MANY OF US WILL NOT RECOGNIZE OURSELVES, OR AMERICA for that matter, in these dreadful episodes—in the waterboarding and targeted assassinations abroad or in the militarization of our police forces, in the infiltration of Muslim mosques and student groups or in the constant collection of our personal data at home. Many of us have no firsthand experience of these terrifying practices. Few of us actually read the full Senate torture report, and even fewer track drone strikes. Some of us do not even want to know of their existence. Most of us are blissfully ignorant—at least most of the time—of these counterinsurgency practices at home or abroad, and are consumed instead by the seductive distractions of our digital age.
And that’s the way it is supposed to be. As counterinsurgency is domesticated, it is our hearts and minds that are daily being assuaged, numbed, pacified—and blissfully satisfied. We, the vast majority of us, are reassured daily: there are threats everywhere and color-coded terror alerts, but counterinsurgency strategies are protecting us. We are made to feel that everything’s under control, that the threat is exterior, that we can continue with our daily existence. Even more, that these counterinsurgency strategies will prevail. That our government is stronger and better equipped, prepared to do everything necessary to win, and will win. That the guardians are protecting us.
The effort to win the hearts and minds of the passive American majority is the third aspect of the domestication of counterinsurgency practices—perhaps the most crucial component of all. And it is accomplished through a remarkable mixture of distraction, entertainment, pleasure, propaganda, and advertising—now rendered all so much more effective thanks to our rich digital world. In Rome, after the Republic, this was known as “bread and circus” for the masses. Today, it’s more like Facebook and Pokémon GO.
We saw earlier how the expository society entices us to share all our personal data and how this feeds into the first prong of counterinsurgency—total information awareness. There is a flip side to this phenomenon: keeping us distracted. The exposure is so pleasurable and engaging that we are mostly kept content, with little need for a coordinated top-down effort to do so. We are entranced—absorbed in a fantastic world of digitally enhanced reality that is totally consuming, engrossing, and captivating. We are no longer being rendered docile in a disciplinarian way, as Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish. We are past notions of docility. We are actively entranced—not passively, not in a docile way. We are actively clicking and swiping, jumping from one screen to another, checking one platform then another to find the next fix—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and on and on.
Winning over and assuaging the passive majority might be accomplished—indeed, has been accomplished in the past—through traditional propaganda, such as broadcast misinformation about the insurgent minority, and through the top-down provision of entertainment to keep us from thinking about politics. The new digital world we live in has rendered these older strategies obsolete. As the counterinsurgency’s mandate to pacify the masses has been turned on the American people, the third prong of modern warfare looks and works differently than it did in previous times and in other places.
Things have changed. Just a few years ago, our politicians still had to tell us to go shopping and enjoy ourselves. “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” President George W. Bush told the American people a few weeks after 9/11. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”1 A few years later, Bush would reiterate, after discussing the situation in Iraq, “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”2 Now, we no longer need our leaders to tell us that anymore. The entire digital world prompts us to do so.
Andrew Sullivan captures well this frenzied digital life we now lead. Sullivan recounts, in a brilliant article in New York magazine titled “Put Down Your Phone,” his own journey through the digital age, starting with his gradual addiction, his eventual recovery in a rehab program, and his ultimate relapse:
For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.3
This is our new existence, fueled and enhanced by all the digital media, apps, and devices. Not all of us are producers or creators like Sullivan, but practically all of us are consumers. We participate actively. We read, click, like, share. We play. We interact. And we derive extraordinary benefits and enjoyments from this. “The rewards,” Andrew Sullivan notes, are “many”: “a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success—in big and beautiful data—that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve.”
To be sure, this frenzy may at times fuel political activity. Groups of Facebook friends are politicizing each other every day, sharing satirical political commentary, forming new alliances on the web. Social media can galvanize real-world protest. The Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring were, in part, facilitated by social media and Internet networks—regardless of whether you ultimately believe, with Evgeny Morozov, that the Internet does not effectively promote democratic values.4 Presidential candidates like Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump have built entire political followings on the Internet. There is no doubt that the digital age has important political dimensions and implications—not to be minimized.
