Danner - Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

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ALSO BY MARK DANNER

Stripping Bare the Body

The Secret Way to War

Torture and Truth

The Road to Illegitimacy

The Massacre at El Mozote

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Copyright 2016 by Mark Danner

Portions of the Introduction and Part One previously appeared in different form in the New York Review of Books .

Excerpt from Tortures from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems by Wisawa Szymborska , translated from the Polish by Stanisaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright 1976 by Czytelnik, Warszawa. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2016

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket Design by Pete Garceau

Jacket Photograph by Warrick Page

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Danner, Mark, 1958- author.

Title: Spiral : trapped in the forever war / Mark Danner.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000732 (print) | LCCN 2016014476 (ebook) | ISBN 9781476747767 (hardback) | ISBN 9781476747774 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781476747781 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States--History, Military--21st century. | United States--Military policy--21st century | War on Terrorism, 2001-2009--Political aspects--United States. | Terrorism--Prevention--History--21st century. | United States--Foreign relations--21st century. | Military history, Modern--21st century. | World politics--21st century. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / General. | HISTORY / United States / 21st Century. | LAW / Military.

Classification: LCC E897 .D36 2016 (print) | LCC E897 (ebook) | DDC 355.00973--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000732

ISBN 978-1-4767-4776-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-4778-1 (ebook)

For Robert J. Cox

Spiral: a curve that emanates from a central point, getting progressively farther away...

We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.

President Barack Obama, May 23, 2013

America must move off a permanent war footing.

President Barack Obama, January 28, 2014

I came upon the half-destroyed truck atop a highway overpass outside Fallujah, the cab shot to hell, the trailer bloodstained and propped up at a crazy angle on its blown tires. On the highway below a great black burn scarred the concrete and over it a rust-red slash, the soot and blood marking the spot where, earlier that day in October 2003, the insurgents had used a cheap remote control to ignite barrels of concealed explosives just as the U.S. armored patrol rumbled by, killing one paratrooper, wounding several. Insurgents, hidden in houses nearby, followed with bursts from their AK-47s.

The Americans promptly dismounted and with their M16s and M4s began pouring lead into everything they could see, starting with the truck that happened to be passing on the highway above, eviscerating the unfortunate driver, and then fired into the houses. How many Iraqis had the troops killed and wounded? The more the better, as far as insurgent leaders were concerned. The point is to get the Americans to fire back, the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne told me the next day, and hopefully the bad guysll get some Iraqi casualties out of that and they can publicize that. By weeks end scores of family and close friends of those killed and wounded would join the insurgents, for honor demanded they kill Americans to wipe away family shame.

American firepower plus Iraqi deaths equals more insurgents: an axiom in the strategy of provocation. Provoke your enemy to kill civilians and thereby call to battle the sleeping population. You have no army? Use the aggression of the occupiers to help raise one of your own. In Iraq, insurgents have used that strategy to grow and prosper, recognizing the characteristic American quickness to react with overwhelming firepower as their best friend. Across continents, al Qaeda used it as well, blowing up towers in New York to create an indelible recruiting poster for the worldwide cause while provoking self-defeating responses. Lure the Americans into Afghanistan, where theyll sink into the quagmire that had trapped their superpower rival two decades before.

Such was Osama bin Ladens strategy. Could he have dared dream that the Americans would prove so cooperative as to invade Iraq as well? Like a celestial slot machine daily pouring forth its golden bounty, the September 11 attacks had led the administration of President George W. Bush not only to an assault on Afghanistan but, scarcely a year later, to a wonderfully telegenic invasion of a major Muslim country. To an attack by a small insurgent group that called for Muslims to rise up and throw off American oppression, the United States had responded by dispatching 150,000 Americans to oppress Muslims. Now the tiny Islamic fringe movement could point to television screens as American tanks rumbled down the streets of an Arab capital, as American soldiers rousted Muslims from their beds, threw them to the ground, placed unclean boots on their backs: as they stripped them and tortured them at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, as they had hooded them and forced them to their knees at Guantnamo.

Abu Ghraib did for the Iraqi insurgents what Guantnamo had done for al Qaeda, embodying in powerful images their arguments about who Americans were, what they did to Muslims, why they must be defeated. A dozen years later the Islamic State, malign stepchild of that insurgency, carries the argument forward with its signature image: a young American in orange kneeling in the dust in a desolate landscape, a knife held to his throat by a masked figure in black who declaims into the camera until the moment when the music rises and he brings his knife into play... To Western audiences the scene says barbarism, savagery, terror. To many young Muslims it says oppression, torture, hypocrisy, the orange jumpsuit calling to mind other prisoners, shackled, blindfolded, ear-muffed, kneeling under the merciless tropical sun. Contrary to the American president who insists that Guantnamo is not who we are , to these viewers Guantnamo is precisely who we are because it is what we have done: Imprison Muslims and hold them indefinitely without trial. Invade and occupy Muslim countries. Torture prisoners. Assassinate with drones.