When I got there he was seated in his chair in the garden as if it was any nice afternoon in July. It was a hot day. Grandma had put a white teacloth over his face, as if she couldn’t bear to see him. She stayed in the house but told me I could go out and look at him. He’d have wanted that, she said. I was as close to her as I had been to him.

I lifted off the cloth: I was silently afraid. But it was him, and he looked calm, or patient. I was surprised to see how still a face is when breath has stopped. I found this comforting and for several minutes I studied his face. I could look at it, and the abandoned self. I was 17, I think, caught in the expectation of being grown up soon, and about to do big things.

On the other side of the hedge beyond the garden a couple of kids passed by. It was still hot. They were talking and chuckling, and of course they didn’t know about our garden and what had happened there. If they looked over the hedge in passing, they might have seen an old man sitting in a chair. They wouldn’t have realized, and if I’d called out, “Look, my grandfather is dead”, they could have said, “Oh, that’s sad, so sorry” — that sort of thing — and kept on going with their afternoon. It wasn’t their loss or disaster. Nor mine, really. That belonged to Grandma who was sitting in the house as still as her husband in the garden. She wasn’t weeping, or evidently upset. She wasn’t going to break down. But it wasn’t possible to see her without imagining her distress. People die all the time, and it may be an unforgettable moment in others’ lives.

More from this author

Watching Trump's Apocalypse

By David Thomson

This was not what you’d call a disaster, though I don’t think Grandma ever got over it. It’s nothing like Gaza. Do you still look at that, or has it been going on so long now you almost take it for granted? I’m talking about the scenes of a city where so few buildings are intact. It is a collapsed place — it looks like rubble or kindling — and if the bodies have been taken away there’s no escaping how many have perished: from the blasts, the fire, the aftermath of illness, the hopelessness. How many? There’s no need to guess: Gaza’s Ministry of Health says 73,386 Palestinians have been killed there.

Those numbers are appalling, but we make them theoretical, as a handling device. Would Gaza be worse if there were 75,386 dead? Can we feel the difference in 2,000 lives? Is there a total at which point everyone will say, Enough. Stop It. Start Again? Are we so calculating, or so adept at managing outrage? Is there a death limit, like 55 m.p.h? Are there cops on that highway, their cars hiding behind bushes, with waiting tickets?

Do understand, I am not simply regretting the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. Nor am I forgetting the ruthless provocation in the mass murder of October 7. It’s not a matter of taking sides, or excusing anyone. Gaza is a devastation that only a terrible distortion of meaning or consequence can justify. (Unless we consider the chance of our own abdication — I mean stepping down from the principle or the hope that we matter.)

For several years now the television news has panned over the wreckage of Gaza, and waited for outrage to take effect. But that hasn’t quite worked, has it? We hardly saw what the Somme looked like in 1916. But we have grown up a lot since then: we have seen the overhead views of Dresden and Berlin ruined. We know the wasteland of Hiroshima. We are connoisseurs of damage. We keep on looking, depressed but hardly motivated by the experience. It’s almost as if our helplessness is groomed by the watching. After all, throughout our decades-long history of anti-war films (that is the wishful label on the genre), from All Quiet on the Western Front to Black Hawk Down, we have also been satisfied, or thrilled, by the scenes of attack. So afraid in life, so brave in watching? And somehow the anti-war plan hasn’t transpired.

But I’m interested in what looking at the pictures does. There was a day, 25 years ago this week, when at breakfast in San Francisco our life was broken in on by TV views of Manhattan (those towers reminded me of Metropolis, that’s 1927). When a toy plane — it must be that — struck a skyscraper. Our six-year-old son, Zachary (raised in a film-watching household), getting ready for school, asked, “Dad, what movie is that?” in the spirit of a child who enjoyed a bit of battle on the screen. This wasn’t just what a kid wondered. Walter Murch (the editor and sound designer) has told me how he came out of his hotel in New York, saw his colleague Anthony Minghella (the director) looking up, and they had said in unison, “What movie is this?” Of course, they “knew” it could not be a movie, but they could not subdue the feeling that it must be contrived, or a show.

Suggested Reading

9/11 could happen again

By William T. Vollmann

By Gaza standards, 9/11 (a slick title?) was hardly vast. The number of people who died that day (in New York, Virginia and in Pennsylvania) was 2,977 (not counting the 19 suicidal killers in the planes). In presenting that as shocking, I realize that the average total of daily deaths in New York is only 150. Of course, most of those losses go unnoticed by the current of News. They occur in gardens or apartments, with just a few onlookers trying to feel what it all means. But what happened at the World Trade Center really was a movie, not just an unmediated error or mischance that Murch, Minghella and my son had wandered into. The damage that day was designed, cast, budgeted, foreseen — it had a creative vision — like a “magnificent” or “stunning” frontal assault from Paths of Glory or We Were Soldiers. It was intended as a movie. And so these terrible occasions are more easily digested as something we are meant to witness. We tame them just a little by identifying as spectators or an audience. Or does that taming diminish us? Is the process of movie turning us into a crowd who are detached or not exactly there — as if we have been nullified?

The story of how we have reached this point is complicated — not least because of the “fun” we have been having. How else can we contemplate the extensive but sometimes rather jolly massacres in which computer-generated figures are deleted? And that is disturbing because we do not like to think ourselves so unworthy. But there are pivotal realizations along the way. The one that strikes me the most is what I’ll call the Great Ignoring. Let me try to explain.

In the early Forties — not so long ago, some of us were alive then — in Germany or nearby parts of Europe, the great crowd of refugees or prisoners trudged along and we did not know how to notice or respond. As if they were not there to be seen and felt. Even in the gloom of dark morning, there might be a stink in the air because the natural traces of cooking are stubborn or lasting. So “down the road” was a no go area, or not for thinking about. One of those places that we (it’s not just they) were determined not to be disturbed by. Oh yes, we might say, there were rumors about what was happening, about the trains that kept arriving, and the occasional faces seen staring out of their carriages. There were anecdotes about people who had been here a few days ago and were gone now, as if on a sudden holiday. Or there were even a few who said they had escaped from there. But they seemed so crazed, so out of their minds, they could hardly be relied on. One of the reasons for that odd term “concentration camp” is how hard you must work to ignore the inner meaning of what is being said. When people are murdered in “impossible” numbers, the function of the state is to insist on the impossibility of what is being asserted. So it was in 1945 that we could act surprised. We were ready to cry out, “Oh, how extraordinary — we never knew about that”. So sorry. And this is not just German. It is in our nature now as watchers. It could happen here. It does, every time we stroll past Gaza, talking to our friends.

There is a temptation in the apparent factual emphasis of movie to say, look, we are looking — we are paying attention. And the impact of that may produce nausea. But more unsettling still is the underlying worry that every time we see a death we see an actor lying still and holding his breath. Could it be that we too are not quite alive? How hard must we concentrate to see that our mattering was a masquerade or a hope?

I kid, I kid. Not about the Houthi takeover, which is all too real, but the “dividend” payments and the geographic renaming. Those are the kinds of things a ragtag group of Yemeni militants might be expected to do. But these days, they are more readily identified with President Trump’s administration in the United States — an astonishing and dismaying turn for the nation as it marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

For all their horror and wickedness, the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks took place amid deep American confidence, as well as a kind of epistemic simplicity. A decade earlier, one version of Enlightenment modernity, market liberalism, had bested its chief and last serious rival, communism. All that was left to do was expanding the system into the farthest reaches of the Earth and maintaining its smooth operations. 

Sure, a few backward holdouts remained — Serbian ultra-nationalists here, Islamist kooks and African warlords there — but none could really threaten the system. And even if they managed serious damage, as they did on that fateful day, American power could always clean their clocks and remake their societies; the universalist logic of the system demanded nothing less.

Yet 25 years later, that blessed simplicity is lost. And worse, a quarter-century of remaking other societies has left the United States looking like one of the holdout rogues: paranoid, warlike for its own sake, socially balkanized, psychologically fragile, given to leader worship, and incapable of articulating a universal idea. 

More from this author

How America became the Middle East

By Sohrab Ahmari

To understand the dismal change, we have to first examine the decision structure that led to it.

It’s a banal truism that what took place after 9/11 was the product of neoconservative hubris. Yet lodging that ancient charge isn’t enough. If George W. Bush and the neocon cohort around him succumbed to hubris, well, so did a lot of others. So did the Clintons and Joe Biden. So did The Economist and The New York Times. So did Fareed Zakaria and Christopher Hitchens and the Leftist writer Paul Berman. So did I, beginning in the late aughts, as an ex-Leftist-turned-hawk.

Yet there were many more reasonable courses of action than the one they — we — settled on. Washington and its allies could have carpet-bombed the Taliban’s strongholds and used special operators to chase down the perpetrators of 9/11 (which was, indeed, how Osama bin Laden was eventually brought to justice). In retrospect, there was no obvious reason why the Afghan effort should have also included teaching their women about Marcel Duchamp and Dada before the Taliban retook the whole country.

Iraq, meanwhile, wasn’t even developing weapons of mass destruction, and old-school balance-of-power calculation should have underscored Saddam Hussein’s value as a check on the Iranians. The Libya and Syria interventions were even more unwise, carving out ungoverned spaces across vast swaths of the region that radiated terror and sent more than a million migrants to Europe’s shores. Libya now features open slave markets; Syria has settled into rule by a newly besuited Al Qaeda warlord.

So how did things get so out of hand? Why go so far? The decision tree, it now seems to me, was predetermined by both material and ideological factors. On the material side, there was the sheer asymmetry between the relative power of the United States and everyone else’s in the 1990s and aughts. Back then, Russia was humiliated and the Chinese economy barely factored as a rival. This led all but a very few US strategists to conclude, maybe we can — why not try?

This unusual correlation of forces gave the Western mind a bad sugar high. Already, a few years before 9/11, the political theorist Benjamin Barber predicted that the early 21st century would be contested by capitalist globalism, which he called “McWorld,” and traditional and identitarian reaction, which he designated by the shorthand “Jihad.” 

Barber himself, to be clear, deplored both of these poles as reductive and deleterious to authentic human happiness. But many others were happy to plant the flag of McWorld in the heartlands of Jihad, an ambition made concrete in the famous Burger King inside Baghdad’s Green Zone. Then, too, the idea of a monolithic Islamist enemy — rather than a reality of an Islamic world fragmented along numerous national and sectarian lines — lent global liberalism the sort of singular ideological adversary it had been missing since the demise of the Soviet Union.

This was always an illusion, of course. Islamism was no real competitor to McWorld. It was savage and exhausting; within a decade or two, the Arab Street decided it prefers its own gleaming McWorld than a restored transnational ummah under a caliph. 

Even so, the illusion of a total adversary, akin to those that menaced freedom in the 1930s, galvanized the intellectuals. The likes of Berman wore “Enlightenment fundamentalism” as a badge of honor. The New Atheism of Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al., celebrated the post-9/11 wars for casting the cold light of reason upon the dark and terrible gods that still kept billions in thrall. If Islamism — or Islam itself — could give way, the thinking went, then so might the cornpone Christianity of the average Bush voter (never mind that it was just such red-state believers who’d be called to carry out regime change).

Which brings us to the consequences. Nations have only limited resources and attention in a world still characterized by scarcity. All along, as they set about remaking the Middle East and North Africa, the United States and many of its European allies neglected the domestic foundations of their power. Manufacturing withered, because McWorld ideology taught that growth is growth; and it doesn’t matter whether GDP is generated by tangible, tradable goods or by software and services (whether high-end or low). 

All along, Wall Street was permitted to swallow large chunks of the real economy, disgorging pink slips and precarity for the working and middle classes. A corrosive ultra-liberalism filled the resulting void with porn, legalized weed, and online gambling. 

All along, employers’ hunger for low wages — and urban professionals’ desire for cheap nannies, gardeners, and dry cleaners — were allowed to dictate immigration policy, welfare nets and cultural cohesion be damned. Impressive new social technologies were allowed to rip through communities and individual minds, without regard for attention spans and mental health.

Suggested reading

Why ‘responsible’ liberals coddle the irresponsible

By Nikos Mohammadi

Meanwhile, the predictably lousy outcome of the regime-change wars themselves sapped national confidence and bred distrust for institutional authority. If “they” lied about Iraq’s WMD, what else did “they” lie about? Military families, especially, witnessed firsthand the wide gap between the rhetoric of the hawks and the grim realities of these conflicts. Democracy itself was cast into doubt; no matter which party you voted for, D or R, you got more regime-change wars.

One grave consequence of all this was a general degradation of American human capital. Writers, such as UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania, who identify the human-capital decline as the crisis of our time aren’t wrong. But they too often overlook the social and material conditions needed to foster high-grade human capital. The post-9/11 wars undermined those necessary conditions in the United States (and, to some extent, in Europe).

Is it any wonder, then, that American politics is characterized by open demagogic bribery, such as Trump’s recent vow to reward every adult with a $5,000 “dividend” drawn from tariff revenue? (The latter, to be clear, wouldn’t begin to cover the full cost.) Or that American political discourse is warped by a kind of dual conspiracism, in which the masses suspect a hidden foreign (often Jewish) hand in the course of events, while elites themselves ascribe the feelings of the masses to foreign (often Russian) interference? 

Is it any wonder that the icon of the late Trump era is the so-called MAGA-tard — a single-toothed gnomic creature who tells himself that $6 diesel is worth the price of liberating Iran? Or that the administration has demanded “academic receivership” to ensure that university history and regional-studies curricula accord with Trumpian ideology? Or that Trump’s “faith adviser,” Paula White-Cain, has issued a fatwa that “to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God”? 

All this — political handouts, pervasive conspiracy theories, leader worship, surveillance of intellectual life, and so on — were characteristic of the Middle East where I was born. Right down to the frenzy for ideological renaming of landmarks and places. The post-9/11 wars thus didn’t fail to achieve anything, as is commonly believed. They remade America in the image of the Middle East.

“Few events can be as debilitating as a great victory,” wrote the eminent liberal Israeli journalist Amos Elon in his 1971 book, The Israelis. Elon was referring to the Six-Day War of 1967, which gave Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, and other territories. Israelis rejoiced, unaware that they had been given a poisoned chalice. America’s victory in the Cold War in 1989 followed a similar pattern: when Communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly collapsed one after another, followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, America and its policy elite basked in triumphalism, seeing democracy as the natural order of things to come. The war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the Nineties did not shatter the smug belief in a linear direction of historical Progress entertained by the powers-that-be; both events were horrific, but they were localized. Convinced that no geopolitical threats existed anymore, America sold its military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new kind of war, whose goal was purely humanitarian. Such was the misleading effect of the victory in the 44-year-long Cold War.

The realization that the end of the Cold War had given us not peace, but an even more dangerous and far more unstable world occurred in stages. And 9/11 was the first shock, magnified by the technology of television, which repeatedly showed the twin towers in lower Manhattan collapsing into a fiery pile of dust and rubble. The event hit Americans, lulled into the complacency of the Nineties, with the psychological force of Pearl Harbor, to which it was repeatedly compared. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the world was already at war. The Nazis had already occupied France, and were at the gates of Moscow. The Japanese had already invaded China and committed the Rape of Nanjing. Thus, for Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on the Axis Powers was not only the right thing to do, but also the natural thing.

Suggested reading

America is lost without idealism

By Robert D. Kaplan

The direction of history after the attacks of 9/11 was not so clear. The world was otherwise at peace. The Chinese were still in the early phase of building a great navy, around which their military capability would be oriented. Moreover, China was still governed by the reformer Jiang Zemin, a leader friendly to the United States. Vladimir Putin had been in power less than two years and was still consolidating control. It was unclear in what direction he would take Russia. Great power conflict was the furthest thing from people’s minds.

And so, with China and Russia out of the mental picture, the public debate went from unreflectively assuming democracy was about to overtake the world to falling in line behind the Global War on Terrorism. In this way, 9/11 was incorporated into post-Cold War triumphalism. Indeed, as 9/11 had demonstrated, and as the conventional thinking went, the Arab world was politically sick, and the cure was to bring democracy to the greater Middle East.

The administration of President George W. Bush was actually slow to come to this conclusion. Caught off guard by the devastating attacks of 9/11, the Bush White House, burdened by guilt and thus determined that no chances could be taken in protecting American security, immediately conceived of a war to topple the Afghan regime of the Taliban, the hosts of the 9/11 killers. Two months after the attacks, the US military and its Afghan allies occupied the Afghan capital of Kabul. Victory had come easy, perhaps too easy, owing to an innovative, economy-of-force strategy emphasizing special operations forces and local Afghan fighters. But again, without much reflection, rebuilding Afghanistan was turned over to the big, conventional US Army bureaucracy, whose conception of Afghanistan — despite inventive interludes under certain commanders — would turn out to be analogous to that of the Soviet occupiers in the Eighties, who themselves withdrew in defeat.

Because Afghanistan was too easy (as it was then thought), and 9/11 still reverberated in a loud, deafening manner, a bigger response was conceived: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime in Iraq. After all, from a human rights perspective there was no worse regime in the world except for North Korea’s. And Bosnia and Kosovo had set the pattern for humanitarian interventions. As I can attest from reporting on the ground in the Middle East, Iraq back then was actually far more repressive than Iran, which had an element of democracy built into its theocratic system under the reformist president Mohammed Khatami, and more repressive even than fellow-Baathist Syria. Though the proof of Saddam aiding al-Qaeda was very flimsy at best, he was certainly supporting many other Arab terrorist groups. Then there was the issue of Iraq seeking a nuclear bomb, which not only the American intelligence community but other Western intelligence agencies assumed to be the case. This is not a defense of invading Iraq — a war I initially supported — merely an argument of how it was not outright madness to consider such an action in sequence, considering that China and Russia were not yet on the radar screen as great power threats, and 9/11 still overwhelmed the public debate.

History is ironic. Had 9/11 not occurred; had Saddam not acted like a guilty man, trying to convince the world that he had a nuclear program even though he didn’t; had the Bush administration’s guilt over 9/11 not led it to a take-no-chances approach in the Middle East, there likely never would have been an invasion of Iraq in the first place.

History is also governed by odd contingencies. Had several Arab armies not threatened Israel in the spring of 1967 — specifically, had King Hussein of Jordan heeded the many warnings not to open a military front against Israel in the West Bank — Israel would not have come into possession of an Arab population totaling 1.25 million at the time. The Jewish settlers’ movement never would have been born, forever deforming Israeli politics in the process. Egypt would have stayed stuck with ruling Gaza. And later on, Iran’s clerical regime, despite its hatred of Israel and the Jews, would have had much less propaganda material to work with. The results of the 1967 War could well be interpreted as a tragedy for Israel; just as the effect of 9/11 could be interpreted as a tragedy for the United States even beyond the initial, massive loss of life, spawning as it did a long and misconceived occupation of Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous war in Iraq.

The problem is that extremism can be emotionally satisfying, especially after a great event or catastrophe. Moderation does not do well when people are literally dancing in the street in Jerusalem like after the 1967 War, or baying for blood like after 9/11, or likewise after 7 October 2023 in Israel. Calls for regime change in Iraq or flattening Gaza appeal to the emotions and not to the intellect. That is their strength. The nuanced, middle-of-the-road technocrats and area specialists are at their weakest in such moments. The last American president who after a great, foreign outrage pursued limited objectives was the moderate conservative George H. W. Bush. Following Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked aggression of Kuwait in 1990, Bush decided to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule but otherwise leave Saddam in power and not invade Iraq, where America would likely have been bogged down for years to come. By saving his successor, President Bill Clinton, from this fate, Bush allowed Clinton to inherit a largely pacified geopolitical climate that, in turn, allowed Clinton to focus on humanitarian wars-of-choice in the former Yugoslavia. In fact, the relatively benign geopolitical climate bequeathed by the elder Bush was largely responsible for the naïve hubris of much of the American policy elite in the Nineties.

Remember that after the Napoleonic Wars, it was enlightened conservatives such as the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, the British statesman Viscount Castlereagh, and the French statesman Talleyrand who, by not pursuing extreme and vindictive solutions, however emotionally satisfying they would have been at the time, bought Europe almost a century of peace. Ironically, it was the assumption that peace was the natural order of things that led several great European powers to stumble naively into the First World War.

Similarly, the success of limited interventions in Panama in 1989, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Kosovo in 1999 allowed significant sectors of the American elite to believe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the US military could do anything in a world ordered to American goals and interests. It was this delusion that allowed the United States to stumble into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beyond the gargantuan loss of life and treasure that the 9/11 wars cost the United States and the affected local populations, perhaps the greatest catastrophe was America’s grand strategic distraction while Russian and Chinese power grew exponentially. The decade of 9/11 wars was the decade when the Chinese military, especially its navy, unleashed its momentum of growth which continues to this day. Meanwhile, Putin consolidated his power in the Russian military and intelligence services, permitting him to rebuild the armed forces under virtual one-man rule for the first time since Stalin.

Suggested reading

The cost of Russia's collapsing empire

By Robert D. Kaplan

The result of all this has not been pretty. Terrorism has certainly not been eliminated. As Joseph Conrad showed in The Secret Agent (1907), all it takes is an angry, politically motivated individual or two, burrowing in the heart of a city, anonymous to their neighbors, to perpetrate great atrocities. And great power conflict now exists alongside terrorism. Despite the attempts by middle-level powers to navigate between the United States and China and chart a course of their own, the very survival of the global system is now in jeopardy. This is the world that has followed what was believed to have been the triumphant end to the Cold War. And 9/11 was a crucial inflection point in this tragic process: distracting us when we should have been focused on Russia and China. It was indeed a great head fake.

Alas, there is no relief from history. The rise and fall of great powers is never-ending, and policymakers’ tragic mistakes are baked into the process. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was avenged by the US victory over Japan in 1945, the United States is still searching for some sort of meaningful historical reply to 9/11 a quarter-century later. Indeed, our 9/11 wars, particularly in Iraq, only emboldened clerical Iran and enlarged its geopolitical footprint. The current war with Iran is part of the process that began with 9/11. The attacks brought us into a generational military struggle in the Middle East that shows no sign of abatement. And it isn’t only the Middle East’s inherent instability that is the problem, but our very obsession with it. Tragedy, as Shakespeare repeatedly shows, is borne of obsession.

Thus 11 September, 2001, that dire shock whose collision momentum irresistibly knocked us out of reality as we had understood it — perhaps because we had failed to understand it accurately — and into something terrifying, agonizing, unformed. Maybe Pearl Harbor felt like this, at least to isolationist homebodies who ignored developments in Poland and Manchuria; the American Civil War, calamity though it was, had telegraphed itself for years; sad John Quincy Adams intuited its approach though he died before it came.

And then the little child got a stomach ache; the bomb went off; the South seceded and a pair of hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers. At first we were bewildered. We could not understand “why they hate us”. But in its own time, the new reality grew distinct. It was necessarily grimmer than the old, because we were at war with shadowy murderers to whom we had paid too little attention.

If this were a happier essay, I would write that the shock improved our comprehension of the world, but that isn’t so. Not long after we invaded Iraq in 2003, to confiscate imaginary weapons of mass destruction and punish Saddam Hussein for 9/11, with which he had absolutely nothing to do, the Iraqis whom we were impoverishing, torturing and shooting very naturally began killing ever more of us and each other. In 2004, I was in California’s Imperial Valley, a poorish, agricultural, fairly pro-military place, when I heard people say: “We liberated them, but they don’t appreciate it. We’re trying to help them, but they’re mean.” And why had the 9/11 hijackers been mean? Well, “they hated us for our freedoms.”

Suggested reading

The man who made bin Laden

By Tam Hussein

We the Americans (never mind the politicos who got us into this) were the little children who maybe or maybe not should have known better, and 11 September was the ant poison left over from the Cold War. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, that was a vicious atrocity; hence we were right and just to support the Afghan resistance. However, we should not have collaborated with the Saudis on bankrolling, arming and letting loose Islamic extremism. We thought we could stir up the Mujahideen to bleed the “Evil Empire” — which they did — Roger, Wilco, over and out! — but what then? Spent, the Russians withdrew in 1989, while we rested on our laurels.

Right then, when the Afghans were still grateful to Reagan and the CIA, we could have spent a pittance on mosques, hospitals, running water and girls’ schools, and maybe helped to build peace. In Yemen, I have seen schools and clinics labeled “A GIFT FROM THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY”. In 2002, at least (I have not been back since), the Yemenis remembered those gifts. They did not hate the Europeans as they hated us. As for us, buttoning up our wallets, we walked away from the Afghan warlords we had enabled. Once the power vacuum grew literally murderous, the Taliban sprang up, promising to replace robberies, kidnappings and rapes with a literalist Muslim society — an awfully persuasive response to the atheists who had burned women alive and drowned “reactionary feudal elements” in Marxist-Leninist cesspools. What tune were we whistling then? The Afghans had served our turn, so about them we no longer cared a rat’s ass. Now we could crow about a “peace dividend”.

***

Osama bin Laden was a brave and effective Mujahid. Maybe he took our money, or possibly he sucked entirely on Saudiya’s tit. When did leaving him alone with his toys and zealots become imprudent? This ordinary citizen cannot say. But once he commenced uttering explicit threats, meanwhile appearing implicated in terrorist acts, why wasn’t he stopped? Much has been written about the cavalier indifference of the Bush administration, which preferred to look for excuses to “take out” Saddam. The intelligence community itself blamed “the wall” imposed by Congress in the Seventies, after revelations of FBI-CIA collusion in various abuses, including widespread illegal surveillance of American citizens. This partition between spookish entities, we are plausibly told, prevented FBI and CIA cadres from sharing enough information to “connect the dots” and stop the hijackers in time. As the 9/11 report told it, “the wall” now “regulated the manner in which such information could be shared from the intelligence side of the house to the criminal side. These procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied.” So down came “the wall,” and, to the government’s credit, I will say that there have been no 9/11-sized attacks on American soil since 2001.

Of course, thousands of Middle Eastern civilians have been killed to further that outcome. How many died for no good reason? How many were justifiably tortured? (My answer is none, because I disbelieve that torture is ever justified. But in my magisterial objectivity let me now quote a “CIA veteran” from the other side, circa October 2001: “A lot of people are saying we need someone at the agency who can pull fingernails out… The only question then is, do you want to have CIA people in the room?”.) How many suitcases of hundred-dollar bills have passed out of oversight? What cost have we paid in civil liberties to achieve our tenuous tranquility? I remember the so-called PATRIOT Act, one of whose provisions was that librarians must on request turn over a list of books checked out by a specific patron, and then keep secret from him or her that the list has gone to the government. Ah, freedom; oh, democracy! We citizens gave in and gave up; we left PATRIOTic tricks up to our protectors, because by definition they knew best. But did they? Has the War on Terror been making us more or less safe?

This August, I was reporting from Kuwait, where I found significant hatred of America and Israel. Our stupid, vicious bully of a President goes on exacerbating Muslim hostility with his Iran war, which in Kuwait has increased food prices and triggered retaliatory Iranian drone casualties to people and infrastructure. One man told me that while he did not support Iran “even 1%”, he stood against America “more than a thousand percent.” His position requires a fairly lofty will-to-hate. That is why I see another 11 September coming. Maybe this time it will entail swarms of drones. Meanwhile, we go on making enemies and strengthening their accusations against us. I guess that’s the American way.

As the 11 September report admitted: “Coalition warfare also requires coalition policies on what to do with enemy captives. Allegations that the United States,” to take just one instance, “abused prisoners… make it harder” — who would have thought it? — “to build the diplomatic, political and military alliances the government will need.”

