Much scholarship on U.S. foreign policy since the September 11 terrorist attacks has stressed its continuity with earlier periods of U.S. foreign relations, and has often linked the reactions of political leaders, the media, and the public to longstanding claims of U.S. exceptionalism vis-à-vis the world. Monten, for example, argues that the historical impulse to embrace a “special mandate to promote liberal democratic values” meshes well with both the Bush Doctrine of preemption, which was promoted as the only way to maintain the vitality of the universalist mission of the U.S., and security through regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq (and less violent transitions from autocracy in countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan).Footnote 1 McCartney characterizes Bush's foreign policy as having deep roots in the civil religion of the U.S., arguing that in the aftermath of September 11, the president “normatively and conceptually” tied U.S. foreign policy “into the deep structure of America's global posture,” itself defined by over two hundred years of self-imputed benevolence and a missionary complex.Footnote 2
Media and think tank commentary on the part of both supporters and critics of Bush administration foreign policy also have weighed in on the side of continuity in U.S. foreign policy. Kagan for example, chides Americans for seeking “comforting narratives of our past” and instead implores them to face up to their true historical nature, which has been to seek power, energetically, expansively, and intrusively.Footnote 3 Others argue that the “reluctant empire” model best fits the U.S. in the war on terror; the reluctant empire role rests on the notion that as in previous eras, the U.S. was once again called upon to carry out a war in Afghanistan and launch an effort to remake the Middle East, however much it wishes to shun the burden.
Critics of the U.S. also see continuity in its foreign policy with previous eras, with Ivie, for example, calling the war on terror a variation on an old theme of “defending civilization against savagery,” just as the Cold War legitimated U.S. empire-building for forty years, and efforts to construct a “city on a hill” by the Puritans defined the U.S. founders' mission.Footnote 4 Golub's analysis exemplifies the critical slant on continuity:
Seized by an imperialist urge reminiscent of the expansionist euphoria of the late 1890s, when it began its century-long ascent to world hegemony, the United States under George W. Bush has been attempting to reconfigure world affairs through force of arms … In the course of this offensive against a supposed new global totalitarian threat made apparent by the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. has abandoned deterrence in favor of a doctrine of preventive war, trampled the provisions of the United Nations Charter regarding state sovereignty, and simply discarded international humanitarian law.Footnote 5
What many scholars and commentators assume is what this paper calls into question. In other words, the debates about continuity in U.S. foreign policy rest on certain assumptions about the nation-state remaining the most important unit of analysis in the U.S.-led global war on terror. When President Bush memorably placed Osama bin Laden in the pantheon of criminals on most wanted posters in the Wild West, vowing to capture him “dead or alive,” he too seemed to affirm that the war on terror would be fought in familiar ways—a classic Indian war updated for the twenty-first century.Footnote 6 Indeed, the nation-state paradigm remains a powerful lens for understanding the patriotic fervor that followed the attacks, the construction of the enemies poised to attack the U.S., and the strategy of coalition building followed by the U.S. after September 11. But there is also another important dimension of the war on terror that has gradually emerged in the past seven years that marks a significant departure from previous eras of U.S. foreign policy and thus calls assumptions of continuity and the nation-state model of war fighting into question. Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-linked transnational terrorism are often both viewed as manifestations of, as well as a threat to, globalization, particularly its business and consumerist dimensions. Terrorism, in other words, is often characterized as a mirror image of a new global form of networked power that includes the nation-state, of course, but is also multi-centered and reflects a new organization of power at the global level that exceeds the power of any one state, including the U.S.Footnote 7 In this post-imperialist world, terrorism continues to threaten nation-states, but it also threatens to undermine the smooth functioning of markets and the global north's “way of life,” itself defined in increasingly distinctive ways that rely less upon citizen identification with the nation-state and more upon one's status as a consumer in a post-Fordist economy defined by the growing prominence of information and technology and new geographies of employment and mobility.
Although my interpretations focus on official policy-making, and popular constructions of the terrorist threat, it should be noted that there have been significant changes in the operation of transnational terrorist groups, which use new information technologies, have networked structures, and evince skills at conducting asymmetric warfare. While these changes are material facts, this analysis engages the way in which transnational terrorism is constructed in the light of certain equally constructed givens about the nature of globalization, including the growth of markets and trade, increased corporate power and the mobility of capital, and noteworthy developments in communications and technology. Furthermore, this article does not provide a new definition of terrorism or rest centrally upon the distinction between domestic, transnational, or state-sponsored terrorism. Rather, the focus here is upon the suggestive connections being made in the framing of the transnational terrorist threat in distinctive terms, which in turn affects the way in which the nation and race are being re-imagined as well.
