All-American Nativism by Daniel Denvir

Author:Daniel Denvir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Bring the war home

“Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Trump told supporters at a December 2015 rally. The war on terror had been sold on idealism. Its glaring failure bred a deep pessimism and even nihilism, which abetted both opposition to foreign military entanglements and hostility toward foreign-born people.

Under Obama, the war on terror continued to spiral into a growing set of global conflicts. In 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seized full control of the Syrian city of Raqqa, then took Mosul in Iraq, and proclaimed an Islamic caliphate, disregarding the national borders that World War I’s European victors had imposed on a defeated Ottoman Empire.209 Thanks to the war on terror, what had been a relatively small and dispersed cohort of militant Islamists was thirteen years later a spectacularly violent and thoroughly mediatized state, governing millions of people and providing a framework to violently connect local grievances from Brussels to Baghdad.210

As of early 2015, the war on terror had killed an estimated minimum of 1.3 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.211 More salient for most Americans were the thousands of US troops dead, the trillions of dollars spent, and the Muslim world’s perceived lack of gratitude for American sacrifice.212 After the invasion, Bush had repeatedly told Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer that Iraq’s new leader should be “someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.”213 As his time in office drew to a close, Bush ruminated upon American disaffection with his war. “That’s the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”214

Gratitude, of course, was not what most Iraqis felt. It was this violently narcissistic amnesia that made it possible for Trump vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence to charge in 2016 that it was Obama’s troop drawdown in Iraq that allowed ISIS to be “literally conjured up out of the desert,” portraying the president as some sort of genie.215 And it was what allowed Trump to declare that Obama had founded ISIS. Literally. “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS,” Trump said, when an interviewer assumed he had meant it metaphorically. “I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.”216

In 2015, a series of spectacular attacks resulted in the massacre of staff at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, and later of scores of civilians at multiple sites across Paris. (The Charlie Hebdo attack was claimed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the subsequent attacks were claimed by ISIS.) After the Hebdo attack, Trump and others on the right fixated on Obama’s refusal to say the words “radical Islamic terrorism,” terminology that he believed counterproductively antagonized ordinary Muslims.217 Obama’s

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