The great moral failure wasn’t only in launching the war on terror, it has been in continuing it in spite of all the moral and statistical evidence.
The social share title reads “The scene of America’s longest war is now world’s terrorism hotspot”.
Nearly 18 years into the war on terror, this headline should be shocking. But it really is no surprise.
Any student of psychology or sociology predicted as much. As could any student of American history. Those ideologies we declare war on (poverty, drugs, terror) have all proven to be incredible opponents. Or have, at the very least, stymied all attempts at eradication.
The real question is why do our leaders refuse to act on the compelling nature of the evidence?
People have pursued an answer to this sort of question for years. From Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind to Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, each with their own related conclusions (cultural identity, emotion, and community).
But there’s something lacking in the pursuit. Something that keeps sticking with me.
Certainly, this is no new idea. Many of us have wrestled with this question for years. And each time, we look for a simple solution. Maybe there’s something in the brain to explain it or some behavior we can influence. Or perhaps if we just listened or talked more. Or maybe if we just keep repeating the word civility like a mantra people will turn nice.
And I can’t help but think that even the most honest pursuits, yielding incredible insights are trying too hard to discover a unified theory of everything. Maybe all this analysis is explaining too much.
There’s more missing than understanding.
We attempt to understand why people believe the counterfactual. But then ignore the vast numbers of people who were right from the beginning. Objectively right. Not as a matter of opinion or left/right politics. Not just because we didn’t want a war or because a broken clock is right twice a day.
We were right because our reading of the situation was right.
Waging a war on terror and terrorism would breed more terrorism. That was central to the opposition to the war on terror. We knew that gutting Afghanistan and Iraq would make these countries more amenable to terrorism, not less.
And the constant response from war supporters for nearly 17 years has not been surprising in the least.
The war on terror has been one excuse after another.
The parallel with Vietnam is no less remarkable. It’s the same mistake. A mistaken theory clung to tightly, mixed with bruised egos and fear of loss, leads to constant and persistent defensiveness.
This means the original mistake and the ongoing mistake are completely different beasts treated as the same. Though, to be fair, they do have something central in common.
At the center is a fundamental flaw. The idea that one entity can impose reality on another. Cleanly and without consequence.
We can’t control other people.
Over and over again, the U.S. response in Afghanistan and other “fronts on the war on terror” has been to enforce control over a world order. We’ve sought to eradicate a perceived threat and its cascading consequences. The echoes of Vietnam reverberate in Afghanistan.
And at the macro level, fear of terrorism mimics the fear of communism.
The American obsession with communism throughout the 20th century was no less devastating. It led to tremendous suffering throughout Latin America and Eastern Europe, a perpetual conflict with other world powers, disaster capitalism and exploitation of already impoverished communities, and the cyclical violence of fascist programs to bring order and stability.
We supported coups and dictators. We sold weapons for evil purposes. And we’ve denied human rights across the globe.
Osama bin Laden even used our war on communism as a justification for the al Qaeda attacks. They saw their actions as a kind of war on terror. He specifically cited our state-sponsored acts of terror in Chile as support for 9/11.
Both the original decision to go to war on terror and the constant decisions to maintain a war on terror were based on the same faulty assumption: imposing our will on geopolitics and a shockingly ignorant assessment of our foreign policy history. And yet, even as they have the same root, they are fundamentally different decisions.
Declaring a war on terror was a mistake. But our never bringing it to an end has been an intentional moral calamity.
Just as we can test a theory we know will fail because we think this time it’ll work, continuing to test a theory while expecting different results is stupid.
Playing blackjack as your means of paying for college is a mistake. Going back dozens of times when you’re $5,000 in the hole is irresponsible.
Here, I don’t think we need to spend hours discussing the psychology of why people stick with a disaster. Helping people out of these disasters is far more important!
This is why the public discourse around this war has been so problematic. We’re not holding ourselves to the fundamental moral responsibility of behaving ethically in the world. Nor do we bring our government to task for its moral failures.
But why have we so struggled to do so? Two reasons:
1. The Quick Fix – Short-term thinking and technical solutions
When we’re in the fog of fear, we forget that problems are often complex. We are easily seduced by a single, technical response to a complex problem. We mistake the moral complexity for the simplicity of action.
For instance, when my son refuses to get up when I need him to, what am I thinking about? Only that I want him to get up. So then what is my response? And what happens as a result?
