The Phantom War

The formulation of a war on terrorism, which we'll talk about in a little while, had quite an impact which, as time passed, became, in your eyes, a bigger and bigger problem. Talk a little about where we are now in the war on terrorism [and] its impact domestically on the United States.

You can reframe that question. Where are the American people? In the mind of the American people, and in the mind of the media as represented in television shows, movies, the way the news is presented, represented in the words of our leadership, we're fighting a war comparable to World War III, comparable to a war against the Axis powers, a war against terror, a threat to civilization. We see [this] in the most recent poll, the Harris poll that showed that 65 percent of Americans believe that there will be a major terrorist attack against the United States within the next year. Other polls show, amazingly to me, since there's been absolutely no evidence of any terrorism in the United States in the last four years, that half of Americans believe that within the next three weeks there will be a terrorist attack in the United States, and they have continued to believe this at somewhat varying levels ever since the beginning of the War on Terror in 2001. So, that's where we are. We are, in our minds, fighting a war on terror. The problem is there doesn't seem to be an enemy present in the country.

So, one the one hand, what we're witnessing and what you describe in your book is enormous expenditure across the board in the American budgetary process, allocating money supposedly to fight the war on terrorism, or at least putting that title on whatever is being funded.

Right. The question is how are we getting into a pattern in a world in which a huge proportion of our discretionary spending, half a trillion dollars, has been spent on homeland security or related items since 2001. The government continues to label -- even today, President Bush on the third anniversary of the "Mission Accomplished" speech, said that we have to win in Iraq because Iraq is the central front on the War on Terror. The estimates of the eventual total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars are in the trillions of dollars. So, how do we get there?

There is a difference in trying to explain that [than] saying somebody -- the oil companies or somebody else -- is benefiting, or somebody benefited from starting it. That's true. The War on Terror as a "war" (as opposed to an expanded law enforcement problem) started because the group that wanted a war in Iraq had been defeated in a bureaucratic war in the first year of this Bush administration. They'd been defeated: the Office of the Vice President [and] the Office of the Secretary of Defense had wanted to ramp up a war against Saddam right away. That was in line with the Project for the New American Century program that these people had been involved in. But Colin Powell, Secretary of State, the joint chiefs, [and] the intelligence community fought against that and defeated it [in favor of] with smart sanctions. The president and Condoleezza Rice sat on the fence, [then] went along with [smart sanctions].

What happened in 9/11 is that the cabal that had been pushing this Iraq war idea and failing saw that tremendous political capital now accrued to the president after 9/11. The ability to rhetorically link the attack on the United States to their ambitions with respect to Iraq, and later other wars, made the whole thing into one big War on Terror which could not be resisted any longer by the intelligence community, by the uniformed military, or by the State Department. They gained control of American foreign policy, they gained control of the president, who became a true believer in the War on Terror, and with him Condoleezza Rice.

That was a victory in a bureaucratic war, and it launched the war in Iraq. But it also launched the War on Terror that was not the war on Iraq, despite the fact that the war on Iraq was supposedly its central front. The bureaucratic war, was won but the main bureaucrats, Wolfowitz, Feith -- they're gone; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is hanging on by his fingernails. But we're stuck with a war on terror that took on a life of its own, and that's what the book is mainly about.

How does something take on a life of its own and trap the entire political class, and most Americans, into behaviors and beliefs that are patently untrue but seemingly inescapable -- beliefs about the need to fight a global war on terror as our first priority, even when there's no evidence of an enemy present in the United States?

This sense of a threat that this war is addressing shows up in all the opinion polls when you look at the attentive elite and when you look at the broad population?

Yes. As a political scientist you don't just look at public opinion, and you don't just look at the answers that people give to opinion polls, because the answers that people give to opinion polls are very much driven by how the questions are framed. So, what social scientists do, what I like to do, is to look at the questions that are asked. If you look at the questions that are asked of elites, whether by the Pew Foundation or the American Foreign Policy Association [to see] what opinion leaders in the United States think, or if you look at the Harris polls and Gallup polls of mass opinion, what questions are asked and how are they asked? The type of question that's always asked since 9/11 is, "Is the government prosecuting the War on Terror well, or not? Are we winning the War on Terror? Are we losing?" No one asks, "Should there be a War on Terror? Is there an enemy that could be fought effectively with a war?" No one asks that question publicly.

