I came of age in the early years of the “War on Terror.” As a young student activist, my initial arguments against the wars in 2001 and 2003 followed a common logic, responding to disinformation, ahistorical narratives, and false claims about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Muslims. Like many who work in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, this work was driven by the belief that exposing the narratives of the target nations to be wrong would in turn expose the false premises behind the wars. I have by now spent my entire adult life researching, writing, and teaching about the “War on Terror” with a specific focus on the war on Iraq. My hope was that “humanizing” and providing more insight into the views of the people “over there” would alter popular ideas in the United States and steer American state actions in a different direction than intervention.
During the years of occupation, the narrative of the American administration shifted as it attempted to blame any shortcoming in Iraq (or Afghanistan) on local factors: the insurgency, sectarianism, a “culture of corruption,” or a lack of a democratic sensibilities within the culture. In response, critical scholarship and activism, including my own work, also changed focus toward the mismanagement of the American occupation policies and “counterinsurgency” as well as the inherent weaknesses of the neoliberal logics behind most of the policies being implemented.Footnote 1 Here too the focus remained on Iraq.
As the status of forces agreement was being implemented in 2011 and the American withdrawal was being carried out by the Obama administration, we heard the familiar bipartisan hand-wringing about “leaving a political void” and Iraqis not being ready for self-governance, amid the backdrop of the dangerous specter of Iranian influence.Footnote 2 ISIS, in 2014, provided a discursive opening to re-narrate the war and rescue America's image. It was a shadowy organization that was hard to decipher and whose spectacular and symbolic use of violence made it easy to see it only as evil, irrational, and savage. ISIS represented the classic pre- and anti-modern actors with whom discussion was impossible. As “Islamic extremists,” they provided a continuity with the likes of al-Qaʿida and the Taliban from a decade earlier as the raison d’être of the “War on Terror.” The consequence of America's war became retrospectively the cause for the war, not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Critics, including myself, responded once again as we did to the 2003 invasion, by attempting to explain the complexity of ISIS, countering hyperbolic analysis with measured and more grounded points of view. We showed how ISIS was a creation of the American wrecking ball in the region. The focus once again was on Iraq.
The mainstream public gaze is never on the perpetrators of violence but rather on their targets. Even our critical analysis of the United States somehow constantly gets refracted and ends up directed back at the target of American actions. The American discourse about itself forces those who seek to resist its actions to respond to its claims about other places and peoples. The debate often becomes about (1) whether they—whoever they are in the former colonized world—need to be fixed somehow; (2) who should do the fixing (e.g., states or international organizations, the US, NATO, a coalition of the willing), and (3) how they should be fixed (e.g., development schemes, nonmilitary coercive techniques such as sanctions, military techniques of different degrees of brutality). The imperviousness of the US to the scrutiny leveled at other states is rooted in the unique type of sovereignty it enjoys.
The US, and indeed all former colonial powers, enjoy unquestioned and guaranteed sovereignty. An exceptionalism that is guaranteed by virtue of who they are. Their liberal and supposed democratic systems entitle them to a type of sovereignty that is intrinsic. These liberal and democratic claims, regardless of their veracity, set up these states as foundations of the global political systems, as models to be envied and emulated elsewhere. In contrast, sovereignty for the rest of the world is conditional. It is to be achieved and has to be deserved. Criteria are developed, which are then used by foreign ministries and their development wings, international bodies, and NGOs to assess other states.Footnote 3 The nation building of the “War on Terror” operated based on this differentiation of guaranteed versus conditional sovereignty. In this roundtable I explore how our analysis would change if we were to reject this contradiction. What would it mean for us to either see all nation–states as having the same guaranteed sovereignty or to see all sovereignty as conditional? Or alternatively, should the question of sovereignty and its colonial roots make us question the entirety of the nation–state system? Twenty years on, I can say that maybe I was wrong to look at Iraq as a site to understand what and why America was doing what it was doing. Perhaps to understand why the US invaded Iraq I needed to look at the United States itself. What would our analysis uncover, if we were to turn our gaze on the United States instead of Iraq?