The victims of 9/11  were innocent, and their murderers evil. I am grateful to the intelligence community for killing the killers. As for the waterboarders and blithely careless shooters and detonators (doubtless they are still at it in some “black site”), how can they not make war into a perpetual motion machine? We citizens never know what well-intentioned cruelties they are up to today and tomorrow. And how can we imagine what we cannot see? From Yemen I remember rectangular windows and round windows like kaleidoscopes of multicolored glass, and, in the old city of Shibam in Hadramawt, a cluster of gingerbread or halvah blocks very occasionally ornamented with satellite dishes. My friends and neighbors will likely never go to Yemen. If they ever hear that we dropped a Predator drone over there, that will mean as much to them as learning that we did something classified on Saturn.

The US, we are told, has a representative government. Abe Lincoln called himself our servant, as well he might. Although King Donald takes furious exception, our representatives are supposed to be temporary servants. (Just wait until he makes terrorism great again in his illegal third term!) In Congress and the judiciary branch, decisions made on our behalf are least supposed to be public. As for the executive branch, its purpose, wrote John Adams, is to do whatever must be done with secrecy and dispatch. Obviously, when the Twin Towers fell, the American masses remained in and of themselves unqualified to decide how to react. How many could have distinguished Iran from Iraq, or located Yemen on a world map? How many could say that Saddam was or was not a 9/11 kingpin? So the chief executive decided for America: get Iraq! I do wish he had worked with other world leaders to map out al-Qaeda targets, instead of dragooning his “coalition” into an unjust war based on a lie.

As for his war with Afghanistan, was it effective? Did it gain its purpose? With our military out, and the Taliban inevitably as strong or stronger than before — Americans go on disbelieving in their populist appeal — I can’t exactly applaud Bush’s victory. But maybe we killed a lot of bad guys, and not so many good guys as to create more bad guys than before we started. How can I know? Doubtless he’s proud of his accomplishment.

***

Yes, we Americans remain blind to Yemen, though even an ill-educated ISIS cadre may possess an excellent visual understanding of his sector of Target America; thanks to the internet he might even have soared up the 405 past the Getty Center, exiting at Mulholland Drive to ascend the green coastal hills and then roll down across stone canyons and round the moist green hills with the San Fernando Valley below; there are the enemy’s white houses; perhaps he hates the more expensive ones most; let’s say that he sees Los Angeles as we cannot see Hadramawt, but does he see us, the ones whom he would kill? I remember chatting with some Talibs about Americans. That was how I learned that we are all prostitutes, gang bangers, homeless addicts, perverts pornography addicts; because these men had all worked in the United States, and therefore thought that they knew us; of course the only work they could get was pumping gas in the red light district, selling cheap liquor to alcoholics or manning the counters of “adult” bookstores. No wonder they had a bad notion of us. And no wonder, too, that my neighbors can’t tell a Talib from a Shi’ite from a Sikh. (“Come on, Bill; they’re all ragheads!”) What turban-wearers do they ever see on their screens but America-hating evildoers?

Again I propose that we set aside a fraction of what we burn on surveillance and drone strikes, and spend it on what will benefit people, and make them friendlier toward us. After years of careless carnage and brutality, it will take more years to soften their hearts. But why not build schools? If the Islamists blow them up, build them again. The locals will take eventual note of who seems to be addressing their interests. Otherwise we can “shock and awe”, but then what? We believe in our own kindness, so why not convince them of the same?

At home, meanwhile, we are now proving the Talibs right by spreading libels about non-white, non-Christian immigrants. Texas politicos fulminate about clearing their state of Muslims. Well, then, why shouldn’t Muslim countries cleanse themselves of American military bases?

I wish, here, that American Muslim organizations would more clearly distance themselves from extremists. I wish there could be a place (or, as post-9/11 Americans would say, “a safe place”) for Muslims and non-Muslims to meet, possibly to share food or practice calligraphy (illuminated Qurans are some of the most beautiful works I have ever seen). You see, I am a lucky man. I can wish away without responsibilities, and keep blaming others.

***

The UK has endured a heartbreaking number of high- and low-level terrorist attacks. From my possibly outsider perspective, it seems that many Muslim immigrants have integrated into British society sufficiently to live anonymously, but not enough to feel accepted. Perhaps it is like that in the Algerian neighborhoods of France, the petri-dishes of Belgium and Germany.

My conclusion — an impractical one in my country now that the Bigot-in-Chief is deporting people right and left — is that immigration ought to be managed mindfully. It should benefit both the hosts and the new arrivals. In a better America, a municipality with a shortage of workers might bid to take, say, 1,000 people, in exchange for infrastructure grants or tax breaks. If the new arrivals are Muslim, then an organization such as the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (which somebody in Texas has pronounced terrorist; for my part I am fond of it and its members) could arrange a meet-and-greet, perhaps with some church volunteers, to teach the respective parties that in our country women can wear short skirts (or have sex with other women) and that no one should be forced or tricked into consuming pork and alcohol. Whenever I go to a foreign place, I feel more at ease once I have found a big brother or big sister to teach me the local mores and help me make friends. Why wouldn’t a new immigrant feel the same?

More from this author

You can’t steal a Cossack’s soul

By William Vollmann

Meanwhile, one thing I can do right now (as can you) is to reach out to those who seem “other” or even positively alien, before their feelings of rejection render them isolated and estranged. It is the grinding little quotidian incivilities that irritate us into resentment.

Consider the possibilities. We could close our borders, abandon our global capitalist empire to China and Russia and devolve into an autarky. Without cheap imported plastics, rare earths for their cell phones and a committed export market, even the most radical Trumpeter Swans might grow disgruntled then. Or we could isolate and surveil immigrants in hopes of precipitating out the haters. My suspicion is that this treatment would defeat its own purpose. (In 2004, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 70 to 90% of Iraqi detainees “had been arrested by mistake.”) Or, thirdly, we could welcome them into our community and treat them according to the Golden Rule. Which of these would be easiest, cheapest and kindest?

***

The Pentagon Papers proved that American Presidents were willing to escalate an ever-more-obviously unwinnable war in Vietnam to look tough in elections. As for our 9/11 goon squad — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and that bunch — it might despite warnings from the intelligence community have truly believed that Iraq was behind the attacks Or, perhaps, they simply felt impelled to “do something”, with Iraq already on the “to do” list. Who can say? The executive branch’s necessary Adamsonian qualities of secrecy and dispatch protected it from oversight and embarrassment long enough for Bush II to steer the country into disaster and then step down without fear of punishment.

One of the most serious deficiencies of our rotating representative system is that any chief executive’s theory of foreign policy can suddenly be contradicted and undone by his successor. Just consider the sharp transition from Carter to Reagan, or Clinton to Bush II. And so, returning to the matter of the Afghan Mujahideen, who drove out the Soviets in 1989, we can if we like blame Bush I, who as a former CIA supremo should have understood the necessity for maintaining ties with his proxies and their weapons;.ut we could also point a finger at Clinton, in whose time Afghanistan grew more volatile — why didn’t he re-engage with the people who were still our friends? (A year before 9/11, the Talibs were still in my hearing expressing gratitude to America.) Did anybody in Washington care?

It would be lovely had there been some sage at State and Defense to assure us: “We’ve been following this issue ever since we ramped up the Mujahideen in 1979. Here is how events have evolved, and so our current national interest can be served as follows…” But with the Soviets beaten, and still more so with the collapse of their system in 1991-92, Afghanistan became irrelevant, which is another way of saying that our Afghan policy was ultimately incoherent, like our current Venezuela policy (kidnap the head of state, blow up random fishing boats) or our Iran policy (threaten, bomb, declare victory and repeat).

Our Vietnam policy continued until the Pentagon Papers got leaked. Then it finally began to founder. If and when we are ever relieved of President Trump, some new politician can end the Iran war, or else continue it in some way that is the same only different; then my neighbors will be satisfied, and forget all about it. But the Iranians, Turks, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Omanis, Qataris and Emirates will not forget. Someday we’ll wonder why they hate us.

Whenever I see the word “Taliban” I always think of The Tempest. Caliban sings those lines after Stephano gets him drunk and persuades him that exchanging Prospero for another master amounts to liberation. The rhyme may be accidental, but rhymes are rarely innocent once they lodge themselves in the mind. Cognitive psychologists Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh have identified a “rhyme-as-reason” effect: formulations that rhyme are processed more fluently and can consequently acquire a spurious sense of truth or fitness. Sound, in other words, can tempt the mind into looking for a connection in meaning. The resemblance between the words “Caliban” and “Taliban” proves nothing logically. But it suggests a track where the echo may lead.

Shakespeare’s Caliban — savage, slave, poet and dispossessed islander — offers an unsettling way of thinking about the movement that returned to Kabul five years ago, 20 years after America invaded Afghanistan in response to 9/11. At first sight, rhyme apart, the two names belong in radically different registers. The Taliban — literally translated as “students” — emerged around Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, in 1994 from predominantly Pashtun religious students and former mujahideen, many formed in the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan’s Afghan refugee belt. Led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, they exploited popular disgust with the predatory warlords who had divided Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, promising order, Islamic justice and disarmament. With substantial Pakistani assistance they captured Kandahar, swept northwards and took Kabul in 1996, establishing the Islamic Emirate that would shelter Osama bin Laden until its overthrow after 9/11.

Caliban, by contrast, is Shakespeare’s fish-smelling monster who claims the island as his inheritance and succumbs to alcohol in a manner later generations could readily associate with dispossessed peoples in America and Australia. He carries utterly different baggage — indeed, he has been made to carry almost every political burden imaginable. The dramatist Trevor Griffiths, surveying stage interpretations from William Charles Macready’s 1838 revival to the postcolonial productions of the Seventies, finds him successively represented as an “underdeveloped native”, revolutionary republican, Darwinian missing link, black slave and oppressed aboriginal. The retreat of the British Empire transformed the relationship again: Prospero increasingly became the colonizer and Caliban the colonized. Yet Shakespeare scholar Meredith Anne Skura, warning against doctrinaire versions of this reading, insists that the play is too slippery to be reduced to a tract about colonialism. Its very slipperiness is its strength.

Shakespeare does not allow Caliban to remain just a monster. He is certainly capable of monstrosity: his attempted rape of Miranda, with the intention of peopling the island with his own kind, cannot be wished away. Yet while the supposedly civilized characters routinely describe him in terms that diminish his humanity, Caliban himself possesses the most intimate knowledge of the island — its springs, berries, pignuts and hidden resources. A 20th-century Stratford program put the matter bluntly: the island belongs to Caliban “both by inheritance and by right”, because it is he who knows its terrain.

Suggested reading

Inside the new Afghanistan

By David Patrikarakos

His political claim is equally uncompromising: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me.” By 1904 the radical journalist W. T. Stead could hear in those lines “the whole case of the aboriginal against aggressive civilization”, comparing Prospero’s blandishments to those used by Cecil Rhodes’s chartered company in southern Africa. Over the centuries, the analogy has kept on changing because Caliban himself will not settle comfortably into either category, savage or victim.

Nor does his language. Prospero and Miranda teach him words, expecting linguistic instruction to be part of civilization. Caliban discovers that language can also be an instrument of resistance: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” Yet the same creature who curses Prospero as a tyrant hears music where his supposed superiors hear nothing: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” The “savage” is aesthetically receptive to his world in a way that complicates the cultivated ducal exile’s account of him.

Actors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries repeatedly discovered this complexity. One critic insisted that however debased Caliban might be, he possessed “human feelings” and could win an audience’s sympathy. A 1974 production visually divided him between monster and noble savage, while his cry of “freedom” carried more passion than anything else in the performance. Derek Jarman’s wonderfully mannered 1979 film foregrounds this ambiguity through Jack Birkett’s compelling, grotesquely vulnerable Caliban. The repertoire of performances shows how much political meaning can gather around Caliban without being settled. 

The rhyme linking “Caliban” and “Taliban” may offer only an acoustic bridge, but the ambiguity is salient. In 2001 the Taliban were expelled from Kabul with astonishing speed. Mullah Omar fled Kandahar on a motorbike. Osama bin Laden escaped into the mountains of Tora Bora. Into the space they left arrived Prospero’s government, and with it came international recognition, constitutions, elections, NGOs, consultants, development targets and, behind them all, overwhelming American military power.

Then there was Ariel. Shakespeare’s sprite is invisible, airborne and astonishingly mobile; when Prospero wishes, he becomes visible to no one but his master. The American version consisted of satellites, drones, special forces, biometric databases and the communications systems through which an immensely sophisticated external power believed it could see and control Afghanistan. Twenty years before Kabul fell, Western forces possessed virtually every technological advantage imaginable.

What they did not possess was Caliban’s intimate knowledge. The Taliban survived in villages, valleys, madrassas, clan networks and cross-border sanctuaries. They understood relationships that could not easily be entered onto spreadsheets: which district commander had quarreled with which governor, which family grievance might be mobilized, which local notable could be frightened, bought or reconciled, when to fight and when simply to wait. They could be brutally coercive, but they were also indigenous to the political ecology in which they operated.

More from this author

What Ireland teaches us about Iran

By Malise Ruthven

The contrast with America’s Prospero, Ashraf Ghani, was painful. Ghani was among Afghanistan’s most intellectually accomplished citizens: anthropologist, former World Bank official, author of a book on rebuilding failed states. When I met him briefly at a conference in New York, he struck me as one of the most quick-thinking and brilliantly articulate people I had ever encountered. For myself, and many others, he represented the dream that Afghanistan might be reconstructed through expertise, institutions and international capital. Yet the republic over which he presided depended upon foreign money, foreign military power and administrative structures whose authority weakened drastically beyond Kabul.

When the Americans finally left, Ariel vanished with them. Or, to be more precise, Ariel ceased to serve Prospero. Some of his magic changed masters. The Taliban now carry American rifles, fly American helicopters and use Western smartphones.  

Yet another Shakespearean echo resonates here. Prospero’s power is inseparable from his books. Cast out of Milan, he remembers Gonzalo furnishing him from his library with volumes “that I prize above my dukedom”. Caliban has learnt the same lesson from below. Plotting Prospero’s murder, he tells Stephano that the first thing to do is seize the books: “for without them / He’s but a sot, as I am.” Then comes the blunt instruction: “Burn but his books! He had brave utensils — so he calls them — which, when he has a house, he’ll deck withal.” Caliban sees that the “brave utensils” are only the outward trappings of power; the real instrument of Prospero’s rule is the knowledge contained in his books. Destroy its source and the magic collapses.

Afghanistan has produced an ironic reversal. The Taliban have seized much of Prospero’s utensils without burning them: rifles, helicopters, smartphones, ministries, uniforms, even some administrative habits. But they have not accepted the assumptions that were supposed to come bundled with the machinery. Prospero’s library is not ornamental: it is the source of the magic that allows an exiled duke to command the island. For the Taliban, ultimate sovereignty belongs to the Qur’an and to the Sharia drawn from it. The discarded utensils of the American imperium may be useful, even indispensable. But the Taliban remain subordinate to a holy Book whose authority the occupiers never displaced.

Washington assumed that modernization would inexorably produce Westernization: that roads, schools, internet connections and elections would carry liberal values. Instead, the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. Caliban has learned to operate Prospero’s machinery while declining Prospero’s metaphysics.

The image should not be pushed too far. The Qur’an is not a magic manual, and Sharia is not reducible to a single book. The Taliban’s jurisprudence also draws on hadith, Hanafi law, Deobandi scholarship, clerical authority and Afghan custom. But as a Shakespearean echo, the contrast matters. Prospero knows that books make rule possible; the Taliban know that technologies can be borrowed without surrendering the textual authority by which rule is justified.

After the American withdrawal five years ago, the Afghan security forces, expensively trained and equipped, dissolved with extraordinary speed. Provincial capitals fell almost without resistance. Ghani fled Kabul for exile in Dubai. Twenty years after being driven into the wilderness, the supposedly defeated barbarian returned to Prospero’s island.

Yet the moral of The Tempest cannot simply be that Caliban was right all along. The play is more conflicted, and Afghanistan more tragic. The Taliban’s claim to indigenous legitimacy does not absolve them of what they have done with victory. Since 2021, they have progressively excluded Afghan women and girls from secondary and university education. They have sought to erase women from large areas of public life, restricted their employment and curtailed their freedom of movement. Meanwhile, Hazaras and other minorities remain exposed to discrimination and violence. Caliban, once restored to his island, may himself become Prospero.

Nor has restoration resulted in prosperity. A recent Afghanistan Analysts Network report describes an economy that contracted calamitously after the Islamic Emirate returned, followed by a recovery so fragile that GDP per head continues to fall. Behind those figures lie families exhausting one survival mechanism after another: savings disappear, possessions are sold, boys leave school, sons are dispatched on dangerous journeys to Iran. Women and children undertake poorly paid work at home or on the streets; the Taliban restrictions on women’s education and employment have denied them escape routes they might otherwise have used.

The result is a grim inversion of development. Families survive today by consuming tomorrow: schooling, assets and earning capacity are sacrificed to the immediate necessity of food and shelter. Yet the report reveals something that is easily missed from Kabul, Washington or London. Afghans do not simply wait upon the state. The social contract of reciprocal help — relatives lending money, neighbors supporting neighbors, families taking responsibility for one another — still operates, though poverty is placing it under severe strain.

Another recent AAN account catches this side of Afghanistan almost microscopically. A 40-year-old Kabul office worker with a slipped disc cannot afford the operation his surgeon recommends. He moves through several worlds simultaneously. He consults modern doctors and has MRI scans; visits hakims who bleed him and prescribe herbal powders; travels to a shrine in Paktia where a mullah ties a tawiz, an amulet containing sacred writing, to his arm; and finally returns to surgery when the pain becomes intolerable.

The story could be treated as an illustration of medical backwardness, but it is more revealing than that. It shows a society whose institutions overlap rather than replace one another: MRI scanner and shrine, surgeon and hakim, religious belief and modern medicine. Most strikingly, when the operation finally becomes unavoidable, formal provision does not rescue him. A friend unexpectedly repays a debt of 200,000 afghanis, enabling him to meet the hospital costs. After surgery he cannot afford physiotherapy, so another friend abroad sends him exercises to perform at home. Afghanistan is full of noises: some of them cacophonous, some of them sweet. This is what Caliban’s knowledge of the island may mean in less romantic language: knowing not merely mountains and pathways but the dense networks through which people actually survive.

Meanwhile the Emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, governs in Kandahar from something like Prospero’s cell: rarely seen, surrounded by clerical advisers, issuing commands whose authority rests ultimately on sacred texts rather than social or political consent. His Afghanistan is a landlocked “island”. His staff may not be magical, but has the weight of religious legitimacy. The symbolism is not invented by outsiders. At Kandahar’s Khirka Sharif, lines of Qur’anic calligraphy run through the decoration around the shrine that houses the Prophet’s cloak. In April 1996, Mullah Omar carried that cloak onto the roof of the main mosque before thousands of ulema and fighters. The assembled scholars acclaimed him Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful. Sacred text, sacred relic and political sovereignty were made to reinforce one another. A few months later, the Taliban captured Kabul.

Yet while decrees issued from Kandahar have religious authority, they are far from absolute. In reality they encounter the messy density of Afghan society. Families improvise around them; religious practice intersects with custom; money circulates through networks of debt and obligation; people move between official and unofficial institutions according to necessity. The Afghan state may prohibit, prescribe and punish, but it does not exercise a totalitarian type of control. That is another lesson the West was slow to learn: power in Afghanistan has rarely been identical with government. The state may issue decrees, but villages, families, ulema, businessmen, elders and local authorities determine the extent to which they become reality.

More from this author

Hartley, not Orwell, foresaw today's tyranny

By Malise Ruthven

Those networks now extend far beyond Afghanistan. For some young men, the escape route leads westwards through a clandestine economy that has become increasingly sophisticated. An Afghanistan Analysts Network investigation found young Afghans traveling through Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and onwards towards Italy, France, Germany, Ireland — and Britain. Journeys are arranged through professionalized smuggling networks using GPS, encrypted messaging, TikTok advertising and hawala, the informal money-transfer system built around personal knowledge and trust, that functions here as a kind of escrow account. A passage from Turkey to Italy can cost €6,000 to €8,000; some networks have graduated from facilitation to extortion, kidnapping and violence.

For British readers accustomed to encountering Afghans at the other end of this journey — in debates over small boats and “illegal migration” — the connection is worth making. Europe’s harder borders have not abolished the traffic. In parts of the Balkans they have helped turn what was once a loose diasporic network of guides and fixers into a profitable criminal industry. The young man crossing the Channel may be the final visible link in a chain beginning with the economic and political constriction of Taliban Afghanistan.

And this takes us back to the Bard. The deep ambiguities in The Tempest lie not in deciding whether Prospero or Caliban are good or bad guys. They involve the much more difficult questions about who possesses the right to rule the island, who possesses the knowledge required to rule it, and what happens when supposedly superior outsiders mistake magical or technological mastery for political legitimacy.

Skura’s caution is helpful. She argues that the colonial interpretation can itself become reductive when every difference between Shakespeare’s island and colonial history is treated as irrelevant and every contradiction as further evidence of domination. Caliban lacks many of the stereotypical attributes Europeans assigned to New World peoples, and Shakespeare repeatedly complicates any straightforward identification. Skura’s larger point is that the personal and political cannot finally be separated. Prospero comes to the island as the victim of Antonio’s usurpation, but responds by becoming master over Caliban: the exile who has lost his dukedom recreates hierarchy in miniature. Caliban becomes a screen onto which Prospero projects the appetite and disorder he disowns; mastering him allows Prospero to rehearse the recovery of authority.

The Afghan story reflects a similar pattern of replication. To explain why the Taliban defeated the republic is not to endorse their theocracy. Their rootedness may confer a kind of authenticity without conferring virtue. Conversely, the ideals proclaimed by the international intervention — education, women’s rights, constitutional government — do not become worthless because the political structure erected to protect them proved catastrophically fragile. Nor should “indigenous” be confused with humane. The restored Caliban may now be the ruler, but his regime has deliberately deprived half the island’s population of opportunities that might make their lives less desperate.

The rhyme, then, can still trigger meaningful perspectives. Shakespeare refuses the comforting choice between enlightened Prospero and the uncouth monster. The native claimant may indeed be brutal, lustful and dangerous; he may also know his island better than the civilizer who has taken possession of it. The civilizer may bring books, knowledge and extraordinary powers; he may also mistake possession for legitimacy. And books themselves can serve more than one sovereignty.

At the end of The Tempest, Prospero says something Western policy rarely admitted in Afghanistan. Looking at the creature he has repeatedly called slave, monster and devil, he declares: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Even that line refuses a simple interpretation. Does Prospero mean that Caliban belongs to him — the last assertion of colonial possession? Or is he recognizing something of himself in the figure he has spent the play defining as Other? Skura points out that critics have argued both ways: the acknowledgment can be dismissed as another act of appropriation, yet its poetry reaches beyond Prospero’s behavior and momentarily destabilizes the distinction between civilization and darkness.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Afghanistan leaves us with much the same discomfort. The Taliban are not simply medieval intruders who somehow captured a modern state. They arose from Afghan history, from war, religion and social structures — but also from the violence, alliances and unintended consequences of outside intervention. And the Afghanistan they now rule is not simply “Taliban Afghanistan”. Beneath the Emir’s decrees lies a deeper and denser reality: women sewing for pennies, boys abandoning school for work, migrants sending money home, relatives lending to relatives, doctors scanning spines, hakims mixing mountain herbs and mullahs tying amulets beside ancient shrines. Some of its young men are also moving through Balkan forests, climbing fences or waiting for boats across the Channel. It is battered, improvisatory and profoundly local — yet connected to us in ways British politics notices only when those connections wash up on a Kentish beach.

Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban. Ban, ban, Taliban.

The rhyme itself proves nothing. But perhaps that is why it lingers. It connects two figures whom powerful outsiders prefer to define as barbarous, and asks the disturbing question Shakespeare leaves hanging over his enchanted island: whose island was it in the first place — and what does its owner do with it once he gets it back?

Known in Spain as El Pelirrojo (“the Ginger”), Suri was not the sort of ginger jihadi Britain produced, the kind who chased you around Whitechapel distributing leaflets proclaiming “sharia-controlled zones”. Instead, he belonged more in a Joseph Conrad novel. Living a quiet life in Neasden, he fused Islamist ideology, Marxism and modern insurgent tactics into a worldview whose legacy has colored countless later terrorist campaigns. For while bin Laden became famous for the hierarchy of al-Qaeda, Suri quite deliberately, wanted its opposite. As such, modern violent Islamism, with its lone-wolf protagonists and random stabbings, takes from Suri, not bin Laden, even as the Syrian’s legacy continues to loom large.

Born in 1958, into a conservative Aleppan family with a strong Sufi tradition, Suri came of age as Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syrian dictator from 1970, was tightening his grip on power — and crushing the Islamist opposition as he went. As a young man, Suri joined an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Fighting Vanguard, and which concluded that the only way to overthrow the regime was through armed struggle. Trained in explosives, Suri was part of a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the Assad regime, culminating in a massacre of army cadets in 1979.

The confrontation reached its climax in 1982, when the Fighting Vanguard, joined by local supporters, rose against the regime in the western Syrian city of Hama. Hafez’s brother Refaat crushed the rebellion with  brutal force, effectively ending the Muslim Brotherhood as an organized force inside Syria and scattering the survivors of the Fighting Vanguard. Many, including Suri, made their way to Afghanistan to fight the USSR.

Suri found himself in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, alongside Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric often described as the godfather of global jihad. In the rugged mountains abutting Afghanistan, he also met a wealthy Saudi benefactor — Osama bin Laden. According to Suri’s own account, he spent three years training bin Laden and other so-called “Afghan Arabs” before traveling to Madrid, acquiring Spanish nationality by way of marriage, then eventually settling in London in 1994.

In the Nineties, London had become an unlikely haven for Islamists, to the late 20th-century Muslim world what Paris, Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut had been to political dissidents in the 19th. The city’s cosmopolitan character made it the intellectual center of the Anglophone Muslim world, teeming with bookshops, activists, Afghan war veterans and assorted other political exiles — all trying to make sense of their movement’s future.

More from this author

The Syrian super-drug coming for Britain

By Tam Hussein

It was in London, too, that Islamists began developing a bewildering range of political philosophies. At one end stood Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, looking to Britain’s parliamentary democracy for inspiration. At the other were those who dreamed of planting the black flag over 10 Downing Street. It was in this extraordinary milieu that Suri started turning the lessons of Syria and Afghanistan into a theory of global insurgency.

That theory marked a radical departure from the way Islam’s martial tradition had long been understood. Traditionally, anti-colonial figures in places like Algeria had conceived of jihad as a form of resistance. To them, noble means led to noble ends. The rules were simple: the enemy was the Western invader. No women. No children. No priests. Only combatants.

Suri threw those assumptions aside. Instead, he asked a wholly different set of questions, the sort that anarchists and Marxists wrestled with in the last century. Does terror achieve political aims? How should asymmetric warfare be waged? Are Muslim governments legitimate targets, as the Algerian military junta had become for Islamist militants? In many ways, Suri reimagined jihad into what the American writer Robert Taber called “war of the flea”: a strategy of guerrilla warfare, terror and asymmetry designed for the weak against the strong.

For a brief moment, following a series of terror attacks in France, Suri was noticed by MI5. But that was about it. The British security services largely turned a blind eye to Islamist activity throughout the Nineties, partly because they had yet to grasp the problem of blowback. There was also an understanding, as the infamous Abu Hamza of Finsbury Park Mosque once put it, that Islamist dissidents were free to agitate against their own governments so long as they did not bite the hand that fed them.

There was another calculation too. Some of these dissidents might one day overthrow the regimes they opposed, so it was better to keep them close than drive them underground. Indeed, some of the sons and daughters of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood exiles, who themselves grew up in London, are now advising the government in Damascus. Suri, however, always had far more global ambitions. In 1991, he attended the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Sudan, where he mingled with everyone from Hezbollah militants to Afghan mujahideen to Carlos the Jackal. Another attendee recalls meeting Suri there, describing him as intensely angry and confrontational.

