Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Six Mistakes on the Road to Permanent War
By Ira Chernus
Posted on December 8, 2015, Printed on December 8, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176078/
In the muddled midst of last week's mass killing in San Bernardino,
California, a few words skittering across my Twitter feed gave me pause. "On
this awful shooting: Is U.S. culture evil? Enemy of our civilization? Must
all Americans apologize? Should we bar U.S. tourists as dangerous?" asked
Simon Kuper, a columnist with the Financial Times.
As information about the massacre was dribbling out, Kuper was surely making
a larger point, but I got stuck on that word "evil" and thoughts about
American culture's long, passionate relationship with violence. This is
well-worn territory, of course, addressed in great depth and with much skill
by many thinkers over the years. But whether we're ruminating on
all-American mass killings or slaughter by foreign terrorists, it's worth
recalling that America was incubated in a roiling storm of atrocity and
birthed in savage cruelty.
Just two years after the first Thanksgiving, in fact, Pilgrim commander
Myles Standish was hacking the head off a Native American chief to be
displayed on a pike in front of the fort at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Not so
long after, in present day Jersey City, New Jersey, settler soldiers fell
upon a group of mostly women and children of the Wappinger tribe. Thirty
were tortured to death for "public amusement." About 80 others were
decapitated and their heads carried across the river to present-day
Manhattan where they were gleefully kicked about the streets of the town.
Fast-forward to 1779 and the father of this country, George Washington, was
dispatching troops to devastate Iroquois settlements in New York and
Pennsylvania. A couple of infant America's slain enemies were then skinned
and turned into footwear. The better part of a century later, native blood
was still being spilled in savage fashion. At Sand Creek, Colorado, U.S.
forces massacred hundreds, scalping old women, killing babies, even
violating the dead body of a "comely young squaw." Soldiers collected
penises of the men, sliced off the breasts of the women. One soldier even
wore a breast as a cap.
This is not to say that Native Americans didn't commit horrendous
atrocities, only that violence is intricately woven into America's DNA, a
winding helix of cruelty that then threaded its way through the Philippines
and the Caribbean, through Hiroshima, No Gun Ri, and My Lai, through Haditha
and Kunduz. Where this country went, so went implements of bodily
destruction, weaponry designed to kill or maim: rifles and landmines, bombs
and missiles. So, too, went cruelty and massacre, rape and torture,
horrendous acts as bad as or worse than any imaginable depredations by an
"evil" terror group. At home, of course, Americans slaughter each other with
frightening regularity in schools and movie theaters and, most recently, a
center that offers services to people with developmental disabilities. And
this is to say nothing of the other lethal and non-lethal horrors we
Americans frequently visit upon each other.
Are these acts evil? Are they committed by evil-doers? What about our
Islamic State (IS) enemies who are still decapitating people as did our
American forebears (and as our current anti-IS Saudi allies do once every
few days)? Is their brand of violence especially atrocious? Have they
renounced their humanity by committing such depraved acts? Did we? Is IS so
evil that we should fight them for that reason alone?
This is precisely the harsh terrain that TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus
navigates today. Analyzing their fundamentalism and ours, he delves into
essential questions about good and evil, humanity and its loss.
We live in an age in which America has called out an Axis of Evil, killed
the most wanted evildoer on the planet, and relentlessly hunted his minions
and spiritual descendants. And what do we have to show for it? Before the
next American war and the next American massacre -- you can surely count on
both -- join Chernus in considering the startling costs of America's
seemingly endless (and fruitless) battle with evil. Nick Turse
America's Reckless War Against Evil
Why It's Self-Defeating and Has No End
By Ira Chernus
Oh, no! Not another American war against evil!
This time, it's the Islamic State (IS). After the attacks in Paris, Barack
Obama, spokesman-in-chief for the United States of America, called that crew
"the face of evil." Shades of George W. Bush. The "evildoers" are back. And
from every mountaintop, it seems, America now rings with calls to ramp up
its war machine.
