E3W Literature | University of Texas

Salah Hassan, ed.
“Terror Wars,” Special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (Spring 2005)
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005
295 pages
ISSN: 1532-687X
Single issue – $18
Annual subscription (three issues)
-- Individuals $30 USA/International $40
-- Institutions $50 USA/International $60

Reviewed by Christopher Micklethwait

At the 2005 Modern Language Association convention, Salah Hassan, associate professor of postcolonial literature at Michigan State, presented his paper “The Politics of Justice and Les Temps Modernes” examining the parallels between the uses of torture during the Algerian War for Independence (1954-62) and the current U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. In contextualizing his argument about the Geneva Conventions in both the Algerian War and the United States’ murky war on terror, Hassan alluded to the Pentagon’s September 2003 screening of The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 cinematic paean to Algerian resistance to French occupation. The revelations in spring 2003 of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq suggested that, despite Bush’s claims to the contrary, our war on terror would not be a war unlike any other; the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the attacks of September 11 themselves emerged from a historical matrix. But, as this anecdote illustrates, attempting to find the context for the war on terror, to map out its historical matrix, leads to further questions: What, exactly, are its historical precedents? Where do its battlefields really begin and end? Who are the enemies, the combatants, and the victims?

“Terror Wars,” Salah Hassan’s specially edited issue of CR: The New Centennial Review, promises a bold intervention against the rhetorical mirages of “the two most misunderstood and misused terms in current public discourse”: Terror and War. Bringing together nine articles on diverse topics related to the war on terror, “Terror Wars” seeks “to empha¬size a relation of contiguity” between war and terror in place of the false opposition implied in the mis¬leading phrase “war on terror.” What makes “Terror Wars” such an important document is the fact that, in casting a wide net, it accomplishes the difficult task of illustrating the far-reaching effects of America’s war on terror, which “ricochets and produces ‘collateral damage’ in the United States, on its borders, and well beyond the terrain of battle.” The articles in “Terror Wars” explore these effects across a variety of subjects: history, the aca¬demy, rhetoric, political theories of the state and nation¬al security, and human rights and citizenship.

“Terror Wars” opens with a pair of essays on war and political theory: Ernest Laclau’s “On ‘Real’ and ‘Absolute’ Enemies” and Yaseen Nourani’s “The Rhetoric of Security.” Laclau’s piece assesses German political theorist Carl Schmitt’s 1963 Theory of the Partisan, adding to it “a new emphasis on political subjectivity and new precisions on the links between war and politics, together with a differen¬tiation between various kinds of hostility.” Laclau begins with a historical analysis of the rise of irregular warfare in Napoleon’s European campaigns and the evolving legal definition of the partisan from the Vienna Congress of 1814-15 through the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Laclau’s re-reading of Schmitt provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding the international war on terror, in which the transition beyond “traditional” inter-state conflicts and “conventional” enemies has left us hard-pressed to identify our “real” enemy. What we find instead is the quasi-mythical terrorist as the “absolute” enemy of civilization itself. Consequently, as Laclau suggests, America’s legitimacy and the legitimacy of its international war on terror will require the perpetual creation of a “real” enemy, regardless of the legality of the means adopted to win the war.

The next article, Yaseen Nourani’s “The Rhetoric of Security,” returns to Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, focusing here on the extra-moral problem of national self-preservation, moving from the legal status of citizens, soldiers, and partisans to the level of nations and civilizations. Nourani’s major point of interest is the Bush administration’s rhetorical equation of U.S. security with the security of a peaceful world order. He bases his analysis primarily on eight of Bush’s public speeches between September 20, 2001 and September 21, 2004, supplemented by the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America and the 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. According to Nourani’s decoding of these documents, the United States has assumed for itself “the location of the self of the world order that must be preserved,” and therefore, as Nourani puts it,
the United States remains unobligated by the norms of this order as long as it is threatened by terrorism. So long as it struggles for the life of the world order, therefore, the United States remains external to this order, just as terrorism remains external to the world order so long as it threatens a universal state of war.
Nourani’s discussion of the use of violence to preserve the peaceful world order echoes Laclau’s “absolute” enemy and the problems of legitimacy faced by de Gaulle’s France as a result of the use of torture in Algeria. According to the rhetoric of the war on terror, terrorism “threaten[s] the very notion of civilized society,” a logic exploited by the Bush administration as an unassailable justification for overstepping national and international laws at worst, if not at best wading cavalierly through the law’s vague peripheries.