It is important to recognize a competing image of deterritorialized terrorism posing a more diffuse threat for a number of reasons. First, it provides a challenge to the continuity thesis of U.S. foreign policy, much of which is grounded in assumptions about the preeminence of the nation-state and older models of how to study the U.S. response to transnational terrorism. Second, it helps to illuminate how understandings and constructions of state sovereignty and the territorial nation-state are undergoing important changes in the national imagination in the twenty-first century. And finally, and perhaps most important, reading these constructions of the terrorist threat as being shaped by of developments in the global capitalist system sheds light on two other important features of the U.S. war on terror. The first is the rather short-lived and ephemeral public reaction to the terrorist attacks, reflecting a more pronounced tilt toward the consumer side of the citizen-consumer doublet. The other is the growing legitimation of a multicultural U.S. national identity, and the concomitant attenuation of efforts to brand enemies both domestically and abroad in dramatically negative and racially charged terms.
In sum, features of globalization that have captured both the official and popular imagination are also at work in certain constructions of the terrorist threat, particularly its non-hierarchical, high technology, and networked aspects. These constructions rest on a deterritorialized conception of the security problem facing the U.S. and have played a role in reshaping two dynamics long commented upon in U.S. foreign policy: vociferous patriotism and the use of racial categories for contending with domestic and foreign enemies. This is not to argue that these developments have supplanted older responses, or that the nation state, conventional patriotism, and racism have disappeared. Rather, as a result of a changed global context, the newer constructions of the terrorist threat have produced distinctive manifestations of patriotic nationalism and racial prisms.
Sovereignty, Territory, Borders
Charles Maier has labeled the middle of the nineteenth century through the 1970s the era of “territoriality” in U.S. history, thus highlighting the overwhelming importance of the nation-state as the organizing principle in the construction of U.S. identity, expansion, and foreign relations.Footnote 8 The nation-state was the backdrop for addressing foreign policy challenges. Presidential power, expansionist wars, and securing and re-securing national borders all played crucial roles in defining the U.S. The ideology of U.S. exceptionalism—notions of the U.S. having a manifest destiny and a unique history particularly vis-à-vis Europe, all helped to anchor U.S. sovereignty and identity. While certainly tenuous (as various wars and the Civil War attest), the nation-building process in the United States, as in other countries of the world, worked mightily to create a self-contained material and ideational notion of state sovereignty.
What were the major components of state building in the U.S. during the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century? Like other states at the same time, state strengthening was accomplished through war. The concept of manifest destiny, and its various avatars, insisted on a strict boundary between settlers and others (Indians, Mexicans, French, etc.), on the significance of the U.S. revolution to the rest of the world, the special providence of the U.S. with its truly revolutionary experiment in governance, and the blending of the sacred and secular mission of the U.S. in the world.Footnote 9 In addition to wars and patriotism, the U.S. nation-state faced state-based threats, whether in the form of secession (the Civil War), rival colonial powers (for example, Spain, in the 1898 war), rising European powers (Germany in both world wars), or the Cold War.
The height of state territoriality described by Maier shares key features with the political economy of Fordism: mass production, intensive accumulation, and regulation of the national economy.Footnote 10 The Cold War coincided with the height of Fordism, with the welfare state, garrison state, and mass production defining society, warfare, and the economy, respectively. The Vietnam War was itself Fordist in a number of respects. As Hallin describes it, until 1968, the war was a national endeavor, a rational and manly task requiring toughness and professionalism, and winning was all that counted.Footnote 11 Gibson captures the Fordist dimension of the war in his depiction of its capital-intensive “big unit” character.Footnote 12 McNamara's use of body counts as a benchmark for progress in the war, Westmoreland's goal of reaching the cross-over point, and the treatment of pacification as a special case of organizational management all resonate with the Fordist penchant for regulatory solutions to seemingly intractable problems in the conduct of the war.
