The suddenness and massive scale of the U.S. attack on Iran has somewhat overshadowed President Donald Trump’s other warmongering, including the continued illegal strikes on civilian boats, last month’s military incursion to detain Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the U.S. military operation in Ecuador this week (had you even heard about that?).
What all of these have in common is that they have been done both without a clear legal basis or practical rationale – and very deliberately without any authorization from Congress. I don’t think questioning this is moot or pointless. We’ve all become kind of inured to the idea of the executive being the country’s war-maker, given that the U.S. hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. But here the president has disregarded the fact that Congress was preparing to have a vote on use of force in Iran. That proposal failed in the Senate, but it’s easy to imagine him ignoring it even if it passed as just another step in his push to become a king.
Setting aside all of the foreign policy implications of the attacks the U.S. launched together with Israel, which are not my forte and which others are better equipped to handle (including my friend Spencer Ackerman), I have not seen a very robust discussion of some of the domestic effects of this operation. I don’t just mean things like price hikes or the inability to travel to the Middle East. A time of war is very often also a time of a certain kind of jingoism, as I think was demonstrated most acutely in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when we went so collectively insane that people were genuinely trying to rename French fries as “freedom fries” because France had not sufficiently committed itself to helping the invasion of Iraq.
There are full-fledged adults, people entering their mid-20s, who were born after 9/11 and have no recollection whatsoever of this period and it can be hard to describe for them the mood and rhetoric of that time. Practically any dissent from the drumbeat of war that led us into Iraq was treated as naïve and unpatriotic, not only by traditional conservatives but by many liberals and institutions across civil society. As I have often discussed, the national security preoccupation that emerged out of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror led directly to many of our contemporary ills.
The fact that the administration of President George W. Bush infamously and openly lied to the public and the press about the rationale for war and got away with it laid the groundwork for Trump’s ability to cavalierly launch a wave of violence without putting forward any even somewhat cogent justification. The Department of Homeland Security was born as a direct result of the terrorism panic. Today it’s the source of so many of the practices that have been slowly unraveling our polity over the past 14 months, particularly the heavily armed roving squadrons of federal agents occupying cities.
I don’t think it is ludicrous now to wonder whether war and the instability it is already bringing will once more reshape our political and social conversations for the worse. I fear that the already too tepid efforts to bring DHS and some of the administration’s surveillance and enforcement practices under oversight could be derailed by the specter of Iranian retaliation for our military adventurism. The war’s first and most notable victim, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was more than just a political leader in Iran; he was an important figure for Shiite Muslims globally, and his assassination caused reverberations globally, setting off anti-U.S. protests in places including Pakistan.
Now that it is apparently becoming routine for the U.S. to simply strike smaller, weaker countries militarily with few boots on the ground, I think analysts are worried about two major global security shifts. The first is that more nations will pursue nuclear weapons programs, which are functionally the only sort of military program that can deter intervention by a power like the U.S. Secondly, we’re going to see more one-off and irregular attacks in retaliation, much of it along the lines of what we’d call terrorism, and which will serve as ample justification for a beefing up of heavy surveillance and autocratic authorities here, much as it did after 9/11.
That said, I do think this is a pretty different moment than 2001. Obviously, the causality has been somewhat reversed – we have not been attacked first and then gone mad with fear and anger. Here, it is our administration, a historically unpopular one at that, that has decided to strike first, apparently at the behest of a foreign government that itself is increasingly unpopular domestically, and without Trump bothering to really make any case before or after the fact for why it was necessary. Republicans have already stepped up calls for Democrats to drop their efforts at oversight of DHS and reform of ICE’s immigration efforts in the face of wartime’s additional dangers. And Democrats have already roundly rejected them, which already seems like a step up from the rush to empower the national security state 25 years ago.
U.S. service members have already been killed and Trump and Co. can barely even muster the motions of caring about it, a callousness exacerbated by the fact that he quite specifically ran on preventing unnecessary foreign wars and slagged his political opponents as warmongers. Even if there are irregular or terroristic attacks on Americans abroad or against soft targets within the U.S. — and I am very, very worried that this is coming down the pike — it’d be pretty easy to make the argument that this is at least partly the fault of an administration that took a running kick at the hornet’s nest after having put a 22-year-old with no experience in charge of a terrorism prevention task force while gutting our cybersecurity agency, detailing FBI agents to ICE, and having that agency’s counter-terror efforts focused on protests and “antifa.”
What worries me more than the public and political establishment closing ranks around the Trump administration (as many did for Bush) is that instability and fear the war generates will make us more susceptible to a further erosion of privacy and the trends of atomization and distrust that have harmed our ability to act as a cohesive society. People are already so conspiratorial, so angry and so segmented into information bubbles that I think all sorts of actors could exploit this sense of wartime vulnerability, including, for example, the tech giants selling surveillance and AI “solutions” to these problems in ways that we would come to regret later.
The main antidote to that is to not let the panic get the better of us. We need to understand that the genesis of these issues lie in an out-of-control government that has broken its promise to stop killing people abroad on a whim – and that we can do something about this. Congress can act, the courts can act and voters, many of whom have buyer’s remorse, can act. Perhaps we may yet really learn some lessons from the post-9/11 era.
