“At the moment, with the bombings, we are more like pushing people into the hands of ISIS,” rather than weakening it, warned French journalist Nicolas Hénin in a recent interview with The Syria Campaign.
Hénin was held captive by ISIS for 10 months. Since being released, he has spoken out against Western policy for dealing with the extremist group, which he argues is not effective.
It’s entirely predictable that the Republicans would be hysterical in the wake of a major terrorist attack in the west that takes place during a presidential election. It’s not the first attack in Europe of this scope since 9/11 — the Madrid attacks in 2004 were even more deadly. But Madrid happened while a Republican president was in office and they were still heavily invested in the Iraq war, so the reaction wasn’t quite as overwrought.
But they can usually be counted upon to immediately call for some kind of military action and propose draconian restrictions on civil liberties whenever the chance presents itself and last weekend was no exception. This time they smoothly jumped on the existing anti-immigrant zeitgeist by hysterically denouncing the proposal to allow some Syrian refugees into the country. By the end of the day yesterday, 15 governors and counting (all but one a Republican) had declared their states would refuse to allow them inside their borders.
You may not know it, but you’re living in a futuristic science fiction novel. And that’s a fact. If you were to read about our American world in such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre American century.
Let me start with one of the odder moments we’ve lived through and give it the attention it’s always deserved. If you follow my train of thought and the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you’ll end up back exactly where we are — in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign in our history.
To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let’s return to late September 2001. I’m sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
I couldn’t resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that’s happened since, including the establishment of a terror “caliphate” by a crew of Islamic extremists brought together in American military prison camps — all of which you wouldn’t believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing would make Planet of the Apes look like outright realism.
Instead, try to recall the screaming headlines that labeled the 9/11 attacks “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century” or “a new Day of Infamy,” and the attackers “the kamikazes of the twenty-first century.” Remember the moment when President George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, stepped onto the rubble at “Ground Zero” in New York, draped his arm around a fireman, and swore paybackin the name of the American people, as members of an impromptu crowd shouted out things like “Go get ‘em, George!”
“I can hear you! I can hear you!” he responded. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
“USA! USA! USA!” chanted the crowd.
Then, on September 20th, addressing Congress, Bush added, “Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941.” By then, he was already talking about “our war on terror.”
Now, hop ahead to that long-forgotten moment when he would finally reveal just how a twenty-first-century American president should rally and mobilize the American people in the name of the ultimate in collective danger. As CNN put it at the time, “President Bush… urged Americans to travel, spend, and enjoy life.”
So we went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq to rebuild faith in flying.
