Manufacturing The Terrorist Threat

From The 1970s To The Obama Era

Virtually absent in the media circus around ISIS is an honest discussion of how the US War on Terror, rather than halting the growth of violent Islamist groups, actually fosters fundamentalism.

... it is US actions in the Middle East that have created the conditions for the rise of a group like ISIS. 

Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq until after the US invasion. Al Qaeda in Iraq was formed in 2004, and was the precursor organization to the current ISIS. 

It is US and various dictatorships’ support of counter-revolutionary forces opposed to the Arab Spring of 2011 that allowed reactionary groups to grow while thwarting progressive ones. 

It is the US’s destruction of Iraq and its support for the Shia government that excluded and oppressed the Sunni that allowed ISIS to take control of such large parts of that country.

In short, it is the US’s War on Terror, and the part played by various regional actors that have fostered the rise of this virulent form of fundamentalism. 

ISIS also represents a dream in terms of US propaganda. It serves to bolster the aims of the Global War on Terror and to justify a vastly expanded national security state. 

Since the Snowden revelations there has been growing concern among Americans of the gigantic surveillance apparatus of the NSA. There has been a greater skepticism of drone wars. 

The box office success of Dirty Wars and its Oscar nomination is an indication of a growing war weariness among the American public. It is this war fatigue that scuttled the intervention into Syria that was proposed last year.

What better to marshal collective anger than a horrendous group like ISIS that cold bloodedly kills Americans, that ruthlessly destroys anyone who disagrees with it, that persecutes religious minorities and is the very prototype of the evil terrorist threat? 

This threat has justified air strikes in Iraq, increased surveillance in Syria as well as a greater escalation including airstrikes by the US, and regional and international involvement in both countries over the coming weeks and years. 

In short, the very thing that causes ire among Jihadis (Osama bin Laden was particularly incensed by US troops in Saudi Arabia), and that allows them recruit, is what the US proposes to do.

People in the establishment who realize that, and who understand that the US can’t win a conventional war, are proposing instead that the US amp up JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) the shady underground outfit of trained killers that is unaccountable even to Congress. This is the very organization that is the subject of extensive critique in Scahill’s book Dirty Wars.

Also, what better to justify the ten-fold increase in the number of people on the no-fly list in the Obama era than the threat of the “homegrown terrorist” like Douglas McCain of Minnesota who it is believed traveled to Syria to fight for ISIS? US officials have emphasized again and again that about 100 Americans are part of ISIS and therefore represent a grave threat to the homeland. 

This bolsters domestic counter-terrorism strategies from arbitrary arrests, to deportation, mass surveillance, and entrapment.

Here is an interview I did with the KPFA radio station’s nationally syndicated radio program Letters and Politics on ISIS, terrorism and the media: https://soundcloud.com/kpfa-fm-94-1-berkeley/isis-terrorism-and-the-media

Some of the themes I discuss in this interview are dealt with in more depth in my talk. I lay out how the terrorist threat was constructed in the US in the 1970s and how this threat was racialized in the 1980s and 1990s in the political sphere, as well in the news and by Hollywood. Finally, I discuss the banalization of the terrorist threat in the 2000s and the Obama era.

Back in 2001 some commentators suggested that the attacks on the twin towers be treated as a criminal act. In other words, they stated that Osama bin Laden and others in al Qaeda who were responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans should have been tried in the World Court and brought to justice. 

Yet, this is not the course of action that the US government pursued. Instead it launched a Global War on Terror that would go on indefinitely. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, passed by Congress three days after 9/11, established the War on Terror as an open-ended, perpetual, global war.

The reason for this is strategic. In a nutshell, it provided the Bush administration and the neoconservatives with the “pearl harbor” moment that they had articulated in a report the previous year that would enable them to realize their vision of a new Middle East. It was about advancing empire; a project that the Obama administration continued in new and old ways.

But what allowed the War on Terror brand to succeed was the decades of work in the political, news media and cultural spheres that had primed the American public to accept war as the appropriate response to 9/11 (as outlined in my talk). And here we are again in 2014.

[Deepa Kumar]