By the way, George W., how did that last war against the "evildoers" work
out for you? Not quite the way you expected, right? I bet you didn't imagine
that your Global War on Terror would plant the seeds of an Islamic State and
turn significant stretches of Iraq (and Syria) into fertile soil in which IS
would grow into a brand new, even more frightening enemy.
But that's the way wars against evil always seem to work.
Pardon me if I vent my exasperation with all the Washington policymakers,
past and present, surrounded by their so-called experts and those
war-drum-beating pundits in the media. I know I shouldn't be shocked
anymore. I've seen it often enough as a historian studying wars against evil
in the past -- ever since biblical times, in fact -- and as a citizen
watching wars in my own lifetime, ever since the one that tore Vietnam (and,
incidentally, America) apart.
Still, it drives me crazy to watch policymakers and experts making the same
dumb mistakes time after time, several mistakes, actually, which
synergistically add up to one self-defeating blunder after another.
What's worse, the dominant trend in public opinion is so often on the side
of just those mistakes. You'd think someone would learn something. And in
that someone I include "we, the people," the nation as a whole.
Yet now, facing the Islamic State, you guessed it: we're doing it all over
again.
Let me try to lay out our repetitive mistakes, all six of them, one by one,
starting with...
Mistake Number One: Treating the enemy as absolute evil, not even human.
Barack Obama called the Paris tragedy "an attack on all of humanity," which
means that, even for the president, IS fighters stand outside that category.
They are evidently some other species and merely appear to be human. And
this was the mildest of descriptions in this overheated political season of
ours. "The face of evil" sounds modest indeed compared to the vivid images
offered by the Republicans vying to replace him. For Ben Carson, IS are a
bunch of "rabid dogs"; for Ted Cruz, "scorpions." Donald Trump calls them
"insane," "animals."
All point to the same dangerous conclusion: Since we are human and they are
not, we are their opposite in every way. If they are absolute evil, we must
be the absolute opposite. It's the old apocalyptic tale: God's people versus
Satan's. It ensures that we never have to admit to any meaningful connection
with the enemy. By this logic, it couldn't be more obvious that the nation
our leaders endlessly call "exceptional" and "indispensable," the only
nation capable of leading the rest of the world in the war against evil,
bears no relationship to that evil.
That leads to...
Mistake Number Two: Buried in the assumption that the enemy is not in any
sense human like us is absolution for whatever hand we may have had in
sparking or contributing to evil's rise and spread. How could we have
fertilized the soil of absolute evil or bear any responsibility for its
successes? It's a basic postulate of wars against evil: God's people must
be innocent.
As a result, we don't need to look at all the ways in which the U.S., even
in battle mode, continues to contribute to the successes of Islamic State
fighters in Sunni Arab lands by, for instance, supporting an Iraqi Shi'ite
regime in Baghdad that has a grim history of oppressing Sunnis, a history
that drives many of them to tolerate, or even actively support IS.
By refusing a future role of any sort for Syria's president Bashar al-Assad,
we have hindered the diplomatic process that might heal the civil war in
that country. Instead we let the Syrian chaos continue as a breeding ground
for IS expansion (though perhaps this policy is just beginning to change).
Our long-term alliance with Saudi Arabia is equally counterproductive,
protecting funding networks that feed a burgeoning caliphate.
Just as we don't look at all this in the present, so we blind ourselves to
what the U.S. has done in the past. Consider this...
Mistake Number Three: Call it blotting out history. We lose the ability to
really understand the enemy because we ignore the actual history of how that
enemy came to be, of how a network of relationships grew up in which we
played, and continue to play, a central role.
The historical record is clear for all who care to look: The U.S. (the CIA
in particular) was a key to the creation, funding, and arming of the
mujahidin, the rebel fighters in Afghanistan who took on the Soviet army
there in the 1980s, the men (often extreme Islamists) whom President Ronald
Reagan compared to our founding fathers. From that situation came al-Qaeda.
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq cracked the region open and paved the way
for the Islamic State. The Bush administration tore Iraq to shreds and then
demobilized Saddam Hussein's army and dispatched its members to the
unemployment lines of a wrecked country.