Warfare in the age of terrorism, on the other hand, follows a post-Fordist logic. Instead of a draft and big unit warfare, the U.S. strategy has entailed the use of a professional army, increased use of private contractors, lowering the risks to soldiers, and a general rejection of enemy body counts as a barometer of success. Civilian enemy deaths, while both common and controversial, are presented as lamentable yet inevitable in a war that seemingly has no end, no surrendering party to a peace accord, and no formal surrender in sight. As David Kilcullen, one of the more astute analysts of the new terrorism remarks, the U.S. is fighting a global jihadist movement comprised of independent networks, loosely decentralized, and not located in one state.Footnote 13
From its inception, the Bush administration's declared war on terror highlighted the tension between territoriality and virtuality in an era increasingly defined by networked war. Two days after September 11, Paul Wolfowitz announced that the war would entail “ending states who sponsor terrorism,” locating the threat inside the familiar category of other nation states.Footnote 14 On the other hand, in their assessment of the continued decline in Iraq in 2005–2006, the authors of the Iraq Study Group report approvingly quote one Iraqi official who told them that “Al Qaeda is now a franchise in Iraq, like McDonald's.”Footnote 15 Likewise, the initial efforts to link terrorist organizations with states was matched by an outpouring of conventional patriotism—donations to charitable organizations, telethons, church attendance, and displays of the U.S. flag were all evidence of the resilience of the manifest destiny-inspired embrace of a unique American identity, grounded in myths about innocence, sacred covenants, and a special destiny. On the other hand, numerous analysts have commented on the short-lived nature of the national response to the attacks. For example, church attendance fell to pre-9/11 levels within two months after the attacks.Footnote 16 On the first anniversary of the attacks, Michelle Cottle of The New Republic declared, “talk of a massive, enduring overhaul of our relationship with God has all but vanished.”Footnote 17 Television was back to normal programming within one week of the attacks.Footnote 18 There was no rush to military recruiting stations. Citizens quickly went back to pre-attack low levels of reading print media, and instead turned to entertainment shows via cable for news—newspaper readership continued to decline.Footnote 19
Networked and non-territorial forms of power and resistance have been described in distinctive ways, as part one of this article will demonstrate. Commentators have reached for both conventional categories to illustrate the features of the terrorist threat as well as the contours of the post-Fordist corporation, portraying the flat, decentralized form favored by Samuel Palmisano, president and CEO of IBM (writing in Foreign Affairs): “Hierarchical, command-and-control approaches simply do not work anymore. They impede information flows inside companies, hampering the fluid and collaborative nature of work today.”Footnote 20 Transnational terrorist groups have been described in ways that resonate with the decentralized, flexible, and information-savvy company that operates smoothly in the newest phase of globalization.
Such portrayals of the terrorist threat in turn effect two phenomena associated with the continuity interpretation of U.S. exceptionalism and post-9/11 foreign policy. The first concerns the distinctive forms of national reaction to the war on terror. Casting the terror threat as networked and decentralized is compatible with a particular form of subjectivity associated with consumption and neo-liberalism. One of the most noteworthy developments in the shift to a post-Fordist economy has been the creation of highly differentiated niche markets where consumers have specific tastes that shift in response to sophisticated marketing and demographic research.Footnote 21 Flexible accumulation, market differentiation, and new communications technologies have refigured the landscape of citizenship. The associational context for many citizens has been dramatically affected by “entrepreneurial” forms of governance, consumer niche choices, and lifestyle diversification.Footnote 22 The privileged mobile subject is more difficult to engage for long term battle and is more likely to find alternative sources of information and often eschew official government declarations altogether. While “networked” consumption provides government with new opportunities for surveillance and data mining, it also creates new forms of citizen interaction and subjectivity that are less amenable to the common public space and shared narratives of U.S. history that exceptionalism has historically rested upon.Footnote 23
A second noteworthy change concerns the way in which the embrace of a multicultural U.S. identity during the past fifteen years has altered the way in which domestic and foreign enemies have been portrayed. McAlister has discussed how the U.S. self-representation during the Gulf War of 1990–1991 incorporated the themes of diversity and difference through its celebration of a multi-ethnic and gender-friendly military.Footnote 24 Projections of a multiculturally benign yet hegemonic identity have of course been contradictory and complex. No doubt there has been extensive racial coding of Al Qaeda and terrorists generally as Middle Eastern fanatics, and this often bleeds into general depictions of the Middle East in blatantly Orientalist terms. There have been detentions of and violence against people of assumed Middle Eastern descent since the September 11 terrorist attacks, and racial profiling. Balanced against this has been a governmental and establishment embrace of official multiculturalism and an argument that diversity is a source of U.S. strength in the world. As the Bush administration's National Security Strategy of 2002 put it, “America's experience as a great multi-ethnic democracy affirms our conviction that people of many heritages and faiths can live and prosper in peace.”Footnote 25 Officially, the government has attempted to rewrite older elements of exceptionalism onto a multicultural template. So, for example, Private Jessica Lynch, who has captured in a convoy shortly after the start of the war against Iraq was at least initially portrayed as a brave, self-reliant, and scrappy American who just happened to be a woman. Time's Person of the Year was the U.S. military, depicted as a diverse, multiethnic group. Inside the magazine, the story depicted the spotlighted platoon in terms straight from a World War II movie or 1950s Western, having a soldier with a surfeit of idealism gnawed by doubts about the war, a green rookie, and a resident “egghead,” and so forth, but with the added presentation of the platoon as ethnically and racially diverse.Footnote 26 Popular television shows such as 24 also simultaneously embraced multicultural identity as well as old-fashioned moral decency in the character of its African American president during its first three seasons.
