I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His Day is marching on.
—Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”
In October 2008, the Republican senator John McCain held a town hall rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, a Minneapolis–St. Paul exurb. There was just a month to go before the electorate would choose between him and Democratic nominee Barack Obama, a charismatic senator from Illinois who had first come to prominence with a speech at his party’s national convention in 2004. McCain’s campaign was flailing. A quarter century older than his opponent, McCain spent the summer watching helplessly as Obama drew massive, ecstatic crowds everywhere he went. McCain was a decorated war hero, and he spent the early stages of the race hoping to paint Obama as insufficiently experienced to run the country’s military. But during the summer, the financial crisis that had begun a year earlier with the collapse of America’s housing market bubble finally came to a boil. In mid-September, the financial services firm Lehman Brothers, which had invested heavily in risky mortgage debt, collapsed. Lehman’s $600 billion bankruptcy filing was the largest in American history, and on the day it was announced, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its largest single-session drop since the week after September 11. The war wasn’t the country’s primary focus anymore. With the economy not just in trouble but on the verge of breaking down entirely, McCain tried to get his hands on the reins of the situation by announcing on September 24 that he would suspend his campaign and return to Washington. He called on President Bush to convene a bipartisan “leadership meeting” to work out a congressional response. He asked Obama to suspend his campaign as well. He said that both candidates should attend the meeting and that any further debates between the two of them—including one scheduled for just two days later—should be postponed “until we have taken action.” “Following September 11th,” McCain concluded, “our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now.”[1]
McCain’s announcement backfired in almost every possible way. Insofar as McCain hoped to position himself as the only candidate with the leadership skills to pull the country through an economic disaster, the effect of his campaign suspension was something like the opposite. Obama said that his campaign would continue, and he insisted that the scheduled presidential debate go on as planned. “Part of the president’s job,” he said, just managing to conceal his glee at the meatball his opponent had lobbed over the plate, “is to deal with more than one thing at once.”[2] To make matters worse, McCain had decided to stake the last days of his candidacy on an issue about which he knew very little and had displayed almost no interest over the course of his political career. He’d advocated for the standard low-regulation economic policies that the Republican Party favored throughout the late twentieth century, but he had little familiarity with the technical ins and outs of the liquidity crunch that was bringing the financial system to its knees. When the two candidates appeared at the Washington leadership meeting McCain had requested, Obama spoke fluently and knowledgeably about the tricky mechanics of the proposed bailout package, while McCain initially declined to say anything at all—“I’ll wait my turn,” he said. When Obama later insisted that McCain contribute, all the Republican senator could manage were a few generalities about the progress being made and the importance of reaching consensus. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson Jr. later wrote that he could see Obama chuckling while McCain searched helplessly for something substantive to add.[3]
By the time McCain stepped onto the stage at the Lakeville auditorium a couple of weeks later, he was down by around seven percentage points in national polls, and the mood in the town hall was angry. McCain’s attacks on Obama’s character had increased since the debacle of his economic summit, with the campaign releasing an ad in early October focusing on Obama’s alleged professional association with the “unrepentant terrorist” Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground. This kind of dog whistle was not hard to understand, aimed as it was at a Black man with a Kenyan father and the middle name Hussein, but McCain’s supporters were not content with dog whistles. Following McCain’s unsuccessful attempts to tamp down a number of audience outbursts, a woman took the microphone to say her piece. “I don’t trust Obama,” she said. She wore a red jacket and slightly wild hair, and as McCain listened to her, he looked every bit the politician who is sick of pretending to enjoy listening to randos on the campaign trail. “I have read about him,” she said, her voice faltering momentarily, “and he’s not, he’s not—he’s an Arab.” “No, ma’am,” McCain replied. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.” That line received a smattering of muted applause, but most of McCain’s supporters didn’t want respectful disagreements on fundamental issues. They wanted McCain to defend their way of life from terrorists, and in their eyes Obama was, at minimum, a terrorist sympathizer. McCain was booed so many times at the town hall that a campaign spokesman was reduced to telling reporters that it was actually a good thing for a candidate to get jeered by the people who were supposed to vote for him in a month. “He’s never been afraid to get boos from his own audience,” he said. “That’s always been John McCain’s thing.”[4]
The media feted McCain extensively for his remarks and continued doing so for the remaining ten years of his life. The moment became a kind of lodestar for the importance of civility in politics, with McCain’s refusal to stoop to the level of his basest supporters described as “harking back to a different moment in American politics, in which disagreements could be intense without becoming existential clashes in which the freedom of the country was at stake.”[5] But the media might have oversold McCain’s courage, because earlier that summer he’d selected Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, to run as his vice president. A newcomer to national politics, Palin soon revealed herself to be astonishingly ignorant of almost every issue a president might be expected to address, but she made up for her lack of policy expertise with the powerful and vulgar charisma she brought to her stump speeches. She saw McCain’s basest supporters as the base of their political success, and at rallies she created an atmosphere in which those on the right wing of the party felt very free to express themselves.
Soon after she joined the campaign, attendees at rallies could be heard responding to mentions of Obama’s name by yelling “Traitor!” and “Hang him!” McCain could speak forcefully about the importance of respectful disagreement, but his choice of running mate all but guaranteed that the campaign’s final months would be fueled, at least on one side, by a strong current of barely concealed racist vitriol. “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do—as the greatest force for good in the world,” Palin said of Obama. “This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”[6] McCain never said anything that incendiary on his own, but he wasn’t above allowing his supporters to believe the worst of his opponent, so long as they didn’t articulate those beliefs too crudely. Even at the famous Minnesota rally, McCain did not directly repudiate the bigotry at the core of his supporter’s statement about Obama-as-Arab. He never disputed the idea that Arabs weren’t to be trusted. All he said was that Obama was not an Arab.
If this aspect of McCain’s performance received little attention, that may be due to the fact that more moderate or subtle expressions of Islamophobia had by 2008 been completely normalized, including at the highest levels of culture and scholarship. A number of intellectuals who spent the first decade of the twenty-first century denouncing the invasion of Iraq or the horrors of the Bush administration’s torture program also spent those years producing work that affirmed one of the core premises of the war on terror: There was something rotten at the heart of the world’s Muslim societies, and the only way to fix it was for the United States to send in the military.
Some of these intellectuals were even ahead of the curve, and they found their work launched to new prominence once September 11 made their racism politically useful. In 1993, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington published an essay called “The Clash of Civilizations?”—soon expanded into a book—in the journal Foreign Affairs. Huntington’s theory attracted much attention at the time of its publication, and interest surged again after September 11. The “clash of civilizations” theory was an attempt to map out the lineaments of the world order that was rapidly and chaotically constructing itself in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The previous half century had been defined by a global conflict between two mutually incompatible political and economic systems, two visions for how the world’s resources should be parceled out and how the world’s governments should be structured. Now that conflict was over. The capitalists had won. Even China, the last remaining communist state of truly international heft and standing, was transitioning into something that more closely resembled state-managed capitalism. What would come next?
Huntington took as his premise a rough approximation of Francis Fukuyama’s famous argument in The End of History and the Last Man, which was also first published in the early 1990s. With the Soviet Union and the global triumph of communism off the table for good, debates and conflicts about the best way to organize humanity’s material wealth were over. The future would still involve squabbles and reforms, but it would be a capitalist future. Going forward, Huntington argued, major global conflicts would have their roots in cultural disputes, and they would take place between two or more of the world’s culturally distinct “civilizations,” of which there were nine (Western, Latin American, African, Buddhist, etc.). Huntington was particularly worried about conflict between a “universalist” West, of which he considered himself a partisan, and Islam.
