A Cultural History of the War without End

Abstract

In October 2001, when President George W. Bush outlined his administration's responses to the September 11 attacks New York and Washington, he also announced that the United States was about to begin and different war, war against terrorism that would need to be fought on all fronts. Bush argued that unlike World War II, which brought clear-cut victory, or the Vietnam War, which ended in quagmire, or even the high-tech Gulf War, the new war would be a different kind of war that requires different type of approach and different type of mentality. Speaking to reporter few days later, Vice President Richard Cheney put it more bluntly, is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.' The sense of historic rupture with previous models of understanding the world was widespread in the weeks following the attacks. Not only were the levels of destruction and the extraordinary human casualties unheard-of for Americans in peacetime, but the live television coverage had left the nation stunned. Eventually, perhaps, television's endless repetition of the second plane slicing through the south tower of the World Trade Center would become numbing, but other, more personal, images retained profound emotional resonance: firefighters covered in soot, rushing to save those they could and, later, searching through the rubble. Then came the friends and family who began to arrive the scene-and the screen-in the hours after the attacks. They carried large photocopied photos of their loved ones and spoke to reporters, tearfully telling of their last contact or determinedly showing the pictures that they hoped would inspire rescuers. Within days, September 11 had taken the folkloric status of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; at nearly every gathering, people would tell their stories: where they were and what they were doing when they heard-or, rather, saw-the news. It was not surprising, then, that the Bush administration would stress what many people in the United States already felt, that the nation was facing an unprecedented crisis and that nothing in our past had prepared us for such an attack. One corollary