Back in London, Suri helped publish the influential Islamist magazine Al-Ansar, publishing letters from leading jihadist figures, including al-Qaeda’s future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Suri also arranged for Western journalists to travel to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden, becoming one of the unlikely intermediaries between Britain’s Islamist exile scene and the emerging leadership of al-Qaeda. Suri was also an advocate of the Taliban, and its leader Mullah Omar, encouraging bin Laden to fall in line and preserve the nascent emirate.

By the late Nineties, Suri had returned to Afghanistan, settling in the outskirts of Kabul. Talha Ahsan, a former jihadist and Dulwich College alumnus who met Suri at this time, remembers him as “one of the smartest people” he had ever encountered. His vision foreshadowed practices that later became commonplace among groups such as ISIS. As Ahsan tells me, Suri believed in recruiting criminals, men with the courage to do things that bourgeois kids like himself could not. It was precisely these sorts of men, alienated from ordinary life, who would later carry out many of the atrocities that scarred Europe during ISIS’s heyday.

Suri’s 1600-page magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which appeared online in 2004, was a hard-nosed articulation of what modern jihad should look like. In it, he anticipated the lone wolf and the autonomous cell, each operating without a rigid hierarchy. The destruction of the Fighting Vanguard had convinced Suri that formal organizations were too easily dismantled. Jihad, then, had to become leaderless, to exist beyond any single group. In modern parlance, he wanted the fight to go viral.

More from this author

Will a new generation of jihadis flock to Somalia?

By Tam Hussein

To that extent, Suri was not opposed to the objectives behind 9/11 — so much as the way al-Qaeda was organized. He well knew that charismatic leaders could be hunted down, leaving the movement in disarray. Bin Laden’s death and the subsequent decline of al-Qaeda, followed years later by ISIS’s struggles after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to prove him right. All the while, Suri argued that jihadist organizations wasted too much energy on theological infighting, instead of concentrating on what he saw as their wider struggle against the West and its allies.

Though Suri remained in the fringes during his lifetime, his ideas nonetheless seeped into the Islamist discourse via the internet and radical preachers. There are doubts as to how far he masterminded the Madrid bombings of 2004 and 7/7, yet both attacks were certainly Suri-esque. “[In my teachings] I have mentioned vital and legitimate targets to be hit in the enemy’s countries,” he remarked later. “Among those targets that I specifically mentioned as examples was the London Underground. [Targeting this] was and still is the aim.”

Beyond outrages like 7/7, Suri’s decentralized approach helped inspire other atrocities: including Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down an American airliner in 2009. The countless stabbings, vehicle attacks and small-scale acts of terror carried out over the next 15 years would become the most enduring and disturbing expressions of Suri’s ideas.

Suri himself spent his last years hiding from the Pakistani authorities, before being captured and transferred to a Syrian prison around 2005. Widely believed to have died there, he disappeared into the same system of repression that had shaped him decades earlier.  But his ideas did not die with him. For if bin Laden is remembered as the face of global jihad, Suri may prove the more consequential figure in the long run, especially as warfare is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unconventional. Besides all that, the Syrian who once edited magazines in London, and took British journalists to meet bin Laden, bequeathed his successors something more durable than an organization. He left behind a method, one that continues to echo wherever individuals kill not in the name of a group — but, in vivid Conradesque fashion, in the name of an idea.

This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colorful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.

It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighborhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.

The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalized four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.

Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.

More from this author

Is Britain heading for civil war?

By Brad Evans

Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.

Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponizing the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.

Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalization, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.

Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.

Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realizing we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalized individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.

In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.

But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalization of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.

The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilizations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonization of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.

We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.

The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.

Suggested reading

A new blasphemy battle is coming

By Liam Duffy

Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponize. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalized. This was spelled out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.

Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organized far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and center. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.

A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I traveled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smoldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.

If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.

You’d think that throwing “Romantic” into this mix of signifiers would reinforce a lot of people’s darkest assumptions — that Trump’s nationalism really is fascist, if not Nazi, and that these young nerds are his ideologists. But they don’t appear this way because, despite their avowed pro-Trump sentiments, their so-called Romanticism does not come across as reactionary in the manner of “Romantic nationalism”, whose consummation was the Nazi bloodbath. Indeed their Romantic sentiments are not devoted to the American nation at all. They don’t express any overt patriotism or nationalism, at least as Afsari relates. They don’t chant “USA! USA!” What they do, most significantly, is yearn.

This is why Afsari calls them Romantics. They are, she writes, “young men looking for meaning, guidance, purpose and use, for a world where they could belong”. It’s clear from her conversations on these themes, with these yearning men, that their yearning is a pretty free-floating thing. It’s not primarily anchored in political or national objects; it’s more likely to be focused on things either more personal or more ethereal. But the yearning itself is primary. Its objects are secondary. It emerges both as a sidenote and as somehow paradigmatic when Afsari quotes one young man at a conservative debate party who stares into space and says: “I just want a girlfriend.” If there’s one thing those wanting young men want more than anything else, it is probably that. A girlfriend.

Aside from (and perhaps in sublimation of) their aching quest for heavenly girlfriends, what these men mainly yearn for, and actively seek out, is serious conversation. They stage debates. They have parties where they talk about philosophy and literature and history. They circulate articles. A striking feature of this intellectual engagement is how non-partisan it is. The articles they circulate are from Leftists as well as conservatives. The parties they hold, Afsari notes, are the most politically ecumenical parties she goes to in Washington. If their deepest impulses were truly political, truly nationalist, you’d expect more line-drawing, more conspiratorial hatred toward their partisan enemies, and fewer invitations for those enemies to join them for drinks and hors d’oeuvres and friendly conversation.

This does suggest a kind of Romanticism, but it’s not the scary, reactionary Romantic dreams of blood and soil that we associate with fascism, and it obviously isn’t the radical Romanticism that links Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution and Karl Marx. It is, instead, the aesthetic and pedagogical Romanticism of Humboldt, Schiller, and Fichte, in which the yearning of young people for purpose and meaning is taken very seriously, but is channeled toward culture instead of politics. With their high-minded parties and cross-partisan guest-lists, Afsari’s conservative subjects resemble those German Romantics, for whom aesthetic culture was more important than politics.

Afsari’s portrait of young conservative men, then, is in fact a damning commentary on the state of American universities. Her account is filled with half-expressed bitterness about university education — both her subjects’ educations and her own. In their free time, her subjects are striving to create an experience of liberal education they were deprived of at university, because their professors had abandoned earnest aesthetic engagement with the texts and subject matter of their disciplines for the power-trip of subverting those things.

More from this author

When Trump fed the press a nothingburger

By Matt Feeney

Afsari had sought a similar experience, also with spotty success. She says that, as an American undergraduate, she “turned away from the tyranny of the present political moment to the timeless classics” — that is, she studied Classics. But this turning-away was hard to achieve, because even her Classics tutors were obsessed with contemporary politics, constantly treating passing political flareups as more important than those so-called classic subjects and texts. She had to go to conservatives such as theologian James Orr, whom she met as an exchange student at Cambridge, and the poet Dana Gioia, to find professors “who took their disciplines seriously on their own terms”. She says: “The few conservative, apolitical or moderate professors I worked with on campus never asked me where I stood, but how I thought.” And Afsari wasn’t even a conservative. Young men like those she writes about — “mocked and marginalized by most of campus culture” — had it even worse than she did.

In this light, their efforts to create a demimonde of cultural discussion in Washington seem not just understandable but admirable. I found it inspiring to read of their earnest reading and meeting and conversing, their attempt to give themselves and each other what their professors had failed to give them. I thought, well, since universities are trying to kill the humanities, maybe the earnest and reverent efforts of guys like these will protect and revive them, keep them breathing until they can be welcomed back into future universities, where their value is recognized.

But I couldn’t help worrying about the other thing, the politics. It’s not just Trump. It’s a more abstract tendency those bookish young men exhibit, in which their admirable willingness to seek and recognize what really is great in art and history is directed back onto the present scene, where it takes the form of a personalized fandom for living figures like, well, Trump. Afsari presents this as an expression of their thwarted Romanticism. Deprived of figures of greatness from culture and history, they have fastened onto Trump as a role model, a hero figure, quasi-historical, quasi-literary.

Even described this way this doesn’t sound like a very healthy adaptation, but I think it’s even more pathological than this suggests. The Romantic disaffection of these young men is real. The people and institutions that were supposed to nourish their souls with great culture really have failed. But the more basic sources of their worship of Donald Trump are pretty banal, not very great at all. One of these sources is the internet. The other is Donald Trump.

The internet creates an illusion that impersonal things are not just personal but somehow intimate. Instead of generalized lore and occasional news stories of nosy people making needless trouble, for example, we now have “Karens” captured on video, their livid faces zoomable, available for exquisitely personal hating. Instead of reading “snippets” and “scraps” of half-reliable “gossip” about celebrities on the personality pages, we now follow those celebrities on Instagram and personally commend their own vacation photos, as if they know us and want to hear what we think. We join thousands of others in networked judgment of them. We find the YouTubers and TikTokers most agreeable to us, and we follow them so that they become more agreeable, their authority a deeper and more intimate part of our own makeup.

This is the psychological model by which otherwise intelligent and discerning young men purportedly seeking higher enlightenment would find themselves hero-worshipping a huckster businessman, a TV personality, a politician, a cranky old man who’s clearly beneath the soul-ideals they’ve been training themselves to seek and appreciate. Their Trump-worship is the opposite of Romantic, a machine output of personal media technology that has insinuated itself into their brains. It’s important to dwell on the historical strangeness and novelty of this form of political engagement. It much more closely resembles the identification that young men have with their famous and infamous online role models — Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate — than it does the more abstract political fandom that Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy inspired in earlier regimes of media technology.

On top of this, Trump’s own way of doing politics, notoriously “transactional” in its use of presidential power, is also transactional in a more personal way. He performs love toward those who show love for him. Trump’s classes of fans — working-class people, rural people, young men — say they feel seen and recognized by him. This is a potent political talent to have, the ability to make people feel as if, from your Olympian remove, you literally see them, recognize them in their specific predicaments and identities. This effect is both enabled and magnified on the internet — just consider Trump’s insulting and preening and perpetually complaining presence on social media, the fact that he can be personally followed and RP’d and @’d, the fact that you can look up the hateful people who attack him, and hate them like he hates them.

It’s surely unhealthy for politicians to be granted the status of Romantic heroes or charismatic best friends or emotional support animals by their supporters, but it’s hard to predict exactly how it will go bad. Since these emotional connections exist only in people’s minds and not in the external world, they’ll most reliably end as other unreal romances end, in disappointment, bitterness, and cynicism.

But the correction to this spiritual overinvestment will likely be more than mere personal disappointment, especially given the roaring and wrecking ambition with which the second Trump Administration has begun. In a provocative 2023 article in National Review, journalist Tanner Greer gives a revisionist take on the lessons of America’s response to 9/11 that casts a worrying light on the present relationship between Trump and the sort of manly yearning expressed by Afsari’s young men. Greer points to a certain complacent and self-serving consensus, among today’s “young Rightists”, about the lessons of America’s foreign-policy overreach after 9/11. This consensus says it was crusading neoconservatism, smuggling the utopian liberalism of Woodrow Wilson into the Pentagon, that led America to embrace the foolish goal of democratizing not just Afghanistan and Iraq but the entire Middle East.

More from this author

What incels get wrong about Fight Club

By Matt Feeney

Greer argues that this view leaves out an important element of American politics after 9/11 — the sudden appeal of a sort of spiritualized manliness, and the belief that this dispensation should have more of a say in how an imperial power such as the US carries itself in the world. As Francis Fukuyama predicted, the End of History had become a time of boredom and suppressed frustration. America’s unchallenged hegemony had rendered manly projects and warlike virtues superfluous and suspicious, which was depriving our natural “spiritedness” its traditional outlet. And then the 9/11 attacks happened, and talk of manly things was suddenly everywhere. I was living in Washington then, working and socializing on the margins of the conservative think tank scene. I watched (sympathetically, I ruefully admit) that scene embrace this new, vitalist understanding of foreign policy — the idea that war wouldn’t just be good for Afghanistan and Iraq; it would be good for us. Greer’s sober lesson is that, since conservatives are once again wanting to see vitalist drives and manly virtues directly guiding the work of the nation, “it is not clear [that] we have learned any lessons from our experience in Iraq after all”.

The second Trump administration is already revealing the wisdom in Greer’s pessimism. As I write, Trump has just announced that America is going to “take a long-term ownership position” on Gaza, as if “Gaza” is a tradeable stock, or a golf course and subdivision complex in Florida. This is obviously unworkable. But triumphalism from Trump’s narrow victory, and the well-founded loathing of the progressive regime he replaced, have instilled in his supporters a sense of historical destiny: what he’s doing will work out, whatever it is, however shallowly and passingly he’s considered the practical questions himself.

This all makes recent days seem eerily like the ecstatic months between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, when the pleasure of those upwelling spirits merged with convictions about the manifest villainy of our adversaries to generate theories of American destiny that were disastrously innocent of practical insight. This is the problem with programs of political action that are grand in scope but based on Romantic feelings. Those feelings are no substitute for knowledge and judgment. At some point, practical payment will come due for those manly feelings and the disruptive ambitions they inspire. That payment is typically steep.

This, ironically, is the historical lesson of Romanticism itself. The idea that the mass spiritual yearning unleashed in modernity could find its object in the imperfect world of real politics has been a repeated recipe for disappointment and disaster. The more real, more enduring and essential achievements of Romanticism have been cultural, which the young Trump supporters whom Mana Asfari got to know seemed halfway to comprehending when she spoke to them last year. They’ve probably forgotten that lesson for now, in this heady moment of brash Trumpian action, but they’ll have occasion to remember it later.

When I first embarked on an academic career 20 years ago, I became friends with Geras after reading his blog, which he launched in 2003. What I most admired about him was his moral clarity and unerring political judgment, as well as his congenital aversion to bullshit. If I was ever uncertain about a political issue, or couldn’t articulate why I felt the way I did about it, Norm’s blog, which he assiduously kept right up until his death from cancer, would invariably supply the answers. The world has changed dramatically since he left it, but his thinking, especially on evil and political atrocity, provides an essential guide for navigating its darker fringes.

Long before BLM and Harvard students were siding with the murderers of partygoers and children in Israel, Geras was contending with the same diseased mindset that saw the September 11 attacks and subsequent jihadi atrocities in the West as a form of retribution for the crimes of imperialism. The dean of this school of casuistry was Noam Chomsky, who is now lauded by some on the Right as a champion of free speech. He responded to 9/11 by changing the subject: he compared it to far worse atrocities that the US had committed, according to his calculus.

“Nothing,” Chomsky remarked, “can justify crimes such as those of September 11. But we can think of the United States as an ‘innocent victim’ only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.” Howard Zinn similarly argued that 9/11 served as a reminder of “the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American military action — in Vietnam, in Latin America, in Iraq”. And Tariq Ali, another prominent figure on the Left, was even more forthright: 9/11 was first and foremost an act of anti-colonial resistance. “The subjects of the Empire had struck back,” he declared.

Christopher Hitchens famously and acrimoniously broke with the Left over 9/11. But Geras remained within the fold, forensically criticising its worst excesses in the hope that he could salvage what honour it still had. He wrote scathingly of the callousness of those comrades whose grudging acknowledgment of the horror of 9/11 contrasted starkly with their extravagant efforts to “contextualise” it. “Half the world stood aghast,” he observed, “but in no time at all there was a great chorus of Left and liberal opinion… saying, ‘Yes, terrible, appalling, but…’; the ‘but’ following so close upon the ‘yes’ as to squeeze out any adequate registration of either the significance or the horror of what occurred.”

Suggested reading

Do Israel's critics understand Evil?

By Jacob Howland

Geras was no less scathing about the unwarranted slippage inherent in the rhetoric of the apologists. “For it was not American imperialism or the US government that they struck at,” he noted, referring to al-Qaeda. “It was a large number of (mostly) American citizens.” He continued: “It is no more a response to imperialism and its effects to massacre thousands of civilians at random, than it would be a response to bad conditions in some inner-city for a person aggrieved about them to rape the child of a wealthy family or kill a few passers-by.”

I don’t need to wonder what Geras, who identified as a “non-Jewish Jew” and had a deep concern for the future of his people, would have made of Hamas’s recent war crimes against thousands of innocents in Israel. He would have vehemently repudiated them, along with any efforts to minimise or excuse the horror that was inflicted on the victims and their families. While he opposed the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he was categorical that nothing justified the indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians. And he would have been outraged by Hamas’s barbarism, knowing full well of the group’s genocidal ambition to destroy Jews.

But, especially, he would have been taken aback by the ghoulish howls of support emitted by some progressives in the West. Najma Sharif, who describes herself as “a Somali-American writer based in the digital world”, tweeted: “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” Zareena Grewal, an anthropologist at Yale University, proclaimed on the same platform: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” She was criticising the idea that Israeli civilians are entitled to non-combatant immunity from murderous violence. Among this contingent, not even the most perfunctory throat-clearing was considered necessary. Indeed, to read their pronouncements, you wouldn’t have had the slightest idea that a terrible and monumental crime had been committed against innocent Israelis, because they made no reference to it.

It is an irony that many of those who gloried in Hamas’s attack on Israel see themselves as anti-racists whose goal is to create a more just and equitable world. And it is a further irony that many of them have condemned and sought to cancel their political adversaries for using speech that was somehow “violent”, even when it incontrovertibly wasn’t. Perhaps these people are unaware of this and of Hamas’s explicit and genocidal racism towards Jews, or perhaps they just don’t care. But their indifference to the systematic slaughter of innocents by Hamas suggests a grotesque devaluation of human life that borders on evil.

Geras knew all about evil and the all-too-human capacity for it. Evil, as he saw it, wasn’t some metaphysical entity that mysteriously ebbs and flows into the world, but is something that men and women do to one another. Like Dostoyevsky and Conrad, whom he had closely read, Geras was acutely alive to the darker emotional forces that animate not a few of us: resentment, greed, spite and the horrible allure of bloody vengeance and violence. It is hard to imagine how he could not have been so attuned, having spent so much of his academic career thinking and writing about the Holocaust and crimes against humanity.

Although he saw much of value in Hannah Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil”, he was aware of its explanatory limits, because it failed to capture the sheer bestiality and sadism that marked so much of the killing in the Holocaust. Arendt’s emphasis on the “social and administrative structures” that facilitated the industrial slaughter of the Jews, he wrote, “gives insufficient weight to — where it does not altogether deny — those human-natural impulses of cruelty, the actual enjoyment of the misfortunes of others, regularly unleashed when the usual restraining circumstances allow them to be”. Anyone who has followed the reporting and testimony coming out of Israel over the last few days will be hard-pressed not to use the word “evil” in trying to make sense of the horror that was inflicted there. But it’s obviously not the kind of evil that Arendt had in mind when she described Adolf Eichmann as “neither perverted nor sadistic…[but] terribly and terrifyingly normal”.

From an ethical perspective, anyone who goes door to door machine-gunning defenceless civilians, including babies, and kidnapping women and children, forgoes that descriptor. What they emphatically are not, as Arendt had described Eichmann, is “thoughtless” with an “inability to think”. On the contrary, these Hamas murderers can and did think. And they had no doubt spent a lot of time wolfishly fantasising about how they would inflict maximum degradation on Jews. And they would have been able to entertain these demonic thoughts because they were raised in a culture that is saturated in a genocidal hatred toward Jews.

More from this author

The seductive horror of extremist violence

By Simon Cottee

Despite this, Western liberals tend to be uncomfortable using the term evil, unless they’re applying it to the historical record and foreign policies of their own governments. Geras was a trenchant critic of that schizoid impulse — not because he thought Western societies were above criticism or had not done terrible things in the past, but because he found it dangerously reductive. Not all the ills of the world stem from the West, he argued, just as not all resistance to the West is driven by a humanistic impulse to change it for the better. Geras warned that Islamist fanatics had no such impulses and that, in an Islamist utopia, progressive liberals would be the first to be cleansed from its dominion. Unlike so many of his colleagues on the Left, he had no illusions about the purity or sanity of the underdog.

At the same time, he never lost hope in the idea of a better social order free of the familiar horrors of human history, although he was always more of a “pessimism-of-the-intellect” type himself. He worried that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would worsen, and that, as he put it, “it may yet turn into a further great catastrophe for the Jews, one way or another”. Optimism is certainly hard to cling to these days, but in a political climate poisoned by tribal division and creeping nihilism masked as progressive activism, Geras’s voice — sane, humanistic and proportionate — is now more urgent that ever.

James Frey, author of the bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces, had been exposed as a fraud. Oprah Winfrey, formerly his biggest champion, was about to confront him live on national television. And she was pissed.

“I’ve struggled with the idea of it,” Frey said, in response to a question about the famous and then-allegedly fallacious scene in his book in which he receives a root canal without anaesthesia. Oprah snapped. “No,” she said, icily. “Not the idea of it. The lie of it.”

Frey, whose book was published in 2003, was the most notorious literary fabulist of the moment, but hardly the only one. The Noughties were rife with fabricators. There was Margaret Seltzer, who had lied about being a biracial gang member in South Central Los Angeles. There was J.T. Leroy, a trans sex worker, drug addict, and author of semi-autobiographical novels — who turned out to be the imaginary alter-ego of a middle-aged woman named Laura Albert. There was Herman Rosenblat, whose Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence was cancelled when it turned out that, though his story of surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp was true, the improbable tale of the little girl who saved his life by throwing apples over the camp’s barbed wire fence, and later became his wife, was not.

All very different narratives, and yet, with a common thread — one that at the time spurred a fiery debate about memoir as a genre, and the proliferation therein of what could only be described as trauma porn.

Memoir offers all the enticing horror of sexual abuse, of graphic violence, of watching a man strapped down and brutalised by a dentist — while offering the upright reader plausible deniability. He consumes these books not because he finds such things titillating but because he cares. Audiences want to read about pain and suffering, abuse and exploitation; you were supposed to feel bad for the people who had written these books, while also feeling good about how bad you felt.

More from this author

The Little Mermaid is Disney propaganda

By Kat Rosenfield

When Oprah angrily told James Frey that he had “betrayed millions of readers”, it was this crucial contract he was accused of violating. Because if these stories weren’t true, then the people who were thrilled by them weren’t empaths, but voyeurs.

Today, the collective horror at Frey’s deception feels like the product of a more innocent time, particularly when compared with the muted response to last week’s unmasking of his contemporary equivalent. Comedian and television personality Hasan Minhaj, an alumnus of The Daily Show, built his career on stories of the persecution he had faced as an Indian, Muslim son of immigrants in a post-9/11 America. But as outlined in a devastating report by New Yorker writer Clare Malone, his most popular material contained key omissions and barefaced lies.

The FBI informant who infiltrated Minhaj’s Muslim community and then reported his mosque to the authorities? Minhaj never met him. The hospitalisation of Minhaj’s daughter after someone mailed him an envelope full of a white mystery powder that could have been anthrax? Never happened. And the high school ex-girlfriend who accepted Minhaj’s invitation to prom, only to jilt him on her doorstep for racist reasons while her new (white) date slipped a corsage on her wrist? She had actually turned down Minhaj several days earlier, and this doorstep moment — upon which Minhaj more or less built his career — was a complete fabrication.

Much like Frey, Minhaj’s popularity centred on his suffering. His work was understood to express the crude, unvarnished and sometimes darkly funny truth of what it is like to be a brown-skinned man in a racist America: white liberal audiences treated him as a sort of mascot for the oppressed, while the culturati lauded him for speaking truth to power. Here, as Slate writer Nitish Pahwa puts it, was “an Indian Muslim, hosting his own show, taking the country to task on his terms, terms that had long been absent from the white man–dominated industries of stand-up comedy and late-night TV”.

But things are a little more complicated when the fabricator is telling tales on the stage rather than the page. It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this — even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves. An essay from 2017 by screenwriter and stand-up David Misch, which tackles this very question, includes a prescient little frisson:

“I agree that the idea of authenticity in a stand-up’s persona is bullshit, but subject matter is a different matter — specifically, when a comedian moves from personal observations to cultural critiques. Wouldn’t we feel betrayed if we found out that the political routines of … Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers (now) didn’t reflect their beliefs? Being Muslim-American is central to Hasan Minaj’s identity as a stand-up — wouldn’t we feel differently about him if it turned out he was Baptist?”

Misch presents this as a rhetorical question, and it is — but only because of the kind of comedian Minhaj is, which is to say, the kind who is not particularly funny. Consider the top YouTube result from his Netflix special, Homecoming King, in which he talks about the harassment his family endured after 9/11. There are ripples of laughter here and there, but it’s only when he stops joking and starts preaching — “I have the audacity of equality!” he says — that the audience explodes like they’re at a tent revival.

Of course, this is as intended. Minhaj isn’t a make-you-laugh-til-your-face-hurts comedian; he’s a Daily Show guy, a pundit with a slightly-better-than-average sense of humour, but one that is smug rather than silly. His audience isn’t there to laugh so much as enjoy the sensation of moral authority with a wink and a titter. And while Minhaj’s material works well enough on television, onstage it translates to something that is less stand-up comedy and more performance memoir.

Suggested reading

Why can't the Left take a joke?

By Kathleen Stock

Here, Minhaj is following in the footsteps of performers such as Hari Kondabolu, John Oliver, Seth Myers, and, of course, Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special Nanette was more trauma porn that explicitly scolded its audience for showing up expecting to laugh. Critics at the time suggested that Gadsby had broken some final frontier, effectively severing the connection between comedy and jokes. Maybe laughter had had its moment; maybe what we needed from comedians now was some moral instruction in what isn’t funny. Maybe what we needed was to feel bad — and to feel good about how bad we felt.

Under this new contract, drawn up amid the creeping identitarianism of Trump-era art, it is not hard to see why someone like Minhaj might fall into the trap of not just monetising his trauma, but fabricating it. It is what Jay Caspian Kang called “oppression fantasy”, writing that Minhaj’s fakery represents “another example of how oppression stories — in this case fabricated oppression porn — gets leveraged by upwardly mobile immigrants to mostly advance their careers”.

It is also a familiar dynamic to anyone who remembers the memoir hoaxes of 20 years ago; the type of audience who flocks to see Minhaj today is the same one that made James Frey a bestseller. There is nothing that white educated liberals love more than to slum it in a voyeuristic narrative of someone else’s suffering, all while congratulating themselves on being enlightened enough to appreciate it for the art it is. Inject a bit of racial guilt into the mix, and you’ll dine out for the rest of your life courtesy of the New Yorker tote bag class — at least until one of said magazine’s investigative reporters finds out you’re full of shit.

But today’s trauma merchants are ultimately better off than the hoax memoirists. The days in which audiences responded to lies like this with a sense of outrage and betrayal are over; if anything, the anger today is reserved for the person who interrupts a comfortable narrative with a bunch of pesky facts. Consider what happens, inevitably, whenever some bias-stroking outrage is exposed as a fraud — whether it’s Jussie Smollett, or kids identifying as cats, or a guy allegedly shrieking the N-word at a crowded sporting event. Instead of revising our priors, or even being relieved, we look for ways in which being wrong only goes to show how right we were. So, this story wasn’t true? Ah, well: this country is so racist, or sexist, or full of sexually depraved weirdos who want to secretly turn every kid into a trans-cat, that it could have been true, and that’s just as bad.