Huntington thought the West needed to abandon its universalist aspirations in the interest of prudence, but he also thought the West needed to steel itself against Islam’s mounting aggression. Even as the developed world’s consumer goods and entertainments spread themselves across the globe, Islam’s ideologues were plotting the downfall of Europe and the United States. “Somewhere in the Middle East,” he wrote, “a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.”[7] Thanks to their “extremely high rates of population growth,” Muslims could be expected to account for “20 percent of the world’s population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s population by 2025.”[8] “Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists,” Huntington wrote. “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”[9] Wherever you looked around the world, “the relations between Muslims and peoples of other civilizations—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist, Jewish—have been generally antagonistic….Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.”[10] If the West hoped to survive the twenty-first century, it would have to accept that its underlying problem was not Islamic fundamentalism but Islam itself, “a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”[11]
Shortly after September 11, another prominent academic, the Princeton Orientalist Bernard Lewis, published the book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, which argued with Huntington’s work in some places and elaborated on it in others. Lewis painted a picture of Islam in which a once great civilization, responsible for many of humanity’s finest achievements in the fields of art, mathematics, and the natural sciences, slowly but steadily devolved into political stagnation, insularity, and violence. While he did not go so far as Huntington in portraying Islam as an existential threat to the West, Lewis agreed with Huntington that Islam was the sole author of its own difficulties. In an earlier essay, titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Lewis had written the following:
There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations. And yet, in moments of upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient and civilized country—even the spokesman of a great and ethical religion—to espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in the life of their Prophet, approval and indeed precedent for such actions.[12]
Like Huntington, Lewis rejected the idea that Muslim grievances had any real material or political justification. Instead, all of it was ascribed to something called “the religious culture of Islam,” which had somehow maintained its basic essence even as the religion spread to almost every corner of the globe over the span of more than a thousand years. Lewis differed from Huntington, though, in his recognition that “fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition.” The Wahhabists, ayatollahs, and suicide bombers might be capable of viewing the world only through the lens of violent struggle, but there were other strains within Islamic thought that, if they were to prevail, might allow the Muslim world to coexist more peacefully with the world’s other civilizations. Crucially, though, Lewis specified in What Went Wrong? that the West should not try to involve itself in what was essentially an internal struggle for Islam’s future. The good Muslims (secular moderates) and the bad Muslims (radical fanatics) would have to square off on their own, and if the West knew what was good for it, every effort would be made to stay on the sidelines and hope for the best.
Lewis wrote What Went Wrong? before September 11—he said the book was already in page proofs on the fateful day—and afterward staying on the sidelines was out of the question. But the idea that there were “good” and “bad” Muslims, those who were able to resist the pull of the violent elements of Islam’s timeless culture and those who weren’t, persisted. It exerted a powerful influence in the fields of art and entertainment. American television networks and bookstores were filled with stories—many of them written by people who understood themselves to be well-meaning progressives, people who abhorred both explicit racism and the Bush administration’s excesses—in which the narrative was driven entirely by the question of whether a Muslim character would turn out to be “good” or “bad.” It often turned out at the end of an episode or season that the character in question was a good Muslim, a plot device intended to serve as a rebuke to Islamophobia and stereotyping, but the final plot twist could not always make up for the fact that the previous hour of television had been compelling only because viewers got to view a Muslim with suspicion. The list of shows that made use of this plot device is extensive, including, as the University of Michigan professor Evelyn Alsultany has documented, Boston Public, The Education of Max Bickford, The Guardian, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, NYPD Blue, The Practice, 7th Heaven, and The West Wing.[13] On the 2005–6 Showtime drama Sleeper Cell, a Muslim FBI agent named Darwyn goes undercover to infiltrate an extremist group, assuring his colleagues that “these guys have nothing to do with my faith.”[14]
Fiction writers made use of this tactic as well. The protagonist of Khaled Hosseini’s blockbuster 2003 novel, The Kite Runner, is another good Muslim, an innocent boy who spends his adult life trying to atone for his failure to protect his best friend from the sexual predations of the Taliban. There’s also Ahmad, the hero of John Updike’s 2006 novel, Terrorist, a high schooler made vulnerable to the extremist teachings of an obscure New Jersey sheikh by his mother’s failure to provide disciplinary structure, his school’s failure to recognize his intelligence and steer him toward college, and a spiritually deadening American culture that privileges material wealth above everything else. He agrees to drive a truck bomb into the Lincoln Tunnel but abandons his plan at the last minute, returning instead to New Jersey with his newly acquired father figure, a Jewish guidance counselor. Stories like these gently pushed back against the idea that all Muslims were terrorists, but they accepted and strengthened one of the most corrosive premises of the war on terror, which is that there was something about Islam that merited a unique degree of suspicion. Updike ended Terrorist with Ahmad’s complete exoneration: He gives up on extremism and will now have a go at muddling through a decent American life in the more conventional way. But the exoneration is preceded by three hundred pages in which the plot is driven entirely by the suspicion that a Muslim boy is going to be a terrorist. Even if some Muslims are innocent in these works, their writers legitimize reflexive suspicion, and that suspicion is the engine that drives everything along. Without it, there would be no story to tell.
Another popular strategy involved making the terrorist a white Muslim rather than an Arab, which allowed audiences to indulge in a kind of “non-racist” Islamophobia. In 2011, the cable network Showtime premiered a new espionage drama titled Homeland, starring Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, a CIA operative with bipolar disorder, and Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson, the CIA’s Middle East division chief and Carrie’s professional mentor. Homeland was 24 for liberals (Obama called it his favorite show). The first season revolved around Nicholas Brody, a Marine sniper captured during the first days of the Iraq War and then held captive by an al-Qaeda commander named Abu Nazir for eight years. Brody is rescued and returned to the United States in the show’s pilot, at which point Carrie becomes suspicious that he has been turned by the enemy and is now working as a terrorist secret agent. Carrie’s co-workers initially dismiss her suspicions as paranoid, but there are troubling if inconclusive signs that something is wrong almost from the moment Brody returns to his home. The first time he has sex with his wife, he is sullen, withdrawn, and violent, and Carrie watches the whole thing thanks to the surveillance cameras she’s had illegally installed in his home. Is he just overwhelmed by the experience and thinking about the years of marital intimacy that were stolen from him, or has he absorbed some of the misogyny that is supposed to define the extremist mindset? In the next episode, Brody wanders around alone in the woods, and then he strolls through a shopping mall with a blank look on his face. Is he reacclimating himself to normal life in America, or is he scouting a potential target? Early one morning, while his wife and children are still asleep, Brody sneaks out to the garage. It’s the one place in his home that Carrie failed to bug, but Homeland’s viewers get to see what he’s doing in there. He cracks the garage door, just enough for a beam of sunlight to get in, carefully washes his hands, and unrolls a mat on the floor. He begins to recite prayers in Arabic. Brody has converted to Islam in captivity, and nobody back home knows.[15]
In Homeland, Carrie’s paranoia is the source of her professional genius, even as it always gets her into trouble. She watches Brody and his family on her video feed in the same way that actual people watched Homeland: late at night, slumped on a sofa, with Chinese takeout approaching room temperature on the coffee table and a glass of white wine in hand. The show intends its liberal viewers to experience some discomfort about Carrie’s spying, but it also knows that guilt intensifies the pleasure in things that are bad for us. If Homeland were the anti-24 that it claimed to be—the show’s two producers both wrote for 24—it would finally have to deny its viewers the pleasure of having their suspicions about a Muslim confirmed: Carrie would, in fact, be deranged and wrong. But all of Carrie’s suspicions turn out to be justified. Brody was turned in captivity, and back in the United States he’s planning an attack on the highest levels of government. As Carrie and Saul race around trying to prevent an attack, the show somewhat tediously depicts them rejecting the Bush era’s brutality, thoughtlessness, and lack of cultural sensitivity. In the show’s fifth episode, a CIA agent asks a Marine to assist in interrogating a terrorist operative. “One question,” the Marine asks, hesitating. “Will he be tortured?” “We don’t do that here,” the CIA agent replies, and the Marine breathes a sigh of relief.[16] In the ninth episode, a character called Special Agent Hall arrives to help sort out the aftermath of a mosque shooting that leaves two innocent worshippers dead. Carrie and her colleagues discuss the delicate prospect of gathering information from the mosque’s grieving community, but Hall, sounding like Donald Rumsfeld after three drinks, has simpler advice: “You people have rubber hoses, don’t you?” When he walks into the mosque, Carrie looks down at his feet, looks up, and says, with indignation, “Would you mind taking your shoes off please?”[17] These rote avowals of religious tolerance allowed liberal viewers to just kick back and enjoy the war on terror for once, to immerse themselves in the paradoxically comforting atmosphere of paranoia and dread without having to worry about the war’s less palatable aspects. In Homeland’s moral universe, strong opposition to torture provides cover for the very fears and myths that made torture possible. With the Bush administration’s failures having discredited the neoconservative bombast that prevailed immediately after September 11, Hollywood came up with subtler ways of expressing the Islamophobia that was required to keep the war going.