The following two articles switch to the ascendance of neo-conservatism in the United States and its influence on foreign and domestic policy. Richard Falk’s “Demystifying Iraq?” challenges the neo-conservative deceptions in the lead-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The majority of Falk’s points should be of no surprise to any reasonably attentive critic of the Bush administration: the administration deliberately cherry-picked intelligence in order to present to America, if not to the entire world, a rosy picture of the Iraqi people rejoicing at their liberation from a brutal dictator content to bring the world down around his ears with weapons of mass destruction. The value of Falk’s article, however, lies in the logically convincing dismissal of the notion that the Bush administration engaged in “innocent” mystification, telling only the sort of white lies that are a political inevitability and adhering (always in good faith) to America’s and the world’s best interests. Falk concludes with an open call for a “politics of demystification” to promote
a peaceful transition to a post-Westphalian structure of human security that preserves the autonomy of particular national and regional communities while encouraging the development of the rule of law on a global basis in an atmosphere dedicated to democracy and the realization of human rights.
As appealing as the prospect of this politics of demystification may be, it seems disconnected from Falk’s actual argument and ultimately detracts from the more specific focus of his analysis of the Bush administration’s mystification of the Iraq invasion.

As a fitting complement to Falk’s article, Zachary Lockman’s “Critique from the Right” uncovers the systematic neoconservative attack on the intellectual independence of Middle East studies programs in the United States. Lockman’s account of this attack begins with the crucial historical event of the 1998 Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Edward Said’s Orientalism. For Lockman, this event symbolizes the rift that Orientalism opened in the field of Middle East studies, with Said’s post-structuralist disciples on one side and classic Orientalists like Bernard Lewis on the other.

Lockman then looks back to the origins of area studies in the Cold War and the U.S. government’s need for specialists in Latin America, the Soviet Bloc and the Middle East, to name only a few. In Lockman’s account, Middle East studies’ collective move toward more enhanced academic legitimacy over the last three decades has also had the effect of opening “a growing gap between academics studying the Middle East and the officials, agencies, and institutions of the U.S. government.” Lockman posits a growing disgust within Middle East studies for U.S. foreign policy choices regarding Israel and the Occupied Territories, Israel’s invasions of Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq War, and the First Gulf War. However, in telling this story, Lockman exposes, and admits, the most obvious weakness of his historiography: there is no hard evidence to demonstrate any consensus of opinion among Middle East studies academics. This weakness is not inconsequential, despite such assertions being perfectly reason¬able. Nevertheless, Lockman overcomes this deficiency with such tangible examples as MESA’s opposition by referendum to the National Security Education Program, created in 1991 by the Department of Defense to support the linguistic training of area experts in regions sensitive to U.S. national security interests.

Lockman then moves his discussion from Middle East academics proper to the right-leaning think tanks that emerged from the shadows in the 1980s. While the topic of Middle East studies may seem comparatively innocent and isolated from the more life-and-death aspects of the war on terror, it is important to note that many of the policy-makers behind the response to September 11 began their professional careers in organizations like Project for a New American Century and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Having shown the grip that these organizations came to hold over U.S. policy formation for the Middle East, Lockman then devotes the remainder of his article to the resulting backlash against Middle East academics like Edward Said and John Esposito, who became scapegoats for what was seen as “a cesspool of error, fuzzy thinking, and anti-Americanism.” Lock¬man illustrates this point with two major examples. First, he recounts Daniel Pipes’ efforts through the website Campus Watch to blacklist American university professors who espoused anti-Israeli or anti-American positions in the classroom. He then offers the example of Martin Kramer’s attempted character assassination of Edward Said in his articles in Commentary disputing the authenticity of Said’s autobiography, and in his book Ivory Towers on Sand (2001), published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which sought in the guise of serious scholarship to discredit all Middle East scholars who disagreed with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

While Lockman’s article may not be news to Middle East scholars, for whom this story is all too familiar, it should be of much interest to others in area studies as a cautionary tale. Lockman makes the forceful point, well supported by numerous cases, that the U.S. response to the attacks of September 11 was more than casually informed by rifts between Middle East academics and their think-tank doppelgangers. His historiography is solid, thorough and reliable, and of clear value to anyone curious about the academy’s role in the war on terror—and vice versa.

