Psychiatry professor Robert Lifton, who studied torture victims comingout of Communist China in the 1950s, noted that torture made people saywhat their interrogators wanted to hear: the victims would regularlycome up with wild confessions.14 This remains true today. As HumanRights Watch observes, ‘The US Army’s interrogation manual makesclear that abuse undermines the quest for reliable information. The USmilitary command in Iraq says that Iraqi detainees are providing moreENDLESS WAR?[ 148 ]Keen08_cha08.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 148useful intelligence when they are not subjected to coercion.’15 Top UScommanders told the New York Times on 27 May 2004 that they learned‘little about the insurgency’ from the Abu Ghraib interrogations.16We are led back, once again to the witch-hunt. Ann Barstow,commenting on sixteenth-centuryfound. Removing the alleged threat posed by these weapons wasthe main justification given for the war. However, it now seems clearthat the existing system of weapons inspection was working well. Asthe UN’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix observed in 2004, ‘Themuch maligned, relatively low-cost policy of containment had worked,and the high-cost policy of counter-proliferation [in other words, war]had not been needed’.24A July 2003 report from the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committeenoted that documents claiming Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger turned out to be crude forgeries. The urgency of disarm-ing Saddam was underlined in the British government’s September2002 report on Iraq, now discredited and known unaffectionately as the ‘dodgy dossier’. The Foreign Affairs Committee report went on:FUEL ON THE FIRE[ 11 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 11The dossier also claimed that the Iraq military would be able todeploy warheads containing biological and chemical weaponswithin 45 minutes of receiving an order to do so. It is knownthat the claim rested on a single source and that there was nocorroborating evidence.25As a former Labour government adviser put it, ‘no attempt was evermade to explain that the notorious 45-minute claim referred to battle-field munitions only, and came from single, uncorroborated sources. Ifthe attempt had been made, the Sun would not have declared [inSeptember 2003] ”Brits 45 minutes from doom.”’26The third problem with the attack on Iraq – perhaps the most funda-mental, and discussed in more detail later in this chapter – is that theattack itself has already proven profoundly counterproductive incombating terrorism. In looting that was prompted by the invasion,nearly 380 tonnes of nuclear-related high explosives went missing froma factory south of Baghdad, and the UN’s Atomic Energy Agencywarned that terrorists could be helping themselves ‘to the greatestexplosives bonanza in history’.27 More fundamentally, the attack hasdeepened the anger that is fuelling terrorism among Islamist militantsin particular. It has led to major resistance inside Iraq, and whilst themajority of resisters have been Iraqi, Iraq has also become something ofa magnet and a cause célèbre for these militants from elsewhere: much inthe same way that Afghanistan did during the struggle against theoccupying Soviet forces. Anger and fear have also been stoked by moregeneral US proclamations of a right to unilateral military action and‘preventive self-defence’. Time magazine noted that its interviews withreligious leaders, Islamic scholars, government analysts and ordinarycitizens in dozens of countries around the world ‘reveal that the fervorof those who adhere to radical forms of Islam has intensified since9/11’.28 Even the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee noted in July 2003that the war with Iraq may have impeded efforts to combat bin Ladenand al-Qaida, and that the war may have enhanced the organisation’sappeal to Muslims.29 The Iraq war has been helping the al-Qaidanetwork with its propaganda, recruitment and fundraising, as well asserving as a training ground;30 it provides a particularly useful trainingin urban tactics.31 Meanwhile, when the United States uses heavy fire-power during counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, many of theeffects are videoed and later used as propaganda for insurgency.32 TobyDodge, a specialist on Iraq, commented that the Iraq war had had abigger impact on British Muslims than Chechnya or Israel–Palestine,ENDLESS WAR?[ 12 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 12where British and American soldiers had not been directly involved inkilling Muslims.33 It is true that the 9/11 attack predated the 2003 Iraqattack, but this of course was targeted at the US, not the UK.Hugh Roberts, an authority on Algeria and Egypt, stresses that thereis often nothing ‘natural’ or even long-standing about anti-Americansentiments (notwithstanding Chomsky’s emphasis on the longevityand continuity of American abuses). Yet anger with one’s own govern-ment has increasingly interacted with anger at the United States tomake a potent and dangerous combination.34 In Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,Palestine, Algeria and elsewhere, the 2003 attack on Iraq has greatlyintensified anti-American sentiments – just as the earlier Gulf War didin 1991. Following the 2003 attack on Iraq – in a world that wassupposed to be safer for the deposition of Saddam – we have seenbombings linked to Islamic militants in Spain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,Morocco, Russia, Chechnya, Turkey, Indonesia, the UK and else-where.35 Blair was anxious to dismiss any connection between the July2005 London bombings and the Iraq war, but most British peopledisagreed. It had been David Blunkett, Blair’s Home Secretary at thetime, who defended anti-terrorism legislation in December 2001 withthe view that ‘a heightened level of risk comes with our militaryalliance with the US’.36 Intelligence officials in the USA and UKreported in early 2005 that a key threat came from ‘bottom up’ groupsof young, radicalised Muslims who might