In the later years of the Bush administration, a number of writers also discovered that one could launder Islamophobia by embedding it within what purported to be a larger critique of religion as such. In the three years after Abu Ghraib, four men separately published books criticizing religious belief and promoting atheism as the only path forward for the democratic West. The neuroscientist Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006), the philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2006), and the ex-socialist polemicist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007) spent years promoting what became known as the New Atheism, traveling around the country, staging debates with religious writers, and telling anyone who would listen that religion was the source of many of the world’s ills. It oppressed women, promoted hatred of homosexuals, countenanced political violence, exploited the poor, and repressed healthy adult sexuality while at the same time covering up the widespread sexual abuse of children. They became known, collectively, as the Four Horsemen.
None of these men were natural allies of the neoconservative or religious right. Hitchens was a former Trotskyist who thought the creation of the state of Israel had been a mistake. Dawkins identified himself as left-leaning and usually voted for Labour Party candidates in English elections. Harris was a registered Democrat who supported gay marriage and the legalization of drugs, and Daniel Dennett sought to avoid politics as much as possible.[18] They deplored the Bush administration’s support of “faith-based” education, its free-market economic policy, and its reactionary views on sex. In one sense, the Bush presidency could even be seen as the prompt for the New Atheist project as a whole: Bush was perhaps the most overtly religious leader in American history, and his administration made no effort to hide the fact that it wanted religion to play a much larger material role in public life, the very thing the New Atheists opposed above all else.
On the issue of Islam, however, they often sounded like the evangelical leaders they most loved to denigrate. It wasn’t giving Christianity short shrift in their critiques; even today, YouTube is filled with videos of Hitchens debating this or that Christian intellectual or theologian, armed always with his mellifluous fluency, seductive baritone, and instant recall of quotations and bons mots from literature and history. But Islam comes off worst of all in the New Atheists’ books. If, in their view, religion distills and concentrates the world’s most intractable problems, then it is Islam specifically that distills and concentrates the worst of religion. In God Is Not Great, Hitchens gave Christianity and Judaism the barest modicum of credit for undertaking reformations at different points in their history. The Catholic Church, he wrote, had (fortunately) “never recovered from its abandonment of the mystifying Latin ritual” at the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. The “Protestant mainstream…suffered hugely from rendering its own Bibles into more everyday speech.” And despite the insistence of some “mystical Jewish sects” on speaking Hebrew and playing “Kabbalistic word games” with the Torah, “the supposedly unchangeable rituals of antiquity” had been consigned to the annals of history, breaking the clergy’s grip on believers’ ability to understand faith for themselves. But not Islam. “Only in Islam,” Hitchens wrote, “has there been no reformation.”[19] Islam continued to insist on the exclusivity of its truth, the immutability of its laws, and the importance of spreading its faith around the world through violent conquest. “ ‘Reformation’ has meant, for Jews and Christians, a minimal willingness to reconsider holy writ,” Hitchens wrote. “But, at the very point when Islam ought to be joining its predecessors in subjecting itself to rereadings, there is a ‘soft’ consensus among almost all the religious that, because of the supposed duty of respect that we owe the faithful, this is the very time to allow Islam to assert its claims at their own face value.”[20]
Even if Bush’s evangelicalism provided the New Atheists with their initial spark, they only had September 11 to thank for their eventual success. Richard Dawkins’s God Delusion begins with reference to a documentary series that aired on British television shortly before the book’s publication. Dawkins, who presented the series, didn’t care much for the title (Root of All Evil?), but he was very pleased with an ad that Channel 4 placed in the country’s newspapers. “It was a picture of the Manhattan skyline with the caption ‘Imagine a world without religion,’ ” he wrote. “What was the connection? The twin towers of the World Trade Center were conspicuously present.”[21] Hitchens insisted that he’d been concerned about religion for years before the attacks, citing in particular the 1989 fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini against the novelist Salman Rushdie. But he, too, described September 11 as “the critical day.”[22] Sam Harris, similarly, wrote in his 2004 book, The End of Faith, that “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death,”[23] and he wrote elsewhere that “while the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization.”[24]
Having framed their critique of Islam in these existential terms, the New Atheists went on to regurgitate many of the same stereotypes that American guards in Iraq had used to justify their abuse. Hitchens echoed one guard’s conclusions about the sexual repression of Muslim men. He found it “revolting” that “the fanatics” could make it to adulthood “without ever having had a normal conversation, let alone a normal relationship, with a woman.” “This,” he wrote, “is disease by definition.”[25] Harris trotted out the old saw about how nothing but religion could explain the existence of terrorism. “Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers,” he wrote. “Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism.”[26] Dawkins was more succinct, declaring that “Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today.”[27] Given these views, it should not be surprising that the New Atheists swallowed their distaste for Bush’s evangelicalism and made common cause with his administration. Christianity and Judaism might be mystifying and retrograde, but only Islam was a threat to the human race. Hitchens, in particular, saw the conflict in terms that he would probably be unhappy to hear described as eschatological. He felt “exhilaration” on September 11, he said, and envisioned “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate.”[28]
New Atheism was not intellectually rigorous. The books produced by the Four Horsemen between 2004 and 2007 are, on the whole, about as substantive as an undergraduate debate club, and they become similarly grating after a while. They assign great significance to cheap thought experiments, belabor at great length all of the most obvious paradoxes of religious belief—why yes, I had already considered that the Bible was not literally dictated to the prophets by God—and refuse to engage with any facts that complicate their belief that religion is the primary source of the world’s ills. Toward the middle of The God Delusion, Dawkins announces that he’s going to deal with the “calumny” that says that the men behind the two worst atrocities of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, “were both avowed atheists,”[29] and Hitchens also devotes a passage to the era’s great totalitarian rulers in the later pages of God Is Not Great. Unfortunately for them, the “calumny” is more or less correct. Stalin was an atheist in the absolute sense endorsed by Hitchens and the others, and while Hitler’s case is more complicated, there is little doubt that the führer thought the most important truths were to be found not in a church but in the “natural science” of racial biology.