Suggested reading

Why comedians stopped being funny

By Dorian Lynskey

Or, as Hasan Minhaj might put it, it doesn’t matter if the story is fake when it is “emotionally true” — which is to say, when it feels like something that could have happened. Needless to say, some people object to this, not least the woman who politely declined that prom invitation as a teenager: she and her family have been receiving death threats for years thanks to Minhaj’s fabrications, a fact about which the comedian is decidedly cavalier. Maybe this girl didn’t do what he described, he says, and maybe what he described wasn’t done to him — but it had certainly happened sometime, to someone, somewhere: “There are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience.”

No doubt this is true, and not just of kids like Minhaj; when I was 17, a more popular boy took me out on a date, then dropped me back at my house several hours later with the dire warning that I couldn’t tell anyone that we were seeing each other. He simply couldn’t risk the humiliation of his friends knowing he was interested in someone like me. His reasons for this had nothing to do with race and everything to do with high-school social dynamics; if I were telling this story as part of a stand-up routine, perhaps I would have to find a way to make him an antisemite.

But despite the fact that the prom story is emotionally resonant with many a teenage experience, there is still something weird — even, dare I say, appropriative — about claiming to have been a victim of something that didn’t happen, let alone making a living off it. On this front, Minhaj has less in common with the comedian who embellishes a wacky story for laughs, and more in common with the TikToker who scammed her followers out of thousands of dollars to treat a cancer she didn’t have. Minhaj has been dining out for years on that doorstep moment. He published it as an essay in Vanity Fair. He’s spoken about it countless times with reporters, never presenting it as anything but a first-person experience. And while it has become a fixture of his comedy over the years, when Minhaj first debuted this material, it wasn’t actually in a stand-up routine, but at a storytelling competition called The Moth.

It is an interesting institution, The Moth: a sort of open-mic night for anecdotes, a performance memoir showcase. It has just one rule: the story you tell on its stage has to be true.

Put to one side the fact that the impetus for al-Qaeda terrorism was not “our democracy” but America’s liberal hegemony and military interventionism abroad — the exaggerations in this dramatic piece of historical revisionism echoed a speech Biden had made in Philadelphia mere days earlier. Speaking in an eerie set-up at Independence Hall, Biden had warned against the threat of a different terror, closer to home — from “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”, who “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”. According to him, they promote “political violence” and “undermine democracy itself”.

After 21 years, it appears we have gone full circle: the War on Terror’s “you are either with us or against us” mentality has come home. Where George W. Bush used American exceptionalism as a basis for militarism and political absolutism, Biden has leveraged democratic exceptionalism — weaponising the mythos of democracy for partisan gains.

Seen together, Biden’s speeches highlight the often-overlooked synergy between domestic and foreign policy: his rhetoric depicts his administration’s war against the amorphous spectre of  “MAGA fascism” at home and its stated goal of militarily defeating autocracies abroad as two sides of the same coin. These speeches could ensnare sceptics on all sides of the spectrum, enmeshing them in false equivalencies. Deny the Establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy and risk being brandished as one of the “extremists” at home; defend America’s civil liberties and due process toward January 6 rioters, and you are in league with Vladimir Putin. This is troubling for any critic of US policy in Ukraine or Taiwan right now, especially the voices of anti-interventionism on the Left. Such voices are already under pressure to conform to the party line and self-censor their restrained positions for fear of being associated with Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Admittedly, the military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year was a breath of fresh air. But the Biden administration still exhibits decidedly hawkish attitudes, as showcased by the Alaska summit, the rhetoric around toppling Putin, and the recent security pledge to Taiwan. And to justify them, it spins an ideological narrative, centred on the existential clash between democracies and autocracies. What’s more, this invented Manichaeanism can be used to browbeat political opponents at any time. Put simply, in addition to creating a moralistic concept of statecraft to use abroad, this existential framework is used to silence those critical of American military interventionism and liberal hegemony, such as the foreign policy realists and restrainer critics of the Blob in Washington.

Suggested reading

Am I really a threat to democracy?

By Mary Harrington

This form of language game is designed to coerce critics into feigned obeisance, valorise the liberal hawks as the crux of the Democratic party, and undermine the remnants of the Anti-War Movement on the Left. It is perhaps ironic — if always inevitable — that the global Democracy Crusade would come home to haunt Americans. The abstract and ominous nature of “authoritarianism” is a convenient way to dismiss Trump supporters en masse as sympathisers with global tyranny — and to disingenuously equate realism and restraint with Trumpism.

This is an absurd equation. The Trump administration housed many globalists such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who used their tenure to advocate for “maximum pressure” against Iran, call for regime change in Venezuela, and facilitate the bombing of Syria. Moreover, criticism of US liberal imperium, and the “liberal international order” it has masterminded, comes from both sides of the political divide; it is neither partisan nor the exclusive domain of populists. While the logic of democratic exceptionalism has been routinely — if selectively — applied to justify liberal interventionism abroad, this agenda has an atrocious track record. It should remain open to criticism from all quarters, particularly in a democratic republic.

After all, the conventional wisdom underpinning the promotion of democracy as a foreign policy objective has now been seriously challenged. Such policies have routinely failed, especially because they tend to focus on the performative and procedural elements of democracy, rather than strengthening effective governance — an approach that masks profound systemic dysfunction. America’s failed policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti are perhaps the most notable examples, but so too are challenges in West Africa, where the US has been compelled to devise a new approach. The failure to prevent an anti-democratic coup in Myanmar, meanwhile, underscores the limitations of US geopolitical reach.

In a different era — at the height of the Cold War, perhaps — Biden’s Manichaean rhetoric might have been a rallying cry for many nations in the developed and developing world. But today’s era is multipolar. Nations, especially in the Global South, are unshackled from the ideological straitjacket of the Cold War and its perception of shared global threats; they are driven instead by the pursuit of economic prosperity and recovering their regional and civilisational strength. America’s democracy agenda rings hollow.

Suggested reading

There is no "Biden Doctrine"

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The same is true at home. American public opinion has grown weary of the activist and internationalist posture of US foreign policy, embodied by decades of endless wars. Democracy promotion is no longer seen as an effective way to advance core US geopolitical interests. The US ruling class has therefore sought to adapt and reframe America’s global adventures and interventionism in terms of a domestic threat that would presumably be more easily marketable to the American public.

This logic has now become the operating principle behind what may be called the Biden Doctrine, which is expected to be unveiled in the administration’s forthcoming National Security Strategy. It holds that the fight for democracy is incessant, totalising, and all-encompassing. That neutralising the alleged threat of fascism at home, personified by MAGA and former president Trump, is part of a larger apocalyptic struggle to defend the liberal international order abroad.

The Biden Doctrine elevates “democratic exceptionalism” as the ideal trope with which to advance its foreign and domestic agenda, while using it as political mallet to normalise any efforts to silence, cancel, and discredit dissent. The latter has long historical precedents with the US ruling class in the 20th century: it echoes the US. establishment’s support for anti-German hysteria in the First World War, the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War, and the persecution of American socialists during the McCarthy era.

The underlying conviction is that in the increasingly polarised America, securitisation and weaponisation of threat, through its identification with domestic enemies, is a viable galvanising force — one that justifies and maintains the imperial controls of the state. In this neo-Jacobin milieu, democratism offers a crucible with which to meld and cohere domestic preferences with foreign ambitions.

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden stressed the importance of building an “alliance of values” based on democratic principles. After two years on the job, his goal of democratic resurgence has become double-edged: to defeat political opponents at home and confront hegemonic challengers abroad. Biden might consider this double-edged agenda “a battle for the soul” of the United States and the “challenge of our time”. But this existential, ideologically-charged language only underscores the need for a sober assessment of this worldview — particularly at a time when America’s credibility as a model democracy is in doubt and its ability to lead remains uncertain.

After all, what else were they going to do?

The conflict in Eastern Europe has thrown the inherent tensions of digital culture into sharp relief. If the war itself is unfolding too slowly, a public hungry for content will get their fix in other ways, filling the void with viral videos and Ukrainian flag emojis, finger-wagging everyone else for being insufficiently engaged, or sombre, or whatever. We may not be on the ground in Ukraine, but we’re on the front lines of the accessory culture war, fighting our common enemy with the only weapon we’ve got: cancellation.

Russian films have been barred from festivals in Glasgow and Toronto, while Hollywood films from Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros are skipping their Russian release. London’s Royal Opera House has cancelled the Bolshoi Ballet. Russian athletes (and in some cases, those from neighbouring country and ally Belarus) have been suspended from competition by FIFA, the International Skating Union, and the Paralympics. In Milan, a course on Dostoevsky — which perhaps didn’t mention the fact that he spent multiple years in exile for defying the Russian state — was cancelled (albeit reinstated after backlash).

And then there’s the vodka, that famous export now the subject of performative destruction. In American liquor stores and supermarkets, Russian vodka has been removed from displays; in a viral Twitter post, a bartender at a ski resort in Vermont poured a bottle of Stoli down the drain.

Even as reasonable voices beg the general public to maintain a sense of perspective — and as countless articles seek to remind us, “the war is not about you” — the impulse is nevertheless easy to understand. No longer is politics a topic thought to be best avoided in public; these days, your good standing in polite society (not to mention the continued operation of your business) requires your vocal participation in the cause du jour. One is reminded of that moment in mid-2020 when every corporation suddenly felt compelled to announce its support of Black Lives Matter in the most strident possible terms. Neutrality was complicity; silence was violence. Somewhere along the way, we decided that we need to know who our neighbours vote for. We need to know if the local hardware store supports the LGBT community. We need to know Doritos’ deep thoughts about racism and police brutality. We need, we insist, to know how the International Cat Federation feels about Vladimir Putin.

Suggested reading

Ukraine is winning the online war

By David Patrikarakos

Because in spite of everything, we remain convinced that this is, somehow, all about us: our sense that we are owed complete political solidarity by the brands we consume, our histrionic sense of betrayal when we don’t get it. The ski resort bartender pouring his Stoli down the drain would probably like to think of himself as a resistance hero; really, he’s more akin to the angry Republicans who set their Nikes on fire when the company hired Colin Kaepernick as a spokesman.

Now, as in 2020, people generally mean well — even if what they’re doing ranges from empty gestures to gross absurdities. As those in charge strategise support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia in the hopes of achieving submission through economic starvation, culture warriors hope that barring Russian athletes and artists from the global stage is an effective secondary strategy. One such argument in The Atlantic suggested that depriving ordinary Russian citizens of the pleasures of seeing their country compete in the Olympics or enjoying the latest MCU blockbuster might provoke them to turn on their leaders — not to mention how much it’ll piss Putin off. (“The decisions to strip him both of his titles as honorary president and ambassador of the International Judo Federation and of his honorary black belt in tae kwon do are particularly personal blows”.)

That’s the optimistic take, of course; the cynical one is to note how very, very reminiscent this argument is of that moment when Left-wing commentators thought they were really sticking it to Donald Trump by making fun of the size of his hands and referring to him as “Drumpf”. You know, right before he was elected the President of the United States.

And even if the symbolic resistance of cultural boycotts is an important piece of the puzzle, then those measures still need to make sense — and here one must note, setting aside the questionable impact of one man in Vermont trashing one bottle of spirits that was already bought and paid for, that Stoli vodka is not actually produced in Russia. The Stoli company is Latvian and owned by the Luxembourg-based SPI beverage group.

Suggested reading

Sanctions won't save Ukraine

By Lee Jones

This absurdity reveals the dark side of the current fever: adopting a hostile stance toward anything that sounds Russian is undergirded by a potent mix of ignorance and misdirected aggression that ought not to be indulged. It’s the sort of blunt impulse that led to the harassment of blameless, turban-wearing American Sikhs in the wake of 9/11, a spasm of bigotry against anything that seemed Muslim which we now look back at with shame and chagrin. Even as much remains uncertain, we know that this with-us-or-against-us line of thinking rarely leads anywhere good.

Well-intended or not, imposing guilt by association on ordinary Russians — the classical musicians, the cat owners, the athletes — in the hopes of inspiring mass resistance against Putin is absurd. Demanding that Russian expats denounce their homeland contains ugly shades of McCarthyism (not to mention that speaking out may put their families at risk). And in the case of Russians now trapped in their country, it’s not just morally questionable but unlikely to be effective, given the country’s merciless crackdown on dissenters against the war. It’s easy for westerners to forget that our willingness to protest our government goes hand in hand with the guaranteed freedom to do so; if speaking up came at serious personal risk, many of us would choose to keep quiet (and keep our skulls intact).

It’s also a betrayal of an important tradition, one in which art, sport, and culture are supposed to sustain our sense of shared humanity in times of tragedy, including war. There’s a reason why the famous Christmas ceasefire during World War I was marked by football matches and music — or why, when the Cold War between the then-USSR and the US finally ended, it was thanks in part to the effects of cultural exchange and engagement between the two nations. Of the many videos to emerge from Ukraine in the past week, some of the more hopeful ones show Russian prisoners being offered bread, tea, and a chance to call their parents.

Yes, these isolated feel-good stories pale in comparison to the wide-ranging and countless horrors of war, but the sentiment they contain is anything but cheap: embedded in each of these moments is a broader perspective, the understanding that we all still have to share a planet when the fighting is done. To isolate, alienate, and demonise those on the other side may satisfy one’s sense of purpose in the moment, but it also creates rifts with our neighbours that are not easily fixed.

More from this author

How cancel culture hurts the Left

By Kat Rosenfield

Meanwhile, Americans of all people should understand that the citizens of a country cannot be expected to shoulder the guilt of their president’s misdeeds. The character of an entire people is not defined by the worst whims of its most authoritarian lunatic. But here, too, our perspective is skewed: we are too used to being able to criticise, insult and openly rail against our political leaders. We are too used to the meaningless performative bluster of American politics. We are, in short, so used to culture wars that we’ve forgotten that real wars have different stakes and are not won by rhetoric — and that if the US decided to truly involve itself in this conflict, a victory would not be measured by how much we managed to hurt Putin’s feelings.

In the meantime, punishing a bunch of figure skaters, cats, filmmakers, and the corpse of Fyodor Dostoevsky for Vladimir Putin’s warmongering is the emptiest of endeavours, like painting half your face blue and booing your favourite football team’s rivals from the safety of your living room. But nobody will emerge at the end of this conflict to hand out awards for team spirit; nobody will congratulate you for all the vodka you didn’t drink. Nobody will ask you, “What did you do during the war?”, when the war had nothing to do with you. And when someone says, “We cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing”, the truth is: yes, you can. Better a witness than a self-involved keyboard warrior. Better to watch than turn away.

MTV was still a thing back then. It was the twilight era of appointment TV viewing. People would say to themselves, “I am going to turn on my television and watch rock videos for an hour”, and proceed to do so. And MTV was central to the tone and feel of the early 1990s. Until the 1991 arrival of grunge, the world felt a bit as though culture had exhausted itself, and it was never again going to be possible for an era to feel like an era. The Eighties were the last era we were ever going to get. And then kaboom! The Nineties happened and it was like a drug kicking in.

Around 7pm two friends and I showed up at Sony studios over on the west side of Midtown to learn we would be in the fourth row directly in front of Kurt Cobain. We sat down and quickly noticed that there were five Sony staffers walking through the audience with men’s XXL black T-shirts: if you were wearing anything with visible branding on it, you had to wear one — but more terrifyingly, if they thought your outfit was too unhip, you had to wear one, too. Imagine the stress inside everybody’s heads as the shirt bearers drew nearer. Some guy with a tie had to wear one (I mean, what was he thinking?) but when they came to our row, we were declared hip enough and were spared The Shirt. Phew.

The room was tense and bristled with the sense of energy that comes from the realisation that you may well be attending your generation’s Woodstock. Everyone there knew they were going to see something that would and could never happen again. And by then pretty much everyone knew of Cobain’s drug issues and the discomfort he experienced being in any form of limelight. There was a very clear sense that Cobain was reaching a tipping point, and it couldn’t be good.

Suggested reading

Nirvana's teen spirit will never get old

By Dorian Lynskey

Cobain walked onstage in a peak-grunge sage green mohair-Lycra cardigan, old jeans and a T-shirt. As he and the other musicians came on, we could tell something was off. The vibe was like having friends arrive at your front door for dinner having had a screaming match in their car a minute before. There were no smiles or hellos, just the music. It was kind of brutal but it was totally on brand; if Cobain had smiled and done hellos, it probably would have wrecked the experience. Are there any sullen stars these days? I doubt it. Our culture of likes and likability is about as far away from the early 1990s as is possible.

For me the highlight was when the band played David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World. Somewhere in the tenth to fifteenth seconds, my brain realised: Oh my God, they’re playing The Man Who Sold the World. I thought I was the only person on earth who loved that song! The evening’s final song, Where Did You Sleep Last Night was astonishing in a gut punch way — and then the show was over. Boom. Of course, everyone wanted an encore, but I could see Cobain near the studio’s exit door talking, in what appeared to be a very blunt manner, with MTV’s Director, and the moment I saw Cobain walk out that door, any possibility of an encore left with him.

It was the opposite of right now, when everything drags on forever. Marshall McLuhan said that when one medium makes another obsolete, it frees up that previous medium to become an art form — which is what happened with the internet eclipsing TV. Around the early 2000s you had the Sopranos and other long-form TV programming emerge, shows which could genuinely be considered art. Recently there’s a new Soprano’s show based on Tony Soprano’s early life, The Many Saints of Newark. If they announced that next month the Muppets were doing a Soprano’s variant, I wouldn’t be surprised. As I said, everything goes on forever these days, sprawling out into seasons of episodes and spawning relentless new iterations. Kurt knew how to make an exit.

But in October of 2019 the sage green cardigan worn by Kurt Cobain during the taping of Nirvana Unplugged — unwashed since the taping, missing one button and sporting two cigarette burns — sold in New York at Julien’s Auctions for $334,000. In June of 2020, the left-handed 1959 Martin D-18E used by Cobain on Unplugged sold at a Beverly Hills Julien’s auction for over $6,010,000.

Suggested reading

We can't be Friends any more

By Mary Harrington

This conclusion is simultaneously thrilling, horrifying and validating. If the 1990s were about anything, they were about “not selling out”. Nobody ever really knew what selling out actually meant, but basically, if you were successful, you were a sellout. Don’t sell out man. That band sold out years ago. So-and-so used to be great until they sold out. Selling out was the getting cancelled of 1993. Cancellation, too, is the wholesale negation of fame. Just as the woke lie in wait to pounce on pronoun infractions, everyone in a flannel shirt was astonishingly attuned to even the most microscopic evidence of success, eager to declare a sell-out.

Kurt was the king not selling out, his own death being the ultimate repudiation of fame and success. As I sit writing these words, I realise that in playing The Man Who Sold the World, he was telegraphing the core more of the day, an era that now, nearly 28 years later, feels as far away as does WWII. I can only imagine what he would have thought of the sale price of his cardigan.

But the Nineties actually came in two halves: the first half were the dark nineties, and the second half was the happy Nineties: Spice Girls! Windows 95! The first episode of Friends aired on 22 September 1994, a few months after Cobain’s death. We’ve all seen at least some of the show, so there’s no need to describe its structure other than to note that here in 2022 it is one of the most popular TV shows on Earth courtesy of streaming and translation. Indonesian sweatshop workers watch it on their breaks. People in caves watch it on their iPhones. It transcends all languages, ages and ideologies, and it appeals especially to the young, who have no living memory of the show in its prime, or of the 1990s at all.

Friends’ appeal is its undeniably good writing, but I suspect, much more importantly, that the show functions as a potent mode of time travel porn. Travel back in time to a magic lost world called the 1990s, a world free of 9/11, communism, Covid and an internet that turned nasty on us. Friends was, in hindsight, the gesamtkunstwerk of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. All scores were settled and the rest of history was going to be a trip to Walmart followed by an Olive Garden dinner followed by nonprocreative sex.

Suggested reading

We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

I do think that deep down, nobody was really surprised by 9/11. In some ways the 1990s were too good to last. By 1998, daily life began feeling like visiting a department store to buy a shirt and realising your Visa card is likely to be declined, and the darkness of the early nineties began to re-emerge. In 2000 the Spice Girls, who may as well have been named The AntiKurt, disbanded and, when tech crashed later that year, a lot of people lost a lot of money — but nobody, to be honest, was the least bit surprised. And then came 9/11.

The western world kept a buzz going for twelve years, and that’s an accomplishment. It must also be said that the 1990s weren’t squandered, because even in the dark years they were fun. They weren’t complicated. Chuck Klosterman says that young people always glamorise and grow nostalgic for the world that existed 20 years before them. I remember wondering how great the 1950s must have been like. And the 1990s make great nostalgia bait: simpler politics, plus great music, plus cool fashion cues. And maybe we can create another halcyon bubble again one day!

The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence. In the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.

I remember doing a book tour and ending up on a local AM radio station’s podium at the grand opening of Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota on 11 August 1992. It was full of Americans in alpha consumption mode, eating ice cream, faces beaming, walking around in unselfconscious bliss. The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds.

But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would”.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesn’t live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends”. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to “mobilise at every level”. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: “Jan. 6 is not in the past,” we’re warned. “It is every day”.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.

Suggested reading

The liberal fantasy of the Capitol coup

By Edward Luttwak

Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clinton’s marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was a blowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of “sexual relations”, as Clinton had sought to claim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amis’s expression, “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, a clash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need to pre-emptively act to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, as Christopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: “I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated.” Hitchens, who confided that he felt “exhilarated” at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principle for the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was the prudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchens’s metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

Suggested reading

The capturing of the Capitol

By Michael Tracey

None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

More from this author

The hypocrisy of America's terror debate

By Simon Cottee

More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. “Such nostalgia,” he noted, “will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.”

So when The New York Times publishes an editorial on how “every day is Jan. 6 now”, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology”. Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In his memoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire “to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like”. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for an impending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isn’t their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue — even if it means engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering and flagrant exaggeration.

He was the one who undermined Trump’s “just the flu” narrative; he was the one who told us that the virus wasn’t going to disappear in the spring. When Trump was touting the unproven benefits of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, Fauci stepped in with a reality check — and yet always, somehow, stayed just enough in the President’s good graces to keep his job.

And so, after last year’s election, we greeted Fauci as a hero who’d emerged safely, against all odds, from behind enemy lines. Journalists sat with him for breathless interviews, asking how he “survived” his time as Trump’s advisor. Time magazine wrote, jubilantly: “Anthony Fauci Is Finally Getting to Do His Job”. The New Yorker declared him “America’s Doctor”.

The fact that he was still standing, preaching the gospel of science while Donald Trump slunk away with his tail between his legs, took on its own significance. Fauci was more than the sum of his parts; he was a figurehead. And while he did decry the tragic and unnecessary politicisation of the Covid pandemic from his new perch as Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor, it was a winking sort of neutrality: when the man wishes out loud that “we had a country where people realized the importance of a communal effort,” it’s not like we don’t know which people he’s talking about.

More from this author

Will Democrats mask America forever?

By Kat Rosenfield

Given that half the nation wants to canonise him as the Patron Saint of Public Health, it was probably inevitable that Fauci would be ultimately unable to resist buying into his own hype — but it was still remarkable to witness. In a recent interview with Face the Nation, Fauci explained why the criticism he’s weathered from politicians like Senator Ted Cruz, who accused him of lying under oath about what kind of viral research the NIH was funding, is not just distasteful but dangerous.

“They’re really criticizing science because I represent science,” he said. “That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever.”

For some, this statement was nothing more or less than a terrifying profession of absolute power: La science, c’est moi. But let’s be charitable and imagine that what Fauci was trying to say — inelegantly — is not that he believes himself to be synonymous with science, but that other people treat him as such, attacking him as a proxy for the ideas they find offensive.

Suggested reading

Did scientists stifle the lab-leak theory?

By Ian Birrell

The thing is, that’s not really any better. These comments reveal a monumental hubris no matter how you slice it, a conviction that no criticism — whether it’s of him or his ideas — could ever be valid. If he’s not accusing his detractors of heresy for questioning capital-S Science, he’s still accusing them of anti-science bigotry and bad faith — and excusing himself from ever considering the possibility that at least a few of them might have a point.

For those old enough to remember it, this rhetorical style was last used to great effect in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when our leaders waved away any notion of examining how the United States might have come to be seen as an avatar for imperialism, oppression, and Western decadence by declaring that the terrorists simply “hate us for our freedoms.” Fauci invokes the same immunity from self-reflection when he declares of criticism that “anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this.”

Never mind the documented inconsistencies in Fauci’s statements on masking, vaccine mandates, or boosters; never mind his lobbying for continued school closures until Biden’s stimulus bill had passed, which would have negative implications for hundreds of thousands of children; never mind the frustrating and opaque debate surrounding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The real question is: why do you hate science?!

Suggested reading

How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

It’s not hard to see the appeal of framing one’s critics as motivated by bigotry, which not only shuts down discussion completely but also has a way of rallying defenders to the cause. Suddenly, science is not about ideas but identity, an ideology with a tribe all its own. It’s a neat trick, this sleight-of-hand. And it is infectious.

The wheels of this social change were already turning before the pandemic. It was mid-2019 when I first encountered one of those rainbow-coloured “in this house we believe” signs, hung on the wall of a local yoga studio like a bible sampler for the Lululemon class. The “beliefs” in question are liberal platitudes, just this side of a thought-terminating cliché:

BLACK LIVES MATTER

WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL

SCIENCE IS REAL

LOVE IS LOVE

KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING

At first, these signs were just a form of political expression, a way for members of the educated liberal class to recognise other members of their tribe. But the isolation and uncertainty of Covid has kicked this mindset into another gear. SCIENCE IS REAL isn’t a statement expressing the literal existence of science; it’s yard-sign catechism, the shriek of a true believer.

And in this world, science isn’t something we do, a method of systematic structure and study that separates fiction from fact and hypothesis from conclusion; it’s something you believe in, like Santa Claus or alien abduction or the ability of your struggling but spirited football team to come through against all odds and win the championship. Secular people have put their faith in science the way the devout put their faith in a God — right down to anointing the most pious among us as institutional figureheads.

More from this author

America's racial fairytales

By Kat Rosenfield

But the result is not just oddly religious, but perverse. Unlike actual science, which is one of the most vital truth-seeking mechanisms we have, this “science” is utterly incurious, hostile to questions, incapable of admitting fault. And while this would be an alarming development at any time, it’s especially bad amid a global catastrophe in which it’s never been more important to stay humble and ask questions, even if they’re politically inconvenient, even if they make powerful people bristle at your insubordination.

We can try to blame Anthony Fauci for this: for accepting the accolades, for licensing his bobblehead likeness, for letting us call the vaccine the “Fauci ouchie,” for buying wholesale into the myth of his own infallibility. But while Fauci may be at fault for getting a bit too high on his own supply, he didn’t appoint himself to this position; we did, when we decided to make him the Science Daddy without whose say-so we can never live normal lives again.

For two years, a frightened populace has looked to Fauci for the answers to impossible questions, for a sense of control amid the uncertainty, for assurance that we’re on the right side of history — even though nobody can tell us exactly what went wrong. We made science a civic religion, and we told Fauci he was the Pope. Unfortunately, he believed us.

As writers who have always positioned ourselves on the Left, we are disturbed at this turn of events. Is there really no progressive criticism to be made about the quarantining of healthy individuals, when the latest research suggests there is a vanishingly small difference in terms of transmission between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? The Left’s response to Covid now appears as part of a broader crisis in Left-wing politics and thought — one which has been going on for three decades at least. So it’s important to identify the process through which this has taken shape.