But for the most part, the entertainment and the spectacle comes first. Spectacle especially: the gladiator sport at which a politician like Donald Trump excelled. President Trump’s middle-of-the-night Twitter screeds drew our attention. His lewd words and extreme statements on social media caused a frenzy. We were practically mesmerized. For the younger generations, especially, the digital activity is primarily geared toward entertainment and pleasure: the YouTube videos, Facebook news feeds, and snapchats. Selfies on Instagram. Dating applications for all tastes, iPhone apps of all kinds.5 Even meditation apps, like Sattva, Buddhify, or Headspace, to help us deal now with our digital addictions.
The paradigm of these new digital distractions—and of the myriad ways they then feed back into the surveillance apparatus—is Pokémon GO. An enhanced reality game, Pokémon GO went online at the start of summer 2016 and immediately went viral. For a few weeks or months, millions of young people around the globe started chasing virtual Pikachus in the streets and alleys, museums and national monuments, even in their own bedrooms across the world. Players became completely absorbed and obsessed with the game, spending all their free time—and even some class time, I noticed—trying to track down and catch Pokémons, or walking around or riding their bike slowly to make their Pokémon eggs hatch.
Pokémon GO became a viral obsession. A recurring image from the summer of 2016—one that I saw in New York, but also in Leiden and Paris—is of a young couple on a Vespa or motorcycle, the young man driving slowly and following the directions of the young woman, behind, both of her hands cradling an iPhone. She is looking back and forth, from one screen to the other, while giving driving instructions to her partner. They are meandering, perhaps waiting for a Pokémon to hatch or to appear on the screen to snatch. The couple stops every so often, discusses and conspires, looks at the screens, and then they take off again, cautiously at times, or fast enough to catch another—or catch them all!
Pokémon GO has already run its course, but that is to be expected. Another digital obsession will follow. These platforms are supposed to capture all of our attention for a while, to captivate us, to distract us—and simultaneously to make us expose ourselves and everything around us. This is the symbiosis between the third and first prongs of the domesticated counterinsurgency: while it pacifies us, a game like Pokémon GO taps into all our personal information and captures all our data. At first, the game required that players share all their personal contacts. Although that was eventually dropped, the game collects all our GPS locations, captures all the video of our surroundings in perfectly GPS-coded data, and tracks us wherever we are. Plus, even though it is free, many players are buying add-ons and in the process sharing their consumption and financial data. The more we play, the more we are distracted and pacified, and the more we reveal about ourselves.
A new powerful form of distraction—for many, an addiction—has taken hold of us, and in the process, fuels our own exposure and feeds the surveillance mechanisms of the NSA, Google, Facebook, etc. And what is so remarkable is how rapidly it has all emerged. There is a new temporality to the digital age, one that mimics the viral nature of memes. Like wildfire, these new addictions catch and spread at lightning speed. As Andrew Sullivan reminds us:
We almost forget that ten years ago, there were no smartphones, and as recently as 2011, only a third of Americans owned one. Now nearly two-thirds do. That figure reaches 85 percent when you’re only counting young adults. And 46 percent of Americans told Pew surveyors last year a simple but remarkable thing: They could not live without one. The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade. The handful of spaces where it was once impossible to be connected—the airplane, the subway, the wilderness are dwindling fast. Even hiker backpacks now come fitted with battery power for smartphones. Perhaps the only “safe space” that still exists is the shower.6
The speed with which these new devices and applications are coming online, and the amount of time that we are spending on them, is stunning. A thorough study published in 2015 revealed that the young adults surveilled were spending at least five hours using their phones every day, with about eighty-five separate interactions per day. The individual interactions may be short, but added together, they represent about a third of these young adults’ waking hours. What is also striking is that, according to the research, these young adults are not aware of the extent of their consumption: “Young adults use their smartphones roughly twice as much as they estimate that they do.”7
The distractions are everywhere: e-mail notifications, texts, bings and pings, new snapchats and instagrams. The entertainment is everywhere as well: free Wi-Fi at Starbucks and McDonald’s, and now on New York City streets, that allow us to stream music videos and watch YouTube videos. And of course, the advertising is everywhere, trying to make us consume more, buy online, subscribe, and believe. Believe not only that we need to buy the recommended book or watch the suggested Netflix, but also believe that we are secure and safe, protected by the most powerful intelligence agencies and most tenacious military force. Believe that we can continue to mind our own business—and remain distracted and absorbed in the digital world—because our government is watching out for us.