Neoliberal Restructuring of the American Government
From a political economic standpoint, the origins of the Iraq war can be traced back to the beginnings of neoliberalism in the United States. Neoliberalism was first experimented with in New York and Chile, but it took Paul Volker's tenure as the chairman of the US Federal Reserve (1979–87) for it to become the structuring logic of global capital.Footnote 4 Volker's aggressive war on nominal inflationary pressures in the US was a simultaneous attack on America's working class and the Third World project of industrialization. In the US, it marked the end of Keynesian welfare capitalism that had created the space for the uplifting of white working classes and European immigrants, especially Eastern Europeans who also were being welcomed into whiteness as a racial category.
Neoliberal restructuring transnationalized production, deindustrializing parts of the United States and eviscerating private sector unions. Real wages declined even as worker productivity increased. Workers faced job insecurity and erosion of benefits as “right to work” legislation deregulated the labor market. Credit became a way to supplement workers’ diminished purchasing power.Footnote 5 The financial sector slowly took over the industrial sector as the leading sector of the economy. Precarity became the new normal, and with it an increasing amount of stress, anxiety, and instability. Neoliberal restructuring slowly undermined the social wage offered by the previous era of embedded liberalism.Footnote 6 The social wage was replaced by investment in the state's coercive apparatus.Footnote 7 This created a political problem when the state was unwilling to provide support to people as they were being dislocated by a profound restructuring of the capitalist economy. How was this resolved?
Anti-Black Racism and Enduring White Supremacy
Neoliberalism's hollowing out of liberal political institutions enabled the rise of neoconservatism, despite the ideological tensions between the two.Footnote 8 Although neoconservatives are commonly viewed as mainly concerned with foreign policy, the focus at the time they began to be prominent political players was on domestic policy, particularly Keynesian era welfare capitalism. Racial resentment animated their critique. Many were Eastern European Jewish thinkers who, at the time when the category of whiteness expanded to include Eastern and Southern Europeans (including many Jewish migrants and refugees), sought to advance their inclusion into whiteness by contrasting themselves with Black Americans.Footnote 9 Intellectually this was couched in their disdain for the New Left.Footnote 10 Neoconservatives became known for their anti-Soviet Cold War policies. These policies themselves were laced with a racialized worldview as they decried anti-colonial movements. After the demise of much of the Third World dreams in the 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives found themselves to be warriors without a cause.
Another strand of the conservative movement comprised nationalists and populists who were skeptical of engaging global institutions and were rooted in the longer tradition of white supremacy in the US. In the mid 1980s segments of this movement came together around what Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming termed paleoconservatism. They criticized neoconservatives for opposing communism based on “liberal democratic rhetoric of universal values and human rights” and for their embrace of neoliberal commercial culture. Paleoconservatives believed in the older conservative tradition of the defense of “American values, institutions, and ethnic-racial composition.”Footnote 11 This wing of the conservative movement, whose legacy includes the candidacies of Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, the anti-immigrant policies of California Governor Pete Wilson, the Tea Party, and the alt-right (also coined by Gottfried); most recently the Trump administration, with the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, was even more acutely anti-Black.
As the 20th century ended liberalism was embattled. Economically, the policies of embedded liberalism were gutted. Liberalism no longer provided any economic benefits or stability. Politically, its rationality was superseded by neoliberalism's market logic.Footnote 12 The material wages of whiteness diminished. Throughout the latter part of the century, moral panics around crime and social disorder propped up an ever-growing carceral state, as policing and incarceration became the site of state investment and the ideological source of legitimacy for the state.Footnote 13 “Culture war” politics, such as the panics around the National Endowment for the Arts, funding for the Public Broadcasting Service, “urban music,” and English-only legislation, just to name a few, mystified and obfuscated economic conditions of precarity while stoking racial anxieties. As the 21st century began, the “War on Terror” provided a powerful new way to pave over the crisis borne out of neoliberal capitalism. It inaugurated a global “Muslim” menace, with Afghanistan being the first target, followed by Iraq. Iraq was both Muslim and had all the trappings of the old Third World moment. These places provided a discursive and ideological opportunity as well as a site for militarized accumulation.
Anti-Muslim Racism as an Affective Wage
Throughout its history, American national identity has been constructed by creating an outside or outsider to come together in opposition to. The “frontier” and the narrative around subduing it was an early example of how Native Americans were the ontological and spatial outsiders around whom the nascent US formed its sense of national identity. More recently, the civil rights movement, anti-colonialism, and communism brought together different wings of the conservative movement through the politics of “fusionism” that propelled Ronald Reagan to national prominence. Neoconservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, religious conservatives, and other parts of the conservative movement formed an unlikely alliance—a “big tent”—held together by their hostility to people of color demanding rights, sovereignty, and redress both within the US and across the world. Race, indeed, has animated American politics throughout its history.
