A Cultural History of the War without End

Melani McAlister

In October 2001, when President George W. Bush outlined his administration's responses to the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, he also announced that the United States was about to begin a "new and different war," a war against terrorism that would need to be fought "on all fronts." Bush argued that unlike World War II, which brought clear-cut victory, or the Vietnam War, which ended in quagmire, or even the high-tech Gulf War, the new war would be "a different kind of war that requires a different type of approach and a different type of mentality." Speaking to a reporter a few days later, Vice President Richard Cheney put it more bluntly, "It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime."1	1
The sense of a historic rupture with previous models of understanding the world was widespread in the weeks following the attacks. Not only were the levels of destruction and the extraordinary human casualties unheard-of for Americans in peacetime, but the live television coverage had left the nation stunned. Eventually, perhaps, television's endless repetition of the second plane slicing through the south tower of the World Trade Center would become numbing, but other, more personal, images retained a profound emotional resonance: firefighters covered in soot, rushing to save those they could and, later, searching through the rubble. Then came the friends and family who began to arrive on the scene—and on the screen—in the hours after the attacks. They carried large photocopied photos of their loved ones and spoke to reporters, tearfully telling of their last contact or determinedly showing the pictures that they hoped would inspire rescuers. Within days, September 11 had taken on the folkloric status of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; at nearly every gathering, people would tell their stories: where they were and what they were doing when they heard—or, rather, saw—the news.	2
It was not surprising, then, that the Bush administration would stress what many people in the United States already felt, that the nation was facing an unprecedented crisis and that nothing in our past had prepared us for such an attack. One corollary to that sense of rupture was the ease with which U.S. officials characterized the military response in Afghanistan and the concomitant commitment to a wider, perhaps worldwide, "war against terrorism" as something entirely new. Insisting repeatedly that Americans should not look to previous military conflicts for models, administration officials failed to mention the existence of one quite relevant historical precedent: the previous "war against terror" launched by the Reagan administration in 1981, just after the U.S. hostages held in Iran had been released. That "war" was also a call for a broad and sustained commitment, one modeled in opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Moreover, it had its own precedents in yet another "war on terror"—one waged by Israel in the 1970s.	3
What most Americans knew about terrorism on September 10, 2001, was shaped by those earlier wars, which had been waged on television, made meaningful through culture, and brought home through violence. U.S. involvement with terrorism and anti-terrorism emerging out of the Middle East began in the 1970s as an emotional engagement with Israel's response to Palestinian violence against civilians. These concerns expanded dramatically in 1979, with the taking of American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran and the ensuing hostage crisis. In the popular culture of the 1980s—particularly but not only in the emerging genre of action movies—there was a sustained fascination with the problem of terrorism and the construction of a U.S. response. As the 1980s progressed, anti-terrorism became the glue of a directly politicized popular culture, which worked to imagine American national power in a global context. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the contests and complexities of three decades of struggle with the problem of terrorism and the role of military power were all but invisible. In their place, especially after September 11, was the promise of clear, effective action against definable, defeatable enemies.2	. . .