The fact is, the domestication of counterinsurgency has coincided with the explosion of this digital world and its distractions. There is a real qualitative difference between the immediate post–9/11 period and today. One that is feeding directly into the third strategy of modern warfare.
Meanwhile, for the more vulnerable—those who are more likely to veer astray and perhaps sympathize with the purported internal enemy—the same digital technologies target them for enhanced propaganda. The Global Engagement Center, or its equivalents, will profile them and send improved content from more moderate voices. The very same methods developed by the most tech-savvy retailers and digital advertisers—by Google and Amazon—are deployed to predict, identify, enhance, and target our own citizens.
The third stage of the domestication of counterinsurgency warfare piggybacks off these new digital technologies and distractions that render the vast majority of us docile consumers glued in front of the plasma screen. It is a connected life in which the privileged move from their iPhones to their iPads, wear their Apple Watches, text and snapchat each other constantly, post selfies and narrate their thrilling, vibrant lives, putting out of their minds the risk to their privacy and personal data. And when this new mode of existence is particularly threatened and directly attacked, it becomes even more sacrosanct. The Paris attacks made many young Westerners newly aware of the threat that terrorists pose to people like them. The Orlando attack similarly actualized the danger to the tolerant liberal way of life that now embraces queer sexualities. With each such attack, this new way of living is under threat. And to protect this new mode of existence, many buy into the idea—subliminally or half-consciously—that a small minority of guardians must safeguard our security, while the rest of us must carry on, continue to shop, consume again as before, or even more.
My point is not that our fellow citizens are becoming more docile than they were before or that we are experiencing a waning of civil and political engagement. While I agree that the growing capacity of the state and corporations to monitor citizens may well threaten the private sphere, I am not convinced that this is producing new apathy or passivity or docility among citizens, so much as a new form of entrancement. The point is, we were once kept apathetic through other means, but are now kept apathetic through digital distractions.
The voting patterns of American registered voters has remained constant—and apathetic—for at least fifty years. Even in the most important presidential elections, voter turnout in this country over the past fifty years or more has pretty much fluctuated between 50 percent and 63 percent. By any measure, American democracy has been pretty docile for a long time. In fact, if you look over the longer term, turnout has been essentially constant since the 1920s and the extension of the suffrage to women. Of course, turnout to vote is not the only measure of democratic participation, but it is one quantifiable measure. And electoral voting is one of the more reliable longitudinal measures of civic participation. But our record, in the United States, is not impressive.