That's the sign of how deeply embedded the expectations are, and if those deeply embedded expectations are wrong, the country has a hard time correcting its course. Here's why: our government is built on a Madisonian system. Every interest group and every ambitious politician is supposed to go out in the arena and fight for everything they can get based on what's good for them. Even if they talk about what's good for the national interest, the way you get ahead in American politics, whether you're George Bush or anyone else, is to fight for your constituency and build coalitions and fight for those constituencies. The Madisonian system assumes that the whole country will go in a direction that is the outcome of everyone doing that, so it will never lurch too far in one direction, because everyone has an interest that's slightly different than mine, and we tend to cancel one another out.

The problem is that if everyone thinks and supports something that's radically untrue, but that untruth is an arousing untruth, then every single ambitious politician and every single interest group, in order to survive, has to say that what it is doing is in line with that belief, in this case, that it is what the War on Terror requires.

I did a search on the internet for professional associations, lobbying associations, industries, and the War on Terror, to show that everyone passes resolutions, from veterinarians to statisticians to political scientists to psychologists to insurance industry spokesmen declaring something like: "We are in the front lines in the War on Terror." Veterinarians? "We need more money to do what we've always told you we need to do -- train people to prevent diseases like hoof-in-mouth disease -- which could be used by terrorists." Every single association, or political party, or group has to do that. When they do it, they increase the expenditures for them[selves] but they also push other groups to amplify their commitment to the War on Terror, to change what they do to make it at least seem like they're fighting the War on Terror. Even more insidiously, since everyone representing every interest group is saying how important it is to support the War on Terror, the question of whether there should be a War on Terror disappears and everyone becomes more and more convinced that the question is only who does it better, and where should we spend more money.

Now there's an even more insidious aspect of this. I'm a social scientist, I'm an expert. What do the experts do? What do universities do? The same thing that everyone else does. Universities saw that the government, desperate to know how to prevent another 9/11, reached out to the universities and said, "Tell us how to do this." And therefore every university, or very large numbers of them, put up what I call catcher's mitts, because billions of dollars are blowing around in the wind coming out of Washington. Those catcher's mitts are simply advertisements that: "We can do things about the War on Terror; fund us."

One of the things experts do is participate in red-teaming exercises. What's a red-teaming exercise? The government says, "We know what the terrorists want. They want to kill as many Americans as possible. What would you do? How would you do it?" "Now, think outside the box," they tell you, "Don't restrain your imagination, because what we saw on 9/11 was a failure of imagination, so we want you to really think creatively." In fact, the government brought in Hollywood script writers, famously, in addition to, you know, lots of smart people, to ask them questions like this.

What do they find? They find that it's incredibly easy to attack the United States and [invent] ways to hurt Americans. In fact, no matter how many precautions you take, the red-teaming team will think of ways around them. So, it's almost like the old joke about lawyers. The more lawyers you produce, the more lawyers you need. The more money you pay to think of ways that the terrorists can strike us, the more money you're going to have to pay to solve those problems, and then solve the problems that red-teaming exercises will produce, because it will be easy to get around those precautions.

So, to sum up what you're saying, if you have a bad idea guiding our system, an idea that purports to explain what our problem is and how we address it, then our system follows that wrong idea and our democracy works in that way. In other words, there's not a built-in mechanism to be self-reflective about what we're all up to.

Right. Our founding fathers, insofar as this was a plan of their own and not simply a form of government that arose out of the fact that none of them could decide what to do, but insofar as it was a plan, they didn't expect that the government would be doing that much. It would be hamstrung by a kind of gridlock, and if government ever did anything it would be something that obviously needed to be done because they had been able to get enough people to agree on it.

So, what you're portraying is a generalized false but extremely frightening belief, which gave al Qaeda the opportunity to do something which very, very few Americans understand?

Everyone understands that al Qaeda hijacked American planes using the best transportation system in the world against us to knock down the Twin Towers and to hit the Pentagon, and so on. What they don't understand is the reaction to that that I've been describing, which I analyze in the book: what al Qaeda has done is hijack our Madisonian system of government and direct its enormous power -- namely the self-interested activity of millions of Americans, corporations, institutions, lobbying organizations -- and set it against our society. And that has shoved us into misappropriations, waste, and into policies in Iraq and elsewhere that have cut the ground out from underneath American foreign policy and opened vast opportunities of expansion and success for al Qaeda and its clones.

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