One of those shreds, al-Qaeda in Iraq, populated by disaffected officers
from that disbanded army, would later transform itself into the nucleus of
the new Islamic State movement. Indeed the U.S. nurtured the present
leadership of that movement in American military prisons in Iraq, where we
introduced them to each other, so to speak. The process was at least
hastened, and perhaps ultimately caused, by the vehement anti-Sunni bias of
the Shi'ite Iraqi government, which the U.S. installed in power and also
nurtured.
To sustain our image of ourselves as innocents in the whole affair, we have
to blot out this empirical history and replace it with a myth (not so
surprising, given that any war against evil is a mythic enterprise). That's
not to say that we deny all the facts. We just pick and choose the ones that
fit our myth best.
In that tale, the enemy is simply what Christians for centuries have called
the devil, which brings us to...
Mistake Number Four: We assume that the enemy, like Lucifer himself, does
evil just for the sake of doing it. Even the most liberal parts of the media
often can't see IS fighters as more than "lunatics" bent on "slaughter for
its own sake."
Under such circumstances, what a foolish task it obviously is even to think
about the enemy's actual motives. After all, to do so would be to treat them
as humans, with human purposes arising out of history. It would smack of
sympathy for the devil.
Of course, this means that, whatever we might think of their actions, we
generally ignore a wealth of evidence that the Islamic State's fighters
couldn't be more human or have more comprehensible motivations. In fact, if
you look hard enough, you can find evidence of just that.
The Atlantic, for instance, gained some attention for publishing an article
by Graeme Wood that explored the complex religious ideas of the IS movement.
In the New York Review of Books, Scott Atran and Nafes Hamid offered
insights from people who had taken the time to actually talk with IS
fighters or former fighters about its strategy and their own motives in
becoming part of it. In this manner, Atran and Hamid helped explain the
great mystery of IS (if you believe it is an inhuman organization): How can
it attract so many young followers, especially from the U.S. and Europe?
Why do some disaffected young men and women find the movement "profoundly
alluring"?
Olivier Roy, a leading scholar of political Islam, has answered that many of
these youth, full of "frustration and resentment against society," are lured
by the fantasy of joining a "small brotherhood of super-heroes." But a
recent study by the Program in Extremism at George Washington University,
full of rich details on American IS supporters, concluded that "their
motivations are diverse and defy easy analysis."
Add up this sort of evidence and you're likely to come to a startling and,
in our present context, deeply unsettling conclusion. It's not just that IS
fighters are distinctly human, but that in some ways they are eerily like
us. After all, we, too, have a military that uses an ideological narrative
to recruit young people and prepare them to be willing to die for it. Our
military, too, is savvy in using social media and various forms of
advertising and publicity to deploy its narrative effectively. Like IS
recruits, youngsters join our military for all sorts of reasons, but some
because they are rootless, disaffected, and in search of a belief system, or
at least an exciting adventure (even one that may put them in danger of
losing their lives). And don't forget that those young recruits, like the IS
fighters, often have only the sketchiest grasp of what exactly they are
signing up to die for or of the nature of the conflicts they may be involved
in.
Our state ideology is, of course, secular. But most of us are certainly
familiar personally (or at one remove) with American religious
fundamentalists whose beliefs share much with the IS narrative. On both
sides, people want to turn back the clock of history and live according to a
sacred plan supposedly etched in stone many centuries ago.
There are, in fact, striking parallels -- and I say this as a professor of
religious studies -- between the evangelical mood and methods of our
fundamentalists and those of the Islamic State. Both agree that one must
choose between God's truth (derived from an ancient text) and the devil's.
Both offer the psycho-social comfort of a community supposedly living by
immutable laws. Some of our fundamentalists, like the Christian
Reconstructionists, would be happy to see this nation governed under
religious law, as long as it's their religion we're talking about.
Whatever any of us think of our homegrown fundamentalists, we would hardly
deny them their humanity, even if we often wonder what leads them to such
(to many of us) strange beliefs. So here's the question: Why shouldn't we be
just as curious about the believers of the Islamic State, even if they are
our enemies?