Elsewhere, I have argued that ours is not a democracy of voters, but of potential voters. It is not an actual democracy, so much as a potential or virtual democracy.8 It has a potentiality, a capacity to democratic rule. And it is precisely through the democratic potentiality that the benefits of democracy are achieved. This is not new. But what is new is the method: rather than being rendered docile as we were in earlier times, in more disciplinarian societies, we are being digitally entranced by all the new technology. And this entrancement does not quash politics, it turns it into spectacle. If anything, there is growing interest in politics—but as entertainment. In fact, the first presidential debate of the 2016 election, the September 26, 2016, debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, set a record for TV viewership of presidential debates. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the debate drew the largest TV audience ever for a presidential debate, reaching up to eighty-four million according to Nielsen numbers.9
Why such numbers? Because Donald Trump turned the presidential election and subsequently his administration into a spectacle; because, in effect, Trump was a master of reality TV, then of digital media, and now of spectacle presidency—as, for instance, when he dealt with an international diplomatic crisis in public, on the dining-room terrace of his Mar-a-Lago resort alongside the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, with club members taking snapshots and posting them on social media. Trump succeeded in drawing attention precisely because he became one of social media’s great communicators. The cable news network CNN captured this best in a pithy lead to a story titled “Trump: The Social Media President?”: “FDR was the first ‘radio’ president. JFK emerged as the first ‘television’ president. Barack Obama broke through as the first ‘Internet’ president. Next up? Prepare to meet Donald Trump, possibly the first ‘social media’ and ‘reality TV’ president.”10
Trump’s presidential campaign was unique in this sense and his success was directly related to his command of reality TV—his commanding performances on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice, and other entertainment venues. Trump became such a social-media phenomenon that even when he did not participate in one of the Republican primary debates, that very night he dominated the other candidates in terms of searches on the Internet and social-media postings.11
This is not to suggest that this new digital entrancement is mere spectacle or simply innocuous. Much of it is based on despicable forms of hatred. Trump’s comments about not letting any Muslims into the country—and his subsequent executive orders prohibiting entry from particular Muslim-majority countries—as well as his derogatory remarks about Mexican immigrants (suggesting that they are rapists and murderers) and women all play on racial and gender prejudice, religious bias, and ethnic hatred. And similarly, a lot of the attention on the Internet is “gawker” interest: the curiosity of the freak show, of the extreme position. In February 2016, Trump was caught unwittingly retweeting a quote from Benito Mussolini—it was a ruse set up by the website Gawker intended to trap Trump. Trump himself, however, did not miss a beat, and when asked by a news network whether he wanted to be associated with Mussolini, Trump responded: “No, I want to be associated with interesting quotes.”12 According to the report, Trump then added that “he does ‘interesting things’ on his social-media accounts, which have racked up ‘almost fourteen million’ followers combined, and, ‘Hey, it got your attention, didn’t it?’”
“It got your attention”: that is the modus operandi of a social media, and it reflects how citizens consume politics today. Van Jones at CNN captured this phenomenon most succinctly in these words: “The Trump phenomenon flabbergasts pundits like me. We thought the billionaire was leaving the world of Entertainment, climbing over a wall and joining us in the sober domain of Politics. But in fact, the opposite happened. ‘Trump, The Entertainer’ stayed exactly where he was. Instead, he pulled the political establishment over the wall and into HIS domain. The political class is now lost in the world of reality television and social media.”13 And not only that. It was also lost—or captured—by people who were earnestly moved by racial or other forms of hatred, as well as people who enjoyed being shocked by other people’s hatred or radicalism.
This new mode of existence and digital consumption pleases and distracts the majority of Americans. The old-fashioned TV has now been enhanced and augmented, displaced by social media on digital devices of all sorts and sizes—from the Apple Watch and tablet, through the MacBook Air and Mac Pro, to the giant screen TV and even the Jumbotron. And all of it serves to pacify the masses and ensure that they do not have the time or attention span to question the domestication of the counterinsurgency.
And, then, it all feeds back into total information awareness. Hand in hand, government agencies, social media, Silicon Valley, and large retailers and corporations have created a mesmerizing new digital age that simultaneously makes us expose ourselves and everything we do to government surveillance and that serves to distract and entertain us. All kinds of social media and reality TV consume and divert our attention, making us give our data away for free. A profusion of addictive digital platforms—from Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, to YouTube and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instagram, and Snapchat, and now Pokémon GO—distract us into exposing all our most private information, in order to feed the new algorithms of commerce and intelligence services: to profile us for both watch lists and commercial advertising.
To understand how the American population is being pacified in this new digital age, it is important to analyze more closely how the information and data shape us so deeply and unconsciously. The fact is, whether it is the attention-grabbing brashness of Donald Trump or the pleasure of Pokémon GO, these new forms of entertainment mold our thoughts and emotions. They shape our deeper selves in profound ways—ways that render us entranced, gullible, and submissive. These new obsessions blunt our criticality.