These weaknesses didn’t matter to the books’ millions of readers, however, because the New Atheists succeeded at doing something more important: They made life easier for people who supported the war on terror but cringed at having to associate themselves with the proud ignorance of the Bush administration. That gang of down-home Bible-thumpers might have chosen war through a combination of lying, hubris, and under-processed anger, but the New Atheists were men who’d clearly taken their educations seriously and who constantly peppered their antireligious broadsides with references to the glories of Western high culture (that Dawkins and Hitchens both oozed Oxbridge with every utterance cannot but have helped them with their American audiences). Theirs was an Islamophobia varnished with an appreciation for the arts, an avowed faith in the objectivity of science, and an insistence that their concerns lay with the defense of the historical legacy of the Enlightenment, rather than anything so petty as control of oil reserves or a narrowly defined national interest.
This was the atmosphere Obama confronted when he decided to run for president. More than five years after launching a series of wars that depended on racism to maintain popular support, the country found that it was losing those wars, and the possibility of defeat was only intensifying the racism. This racism was being expressed and amplified on every level of society, from conspiracy theorists with clumsily designed websites, popular entertainment, and law enforcement, all the way up to the highest echelons of academia and journalism. To run for office as a nonwhite candidate has been a dicey proposition in all periods of American history, but to run for the country’s highest office amid a fundamentally racist war and a drastic increase in public expressions of bigotry is trickier still. If he wanted to win, Obama would have to appeal to an electorate that was reflexively suspicious of someone with his name and skin color. If he wanted to successfully govern, he would need to deal with a cultural climate that would keep hostility toward his administration at a fever pitch. Together, these two imperatives comprised the fundamental task of his political life.
So what was Obama’s plan? In the first volume of his presidential memoir, A Promised Land, Obama recalls winning the South Carolina Democratic primary election in January 2008. The young Illinois senator had beaten Hillary Clinton in Iowa, lost to her in New Hampshire, and fought to an effective draw in Nevada, losing the popular vote but winning a majority of the state’s Electoral College delegates. South Carolina was the first primary to be contested in the South, as well as the first in a Black-majority state, and pundits believed both factors would play to Clinton’s strengths, given her husband’s Arkansas roots and Black voters’ long-standing loyalty to him. A debate between the two candidates a week before the election was acrimonious; Clinton accused Obama of failing to take responsibility for his votes in the Illinois legislature, and Obama called Clinton “a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart.” On election day, Obama won big-time, drawing twice as many votes as his rival, and the victory unlocked a string of major endorsements that confirmed the national viability of his campaign and eventually powered him to the White House. Speaking to supporters in a Columbia auditorium once the results came in, Obama “could feel the pulse of stomping feet and clapping hands.” He squinted through the glare of the television lights and saw “college students mostly, white and Black in equal measure, some of them with their arms interlocked or draped over one another’s shoulders, their faces beaming with joy and purpose.” They were looking up at their candidate and repeating a chant that one could not possibly imagine coming out of the mouths of young progressives a decade later: “Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!”
Obama resisted the urge to correct his supporters, “to remind them that in the year 2008, with the Confederate flag and all it stood for still hanging in front of a state capitol just a few blocks away, race still mattered plenty, as much as they might want to believe otherwise.”[30] But those college students had done nothing more than follow his lead. The Obama campaign was founded on a simple theory: If a half-Black, half-white Hawaiian, a man with a Kenyan father and an Arabic middle name, a man who’d spent some of his childhood years living in the most populous majority-Muslim country in the world, could become the president of the United States, it would prove that America wasn’t fundamentally racist after all, that the country’s history of genocide, enslavement, and Jim Crow hadn’t sprung from some immutable part of the national identity. Obama articulated this theory again and again, starting with the most famous line from the 2004 Democratic National Convention address that first launched him to national prominence: “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”
The theory drew power from the fact that Obama was personally invested in proving it correct; it wasn’t just something he liked to say to win votes. He wanted to discover and then cultivate “a politics that bridged America’s racial, ethnic, and religious divides, as well as the many strands of my own life.”[31] Obama understood himself to be “running against the implacable weight of the past; the inertia, fatalism, and fear it produced.” That is a fancy way of saying that he was running against history itself. By embodying and manifesting the racial reconciliation for which his supporters longed, by challenging “America’s reigning political assumptions about how divided we were,” Obama thought he could establish a durable majority, “a new covenant between its citizens.”[32]
The Obama campaign also organized itself around the counterintuitive belief that in order to found this new covenant, it was important to avoid addressing racism too explicitly. As a young community organizer in 1980s Chicago, Obama had watched Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, take a more confrontational approach, to which the white-dominated city council responded by blocking all of his proposed reforms. Washington spent the entirety of his first term trying to get a federal court to invalidate the city’s racially gerrymandered political map, and though he finally succeeded and won reelection, he died of a heart attack seven months later. This taught Obama that “a political campaign based on racial redress, no matter how reasonable, generated fear and backlash and ultimately placed limits on progress.”[33] As a brand-new senator in 2005, Obama went on television shortly after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in majority-Black New Orleans and insisted that racism had played no part in the Bush administration’s incompetent response. “The incompetence was color-blind,” he said.[34] When right-wing shock jocks such as Rush Limbaugh went on the air and called him “Osama Obama,” he thought it better to shrug and “let them have their fun” rather than send even more media attention their way by responding.[35] He told voters that inner-city poverty was just as much a problem of indifferent parenting as it was of intentional government neglect, he sympathized with white people who thought affirmative action was unfair, and he was even willing to admit to racist views of his own. “If I’m honest with myself,” he wrote in his campaign book The Audacity of Hope, “I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to…nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”[36] Obama’s campaign advisers “made no apologies for de-emphasizing any topic that might be labeled a racial grievance, or split the electorate along racial lines,” Obama wrote. “To them, the immediate formula for racial progress was simple—we needed to win.”[37]
They did. In early 2009, as Obama took the oath of office while a crowd of nearly two million people stretched down the Washington Mall, his theory seemed pretty well vindicated. Eight years later, as Obama ceded the presidency to a man who’d first come to political prominence by promoting conspiracy theories about whether Obama was a natural-born citizen, it would lie in tatters. Obama was wrong about the centrality of racism to American political life. With respect to domestic policy, he was wrong in believing that Republicans would accept the legitimacy of his presidency or cooperate even a little with the implementation of his agenda (e.g., health-care and immigration reform) in exchange for policy concessions, no matter how generous. And with respect to foreign policy, he was wrong in thinking that his administration could continue to fight the war on terror without exacerbating the very racism that made implementing his domestic agenda so difficult. Obama’s misreading of the situation on these two fronts, his belief that America’s racism could be ignored or evaded rather than confronted, would turn out to be the central tragedy of his presidency. As a result of his misapprehension, almost all of the problems Obama vowed to ameliorate as president had only further intensified by the time he left office.
The first year of Obama’s presidency was frantic. The inauguration had been a cathartic celebration of his triumphant campaign against the “implacable weight” of American history, but with millions out of work and the financial engine of the economy still making all kinds of ominous noises, there would be no time to bask in the afterglow. He signed a clutch of executive orders immediately after taking office, which he hoped would signal the shape of the broader policy reset his administration was preparing. He banned torture, announced that the detention center at Guantánamo Bay would be closed within a year, prohibited corporate lobbyists from taking jobs in the federal government, and established various White House offices, councils, and advisory boards dealing with urban affairs, women, and the economy. He nominated Sonia Sotomayor to serve as the first Hispanic woman on the Supreme Court, and he proposed a health-care reform law that would provide tens of millions of Americans with insurance. He also assembled an economic policy team that would spend months scrambling to prevent the global financial crisis from destroying the economy. The corporate bailouts his team designed were broadly unpopular, however, and combined with the administration’s lack of meaningful assistance to the millions of Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure, they burned through a substantial amount of Obama’s political capital. Two years later, the bailouts would give rise to the Occupy protest movement.
