Ackerman guides us through the next two decades, showing how any prospect of national unity in response to 9/11 buckled under the incoherence of the wars that followed, which he says were “conceptually doomed” from the start. Their endlessness was a source of profound instability, as one conflict (with Iraq) begat another (with ISIS). Ackerman shows how euphemisms became so far removed from the reality they tried to obscure that they were rhetorically useless — “targeted war” (i.e. war), “enhanced interrogation” (i.e. torture), “targeted killing” (i.e. drone strikes), “Long-Term Non-Religious Fasting” (i.e. hunger strikes).
President Bush may have been a conservative Republican, but Ackerman reminds us that liberal Democrats were complicit in starting and sustaining the forever wars. A growing popular disgust with both parties reflected how nativists on one side and progressives on the other understood a truth that centrists elided. The fringes on the right and the left could see how the War on Terror was an extension of the country’s history, Ackerman says, with its settler colonialism and fantasies of a race war; the difference was that the nativist right insisted that settler colonialism was part of what made America great, while the progressive left found it morally despicable. By 2016, nativists were rejoicing at the prospect of Trump pursuing (nonwhite) terrorists without any restraints; progressives wanted the War on Terror abolished.
Those progressives were especially disenchanted by President Obama, who was a vocal opponent of the forever wars but once in office labored to put them on a more “sustainable” and “more lawful” footing. Obama abhorred torture; otherwise, Ackerman says, he was “flexible.” Ackerman depicts the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011 as an opportunity to declare the mission accomplished. “Instead,” he writes, “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.”
There is, of course, a counterargument, and Obama’s close adviser Ben Rhodes offers it to Ackerman: “Let’s say he did that, and dismantled our counterterrorism apparatus over that summer, and there’s a terrorist attack and then the world ends.” However inelegantly phrased, it’s a possibility that Ackerman doesn’t really address.
Still, this revelatory book shows that for all the lawyering and “targeted killing,” Obama’s centrist approach simply could not hold. Under President Trump, there were even more drone strikes and less transparency. According to one study, Trump’s accelerated bombing campaign in Afghanistan increased civilian casualties by 330 percent.
Not to mention that the animus and cruelty that had been stoked for a decade and a half could be easily turned on immigrants closer to home. Trump, Ackerman writes, “had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: The terrorists were whomever you said they were.”