A good illustration of how these new digital distractions shape us, almost surreptitiously, was the Internet phenomenon “Damn, Daniel!” You may already have forgotten about it—that is the singularity of these fleeting viral episodes. They consume all our attention and then vanish and are forgotten, under the spell of the next one. “Damn, Daniel!” exploded on the scene in February 2016 and rapidly went viral. The video, made on an iPhone using Snapchat, was that of a young man, Daniel Lara (age fourteen), caught on camera on successive days, showing off his stylish shoes. It had an overlaid voice, each day and each time, saying, “Damn, Daniel!” with a swagger. On particular snippets, when Daniel was wearing particular shoes—white slip-on Vans—the voiceover said “Damn, Daniel! Back at it again with those white Vans!”
The short video, only thirty seconds long, was made public on February 15, 2016, and went viral in a matter of days. It had over forty-five million views by the time the two boys—Daniel Lara and Joshua Holtz (age fifteen)—were invited on The Ellen Degeneres Show on February 24, 2016.14 The boys became overnight celebrities because of the supposed catchiness of the meme “Damn, Daniel!” (You can still watch the video.15) Within days, songs and remixes were being written and produced using the meme. Rappers Little, Teej, and LeBlanc created a track using the meme, raising issues of race and white privilege.16 Another artist, Suhmeduh, made a more popular techno remix as well.17 Celebrities as far and wide as Justin Bieber, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian began sporting white Vans, riffing off the meme.18 On February 25, 2016, the New York Times—yes, the Times began writing about it—referred to the video as “the latest Internet sensation,” and reported that “Daniel said that he can’t even go to the mall or a swim meet without being asked for photos with his fans or getting marriage proposals.”19
Only twelve days after the video had been released, on February 27, 2016, it was hard to keep up with all of the fallout from the meme—positive (Ellen gave Daniel a lifetime supply of Vans) and negative (Joshua Holtz, for instance, got swatted).20 Although easily dismissed as just “entertaining nonsense”—that’s how the New York Times starts its article about the Internet phenomenon, describing it as “a meme ris[ing] up from the wondrous bog of entertaining nonsense that is the Internet”—a lot was going on with the “Damn, Daniel!” meme.
For instance, the video itself valorized consumption. In the video, Daniel sported a different pair of new shoes practically every day, with the climax being his white Vans. It’s unclear whether the shoe company, Vans, was in on the phenomenon, according to the Times; but they certainly benefited commercially. They could not have produced a more effective commercial. The whole phenomenon centered on consumption and the commercialization of those white Vans, masquerading under the surface of a popular joke.
There was also a clear racial dimension to the meme. It was filmed by white boys at a white high school in Riverside, California, and had all the trappings of white privilege: sunny, monied, fashionable, blond-haired white boys. The rappers Little, Teej & LeBlanc made the racial dimensions clear in their take, suggesting that black kids might not so easily get away with the same things, and they rapped about the racial-sexual innuendos surrounding the phenomenon. “Back at it again with the white Vans. Back at it again with the black Vans […] Black canvas with the black stiches and the white slit.” The white vans symbolized, for these rappers, white privilege. “Vans on, they are Mr. Clean.”21
But notice that all of these racial and consumerist political dimensions were buried in the entertainment, hidden, though at the same time internalized by us all through a process of addictive web surfing, clicking, and downloading. As of February 22, 2016, seven days in, the video had 260,000 retweets and 330,000 “likes” on Twitter. The official YouTube version had almost 1.5 million views by February 27, 2016, with 13,617 “likes.” The meme—with all its hidden messaging and politics—surreptitiously shaped viewers through a process that included hundreds of thousands of “likes” and tens of millions of “shares,” “follows,” and “clicks.” It spread contagiously and simultaneously turned into a mode of existence. A style of life. The pool. The white Vans. The swim team. The girls.
And what is not in the picture? The political economy surrounding how those white Vans were produced and made their way to the poolside at Riverside High School, or the differential treatment that young black teenagers received at their high school. Or the forms of wealth inequality and residential segregation that produced all-white public high schools. Or the contrast to the daily lived experience in an inner-city school. All of the politics were elided behind the pleasure and catchiness of the meme.