The exceptionalism of a racially codified manifest destiny has historically been used to make sharp distinctions between Europeans and domestic threats and foreign enemies. Othering in the war on terror has produced contradictions and has not offered as many opportunities to mobilize citizens around the terrorist threat. The public sphere has been altered by newer forms of consumerist subjectivity while the embrace of multiculturalism has broadened the definition of who belongs in it. Thus, changes in the social organization of capitalism and the reworking of the categories of both citizenship and race have interacted in interesting ways with a terrorist threat itself congruent with post-Fordist globalization.
An Evil Holding Company
There was, of course, the usual demonization of Osama bin Laden after the terrorist attacks, and the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan from where he ordered the attacks was described as a neo-feudal, backward, and barbaric land and also a rogue state because it provided safe haven to Al Qaeda. At the same time, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were depicted as a powerful global enterprise with hubs all over the world, a very different image from that of other historical threats to the United States. The various descriptions of Al Qaeda have included a holding company, a Starbucks or McDonald's franchise, an E.F. Hutton for terrorists, a communications company, a Ford Foundation for terror, Terror, Inc., and Osama and Company.Footnote 27 The corporate metaphors are so common that they go beyond mere turns of phrase. The reach for a vocabulary from the world of business and finance are metaphors its users assumed would be both readily understandable to readers of popular media and those listening to official government announcements about the nature of the threat facing the U.S. in the wake of September 11.
The popular renderings of Al Qaeda in business and networked terms echoed the analysis offered by terrorist experts. Benjamin and Simon described Al Qaeda as an “international clearinghouse and bankroller of jihad,” while a New York Times journalist described Al Qaeda as having a “board of directors of what amounts to a holding company for terror.”Footnote 28 The jacket blurb for Peter Bergen's book Terror, Inc. praised the author for helping us to see bin Laden's organization in a new light: “as a corporation that has exploited modern technology and weaponry in the service of global terrorism and the destruction of the West.”Footnote 29 Likewise, Newsweek's Hosenball focused on the terrorists' cash flow through financial networks like Al Taqwa, which funded Al Qaeda.Footnote 30 Terrorist expert Cronin described terrorists as opportunistic entrepreneurs whose “product” is violence quite consciously “sold,” and the 9/11 Commission described the terrorist hijackers of U.S. flights as “Terrorist Entrepreneurs” led by an efficient “manager,” Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who presented himself as “an entrepreneur seeking venture capital and people.”Footnote 31
In the face of a threat portrayed as resembling the flattened, decentralized nature of the networked global business enterprise, critics of U.S. terrorist policy have responded with exhortations to the government about modeling its own practices on a corporation in order to respond effectively to the terrorist threat. Analyst Ashton Carter bemoaned the U.S. incapacity to respond effectively to the terrorist threat, calling it a “managerial inadequacy, as basic as that of a corporation with no line manager to oversee the making of its leading product.”Footnote 32 Bobbitt likened Al Qaeda to a “virtual state” and called for a U.S. response modeled on a “market state,” which would enhance its effectiveness against terrorism by hiving off important functions to the private sector and limiting its welfare function to “increase opportunity and minimize risk for all as best they can.”Footnote 33 Rothkopf called for the government to offer incentives to “Soldiers of Fortune 500” to enlist the private sector in the war on terror.Footnote 34 The government's role in the war on terror, in other words, was described as hierarchical, old-fashioned, and inadequate—no match for the post-Fordist corporate and networked structure of Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tried to change the environment of the military in similar terms when he sketched a view of the optimal practices needed to fight terrorism:
We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be “validated” but rather anticipates them before they appear and develops new capabilities to dissuade and deter them.Footnote 35
Rumsfeld's embrace of the revolution in military affairs got considerable coverage in the media, as did the management practices adapted to the Pentagon from the business world. Risen explained that “‘outsourcing’, ‘lean management’, and just-in-time logistics are all the rage at Rumsfeld's Pentagon,” and Donnelly reported on the use of Lean Six Sigma management theory—the use of statistical measurements, benchmarking, and the reduction of cycling time.Footnote 36 While it is not unusual for the military and business worlds to adopt each other's operating principles, as McNamara's conduct of the Vietnam War demonstrated, what is significant about these recent developments is the assumption that a corporate model should replace state governance altogether.
