The U.S. invasion of Iraq was essentially the most consequential political occasion of the previous 20 years. But it doesn’t really feel that means. It has the faint whiff of youthful indiscretion, an episode that many Americans would somewhat neglect. I used to be 19. The tenor of that point in American life—after the September 11 assaults—appears ever extra overseas to me. Instead of the chaotic info overload of the present second, during which consensus seems not possible, the early 2000s have been a time of conformity, authority, and safety. When I take into consideration why even the mere thought of consensus makes me anxious to this present day, I preserve coming again to what occurred 20 lengthy years in the past. Consensus could be good, nevertheless it may also be harmful.
Once American floor troops have been engaged in Afghanistan, risking their lives preventing the Taliban, any criticism of the conflict effort invited fees of disloyalty. That was the “good war.” I used to be a freshman in school on 9/11. Just a yr later, within the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, I turned energetic within the anti-war motion. Grappling with my very own id as an American Muslim in an surroundings rife with Islamophobia, I needed someplace to belong—a secure house, so to talk. And I discovered it. For the primary and possibly final time, I organized a die-in. I additionally helped arrange a “tent-in” with a gaggle of mates and fellow vacationers, a motley crew of socialists, anarchists, and abnormal college students who discovered themselves stupefied by a conflict that appeared self-evidently absurd. In the weeks earlier than the conflict started—after which for your entire length of the invasion—we protested by establishing camp in Georgetown University’s free-expression zone, the sarcastically named Red Square. In observe, no less than one individual was anticipated to sleep within the tents on any given night time, which translated right into a steady presence of greater than 2,000 hours.
We failed. Obviously, we have been simply school college students, naive and never but cynical. But there have been many people. On February 15 and 16, 2003—a weekend of coordinated anti-war demonstrations across the globe—greater than 6 million individuals stuffed the streets in a whole bunch of cities. As Patrick Tyler put it in The New York Times, “There may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” It was an odd thought, that the individuals, united, may cease a horrible factor from occurring.
When President George W. Bush infamously declared in May 2003—lower than a month after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces—that the mission had been completed, an prolonged interval of confusion and reckoning set in. After the apathy and triumphalism ushered in by the Cold War’s finish, mass mobilization was again. But what was the purpose of individuals energy if authorities officers couldn’t be bothered to pay attention? They had already determined. A comparatively small variety of so-called neoconservatives, lots of whom had run in the identical rarified mental circles, have been dedicated to a wedding of overwhelming energy and maximalist function. As the Lebanese American scholar Fouad Ajami described it:
A reforming zeal should thus be loaded up with the luggage and the gear. No nice apologies should be made for America’s “unilateralism.” The area can stay with and use that unilateralism. The appreciable energy now at America’s disposal can be utilized by every one as a justification for going together with American targets.
Like most utopians, they could have been well-meaning of their fervor. A real believer himself, George W. Bush had admirable views about democracy’s universality, for which he deserves some credit score. He excoriated critics for suggesting that Arabs weren’t prepared for democracy; this was nothing greater than “cultural condescension,” he stated. He was proper. In a November 2003 speech marking the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, he requested, “Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it.”
But the acknowledged justification for invading Iraq was not that Saddam Hussein was a dictator. After all, America’s closest allies within the area have been dictatorships too. As senior administration officers informed the United Nations and Congress, navy motion was mandatory as a result of Saddam’s regime had weapons of mass destruction and was due to this fact a mortal risk to the Middle East. Others who may need in any other case been skeptical in regards to the indiscriminate use of American energy—together with outstanding Democrats similar to John Kerry and Hillary Clinton—fell in line. In October 2002, 39 p.c of Democrats within the House supported the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. Remarkably, 58 p.c of Senate Democrats voted in favor. It was the worst and maybe most tragic instance of “bipartisan cooperation” in current American historical past.
Their hearts weren’t essentially in it, however Senate Democrats have been an formidable bunch. For anybody who aspired to greater workplace, being on the flawed facet of the fitting conflict was a dangerous proposition. With the injuries of September 11 nonetheless smarting, vengeance was within the air. In mainstream media shops, passionate anti-war voices—earlier than the conflict, somewhat than after—have been tough to search out. I largely obtained my day by day dose of anti-war information and protection from small leftist web sites. I even wrote for one such publication: It was (and nonetheless is) known as CounterPunch, a completely applicable description of each the futility and pluckiness of the endeavor.
A large minority of Americans had their reservations about this new tradition of patriotic deference, however they have been on the defensive from the very begin. The post-9/11 consensus was a tragedy upon a tragedy, exemplified by a 98–1 Senate vote for the PATRIOT Act simply 44 days after the assaults. “National unity” is often an aspiration not met. Here, it appeared inside attain.
This was bipartisan cooperation at its greatest but additionally its worst. At greater than 130 pages, the PATRIOT Act—a suitably Orwellian acronym for “Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”—ushered in a perpetually overreaching national-security state and a litany of civil-rights abuses that disproportionately affected Arab and Muslim communities. As the ACLU described it, “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.” Under an expansive surveillance regime, the FBI issued about 192,000 “national security letters” from 2003 to 2006, which allowed it to entry the personal info of American residents with out a warrant.
This is what unity, consensus, and cooperation made attainable within the fog of conflict. For these Americans at the moment who lament polarization and lengthy for a return to the politics of consensus, watch out what you would like for. In 2001, inside a sprawling, unwieldy democracy of 285 million individuals, what may “consensus” even imply? As the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe has written, “All forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion.” The post-9/11 consensus was synthetic, guided and strengthened from above. It was additionally fleeting. When the Bush administration’s maintain on the general public creativeness weakened, Americans returned to their pure boisterousness and mistrust of politicians and establishments alike. This is an efficient factor.
When it involves wars of selection—which is to say, most wars—Americans ought to disagree amongst themselves, and they need to categorical these disagreements forcefully. A democratized information panorama, like democracy itself, could be messy. But that messiness is crucial. A sure sort of chaos is exactly what permits for a vibrant change of contending and conflicting views. In a democracy, the bulk nonetheless guidelines. At the identical time, embattled minorities want avenues—and encouragement—to register their dissent, within the hope of convincing sufficient of their fellow residents that they’re proper. Because typically they’re. And the Iraq War was a kind of occasions.