Remember, to understand is not to justify. Quite the opposite, understanding
often opens up ways of thinking more constructively and creatively about how
to respond to such a challenge. It's clear that Islamic State strategists
understand American and European political cultures well indeed and, as
they've repeatedly shown, they use that understanding to their grim
advantage. They know just how to provoke us into anti-Muslim rhetoric and
belligerent policies, which they find most useful to their project and their
movement. Like classic judo warriors, they employ our immense strength
remarkably effectively against us.
Every one of Washington's words and acts of war, every ally like Great
Britain that joins the bombing campaign against IS, only confirms the
Islamic State's message that Muslims are under attack by the West. All of it
only plays into the IS's own apocalyptic worldview. Every step in the
process makes the IS more attractive to Muslims who feel oppressed and
marginalized by the West. So think of every threat uttered in the
presidential campaign here and every bomb now being dropped as yet more
global recruitment posters arriving "like manna from heaven" for that
movement. Each is an invitation to launch yet more Paris-style attacks.
Our blindness to them as human beings, and to all the ways we have
influenced them, increases their power and undermines our power to shape the
outcome of events in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Greater Middle East.
Ironically, we accept this loss of power willingly, even eagerly, because it
allows us to hold on to what seems to matter most to us: our vision of a war
against inhuman evildoers, which brings us to...
Mistake Number Five: To convince ourselves that the Islamic State is evil
incarnate, we imagine that the enemy is as relentless, intractable, and
implacable as the devil himself. As a result, we also imagine that nothing
we could do might diminish their will to evil. Since, as we see it, we had
nothing to do with creating these monsters, no changes in our policies or
actions could possibly influence their behavior. And since they are just
crazy -- not capable of normal rationality -- there is no point in trying to
talk with them.
By this route we finally, inevitably, arrive at...
Mistake Number Six: The belief that we have only one option: annihilation.
Or if that proves impossible, despite the military forces at our disposal,
then at least containing them forever.
In fact, the presidential candidates of this moment all demand annihilation
and nothing less. In Donald Trump's words, "bomb the shit out of 'em." In
Hillary Clinton's more demure formulation, "crush ISIS... break the group's
momentum and then its back." Even Bernie Sanders agrees: "Our priority must
be... to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime."
The dream of a war of annihilation against evil has a long, long history in
white America. It began in 1636 when Puritans in New England wiped out the
Pequot tribe, promising that such a lesson would prevent further attacks by
other tribes. In fact, it created a spiral of violence and counter-violence,
and a war-against-evil template that the country still follows nearly four
centuries later in its "war on terror." The current conflict in Iraq and
Syria seems only to be locking us into that template and its guaranteed
cycle of violence ever more firmly.
Why do we as a nation keep on playing into the same dismal scenario and
committing the same mistakes? Why this seemingly irresistible urge to fight
yet another war against evil?
I worry that the answer to such questions may lie in what I've called an
American myth of national insecurity. It tells us that we will always be at
war with evildoers bent on destroying us; that this war (whichever the
latest one may be) is the mission and the meaning of our nation; and that
the only way to feel like a real American is to enlist permanently in
permanent war.
In other words, even as we stoke the Islamic State, we stoke ourselves as
well. The longer we fight, the more deeply we are seized by fear. The more
we fear, the more fiercely we are determined to fight. Perhaps the point is
not to win the war but to remain trapped in this vicious circle, which feels
perversely comforting because it offers a sense of unified national identity
as nothing else can in our otherwise deeply divided nation.
National myths are, however, invented by human beings, and we are always
capable of changing our minds. Who knows? Maybe someday the Islamic State
will figure out that brutal killing and other acts of horror in the name of
the caliphate are not such a good idea after all. And maybe the United
States will figure out that depending on an eternal, self-defeating war
against evil for our national identity is a huge mistake after all. Maybe.
