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With respect, it shouldn't be called a 'Global War on Terrorism' memorial [1]

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Date: 2023-09-25

No one in this country would contest or doubt the sacrifices made by veterans of the two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, launched by the George W. Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Nor can or should anyone ignore the fact that many of those veterans made the ultimate sacrifice, some permanently maimed, blinded or disfigured as a consequence of fulfilling their duty, and many, of course, by paying with their own lives. Those heroes fallen in the line of their service in particular are every bit as deserving a memorial on our hallowed ground than any killed in Vietnam, Korea, or the two world wars of the 20th century.

What they don’t deserve, however, is to be memorialized in the name of a purely political construct called the “Global War on Terrorism.” In particular, to suggest that the 4431 American troops killed in Iraq died in the pursuance of an amorphous “war on terror” is simply a whitewashing of the genesis and rationale for that war, an attempted justification for something patently unjustifiable. On one level it is an unfortunate consequence of this country’s tendency to reflexively treat its own history as something noble rather than to face a much less pleasant reality. On another level it’s even insidious because, by wrapping itself in a cloak of patriotism, it actually distorts and misrepresents that history.

Despite the fact that both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were temporally linked to the attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, there was, in truth, no correspondence between Bush’s decision to attack Iraq and ”terrorism” directed to the U.S. because there was simply no link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 attacks. The war in Afghanistan might be legitimately construed as a response to terror because our adversaries in that war, the Taliban, had initially protected and served as a refuge for al-Qaeda and their leader, Osama bin Laden. That war was provoked, at least at the outset, by terrorism, even if as it devolved into something different over the course of the next 20 years.

But to suggest that the Iraq war can be justified in the same way by memorializing the troops that fought and died there as casualties of a “Global War on Terror” is to rewrite the history of that war through a distorted lens, one that essentially amounts to pure propaganda. Call it the Iraq and Afghanistan war memorial, certainly. But don’t call it the “Global War on Terrorism” memorial because the war waged by the George W. Bush administration in Iraq, at least, was nothing of the sort. It was, rather, a war of choice unscrupulously sold to the American people by the Bush administration as a response to the 9/11 attacks, even though — as indisputably revealed in subsequent years — that justification had been invented out of whole cloth. The soldiers that died in Iraq did not die for the cause of fighting terrorism. They died for reasons known only to people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, right-wing conservatives with dreams of American military hegemony simply itching for an excuse to wage war. And those reasons remain --at best — disputed and murky, even today.

The Global War on Terrorism memorial, intended primarily to honor the men and women who fought and died in Afghanistan and the second war in Iraq, is to be constructed on the national Mall, adjacent to the Lincoln memorial, and across the street from the Vietnam War memorial. In a guest essay appearing in the Washington Post, Elliott Ackerman, a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Jennifer Ballou, a Gold Star widow who served in Afghanistan, envision the proposed memorial (for which they are in the process of soliciting an approved design) as an “epicenter of healing,” and in keeping with the purpose of other memorials on the Mall, “an opportunity for our country to reconcile itself to the implications of this era.”

The two authors acknowledge that the so-called “Global War on Terrorism” is ongoing, with troops deployed for “missions in Syria, the Horn of Africa and Pakistan, among other locales.” This memorial, they concede, will be “a unique prospect in the history of American war memorials.”

As the authors write:

So, too, is one that gives us the opportunity to confront humankind’s penchant for fighting. War is, of course, a part of human nature. Perhaps this will be an opportunity for our society to make the truest war memorial possible: a monument to this fault in our nature.

These sentiments are admirable, but they actually illustrate a problem that no design or representation of such a “war” can avoid: A “war on terrorism” is by definition an amorphous, subjective and all-encompassing endeavor, not easily or susceptible to being neatly pigeonholed. It isn’t really a “war” at all but a series of discrete military actions deemed essential to national security by whatever regime happens to be in power. But far more problematic, it cloaks all of those actions under the same rubric, no matter their justification, and thus imposes a gauzy veneer of legitimacy for all of those unique, separate actions which can in fact — as the Iraq debacle grievously demonstrates — impact the way they are viewed and understood by future generations.

In other words, characterizing something as the product of a “Global War on Terrorism” — particularly when its nexus to actual terrorism, like the war in Iraq, is dubious or non-existent — is a step dangerously close to falsifying history. That is not something any memorial on our national Mall should be doing, because it isn’t being honest, either to the American public , to the fallen soldiers themselves, or to their families.

The very phrase “Global War on Terrorism” was a creation of the George W, Bush administration as a catch-all justification for some of the most sordid acts our national security establishment has ever committed, including the torture and often arbitrary and unlawful detention of human beings. It’s also been wielded since its “declaration” as a cudgel to justify an unprecedented expansion of domestic surveillance and security measures. As such, it implicates far more than the soldiers enlisted to fight and die in its name. And since terrorism is a tactic, it validates what essentially amounts to an endless “war.”

It is also wholly subjective: Does the so-called “War on Terror” encompass domestic terrorism? Does it include the defense of the U.S. Capitol against insurrectionists on Jan. 6?’ Does it contemplate the failure, for political and economic reasons, to hold those responsible for funding and training the actual 9/11 terrorists, to account? There are many, many faces of ostensible “terrorism” and the American public is not going to be comfortable with all of them.

There are ways to honor those who fought in this country’s wars or otherwise in the defense of our national security interests that don’t involve propagandizing or misleading the public. And while the proposed name of this memorial is doubtlessly well-intentioned, it does the nation no favors to memorialize the fallen veterans in these two wars as participants in the name of a “Global War on Terrorism,” created by our political class to justify and sell those wars to the American public. Create the memorial? Of course. But just call it something else.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/25/2195314/-With-all-respect-this-country-doesn-t-need-a-Global-War-on-Terrorism-memorial

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