have little or no connectionto al-Qaida. In Britain, intelligence chiefs and senior police officers saidin early 2005 that planned terrorist attacks had been thwarted there.37On 7 July 2005 there were four deadly explosions on London’s tubetrains and a bus, with a further four bombs failing to go off two weekslater. In October 2005, Bush said that at least ten al-Qaida attacks hadbeen thwarted since 9/11, including three in the US.38A fourth flaw in the promise to make the world safer – at once obvi-ous and virtually unnoticed – is that the attack on Iraq and the subse-quent occupation have themselves been a source of terror.39 Terror toend terror makes no sense. One study compiled from media reportsconcluded that up to 7,350 civilians were killed in the ‘major combat’phase prior to 1 May 2003.40 Many more were killed in looting, subse-quent crossfire and coalition retaliation, as well as from poor healthinfrastructure. A detailed study in the Lancet, published in October2004, found that ‘Making conservative assumptions, we think thatabout 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths andair strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.’41 AsFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 13 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 13one Iraqi internet ‘blogger’ put it in April 2004, ‘I hope someone feelssafer, because we certainly don’t’.42 Part of that danger has come fromthe most sustained suicide bombing campaign in history. In all,between August 2004 and May 2005, Iraqi civilians and police officerswere dying at a rate of more than 800 a month, with an increase indeath rates since the election of January 2005.43A fifth flaw in the idea that attacking Iraq would make the worldsafer is that it has exposed many foreigners in the country to violenceand death. This, of course, includes coalition soldiers. As of 25 October2005, there had been 2,198 coalition troops deaths in Iraq, with at least15,200 US troops wounded in action.44 On 19 August 2003, the bombingof the Canal hotel used by the UN in Baghdad killed at least 23. Aidagencies left Baghdad in large numbers.A sixth problem is that the attack, so far from limiting the spread ofnuclear weapons, appears likely to encourage nuclear proliferation.The fact that the United States has been talking, in effect, about anuclear ‘first strike’ against terrorist targets adds to a climate of fear. Itseems to be only those who do not pose an immediate threat that theUS/UK Atlantic coalition has been prepared to attack, and this policycreates a perverse incentive to arm yourself rapidly (and covertly) sothat you can climb out of this vulnerable category. As in civil wars, anemphasis on attacking the unarmed serves, in practice, as a majorincentive to acquire arms.45witch-hunts in Europe, notes, ‘Itappears that jailers, [witch] pickers, executioners and judges, all couldtake their sadistic pleasure with female prisoners [accused of witch-craft]. Men involved wanted more from witch-hunting than the convic-tion of witches: namely, unchallengeable sexual power over women.’17Barstow adds, ‘the basic fact of having total juridical power over womenmay have fanned the propensity for violence’. Today, the temptations ofexerting extreme power in the form of torture would appear to be partic-ularly great in the context of: first, the extreme powerlessness of 9/11;second, the fear and sense of powerlessness among occupying soldiersliving among an increasingly hostile population (notably in Iraq); andthird, the opportunities for control and impunity offered by implement-ing the ‘war on terror’. Experience in countless wars as well as in the fieldof criminal violence tells us that there is nothing more dangerous than anindividual (or group) with a sense of victimhood and a simultaneoussense of impunity.18 This describes the position not only of many militarypersonnel on the ground but also of the United States as a whole (itsimpunity deriving in large part from the absence of any other super-power following the collapse of the Soviet Union).Prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American facilities, includingin Afghanistan, seem to have been designed to inflict maximum power-lessness and shame on the victims, with photographs serving as whatMark Danner calls a kind of ‘shame multiplier’.19 In these prisonabuses, it appears that local sensibilities have been consciously takeninto account, and turned against the victims. A training manual for theMarine Corps includes advice that takes Iraq’s culture into account:Do not shame or humiliate a man in public. Shaming a man willcause him and his family to be anti-Coalition. … Shame is givenby placing hoods over a detainee’s head. Avoid this practice.Placing a detainee on the ground or putting a foot on himimplies you are God. This is one of the worst things we can do.20Yet the lure of ‘shaming’ others was clearly very great. An immediatesense of powerlessness stemming from 9/11 seems to have been all thegreater for the fact that America has been accustomed to exercising greatpower and authority: like a child grown used to having everything itsWARDING OFF THE SHAME OF POWERLESSNESS[ 149 ]Keen08_cha08.