The Climate Of Hatred And Fear Produced By Both Political Parties Is The 21st Century's Most Important Bipartisan Achievement

n+1, A #NoWarInIran Reading List, January 3, 2020:

[On January 3] the Trump Administration assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad. This attack represents not only an illegal escalation of the US's long conflict with Iran, but also, inevitably, another chapter in the Global War on Terror, begun by George W. Bush in 2001. ... [Since 2004] n+1 has sought to chronicle America's wars in the Middle East as they unfolded, as well as their impact on daily life and culture in the US and throughout the world. This week, we've put some of the best pieces from the archives in front of the paywall. ...

Why Are We in the Middle East? by Richard Beck (from Issue 26)

As a style of foreign policy thinking, humanitarian interventionism can only be reactive ... This persistent panic and desperation prevents humanitarian interventionists from thinking about the fact that after the emergency has been averted, the intervention will have consequences requiring humanitarian solutions of their own. Meanwhile, the traditional hawks to whom the humanitarians must make their case simply do whatever they were going to do in the first place.

Which Country Shall We Bomb Today? by Nikil Saval

It is a feature of America's unyielding narcissism that much "news analysis" has been devoted to how these attacks affect the standing of this dangerously entitled country and its vile President. There is no other country in the world whose citizens wake up wondering which country their leader will bomb next—and what those bombs will do for said leader's approval rating. ...

Coalition of the Willing by the Editors (from Issue 34)

When Trump took power, he inherited a rationale for global war that had been worked out and institutionalized by the two Presidents who preceded him and that had the full support of both political parties. All of Washington has spent the past eighteen years working to expand the set of circumstances under which it's acceptable for white people to observe and harass and kill Muslims, and to minimize the justifications that are required to do so. To date, the climate of hatred and fear they have produced is the 21st century's most important bipartisan achievement.

The Drone Philosopher by Marco Roth (from Issue 17)

My fantasies are fed by the same logic and apparatus that authorizes the drone strikes and maintains the torture prisons: namely, the desire to distinguish good from evil, friend from enemy, without allowing the objects of our attention to speak to us for themselves. ... Our very language of precision and protocol, our military planners' analogies to surgery, and our government's invocations of secret "intelligence," all this licenses the continuation of perpetual warfare as though it were some chronic illness, manageable only by skilled doctors committed to the care of our vulnerable bodies.

Special Journey to Our Bottom Line by Elizabeth Schambelan (from Issue 34)

In 2016, Eric Trump said that "waterboarding is no different to [sic] hazing." Like his father, Eric has the moral intellect of a tapeworm, and so he intended his remark as a defense of waterboarding, not as an indictment of hazing. But his basic point was sound. It should be noted that of the twelve enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA asked the Department of Justice to approve in early 2002, the only one deemed too extreme to green-light, mock burial, has long been a recurrent feature of frat initiations.

Bringing the War Home by the Editors (from Issue 31)

Soon after September 11, 2001, Americans made a collective decision that in response to a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe, an event whose scale and devastation were unrepeatable, large swaths of American life, as well as the country's relationship to most of the world, would be militarized on a permanent basis. Since then, the ways in which politicians and journalists have responded to terrorist attacks and school shootings have been so consistently similar that it seems foolish not to think of the shootings as extensions of the war we are waging around the world ...