Waging the "war on terror" is part of a wider political and economic strategy for the US, where winning is not always the main objective, writes David Keen
Pre-emptive strikes on Iraq (and perhaps Iran), the deposition of tyrants, torture, imprisonments without trial - if the forms of violence used in the "war on terror" are examined at all critically, the most common question has been: will they make us any safer? If the answer is No, then these violent actions are most often labelled as mistakes. This line of criticism is important: if the "war on terror" is counter-productive, we need to know about it. But it only takes us so far.
Perhaps making us safer is not, after all, the aim. In any war, the assumption that the principal goal is to win has proven to be a very dubious one. In fact, our developing knowledge of wars in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and a number of other countries suggests that tactics which actively promote the strength of the enemy have been widely adopted; they have also been maintained even when it has become clear that, from a military point of view, they are counter-productive.
Part of this has been economic. When fighters in civil and regional wars attack civilians, it tends to radicalise these civilians and attract support for the enemy. In Sudan, government-backed militias frequently raided areas of the south with little or no allegiance to the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army, attracting support for the rebels in the process.
Economics was part of the explanation: the militias wanted access to grazing land and cheap (or free) labour. The government wanted access to oil in land vacated by civilians who had been attacked.
During civil war in Cambodia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, there was evidence that military factions sold arms to their opponents while tending to avoid any military confrontation with them: attacking civilians was much safer, while selling arms to the Khmer Rouge or the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) brought not only immediate profits but also the prospect of prolonging a conflict that legitimised the presence of government soldiers in resource-rich areas.
In the DRC, too, Rwandan troops tended to avoid confrontation with their declared enemy, the Interahamwe fighters responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide; increasingly, the Rwandan troops concentrated on extracting the rich mineral resources of the DRC and engaging, once again, in arms sales to the enemy.
Another aim has been political. The expressed aim of defeating a reviled enemy - a Khmer Rouge, an RUF, an Interahamwe militia or a Chechen "terrorist"/rebel - may help to justify the suppression of democratic freedoms and free speech.
Seen within this framework, the wager of a war against this or that demon must always be seen to be winning, but they can never be seen to have won.
If this looks like a conspiracy theory, it is. Of course, enemies cannot simply be dismissed as fabrications or phantoms: the 1994 Rwandan genocide was all too real; and 9/11 was a horrifying fact.
But once we start to reconsider our idea of what a war is, once we appreciate the multiplicity of aims in a war that go well beyond winning, the paradoxical persistence of counter-productive tactics in the "war on terror" begins to make more sense.
One key aim has been to make money. US interest in Afghanistan has been inseparable from the oil and gas fields of the Caspian, just as US interest in Iraq has been linked to the oil.
Beyond this, there is the vast US military-industrial infrastructure which burgeoned during the Cold War. In this "war", too, the (Soviet) enemy was not engaged directly: that would obviously have been suicidal; instead, the casualties were mostly exported to civilians and soldiers in Third World countries hosting proxy wars and to those Americans (often poor, often black) recruited into the proxy war in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the profits and jobs came to be seen as indispensable.
When the Cold War thawed, the démon-du-jour was variously redefined as fundamentalism, rogue states, drugs, "narco-terrorists", and now al-Qaeda - enemies both hated and needed. Profits and jobs were maintained. And those who objected to any particular definition of the enemy could be neatly labelled as un-American or unpatriotic. In all this, the cognitive satisfactions of having identified an enemy are not to be underestimated. As Hannah Arendt understood in relation to 1920s Germany in particular, when a military reversal (in this case, defeat in the first World War) is combined with serious social and economic uncertainty, the search for a clearly identifiable enemy becomes intense. The point is not to be right but to be certain - however flimsy the evidence. The lack of evidence linking Saddam and 9/11 becomes an irrelevance.
In the context of Algeria's war for independence, Frantz Fanon advocated a strategy of using terror to provoke the (French) enemy and to bring out its true, oppressive nature. Bin Laden seems to have had something similar in mind, and George Bush duly walked into the trap.
This mechanism cuts both ways, however: the wagers of a war that provokes terrorism also stood to gain the perverse satisfaction of confirming: "Yes! The enemy is just as dangerous, aggressive and pervasive as we imagined!" From this point of view, the imprecision of the retribution is actually functional.
In many ways, the process comes to resemble a medieval witch-hunt. First, there need be no logical connection between the past crime and the chosen victim.
Second, the focus is on the evil intentions of the victim, which (as, notably, with Saddam Hussein) are presumed to be harmful in themselves.
Third, it is the weakness of the victim (the lack of weapons of mass destruction, for example) that attracts the persecutor: as René Girard explained in Violence and the Sacred, society's rage can most conveniently and safely be focused on a target that is not in a position to hit back.
Fourth, the victim is forcibly invited to collude: just as witch-hunts were legitimised by the witch's confession, so Saddam was invited to confess to WMD he did not actually possess.
Fifth, those who challenge the morality or efficacy of the witch-hunt may themselves be labelled as witches - or, in the modern parlance, as anti-American.
Finally, punishment may itself be taken as evidence of guilt. If there are no witches, the logic goes, why then is there a witch-hunt? Arendt observed in the context of the Nazi Holocaust: "Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: 'What crime must these people have committed that such things were done to them!' "
Deferential to their president, many Americans took the targeting of Iraq as evidence that it must be linked to 9/11. On the eve of the war, a February 2003 poll suggested that 72 per cent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
To a surprising extent, the system can accommodate failure and turn it into success - not least because the persistence of the enemy brings hidden benefits.
Yet at the same time, an obvious defeat is humiliating and an electoral liability: a conspicuous quagmire and mounting casualties in Iraq become all the more threatening for the Bush administration.
Perhaps the trick is to maintain an appearance of winning without actually solving the problem. One way of doing this is to open some new (distracting) theatre of operations - for example, in Iran.
David Keen is the author of Endless War? Hidden Functions of the "War on Terror", published by Pluto, and of Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone, published by James Currey/Palgrave