The corporate model for fighting terror that has received the most publicity and commentary has been the outsourcing of the war on terror to private security firms, highlighted by the gruesome deaths of four Blackwater Security personnel in April 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq. Outsourcing security represents a consolidation of trends that began during the humanitarian wars of the 1990s in Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans. By the fall of 2006, Scahill estimated that there were 48,000 private soldiers working for 181 private military firms in Iraq.Footnote 37 Contract security workers were implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and they guard top U.S. military commanders as well as Iraqi and Afghan politicians. The rationale provided by the Pentagon is that “the private sector works faster and cheaper than the military.”Footnote 38 Soldiers who fight for monetary gain, in the words of Ted Koppel “serve their country less directly, if more profitably.”Footnote 39
Wars in the service of nation and state building in the U.S. required collective mobilization, while the war on terror has increasingly been framed as requiring effective management through a flattened organizational structure, new opportunity structures, and outsourcing strategies. The government has “partnered” with data mining firms to obtain information about high school graduates in order to further the aims of military recruiters. It has floated the idea of a terrorist futures market in order to encourage speculation among savvy analysts in the FBI and CIA about the likely next terrorist attack.Footnote 40 It has adopted benchmarking, a technique devised by Motorola, to assess progress in the war in Iraq. Policy analysts who study the terrorist threat have urged the government to respond in more effective ways to a threat that, since the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, has become “at once less centralized, more widely spread, and more virtual than its previous incarnation.”Footnote 41 What becomes of citizenship when enemies are considered deterritorialized and engaged in permanent competition? As both the nature of the terrorist threat as well as the appropriate response to its persistent capabilities increasingly resemble networked power, personal democracy and short-lived mobilization define the contours of public reaction to the threat of terrorism.
United We Shop
Fighting a war on terror that mimics the decentralized and networked operation of the enemy inspired by post-Fordist capitalist rules for corporations poses new challenges when it comes to calling forth a sustained national and collective response to the threat of terrorism. Practices of citizenship have increasingly conformed to Crenson and Ginsberg's portrait of personal democracy: partial and selective mobilization, citizens treated as “customers,” and the absence of elite encouragement of political participation.Footnote 42
There have been, of course, real tensions at work in the contours of the public's response to the terrorist attacks as well as the cues offered by government on the appropriate citizen response. For example, America's Fund for Afghan Children, launched in October 2001, was consciously modeled on FDR's 1938 campaign to eradicate polio, an effort designed to enlist national participation in a war against the disease. On the other hand, the anti-terror campaign unfolded alongside another message directed at a specifically configured consumer. As Bush explained, “[But] I have great faith in the resiliency of the economy. And no question about it, this incident affected our economy, but the markets open tomorrow, people go back to work and we'll show the world.”Footnote 43 Senator John Kyl combined both the sacrificing citizen and consuming subject in his charge as well: “The best thing you can do to defeat this enemy is live your normal life, because it will do two important things: keep the economic train running and it will demoralize the enemy more than the enemy will demoralize you.Footnote 44 By late November 2001, Haberman reported that “shopping has been elevated almost to an act of patriotism by some Americans—keeping life normal, not letting the terrorists win and all that.”Footnote 45 The consumption-driven definition of patriotism is less grounded in connections with the state and its symbols, undergoing personal sacrifice, foregoing comforts, joining the military, or paying higher taxes. In fact, participation in the war effort tends to take a specific form, whether one is a supporter or opponent. Good Housekeeping's story on Operation Gratitude, which has sent more than 44,000 care packages to soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, is a good example of personal democracy that marries support for the war with consumption.Footnote 46 The website offers ways to donate money or items, host a collection drive, or nominate a soldier to receive a care package. The website also has a “care clicks” link for shopping, and each transaction in Operation Gratitude's virtual mall generates donations. This consumption-driven, support-the-troops drive provides feelings of personal efficacy in cyberspace while providing goods and services to troops.