The next two articles in “Terror Wars” deal ex¬clusively with the history of political Islam: Joel Beinin’s “Political Islam and the New Global Economy” and Paul A. Silverstein’s “The New Barbarians,” which both offer intriguing reinterpretations of the political economy that has supported “terror” in the Middle East. Read together, these two articles challenge the dangerous oversimplifications of and misconceptions about political and militant Islam.

Joel Beinin’s “Political Islam and the New Global Economy” resists the conception of political Islam as atavistic, rejecting the term “fundamentalism” as denying the engagement of political Islam with the same problems of modernity faced by Western liberal societies. As such, Beinin’s article builds on the thesis that
[p]olitical Islam has become the most popular framework of resistance to autocratic Middle Eastern regimes and the new regional political economy. These movements are the outcome of three interlocking developments: (1) the defeat of secular Arab nationalism in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967; (2) changes in the global economy initiated by the delinking of the dollar from gold in 1971 and the recession of 1973-75; and (3) the demise of economic nationalism exemplified by Egypt’s announcement of an “open door” (infitah) policy in 1974 and Turkey’s 24 January 1980 economic measures. Understood in these contexts, political Islam is not a recrudescence of medieval thinking and rejection of modernity; it is an integral part of modernity.
Beinin, then, seeks to disprove the theory that Islam itself is a violent religion by replacing it with a very credible theory that militant Islam arose out of political Islam due to psycho-social problems related to the world economy. He achieves this goal with a superb recounting of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its rocky relationship with the governments of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, making good use of his copious research to demonstrate how Islamist trends flowed through student groups and the middle and working classes.

Paul Silverstein’s “The New Barbarians” resonates with Laclau’s article. Much as Laclau’s piece is rich with possible reinterpretations of the terms “enemy combatant” and partisan, Silverstein’s piece challenges us to rethink or redefine today’s “terrorists” in conjunction with the “pirates” of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Barbary Coast. Silverstein’s first order of business is the attempt by conservative writers to find a historical precedent for Bush’s war on terror in Thomas Jefferson’s Tripoli Campaign (1801-05). Silverstein cunningly deflates this false analogy by, oddly enough, embracing it in its more nuanced implications, “re-read[ing] Barbary corsairing and its suppression within a history of transformations of French national sovereignty.” Piracy, as Silverstein explains, was not practiced exclusively by vassals of the Ottoman Empire on the Barbary Coast; rather, it was an integral part of European state power in its formative years and a powerful tool of empire building. Silverstein’s article might have been an ideal place to explore a topic not raised in “Terror Wars”: the U.S. military’s use of private contractors in Iraq. Following Silverstein’s conclusions in that direction would provide condemning terms with which to understand the use of privately contracted security forces and interrogators in Iraq.

Possibly the least necessary article in “Terror Wars” is Robert Stam’s and Ella Shohat’s “Variations on an Anti-American Theme.” Given their expressed purpose to “argue for an intelligent political anti-Americanism…against a misconceived cultural anti-Americanism,” Stam and Shohat take the examples of French and Brazilian anti-Americanism to “argue against ethno-essentialist formulations of political positions.” For all the virtues of transcending ethnicity in formulating political positions, Stam and Shohat’s first analytic claim oddly reduces Franco-American relations to “the neuroses typical of dysfunctional kinship relations.” While this reduction does not bode well for the remainder of the article, Stam and Shohat justify their bizarre statement with an intriguing analysis of the United States and France as Enlightenment empires “struggling over the monopoly of the very concept of the universal.” They carry their historical account through post-World War II anxieties of franglais and the Americanization of French culture and the current trends in French public discourse that either suggest that American hubris warranted the attacks of September 11, or that America itself didn’t orchestrate the attacks against itself. The case of Brazil begins again with the question of family neurosis, pointing out the absence of such neuroses as they apply in French anti-Americanism. Stam and Shohat ulti¬mately attribute Brazilian anti-Americanism to the absence of resentment over a debt of gratitude such as the French bear for their liberation in World War II and the Marshall Plan thereafter. Despite the peculiar analytic framework of family neurosis, “Variations on an Anti-American Theme” can boast of thorough and interesting historical research, particularly in the case of Brazilian commentary on the United States through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