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 149own way, America was in the habit of imposing its will, not of havingothers impose their will on it. The shock of 9/11, moreover, seems to havecome on top of a wider unease: a collective anxiety at the slipping awayof America’s economic supremacy. In this dual context, fantasies ofrenewed omnipotence have been deeply alluring: they seem to havehelped to reassert some sense of control. The desire to reassert controlwas evident even in small details, as when Bush insisted that the UnitedStates would respond to 9/11 ‘at a time of our own choosing’.Closely linked to reversing the shame of powerlessness is the desirefor revenge, a revenge whose chosen victims have been determined toa significant extent by high-level definitions of the enemy. Again, thishas very little to do with winning the ‘war on terror’ and tends activelyto impede the business of winning. On 4 February 2002, about 25 menfrom three US Special Forces units and three CIA paramilitary teamsgathered near the Pakistan border of Afghanistan. A pile of rocks hadbeen arranged as a tombstone over a buried picture of the destroyedWorld Trade Center. One man read a prayer and then declared, ‘Weconsecrate this spot as an everlasting memorial to the brave Americanswho died on September 11, so that all who would seek to do her harmwill know that America will not stand by and watch terror prevail.’21 Sofar, so Bush-like. But soldiers can sometimes go further than a presidentin spelling out an underlying desire for violence. The prayer continued,‘We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth indefense of our great nation’. Similar sentiments could be found amongsome US soldiers serving in Iraq. Corporal Michael Richardson, 22,commented:There’s a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by mybed and I keep one in my Kevlar [flak jacket]. Every time I feelsorry for these people, I look at that. I think, ‘they hit us athome and, now, it’s our turn.’ I don’t want to say payback but,you know, it’s pretty much payback.22One British former officer interacting with US troops in Iraq said thefeeling was that ‘the gloves are off’, adding, ‘Many of them still thinkthey are dealing with people responsible for 9/11.’23Dependence and omnipotenceNo-one is weaker than a baby, and in May 2003, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young observed, ‘The US is like a baby with a bomb’.24ENDLESS WAR?[ 150 ]Keen08_cha08.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 150The comparison no doubt will have annoyed a lot of people: just as didthe US officials’ and observers’ attempts to infantilise France for its lackof belligerence over Iraq (Chapter 9) or North Korea’s leader Kim JongIl (Chapter 2). However, the musician’s words may be something morethan a provocative phrase. British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, in a bookco-authored with child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, notes, ‘a babydoes not recognise anyone’s existence but his own … and he expects allhis wants to be fulfilled’.25 When he realises that he is dependent onothers, he is likely to become very aggressive. Riviere goes on, ‘Thebaby cannot distinguish between “me” and “not-me”; his own sensa-tions are his world, the world to him; so when he is cold, hungry orlonely there is no milk, no well-being or pleasure in the world.’26 Thisrealisation of powerless may itself be a primary source of shame.27Barbara Ehrenreich has written that before 9/11, ‘We Americans hadbeen lazy, willfully ignorant, and self-involved to the point of solip-sism. If there was an outside world, we didn’t want to know about it,unless the death of a beautiful princess was involved.’28 In many ways,9/11 reinforced a certain deep-seated self-absorption. How many timeshas the world been told that 11 September 2001 was ‘the day thatchanged the world’, that ‘our sense of security vanished on that day’,that ‘nothing would ever be the same again’? These statements have adegree of truth to them, and through their cataclysmic nature, theyhave helped feed a reaction (and a doctrine of pre-emption) that hasitself radically changed the world. But there is self-absorption andblindness here too. If you try to make a case for 6 April 1994 as ‘the daythat changed the world’, you will get mostly blank looks on the streetsof New York (or London, for that matter). You will be lucky indeed torun into someone sufficiently educated and aware that they can dimlyrecall, ‘Oh yes, wasn’t that the start of the Rwandan genocide thatkilled some 800,000 people?’Of course, the United States is not a child but an innovative andtechnologically advanced nation with a rich and diverse culture; but ina country that runs up a record trade and budget deficit while launch-ing expensive wars and implementing a US$350 billion tax cut, is therenot something of this creature expecting ‘all his wants to be fulfilled’?Is there not also something infantile or at least irresponsible in themagical thinking that sees high-tech wars as almost cost-free for thevictims and the perpetrators, the belief that one can usefully respond toterror by increasing spending, the view that evil can be somehow cutfree from the rest of us, and, finally, the belief that if you close your eyes and wish for something hard enough (some weapons of massWARDING OFF THE SHAME OF POWERLESSNESS[ 151 ]Keen08_cha08.qxd 13/02/2006 09:57 Page 151destruction in time for Christmas or Easter), they will magically materialise?29In many ways, US policy seems to be based on maintainingUS officials and international atomicexperts say Iran could have a nuclear bomb by 2006. It already seemsto have mastered the technology for uranium enrichment.46 John Kerrynoted in a pre-election debate with Bush that at the moment when Iraqwas invaded, some 35 to 40 countries had greater capability of makingweapons than Iraq. Comparing the capabilities of Iraq and North Koreasuggests that it is the lack of WMD that may create conditions for inva-sion. As North Korea’s foreign ministry put it, ‘The Iraqi war showsthat to allow disarmament through inspections does not help avert awar, but rather sparks it,’ concluding that ‘only a tremendous militarydeterrent force’ could prevent attacks on countries the United Statesdislikes.47 As Isabel Hilton commented in February 2003:Since the Korean war, [the North Korean regime] has under-stood that the disappearance of the Kim [Jong Il] regime, andeven of North Korea itself, is a long-term goal of US foreignpolicy. Deterring the US, therefore, has been its fundamentallong-term objective. … China, Russia, Japan and South Koreaall want a nuclear-free North Korea. But they know that suchENDLESS WAR?