Often, there is a refusal to get up. And I start to lose my cool. There are insistences and requests and rebuttals and refusals and then threats and raised voices and tantrums and sometimes room-to-room movements and slamming doors and lost minutes of back-and-forth and we’re late for school and we’re angry and humiliated and the whole morning is ruined…
By nearly any objective terms, neither of us truly got our way. Nor did we learn what we hoped to learn from each other. The real communication was missed, the internal frustrations remain, and, this one’s the kicker, the interaction has created new distance between us.
Yes, we got to school. But we both know next time will look a lot like this time. So if I hoped to teach him something positive about punctuality, I failed completely.
I’m trying to impose my will upon him to do what I want rather than find an actual solution which encourages his positive behavior.
The idea of imposing our will only sounds like a good rhetorical strategy.
And when it “works” with one kid, we think it will have the same response for another.
Of course, none of this is true. But neither is it just about parenting strategy. It’s also about a worldview.
We tie our cultural identity to this pursuit as an icon. So it becomes what we mean when we speak of raising children. Many of us tie our entire view of the world to the idea of diametric struggles with winners and losers and good and evil. Kids refuse and parents demand their way; enemies attack us and we retaliate.
So what happens when we face a situation more complicated than mere force can solve in a singular action? What happens when you can’t physically force your way?
The quick fix of imposing our will is an illusion. Unreasonably believing a complex problem will be solved with a simple technical solution becomes criminally naive when we’re the ones chosen to solve those very problems.
2. Moral Arguments are Dismissed
It is far easier to speak of problems from the left/right sort of diametrically opposed political arguments than it is to grapple with the moral complexity of 17 years of war. Especially when the evidence overwhelmingly points to the war’s ongoing creation of more zealots and perpetual opponents to the United States.
This complexity yields a terrible choice which may have an element of the non-solution to it. As we’ve seen domestically throughout history that going after white supremacy and ignoring white supremacy have both yielded an increase in white supremacy. The moral hazard of doing nothing may be born, not of wisdom but fatalism.
But notice how the complexity doesn’t more justify the radical act of maintaining a failed war on terror. We simply move it. The moral hazard shifts from whole villages destroyed and innocents killed by tanks and drones and the resulting rise in both nationalistic and religious retaliation to American aggression (and all the evil of war itself!) to the only moral dimension allowed — what a withdrawal would do to the region.
In other words, the moral arguments are isolated to the technical aspects of ending the war rather than the bigger picture. This, of course, is intentional.
But what if we simply entertained the moral dimension of the whole? Or more specifically, to the constant action of our daily continuing to impose our will? The constant battling, demanding, forcing, belittling, destroying…
Well, it naturally leads us to also entertain the true costs. To esteem; broken promises, broken objects, broken homes. We’ve sacrificed millions of lives and trillions of dollars for what ultimate purpose? To prove a point? To look tough? Or to avoid being the one to declare the whole thing was a mistake?
Then we may reckon with our past. And the evil behind our current actions.
But not acting to bring the war on terror to an end is its own mistake.
Every day we’ve continued to remain at war with terrorism is unconscionable. Doing so while knowing its utter failure is that much worse. Especially in light of its consequences.
Remaining at war has perpetually increased international anger, decreased moral standing, and ultimately built a perpetual cycle of terrorist recruitment. Which means we have 6290 days of moral responsibility for it.
6290 days since President George W. Bush declared war on terror.
6290 days we’ve assumed a war posture with an ideology. A posture which destroys countless lives, destroys our relationship with a whole region of the globe, and destroys our moral authority in international affairs. Every day.
The war on terror has been a complete and utter moral failure from the very beginning. And its fallout has been far deadlier than its perpetrators imagined. This too is important.
We have allowed it to justify morally indefensible acts at the microscale (torture) to the macro (invasion of sovereign countries) and at the inhumane (drone strikes) and illegal (military strikes across borders without permission).
We’ve adopted a completely different relationship to the world. And we refuse to see a therapist about it. And for 17 years running, we’ve ignored the evidence of our failure. Only to pursue the perceived rightness of our conviction.
The whole thing was foolish and stupid from the beginning.
But choosing daily to endorse stupid for 6,290 straight days is willful and intentional. It’s irresponsible and remorseless. And those who started this don’t bear the moral burden alone. Those who refused and continue to refuse to bring it to end are also guilty of a true moral failure.