Ira Chernus, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of religious studies at the
University of Colorado Boulder and author of the online "MythicAmerica:
Essays." He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Ira Chernus
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176078
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Six Mistakes on the Road to Permanent War
By Ira Chernus
Posted on December 8, 2015, Printed on December 8, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176078/
In the muddled midst of last week's mass killing in San Bernardino,
California, a few words skittering across my Twitter feed gave me pause. "On
this awful shooting: Is U.S. culture evil? Enemy of our civilization? Must
all Americans apologize? Should we bar U.S. tourists as dangerous?" asked
Simon Kuper, a columnist with the Financial Times.
As information about the massacre was dribbling out, Kuper was surely making
a larger point, but I got stuck on that word "evil" and thoughts about
American culture's long, passionate relationship with violence. This is
well-worn territory, of course, addressed in great depth and with much skill
by many thinkers over the years. But whether we're ruminating on
all-American mass killings or slaughter by foreign terrorists, it's worth
recalling that America was incubated in a roiling storm of atrocity and
birthed in savage cruelty.
Just two years after the first Thanksgiving, in fact, Pilgrim commander
Myles Standish was hacking the head off a Native American chief to be
displayed on a pike in front of the fort at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Not so
long after, in present day Jersey City, New Jersey, settler soldiers fell
upon a group of mostly women and children of the Wappinger tribe. Thirty
were tortured to death for "public amusement." About 80 others were
decapitated and their heads carried across the river to present-day
Manhattan where they were gleefully kicked about the streets of the town.
Fast-forward to 1779 and the father of this country, George Washington, was
dispatching troops to devastate Iroquois settlements in New York and
Pennsylvania. A couple of infant America's slain enemies were then skinned
and turned into footwear. The better part of a century later, native blood
was still being spilled in savage fashion. At Sand Creek, Colorado, U.S.
forces massacred hundreds, scalping old women, killing babies, even
violating the dead body of a "comely young squaw." Soldiers collected
penises of the men, sliced off the breasts of the women. One soldier even
wore a breast as a cap.
This is not to say that Native Americans didn't commit horrendous
atrocities, only that violence is intricately woven into America's DNA, a
winding helix of cruelty that then threaded its way through the Philippines
and the Caribbean, through Hiroshima, No Gun Ri, and My Lai, through Haditha
and Kunduz. Where this country went, so went implements of bodily
destruction, weaponry designed to kill or maim: rifles and landmines, bombs
and missiles. So, too, went cruelty and massacre, rape and torture,
horrendous acts as bad as or worse than any imaginable depredations by an
"evil" terror group. At home, of course, Americans slaughter each other with
frightening regularity in schools and movie theaters and, most recently, a
center that offers services to people with developmental disabilities. And
this is to say nothing of the other lethal and non-lethal horrors we
Americans frequently visit upon each other.
Are these acts evil? Are they committed by evil-doers? What about our
Islamic State (IS) enemies who are still decapitating people as did our
American forebears (and as our current anti-IS Saudi allies do once every
few days)? Is their brand of violence especially atrocious? Have they
renounced their humanity by committing such depraved acts? Did we? Is IS so
evil that we should fight them for that reason alone?
This is precisely the harsh terrain that TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus
navigates today. Analyzing their fundamentalism and ours, he delves into
essential questions about good and evil, humanity and its loss.
We live in an age in which America has called out an Axis of Evil, killed
the most wanted evildoer on the planet, and relentlessly hunted his minions
and spiritual descendants. And what do we have to show for it? Before the
next American war and the next American massacre -- you can surely count on
both -- join Chernus in considering the startling costs of America's
seemingly endless (and fruitless) battle with evil. Nick Turse
America's Reckless War Against Evil
Why It's Self-Defeating and Has No End
By Ira Chernus
Oh, no! Not another American war against evil!
This time, it's the Islamic State (IS). After the attacks in Paris, Barack
Obama, spokesman-in-chief for the United States of America, called that crew
"the face of evil." Shades of George W. Bush. The "evildoers" are back. And
from every mountaintop, it seems, America now rings with calls to ramp up
its war machine.