Dissent, on the other hand, is filtered through perpetual public opinion polls (whose meanings are continually contested) and through framings of dissent in individualized and often sensational terms. Cindy Sheehan, for example, an organizer of Gold Star Families for Peace and then “Camp Casey,” an encampment in Crawford, Texas, named for her son who was killed in the war in Iraq, got a great deal of press attention during the summer of 2005. Gradually, however, there was a shift from focusing on Sheehan as an anti-war activist to her personal life, and the toll of her protesting on her marriage and family. People reported in August 2005 that “her own sister-in-law said that she was promoting her own personal agenda at the expense of Casey's good name.”Footnote 47 Her initial public protests about the war came to compete with a narrative about her failed marriage. Sheehan's growing status as a celebrity with personal problems (she hired her own political consultant and team of public relations professionals) and her opposition to the war itself was depoliticized. In addition, the Bush administration launched a counter-campaign, portraying Sheehan as unrepresentative of military families, arranging a counter rally at “Camp Reality,” and proclaiming that their strategy of “staying the course” was better than Sheehan's embrace of “cut and run.”Footnote 48
A Multicultural Superpower
Scholarship on U.S. exceptionalism stresses the centrality of racial othering in the U.S. nation-building endeavor. Historically, the frontier was a literal and metaphorical site of separation between civilization and savagery, and at the heart of conflict was racial difference.Footnote 49 Hunt makes one of the strongest claims about racial hierarchy in U.S. foreign policy, placing it alongside the claim to national greatness and suspicion of revolutionary change as fundamental components of U.S. identity since its founding.Footnote 50
Nevertheless, while the history of the US. as well as the influence of racial thinking have been omnipresent throughout U.S. history, increasingly the U.S. has officially embraced anti-racism and multicultural diversity both at home and abroad. Buell argues that the culture wars of the 1990s between those who bemoaned “endangered national foundations” and those who championed multicultural cosmopolitanism has been uneasily and contradictorily won by powerful rhetoric by cultural brokers who have championed the forces of diversity, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.Footnote 51 In other words, just as the increasingly altered public sphere of collectively mobilized citizens has been partially reconfigured by new forms of subjectivity, the racial grounding for fighting a war on terror has shifted as well. This racial reconfiguration can be seen in a number of different arenas and of course exists alongside as well as in tension with partial and short-lived outbursts of xenophobia and racial othering.
Evidence for the influence of the robust legitimacy of multiculturalism can be found in a number of different arenas. The first is in official government announcements, particularly those of the president. In his September 20, 2001, address to Congress, for example, President Bush explained that Al Qaeda was not representative of most Muslims:
The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics—a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam… I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends… The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.Footnote 52
The president visited the Islamic Center of Washington, DC on September 17, 2001, and insisted that “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens,” and “they need to be treated with respect.”Footnote 53 The widespread detention and plans to interrogate thousands of Muslim men was resisted in at least one locale, with the police chief of Portland, Oregon, refusing to comply with Justice Department demands that it cooperate in identifying them. The police chief explained that the interrogation sweeps violated state laws against racial profiling.Footnote 54 New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani promised police protection to Arab and Muslim citizens shortly after the attacks.Footnote 55 After Ann Coulter wrote that the U.S. should invade Muslim countries, kills their leaders, and convert their people to Christianity, National Review dropped her column, and after Representative Jack Cooksey (R-LA) defended racial profiling by remarking that “If I see someone come in that's got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over,” he was widely condemned and apologized for the statement.Footnote 56 This anecdotal evidence is buttressed by Kaplan's analysis of statistics on hate crimes against Muslims after the September 11 attacks. There was a jump in the number of hate crimes in the first nine weeks after the September 11 attacks, but there was a steep decline thereafter. Kaplan attributes the drop to presidential leadership, strict law enforcement, outreach to the Muslim community, and growing skepticism about the war on terror itself.Footnote 57 The Program on International Public Attitudes (PIPA) surveys also buttresses the anecdotal evidence of a more accepting and tolerant political culture. For example, in a 2003 poll by PIPA, sixty percent of the respondents chose the statement, “Though there are some fanatics in the Islamic world, most people there have needs and wants like those of people everywhere, so it is possible for us to find common ground,” while only thirty-six percent agreed with the statement, “Because Islamic religious and social traditions are intolerant and fundamentally incompatible with Western culture, violent conflict is bound to keep happening.”Footnote 58 In 2004, the Council on Foreign Relations found that sixty percent of Americans favor working with the United Nations, even when it adopts policies with which the U.S. disagrees.Footnote 59 There is plenty of evidence, in other words, to support Destler's argument that the public is quite reasonable and has multilateralist and tolerant inclinations, but that these attitudes coexist alongside a highly polarized and distorted elite political process.Footnote 60