[ 14 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 14an agreement would require a guarantee that the US will notstage a pre-emptive strike. On September 20 last year, the USproclaimed its right to stage pre-emptive strikes.48Russian military spending has been rocketing during the Bush era; inFebruary 2004, Russia carried out its largest military exercises for twodecades, and Russian generals and defence minister Sergei Ivanovannounced that they were responding to Washington’s plans ‘to makenuclear weapons an instrument of solving military tasks’. Some reac-tion from China can also be predicted.49 We seem to have forgotten thatUS atomic attacks on non-nuclear Japan in 1945 helped to spur theSoviet atomic programme in the first place.A seventh problem with the attack on Iraq is that it has helped under-mine the whole idea of collective security and has severely damaged theinstitutions – notably the United Nations – charged with achieving it.One could say that the attack on Iraq was effectively a vigilante opera-tion: except that this would be too kind. Vigilantes typically respond tocrimes, but this attack was essentially pre-emptive. In this it differedfrom the coalition attack in 1991 when Bush senior responded to Iraq’sinvasion of Kuwait. Levels of international consent were also very differ-ent: to put the matter in a catch-phrase, while the Iraq war of 1991 wasUN-endorsed (with Security Council approval), that of 2003 was simplyun-endorsed.50 The 2003 attack was opposed by a majority of the UNSecurity Council members, and many prominent international lawyersdeemed it illegal.51 UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix commented,‘It was not reasonable to maintain that individual members of the Secu-rity Council had the right to take armed action to uphold decisions of theCouncil when a majority of the Council was not yet ready to authorizethat action’.52 The UK Attorney General told Blair that it was for the UNSecurity Council, not him, to decide whether Iraq was complying withthe earlier UN Resolution (1441) of November 2002 that called on Iraq toallow free access for weapons inspectors.53 As international lawyerChaloka Beyani makes clear, it was also for the Security Council to decidewhat would be the ‘serious consequences’ referred to in resolution 1441.54In any case, the usual code for war is ‘to use all necessary means’, not‘serious consequences’. Significantly, Resolution 1441 was introducedwith an assurance from British UN Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock thatthe resolution would not have any ‘automaticity’ that would trigger awar without further discussion by the Security Council.55A final problem with the attack on Iraq is that the enterprise ofspreading democracy by force is deeply flawed. The humiliation of anFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 15 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 15imposed solution is one problem. George Soros, who knows somethingabout practical steps to promote democracy, said of the attempt to useforce to bring democracy to Iraq, ‘In light of the ethnic and religiousdivisions, the introduction of democracy could easily lead to the disin-tegration of the country.’56 Ethnic tensions are indeed rising, with manySunni Arabs feeling marginalised from negotiations over the newconstitution, Shi’ites and Kurds sitting on most of the oil, Sunni Arabinsurgents targeting Shi’ite mosques and pilgrims, and growingnumbers of retaliatory killings by Shi’ites; even the growing use ofethnic terminology implies – and perhaps assists – the ethnicisation ofIraqi politics.57If the logic of the attack on Iraq was thus deeply flawed, what thenof the earlier attack on Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?Though the issue of weapons of mass destruction did not arise, therewere still many flaws in the approach.First, the connection with 9/11, though less far-fetched, was stillvery questionable. Certainly, the attack on Afghanistan reflected thefact that the Taliban had allowed al-Qaida to establish its headquartersand training camps in Afghanistan,58 and the attack did succeed indisrupting al-Qaida, its leadership and its supporters in the Taliban –not least by forcing many to flee.59 Bin Laden was certainly an impor-tant connection between 9/11 and the Afghanistan attack, but hefamously escaped, helped by the US reliance on local militias and bythe gathering US focus on Iraq.60 Significantly, none of the 9/11 attack-ers were Afghans; most were Saudis, with financial backing alsocoming in large part from Saudis.61 Yet Saudi Araba escaped any retal-iation. In a detailed report for the Project on Defense Alternatives, CarlConetta observed:The Taliban regime, which absorbed most of our attention, boreonly a contingent relationship to Al Qaeda’s activities outsidethe region. In fact, most of the Al Qaeda facilities and most ofthe foreign troops under their control in Afghanistan had to dowith the civil war there. Most of the organization’s capabilitiesto conduct far reaching terrorist acts resided and residesoutside of Afghanistan, and thus fell beyond the scope of Operation Enduring Freedom [the US-led attack].62When it came to the activities of al-Qaida beyond the region,Afghanistan’s importance was not so much in providing sanctuary andtraining; rather it lay in providing a recruiting ground for future cadreENDLESS WAR?[ 16 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 16(with most al-Qaida volunteers used as shock troops in local civil war oras a Taliban security force). Al-Qaida doesn’t really need states or massiveopen-air training facilities, as Conetta notes; warehouses and small adhoc sites (like Florida flying schools) have served its purposes well.63A second flaw with the Afghanistan attack was that other morepeaceful options were neglected. Previous US efforts to get the Talibanto hand over bin Laden had not yielded him, but a deadline couldeasily have been set.64 Taliban leader Mullah Omar had asked the USgovernment for evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11, and indi-cated that if this was done he would be ready to hand bin Laden to anIslamic court in another Muslim country. (Later, in an even more concil-iatory offer, the Taliban said bin Laden could be handed over to a courtwith at least one Muslim judge.)65 Pakistan had a lot of leverage on