Of course, Obama had also run as an antiwar candidate, constantly bludgeoning Clinton and then McCain with their prior support for the invasion of Iraq (Obama had opposed it, and said so in a speech at a Chicago antiwar rally in 2002). Deciding exactly how to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would take a while, with the Pentagon’s planners needing months to puzzle out which troops could come home, and from where, and when, before any concrete de-escalation could take place. But there was an aspect of the war on which Obama felt he could act quickly. He’d been troubled by surveys indicating that a majority of the world’s Muslims thought the United States was hostile to their religion “and that our Middle East policy was based not on an interest in improving people’s lives but rather on maintaining oil supplies, killing terrorists, and protecting Israel.” The administration decided that Obama would give a speech addressing the Muslim world at Cairo University in Egypt, and that its title would be “A New Beginning.” As with his approach to domestic race relations during the campaign, Obama wanted to show the people of the Middle East that even as the United States waged two wars in Muslim-majority countries, Americans and Arab Muslims already shared significant common ground. “I told Ben,” Obama wrote, referring to his speechwriter Ben Rhodes, “that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other.” That meant praising the Muslim world’s contributions to civilization in the fields of math, science, and art; acknowledging that the United States had coddled regional autocrats and helped to overthrow the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953; and recognizing the burdens shouldered by Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Obama believed that the Middle East’s low expectations for American leadership would serve him well. “Hearing such basic history from the mouth of a U.S. president,” he later wrote, “would catch many people off guard, I figured, and perhaps open their minds to other hard truths.”[38] These truths included that terrorism was incompatible with modern progress, that Muslim leaders often fomented anti-American outrage so as to distract people from their own failings, that Palestine would never liberate itself through violence, and that sexism was wrong. He delivered the address on June 4, 2009. It pointedly did not include the words “terror” or “terrorism.”
In Europe and the United States, reactions were overwhelmingly positive. The Republican House minority leader, John Boehner, said that Obama should have gone easier on Israel and harder on Iran, but he said that kind of thing all the time, and elsewhere in the American press the speech was viewed as a bold diplomatic gambit that had the potential to shift the region’s politics. Sweden liked the speech so much that it gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize four months later. Opinion in the Middle East, however, was more divided. Many commentators in the Arab press praised the speech and expressed the hope that it would lead to concrete policy, and centrists in Israel and Pakistan were pleased, but for officials who took a harder line, it left much to be desired. Some of the region’s problems, it seemed, would require a more targeted approach than the new president’s bromides about finding common ground. For all Obama’s rhetoric about the importance of confronting “hard truths,” he had skirted many of the thorniest issues. In the section on democracy, Obama said he would support all people who yearned for “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose,” and he also talked about “the struggle for women’s equality” throughout the world. But his speech had been preceded by friendly visits with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, two of the world’s most authoritarian heads of state. He voiced support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but he called on only one of those groups (the Palestinians) to “abandon violence.” “Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed….For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights,” he said. He insisted that America was at war with extremism, not Islam, and pointed out that most of the victims of terrorist attacks were themselves Muslim, but he did not grapple at all with the fact that the United States had killed many more Muslims over the prior eight years than the world’s terrorist groups had.
As Obama rolled out his more concrete changes to how the war on terror would be fought under its second chief executive, it became clear that his war policy was based on a similar hypothesis as his candidacy. If America wasn’t racist in some fundamental way, if racism only distracted people from the more urgent tasks of solving social problems, then what the country’s domestic policy needed was a president who could serve as a living symbol of post-racial utopia and inspire people to set aside their prejudices and work for the greater good. And if racism was similarly ancillary to the war on terror, then what the world needed was an American head of state who could use military force to keep extremists in check without the abuses, renditions, and rhetorical excesses that stoked the fires of Islamophobia and racism in the affluent West. Obama thought of himself as someone who was good in a crisis, someone whose role in any delicate or tense political situation was almost always to lower the temperature in the room. In terms of war, lowering the temperature meant getting people to pay attention to something else. Where Bush’s war speeches had called up images of cowboys meting out summary justice as they raced across the plains, Obama’s war would be sedate and carefully managed. If things really went well, it might even be dull.
So: Torture was banned. Interrogations in real life would no longer resemble their violent, carnivalesque counterparts on prime-time television dramas. Instead, they would be unglamorous but effective exercises in patience, cunning, and ordinary human psychology. Guantánamo would be closed, and the people detained there would be released into anonymity, transferred to other countries far beyond the scope of America’s daily consciousness, or tried in court like ordinary criminals. Most American soldiers would leave Iraq and return the country to its people, who would then be solely responsible for their own successes and struggles. Drones would replace troops wherever possible. Keeping American soldiers miles away from the battlefield would adjust the drumbeat of U.S. casualty reports to a distant, barely audible level. So determined was Obama to fix the war’s image problem that he even gave it a new name. “War on terror” might sound like something out of The Lord of the Rings, but about two months after taking office, the Obama administration announced that the war would henceforth go under the dazzlingly boring title “Overseas Contingency Operations,” which sounded like a phrase shipping companies might use in discussing potential solutions to supply chain issues. It did not catch on.
In many respects, these reforms carefully skirted issues that went more to the heart of the war’s conduct. Although the administration withdrew all of John Yoo’s legal memos regarding the interrogation of terrorist suspects and detainees, it left Yoo’s memos regarding the broader use of military force against non-state actors, which provided the legally dubious but crucial justification for the war as a whole, in place. But the reforms had, at least for a while, their intended cooling effect on public discourse. Three days after his inauguration, The Washington Post published a dramatic headline: “Bush’s ‘War’ on Terror Comes to a Sudden End.” “With the stroke of a pen,” the article said, “[President Barack Obama] effectively declared an end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President George W. Bush had defined it.” In the very next paragraph, however, was this: “Obama says he has no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad.”[39]
Indeed, although he did carry out the promised troop drawdown in Iraq, Obama expanded those operations, occasionally on a breathtaking scale. With little to no official fanfare, drones, which under Bush had served to complement the military’s troop deployments, became in many respects the country’s primary instrument of war. Obama had been critical of the CIA’s secrecy, brutality, and bad-faith legalese during the campaign, and among the first executive orders he signed were instructions to close all of the agency’s overseas prisons and prohibitions against extraordinary rendition. But Obama simultaneously pushed for an aggressive expansion of the CIA drone program. Just three days after the inauguration, on January 23, 2009, a Predator drone launched a Hellfire missile at a compound in a remote area of Pakistan, killing nearly twenty people. The compound was thought to be inhabited by Taliban fighters, but the Obama administration didn’t actually require the CIA to be sure. Obama’s drone program leaned hard on a tactic known as the “signature strike,” in which the CIA was authorized to fire at groups of suspected militants without having to make a positive identification.[40] Similarly, the administration decided that all “military-age males” killed by drones would be categorized as enemy combatants. That categorization could be changed if evidence emerged that a particular drone strike had killed civilians, but since many strikes took place in Taliban- or al-Qaeda-controlled areas near the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, such evidence was often impossible for journalists or human rights organizations to gather. By the end of Obama’s first year in office, the CIA had carried out dozens of strikes in Pakistan alone, killing as many as 210 civilians in the process.[41]
Pakistan was a logical place for Obama to begin the expansion of his drone war. Many Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters had fled across the Afghan border into Pakistan’s relatively ungoverned northwest region following the American invasion in 2001, and they had long since used the area’s mountains and caves to regroup, train, and deploy fighters back to Afghanistan to rejoin the conflict. Declaring war on Pakistan was out of the question. The Pakistani government was officially an American ally in the war on terror, even though the ISI, the country’s powerful intelligence agency, was known to be arming and providing sanctuary to extremist groups. But the administration’s lawyers decided that drone strikes, which could be carried out in secret under the auspices of the CIA, didn’t require a declaration of war, and Obama would not publicly acknowledge his own drone wars until after he won reelection in 2012. By then, drones had been deployed in many other countries, including Somalia, Yemen, and especially Afghanistan, which became the most droned place on earth during Obama’s two terms.