The terrorist attacks also gave diverse groups in the U.S. the opportunity to affirm the appeal of the U.S. to non-citizens eager to identify with the U.S. Shortly after the terrorist attacks, The Christian Science Monitor published a headline story on the rush to apply for citizenship on the part of immigrants.Footnote 61 The rush was partly motivated by fear, of course, of being singled out as dangerous, but it was also a time for some immigrants to announce their realization that “they feel truly American.” The boom in applications for citizenship reinforces the image of the U.S. as still offering the promises of the “American Dream” to all who arrive, and it reaffirms the image of the U.S. as a multicultural country that continues to be defined by its diversity. Also in this vein, Parade Magazine ran a story on Arab Americans in the U.S. military, highlighting the work of one Marine to found the Association of Patriotic Arab Americans in the Military. Despite reporting taunts, discrimination, and often disagreeing with U.S. foreign policy, the overall tone of the article conveyed a grateful minority fully embracing what they defined as the heart of U.S. identity: “Our values as Americans—dignity, respect, and fairness—are more valuable than our military might,” said Sgt. Omar Masry.Footnote 62 Five years after the terrorist attacks, the number of permanent legal immigrants from predominately Muslim countries outstripped their pre-9/11 numbers, and their stories echo the classic immigrant stories of seeking political freedom and economic opportunity in the United States.Footnote 63 As Peter Skerry explained it in Time, “Muslims never sound quite so American as when asserting their rights against government policies that seem unjust,” thereby placing them alongside other minorities such as Jews, African-Americans, and Japanese Americans who have struggled against discrimination and prejudice and joined the mainstream.Footnote 64
Embracing this multicultural identity has not ended racial profiling and widespread prejudice, of course, but it does signal a need to take note of the changing meaning of U.S. patriotism and unity in a context of a self-proclaimed multicultural and polyglot nation. And while it in no way spells the end of racism and hierarchy, the war on terror in a context of embracing religious and ethnic diversity has meant that racial othering has maintained much less traction than it had during the Vietnam War and during earlier conflicts.
It is important to also link the embrace of a multicultural superpower identity to consumer culture. In other words, one of the key ingredients of post-Fordist marketing has been cultivating the embrace of diversity—what Christopherson has called a commodified version of diversity found in everyday life such as international food courts at malls and in marketing campaigns for products that feature diverse racial and ethnic groups.Footnote 65 The marriage of consumption and diversity took concrete form after September 11 with the Ford Motor Company, for example, reaching out to its large Arab-American community in Dearborn, Michigan, by hosting “An Islamic Perspective on the Events of September 11.”Footnote 66 The star of the widely popular television show 24, a recipient of Ford Motor Company sponsorship, make a public service announcement during season 4 (in 2005) that linked all Americans in the fight against terrorism: “… it is important to recognize that the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism.”Footnote 67 Consumer culture played a role in encouraging Americans of all ethnicities to be participants in shopping as a civic duty. As Grewal points out, wearing the flag on clothing and displaying it at businesses and homes was enthusiastically taken up by all Americans, including ethnic and racial minorities.Footnote 68 Buying and displaying the flag were central in producing a simultaneously diverse and patriotic American nation united in the struggle against terrorism.
Conclusion
Analysis that stresses the continuity of the war on terror with earlier U.S. foreign policy overlook subtle yet important developments in the way that anti-terrorist policy is being developed and “sold.” The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate the tensions between traditional models of continuity and the newer modalities of confronting transnational terrorism. The conflict in Afghanistan now resembles in many respects networked warfare, although the U.S. remains engaged in nation-building amidst worries of “state failure.” Pakistan's continued support of Taliban if not Al Qaeda fighters vividly highlights the permeability of borders, and the inability of the U.S. to secure the border is the subject of much commentary. Rubin describes the changing position of Afghanistan during the past thirty years, from a battleground of a Cold War ideological struggle, which “morphed into a regional clash of ethnic factionalism,” and is now part of a “broader conflict between the West and a transnational Islamic terrorist network.”Footnote 69 The threat posed by Afghanistan is not confined to that country; it bleeds already into Iraq and doubles back into Afghanistan. Newsweek has chronicled how “Osama bin Laden has opened an underground railroad to and from jihadist training camps in the Sunni Triangle,”Footnote 70 and journalists regularly comment on the growing “Iraqization” of the insurgency in Afghanistan as the use of improvised explosive devices as well as suicide bombing missions multiply.Footnote 71