In the first phase of the pandemic — the lockdowns phase — it was those leaning towards the cultural and economic right who were more likely to emphasise the social, economic and psychological damage resulting from lockdowns. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s initial lockdown scepticism made this position untenable for most of those leaning towards the cultural and economic Left. Social media algorithms then further fuelled this polarisation. Very quickly, therefore, Western leftists embraced lockdown, seen as a “pro-life” and “pro-collective” choice — a policy that, in theory, championed public health or the collective right to health. Meanwhile any criticism of the lockdowns was excoriated as a “right-wing”, “pro-economy” and “pro-individual” approach, accused of prioritising “profit” and “business as usual” over people’s lives.

In sum, decades of political polarisation instantly politicised a public health issue, without allowing any discussion as to what a coherent Left response would be. At the same time, the Left’s position distanced it from any kind of working-class base, since low-income workers were the most severely affected by the socio-economic impacts of continued lockdown policies, and were also those most likely to be out working while the laptop class benefitted from Zoom. These same political fault lines emerged during the vaccine roll-out, and now during the Covid passports phase. Resistance associates with the Right, while those on the mainstream Left are generally supportive of both measures. Opposition is demonised as a confused mixture of anti-science irrationalism and individualistic libertarianism.

But why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures? How did such a simplistic view of the relationship between health and the economy emerge, one which makes a mockery of decades of (Left-leaning) social science research showing just how closely wealth and health outcomes are connected? Why did the Left ignore the massive increase in inequalities, the attack on the poor, on poor countries, on women and children, the cruel treatment of the elderly, and the huge increase in wealth for the richest individuals and corporations resulting from these policies? How, in relation to the development and roll-out of vaccines, did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that, given the money at stake, and when BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer currently make between them over US$1,000 per second from the Covid vaccines, there might be motivations from the vaccine manufacturers other than “the public good” at play? And how is it possible that the Left, often on the receiving end of state repression, today seems oblivious to the worrying ethical and political implications of Covid passports?

More from this author

Inside the Austrian lockdown

By Freddie Sayers

While the Cold War coincided with the era of decolonisation and the rise of a global anti-racist politics, the end of the Cold War – alongside the symbolic triumph of decolonisation politics with the end of apartheid – ushered in an existential crisis for Left-wing politics. The rise of neoliberal economic hegemony, globalisation, and corporate trans-nationalism, have all undermined the Left’s historic view of the state as an engine of redistribution. Combined with this is the realisation that, as the Brazilian theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, the Left has always prospered most at times of great crisis — the Russian Revolution benefited from the World War One, and welfare capitalism from the aftermath of the World War Two. This history may partly explain the Left’s positioning today: amplifying the crisis and prolonging it through never-ending restrictions may be seen by some as a way to rebuild Left politics after decades of existential crisis.

The Left’s flawed understanding of the nature of neoliberalism may also have affected its response to the crisis. Most people on the Left believe that neoliberalism has involved a “retreat” or “hollowing out” of the state in favour of the market. Thus, they interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing neoliberalism’s allegedly anti-statist project. The problem with this argument, even accepting its dubious logic, is that neoliberalism hasn’t entailed a withering away of the state. On the contrary, the size of the state as a percentage of GDP has continued to rise throughout the neoliberal era.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neoliberalism relies on extensive state intervention just as much as “Keynesianism” did, except that the state now intervenes almost exclusively to further the interests of big capital – to police the working classes, bail out large banks and firms that would otherwise go bankrupt, etc. Indeed, in many ways, capital today is more dependent on the state than ever. As Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan note: “[A]s capitalism develops, governments and large corporations become increasingly intertwined. … The capitalist mode of power and the dominant-capital coalitions that rule it do not require small governments. In fact, in many respects, they need larger ones”. Neoliberalism today is more akin to a form of state-monopoly capitalism – or corporatocracy – than the kind of small-state free-market capitalism that it often claims to be. This helps explain why it has produced increasingly powerful, interventionist, and even authoritarian state apparatuses.

More from this author

Mary Gaitskill teaches us to embrace complexity

By Ann Manov

This in itself makes the Left’s cheering at a non-existent “return of the state” embarrassingly naïve. And the worst part is that it has made this mistake before. Even in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, many on the Left hailed large government deficits as “the return of Keynes” – when, in fact, those measures had very little to do with Keynes, who counselled the use of government spending to reach full employment, and instead were aimed at bolstering the culprits of the crisis, the big banks. They were also followed by an unprecedented attack on welfare systems and workers’ rights across Europe.

Something similar is happening today, as state contracts for Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies are parcelled out to transnational corporations (often through shady deals that reek of cronyism). Meanwhile, citizens are having their lives and livelihoods upended by “the new normal”. That the Left seems completely oblivious to this is particularly puzzling. After all, the idea that governments tend to exploit crises to further entrench the neoliberal agenda has been a staple of much recent Left-wing literature. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, for example, have argued that under neoliberalism, crisis has become a “method of government”. More famously, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explored the idea of “disaster capitalism”. Her central thesis is that in moments of public fear and disorientation it is easier to re-engineer societies: dramatic changes to the existing economic order, which would normally be politically impossible, are imposed in rapid-fire succession before the public has had time to understand what is happening.

There’s a similar dynamic at play today. Take, for example, the high-tech surveillance measures, digital IDs, crackdown on public demonstrations and fast-tracking of laws introduced by governments to combat the coronavirus outbreak. If recent history is anything to go by, governments will surely find a way to make many of the emergency rules permanent – just as they did with much post-9/11 anti-terrorist legislation. As Edward Snowden noted: “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky. The emergency tends to be expanded”. This confirms, too, the ideas on the “state of exception” posited by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has nonetheless been vilified by the mainstream Left for his anti-lockdown position.

Ultimately, any form of government action should be judged for what it actually stands for. We support government intervention if it serves to further the rights of workers and minorities, to create full employment, to provide crucial public services, to rein in corporate power, to correct the dysfunctionalities of markets, to take control of crucial industries in the public interest. But in the past 18 months we have witnessed the exact opposite: an unparalleled strengthening of transnational corporate behemoths and their oligarchs at the expense of workers and local businesses. A report last month based on Forbes data showed that America’s billionaires alone have seen their wealth increase by US$2 trillion during the pandemic.

More from this author

How Covid despots humiliated America

By Jacob Howland

Another Left-wing fantasy that has been shuttered by reality is the notion that the pandemic would usher in a new sense of collective spirit, capable of overcoming decades of neoliberal individualism. On the contrary, the pandemic has fractured societies even more – between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, between those who can reap the benefits of smart working and those who can’t. Moreover, a demos made up of traumatised individuals, torn apart from their loved ones, made to fear one another as a potential vectors of disease, terrified of physical contact – is hardly a good breeding ground for collective solidarity.

But perhaps the Left’s response can be better understood in individual rather than collective terms. Classic psychoanalytic theory has posited a clear connection between pleasure and authority: the experience of great pleasure (satiating the pleasure principle) can often be followed by a desire for renewed authority and control manifested by the ego or “reality principle”. This can indeed produce a subverted form of pleasure. The last two decades of globalisation have seen a huge expansion of the “pleasure of experience”, as shared by the increasingly transnational global liberal class – many of whom, somewhat curiously in historical terms, identified themselves as on the Left (and indeed increasingly usurped this position from the traditional working-class constituencies of the Left). This mass increase in pleasure and experience among the liberal class went with a growing secularism and lack of any recognised moral constraint or authority. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the support from this class for “Covid measures” is quite readily explained in these terms: as the desired appearance of a coterie of restrictive and authoritarian measures which can be imposed to curtail pleasure, within the strictures of a moral code which steps in where one had previously been lacking.

Another factor explaining the Left’s embrace of “Covid measures” is its blind faith in “science”. This has its roots in the Left’s traditional faith in rationalism. However, one thing is believing in the undeniable virtues of the scientific method – another is being completely oblivious to the way those in power exploit “science” to further their agenda. Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any alternative views, regardless of their scientific value.

This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University. Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021 when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.

This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”. But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of corporate interest exploded – and yet talking about them became anathema. He continues: “Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost”.

Ultimately, the Left’s blatant disregard and mockery of people’s legitimate concerns (over lockdowns, vaccines or Covid passports) is shameful. Not only are these concerns rooted in actual hardship but they also stem from an understandable distrust of governments and institutions that have been undeniably captured by corporate interests. Anyone who favours a truly progressive-interventionist state, as we do, needs to address these concerns – not dismiss them.

But where the Left’s response has been found most wanting is on the world stage, in terms of the relationship of Covid restrictions to deepening poverty in the Global South. Has it really nothing to say about the enormous increase in child marriage, the collapse in schooling, and the destruction of formal employment in Nigeria, where the State Statistics agency suggests 20% of people lost their jobs during the lockdowns? What about the reality that the country with the highest Covid mortality figures and excess death rate for 2020 was Peru – which had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns? On all this, it has been virtually silent. This position must be considered in relation to the pre-eminence of nationalist politics on the world stage: the electoral failure of Left internationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn meant that broader global issues had little traction when considering a broader Western Left response to Covid-19.

It is worth mentioning that there have been outliers on the Left – radical-left and socialist movements that have come out against the prevailing management of the pandemic. These include Black Lives Matter in New York, Left Lockdown Sceptics in the UK, the Chilean urban left, Wu Ming in Italy and not least the Social Democrat-Green alliance which currently governs Sweden. But the full spectrum of Left opinion was ignored, partly due to the small number of Left-wing media outlets, but also due to the marginalisation of dissenting opinions first and foremost by the mainstream Left.

Mainly, though, this has been a historic failure from the Left, which will have disastrous consequences. Any form of popular dissent is likely to be hegemonized once again by the (extreme) Right, poleaxing any chance the Left has of winning round the voters it needs to overturn Right-wing hegemony. Meanwhile, the Left holds on to a technocracy of experts severely undermined by what is proving to be a catastrophic handling of the pandemic in terms of social progressivism. As any kind of viable electable Left fades into the past, the discussion and dissent at the heart of any true democratic process is likely to fade with it.

But Sinema is more enigmatic. It was said that she demanded $100 billion in cuts to proposed climate programmes, though this was denied by her office. The package was trimmed to $2 trillion, but she still refused to support it. She was accused of being bent on the “destruction” of the Biden Presidency. She had, one commentator wrote, a “death grip” on the Democratic Party.

In public, Sinema was taciturn, even as she was trailed and harried by progressive activists, who followed her into public restrooms, or tried to confront her at a marathon. Nobody on the Left understands her thinking; to the Washington Post she is simply “inscrutable“. So fury, and theorising, is their response. (Hers was to tell them, somewhat cryptically on Instagram, to “fuck off”.)

Biden’s bill has been maimed by Sinema, regardless of what happens in the weeks ahead. Eventually, interest in her may begin to fade, or she might face a primary challenge that ends her career as a senator. But there is another way to look at Sinema, one with wider and much longer-lasting implications for politics and political theory than her obstructionism in the Senate.

In recent years there have been two major shifts in the relationship between politics and political theory. On the one hand, a number of important modern political thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, once perceived in American academic and activists circles as useful, even necessary, for ostensibly radical and critical Leftist politics, have begun to appeal to the Right, which long rejected them. On the other hand, adherence to a capitalism-friendly version of academics and activists’ politics, especially on matters of culture, race and sexuality, became a condition of membership in nearly every important institution in the United States. Ideas that once generated a thrilling frisson of subversion in college seminars among students and teachers, who at the time could see themselves as joined in a common project of Leftist critique, have now become the ever-more explicit moral centre of our regime — or are being taken up by its opponents on the Right.

More from this author

Conservatives need multiculturalism

By Blake Smith

Such changes can perhaps be traced more easily through the writings of thinkers whose minds, because of their mediocrity, reflect rather than resist larger trends. One such thinker — a former activist and, technically, a scholar — is Sinema, who holds a PhD in “Justice Studies” from Arizona State University. Her 2012 dissertation Who Must Die: the State of Exception in Rwanda’s Genocide, and her 2015 book of almost the same title, are representative moments in the double shift by which Leftists once enamoured of certain strands of radical political theory repurposed it towards the consolidation of a new hegemonic political morality, discarding its subversive dimension — and making it available to the Right.

In her work on Rwanda, Sinema purports, through a handful of incompletely understood concepts drawn chiefly from the writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, to discover in the genocide committed in 1994 a generalisable lesson about the importance of the rule of law. In its absence, she argues, the worst sorts of barbarities are possible, and indeed likely.

Sinema’s work has no original insights, and hardly any grasp on the theory that supposedly informs it. It is, however, a useful document. It sheds, in the first place, some light on Sinema herself, a former anti-war radical who is now perhaps the most notorious centrist in Congress and who prides herself on upbeat bipartisanship (expounded in her 2009 book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions that Win and Last). For those who would rather dim the lights on Sinema, an already highly-visible political personage, her invocation of Schmitt and Agamben offers an opportunity to consider the strange transformation that these theorists’ work has undergone.

Schmitt and Agamben, in principle, should have been uncomfortable reading for Sinema. The former was an early 20th-century German legal theorist who attacked liberal democracy and supplied theoretical justification for the Nazi regime; the latter is a still-living Italian philosopher who used Schmitt’s ideas for his own critique of liberalism, launched from the radical Left rather than the far Right. But, given Sinema’s political and intellectual origins on the anti-war Left of the early 2000s, her choice is less surprising. The two thinkers were critical references for activist and academic critics of American power throughout the War on Terror.

Since the Eighties and Nineties, Schmitt had become first acceptable, and then compulsory reading, for American political theorists, who were taken with what seemed to be his insights into the deficiencies of liberal democracy’s emphasis on the rule of law and the formal aspects of democratic procedure. Some thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe, used his ideas to advocate for a reinvigorated form of political democracy that valued frankly acknowledged conflicts over neutral rules and norms. This so-called “agonism” once inspired populist Leftist movements in Europe, but seems to appeal to few American academics after the rise, since the first Trump campaign, of Right-wing populism at home. Norms — such as Nato and Nafta — suddenly appealed to Leftists who had long critiqued them.

Suggested reading

The new public health despotism

By Matthew Crawford

While some tried to use Schmitt to attack liberalism from the Left, others, drawing on Agamben’s interpretation of Schmitt, argued that the United States was becoming or had become a dangerously illiberal country. Schmitt had argued, infamously, that states inevitably find themselves confronted with “states of exception” — situations where legal norms can no longer be applied. In such instances, some agent must decide what is to be done so that order can be restored and the normal rules can function again. Schmitt saw this power to make decisions in exceptional circumstances as the essence of sovereignty. He argued that liberal democracies — oriented towards preserving the rule of law, which their leaders and ideologues imagine needs no supplement of sovereign decision-making — ignore this fact to their peril.

Agamben, however, countered that supposedly liberal states are in fact constantly dealing with “states of exception”. Liberals do not, in his view, periodically confront normless states of exception in crises; rather they constantly create these conditions. In a series of works including his 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben drew on Schmitt and Foucault to warn that what he saw as the paradigmatic instances of the Nazis’ systematic illegality and inhumanity — the concentration camp and the lethal power of doctors over “life unworthy of life” (the disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) — were also present, at least potentially, in democratic states, which create their own zones in which law and rights are suspended.

After 9/11, these arguments took on great cogency for many thinkers on the American Left. The US Government appeared to them to be suspending fundamental rights of its citizens through the Patriot Act, which suspended long-standing norms about the limits of state surveillance. Meanwhile, in Guantanamo Bay, the Government seemed to consign individuals to a site-specific state of exception in which the norms governing neither the treatment of prisoners of war, nor criminals applied. Agamben’s theories did not offer much clear direction on what critics of the apparently norm-less War on Terror might do to oppose the “sovereign” power of the United States, but they did give a moral and philosophical weight to critics’ sense that the country was on a dangerous slide towards reenacting the worst horrors of the 20th century.

Suggested reading

The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

Rather than argue, as Schmitt and Agamben did, that states of exception necessarily appear, or that liberal states continually create them, Sinema insisted that such situations could be avoided by protecting the rule of law. This revealed a basic misunderstanding of her chosen interlocutors’ arguments. Schmitt posited that the rule of law is never adequate, since states of exception requiring the exercise of sovereignty necessarily appear; Agamben likewise argued, following Foucault, that liberal states are inherently unable to live up to their own constitutional norms and in their routine exercise of power, place certain spaces and persons outside them. Sinema, either with naïveté or the cunning of stupidity, simply wishes the problem away and urges us to follow the rules. But, while her intellectual inadequacies are her own, the lameness of her conclusion reflects a change in the political valence of theory.

By the mid-2010s, as Sinema was writing, Leftist opposition to the imperial and illiberal dimensions of American security policy was melting away — or moving to the Right. In the following years, fears about terrorism targeted the latter, painting American conservatives, and the spectre of white supremacy, as security threats in much the same rhetoric that had been used to describe Islamic terrorist networks.

Since the spring of 2020, as Agamben has repeatedly observed, Covid policy has imitated the War on Terror in its suspensions of rights — and intimated the handing over of political power to medical officials in ways anticipated in Homo Sacer. Thus, if Schmitt and Agamben remain relevant for understanding our politics, it is in ways that are uncomfortable for the cultural Left, which now finds itself increasingly running, rather than critiquing, the machinery of American power.

Suggested reading

The triumph of America's ruling class

By Jacob Siegel

In our present-day sequels to the War on Terror — the campaigns against racism and Covid — hegemonic institutions pursue enemies and suspend liberal norms in the name of our psychological and physical wellbeing. Now in possession of what we might call the commanding heights of the moral economy, from which it produces elites’ and would-be elites’ worldview, this Left no longer needs to perform radicalness.

It can assume instead the position of a centre ringed about by benighted, ignorant, but nevertheless dangerous enemies: conservatives. The latter are not credited with having specific, comprehensible or legitimate objections to the dominant policies and values. They are instead imagined as hateful, prejudiced enemies of legality, science, and moral decency — that is, they are seen not as political foes, but as cognitive and moral degenerates — in a manner that recalls the way Islamic terrorists during the Bush era were said to hate America “for our freedom” and to be full of irrational “Islamic rage”, rather than recognised as having a comprehensible set of objections to American policies in the Middle East.

We should not be surprised to hear pleas for the rule of law and deference for experts from those who once, drawing on radical theory, revealed the subterfuges and hypocrisies behind liberal norms of legality and objectivity. Critique, like terrorism, is a weapon of the weak. The powerful claim to defend security, reason and morality, while those out of power, grown clever and cynical from their experience of marginality, contest these claims and question whether such things even exist to be defended. With the cultural Left in the ascendancy, the political theory by which it climbed has become a ladder to be thrown away — and available to be taken up by the Right.

Long after the furore around Sinema is forgotten, her academic work will glint as one ironic point of light in this vast change in the way liberals and conservatives in America think about themselves and their country.

The proximate cause of this upsurge of air rage is masks of course. We Brits have our own mask conflicts, but they usually end with some tutting or a sarcastic tweet. Americans bash each other in the aisles.

What are they thinking? The CNN air-rage compilation was shown the night before the 9/11 anniversary. On planes around the nation – perhaps some of the featured flights — families of the victims would have been travelling to Pennsylvania, to Washington DC and to New York. Among them was Deborah Borza who lives on the west coast. When we talked last week, she told me how much she missed her daughter Deora, who at the age of just 20 had managed to get a standby seat on a flight across the nation to see her mum. It was Flight 93.

There was a real fight on Flight 93.

At the Pennsylvania memorial ceremony, President Bush didn’t specifically mention the political weaponising of the pandemic measures but he did say this:

“A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”

An example of what he meant: The Federalist, a Right-wing website with a big readership but no clarity about its funding, suggested in a headline on the very day of the 20th anniversary ceremony: “The Left hates America and ordinary Americans at least as much as the 9/11 hijackers did, and for some of the same reasons.”

There are certainly some Americans who cannot stand their country, and it’s fair to point out that a good many white Left-wing Americans seem in the modern age to have a problem with their own skin colour, but this smearing of a wide group of people so offensively, so callously, is breath-taking, or would have been back in the days before 9/11.

It’s as if the anger and frustration that welled up that day, spending 20 years rushing around the world, never quite finding a proper satisfying target, has boomeranged home.

More from this author

Washington was gripped by fear

By Justin Webb

But there is more to it than anger. The context is the creation of a society ripe for conflict.

Why is this?

The New Yorker writer Evan Osnos has just published a book about the state of the USA which has a stab at an answer.

The terrorists would not have known it, but in the years before and immediately after 9/11, local papers were closing all over the nation. Local papers with local news, about which you could complain to a local editor. Papers that told you what was going wrong and going right too because that is what people (normal people not reporters) like. Papers that provided careers for nosey clever people that kept them in Boise Idaho or Normal Illinois. All of this replaced by scandal sheets online, bottom-feeding for clicks. And tumbleweed in Main St, as everyone lost interest in the community or believed it to have died.

Wildland, The Making of America’s Fury is not the first weighty book to point out that modern American inequality is untypical of the nation’s history and sapping of its soul but the impact of inequality on community is a subject that needs to be more fully explored. Osnos writes about what happens when institutions move out of town but also what happens when money moves in: literally and metaphorically people cannot see each other’s houses any more. It happened, he says, in Greenwich Connecticut, always a comfortably off town, but when the hedge fund folk moved in, a walled town. They stopped their McMansions from being seen. Privacy, leading to suspicion. Reducing shared experience, and, he argues, providing the essential breeding ground for something worse than discord: a place that, as President Bush put it, “turns every disagreement into an argument”.

More from this author

Barack Obama was a false hope

By Justin Webb

During the week I spent in America for the 9/11 ceremony, the atomisation of the nation continued apace. The state of Missouri, far from the centres of power in recent years, is now trailblazing the new American normal. A measure passed by the Republicans who run the state gives people accused of federal gun crimes the right to sue local police if they co-operated with an FBI investigation but that investigation eventually found no wrong. You can carry a weapon concealed and loaded in Missouri, but nowhere in America — thanks to federal law — are you allowed to sell it to a felon. So, the federal law is no small deal here.

But the point is not the extra gun danger the new law seems to impose: it’s the ingenious way in which ordinary citizens are co-opted, via the courts, into enforcement of what Missouri lawmakers regard as second amendment rights. They have done the same with abortion in Texas, where those who dislike it are encouraged to sue individuals who have enabled abortions to take place.

Fissiparous is not a word much heard in Missouri (and certainly not in the Lone Star state) but that is what this is.

Suggested article

Texas has betrayed women

By Jill Filipovic

It feels to many like a radicalisation of Americans; an encouragement to turn against each other. And a challenge to the authority of the federal government which enforces the basic fact of nationhood.

It is fair to say that the Left encourages this too, via so called sanctuary cities where federal rules about immigration are openly and proudly flouted. Now — via Missouri — we are to have “second amendment sanctuary cities” as well. It doesn’t bode well for peace or cohesion.

The reflecting pools that have taken the place of the twin towers in New York are a work of genius. Each square pool is an acre in size; the water cascades noisily but neatly down the four walls and is gathered in a central shaft. It disappears but you cannot see the sides of the shaft. You cannot see where it goes.

The message is that nothing dies because everything was here and because it was here it has stamped itself on time. A nation capable of asserting this, and doing so with such stark beauty in the heart of a busy city, is a nation not yet dead.

The 9/11 memorial is not a bad ground zero for a nation in pain. Rebuilding is always possible — Lord knows it has been done before — but the first job, as it was when the memorial was proposed, is to be clear about the enormity of what happened.

Then: to gather up the wreckage and start afresh.

I have had several chances to visit Iraq since ISIS took hold in 2014. My first three trips involved having to bypass ISIS-controlled Mosul to reach the land where the Yazidi genocide was committed. I was there to meet survivors, as well as the admirable female fighters taking on the Islamic State, for my movie Sisters in Arms.

On my most recent visit, we were accompanied by a fleet of helicopters and were able to land in the former capital of the caliphate — the now-liberated Mosul. Standing in front of the ruins of the al-Nori Mosque, President Macron delivered a message of hope. This was the very place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had launched his murderous caliphate, only to blow it up in the face of defeat — a desperate attempt to hide behind a veneer of strength. Obscurantists destroy while democrats rebuild.

But unfortunately, the democrats sometimes leave a foundation so weak that they collapse in a few days. This is the disastrous spectacle that the world has witnessed in Afghanistan – hardly the outcome we might have hoped for twenty years after 9/11.

Suggested reading

The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Lévy

The visuals are horrific: Taliban soldiers strutting around in GI uniforms, driving abandoned humvees, terrorising Afghan civilians, especially women, and ultimately crushing the final bulwark of freedom — the resistance in the Panjshir valley. Tragically, this was all accomplished with the help of weapons and equipment left behind by the United States.

Carefully coached by Qatar — the best PR firm for political Islam in the world — the Taliban claims to have evolved. It promises an “inclusive” government, but this includes only the old guard members of the Taliban and the worst incarnations of Salafism.

Afghanistan is now fated to become a sanctuary for jihadists — especially for a revitalised al-Qaeda. One Afghan chieftain who led Bin Laden’s “black guard” has already returned to the country in triumph, while Ayman al-Zawahiri, the brains behind 9/11, will likely now be protected by the Emirate of the Taliban.

Several failures explain this disastrous state of affairs. The most obvious was the failure to cut off the Taliban from the drug trafficking that funded them, as well as the failure to isolate them from their sponsors, the Pakistani Secret Service.

But the most important failing was not a military one. It was psychological: it was to fail to realise that you can only beat terrorism by attacking its ideological roots — religious fundamentalism. France and Europe realised this a long time ago — only to be labelled “Islamophobes” by parts of the American media whenever they dared to robustly defend secular values.

Some in the United States seem to believe that religious fundamentalists can embrace democracy overnight. They view Islamism through the prism of their own world, believing that everyone aims for the same thing — social justice. That blend of naivety and cynicism has even led some to suggest that the Taliban have changed. After all, that is what they promised, hand on heart, during the negotiations in Doha. Surely they were telling the truth?

A similar naivety has been displayed towards the Muslim Brotherhood, often presented as “democrats”, or even “largely secular”, in the American press. Even Hezbollah and Hamas have been described as “anti-imperialists”.

Suggested reading

Afghanistan always defeats the West

By William Dalrymple

Yet anyone who has closely studied Islamist movements knows that their acceptance of democracy is always tactical, viewed as a means to advancing theocracy and Islamic law. Any commitments given to the West are worthless; for the Taliban, Sharia law is the supreme goal.

Of all the extremist movements I have studied, from the ultra-religious Right to neo-Nazism, none has shown such talent at strategic subterfuge as Islamists. They know better than anyone how to instrumentalise democracy to promote anti-democratic views — or how to be victims of “islamophobia” while radicalising the muslim youth of Europe, convincing them that they would be happier in the shadow of a caliphate, rather than in secular democracies.

Of course, the American intervention in Iraq has not completely failed. Life for ordinary Iraqis in the Kurdish north is no longer the procession of massacres and executions that it was under Saddam Hussein.

But while they are freed from daily terror, Iraqi communities continue to eye each other with suspicion and bitterness. Some Sunnis continue to perceive ISIS as a form of protection against a government under the influence of Iran, which now arms Shia militias in the country’s many disputed areas.

The country continues to smoulder and the “Lebanonisation” of Iraq — its disintegration — remains a possibility, with the tiniest spark capable of enflaming the Sunni community once again to support a revived jihadist movement. Just like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS is waiting patiently on the sideline for the Americans to depart. Such an outcome would prove to be the final failure of American policy in the Middle East.

So is the era of Western “interference” dead?

Here, a distinction can and should be made between a neoconservative vision of values being inflicted by force and our duty to care about what is happening in the rest of the world. It is, after all, possible to support democracy without wishing to impose it from above by military means. Indeed, during President Macron’s visit to Iraq late last month, he specifically made this distinction and called for a new approach which he called “neither interference, nor indifference”.

It is unacceptable to undermine a country which poses no immediate threat to the rest of the world, nor has genocidal plans for its own people. But it is “indifference” to allow tyrants to thrive — first in their own countries, then globally.