By the way, George W., how did that last war against the "evildoers" work
out for you? Not quite the way you expected, right? I bet you didn't imagine
that your Global War on Terror would plant the seeds of an Islamic State and
turn significant stretches of Iraq (and Syria) into fertile soil in which IS
would grow into a brand new, even more frightening enemy.
But that's the way wars against evil always seem to work.
Pardon me if I vent my exasperation with all the Washington policymakers,
past and present, surrounded by their so-called experts and those
war-drum-beating pundits in the media. I know I shouldn't be shocked
anymore. I've seen it often enough as a historian studying wars against evil
in the past -- ever since biblical times, in fact -- and as a citizen
watching wars in my own lifetime, ever since the one that tore Vietnam (and,
incidentally, America) apart.
Still, it drives me crazy to watch policymakers and experts making the same
dumb mistakes time after time, several mistakes, actually, which
synergistically add up to one self-defeating blunder after another.
What's worse, the dominant trend in public opinion is so often on the side
of just those mistakes. You'd think someone would learn something. And in
that someone I include "we, the people," the nation as a whole.
Yet now, facing the Islamic State, you guessed it: we're doing it all over
again.
Let me try to lay out our repetitive mistakes, all six of them, one by one,
starting with...
Mistake Number One: Treating the enemy as absolute evil, not even human.
Barack Obama called the Paris tragedy "an attack on all of humanity," which
means that, even for the president, IS fighters stand outside that category.
They are evidently some other species and merely appear to be human. And
this was the mildest of descriptions in this overheated political season of
ours. "The face of evil" sounds modest indeed compared to the vivid images
offered by the Republicans vying to replace him. For Ben Carson, IS are a
bunch of "rabid dogs"; for Ted Cruz, "scorpions." Donald Trump
callshttp://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/20/donald-trump-isis-these
-people-are-insane/ them "insane," "animals."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20All point
to the same dangerous conclusion: Since we are human and they are not, we
are their opposite in every way. If they are absolute evil, we must be the
absolute opposite. It's the old apocalyptic tale: God's people versus
Satan's. It ensures that we never have to admit to any meaningful connection
with the enemy. By this logic, it couldn't be more obvious that the nation
our leaders endlessly call "exceptional" and "indispensable," the only
nation capable of leading the rest of the world in the war against evil,
bears no relationship to that evil.
That leads to...
Mistake Number Two: Buried in the assumption that the enemy is not in any
sense human like us is absolution for whatever hand we may have had in
sparking or contributing to evil's rise and spread. How could we have
fertilized the soil of absolute evil or bear any responsibility for its
successes? It's a basic postulate of wars against evil: God's people must be
innocent.
As a result, we don't need to look at all the ways in which the U.S., even
in battle mode, continues to contribute to the successes of Islamic State
fighters in Sunni Arab lands by, for instance, supporting an Iraqi Shi'ite
regime in Baghdad that has a grim history of oppressing Sunnis, a history
that drives many of them to tolerate, or even actively support IS.
By refusing a future role of any sort for Syria's president Bashar al-Assad,
we have hindered the diplomatic process that might heal the civil war in
that country. Instead we let the Syrian chaos continue as a breeding ground
for IS expansion (though perhaps this policy is just beginning to change).
Our long-term alliance with Saudi Arabia is equally counterproductive,
protecting funding networks that feed a burgeoning caliphate.
Just as we don't look at all this in the present, so we blind ourselves to
what the U.S. has done in the past. Consider this...
Mistake Number Three: Call it blotting out history. We lose the ability to
really understand the enemy because we ignore the actual history of how that
enemy came to be, of how a network of relationships grew up in which we
played, and continue to play, a central role.
The historical record is clear for all who care to look: The U.S. (the CIA
in particular) was a key to the creation, funding, and arming of the
mujahidin, the rebel fighters in Afghanistan who took on the Soviet army
there in the 1980s, the men (often extreme Islamists) whom President Ronald
Reagan compared to our founding fathers. From that situation came al-Qaeda.
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq cracked the region open and paved the way
for the Islamic State. The Bush administration tore Iraq to shreds and then
demobilized Saddam Hussein's army and dispatched its members to the
unemployment lines of a wrecked country.
