Lasting Cruelties

Abstract

Lasting Cruelties Lyle Jeremy Rubin (bio) Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman Viking, 2021, 448 pp. On the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraqis plundered and burned government offices, banks, businesses, and hospitals. Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, responded: While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime. And I don't think there's anyone in any of those pictures … [who wouldn't] accept it as part of the price of getting from a repressed regime to freedom. In Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Spencer Ackerman repurposes Rumsfeld's words in his chapter on the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. That juxtaposition between post-invasion Iraq and the Black Lives Matter uprising encapsulates the thesis of Ackerman's sweeping history of America's early-twenty-first-century wars. Ackerman details not just how the reactionary mindset and methods of the War on Terror have been brought home, but [End Page 130] also how U.S.-led militarism diverts liberationist energies abroad while containing or distorting them at national borders. Ackerman begins his striking prologue with the story of what was at that point "the worst terrorist attack in American history": the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which claimed 168 lives, with hundreds of others maimed or dismembered. Its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, was a veteran of the first Gulf War, a white supremacist, and an associate of a robust far-right network with the Christian Identity movement at its center. His two accomplices, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, were Army pals. Yet journalists and officials were reluctant to explore the significance of these facts and instead tended to treat McVeigh as a curious loner. The days after the bombing, before McVeigh was identified as the suspect, politicians from both parties, along with FBI agents, blamed the mass murder on Muslims. (They had in mind the culprits behind the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.) One pundit claimed—;without any grounding—;that Oklahoma City was "probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East." Another called for the mass surveillance or assassination of threatening foreigners. Law enforcement recorded an uptick in instances of Islamophobic harassment nationwide. And a year later, in a prelude to the 2001 Patriot Act, Congress passed the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, authorizing the FBI and federal prosecutors to spy on and prosecute any Muslim suspected of association with "international terrorists." Ackerman goes on to chronicle the boomerang effects of militarized weaponry, tactics, and culture. In this project, Reign of Terror joins the scholarship of historians like Kathleen Belew and Karen J. Greenberg, along with many other academics and reporters cited by Ackerman. But Ackerman insists on an even more discomfiting verdict: the U.S. security Click for larger view View full resolution Donald Rumsfeld in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2005 (Jim Young-Pool/Getty Images) [End Page 131] policies that have contributed to the hollowing out of American democracy and encouraged the rise of Donald Trump and the far right are part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the nation's founding as a settler-colonial project and slaveholding behemoth. The title of the book itself, an explicit reference to the French Revolution, is an implicit jibe at how perseverations over the crimes of lowlier challengers can obscure the more lasting cruelties of the Global North. Ackerman's career as a journalist spans nearly the entire War on Terror. He has embedded in Afghanistan and toured Guantanamo Bay's notorious detention camp, interviewed generals like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, and played a central role in monumental scoops like the Snowden leaks. The breadth of his knowledge and experience are evident throughout Reign of Terror, which focuses primarily on political dynamics within the United States. Ackerman moves chronologically from the...