As neoliberalism exacerbated inequality and made precarity an endemic feature of American society, the American state faced a political crisis of legitimacy. What was it good for? It responded with newfound confidence by reasserting its role as the defender of the nation, liberalism, and civilization itself. The amorphous “Muslim” with a propensity for jihad that lurks everywhere and no one place in particular became the new, rearticulated outside and outsider.Footnote 14 The investment in the construction of the “Muslim” as the quintessential illiberal subject, threatening the walls of liberalism and civilization, became the affective wages of neoliberalism.Footnote 15 These wages afford liberalism's subjects the feeling of civilizational superiority—of being God's chosen people in an increasingly callous and dangerous world. George W. Bush exclaimed during his 2003 State of the Union, “and we go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right country. . . . The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity.”Footnote 16 The obligation to create a liberal nation–state in the “heart of darkness” of supposedly “Muslim” spaces makes liberalism worth defending, even by its conservative detractors. The “Muslim” menace now replaced the communist threat, bringing together an unlikely alliance of political forces. The war, then, was at all times a racial project, with anti-Muslim racism operating within and through the conditions created by anti-Black racism. The question then becomes: how did the racially motivated political genealogies of American thinkers, especially within the conservative movement, shape the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Is the oft-cited fundamental problem of sectarianism in Iraq perhaps a projection of American tendencies, rooted in its own national and state formation?
To consider these issues is to reconsider the “War on Terror” as originating in the United States due to its own ideological contradictions, anxieties, and profound failures. The “War on Terror” was not on or about terror, but rather simply a war of terror attempting to resolve systemic problems far from Iraq, Afghanistan, or the “Muslims.”
What if We Provincialized America?
In my alternative historiography, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan remain invisible and without agency. They are only the targets. A fuller explanation would see the role of anti-colonial forces in creating the neoliberal backlash across Western Europe and the United States. It would highlight the role of Iraqis, for example, in hampering American social experimentation during what was euphemistically called “reconstruction.” To put it in another way, the politics of “over here” cannot be disentangled from the politics of “over there.” Iraq reshaped America as America attempted to reshape Iraq. Simply reversing our analytical gaze is reactive, maintaining the fiction of a nationalism in which nation–states are separate and distinct from each other.
The United States invoked its supposed liberal and democratic credentials as the reason it was obligated to wage the “War on Terror.” Indeed, it is these credentials that give America and all former colonial powers their guaranteed sovereignty. They are the creators of these universal ideals and are themselves models to be emulated, which will bring humanity into modernity and leave behind the irrationality and savagery of previous human epochs. Their violence is thus recast as a necessary evil to achieve these goals. It is this sovereignty, then, that also makes every other state's sovereignty conditional. For others to achieve sovereignty, they must be able to copy the models provided by former colonial powers. For this idea to take hold and have any currency in the popular imaginary, a process of perpetual revisionism also must take place. Liberalism in the European or the American context has only ever operated through colonialism and imperialism. It has always been bloody and dehumanizing and operated from a “state of exception” to any laws.Footnote 17 Disavowal and deflection are part and parcel of America's assertion of itself as liberal, democratic, and a beacon of universal ideals worthy of emulation.Footnote 18 History itself must be disavowed and accountability for past wrongs must be deflected constantly. The universal here turns out actually to be provincial.Footnote 19 In fact, it is particular to the colonial project and its narrow interests, a particularism steeped in racialized hierarchies and divisions of labor. The move to simply reverse the gaze leaves intact the question of sovereignty. Those with conditional sovereignty are still left reeling from problems that invade them.
The argument needs to move beyond the assumptions of sovereignty outlined in the first part of this essay. Given that the sovereignty of most countries across the world is always conditional, what would it mean to make the US susceptible to the same condition? Guaranteeing sovereignty for all might be a losing strategy, given how some supposed anti-imperialist states have abused state power to violently suppress their own populations. What would happen if sovereignty for all nations was conditional? What would it mean to generalize the conditional sovereignty of the “wretched of the earth”? Would this help us move toward an anti-imperialism that is not simply an opposition to American policies, but a political subjectivity that is transnational in identification, freeing us from the “pitfalls of national consciousness”?Footnote 20