One of those shreds, al-Qaeda in Iraq, populated by disaffected officers
from that disbanded army, would later transform itself into the nucleus of
the new Islamic State movement. Indeed the U.S. nurtured the present
leadership of that movement in American military prisons in Iraq, where we
introduced them to each other, so to speak. The process was at least
hastened, and perhaps ultimately caused, by the vehement anti-Sunni bias of
the Shi'ite Iraqi government, which the U.S. installed in power and also
nurtured.
To sustain our image of ourselves as innocents in the whole affair, we have
to blot out this empirical history and replace it with a myth (not so
surprising, given that any war against evil is a mythic enterprise). That's
not to say that we deny all the facts. We just pick and choose the ones that
fit our myth best.
In that tale, the enemy is simply what Christians for centuries have called
the devil, which brings us to...
Mistake Number Four: We assume that the enemy, like Lucifer himself, does
evil just for the sake of doing it. Even the most liberal parts of the media
often can't see IS fighters as more than "lunatics" bent on "slaughter for
its own sake."
Under such circumstances, what a foolish task it obviously is even to think
about the enemy's actual motives. After all, to do so would be to treat them
as humans, with human purposes arising out of history. It would smack of
sympathy for the devil.
Of course, this means that, whatever we might think of their actions, we
generally ignore a wealth of evidence that the Islamic State's fighters
couldn't be more human or have more comprehensible motivations. In fact, if
you look hard enough, you can find evidence of just that.
The Atlantic, for instance, gained some attention for publishing an article
by Graeme Wood that explored the complex religious ideas of the IS movement.
In the New York Review of Books, Scott Atran and Nafes Hamid offered
insights from people who had taken the time to actually talk with IS
fighters or former fighters about its strategy and their own motives in
becoming part of it. In this manner, Atran and Hamid helped explain the
great mystery of IS (if you believe it is an inhuman organization): How can
it attract so many young followers, especially from the U.S. and Europe? Why
do some disaffected young men and women find the movement "profoundly
alluring"?
Olivier Roy, a leading scholar of political Islam, has answered that many of
these youth, full of "frustration and resentment against society," are lured
by the fantasy of joining a "small brotherhood of super-heroes." But a
recent study by the Program in Extremism at George Washington University,
full of rich details on American IS supporters, concluded that "their
motivations are diverse and defy easy analysis."
Add up this sort of evidence and you're likely to come to a startling and,
in our present context, deeply unsettling conclusion. It's not just that IS
fighters are distinctly human, but that in some ways they are eerily like
us. After all, we, too, have a military that uses an ideological narrative
to recruit young people and prepare them to be willing to die for it. Our
military, too, is savvy in using social media and various forms of
advertising and publicity to deploy its narrative effectively. Like IS
recruits, youngsters join our military for all sorts of reasons, but some
because they are rootless, disaffected, and in search of a belief system, or
at least an exciting adventure (even one that may put them in danger of
losing their lives). And don't forget that those young recruits, like the IS
fighters, often have only the sketchiest grasp of what exactly they are
signing up to die for or of the nature of the conflicts they may be involved
in.
Our state ideology is, of course, secular. But most of us are certainly
familiar personally (or at one remove) with American religious
fundamentalists whose beliefs share much with the IS narrative. On both
sides, people want to turn back the clock of history and live according to a
sacred plan supposedly etched in stone many centuries ago.
There are, in fact, striking parallels -- and I say this as a professor of
religious studies -- between the evangelical mood and methods of our
fundamentalists and those of the Islamic State. Both agree that one must
choose between God's truth (derived from an ancient text) and the devil's.
Both offer the psycho-social comfort of a community supposedly living by
immutable laws. Some of our fundamentalists, like the Christian
Reconstructionists, would be happy to see this nation governed under
religious law, as long as it's their religion we're talking about.
Whatever any of us think of our homegrown fundamentalists, we would hardly
deny them their humanity, even if we often wonder what leads them to such
(to many of us) strange beliefs. So here's the question: Why shouldn't we be
just as curious about the believers of the Islamic State, even if they are
our enemies?