Afghanistan became the center of Obama’s longer-term military project. Like many of the voters who had elected him, Obama saw the global war he’d inherited as divided in two. First there was Iraq, the bad war. That war never should have happened at all, and Obama wanted to end it as quickly as his methodical, process-oriented management style would allow. Then there was Afghanistan, the good war, the one that correctly targeted the people who’d attacked the United States. President Bush had bungled his attempt to turn Afghanistan into a democratic state with his political clumsiness and inadequate troop deployments, but Obama believed that America’s strategic goals were still salvageable, and so in 2009 he began to ramp up the troop levels. On the day of Obama’s inauguration, the United States had fewer than 40,000 troops in the country. By 2011, that number had gone up to nearly 100,000, an increase paired with a command-level reshuffle that brought in Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, then the director of the Joint Chiefs, to replace General David McKiernan as the war’s commanding officer.[42] The change was something of a gamble—no top general had been relieved from duty in the middle of a war for half a century—but the decision was well received by the media. McChrystal had assiduously cultivated a compelling warrior-monk persona, presenting himself as the kind of man who spent his predawn hours on strenuous runs and his evenings reading from his vast library of military theory and history. McChrystal was an advocate of a military doctrine called counterinsurgency, or COIN, which posited that when one conducted offensive operations in a failed state, it wasn’t enough just to destroy the enemy. American troops would need to live among the Afghan people as well, potentially for a long time, and painstakingly build up the country’s ability to govern itself. As one magazine profile of McChrystal put it, “The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps.”[43]
Though the raw numbers of the troop increase received lots of media attention, the shift in the Army’s goals with respect to Afghanistan took place with almost as little fanfare as the expansion of the drone war. With almost no public discussion, Obama’s new commanding officer had made the military project in Afghanistan almost as ambitious as the one Bush had disastrously undertaken in Iraq. This decision was a grave mistake. As the military historian Andrew Bacevich notes in his book America’s War for the Greater Middle East, the U.S. war in Afghanistan had already been lost by the time Obama took office. After toppling the Taliban government in Kabul, the Bush administration had decided to keep troop levels low in Afghanistan, averaging out to just eighteen thousand per year.[44] These skeleton crews were supposed to “chase down al-Qaeda remnants” and anyone else referring to themselves as “Taliban,” while a horde of NGOs and “twenty-six U.N. agencies” established offices in Kabul and went about trying to build a new Afghan state. But despite some improvements that looked good on television, such as formal elections and a draft constitution, “substantive improvements lagged,” and the only thing that really developed in Afghanistan through the end of 2008 was the country’s opium sector, which came to account for 90 percent of global production. “The disparity between what the occupiers promised and what they delivered,” Bacevich writes, “created an opening for the Taliban and al-Qaeda to make a comeback.”[45]
The military brass wanted troop levels boosted in Afghanistan to counter a Taliban offensive they expected to come in the summer of 2009, and even with the extra troops many within the Pentagon believed that “the war could not be won militarily.”[46] They knew full well that the war required a political solution, in the form of a state structure and ruling class that could both defend itself and win the allegiance of the Afghan people. Bringing that state into being wasn’t the U.S. military’s job, though; their task was just to hunker down, pick off insurgents, and wait for Afghanistan’s saviors to materialize. The biggest problem with this remit was the last part. Who were the saviors going to be? Where would they come from? Nobody knew, nor did anyone have good reason to expect they would ever arrive. The likeliest outcome was always that the Taliban would bide their time and then seize power whenever the Americans decided they were tired of spending money and losing troops in a faraway country of low to moderate strategic importance, which is exactly what happened in 2021. Although Obama sold the Afghanistan surge with a much greater show of thoughtfulness and deliberation than Bush could muster before the invasion of Iraq, his plan was just as strategically incoherent as his predecessor’s. The most prudent course would have been to accept defeat, withdraw all American troops, treat the reestablishment of the Taliban’s seat of power in Kabul as largely irrelevant to America’s interests, and focus exclusively on tracking down Osama bin Laden. Instead, Obama allowed the Afghanistan war to become the longest in American history.
Finally, Obama oversaw a secret government surveillance apparatus that reached deep into the private lives of Americans, targeting not just those suspected of terrorism but hundreds of millions of innocent civilians. Though not in office when these systems were built, he made a conscious choice to allow them to continue operations without any public scrutiny. It was not until almost five years into Obama’s presidency that Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, revealed that the NSA had constructed a bulk surveillance program that was monitoring the phone calls and emails of millions of Americans, not to mention those of millions more around the globe (the Snowden leaks would push German-American relations, for example, to their lowest point since before the Iraq War). The scale of the NSA’s surveillance operation, code-named STELLARWIND, was incredible, in some respects too large for an individual to comprehend. No government in human history had ever gathered so much information about so many of its citizens.
Obama’s reaction to the Snowden revelations deserves some discussion in its own right, as an example of how his confidence in his own procedural and managerial acumen could cloud his judgment. It was easily the biggest political scandal of Obama’s presidency. On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama had promised that his would be the most transparent government in history. Now it seemed that his government had done something like the opposite, making the private lives of hundreds of millions of Americans transparent to the government instead. His initial responses to the publication of Snowden’s leaked files were angry and paternalistic. Ever process oriented, he said that Snowden should have gone through the government’s formal system for whistleblowers rather than taking his objections to NSA policy to the press, neglecting the fact that had Snowden gone through the formal system, he would have been entrusting his revelations to an agency whose primary purpose was not to inform the public but to protect the secrecy of classified NSA data. He said the American people would have been better off had they never learned about the NSA’s surveillance programs. He said that his administration had conducted a review of the government’s intelligence practices “before Mr. Snowden made these leaks,” though he provided no details on what the review had scrutinized, nor what its findings were, nor what changes were implemented as a result. He disputed Snowden’s description of himself as a patriot. He defended the agency’s bulk collection of telephone data, pointing out that the NSA did not actually record the calls. The surveillance, he said, only “provides a record of phone numbers and the times and lengths of calls,” as though Americans should not worry themselves at all about the government knowing the time and date on which almost every phone call in the country had been made, as well as the number to which the call had been placed.[47] “My preference, and I think the American people’s preference, would have been for a lawful, orderly, examination of these laws,” he said at a press conference, the tone of his voice communicating the effort involved in not exploding too angrily at a group of people who just couldn’t understand that he knew better than they did.[48] In a speech delivered seven months after Snowden’s disclosures, he declined to address Snowden’s allegations about military intelligence officers regularly circulating people’s sex photos around the office, claiming instead that “the men and women of the intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people.” He also resorted to what is perhaps his favorite rhetorical technique, claiming that despite a full year’s worth of anger and controversy, Americans didn’t actually disagree with the country’s surveillance practices as much as they thought they did. “The basic values of most Americans when it comes to questions of surveillance and privacy,” he said, “converge a lot more than the crude characterizations that have emerged over the last several months.”[49] As with racism during the campaign, Obama hoped to resolve the debate around surveillance by convincing people that there wasn’t much of a debate to have in the first place.
