Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War by Mark Danner

Author:Mark Danner [Danner, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

A SELF-DEFEATING SPIRAL

Like fever lines tracing jagged paths above our politics, fear and political posturing spike and ebb with the day’s news. The time of the terrorist “spectacular” of 9/11 scale seems long past—the “planes plot,” the last Grand Guignol bloodbath, was foiled by British and American intelligence nearly a decade ago. But smaller attempts come regularly, sponsored by regional franchises—the Underwear Bomber and UPS plot, courtesy of al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula; the Times Square bomber, courtesy of the Pakistani Taliban—or undertaken by lone wolves like the Boston bombers or the San Bernardino attackers. As each plot is uncovered it brings with it a predictable rhetorical attempt to reignite the politics of fear.

Throughout the country’s history, from “waving the bloody shirt” in the wake of the Civil War to charging that adversaries were “soft on communism” during the Cold War, some politicians have worked hard to frighten the people. But working to gin up fear about terrorism is special. What terrorists ultimately aim to produce, after all, is not death or mayhem or destruction—these are only the means to an end—but terror. To say that the politics of fear has become embedded in our politics is to say that, in a permanent war on terror, the rich political benefits of that most lucrative emotion are being shared, between the terrorists themselves and some politicians who portray themselves as leading the fight against them. Our institutionalized overreaction to terrorism is a boon to the terrorists, for it multiplies the power of their actions. It is what granted two young men with pressure cookers the power to shut down the city of Boston.

More than a dozen years after the attacks of September 11 the politics of fear has joined hands in a self-defeating spiral with la politique du pire. As we saw, this time-honored French phrase—meaning, roughly, “the politics of the worst”—describes the insurgent strategy of staging attacks intended to provoke the adversary into taking reckless actions that “strip off his mask” and make manifest the underlying dynamics of repression. Al Qaeda stages acts of terrorism intended to provoke the United States into taking actions that reveal itself as an oppressor of Muslims. The strategy of la politique du pire—sometimes called “the strategy of provocation” and drawn originally from revolutionaries of the nineteenth century—depends on a dialectical escalation, on provoking a response and then provoking another. The first terrorist attack provokes counterattack and repression, which in turn produces recruits for the revolutionary cause, who undertake more terrorist attacks, provoking harsher repression, and so on. By so doing, al Qaeda’s theoreticians believed they could turn the United States and its Arab puppet states “into recruiting sergeants for their cause,” in the words of historian Michael Ignatieff:

Success depends less on the initial attack than on instigating an escalatory spiral, controlled not by the forces of order but by the terrorists themselves. If terrorists can successfully draw democracies into this spiral and control its upward acceleration, they will begin to dictate the terms of the encounter.

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