For as more democratic — and “indifferent” — countries retreat, the more influence they abandon to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. These states have their own methods of interference, which have nothing to do with democracy or the desire to install democratic regimes. Quite the contrary; they are ruled by tyrants and dictators who see no problem with manipulating other countries with social media trolls and authoritarian state media outlets such as RT.

Suggested reading

Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now that Afghanistan has been abandoned, the honourable course for Europe and the United States is not just to become a place of safety for those fleeing dangerous regimes. Rather, they must also support and protect democracy in the Middle East where it still survives; to champion the autonomy of countries or regions which act as refuges or alternative systems of government; to create “safe spaces”, if you will, for the ideals of democracy and equality.

It should be our great honour, and our duty, to support the miracle which is Iraqi Kurdistan, defended valiantly by the Peshmerga, and which has provided a refuge to millions of international displaced peoples from the region. This is now a rare island of relative peace and stability in the war-stricken area.

Likewise we must support the miracle of Rojava, the Kurdish northeast region of Syria, which upholds courageously progressive, secular, egalitarian and environmental values — those which the West claims to defend as its own.

This is an opportunity to remind ourselves that the Kurds are on the frontline, defending our common values. They must no longer be abandoned to Turkish bombardments, which recently targeted a hospital in Sinjar without any reaction from NATO, Europe or the United States.

Similarly, it should also have been our duty to protect the Panjshir region of Afghanistan and its National Resistance Front. This mountainous area was the last region to resist the Taliban, acting as a haven for those fleeing their rule. Panjshir was reported to have fallen to the Taliban last week but guerrilla resistance is likely to continue — as it remains in the streets of Kabul, where brave women and men are demonstrating against the Taliban and the interference of Pakistan.

Across the country, pockets of democracy to survive, as symbols of resistance to tyranny and optimism for a better future. Democracy grows from such places — from the bottom, not the top.

In our own interest — in the interest of freeing Afghanistan — we must not let these seeds of hope perish.

My mother could be fierce and she punished me frequently, but even then I knew that her threat was bluster. She might smack me, but she wasn’t going to take off any digits.

Empty threats are used as leverage to entice certain behaviour. But what if the threats are real? For the girls living under Taliban control in Afghanistan, threats are not theatre: they are promises. Even for transgressions as small as painting their fingernails, they face real consequences.

Saturday marks 20 years since the fall of the World Trade Center, a day that brought unimaginable devastation, heartbreak and loss to America. But if there was one glimmer of hope that came from that tragic moment, it was for the women and girls of Afghanistan. After 9/11, and the conflict that followed, a level of freedom unknown to previous generations came to their country.

I remember watching the planes crash on television. I was at work in the Netherlands at the time, and sat, horrified, with my colleagues. As we watched, we wondered how the world’s superpower would respond to such an evil attack on the American homeland. They certainly had the power, resources and reason to go and obliterate their newfound enemy. Sitting there, we could never have guessed that this tragedy would end up bringing more rights and freedoms to women in Afghanistan.

More from this series

How 9/11 created the surveillance state

By Jacob Siegel

The United States could have gone into Afghanistan, taken its revenge and left. President Biden’s continual defence over the past weeks has been that he was following the original plan. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11^th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.”

But this is not where the legacy of 9/11 ends. It was not all necessary revenge and retaliation. Instead, we offered to help rebuild and provide hope to those who had not had it before. Together with our Afghan allies, we built a more inclusive society for women and girls, in the belief that precisely this kind of modernisation would reduce the danger of a Taliban restoration.

As Adam Tooze explains in his brilliant Substack, from 2003 to 2018, the number of women enrolled in university rose from 7,200 to 49,000. Female life expectancy increased by almost 10 years from 2001-2019. “Whereas in 2000,” Tooze explains, “Afghan men lived longer than women, now Afghanistan has the normal pattern of women outliving their menfolk.” Rates of literacy among females more than doubled between 2000-2018.

A generation of girls was raised without knowing life under Taliban control. And they soared. In 2017, an all-girls robotics team was founded, known as the Afghan Dreamers, who went on to win the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the Robotex festival in Estonia. In 2008, Afghanistan saw its first female mayor, Azra Jafari, in the town of Nili. And she was just the first of many females to hold political positions, including Salima Mazari, Zarifa Ghanfari, and Fawzia Koofi. Women made up 40% of the most recent class of graduates from the American University of Afghanistan. They have their own all-female orchestra. Female entrepreneurs invested $77 million over 18 years, resulting in 77,000 jobs. Their rights were promoted by the 2004 Afghanistan Constitution in Article 44, stating that “the state shall devise and implement effective programs to create and foster balanced education for women”.

Their successes were awe-inspiring. They were also a source of pride for Americans. They were, in part, America’s girls — girls raised to know a certain level of freedom, with their rights secure and protected, thanks to the U.S.-led intervention prompted by 9/11.

More from this series

How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme produced the Arab Human Development Report, aimed at providing a path for growth and opportunity in the Arab world. The report concluded that three factors contribute to the constraints of human development in the Arab world: “freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge”. Individuals needed to be educated beyond religious ideology, their human rights respected and women’s rights expanded. And for the last 20 years, the United States has supported women and these goals through the US Agency for International Development and State Department-funded programmes, as well as encouraging women’s participation in government and the private sector.

But now women’s rights are being ripped away. Biden’s betrayal reverberates sharply across the country. He offered a false dichotomy to the American people: either pull all troops out or go back to fighting an “endless war”. Pulling out the remaining US troops initiated the swift collapse of the Afghan government, will result in Afghanistan returning to a terrorist safe haven and removed the shield protecting women’s rights in the country. Surely this is not the legacy that Americans want to leave behind on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11?

The effects of Taliban control are already being felt by women. The Taliban have announced that women must cover their faces to attend university and genders must segregate, both in class and while entering and exiting the building. They are banned from sports, considered by the Taliban’s cultural commission as “neither appropriate nor necessary” for women. Women can no longer hold ministerial positions. There are no women included in the new administration. Some are being told not to go to work, allegedly a temporary change while the Taliban draw up new “women related procedures”. They face real violence if they disobey. Those speaking out against the Taliban are being deemed “agents of America” and accused of “not being true Muslims”. They are being erased from the public square. And the Taliban haven’t been in control for a full month yet.

What will happen to America’s Afghan girls? The ones born and raised since 2001. The girls inspired by the allure of freedom, liberalism, and chasing their own dreams. Those who have, until now, not known the crushing burdens and barriers of life under the Taliban. What will become of the defiant girls, who speak up for their rights? The ones who question the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban?

Many will suffer severe punishments. Violence will be unleashed against them in a magnitude that those in the West do not comprehend. Body parts will be chopped off. Sexual harassment, rapes, honour violence and murders will become the norm.

More from this series

We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

But, unlike before, this time is different. The women of Afghanistan will fight back. They’ve already begun. Protests are erupting across the country. Women of all ages are standing firm against the Taliban. In Kabul, women attempted to march to the presidential palace, “demanding the right to work and to be included in government”. They were attacked for it, with videos and photos revealing the bloody violence they faced at the hands of the Taliban. At a subsequent protest in Kabul, one woman stated: “We don’t care if they beat us or even shoot us. We want to defend our rights. We will continue our protests even if we get killed.”

At another protest in Herat, calling for girls’ education, one of the organisers, Basira Taheri, explained: “The women of this land are informed and educated. We are not afraid, we are united.” Pashtana Durrani, the Executive Director of Learn Afghanistan, a bulwark for Afghan women’s rights, said; “We are going to make sure [girls] get to go to school, they get to go to work. If not on the terms that we want in public, we’re going to make it happen anyways.”

As the saying, often attributed to Thomas Carlyle, goes: “Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.” The Taliban cannot undo the last 20 years. These women and girls are refusing to submit to a new Dark Age. That glimmer of hope, sparked after 9/11, has not been extinguished. Even with the Taliban in control, America’s girls aren’t going to give up.

And now the world is watching. Before 9/11, the atrocities committed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan received very little coverage in the West. Now, everyone knows names like Malala and Bibi Aisha. And we will come to know more names, like Basira Taheri’s, as we cheer them on. Two decades on, these women may be the most enduring achievement of the American intervention that followed 9/11.

They are defiant. And, as a former defiant girl, I can say with conviction that they can’t beat or cut that defiance out of you.

Meanwhile, the members of an al Qaeda cell were plotting.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were believed by many at the time to have awakened America from the post-historical fantasies of the 1990s. “We have been called out of our trivial concerns,” declared an editorial from September 19, 2001 in The Weekly Standard, the influential neoconservative publication known as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One”. This was a prominent attitude and not confined to the Right. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, in an interview published the day before, declared “the end of the age of irony” and predicted that “things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear”.

Twenty years later, the Taliban’s predictable takeover of Afghanistan is the final crushing defeat of America’s post-9/11 calling as the armed evangelist of global democracy. Instead of spreading the gifts of liberty to the Middle East, the crusading policy of the past two decades collapsed the guardrails of liberal democracy at home, undermined its appeal abroad and wasted America’s strategic power while enriching its ruling class.

Over those same years, the infrastructure of the War on Terror achieved a revolutionary transformation of the global order; albeit one altogether different from the liberalising mission it heralded. From the start, US intelligence agencies argued that the Internet comprised the key terrain of 21^st-century warfare and only by controlling it could they prevent another “intelligence failure” like the one blamed for the al Qaeda attacks in 2001. The unprecedented rise of Google, Facebook and Amazon, as hegemons of the new digital order in which “real life” is what takes place online, is in part the story of the American security establishment outsourcing its surveillance project to private information monopolies. In the process, the emerging digital economy amassed the greatest concentration of wealth in human history, while helping to systematically dismantle the American middle class and with it those institutions like the free press that made liberal democracy possible.

More from this series

We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The Weekly Standard editorial from September 19th continues in the next line: “We have resigned our parts in the casual comedy of everyday existence. We live for the first time since World War II, with a horizon once again.” You couldn’t look at the carnage in downtown New York and the Potomac without seeing that the US had enemies who were both determined and savage. Salafist-jihadism is a millenarian cult, an authentic expression of Islamic fundamentalism and an ultra-modern totalitarian ideology. Formulating an effective response to networked and state-aligned terrorism that matched the severity of the threat without overstating its significance was not an easy task — which is why so many people got it wrong.

But the answer given by people with the President’s ear, to elevate the terrorist attack to mythological significance as the event that restored a lost horizon, set the mould for a naive triumphalism that led directly to Iraq and twenty years of delusion and defeat in Afghanistan.

Not everyone held such views, of course. There was some dissent even within the D.C. Beltway. But the Standard’s Republican version of Wilsonian Neoconservatism, which shared with the Democrats’ liberal interventionism almost everything but its cultural and stylistic tics, was the purest expression of a prevailing attitude in the American political and media classes. In a nation that had grown too comfortable and complacent, global jihadism offered a civilisational challenge. Our Islamist enemy would call forth a new “national greatness” in the American character, wrote the New York Times’ David Brooks.

The authors of this vision were nearly all baby boomers. Their call to forge a new generation’s greatness in battle against “Islamofascism” was a self-conscious attempt to recreate the heroic national destiny they had grown up venerating in the shadow of the Second World War. It was an understandable response to the strength and nobility of their fathers’ generation, but a fatal blueprint for American foreign policy.

This new call to arms was not purely a response to 9/11. One important source text was written in the summer of 1996 while Bill Clinton was in office. Together, the Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol and fellow influential neoconservative Robert Kagan co-authored an essay in which they developed ideas that would inform George W. Bush’s vision for the world, especially the “freedom agenda” put forth in his second inaugural address. The article lamented the “tepid consensus” that had taken hold after Ronald Reagan left office among conservatives who accepted a diminished role for America in global affairs.

More from this series

The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

Against what they called “the pinched nationalism” of Patrick Buchanan’s “America First” foreign policy, the authors presented a true “conservatism of the heart”. Under this maudlin title, they enumerated their aims: “To emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in American foreign policy.”

Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it at the time — certainly I was too caught up in my own anger and patriotic furore, which involved enlisting in the military in 2002 — but some 20 years later, the overwrought boyishness of these programmes for the making of “great men” makes for painful reading. In the pages of The New Republic, the emotionally precocious Peter Beinart championed a politics of “muscular liberalism”. Beinart’s twee recreation of historical mission was captured in his 2006 book arguing for why “Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”

So what did we get for all this talk of revived greatness and reborn heroism? We got Bush, the boyish president whose reputation for mangling the English language could never account for his genuine knack for grandiloquent oratory. We got Rumsfeld and Cheney, who were not quite the Strangelovian villains of lore, mostly because they were less cinematic in their foibles and more grubby and desperate. We got a new techno-Calvinist social dispensation and a permanent state of exception that blurs the line between terrorism and disease. We got generations of military generals who have been, with few exceptions, glorified hangers for uniforms overweighted with cheapened medals.

American soldiers who fought with honour know all too well that the heroism of our peers was a private affair, shared between comrades. There was nothing larger in it. No national greatness or unifying purpose. Any contact we had with real heroism only widened the gulf between us and our fellow citizens.

All in all, this quest has been a tragic disappointment. Rather than enlarging the stature of Americans, the effort to manufacture greatness had a miniaturising effect. Everything it touched became not only less heroic but less human. We wanted greatness, but we got simulations.

More from this series

How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

Meanwhile, in the same years that the measure of man was being stunted, another type of anti-heroism — this time in a technological form — was coming to rule over the planet. Even before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the budding War on Terror had already begun to metastasise into a permanent bureaucracy. Word of the “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) programme was leaked to the New York Times, which reported on the initiative in 2002 while it was still in development.

Headed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), TIA intended to create a universal data mining system in which every kind of information ever collected on a person would be collated in one database. US authorities could then query and analyse the data — which, properly interpreted, would contain a composite portrait of every individual alive — with algorithms designed to detect patterns identified with criminals and terrorists. For its logo the group chose the eye of providence, that always reassuring image from the one-dollar bill of an eyeball floating at the apex of a pyramid.

Once word got out about TIA, a backlash ensued led by both legislators and civil liberties groups and the programme was shut down. But what we now know — thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 — is that TIA didn’t end when the Government shut it down; it just took on new names as it spread far outside its origins at DARPA. Within the US government, TIA was a direct forerunner to the National Security Agency’s secret efforts known as PRISM to collect bulk data and spy on Americans’ communications. Just this past April, it was revealed that the US postal office was running a secret programme to monitor Americans’ social media activity for signs of “extremism” that would then be passed on to other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. As a specific office TIA is gone, but the principle that unconstitutional spying on Americans’ private behaviour is only limited by the possibility of getting caught lives on.

The true heirs to the Government’s efforts at total information control are companies like Google and Facebook whose businesses are based on luring people in with free services in order to extract their user data. In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes how the “state of exception” created by the Government use of special extra-legal prerogatives in the aftermath of 9/11 “favored Google’s growth and the successful elaboration of its surveillance-based logic of accumulation”. In other words, why would US intelligence agencies run their own collection programmes and have to worry about political scandals and Congressional oversight when they can just allow private companies to cast a legal surveillance net over the entire globe and then tap into the servers on the backend, like they did with PRISM.

More from this series

Washington was gripped by fear

By Justin Webb

In 2000, the year the tech bubble burst, there was a burgeoning effort in the US government, led by the Federal Trade Commission, to regulate the Internet and protect users’ privacy. Zuboff details how that came to an abrupt end after 9/11 as, “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism”.

Exactly 20 years after the survey that found “Optimism Reigns, Technology Plays Key Role,” Pew conducted another survey in 2019. Too much has happened to reduce its findings to any one cause, but its headline gives one indication of the direction that change took in the post 9/11 era: “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts: Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system.”

The soaring rhetoric employed by the architects of post-9/11 US policy promised to restore a classical grandeur to American democracy that had supposedly been lost in the “end of history” Nineties. Instead, they undermined its foundations and launched the United States into the anti-heroic era of human-bots, social automation and authoritarian technocracy.

Despite some bright moments, like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the rescue of the Yazidis from Mount Sinjar in 2014, the overall story hews more towards farce and tragedy. In the grief and rage following the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US collectively took leave of its senses and embarked on a generational project of warfare that entailed creating two overseas protectorates, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that inexplicable and indefensible project is over, stillborn and incomplete, as America retreats ignominiously from its obligations, reneging on its lofty promises. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, none of the instigators or cheerleaders for this disaster has suffered any career or reputational loss for their hubris or misjudgment, and almost no one has ever expressed regret.

It began with much more bravado in the early 20th century; wars were waged on two fronts with a casual arrogance that many seem to have forgotten. On 29 May, 2003, a few months after the US invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times declared on The Charlie Rose Show: “suck on this…We could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”

Meanwhile David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter of George W. Bush, co-authored a belligerently pro-war book with the hyperbolic title An End to Evil in 2004. Before the invasion, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article titled “The Great Terror” for The New Yorker, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in genocide against the Kurds, offering a compelling humanitarian rationale for the invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s overthrow.

Goldberg wasn’t alone at that august magazine, with storied foreign correspondent George Packer also being an invasion supporter. William Kristol, arguably the most prominent turn-of-the-century neoconservative, contributed The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission in early 2003, and predicted a two-month rather than eight-year conflict. At the highest levels of the American government, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred with their advisors that the best way to win the “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was to invade and conquer a secular nation-state, Iraq. Leading national security lights such as Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer encouraged Bush and Cheney and then attempted to execute their imperialist vision.

Somehow, all this seemed reasonable to 72% of Americans in 2003. America was the land of promise and possibilities. At the turn of the millennium, the US budget surplus was $230 billion. America was 30% of the world economy, and Russia and China were both considered geopolitical allies. The protracted dispute over the 2000 presidential election actually convinced many that the democratic system in the United States of America was robust even under stress. America at the turn of the century was in the afterglow of Cold War victory, a hyperpower in a world where it was the singular imperial colossus.

But the world has turned sideways in a single generation. By 2020, the US had a $3-trillion-dollar budget deficit, and our share of the global economy had decreased to 25%, in large part due to the rise of China. Nearly 7,000 Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than double the number killed on 9/11. In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, and on 6 January this year the US Capitol was stormed by an enraged mob. To the broader world, the American colossus was looking a lot more like an American basket case.

More from this author

British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

The results of American hubris have been mixed at best for Iraq and Afghanistan. A conservative estimate is that more than 200,000 Iraqis and 250,000 Afghans have died since 2001 as a result of the invasions. Iraq’s democracy is shaky, having undergone an existential fright with the rise of ISIS in the mid-2010s. Afghanistan is now under Taliban rule, just as it was in 2001. America came to liberate, but in the wake of imperial conquest, the natives suffered through corruption, factionalism and civil war. Due to our all-volunteer army and reflexive recourse to deficit spending, most Americans did not experience the wars in a visceral or indirect manner. All the while, viscera were being splattered across the streets of Baghdad and Kabul as young men blew themselves up, inspired by a religious fanaticism in turn aggravated by American occupation.

Notably, while the consequences for the Iraqis and Afghans have been tragic, our social, intellectual and political elite have suffered no professional repercussions for their incompetence. On 2 November, 2001 Friedman asked us to “give war a chance”. Twenty years later, he continues to opine for The New York Times, pulling down a salary of $350,000 per year at a time when journalism as a profession is collapsing.

Goldberg, whose New Yorker piece burnished the humanitarian need for the overthrow of Hussein, was appointed editor of The Atlantic in 2016. Packer wrote a book, Assassin’s Gate, where he chronicles his disillusionment with the war. This was sufficient to maintain a sinecure at The New Yorker until 2018, when he moved to The Atlantic to work under his former colleague Goldberg. Frum has had a more chequered career, but that had little to do with his position on the War on Terror, and everything to do with his scepticism of the Republican stance on healthcare reform in 2010, illustrating the true red-lines in American politics.

Frum is now more often speaking to a centre-left rather than a centre-right audience (though still identifying as a conservative), but he is still comfortably ensconced in the American establishment. Similarly, Kristol has converted into a “Never Trump” “Biden Republican,” and is a member of good standing of the “Resistance”. His publication, The Bulwark, receives funding from centre-left foundations. Even George W. Bush, who was once a hate-figure for the Left, is now being rehabilitated. The man who unleashed two disastrous wars and whose decisions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands is now celebrated for his paintings of immigrants.

More from this author

What the Mongols did for us

By Razib Khan

Bush’s one-time viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has also taken up painting and become a ski instructor in his leisured semi-retirement. Meanwhile, his hawkish lieutenant Dick Cheney is now well regarded for his support of gay marriage, while Cheney’s daughter, Liz, is garnering respect and accolades from Democrats for her anti-Trump views following the 2020 election. Condeleezza Rice, also an anti-Trump Republican, returned to academia, but has also become a pop culture phenomenon, and has now been tapped to make guest appearances on The View.

The soft-glow Cheney rehabilitation is emblematic of the primacy of domestic political concerns in today’s American cultural landscape. Just a decade ago, he was being pilloried for his frank defence of torture. Today his anti-Trump stance gets more weight when determining whether he’s one of the “good ones” or “bad ones”. Despite how much foreign policy dominated American politics in the early 2000’s, the rest of the world has faded from view over the past decade. The 2016 and 2020 Democrat presidential candidates were both supporters of the Iraq invasion and hailed from the party’s more hawkish wing, Hillary Clinton being a major proponent of American intervention in Libya.

Under Trump, many conventional narratives surrounding national security and foreign policy flipped. Liberals and the intelligentsia came to love the CIA and FBI, and cast a sceptical eye on foreign powers like Russia. Kristol, the architect of the neoconservative intellectual project in the 2000s, has now become an icon of the anti-Trump faction, even lauded by mainstream liberals. Establishment intellectuals even now see Bush as a bulwark of American democracy, a contrast to Trump’s strongman tendencies.

It turns out that 9/11 didn’t change everything. Despite a decade of international adventurism in the 2000s that extended at lower wattage into the 2010s, the US remained a nation apart, focused on its own concerns. The pundits and politicians whose blunders in the early 2000s had grave consequences for nations far away suffered few ill consequences for their disastrous prognostications, short-sighted decisions and uninformed arguments.

Suggested reading

Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

Bush is now allowed to be the pro-immigrant painter ex-president, not the executive who authorised extraordinary rendition and whose decisions pulverised two nations for a generation. Kristol’s legacy may not be as organiser of Bush’s imperial braintrust, but as the rebel against the Trump regime. Friedman remains one of the best-paid journalists in the country, while Goldberg is now editor of one of the nation’s most venerable magazines. Frum and Cheney have not changed their fundamental politics, but are now embraced by the liberal establishment thanks to their strident anti-Trump position.

Never mind that Cheney’s objection to Trumpism is rooted in the latter’s deviation from the disastrous foreign policy of the 2000s. The period in the middle of that decade when foreign policy loomed large as a polarising issue in partisan politics was the exception and not the rule, and the collateral damage abroad of American adventurism is out of sight and out of mind. The current President supported the Iraq War, while Kristol is now a Biden-defender against even the gentlest conservative criticisms.

Twenty years down the line, the American elite is somewhat chagrined to be reminded of the arrogance and ignorance they showed in the wake of 9/11. But they are the same elite that they always were, because their sinecures are ultimately yoked to the whims of domestic politics, not the horrors that American enthusiasms unleashed abroad. Once obtained, a position in the pundit and political elite is rarely subject to the vicissitudes of meritocracy. America is ruled by a soft and complacent aristocracy of error in 2021, just as it was in 2001 on the eve of the 9/11 terror attack. In that sense, it was a day that changed nothing.

“It was an awful crime,” the British journalist Andrew Anthony wrote later, “but it was also, as its perpetrators would have known, an awesome televisual event.” Anthony, for his part, was in a bar in London’s Soho, transfixed to a television screen with a gasping crowd. “There was something disturbingly pornographic about the need to see more and different angles of the impact over and over again,” he noted. “I’ve never understood the question: ‘Where were you when [fill in the significant historical event] happened?’ Because the answer is almost always: ‘In front of the television.’”

Now, two decades on from the attack, the answer is almost always: on a smartphone, into which television and much else, including the spectacle of international terrorism, has since disappeared.

Terrorism, too, has changed dramatically since 9/11, and in ways that are closely related to the rise of the smartphone and the global proliferation of social media. Most obviously, its style has become more immediate and intimate. Had the 9/11 hijackers possessed smartphones, we wouldn’t have had to rely on network television for footage and speculative commentary.

The hijackers would have live-streamed their depredations inside the planes in real-time, disseminating the footage on Facebook, just as Brenton Tarrant did in 2019 when he slaughtered 51 Muslim worshippers in two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. We would have seen their wolfish smiles as they terrorised the passengers and attacked the pilots and flight attendants. We would have heard them shout “Allahu Akbar” moments before the impact, and we would have seen cockpit footage of the planes plunging into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Suggested reading

Why ISIS love to kill

By Simon Cottee

But of course we saw and heard none of this, and Martin Amis could only write about how “That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien”. But what about the chaos inside the plane, as it came, in Amis’s words, “sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty”?

On 11 September, 2001, we could only imagine it — or, mercifully, try not to. Today, we don’t have to imagine what it’s like to be in the midst of a terrorist atrocity, because terrorists are all-too-eager to show us their POV. Nor do we have to imagine what it’s like when a prisoner is beheaded: thanks to ISIS, we can now see this up close and in High Definition. Like gonzo porn, terrorism’s new ruling credo is to show everything. Indeed, terrorists have become auteurs of a horrifying new type of theatre, where the myth of the snuff movie becomes a grim reality.

Yet paradoxically, at the same, terrorism has also become less spectacular. When Osama bin Laden dispatched the 19 hijackers who pulled off the 9/11 attacks, he knew that the whole world would be watching, and it was. Indeed, he didn’t just want to murder vast numbers of innocent people, but to create what the sociologist Douglas Kellner has called a “mega-spectacle”.

And he was unquestionably successful in that. On NBC, within minutes of the second plane slamming into the South Tower, one eyewitness, gasping for breath, told news anchor Matt Lauer via a telephone line: “It looks like a movie… I’ve never seen anything like it.” Lauer concurred, describing the footage as “the most shocking video tape I’ve ever seen”.

No terrorist group since 9/11 has carried out an attack of such lethality and ambition or produced a propaganda image as symbolically potent as the collapse of the Twin Towers. This, chiefly, is because the soft targets of civil aviation have decidedly hardened: today, you can’t take a hip-flask on a plane, let alone Mace and a four-inch blade. Mass surveillance has also made it much harder for terrorists to plan and coordinate large-scale attacks.

More crucially, the US invasion of Afghanistan, which killed nearly 80% of al Qaeda’s core members in that country, meant that the group no longer had a sanctuary in which to plan future terrorist attacks. With bin Laden and his chief lieutenants scattered and on the run, al Qaeda’s terrorism shape-shifted into something less terrorising: what Marc Sageman called “leaderless jihad”.

This was the jihad of the self-financed and self-trained terrorist whose headquarters was his bedroom. It was the jihad of the “jihadi next door”, who, to their neighbours, were just ordinary guys, if a little quiet and reserved. While these “inspired” killers proved deadly, they lacked the skills, resources and support to wreak havoc on the scale of 9/11; their jihad was more squalid than spectacular.

Suggested reading

What the media gets wrong about incels

By Naama Kates

In the summer of 2014, when ISIS rose to power in Syria and Iraq, that all threatened to change: the leaderless jihadis now had a leader (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and territory (the caliphate) to profess allegiance to and defend. Some of them returned to Europe, carrying out large-scale attacks in Paris and Brussels. Jihadi terrorism, for a short period, became “directed” again.