theTaliban and a patient approach might have borne fruit over six monthsor so.66 In fact, the leaders of two Pakistani Islamic parties are reportedto have negotiated the extradition of bin Laden to Pakistan, but extra-dition was blocked by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, quiteconceivably on US advice.67 US demands for turning over bin Ladenand the al-Qaida cadre, and the closing of al-Qaida camps and sites,were framed as non-negotiable, and Conetta commentsthat thisrequired that the Taliban assume a supine posture. A national-ist reaction should have been predictable. And this gave lever-age to the [Taliban veteran] hardliners in Kandahar, rather thanthe more flexible shura (a council of village clerics and mullahs)in Kabul.68A third problem was that the attack on Afghanistan prompted signifi-cant and continuing resistance inside the country. Fourth, the attackitself was again a source of terror. Fifth, the attack on Afghanistanstoked up anger among many Muslims around the world. These pointsare elaborated later in this chapter.Finally, the attack on the al-Qaida camps was of dubious benefit inthe context of an increasingly decentralised and amorphous enemy.Indeed, the attack contributed to the decentralisation of al-Qaida, tend-ing to disperse rather than eliminate the terror group. A top FBIcounter-terrorism expert estimated that the Afghanistan war led to onlya 30 per cent reduction in al-Qaida’s capacity. Many al-Qaida opera-tives fled to Iran.69 Many of the al-Qaida leaders returned to their homecountries, with destinations including Chechnya, Yemen, East Africaand Georgia.70FUEL ON THE FIRE[ 17 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 17Whilst some dispersed al-Qaida terrorists will certainly have foundit difficult to operate,71 dispersal is unlikely to have proved a majorhindrance. Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on al-Qaida, noted in 2003 thatregional commanders were now operating independently ofcentralised control. Crucially, the dispersal of al-Qaida seems to havehelped to foster an increasingly decentralised leadership that often hasits own local sources of funding.72 In late 2001, American intelligenceofficials said they believed bin Laden had delegated authority forlaunching terror strikes to individual cells within the al-Qaidanetwork.73 In May 2003, Jonathan Stevenson of the International Insti-tute for Strategic Studies commented that, perversely, the counter-terrorism effort ‘impelled an already decentralized and elusivetransnational network to become even harder to identify and neutral-ize. … Thanks to technology and the multinational allure of jihadism,the Afghanistan camps were [now] unnecessary.’ Stephenson notedthat mid-level coordinators, already trained in Afghanistan, had subse-quently been able to operate in dozens of countries, and that bombingslike those in Kenya in 2002 could be left to ‘local footsoldiers’.74Certainly, the Afghan attack did not prevent the bombing of a Balinightclub in October 2002 – an atrocity coordinated by Jamal Islamiyah,a south-east Asian Islamist terrorist group drawing funding from al-Qaida.75 The Bali bombing of October 2002 cost perhaps US$35,000 tocarry out, a sum easily gathered from the credit card fraud and pettycrime networks that certain Islamist extremists run.76 Referring to al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan, Roland Jacquard, a French experton terrorism, commented, ‘What cost al-Qaida millions was the camps.The group doesn’t have the same financial needs as it did before’. Thecost of planning and executing the 9/11 attacks has been estimated atno more than US$4–500,000.77Acting Assistant Director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division, J. T.Caruso, reckoned that Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistanwould cause a ‘stuttering’ in al-Qaida’s operation but not necessarily a‘pause’: because of the decentralised nature of the organization. Al-Qaida has sometimes reportedly acted like a foundation, giving grantsto those who present ‘promising’ plans for terrorist attacks. It has alsobeen compared to a corporation with a common ‘mission statement’and potential for local-level initiative. Decentralised organizations canbe harder to monitor and control.78Whether the loose network of Islamist terrorists is even accuratelydescribed as ‘al-Qaida’ is also questionable. William Dalrymple wrotein the New York Review of Books:ENDLESS WAR?[ 18 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 18While al-Qaeda has dominated the news since September 11,2001, there are dozens of similar groups made up of freelanceIslamic radicals trained since the 1980s in camps on the Afghanborder. Many of these were run by the ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] and funded initially by the CIA (one reli-able estimate puts the US contribution at 7 billion dollars), andlater, after the Soviet withdrawal, by Saudi intelligence.79In an important study of al-Qaida, Jason Burke observed that by 9/11,bin Laden had the loyalty of about a hundred motivated individuals –the al-Qaida hardcore.80 Further:For all but five (or arguably three) years of his life, bin Ladenwas a peripheral figure in modern Islamic militancy. … Overthe past 15 years, tens of thousands of young Muslim menmade their way to training camps in Afghanistan. Many, as lateas 1998, had never even heard of Osama bin Laden.81Even in terms of Afghanistan, the problem of al-Qaida was never‘solved’: both the Taliban and al-Qaida remained present inside thecountry’s borders. Al-Qaida was reported by the UN to have subse-quently reopened training camps in remote areas of easternAfghanistan and new recruits were pouring in.82 While the war inAfghanistan has long been presented as ‘over’, US bombing inAfghanistan did not end in 2001. Indeed, Washington was still bomb-ing in 2005: trying desperately to eliminate a force containing elementsof the Taliban and al-Qaida.83The doctrine of pre-emptionAlongside the apparently serial selection of enemies there has been analarming and revealing change in expressed US foreign policy. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Haass stated:What you are seeing in this [George W. Bush] administration isthe emergence of a new principle or body of ideas … about whatyou might call the limits of sovereignty. Sovereignty entails obli-gations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is notto support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meetthese obligations, then it forfeits some of the advantages ofsovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your ownFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 19 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 19territory. Other governments, including the United States, gainthe right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even leadto a right of preventive … self-defense. You essentially can act inanticipation, if you have grounds to think it’s a question ofwhen, and not if, you’re going to be attacked.84Referring to ‘those terrorist organisations of global reach and anyterrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or useweapons of mass destruction or their precursors’, the US governmentstated in September 2002:While the United States will constantly strive to enlist thesupport of the international community, we will not hesitate toact alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense byacting pre-emptively against such terrorists, to prevent themfrom doing harm against our people and our country.85Note that this is not just advocating pre-emptive strikes against thosewith weapons of mass destruction; it is advocating pre-emptive strikesagainst those attempting to acquire them, and indeed attempting toacquire ‘their precursors’. It is not clear who is being excluded from thiswide-ranging project. Furthermore, Bush has declared, ‘We will makeno distinction between those who planned these [9/11] acts and thosewho harbor them’.86 In fact, the doctrine seems almost infinitely extend-able. All this represents a major shift from a policy of nuclear non-proliferation to a policy of actively removing nuclear (and other WMD)threats. The Pentagon has stated that the United States should prepareto use nuclear weapons to prevent, or retaliate against, use of WMD.87Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who pushed for Iraq tobe made a principle target in the ‘war on terror’ after 9/11, observed:It’s not just simplya matter of capturing people and holdingthem accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing thesupport systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. It willbe a campaign, not a single action. And we’re going to keepafter these people and the people who support them until itstops.88All this adds up to a very wide-ranging license to kill and a prettystrong hint of endless war. Donald Rumsfeld said in June 2005 that theIraqi insurgency could last as much as 12 years.89 Even the name thatENDLESS WAR?[ 20 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 20was initially adopted for the strikes on Afghanistan (‘Operation InfiniteJustice’) seemed to suggest a kind of hunger for perpetual warfare.90The Pentagon has referred to the need for ‘regime change’ in Iran.David Frum and Richard Perle, influential neo-Conservatives withpositions at the American Enterprise Institute, noted in 2003 that Iranwas ‘a terrorist state, the world’s worst’.91 Of the regimes in Iran andNorth Korea they observed, ‘both regimes present intolerable threats toAmerican security. We must move boldly against them both andagainst all the other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya, andSaudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time.’92 Saudi Arabia wasaccused of inciting terror and of being a ‘disguised enemy’.93 Turning tothe Far East in more detail, Frum and Perle noted, ‘our interests (andthose of Japan) differ from those of South Korea. Put bluntly: A NorthKorean nuclear warhead that might be sold to al-Qaeda or some otherterrorist group is more dangerous to us than a war on the Koreanpeninsula. … In Korea, the surest way to avoid war is to prepare tofight it.’94 In one chilling passage, Frum and Perle suggest:Next, we must accelerate the redeployment of our groundtroops on the Korean peninsula so they are beyond the range ofNorth Korean artillery and short-range rockets. President Bushand Secretary Rumsfeld have already begun to do this. U.S.troops originally served to deter the North from invading asecond time; today they have become hostages, whose vulner-ability the North exploits to deter us – and whose presencediscourages the South from improving its own defences… aswe reposition troops, we should develop detailed plans for apreemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities.95There were also vague threats towards China: ‘the North Koreannuclear program is a Chinese responsibility, for which China will beheld accountable.’96 The authors referred to the possibility that Chinamay become ‘menacing’ over the long term.97 This worry found an echoin a Pentagon review of America’s military needs – leaked in 2005 –which mentioned China in the context of the need for huge militaryspending to deter would-be superpowers.98Nor is this kind of hunger for war restricted to the United States.Tony Blair has said that if Bush had held back from intervention in Iraq,he would have been pushing him in that direction. The British PrimeMinister is also on record as saying that after Saddam was toppled, itwould be necessary to ‘deal with’ North Korea. While there seem inFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 21 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 21practice to be limits to this project (not least because of the prospect ofa Labour revolt), Blair’s own inclinations appear to set few limits. Blairstated just before the attack on Iraq, ‘What amazes me is how manypeople are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don’t get rid ofMugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’tbecause I can’t, but when you can, you should.’99Pre-emption is now widely lauded as