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It's hardly the most egregious thing in writing, but reporters using "we" to describe the actions of the US government is always weird.
anyway I've just read the worst essay about the War on Terror I thought possible and rather than link to it I'm going to share the preorder page for REIGN OF TERROR https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622555/reign-of-terror-by-spencer-ackerman/
[CITATION NEEDED]
![[CITATION NEEDED]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ett3FC_WYAAWsMk.png "[CITATION NEEDED]")
![[CITATION NEEDED]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ett3FufWgAQqbcU.png "[CITATION NEEDED]")
If I were writing this, I would google for like one second the origins of ISIS before saying that "bombing al Qaeda meant no more al Qaeda-like groups emerged." Also, I'm sorry, by roasting this thing I have now un-won the War on Terror.
There's great work to be written on the changed relation of the public to the War on Terror vis a vis white supremacy, but if you want to tell that story, you should maybe mention which members of Congress are cautioning restraint in launching a Domestic War on Terror, and why.
literally what of these panics were justified. It's coward shit to say "sometimes the right was justified in a panic" without naming one you think was reasonable, and if you don't think any of the panics you named were justified, just say that.
do you not remember the domestic enemies the GOP picked during the Bush administration. There's no finite capacity for groups to exclude from a narrow definition of citizenship, and the right has built itself on who gets to be a real American. This isn't a break, it's continuity
this is powerful "learned about 'far enemy' in undergrad in 2004" vibes, and, like the earlier paragraph that misses the continuity between al Qaeda and ISIS, it shows absolutely no understanding of news after, like, 2006
oh *now* we're approaching the shaky ground??????????
the thing is a protracted metaphor about the 30 Years War, which, ignores the agency of people fighting the wars (as does all of this, really), and assumes that a sea of proxy wars makes it less likely for the US to get involved, which, lol
80% of this could have been written in 2009, when Obama rebranded the War on Terror as Global Overseas Contingency Operations. But what's meaningful is how the wars persisted, even as the targets and administrations changed. This doesn't address that, of course. But others do.
The continuity of the War on Terror, and how it created a durable war nationalism within the US out of Islamophobia, is the story, and it's told well elsewhere. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622555/reign-of-terror-by-spencer-ackerman/