“Terror Wars” concludes with two intriguing essays on women’s rights in the war on terror. Elizabeth Armstrong and Vijay Prashad’s “Solidarity: War Rites and Women’s Rights” looks to women’s involvement in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle for lessons to combat “the cynical use of masculinist protectionism to co-opt feminist support for U.S. military invasions,” as has been the case in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most interestingly, Armstrong and Prashad contradict the widely held belief that feminism has always originated in the West and that Western feminism has always served as the model for women’s rights movements in the third world. On the contrary, the American women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, they argue, found inspiration in the model of such groups as the Women’s Union of North Vietnam and the Union of Women for the Liberation of South Vietnam. Further challenging this popular belief, Armstrong and Prashad combine their study of women in the Vietnamese national liberation movement with a longer history of women’s roles in third-world national liberation struggles throughout the twentieth century, placing special emphasis on the First Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo in 1961 and the examples of women’s rights gained and lost in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last fifty years. “Solidarity” concludes with the example of CODEPINK, a women’s anti-war movement in the U.S., traveling to Iraq after the 2003 invasion to participate with Iraqi women’s organizations in their struggle to maintain rights that are now threatened by the inclusion of sharia law in the new Iraqi constitution.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho’s “Ciudadana X,” the last article in "Terror Wars," is the most conceptually original article in the collection. Without expressly using the term “terrorism,” Schmidt Camacho suggests that the violence against women in the border region around Juárez exemplifies the Mexican state’s use of terror to promote national economic stability and state security. The parallels to the exploitation of Islamophobia and the threat of terrorism in the United States are alarming in that both cases produce “a climate where sociality is defined less by national belonging than by the more atomizing force of collective fear.” But this emphasis is not the major point of “Ciudadana X.” Rather, Schmidt Camacho aims to demonstrate how the globalization of the labor market and the inter¬national framework for human rights have left subaltern classes—the women of Juárez being Schmidt Camacho’s example—deprived of political agency to secure their rights as national citizens. In a move similar to Beinin’s in his analysis of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Schmidt Camacho dispels the idea that the feminicidio—the unsolved murders and rapes of hundreds of maquiladora workers around Juárez over the last decade—is rooted in the culture of Mexican masculinity. Seeing the feminicidio as a visceral metaphor for the exploitation of women’s sexual and labor capital in the border region, she argues that
it is perhaps better understood as a rational expression of the contradictions arising from the gendered codes of neo-liberal governance and development. The combined processes of economic restructuring and political transition have had the perverse effect of increasing the state’s stake in the denationalization of poor women’s citizenship precisely at the moment of their emergence as new political and economic actors. The global economies that convert subaltern women into commodities interrupt women’s purchase on the most basic right to personal security. The feminicidio represents an assault on this bodily agency in the extreme.
“Ciudadana X” is a valuable model for those interested in the study of international human rights, transnational citizenship and migration.

Although the selection and arrangement of articles in “Terror Wars” speaks to a set of unstated paradigmatic questions that the articles seek collectively to answer, if not simply to raise, it is regrettable that its message has not been consolidated and expressed more explicitly in a comprehensive editor’s introduction. On that account, this reviewer found some difficulty in grasping the whole produced by these articles. Then again, such an introduction may run contrary to the true usefulness of this special issue, which is to resist the crystallization into absolute terms of our historical understandings of the complex events the world is living through under the name of a “war on terror.” The very concept of a “terror war” remains an open-ended question, and “Terror Wars” in the end provides a variety of refreshingly flexible frameworks for arriving at a radical understanding of the ever-mutating historical conditions the world finds itself in today.