By institutionalizing and in some ways expanding the war he had promised to end while campaigning, Obama helped to fuel the racist anger of a right wing whose sole political aspiration during his presidency was to delegitimize him as a leader. The right understood better than Obama’s Democratic Party the fundamental truths that wars are sustained by rage and that rage seeks an object. In the war on terror, that object was Muslims.
By trying to rebrand the war rather than taking the political risk of tearing it out by the roots, Obama provided those on the right with all the space and energy they needed to organize, spread, and amplify their ideas. Whenever Obama spoke about an attack perpetrated by “violent extremists,” Republicans flocked to cable news to wonder why it was so hard for the president to call the enemy by its real name, “Islamic terrorism.” When he decided that detainees could no longer be waterboarded, beaten, or threatened with electrical wires, when he said of such practices, “That’s not who we are,” conservatives accused him of failing to understand who the enemy was instead. If terrorists remained enough of a threat to justify carrying a global war into its second decade, as Obama clearly believed, why force your own soldiers into battle with one of their hands tied behind their backs? The terrorists certainly weren’t going to consult the text of the Geneva Conventions before they decided what to do with any Americans they captured. And when Obama announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others who planned September 11 would be transferred out of Guantánamo Bay and tried in a New York federal court, conservatives and moderates went ballistic. New York City officials, including Michael Bloomberg, objected on the grounds of disruption and security costs. “It would be great if the federal government could find a site that didn’t cost a billion dollars,” Bloomberg said. “It’s going to cost an awful lot of money and disturb an awful lot of people.”[50] For conservatives, the objection was more visceral: KSM was an enemy, not a criminal. The government had sent Special Forces soldiers and intelligence officers to capture him, not a squad car from the First Precinct. To try a monster like Mohammed in the same civilian court that meted out punishment to bankers who made a few million from insider trading was to misunderstand, once again, the nature of the threat. As Dick Cheney said in a CNN interview a few months after Obama’s inauguration, “When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing, closing Guantánamo and so forth…they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that’s required, that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.”[51] Obama’s election threw the Republican Party into chaos in many respects; the radical Tea Party movement would spend years wreaking havoc on moderate Republican incumbents in primary campaigns. On the issue of terrorism and Obama’s insufficient willingness to fight it, however, conservative messaging was impressively disciplined.
The right’s biggest victory during Obama’s first term also took place in lower Manhattan, though it had nothing to do with KSM. In December 2009, The New York Times broke the news that two Muslim men—one an imam, the other a real estate developer—were going to build a fifteen-story Islamic cultural center in the Financial District, two blocks north of the site of the World Trade Center. Located at 45-51 Park Place, the center would be called Cordoba House, and in addition to a prayer space that could fit more than a thousand worshippers, it would include a lavish array of other community amenities: theater, gym, child-care room, swimming pool, basketball court, art studio, food court, and bookstore, plus a September 11 memorial. The Burlington Coat Factory that stood on the site had been abandoned since September 11, and Muslims were already using the derelict building as a place of worship on Fridays. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf envisioned a neighborhood and community revival. It would send “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11,” he said. “We want to push back against the extremists.” (Feisal had previously assisted the FBI in its counterterrorism efforts.) Though the Times noted the possibility of a backlash thanks to the project’s proximity to Ground Zero, success seemed to be possible and even likely. Imam Feisal had the support of the city government; a mayoral spokesperson said, “The building owners have a right to do what they want.” Feisal’s wife was on an advisory team for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. A prominent Upper East Side rabbi supported the project, as did the mother of one of the men killed on Flight 93. She called it “a noble effort.”[52]
Cordoba House never stood a chance. Within weeks, most Americans who knew about the project knew it by the name that had been foisted on it by a group of right-wing activists led by Pamela Geller. She’d worked in newspaper publishing and advertising during the 1980s and 1990s, but September 11 radicalized her, and in 2004 she started a blog called Atlas Shrugs. “There’s no gray area with me,” she once told a reporter from NY Jewish Week before storming out of the interview yelling, “Shame on you!”[53] Her post-9/11 career was dedicated to stopping what she called the “Islamic takeover” of America, and she had a knack for going viral on the pre-social-media internet. “Here I am in my chador, my burka,” she said in one of her videos, wearing a bikini while bobbing around in the ocean. “There is a serious reality check desperately needed here in America and I’m here to give it to you.” The blog won enough fans to make Geller a bête noire on the margins of the Bush-era conservative movement, but Obama’s election and the Cordoba House announcement turned her into a national star. She founded another website, this one called “Stop Islamization of America,” and became the country’s leading voice against what she insisted on calling the “Ground Zero Mosque.” She bought ads on the sides of New York City buses. They juxtaposed a picture of the September 11 attacks with a picture of a mosque, with the question “Why here?” between the two. When “Ground Zero Mosque” wasn’t sufficient, she called it the “Ground Zero Mega Mosque.” Her campaign won the full-throated support of Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and future Wyoming congressional representative, as well as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who said that building Cordoba House in its planned location would be akin to putting Nazi signs outside the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. (Geller, in search of a cynical metaphor to call her own, said it was like building a Ku Klux Klan shrine next to a Black church in Alabama.)[54] Obama spoke out in support of the project at an iftar dinner the White House hosted in August 2010. “This is America,” he said, using his under-control-but-furious-father voice again. “Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable….The writ of the founders must endure.”[55] Substantive action did not follow from this portentous rhetoric, however. So, with about 70 percent of Americans opposed to the project, and with congressional Democrats, including some from New York, breaking party ranks to oppose it as well, Cordoba House was allowed to die. Imam Feisal was removed from the project, and his real estate developer partner built some luxury condominiums instead.
That the right wing was able to mobilize so quickly, and with such force, around its racist opposition to Cordoba House, and that such a huge majority of Americans agreed with them that the construction of a mosque and community center would in some way dishonor the memories of the victims of September 11, should have sent a clear and ominous signal to the Obama administration that its attempt to move past racism by ignoring it was failing. Sidestepping difficult issues and always seeking to “lower the temperature” may work well during election season, when voters are looking for a candidate onto whom they can project their rosiest fantasies about the country’s character and potential. It works even better if your candidate is perhaps the greatest political orator of his generation. But it didn’t work once Obama assumed office and began the work of governing, and based on the evidence of A Promised Land, Obama did not spend much time wrestling with the reasons why. He was well aware that the simple fact of “a Black man in the White House” had “spooked” “millions of Americans,” and there wasn’t much he could do about that.[56] But his memoir contains no reflections on how maintaining and even expanding a war powered by the country’s long-standing fears of nonwhite barbarians threatening the homeland might have fueled the racism that became the organizing principle of political efforts to destroy his presidency. Obama spent less than a full page writing about Cordoba House, and the majority of his brief discussion of the episode is devoted to his arguing with Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel about whether to speak out at the upcoming iftar dinner. Rahm tells the president to avoid the subject; if he says anything, it will just give conservatives even more ammunition to use during the upcoming midterm elections. “I’m sure you’re right,” Obama said, “but if we can’t speak out on something this basic, then I don’t know what the point is of us being here.”[57] And that’s where Obama the memoirist leaves things, with an image of Obama the president determined to give a principled speech even if it costs him politically. He doesn’t tell his readers what he did to support Cordoba House after the speech—nothing—nor does he note that the project was never built. Instead, the next paragraph begins with Obama discussing how much he likes his family’s vacations on Martha’s Vineyard.