Even so-called “lone wolves” who had never been to Syria or Iraq could communicate with ISIS operatives online and receive operational guidance and support from them. Others, who had neither been to ISIS-controlled territory nor received guidance from the group, nevertheless took “inspiration” from it, using cars, trucks, or knives to conduct killing sprees against random civilians in Western cities.

Today, this seems to be the dominant form of jihadi terrorism in the West: low-tech, amateurish attacks devoid of any real logic or political rationale. Indeed, this type of terrorism seems more performative and personal than instrumental and political.

What, for example, was the point of Usman Khan’s rampage at Fishmonger’s Hall in London in November 2019? What set of political demands did Khan have? Given that Khan’s violence was directed at those associated with the “Learning Together” programme, a liberal-minded prison education initiative he took part in, and given his desire to become a martyr, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Khan’s motives were more personal than political or a complex combination of both. Perhaps terrorism has always been like this, but in its current incarnation it seems that the gap between terrorist atrocities and real-world politics has never been so far apart.

Yet as terrorism in the West has become more banal and less lethal, the response to it, in contrast, has become insistently more hysterical. ISIS, as the recent attack in Kabul has demonstrated, remains a potent threat in Muslim-majority countries, but its military defeat in Syria and Iraq has massively hampered its ability to direct and inspire attacks in the West.

This has left a large void which our over-bloated security state and counter-extremism industry has tried to fill by amplifying the threat of far-Right groups. Not so long ago they were sounding the alarm about the dangers of “slick” online ISIS propaganda, and how vulnerable young people were being radicalised by it. Today, widely respected extremism scholars are sounding the alarm about far-Right online “echo-chambers” and writing feverish articles on: “How parents can learn to recognize online radicalization and prevent tragedy – in 7 minutes”.

Suggested reading

You can't deradicalise every terrorist

By Liam Duffy

While far-Right violence is certainly a serious issue in America and Europe, it’s nonsensical to compare it to the far greater global threat of jihadism – or to exclude 9/11 from your calculus in an effort to show, as one terrorism expert recently did, that “excluding the coordinated attacks of 9/11, domestic right-wing terrorism has caused more harm to American citizens at home than radical Islamist attacks over the past two decade”.

It’s also hysterical to believe that far-Right terrorists are using the internet to turn children into white supremacist terrorists, or to think that a meme or an ironic joke “can be a gateway to extremist views”. This is part of a deeper confusion, where the counter-extremism industry, instead of focusing on specific violent groups and their kinetic threat level and capabilities, has sought to expand its remit (and potential revenue) by inventing useless and nebulous categories like “hateful extremism” and “extremist narratives”.

The cartoonish notion that terrorists are “hateful” has somehow caught on among policy-makers post-9/11, but it has little to do with how and why people decide to kill themselves and others in service to a sacred cause. While hate and reductive thinking are clearly bad, they’re useless as predictors of terrorism, which, as every terrorism scholar knows, is rare and committed by very few individuals.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of today’s confusion about terrorism came after the breaching of the Capitol Building on 6 January, 2021. “This is terrorism,” scholar John Horgan gravely tweeted on the day of the riots. Kathleen Belew, another expert, was similarly emphatic and self-certain, tweeting on the day of the riots and about the rioters: “They are certainly anti-democratic, since they are using terrorism to attack fair electoral process. The word you want, I think, is fascist.”

But whatever happened on 6 January, it wasn’t terrorism; if by terrorism we mean, in accordance with standard non-politicised definitions, violence aimed at civilians to achieve some political goal. No civilians were deliberately targeted and harmed in the Capitol building, except for one of the rioters who was shot dead by the police. According to the FBI, the motives of the vast majority of the rioters were unclear since they had not given any thought to what they would do once they were inside the Capitol building, and there was scant evidence of any plot or coordination among them.

The world has changed markedly since 9/11, and in no small part because of it. Terrorism remains a potent global threat. But we should not overstate the threat, still less pretend that people who disgust us with their ideas and hatreds are really terrorists.

“Terrorism is theatre,” the seasoned terrorism expert Brian M. Jenkins observed more than 40 years ago. He was referring to how terrorist atrocities “are often carefully choreographed to attract the attention of the electronic media and the international press”. He was right about that, but I doubt that even someone as prescient and sharp as Jenkins could have envisaged an act of terrorism as theatrically spectacular as 9/11.

Today, however, terrorism is still a spectacle, while no longer being all that spectacular. Indeed, while terrorists continue to horrify us with their violence and contempt for life, most — like the fool who tried to blow up a group of gendarmes on the Champs-Élysées in 2017, but only managed to asphyxiate himself after the gas canister in the car he was driving failed to properly explode — will be half-remembered and enjoy no infamy whatsoever.

Dear Bobby,

I wanted to warn you that only one of my three kids will show at the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan this year. Roman finally exploded that the reading of all those names every frigging September (though he didn’t say “frigging”) has got “kill-yourself boring”, even if one name is his uncle’s.

For Ettie, who was only two at the time and can’t remember you, 9/11 belongs in the same dusty bag as Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. Just out of college, she dismisses the memorial as an exercise in archaic patriotism — itself a celebration of “white supremacy”. I know, I know. That expression used to refer to a few kooks in peaked white hats. It now functions as an indictment of the entire country. And that’s just the beginning of what you’ve missed out on.

I’m hoping that bringing you up to date about the past two decades will partially restore the breath-taking sense of perspective that descended on me that monstrous morning. Although the weight on my chest was almost unbearable, I do miss the accompanying clarity.

To my chagrin, I’d suddenly been elevated to American royalty: I’d lost an immediate relative to the attacks. I soon grew weary of the deference. I didn’t want to feel special. After all, part of that clarity was realising the country itself wasn’t as special as we’d thought. People have been attacking other countries since forever, especially rich countries full of people who think they’re special.

More from this author

Why wait to die?

By Lionel Shriver

Not that I believe we deserved it, mind. Just that shit happens, even to the United States, which we might have learned from Pearl Harbor. And sisters have been losing their brothers forever, too.

Everyone was nice and kind and open in the immediate aftermath, as if the shock had shattered the shells we hadn’t even realised we were cocooned in. The force of collective mourning was so overpowering that nothing else seemed to matter, which frankly made the conduct of prosaic daily life rather difficult.

Having still to remember that we couldn’t have tacos again tonight after having had tacos just three days earlier was embarrassing. Funny, I got into a huge fight with Roy, when I pointed out about ten days in that now no one was going to give a flying fig for a documentary about how “attachment parenting” turns your kids into little shits; all that mattered about kids now was that they had parents at all.

Roy exploded. He couldn’t believe his wife could concern herself with anything as petty as her career at a time like this. I said, well, at least it took me a whole ten days to even remember that, oh, crap, a year’s work just swirled down the sewer. In our family mythology, I was the selfish one, and Roy found the typecasting useful. By the way, and you won’t be crushed, because you never cared for his high-horsery: we’re divorced.

Epiphanies are lies. They seem to offer a radical realignment of how you look at things for the rest of your life, but actually they’re just tiny wrapped-up presents that you can peek at but don’t get to keep, and then you snap right back to seeing everything the same way again. It took New Yorkers only a day or two to get competitive about who’d lost someone or knew someone who’d lost someone, who was closer to downtown at the time, whose neighbourhood stank worse, and whose sidewalks were more covered with that awful grey silt. 9/11 brought in a whole new hierarchy, but it was still all about status, so New Yorkers were simply reverting to the same rivalrous assholes they’d always been.

It’s been especially brutal for me that when you died, we still weren’t speaking. And we fell out over what? Bush v Gore! I can’t even dredge up the details we got so exercised about—something about chads and military ballots and “cherry-picking”. Okay, our whole family couldn’t get over my having voted for “that idiot”. You accused me of merely trying to distinguish myself from my liberal family out of desperation for a separate “identity”, but at the expense of throwing the country under a bus. Honestly, in retrospect, I think I just didn’t care for Al, whose dreary sanctimony reminded me of Roy. FYI, our pal Al, always fleshy, is now fat.

Suggested reading

America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

Obviously, that 2000 election ripped the country in half and put us all at each other’s throats. At first, 9/11 seemed to mend that rift. But only with a basting stitch, whose straggled threads broke years ago. No one cares about terrorists anymore. Americans save their animosity for each other. As for contested elections, the last one takes the cake. Two-thirds of Republicans think the 2020 presidential election was stolen, without a shred of evidence. Like, practically half the electorate thinks voting is rigged and fake. That’s way worse than some too-close-to-call in Florida, and even Al had the grace to concede. So that sensation of us all being in this together, that warm feeling of communal suffering while walking down Broadway? Long gone.

The other revelation 20 years ago was, wow, there really is such a thing as an enemy. There really are people out there who hate this country and want to destroy it, and it was pretty disturbing that I’d never noticed before. Well, kiss that insight goodbye, too. These days, no one seems to pay the slightest attention to enemies outside the country. They’re all in the country. Our very President — Joe Biden, believe it or not, and no, he’s not dead, or not quite — claims the biggest threat to the US is “domestic terrorism”. He’s not talking about Islamic nutjobs with visas for going to flying school, either, but about white people — and not even the white people burning down black-owned businesses in the interest of “social justice”.

So never mind China (massively more dangerous than in your day), or Russia, or Iran, or the tons of terrorists in Africa and the Middle East still plotting more mayhem; all that matters is “systemic racism” right here. You’d think this country had never elected a black president (surprise!) — twice (double surprise!). You’d think 9/11 had never happened — that we’d never been shaken up, never looked around wide-eyed at the big scary world out there. We’re back to squabbling with the other children in our grubby private sandbox.

When the South tower collapsed with you in it, I also thought: my God, there is such a thing as evil. Such a thing as truly horrible, despicable people who do horrible, despicable things. And now our compatriots think “evil” means asking someone where they’re from or complimenting a foreigner’s English or using the wrong pronoun. If Ettie and her friends ever came face-to-face with proper evil, smoke would come out their ears and their brains would short out.

After the attacks, we blathered endlessly about defending “freedom”, but no one gives a tinker’s damn about freedom anymore. For 18 months they’ve “locked down” swathes of the country, telling everyone to close their businesses and stay home. That’s what now passes for “liberty and justice for all”, and practically nobody complained.

Maybe that’s because no one feels safe saying anything more controversial than their shoe size. If you announce what might have seemed self-evident 10 years ago, like “women don’t have penises”, you can lose your job, and the only place I’d dare to type such heresy is in an unposted letter to my dead brother.

Suggested reading

This is Britain's 9/11 moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You’ll be glad to hear we attacked Afghanistan in your memory, but less happy to learn that we only left that slagheap, tail between our legs, ten days ago. The Taliban are back in power, and aside from leaving them as one of the best equipped fighting forces in the world — with $86 billion’s worth of our gear — everything is the same. Oh, we finally shot the Jesus-y creep who ploughed a plane into your office, but two trillion dollars is a stiff price for one hit job. Eight years of occupation of Iraq cost nearly the same money and accomplished the same nothing.

I need to get ready for that memorial, so this will be rushed. In 2008, the financial world went blooie. Though we’ve technically recovered, we’re still tippling on the edge of a sheer drop; my finance guy’s advice is: “Don’t look down.” In 2016, we elected an inarticulate, narcissistic blowhard as president, who made us an international laughingstock. Now we’ve elected an elderly puppet with encroaching dementia who draws not contempt but pity; he’s spending money as if medically incapable of remembering that he already spent all of it last week. The government is in hock $23 trillion and counting (your eyes are bulging), and if the dollar is ever replaced as the world’s reserve currency — this is your bailiwick, Wee Willy Wall Street — we’ll all be huddled around campfires with meat on sticks. Or soy protein on sticks. Yum.

Back in 2001, it was medieval fanatics who denigrated our country as decadent, degenerate, corrupt and irredeemably amoral. Now the leadership of all our institutions — universities, arts foundations, corporations, even the Army and CIA — has taken on the smear job for them, happily trashing the country as wicked and unsalvageable. It’s a form of the entrepreneurship we’re so famous for: Americans have learned to terrorise themselves.

By the way — although well into production, my new documentary on “cancel culture” has just been cancelled. Imagine the hilarious late-night debrief you and I might have enjoyed as I drip-fed you the ironic details. One more of our jousting, wine-soaked sibling powwows would have more than compensated for my wasted work.

L.

That was some time ago. More recently, the last time the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, in 1996, they found a previous president, Mohammed Najibullah, at the UN compound in Kabul. He, too, had been a puppet leader, supported by the Soviets. The Taliban seized him and tortured him and his brother to death, castrating him at some point. Their naked bodies were dragged through the street and hanged outside the presidential palace, as a warning to the populace. As a considered insult, funeral prayers for Najibullah were forbidden in Kabul.

On August 16^th this year, the American president Joe Biden gave a televised speech justifying his decision to withdraw his troops. Much of it was devoted to complaining about the conduct of the Afghans — the ones who had been left high and dry. “Afghanistan’s leaders gave up and fled the country,” he claimed. It would have been true with the addition of the word “some” — Hamid Karzai, for instance, stayed where he was, in Kabul. And if the president, Ashraf Ghani, took the opportunity to seek safety in the UAE, it may have been the memory of Najibullah’s grisly fate that encouraged him to flee. Or the fate of Shah Shujah. Biden, on the other hand, appeared entirely ignorant of how things go and have gone in Afghanistan. Ignorance is the general condition of many anti-imperialists in the West, and Afghanistan has paid heavily for it.

I am a novelist by profession. About twenty-five years ago, I found myself inexplicably possessed by a subject. I couldn’t understand it. I had very little interest in historical novels. I had never been to Afghanistan. But there was no alternative: I felt under a compulsion to write a novel about the First Afghan War.

Suggested reading

The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Levy

The British invaded Afghanistan in 1839, replacing the Emir, Dost Mohammed (who fled) with Shah Shujah. Two years later, forces loyal to Dost Mohammed routed the British, killing almost all of them on their retreat. Dost Mohammed regained his throne and kept it.

Nobody, in the late 1990s, could understand why I was writing this. I could only shrug. I could see that something important was happening in Afghanistan while I was writing, but I submitted to the compulsion rather than investigate parallels. Very strangely indeed, at one point I had the unarguable conviction that my hero, in 1839, should look up into the sky and see jet planes flying westward. It made no sense, and it had to be done.

The novel was finished, and the bound proof was delivered. It was September 10^th, 2001. The next day I switched the television on, and understood what The Mulberry Empire had wanted to say.

At this time, I’d also been writing a weekly column for the Independent, and though I seemed like an unserious person to the editors, they occasionally let me write something about Afghanistan if there was nothing else going on. These are curious to read now.

I wrote that, when the Taliban destroyed the 6^th century statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan in March 2001, it was a harbinger of much worse acts of destruction. After the war started, mindful of Dost Mohammed’s tactics in the 1830s, it was absolutely clear to me that the Taliban had usefully melted into the mountains to regroup patiently. In an interview in March 2002, I complained with comic exaggeration that rather than an imperialist project, the West in Afghanistan was “going there for three months, sending sandwiches and then leaving again, which is a recipe for disaster”. Quite soon after, I wrote that in the end of our Afghan adventure, “when it comes to the point, we can evacuate in shame and dishonour”. And so it has proved.

All this was perfectly obvious to a fairly lazy novelist sitting in South London. Why the sequence of events has proved so astonishing to every Western commentator and politician is an interesting question, and unlike many things said to be an interesting question, this one has a fairly easy answer. They don’t know anything.

This is not much of an exaggeration, as Biden’s amazement at Ghani running for safety instantly shows. What has primarily driven all political decisions in the absence of understanding is something universally agreed upon. Imperialism was a very bad thing. No-one must ever be able to describe us, now, as imperialists. We must “start a conversation about Empire” — since this demand came fifty years after Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica was a bestseller, this did not quite mean what it seemed to.

Suggested reading

Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There was plenty of very interesting work being done on empire, but not much of it seemed to enter into the “conversation” — neither Srinath Raghavan’s exceptional study of India’s transition from empire through the experience of World War II, nor Amartya Sen’s lucid understanding of how Empire both shaped and went on restricting India.

Instead, a soothing bromide like Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland was much preferred by the lumpenintelligentsia, however ill-informed or misleading. Sanghera’s approach to his subject was summed up by his account of the “brutal truth” that the Koh-i-Noor diamond ended up in the Crown Jewels after being seized from Ranjit Singh. He fails to mention that Ranjit Singh’s family had owned it for all of 36 years, having seized it from Shah Shujah as the price of hospitality. Still, the evils of imperialism emerge consolingly from the half story Sanghera tells.

What lies behind Biden’s decision is a horror of what people might think of us. This is never going to lead to a stable position. People might think that an unstable and wicked foreign state needs to be dealt with. People might also think that putting things right by moving in and running is wicked imperialism. The end result is that the West decides to move in; after a while, they get bored and nervous of bien pensant opinion; their President declares that twenty years’ presence is a “forever war” and the only solution is to run away, and anyway, look how expensive it’s been. We tried to get them to do stuff our way for, like, forever, and my God they just wouldn’t. Their fault, obviously.

Since there is clearly no appetite for an open-ended imperial commitment, with a viceroy in the Bala Hissar, the only realistic option would have been never to have engaged in the first place.

“Hang in there, sisters,” a groovy Greek commentator advised the women of Kabul last week, and that seems to be about the limit of our interest. The old imperialists, appalling as they were to our eyes, at least took the trouble to find out about these cultures and talk to them. Sathnam Sanghera sneers at the limit of engagements of the imperialists who were to be found “dining on curry and arak, chewing betel and smoking hookahs, forsaking beef, donning dhotis and growing moustaches.”

I doubt Sanghera’s knowledge of Pushto and Dari is as confident as Alexander Burnes’s, however, or his Sanskrit up to that of William Jones. I suspect, on a lighter level, that those imperialists who dined on curry were a bit better informed than the commentator in the Washington Post who, from an impeccably bien pensant position, informed his readers this week that Indian food is “the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based on one spice”.

Suggested reading

The man who lost Afghanistan

By Will Lloyd

We are never, now, going to be able to have an honest conversation about Empire. It would now be quite impossible to say on paper, for instance, that Fiji tried to join the British Empire in 1852 and was turned down flat. Or to talk about the establishment of the medical school in Agra in the 1850s. Or to suggest, as I did, that the heroic ability to fight off imperial annexation, whether in the 1830s or the 2000s, may carry something of a cost.

The current confused state of affairs is that we are perfectly certain that wrong is being done elsewhere, and something must be done, and, also, it would be terribly wrong to do anything but run away in order to put that wrong right, or at any rate excuse ourselves from being called names.

I dare say that the Taliban are going to settle in for an extended period of rule after a certain amount of initial bloodshed, just like Dost Mohammed on his glorious return. There was always considerable tension between them — parochial, tribal, Afghanistan-focussed — and the sophisticated internationalists of al-Qaeda they found themselves hosting. They might not want to go down that path again, and the West will stick to mouthing platitudes and leaving the men, women and children of Afghanistan in the situation they find themselves in.

What’s the alternative? Learn something about the long history and culture of those men, women and children? Talk to them in their own languages? That’s never going to catch on.

Ashraf, the father, was the country’s last president. A trained anthropologist, he believed in books, and the power of the ideas within them to move the world. His wife, Rula, a student in Paris in 1968, said she believed in women. Mariam, their daughter, became a filmmaker — she believed in Art. Their son, Tarek, believed in his father. His two-decade career in American academia and philanthropy is an echo of Ashraf’s own cloudless trajectory through blue-chip universities, the World Bank and think tanks. It was a tribute.

For half a century, Afghanistan was simultaneously obscure and at the centre of world events. It had swallowed the fading comet tail of the USSR and absorbed the late afternoon light of American Empire. It had been a hideaway for renegades and a bazaar of ideologies. From Hippie free love to political Islamism, from Marxist-Leninism to market democracy — all had been hawked and bartered over in Afghanistan.

Whether it was itself a “real” country at all, or simply a vast outdoor laboratory worked by imperial meddlers and narco-criminals was hard to say. But every force and idea that acted on Afghanistan acted on the Ghanis too. They were both the victims of events and the instigators of them. They had been exiles, then leaders; they had been scattered across the globe and enthroned in Kabul. The family was Pashtun, and prominent, with a history of political influence. The Ghanis first left in 1977, as the communists began their takeover.

Ashraf Ghani fled again this week. Mariam posted about it — “I’m pretty burned out” — on Instagram from her home in New York. Tarek and Rula have so far remained silent. This time it was widely reported that Ashraf had attempted to upholster four cars and a helicopter with millions of stolen dollars. This was surely — hopefully — untrue, and not because the source was a Russian news agency.

By Afghan standards the Ghanis were not that corrupt. It was for other politicians to mainline America’s billions into lavish compounds, or to be apprehended in Dubai’s airport with $52 million in cash. Ashraf did not believe in money. He believed in books.

When he became President, in 2014, after a fraught and nervous election, he indulged his obsession. Like all Afghan presidents, Ghani moved to the Arg — a labyrinth of palaces within a 19^th-century fortress in central Kabul. But unlike his predecessor, he immediately set about restoring the ruined royal library, with all its decaying antique volumes. His personal library was his most valuable asset, according to a New Yorker profile. He owned seven thousand books. Every day he woke up before the sun rose and read them under his favourite chinar tree. He would have taken his volumes, not cash, when he fled on Sunday, wouldn’t he?

Suggested reading

Can the Taliban bring peace?

By Aris Roussinos

Ghani didn’t just read books — he wrote them. With his collaborator, the British human rights lawyer Claire Lockhart, he published Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (2008). “Novel strategies” were needed, they argued, to stabilise failed states that were contaminating “our fully globalised world” with anarchy.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these chaotic zones were spreading. Ghani believed he had the ideas — a “sovereignty index” to be annually published by the UN, and a “citizens-based approach” to state-building — that could mop away the disorder. Fixing Failed States offered, according to a small review in Foreign Affairs, “a surprisingly hopeful vision”.

The vision was delivered as a TED talk in 2007. Ghani’s manner is cerebral, candid, impish, shrilly excitable — theory excites him. His voice is as squeaky as an old floorboard being stepped on. The TED stage suited a pedagogue like Ghani. It was not so different from the lecture halls and seminar rooms of John Hopkins, where he’d spent the 1980s teaching. He never looks uncomfortable.

America was comfortable enough for the Ghanis. It was their main chance, as it was for other exiled Afghans. It gave Ashraf, Rula and Tarek the opportunity to collect the academic prizes that are today’s proof of intelligence and moral worth. It allowed Mariam to transform herself from the child of exiles to an artist; not merely an artist working in “installation, performance, photography, text and video”, but, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, an “activist, archivist, writer and lecturer”.

A 2015 New York Times profile found Mariam in her loft apartment in Clinton Hill, worrying about being “a Brooklyn cliche”. The Times sketched her “as well-versed in the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is in the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet”.

Mariam’s work was exhibited at Tate Modern in London, and the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York. One exhibit, “Afghanistan: A Lexicon”, was made in collaboration with Ashraf over Skype. Over 72 panels of text and photos created by the Ghanis, the history of Afghanistan is shown to be cyclical — an endless rotation of invasion, revolt, reform, collapse and recovery. A country cruelly frozen in dynamism.

Suggested reading

Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She made films about the discovery of oil in Norway, and the melancholy difficulties of translation. She was born in New York, but identified “most with the border”. What Edward Said called the “essential sadness” of exile was there in Mariam, and in all her family. Perhaps that’s why the “Lexicon” had one telling absence from its story — the Ghanis themselves.

Ashraf had returned to the country with Rula in 2002 almost as soon as the Taliban were banished. First a finance minister under Hamid Karzai, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2009, and then the winner of that disputed election in 2014.

Afghanistan was a problem for the family in a way that America — where they had flourished — was not. America only needed Ashraf’s theories in the classroom. Afghanistan, Ashraf believed, could be saved by his theories. It was all in his book, and his TED talk. Opium farmers would make t-shirts. Embroiders in Kandahar would partner with Versace. Guns would become ploughshares. One day the daughters of Afghanistan would be like his own, free to study in America; free to make jam in Brooklyn; free to exhibit their work in Berlin.

Afghans were not fools. They only needed jobs. The people, Ghani said in 2005, were internationalist by temperament — “they’re much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans.” Well, perhaps.

Becoming President gave Ghani the chance to govern the country that shone in his mind. Afghans would learn about sheep raising from New Zealand, and hydroelectricity from the Swiss. Afghanistan was a blank slate. Ghani began to doodle his beautiful diagrams on it.

Sigmund Freud once said there were two “impossible professions”: education and government. Ghani was a wonderful educator. He proved to be an impossible President. He micromanaged his illusions and his staff. He took anger management classes.

Suggested reading

America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

Why was he so angry? Was it the pressure — grinding and invidious — of watching his theories of the state become exposed as just another exile’s hopeless fictions?

Either way, he grew ever more solitary behind the blast walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints of the Arg. The library was his succour and support — one journalist described Ghani’s office, filled with open books on every surface, marked neatly with pencil annotations. This is what most intellectuals (quite rightly) do in a crisis. They retreat, like Michel de Montaigne did during the 16th century French wars of religion, to brood in their towers and libraries, hoping that solitude will yield new ideas. Montaigne, though, only advised the king of France, he had no pretensions to power itself; Ghani was supposed to be something like the king of Afghanistan.

At least, as everyone said, he was not corrupt. That was a blessing in a country where the MPs alone ritualistically stole over a billion dollars a year. But there was the rest of the family. Ashraf’s brother, Hashmat, and his nephew Sultan.

Hashmat will be remembered, not for driving a bulletproof Mercedes Limousine, or the 23,000 square feet of his Kabul home, but for the SOSi scandal. It was extraordinarily complicated; it involved hugely valuable rights to mineral deposits in Kunar province, illegal links between US special forces and militias — and the Ghani family. It was Hashmat who owned significant shares in the US company that wanted to buy the rights to the minerals, and it was President Ghani who signed off on the deal. Was it corrupt? “If there was a colour redder than red, that’s what colour this red flag would be,” said one American expert in procurement law.

Sultan, meanwhile, styled himself the President of ‘The Ghani Group’ on LinkedIn, and the co-founder of ‘The Institute for Afghan Women’ on his website.  As the country started to tremble a few weeks ago, he shared photos of himself on Instagram walking towards a Learjet 75 Liberty.

Ashraf had promised to clean up grift when he first ran for President, but if it flourished in his immediate family, what hope did Afghanistan have?

More from this author

The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

When Ghani fled on Sunday he left behind half the population in poverty, a third of the population facing emergency levels of food insecurity, stagnant GDP, a massive trade deficit, a restive and furious countryside, and, in the words of one report, “a largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional state”. Now the Taliban control it, down to the very last bumper car.

A few days before, Mariam Ghani’s latest film had its theatrical release in the United States. It’s title? What We Left Unfinished. For Ashraf — intellectual and politician, then, at last, a corrupted idealist — it was all unfinished.

How shocked, how distressed he looked, when he surfaced this week in the UAE, exiled once more. When his security team extracted him, he said, he was “in a condition where I couldn’t even put on my shoes”. Did Ashraf Ghani realise that the things he put his faith in, the codes by which he lived his life — ideas and books, globalisation and rational governance — had been diminished? That if the reports were true, and he really had left the country, not with his library, but with $169 million dollars, that he had maimed his life’s work, as well as Afghanistan?

Maybe he knew. All year, until almost the very end, he had promised his army could hold out against the Taliban, “forever“. But there was lucidity amidst the delusion.

“The future will be determined by the people of Afghanistan,” he told the BBC in February, “not by somebody sitting behind the desk, dreaming.”

He was wrong about the people of Afghanistan. Whether they stayed or fled, they would still be dragged into the conflicts of others. But he was right about the dreamer behind the desk. Ashraf Ghani, unable to determine Afghanistan’s future, was describing himself.