Iraq also clearly has elements of a classic state-to-state conflict, with the “shock and awe” invasion declared a decisive success, and President Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished” on May 1, 2003. It has since become obvious that this is not the case, but at the time it could have reasonably appeared to be, with low U.S. casualties, the Iraqi regime overthrown, and the Iraqi people “freed” from tyranny by the U.S. and coalition forces. Even as U.S. war policy failed, statist concepts dominated policy and popular critiques, and Vietnam analogies proliferated, with constant discussions of quagmires, credibility gaps, and opinion polls showing a public very concerned that Iraq was becoming another Vietnam. Directing the writing of the Iraqi constitution, holding elections, and attempting to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis were all reminiscent of Vietnam strategies that had been tried and failed. James Baker, the co-chair of the Iraq Study Group Report, was likened to Clark Clifford, one of the “wise men” who advised Johnson in 1968 on strategy for the Vietnam War.Footnote 72
This comparison between two state-to-state wars in Vietnam and Iraq has much to recommend it, but it is also important to recognize how another view of the Iraq war has started to gain credence, with some portraying it as evolving into a networked war similar to the one in Afghanistan. In Iraq, according to one expert, the U.S. now faces a “resilient network made up of small, autonomous groups.”Footnote 73 This is a conflict less amenable to a surge strategy of sending 30,000 troops to Baghdad and instead will require the long-term engagement with “agile, flexible, often hidden networks.”Footnote 74 The insurgents in Iraq, like those in Afghanistan, are described as more adept at technology and media than earlier generations of guerrillas; Johnson writes admiringly of the insurgents' ability to download video files, broadcast graphic images on Arab-owned television, and carry out production work on a laptop that used to require a studio.Footnote 75
Although the term “long war” was retired from official discourse in the spring of 2007, there have been an increasing number of references to indefinite struggles in both countries.Footnote 76 NATO Lt. General David Richards stated in 2006 that a foreign military presence would be needed in Afghanistan for fifteen years.Footnote 77 The expectations of a long war have seeped into popular media as well, with McGirk in Time quoting Afghan officials that the war will go on perhaps for years.Footnote 78 In Iraq, the Baker-Hamilton commission envisioned extensive embedding of U.S. support troops in advising and providing combat and staff assistance as well as rapid reaction teams and special operations forces to conduct strikes against Al Qaeda.Footnote 79 At a May 2007 press conference, President Bush stated that one of the things he found appealing in the Baker-Hamilton recommendations was its recommendation for providing a long-term basis for the stability of Iraq.Footnote 80 Alongside the “surge” strategy of sending an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq, the administration considered a long-term presence with three or four major bases in the country, where, according to Sanger's interviewees, the U.S. “could fly in and out [of] without putting Americans on every street corner … And our mission would be very different—making sure that Al Qaeda doesn't turn Iraq into a base the way it turned Afghanistan into one.”Footnote 81 The U.S. nation-state and its security forces remain important in this scenario, of course, but so do a host of private security firms, international non-governmental organizations, corporations, and eventually, no doubt, the United Nations and its affiliate organizations. Networked war, in other words, has increasingly come to define the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The conflict in Afghanistan has begun already to resemble a post-Fordist enterprise. As Wizner described it, after the overthrow of the Taliban, the U.S. was responsible for training the army, the Germans the national police, and the U.K. took charge of narcotics control efforts.Footnote 82 After 2006, when the U.S. began sharing the fight against the counterinsurgency with NATO, a kind of flexible specialization has evolved, with, for example, the Dutch troops in Urzugan province using a more civic-action approach and avoiding military engagements with the Taliban but with the U.S. favoring direct combat.Footnote 83
These trends presage interesting developments on the patriotism front as well. If Suskind's characterization of Al Qaeda's evolution into a “franchise operation” is correct, with radicalized and rejuvenated terrorist cells periodically checking in with “top management” before major assaults, how should we expect the citizens of the United States to respond?Footnote 84 Another terrorist attack would no doubt elicit a fervent patriotic response; long-term battle against decentralized cells using a variety of tactics is less likely to capture the public's imagination for battle, although it undoubtedly will cause periodic fearfulness. Congressman Jack Kingston's proposal to develop a “standardized metric,” rather like the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which would provide a bipartisan measure of the Iraq war's progress, is also unlikely to garner a collective mobilization around the war on terror strategy.Footnote 85 And while racial animus will continue to be evident in everything from surveillance to racial profiling and deportations, as well as in popular media, official discourse will embrace benign diversity, particularly in the military, but also in its insistence that to criticize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is to assume that somehow Middle Easterners were not “ready” for democracy, “as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress.”Footnote 86 Networked war, partial mobilization, and neoliberal multiculturalism are important components of the war on terror that can easily be missed if we only focus on the resurgence of the traditional markers of imperialism and the discourse of the religious right. The analysis presented here suggests a new way of thinking about the national and the global in what is bound to be a long war.