Remember, to understand is not to justify. Quite the opposite, understanding
often opens up ways of thinking more constructively and creatively about how
to respond to such a challenge. It's clear that Islamic State strategists
understand American and European political cultures well indeed and, as
they've repeatedly shown, they use that understanding to their grim
advantage. They know just how to provoke us into anti-Muslim rhetoric and
belligerent policies, which they find most useful to their project and their
movement. Like classic judo warriors, they employ our immense strength
remarkably effectively against us.
Every one of Washington's words and acts of war, every ally like Great
Britain that joins the bombing campaign against IS, only confirms the
Islamic State's message that Muslims are under attack by the West. All of it
only plays into the IS's own apocalyptic worldview. Every step in the
process makes the IS more attractive to Muslims who feel oppressed and
marginalized by the West. So think of every threat uttered in the
presidential campaign here and every bomb now being dropped as yet more
global recruitment posters arriving "like manna from heaven" for that
movement. Each is an invitation to launch yet more Paris-style attacks.
Our blindness to them as human beings, and to all the ways we have
influenced them, increases their power and undermines our power to shape the
outcome of events in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Greater Middle East.
Ironically, we accept this loss of power willingly, even eagerly, because it
allows us to hold on to what seems to matter most to us: our vision of a war
against inhuman evildoers, which brings us to...
Mistake Number Five: To convince ourselves that the Islamic State is evil
incarnate, we imagine that the enemy is as relentless, intractable, and
implacable as the devil himself. As a result, we also imagine that nothing
we could do might diminish their will to evil. Since, as we see it, we had
nothing to do with creating these monsters, no changes in our policies or
actions could possibly influence their behavior. And since they are just
crazy -- not capable of normal rationality -- there is no point in trying to
talk with them.
By this route we finally, inevitably, arrive at...
Mistake Number Six: The belief that we have only one option: annihilation.
Or if that proves impossible, despite the military forces at our disposal,
then at least containing them forever.
In fact, the presidential candidates of this moment all demand annihilation
and nothing less. In Donald Trump's words, "bomb the shit out of 'em." In
Hillary Clinton's more demure formulation, "crush ISIS... break the group's
momentum and then its back." Even Bernie Sanders agrees: "Our priority must
be... to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime."
The dream of a war of annihilation against evil has a long, long history in
white America. It began in 1636 when Puritans in New England wiped out the
Pequot tribe, promising that such a lesson would prevent further attacks by
other tribes. In fact, it created a spiral of violence and counter-violence,
and a war-against-evil template that the country still follows nearly four
centuries later in its "war on terror." The current conflict in Iraq and
Syria seems only to be locking us into that template and its guaranteed
cycle of violence ever more firmly.
Why do we as a nation keep on playing into the same dismal scenario and
committing the same mistakes? Why this seemingly irresistible urge to fight
yet another war against evil?
I worry that the answer to such questions may lie in what I've called an
American myth of national insecurity. It tells us that we will always be at
war with evildoers bent on destroying us; that this war (whichever the
latest one may be) is the mission and the meaning of our nation; and that
the only way to feel like a real American is to enlist permanently in
permanent war.
In other words, even as we stoke the Islamic State, we stoke ourselves as
well. The longer we fight, the more deeply we are seized by fear. The more
we fear, the more fiercely we are determined to fight. Perhaps the point is
not to win the war but to remain trapped in this vicious circle, which feels
perversely comforting because it offers a sense of unified national identity
as nothing else can in our otherwise deeply divided nation.
National myths are, however, invented by human beings, and we are always
capable of changing our minds. Who knows? Maybe someday the Islamic State
will figure out that brutal killing and other acts of horror in the name of
the caliphate are not such a good idea after all. And maybe the United
States will figure out that depending on an eternal, self-defeating war
against evil for our national identity is a huge mistake after all. Maybe.
Ira Chernus, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of religious studies at the
University of Colorado Boulder and author of the online "MythicAmerica:
Essays." He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Ira Chernus
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176078