Before planting a single bulb, you need time and patience to learn about the different types of terrain, shrubs and climates. Only after you have acquired that foundational knowledge can you decide what you wish to grow. But even then, it’s all too easy for the vagaries of the weather to wreak havoc on your plans, for you to lose faith and pull the plug. Yet failure isn’t guaranteed; with a bit of persistence, your original target could still be reached.

Consider the US government’s attitude towards Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty years since 9/11. It has invested so much in terms of lives, injuries, morale and money on its campaigns in the Middle East. At the same time, paradoxically, it has learned an extraordinary amount. More was achieved than met the eye. But just as green shoots were beginning to emerge, America gave up.

Joe Biden appears to be pivoting away from almost every key decision made by his predecessor, for no other reason than the fact that he was a Republican. US foreign policy, which should be a long-term strategic investment, is falling victim to the perennial inter-party struggle between the Republican and the Democratic Parties.

It was not always like this. In the late 1940s — a period now so remote that few living Americans can remember it — the US was starting to face the full extent of the Soviet threat. The new President, Harry Truman, took a far harder line towards Stalin than his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. But until the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, both Democrat and Republican administrations opposed communism.

More from this author

Why Islamism became woke

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yes, fellow-travellers and spies still existed. But largely there was a remarkable degree of bipartisanship, and its importance should not be overstated. Across the world, every political leader knew that the US would continue to pursue a consistent foreign policy, no matter who was in the White House. If the Soviet Union intervened anywhere, the United States would seek to thwart its efforts.

Intellectually, too, this bipartisan support for the broad contours of US foreign policy made it easier for those abroad — friend as well as foe — to predict how America would act in a given situation. This helped reduce the chance of a catastrophic miscalculation. Certainly, some presidents were “tougher” on communism than others, but a new administration did not rip up a previous administration’s policies out of spite.

So when did it all go wrong?

On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama set a precedent when he declared his intention to reverse the key foreign policy decisions of the George W. Bush Administration, promising “to remove US combat troops [from Iraq] within 16 months, leaving behind a residual force with limited responsibilities”. The effects of this withdrawal are well-documented — the most serious being the rise of Isis.

Eight years later, Donald Trump responded by resolving to do all he could to “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran” — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — which was portrayed by top officials in the Obama Administration as their biggest diplomatic achievement. And four years after that, Joe Biden indicated he would reverse key foreign policy decisions of the Trump Administration, particularly with respect to Iran and Saudi-Arabia. The Biden Administration has also decided to not only pull out of Afghanistan — prioritising haste over competence — but also to resuscitate the Iranian JCPOA deal, despite unrelenting provocations by the Iranian regime.

Indeed, the end of bipartisanship was all but confirmed in May, when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki delivered a scathing verdict on the Trump Administration’s efforts in the Middle East: “Aside from putting forward a peace proposal that was dead on arrival,” she said, “we don’t think they did anything constructive, really, to bring an end to the long-standing conflict in the Middle East.”

In reality, last August’s Abraham Peace Accords represented an extraordinary step forward for the Middle East. The UAE and Bahrain recognised Israel’s right to exist, and with it the need for Arabs and Jews to join forces against the existential threat posed by Iran.

More from this author

America's Muslim #MeToo moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

As for this summer’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, it should be noted that the country was far from stable when it was handed over to the Biden administration — though it was certainly not so dire as to justify a hasty withdrawal of the remaining US troops. Indeed, far more concerning for America’s security is another development over the past decade, something rarely noted in the American media: that is, the discernible leadership change that has occurred within several countries of the Middle East, particularly in the Gulf States.

For a long time, America’s relationship with Middle Eastern countries centred around the question of oil — and the vast fortunes the West hoped to extract from it. But during this period, US diplomats had to negotiate with men who, after making assurances, would then go home and do nothing. Combined with a frequently oppressive treatment of women, and widespread anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda, the Arab status quo was more threatening to American interests than supportive of them. Later, when confronted with their financing of jihadist groups, these “diplomats” would deny any involvement, no matter how strong the evidence.

Today’s leaders in the Middle East are quite different, whether in the UAE, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. This is especially true when it comes to their key advisers, many of whom have been educated in Britain and America, and seek a future in which a more humanist, pluralistic Islam emerges to challenge the fundamentalists. Financing radical Islamist ideology abroad — to say nothing of jihad — is no longer on the agenda. Instead, the focus is on developing the framework of a modern economy.

But to do this, Middle Eastern governments are fighting a number of opposing power dynamics in their own societies, including jihadists, Wahhabis and traditional tribal interests. All of this takes time. Nevertheless, one can see that real change is happening, particularly in terms of the role of women.

All this and more is now being undone by the Biden administration — and the result will not be that Americans sleep more peacefully in our beds. Rather, if the jihadists regain control of Afghanistan, or if violence escalates in countries such as Iraq and Lebanon, neither Europe nor America will be spared the consequences. Any additional instability in the Middle East will produce an enormous refugee flow, as happened following the rise of Isis and the collapse of Libya following Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow.

More from this author

Tribalism has come to the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

How can this be avoided? Well, America’s eventual success in the Cold War surely proves that foreign policy needs to be a long-term effort. Strategy cannot be made on the campaign trail. If US policy is reversed every four or eight years, America is bound to lose — with the Chinese Communist Party being the main beneficiary. For in mixing elements of capitalist efficiency with authoritarianism, the CCP benefits from a long-term geopolitical outlook and strategy.

Beijing is already exploiting the power vacuum in Afghanistan, while in Pakistan Chinese influence has succeeded in pressuring the prime minister to downplay the horrific mistreatment of the Uighurs. In the Middle East, too, the CCP is wooing governments with the familiar offer of investment in infrastructure with no political strings attached.

Under such circumstances, what country in the world would decide in favour of a strategic alliance with the US? If every incoming American administration gleefully shreds the foreign policy of the Administration that preceded it, why would its strategic adversaries not exploit this vacillation to their advantage?

After forty long years, the consistency of Cold War containment ultimately brought victory. The subsequent inconsistency of America’s foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is having the opposite effect. And under Biden, that shows no sign of changing.

A newcomer to the US, I had been hired off the streets by Francis J. West, Schlesinger’s Special Assistant, a young Marine combat veteran who had already published a celebrated book about the Vietnam War. Schlesinger liked to collect brains (one, Andrew Marshall, served as Director of Net Assessment for 42 years, retiring at age 94), but with me he was habitually quarrelsome, in part over his obsession with Jews — he was a convert to Lutheranism of all things.

When Donald Rumsfeld arrived, his very elegant suits cut a sharp contrast to Schlesinger’s tweedy birdwatcher clothes . Unlike his predecessor, he had no intellectual credentials at all but he was certainly a political prodigy; he had won a seat in Congress when he was 30, became a White House Cabinet-level counsellor for Nixon at 37, and then Ambassador to Nato before he was recalled to serve as Chief of Staff for President Ford in 1974.

When he asked me, with an openly sardonic grin, what I was doing on the premises, I explained that the Secretary of Defense must present a bulky annual report to Congress, and I was writing the “national strategy” front-matter, which Congressmen and lobbyists usually skip over to devour what follows: details about the various weapons and other purchases that will rain down dollars on their districts.

More from this author

The phoney war between Israel and Hamas

By Edward Luttwak

“Why you?” he asked. “You are not even a US citizen!” So I explained that lots of others were also sharing the burden, and that I would not even be in the room when the final editing would be done. Then I gratuitously added that strategy was beyond the capacity of Anglo-Saxons because they are gloaters, while only brooders seriously think about threats.

His reaction was unsettling: he burst out laughing and went on laughing, stopping only to start again. Finally, he said that in Brussels at Nato they were all brooders, still resentful for no longer lording it over the Congo, Surabaya and Ceylon. As I walked out, he asked me if I wanted a job. I reminded him that as a non-citizen I could only consult. “So consult away,” he said, still laughing.

It was only later that I understood why Rumsfeld was in such an uproarious mood. He had just pulled off the bureaucratic coup of the century: with the amiable President Ford as his frontman, he had demoted Kissinger to Secretary of State, removing him from his more important job as the White House National Security Advisor. He had effectively hoisted Kissinger with his own petard; it was Kissinger himself who had shifted all the power from State to the National Security Council.

But Kissinger wasn’t his only target. At the CIA, meanwhile, Rumsfeld had removed the embarrassingly truthful William Colby and installed his associate and future President H.W Bush, sacked Schlesinger from the Pentagon and appointed his own loyal protégé, Richard Cheney, as his successor as Chief of Staff — to protect himself from further White House intrigue.

It was only later that I understood the logic behind Rumsfeld’s political masterplan: Kissinger had to go because the “Ford-Brezhnev” duopoly of power — which aimed to control Third World troublemakers and deflate the pretensions of their tiresome European allies — was viewed as a pact with the devil among the anti-Communist wing of the Republican Party, which now demanded his removal. Getting rid of Kissinger would keep them at bay. But to demote Kissinger would unleash the power of Schlesinger, who was already demanding sharp increases in defence spending and had irritated President Ford by encouraging anti-Kissinger hard-liners. So the perfect solution was to fire both, and then use the dust-up to get rid of Colby.

Suggested reading

What if Reagan had been murdered?

By Dominic Sandbrook

This collective defenestration was Italian-renaissance politics at its best, with Rumsfeld playing its Machiavellian puppet-master, though the vernacular press preferred the folksy “Halloween massacre”. It was a feat entirely beyond the imagination of Gerald Ford, an all-round decent fellow who became the uncontroversial Republican leader in 1965 because of his distaste for intrigue, and then Nixon’s obvious “squeaky clean” choice to replace the scandalous Spiro Agnew as Vice President.

It was Rumsfeld who had laid the entire plot and persuaded the mild-mannered Ford to act against character, especially in regard to Kissinger whom he greatly admired. Evidently, Rumsfeld had decided that the time had come for him to emerge from the back rooms of the White House and receive some career-enhancing publicity as Secretary of Defense. The then ample Pentagon press corps has the “SecDef” as its focus just as its White House counterpart has the President — and not his underling Chief of Staff, however powerful.

That, in turn, reflected another of Rumsfield’s priorities: he must have calculated that Ford’s election chances the following year were very poor, especially after eight Republican years, and he needed the prestige of being Secretary of Defense for his future job hunt. At the age of 45, he wanted to become a very well-paid CEO and not just sit on boards for small change.

He succeeded in that as well, becoming seriously rich during President Carter’s four years then Reagan’s eight years, initially by becoming CEO of a pharmaceutical company. During this period, he once invited me to dinner solely to complain about a passage in one of my books that he found objectionable. As he spoke, I realised that he was following the defence scene very closely. And as a prior appointee, and still quite young, he was an obvious candidate for high office when his party won the White House again with Reagan, and then again with Bush senior.

But he was still in his money-making phase, and was also flirting with Presidential ambitions of his own. In any case, had he wanted to return under Bush senior, Schlesinger’s admirers — a tenacious lot — were very well placed to block him. And so it was not until January 2001 that G.W. Bush re-appointed him Secretary of Defense.

It was, however, an unlucky return. In his years of reflection since his last Pentagon passage, he had applied his business brain to the business of the Pentagon, and he was looking forward to implementing drastic reforms, once he had staffed the department with likeminded officials. He told me that he wanted to change the very nature of the Department; he viewed it as an inefficient machine that turned every weapon purchase into an endless quest for perfection, and he wanted to change the military mind-set that turned every operation into another D-day.

Suggested reading

The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

In its place, he wanted intelligence-driven “manoeuvre warfare”, and focused combat efforts that replaced bulk with precision, along with efforts to set limits on bureaucratic overspending.

It was not to be — or, rather, it was starting to be. But after September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon itself was attacked, the Joint Staff started looking at different options of implementing another D-Day: there was talk of sending large forces with mountains of supplies to march up from Pakistan, some even amphibiously via Pakistan’s Baluchistan coast. Rumsfeld wanted none of it: he wanted to knock out the Taliban with small teams of green berets backed up by precise bombing directed by hand-held laser designators.

Rumsfeld pulled it off. He overruled the D-day crowd in the Joint Staff — though not without the support of Richard Meyers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and an airman who saw nothing wrong with relying primarily on air power. What followed was a triumph for Rumsfeld and his “light footprint”: the Taliban crumbled and everything went very well, except for the total failure of the CIA “operatives” who were supposed to help the Green Berets communicate with the anti-Taliban Tadjiks and Uzbeks: none knew a word of either language.

The much bigger failure for Rumsfeld was to come later, with his inability to persuade Bush and even Cheney that with the Taliban defeated and Al Qaeda camps liquidated, the next step was to leave Afghanistan to pursue his own history. Instead, what followed was the prolonged farce of “counter-insurgency warfare” (military malpractice institutionalised) with its corrupt “nation-building” twin (a very expensive and impotent form of colonialism).

Yet the great success of Rumsfeld’s own light-footprint method in invading Afghanistan was also the proximate cause of his own great failure of Iraq in 2003.

The plan was to conquer Baghdad swiftly from the north, via the Kurdish region where US troops would be welcomed. To get there, 80 shiploads of equipment for 60,000 US troops would land in Turkey’s port of Iskenderun to be trucked more than 400 miles into Iraq, while the troops would be airlifted into Incirlik base and to more forward airstrips.

When I heard about the plan, it struck me as foolish because I did not believe it possible to have Turkish parliamentary approval, given that the entrenched Kemalists and the newly empowered Islamists would both refuse. I explained that to Rumsfeld , only to be told that I was wrong and that the newly elected Islamist PM Erdoğan had just agreed everything in a meeting with his Deputy, who was in Ankara as we spoke.

More from this author

How to stop China's long march

By Edward Luttwak

When, on March 1, the Turkish parliament refused to allow US forces to drive into Iraq via its Kurdistan region, as Erdogan had promised, the bulk of their equipment was loaded on to the 80 ships in the Mediterranean. It could not possibly be ready for the planned start of the invasion on March 20; aside from the long passage around Arabia via the Suez Canal, Kuwait’s unloading facilities were remarkably undeveloped — not much infrastructure is needed to unload Rolex watches, Rolls Royces and other Kuwaiti necessities.

As a result, the bulk of the invasion force, built around the 4^th Infantry division (that had twice the men of a normal division and lots of armour too) was missing when Rumsfeld decided to invade on schedule nonetheless, with just one Marine division and one infantry division as well as smaller units. Moreover, those scant forces were still strung out over the distance from Kuwait when the lead units entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The division and extra brigade stranded on the side of the Suez Canal would not arrive until later, while the British armoured division remained to secure Basrah and its surroundings, and that too with great difficulty because the US Marines who were supposed to secure their flank had been dispatched to Baghdad instead.

Two months earlier, on February 25, 2003, General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, had testified in an open hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services that “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required “for postwar Iraq”. Accepting Shinseki’s estimate would not have required any change of plans, because no plan would be needed, given that there would be no invasion of Iraq because it was unimaginable that the bulk of the US Army would be converted into a Mesopotamian constabulary, ad infinitum. But instead of paying attention, Rumsfeld was scathing in his dismissal of Shinseki’s opinion.

Indeed, it was hardly surprising that his “light footprint” approach turned into an irremediable disaster when mobs across the country came out to destroy all they could. The Ba’ath militia had disappeared, the 500,000-strong Iraqi army had disintegrated, the local police were barricaded in their stations or at home and there were so few US troops in Baghdad — and in Falluja and in Ramadi and in other towns — that they could only protect themselves.

Whatever slim chances there were of quickly forming a provisional government — in spite of Sunni-Shia hostility, Kurd-Arab-Turkmen hostility, intra-Sunni tribal hostility, Barazani-Talebani intra-Kurd hostility, and the murderous rivalry of the Shi’a prelates — could not survive the complete collapse of public order.

And this time, Rumsfeld could not recommend evacuation: the United States had broken Iraq and now it owned the pieces, as Colin Powell had warned. Rumsfeld’s agony lasted till November 8 , 2006, when President Bush Jr announced his resignation, which Rumsfeld had actually proposed earlier. The delay cost Republican seats in the mid-term election the day before. American public opinion, disgusted by the war, did not turn against the generals, let alone the troops, but against Rumsfeld, whose elegant good looks merely added to his reputation as a slick manipulator.

Until his death this week, he tried to live down his arrogant rejection of the Shinseki warning — without, it must be said, much success.

For many foreign observers, meanwhile, the most fascinating thing was seeing British politicians and civil servants doing the very reverse of keeping calm and carrying on. As Cummings made clear, the decision-making process during the early months of Covid was not only frenzied but highly emotional and laden with expletives.

In particular, his account of one “crazy” day in March last year — when Number Ten discussed bombing the Middle East, whether to introduce a national lockdown and a newspaper story about the Prime Minister’s girlfriend’s dog — seemed more reminiscent of Fawlty Towers than Yes, Minister.

Yet the true significance of what we learned from Cummings’s remarks is the light they shed on how the modern state copes — or fails to cope — with a crisis. This is not the stuff of tabloids or sitcoms. It is not entertaining. But it is important. For Britain, whether it realises it or not, is facing its 9/11 moment.

When I went to university in the Netherlands, the most boring classes were on public administration. The coursework was filled with abbreviations of unpronounceable names of various government agencies with opaque missions and overlapping remits. There were bewildering “org charts” — diagrams that always seemed to swim before my eyes, precisely because they bore no conceivable relationship to political reality.

The exception to the tedium was the rare occasions we were able to analyse how advanced governments handled crises. The quality of senior leadership; budgets or lack thereof; the decision-making process; external factors — all were examined with the aim of determining what lessons could be drawn to prevent, or at least better handle, future emergencies.

More from this author

How influencers have legitimised anti-Semitism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In this context, Cummings’s testimony deserves to become an instant classic in the textbooks of public administration over the Western world.

Many of the facts were already clear before Cummings spoke: the emergence of Covid-19 in Wuhan; the Chinese government’s lack of transparency; the inadequacy of the World Health Organisation.

But amid all the entertaining titbits about whether Dilyn the Dog would “make it through the next reshuffle“, Cummings revealed one thing in particular that, despite being widely ignored, was more important than anything else: that Britain’s plans in place to deal with a major pandemic were either useless or non-existent.

This raises a disturbing question: how reliable are the plans for other kinds of emergency that the government may one day face? If Britain’s response to the pandemic is any guide, the answer is not encouraging.

Suggested reading

Dominic Cummings is writing history

By Ed West

Take the NHS, an organisation which even in the most normal of winters can still easily be overwhelmed. It is, to give it some credit, a system that has to cater to an ageing population. Still, almost as soon as the pandemic struck, the Government was forced to acknowledge that the NHS lacked the capacity to deal with Covid. So often a source of pride in Britain, it suddenly became symbolic of institutional malaise: a system that struggles during normality, and has no capacity to handle a national emergency.

There are lessons here not only for the UK but for all Western governments. Not a single country in the West, after all, can be said to have handled the pandemic well. The key question now is how well they will learn its lessons.

And this is where an analogy can be drawn with the way the US Government responded to the 9/11 catastrophe. In the wake of the devastating terror attack, a 9/11 Commission was set up — and, although there was controversy surrounding its makeup and the lengthy nature of its hearings, it ultimately produced an accurate and useful report on what had gone wrong.

It uncovered bureaucratic agencies with no shared goals; rivalries, distrust and turf-wars; a chronic failure to share information — in short, a dysfunctional and bloated bureaucracy. Sound familiar?

Suggested reading

What Cummings doesn't understand

By Freddie Sayers

Yet the administration of George W. Bush decided to add to the bureaucratic tangle by creating a brand-new institution, the Department of Homeland Security. It is far from clear whether this innovation has been a success. The subsequent lack of terrorist attacks on the same scale as 9/11 may testify to its effectiveness — although one might think that’s a low bar.

Perhaps the bigger mistake the Bush administration made after 9/11 was to think that occupying Afghanistan and Iraq would be effective counter-terrorism measures. These moves formed part of a broader “War on Terror”; a clear threat was identified and a solution, regardless of whether it was the right one, was settled on. But was it proof that the lessons of 9/11 were heeded? The rise of Isis, just thirteen years later, sadly suggests not.

Similarly, another parallel can be drawn with current debate over the origins of Covid-19. Following 9/11, the US and its allies in the West failed to thoroughly understand and develop a plan for countering radical Islam. There was never an urge of to tackle the root cause of Islamism: dawa — the propagation of radical Islamist ideology.

Just as efforts to determine the origins of Covid-19 have been stymied, to this day Homeland Security is still not paying enough attention to dawa, which, to me, has taken the form of a dormant virus. No doubt it will rear its ugly head in the near future, and while we have no excuse not to be prepared, I fear we will be surprised yet again.

Will we continue down a similar path following the pandemic? Will Britain succeed where America failed? It depends, of course, on what comes next. Cummings, to his credit, has said that “there is absolutely no excuse for delaying” a full-scale inquiry into the Covid debacle. Whether or not Boris Johnson takes notice remains unclear.

But what we do know is this: if, twenty years from now, we can look back on two decades without a comparable public health disaster, it will be because we bothered to treat the British response to Covid not as political soap opera but as a case study in public administration. Crafting a dependable plan may not sound like a vote-winner, but it is the only way that Britain, as well as the West, can expect to survive its 9/11 moment.

Likewise, if you deign to raise concerns about the implications of this sudden impeachment sequel — or any of the other extraordinary actions taken in the past week, such as an ongoing corporate censorship purge of unprecedented proportions — you can expect to be accused of defending or supporting the “domestic terrorists” who carried out the mob attack on the Capitol.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, rationalised rushing through Wednesday’s impeachment resolution at spell-binding speed — by far the fastest impeachment process ever — on the grounds that Trump posed a “clear and present danger” to the country, and needed to be removed immediately. “Imminent threats” of various stripes also have a long history of being cited to justify sweeping emergency action, such as the invasion of Iraq. Often upon further inspection, the purported “threat” turns out to have been not so “imminent”, or in fact to have never existed at all.

More from this author

Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

By Michael Tracey

But as rushed as the impeachment was, if the purported emergency conditions were truly so dire as Pelosi maintained, she could have theoretically summoned the House to convene the day after the mob attack and impeach Trump right away. Congress convened the very next day after the attack on Pearl Harbor to declare war on Japan, for example. Instead, Pelosi waited a full week, and gave everyone the weekend off in the interim. Trump, alleged to be in the process of orchestrating a violent “coup”, was allowed to remain in office unimpeded with access to the nuclear codes for seven days.

Nonetheless, with a total of two hours of perfunctory debate — and no hearings, fact-finding or meditation on the relevant Constitutional Law considerations — Trump was impeached for the second time. As such, the text of the impeachment article will now be permanently embedded in the fabric of American governance.

One wonders who even had a chance to actually sit down and read it. The article, which charges Trump with “incitement of insurrection”, is far-reaching in its potential implications. “Incitement” is an extremely narrowly circumscribed doctrine in US law, and for good reason: anyone who engages in inflammatory but protected political speech could theoretically be said to have engaged in criminally punishable “incitement” without the shield of the First Amendment. If someone who hears your speech chooses on their volition to engage in violent or criminal conduct, you in almost all circumstances cannot be prosecuted.

This new impeachment changes that equilibrium. The one quote cited from Trump in the article to demonstrate his alleged “inciting” speech was: ‘‘If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’’ That line — which could have been uttered by Trump in about a thousand different contexts over the past five years — is alleged to have “foreseeably resulted in… lawless action”.

Suggested reading

Why America is haunted by Ancient Rome

By Tom Holland

I witnessed countless instances of political speech expressed by activists, journalists, and others during last summer’s protests and riots which under the same standard could have been deemed to have “foreseeably resulted” in “lawless action”, such as attacks on police or destruction of property. But there was always a presumption that the speech was nonetheless protected under the First Amendment. The new “Trump standard” codified by this impeachment could have drastic implications for the the future, should it be applied more widely throughout US jurisprudence. Impeachable “incitement” is also unlikely ever to include statements by a president “encouraging” violence by way of, say, military force.

Still, Trump’s statements on 6 January  — just like a seemingly infinite number of others over the past five-plus years — could surely be worthy of political rebuke or censure. Indeed, Trump has already been rebuked. He’s been roundly condemned by his own party and administration. His main communications platform, Twitter, has banished him. His high-profile supporters are being systematically nuked from social media writ large. He’s been made to issue several humiliating statements conceding defeat and “disavowing” the MAGA mob which marched in his name. The bozo rioters at the Capitol were undoubtedly inflamed by a barrage of lies and conspiratorial delusions that Trump churned out on an almost hourly basis since losing the election — that’s beyond dispute.

But it was still clear pretty soon after the mob intrusion began last week that the most significant consequences from what occurred would arise not from the intrusion itself, which was dispersed by agents of the state in a matter of hours. Rather, the real consequences would stem from the predictably rash over-reaction. The more extreme the characterisation of last Wednesday’s events, the more emotional ammunition that lawmakers have to demand whatever extreme remedial action they had been ideologically committed to pursuing anyway. This goes well beyond the expedited impeachment, and into the corporate censorship purge which has now radically altered the principles undergirding the open internet.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most high-profile member of the Left-wing Congressional “#squad”, has claimed that she narrowly escaped assassination at the Capitol and has thus been “traumatised”. Evidently she will be publicly working through this “trauma” on Instagram. It is also her contention that half of the House of Representatives (over 200 people) had been on the verge of mass execution. This style of political rhetoric has already been marshalled by “AOC” and others to demand corporate censorship on a vast scale, and successfully so; last week she tweeted pressure on Apple and Google to expel the alternative social media platform Parler from their app stores, and the corporations quickly obliged.

Amazon, falling like a domino, then completely terminated Parler from its web hosting service — effectively killing the site. As perhaps the country’s most influential Democrat by online following, AOC is someone who these tech corporations have an interest in appeasing, especially as Democrats enter full control of the federal government on 20 January. Her exceedingly dramatic recounting of what transpired during the mob intrusion is a powerful tool in her arsenal.

More from this author

Why America is haunted by Ancient Rome

By Michael Tracey

Curiously, the most putatively “progressive” members of Congress seem to be the most exercised about resurrecting concepts that sound like Woodrow Wilson suppressing dissidents in wartime. Mondaire Jones, a highly touted “progressive” incoming freshman Congressman, took to fulminating on the House floor during the impeachment proceeding about “treason and sedition”.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney further declared from the floor of the House that Trump had “wilfully incited an armed insurrection”. Which is again another curious characterisation, because while a Capitol Police officer was in fact killed in the melee, the only person against whom armed, deadly force was used against was Ashli Babbitt, a Trump-supporting Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran who was shot dead at point-blank range by an officer.

Any rational observer who has the capacity to detach from the temporary passions of the moment should be able to recognise that the United States government was never at risk of being “overthrown” by the chaotic band of yahoos who stormed the Capitol. All they accomplished was to delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory by a few hours. They also humiliated the man they apparently thought they were valiantly coming to the defence of; even Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House, took to the floor during the impeachment session to declare that “Antifa” was not to blame for the chaos which unfolded, and blamed Trump as bearing responsibility for the events. Indeed, the full force of state and federal law enforcement power is now being deployed against the intruders, and many — perhaps hundreds — will be going to prison.

Reminiscent of the post 9/11 period, the “crisis” of the past week has been seized upon to execute a pre-existing agenda. Impeachment, purges, the militarisation and lockdown of the Capitol — it’s only the beginning, and it’s all happening with hardly even a peep of criticism or moment for reflection. Given this historical continuity with the events of 2001, it was therefore fitting when Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Majority Leader in the House, went out of his way Wednesday afternoon to herald the valour of Liz Cheney — daughter of the architect of US policy after 9/11, Dick — who was one of the ten Republicans to vote along with Democrats to impeach.