legitimate. But as a principleon which to base international relations or international law, pre-emption is woefully incoherent and dangerous. One difficulty is that agovernment might say a war is pre-emptive when actually it has othermotives.100 More fundamentally still, a doctrine of pre-emption wouldbe totally unworkable if even remotely generalised.101 Let’s suppose itis right to attack another country if you believe you are about to beattacked. For those countries who see that this doctrine might be turnedagainst them (North Korea? Iran? Iraq itself?), do they then have a rightto attack the United States to pre-empt the coming attack?102In September 2004, following the terrorist attack on Beslan school,Russia asserted a right to pre-emptive strikes on terrorist bases aroundthe world.103 It would not be good (or welcomed by the US) if Russiatook it into its own hands to enforce UN Security Council resolutionson the Israeli-occupied territories, for example.104 Peter Singer notesthat ‘America harbors Cuban exiles who have used Miami as a basefrom which to carry out terrorist attacks in Cuba’, and asks whetherthis gives Cuba a right to attack the US.105 Few would think that USsupport for anti-Sandinista terror in Nicaragua would have justifiedNicaraguan bombing of the US.106 Nor are more distant historical prece-dents a good advertisement for attacks on the alleged ‘state backers’ ofterrorism. In 1914 when Austria-Hungary went to war on Serbia(precipitating the First World War), the Austro-Hungarian governmentcited Serbian involvement in the assassination of Austrian ArchdukeFranz Ferdinand.107The grave problems arising from the assertion of a right to pre-emptive strikes become even clearer if we apply the principle to therealm of law and order within states. What kind of community would itbe if an attack on an individual was deemed acceptable and desirablemerely because some other member of the community believed they hadgrounds for thinking that the individual intended harm to them?Perhaps a community like Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692? What kind ofcountry would it be, moreover, if entire groups could be attacked becausesome other groups believed the victims intended them harm? Perhaps acountry like Rwanda in 1994 or Germany in the 1930s? Mass violence hasENDLESS WAR?[ 22 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 22FUEL ON THE FIRE[ 23 ]long been hailed and legitimised as ‘preventive’, and has been facilitatedprecisely by such dubious predictions; in this sense, as in many others,the Bush doctrine follows a long and dangerous tradition.Fuelling angerDespite the evident satisfactions of Bush’s high-stakes game of Ovaloffice bingo, the problem of terrorism – unfortunately – goes ratherbeyond the 22 ‘evil’ individuals in his deck of cards. (In any case, threeyears after 9/11, 19 of the 22 were still free.) Almost 2,700 ‘known orsuspected’ terrorists had been arrested by the United States and itsallies by May 2003.108 (The category of ‘suspected’ is itself suspect,particularly given the major role that wrongful arrest has tended toplay in generating terrorism.) The figure of 2,700 arrested is still a frac-tion of the estimated 18,000 al-Qaida members in 90 countries in 2003.The CIA itself has claimed that some 70,000 to 120,000 recruits wentthrough bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan,109 though thisseems to involve adding al-Qaida terrorists together with other inter-national terrorists as well as many terrorists with a national agenda.110What is very clear is that the problem of terrorism cannot be containedby a regime that assumes that the number of terrorists is both small andfinite. We can see this even within individual countries. In the wake ofthe Bali bombing of October 2002, Indonesian police arrested more than80 members of Jamal Islamiyah, the south-east Asian terrorist networklinked to al-Qaida. That did not prevent the bombing of a Western hotelin Jakarta in August 2003, killing at least ten, or the repeat bombing ofBali in October 2005.111 This is not to say that such arrests are a waste oftime; merely, that the apparently endless supply of ‘new’ terrorists hasto be taken seriously.Even when dealing with insecurity inside Iraq, there has been anerroneous assumption among US officials and generalsthat the enemyrepresents a hierarchy – very much on the lines of the occupying forces– and that elimination of the enemy leadership (first Saddam’s sons,then Saddam) will disable the violence. The habitual sense of shockwhen this happy outcome has persistently failed to materialise revealsa particular mind-set.While some US administration officials have optimisticallycompared al-Qaida to a snake which will die when the head is cut off,other analysts argue more plausibly that the network resembles amould: you have to tackle the environment in which it grows.112 RatherKeen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 23than imagining that terrorists are a discrete group of evil individuals,we need to look at processes of becoming. How do people come to beterrorists? This means looking at repressive domestic structures and atthe damaging effect of international conflicts: not least the damagedone by the ‘war on terror’ itself. In counter-terrorism, as in theevidently very different field of famine relief, there has been a tendencyto focus on a target group without considering the processes by whichpeople arrived at this extreme state.113To understand a process of becoming we need a sense of individualand national history, as well as a sense of the West’s impact on the prob-lem. But these have generally been lacking, particularly in the UnitedStates. Bush put it with characteristic aplomb when he said, ‘I think weagree, the past is over.’114 When it comes to history, the very word isfrequently used in the United States to mean something that is dead orirrelevant (as in ‘you’re history’). At the same time, history is frequentlyan arena for narcissism: notably, for Bush and Blair themselves, who haveoften invoked ‘history’ to allude to how key actors (notably, themselves)will be judged in the future. For example, Bush said in the introductionto the National Security Strategy on 17 September 2002, ‘History willjudge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act.’115Blair told the US Congress that if Saddam’s WMD capabilities were beingwrongly assessed, ‘That is something I am confident history willforgive.’116 Former UK International Development Secretary Clare Shortnoted that Blair had a preoccupation with his own legacy.117The point that counter-terror critically determines the strength of theterror threat might be lost on Bush, but it is not lost on the terrorists. AsThomas Friedman put it, Islamist terrorists ‘want to trigger the sort ofmassive US retaliation that makes no distinction between them andother Muslims. That would be their ultimate victory – because they dosee the world as a clash of civilizations, and they want every Muslim tosee it that way as well and to join their jihad.’118Quite apart from the effect of violent counter-terror in radicalisingpeople, Bush’s statements have also been encouraging a politics of polar-isation. Bush famously said after the 9/11 attacks, ‘You are either with usor against us in the fight against terror.’119 The phrase was apparentlyintended to cajole would-be neutrals into supporting the ‘war on terror’.But for those who do not want to be ‘with’ Mr Bush in his chosen path,the perverse and unacknowledged logic of the instruction is: join theterrorists.Of course, many people are relieved to see the back of the Talibanand Saddam. But the Bush/Blair retaliation has generated significantENDLESS WAR?[ 24 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 24anger both inside and outside the chosen target countries. Consider the‘insiders’ first.Anger in the targeted countriesIn theory, the US-led military forces responding to 9/11 were to distin-guish sharply between the evil people and the good ones: bombing wasto be targeted, abusive governments were to be overthrown and thewelfare of ordinary people was to be protected with humanitarian aid.However, there have been at least four problems here, all of themfuelling anger with the US-led coalition.First, such a project of ‘separation’ is inevitably difficult in practice:bombs do not always find their targets, economies are inevitablydisrupted, civilians are forced to uproot and so on.The attack on Afghanistan produced some 500,000 new refugees anddisplaced persons,120 and a three-month interruption in humanitariansupplies cost many lives.121 Even after the Taliban collapsed, banditryand lawlessness impeded distribution.122 An estimated 3,400 Afghancivilians were killed by US military action between the start of theAfghanistan attack in October 2001 and end of March 2002.123 High-level bombing was designed to avoid US casualties, and in this it wassuccessful: by 10 January 2002 only two US personnel had been killedby enemy fire.124 The Pentagon’s most optimistic estimate was that 85per cent of US bombs hit their targets. But even that implied some 15per cent – 450 or more – went astray.125 The United States acknowl-edged dropping two 225-kg bombs in a residential area north ofKabul.126 Navy spokesmen said 60 per cent of bombs dropped onAfghanistan were smart bombs, though most of these were originally‘dumb’ bombs smartened with satellite-guided tail-fins.127 Killings inAfghanistan continued even as press coverage faded almost to nothing.For example, eleven civilians were killed in Paktika, easternAfghanistan, on 10 April 2003, after a US warplane mistakenly droppeda laser-guided bomb onto a house. Such incidents inevitably alienatedthe local population.Between March and September 2002, a massive 1.7 million refugeesare estimated to have returned to Afghanistan. But lack of funding forreconstruction meant many were finding it difficult or impossible tosurvive, and some were having to leave once more. Much of the recon-struction money was used for internally displaced people after ethnicunrest in the north and widespread drought.128 In February 2003, onevisiting journalist described the country’s ‘utter desolation andFUEL ON THE FIRE[ 25 ]Keen02_cha02.qxd 13/02/2006 09:56 Page 25poverty’, adding, ‘already about half of the 3 billion pounds from theUN [pledged towards reconstruction] is said to have been spent,though the Afghan government claims to have seen only a fraction ofthe money’. Very large numbers of aid agencies were working in thecountry but ‘with notable exceptions, their achievements are difficult todiscern’. Tens of thousands of refugees were living in the bombed-outruins. Meanwhile, the Afghan Army stood at only 4,000 – roughly one-twentieth of its proposed level. ‘As fast as new soldiers sign up fortraining at 20 pounds a month – if, indeed, they are paid at all – othersare homesick for their remote villages and are quitting’.129 In May 2003,mines or unexploded shells were killing 100–150 people a month inAfghanistan.130A second problem was that the proclaimed international project ofseparating the good from the evil, already unrealistic, was made moreso by the corresponding incentive in the ‘enemy’ countries to ‘muddythe waters’, notably by mixing themselves with civilians. Talibanartillery was sometimes adjacent to mosques and schools131 – at least inpart a legacy of the old Soviet-backed government, which put militaryfacilities in urban areas to protect them from the mujahadeen.132 In Iraq,soldiers reported that some guerrillas dressed as civilians,133 and SeanHuze, a US infantryman attached to the 1st Marine Division in 2003,complained:the position we were put in – fighting an enemy that usedwomen, children, and other civilians as shields; forcing us tochoose between firing at ‘area targets’ (nice way of sayingfiring into crowds) or being killed by the bastards using thecrowds for cover – is indescribably horrible. I saw more than afew dead children littering the streets in Nasiriyah [southernIraq] along with countless other civilians.134A third problem was that civilian casualties inevitably fuelled resist-ance, which led to further civilian casualties.