Obama would get a big win of his own the following spring, although the victory would turn out to be a Pyrrhic one. On the evening of May 1, 2011, news organizations suddenly reported that the president would soon be making a televised announcement. This was unusual. It was after 10:00 p.m., and White House staff would say nothing about the content of Obama’s hastily arranged national address other than that it was a big deal and had to do with foreign policy. More than an hour passed in speculation. Some thought the announcement might have to do with Libya, against which Obama had launched air strikes nearly two months prior. But as reporters worked their contacts on Capitol Hill, it became clear that the announcement concerned something even more consequential.
At 11:35 p.m., Obama walked up to a lectern stationed in the East Room of the White House. “Good evening,” he began. “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” He went on to offer a brief and almost sunny history of the wars America had launched in response. “The American people,” he said, “came together” on September 11. “On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.” This was dishonest, but what else was he going to say? “We went to war against al-Qaeda,” Obama said, and “thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and counterterrorism professionals…we’ve disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense….Around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al-Qaeda terrorists.” Earlier that day, Obama said, a “small team of Americans”—meaning a group of Navy SEALs—had “launched a targeted operation” against “a compound deep inside of Pakistan,” in the suburbs of a city called Abbottabad. They’d breached the compound, killed bin Laden, and taken his body. “Let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11,” he said, returning to his earlier theme. “I know that it has, at times, frayed. Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.” The speech lasted for just under ten minutes.[58]
I watched this address on television from my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, along with Rachel, my good friend and roommate. I was twenty-four years old. Flipping over to the city’s local news station after the speech, we learned that people were gathering at Ground Zero. “I kind of want to go,” she said. For a few minutes, I kept scrolling around on my computer in silence, and then I realized I wanted to go as well. We found a taxi. As we rode over the Brooklyn Bridge and looked at the city, I received a text message from my mother: “Such thrilling news, but sobering, too, as counterattacks are anticipated. Hope you’ll be extra vigilant and try to avoid iconic locations in NY during the next few days (e.g., Times Square, etc.).” I cannot remember whether I replied; I was pretty confident that the members of New York City’s Islamist sleeper cells needed more than a day or two to organize a suicide attack. As our cab pulled up in the Financial District and let us out, the driver said, “There’s supposed to be retaliation attacks.” He’d apparently been following the same news coverage as my mother. A few blocks away, we found the crowd, milling around on a street adjacent to the Ground Zero construction site. We could see the unfinished Freedom Tower beginning to rise out of the ground. The cranes surrounding the tower were illuminated from below by klieg lights, and camera flashes sparkled all around us for the duration of our stay. Television reporters huddled in little groups to share intelligence on who might be worth talking to, then dispersed in search of their next interview. One of them, from CNN, stood a few feet to my right, a big camera on his shoulder, and complained to his co-worker, “I’m trying to get on Twitter, but it’s hard because I’m holding this camera.” Later, I heard him say, “Okay, I’m on.” The crowd was young. They seemed uncertain as to what a crowd like this was supposed to do, which makes sense to me in retrospect; it was the first time in their lives that Americans had assembled to celebrate, rather than protest, a foreign policy development. They compensated for their inexperience by borrowing gestures and attitudes from the kind of crowd with which they were more familiar: fans at sporting events. I watched two men who probably weren’t out of college shimmy up a telephone pole. Clutching the sign for Church Street with one hand each, they held up and waved an American flag between them, to cheering. Then they displayed a cardboard sign that read, Obama—1, Osama—0, to more cheering. Then, to loud, extended cheering, they popped open two bottles of champagne and sprayed the people below them.
Three young women down on street level were unhappy with the attention being paid to the street sign boys. “Why aren’t we looking at the monument?” one of them said, referring to the Freedom Tower. “Why are we looking at two douchebags waving flags around? I just feel like it’s not respectful.” Every so often, someone struck up the national anthem, and people sang along. The second or third time through, Rachel said it would be great if people could sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” instead, though of course nobody knows the words. I agreed. The melody is much more exciting, even if the lyrics do focus a bit too much on Jesus Christ and war. A little before 1:00 a.m., Rachel and I left, looking for someplace to have a beer. I noticed my footsteps falling in rhythm to the “Battle Hymn” playing inside my head—mine eyes have seen the glory of the something dum-dee-dum. By the time we got to the bar, I was in a bad mood.
Bin Laden’s death should have ended the war on terror. Despite the Bush administration’s megalomaniacal stupidity, and despite the willful moral blindness of Obama’s drone campaign, ten years of bombing and special ops raids had, in fact, beaten the group that had carried out September 11. Al-Qaeda no longer posed a serious threat to large numbers of Americans, and the threat it still did pose was not remotely sufficient to justify dragging the war into its second decade. Even before Rachel and I hailed our taxi to Manhattan, however, I knew the war would not be ending, because Obama had said the following in his speech: “His death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must—and we will—remain vigilant at home and abroad.” Having accomplished the war’s only goal that was both concrete and achievable, Obama decided the country would continue to pour money and blood into a project whose only remaining function was to fuel bigotry and anger.
The next morning, I clicked over to the New York Times website and learned something. The military’s code name for bin Laden during the operation had been Geronimo. When they killed him, what they’d radioed back to the White House Situation Room was, “Geronimo EKIA”—enemy killed in action. Just as they’d shaped the country’s unconscious response to September 11, so were the country’s Indian Wars hovering in the background at the moment of America’s revenge, and so would they continue to serve as one of the unacknowledged legislators behind the decision to keep America’s troops in the Middle East for at least another ten years. If their memory, along with all of its attendant historical traumas, still drove the country’s government toward violence and failure even after bin Laden’s death, it also made those failures easier to bear. SEAL Team Six had ventured into the wilderness and scalped the savage—one shouldn’t underestimate the consolation provided by a moment of cathartic violence that rhymes so perfectly with your own history.
The real Geronimo was an Apache shaman and famous warrior. For more than thirty-five years in the nineteenth century, he led raids against colonizers in both the northern states of Mexico and the American territories of New Mexico and Arizona. The Apaches had been driven onto reservations after the Mexican-American War, and Geronimo would not stop trying to break out. White settlers called him “the worst Indian who ever lived.” One girl his band captured on one of their raids was found hanging from a meat hook, which had been driven into the base of her skull. Geronimo surrendered in 1886 and became a permanent prisoner of war. He and other Apaches were shuttled first to Texas, then to Florida, then to Alabama, and finally to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where, though not free to leave, they were allowed to build villages and farm the arid land. Geronimo’s fame did not dissipate with his captivity, however, and he soon became a traveling, government-sponsored tourist attraction. He was brought to an international exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska, and he was also given a role in one of Pawnee Bill’s traveling vaudeville entertainments, where he demonstrated how the Indian had been tamed.
In 1905, he and five chiefs were included in Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade, after which Geronimo asked Roosevelt to free the prisoners at Fort Sill and allow them to return to their homes in Arizona. Roosevelt refused. He said Geronimo and his people “were not good Indians.” Geronimo spent five more years living at Fort Sill. One cold night, he was thrown from his horse while riding. Someone eventually found him and brought him back to Fort Sill, but the ordeal had taken its toll, and Geronimo contracted pneumonia. Lying on his deathbed, he asked to see his nephew, who later said that the great man’s last words were, “I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.”[59] After Geronimo passed away on February 17, 1909, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article about him. The headline read, “Geronimo Now a Good Indian.”[60]