Tomgram: James Carroll, An American Reckoning
Here’s a thoroughly humdrum figure from the post-9/11 world: this February an estimated 1,294 people were killed in Iraq and another 266 wounded, including ISIS militants, numerous civilians, Iraqi security forces, Kurds, and Turks. Few of them died in major combat, just low-level incidents, suicide bombings, and bodies found in mass graves. And keep in mind that that’s what passes for a peaceful month in the country George W. Bush invaded and occupied in March 2003. Since then, the violence there has never ceased, amid insurgencies, religious strife, the rise and fall (and rise) of terror groups, acts of ethnic cleansing, and other horrors without end. A number of Iraq’s major cities, including Fallujah, Ramadi, and its second largest urban area, Mosul, are little more than rubble today. Hundreds of thousands of its people, many of them civilians, have been killed and more wounded. In the last few years, an estimated 1.3 million Iraqi children have been displaced in the war against ISIS, even as the country remains deeply riven and without access to the funds necessary to truly rebuild.
And that, of course, is just one ruined land in the Greater Middle East, a region from Afghanistan to Libya increasingly filled with failed states, terror groups, and ruins as, almost 17 years after the attacks of 9/11, the Trump administration once again ramps up the war on terror (which should long ago have been renamed the war for terror). Today, TomDispatch regular James Carroll, a former columnist for the Boston Globe, leaves Donald J. Trump in the dust and returns to the fateful moments when all of this first began, when President George W. Bush launched what would be, to choose a word that has long been on Carroll’s mind, a “crusade” not just against terrorism but, as it turned out, against much of the Islamic world. Carroll, whose new novel The Cloister, is set against the age of the original crusades, takes in its enormity so many years later. Tom
God Wills It!
The War on Terror as the Launching of an American Crusade
By James Carroll
America may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the malevolence of this period began with him, think again. The moment I still dwell on, the moment I believe ignited the vast public disorder that is now our all-American world, has been almost completely forgotten here. And little wonder. It was no more than a casually tossed-off cliché, a passing historical reference whose implications and consequences meant nothing to the speaker. “This crusade,” said President George W. Bush just days after the 9/11 attacks, “this war on terrorism…”
That, however, proved to be an invocation from hell, one that set the stage for so much of the horror to follow. The Crusades were, of course, a centuries-long medieval catastrophe. Bush’s Global War on Terror, in contrast, has already wreaked comparable havoc in a paltry 17 years, leading to almost unimaginable mayhem abroad and a moral collapse at home personified by President Donald J. Trump.
Despite the threads of causality woven together as if on some malignant loom that brought about his election -- the cult of reality-show celebrity, the FBI director's last-minute campaign intervention, Russian mischief, Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability to self-defeat and misogyny, electoral college anomalies, Republican party nihilism, and a wickedly disenchanted public -- the ease with which such a figure took control of the levers of power in this country should still stun us. Some deep sickness of the soul had already played havoc with our democracy’s immune system or he wouldn’t have been imaginable. Think of him as a symptom, not the disease. After Trump finally leaves the Oval Office, we’ll still be a stricken people and the world will still be groaning under the weight of the wreckage this country has brought about. How, then, did we actually get here? It might be worth a momentary glance back.
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