This third aspect of counterinsurgency’s domestication is perhaps the most important, because it targets the most prized military and political objective: the general masses. And today, in the expository society, the new algorithms and digital-advertising methods have propelled the manipulation and propaganda to new heights. We are being encouraged by government and enticed by multination corporations and social media to expose and express ourselves as much as possible, leaving digital traces that permit both government and corporations to profile us and then try to shape us accordingly. To make model citizens out of us all—which means docile, entranced consumers. The governing paradigm here is to frenetically encourage digital activity—which in one sense is the opposite of docility—in order to then channel that activity in the right direction: consumption, political passivity, and avoiding the radical extremes.
What we are witnessing is a new form of digital entrancement that shapes us as subjects, blunts our criticality, distracts us, and pacifies us. We spend so much time on our phones and devices, we barely have any time left for school or work, let alone political activism. In the end, the proper way to think about this all is not through the lens of docility, but through the framework of entrancement. It is crucial to understand this in the proper way, because breaking this very entrancement is key to seeing how counterinsurgency governance operates more broadly. Also, because the focus on docility—along an older register of discipline—is likely to lead us into an outdated focus on top-down propaganda. We need to think of domesticated counterinsurgency as not simply something done to us, but something in which we are also choosing to participate—and could choose not to.
We could have foreseen the domestication of counterinsurgency. The French officers who developed modern warfare in the 1950s and 1960s, in fact, realized quickly that the principles and doctrines could have wider application than just the colonial conflict. Roger Trinquier identified, early on, the domestic implications of insurgent warfare. “Tried out in Indochina and brought to perfection in Algeria, [the guerre révolutionnaire] can lead to any boldness, even a direct attack on metropolitan France,” Trinquier warned. He even suggested that the French Communist Party might facilitate domestic terrorism, leading to the possibility that a “few organized and well-trained men of action will carry out a reign of terror in the big cities” of France. The countryside and the “hilly regions such as the Massif Central, the Alps, or Brittany” would be even more susceptible to insurgency. And “with terrorism in the cities and guerrillas in the countryside, the war will have begun,” Trinquier warned his French compatriots. “This is the simple mechanism, now well known, which can at any instant be unleashed against us.”22 Modern warfare, it seemed, could flow seamlessly from the colonies to the homeland—and thus counterinsurgency needed to as well.
The historian Peter Paret also anticipated the domestication of the counterinsurgency paradigm. In 1964, he admonished his readers “not to ignore the theses of guerre révolutionnaire, nor their implications in fields other than the purely military”—a clear reference to the political and the domestic. In fact, in the very next sentence, Paret referred to the fact that the new strategies had impacts “across military and political France.”23
At about the same time Paret was writing on counterinsurgency, Michel Foucault advanced the idea in his 1971–1972 lectures, “Penal Theories and Institutions,” that domestic law enforcement and, more generally, relations of power in civil society could be mapped on the model of civil war. Taking the historical example of the brutal repression of the 1639 peasant uprisings in Normandy by Cardinal Richelieu and his appointed agent, the Chancelier Séguier, Foucault demonstrated how there emerged at that time a repressive model of power, or what he called a repressive judicial state apparatus. Neither purely military, nor purely fiscal—as had been the state apparatuses of the Middle Ages—the repressive strategies of Richelieu and Séguier gave way to a new law-enforcement mechanism that combined the military and the civil. This repressive judicial state apparatus appropriated the military right to give orders and the civilian right to mete out punishments. And it infringed all boundaries between military and civilian, placing itself above both simultaneously.
That new repressive form of governing, Foucault suggested, had to be understood through the lens of the domestication and extension of civil war. Foucault’s embrace of a war matrix was influenced by his engagements with the Maoist movement, the Gauche prolétarienne. In dialogue with Maoist insurgency theory, Foucault would invert Clausewitz’s famous dictum. It is not so much that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but that politics is the continuation of war by other means. At practically the same time, Peter Paret argued, “A full understanding of Clausewitz’ famous dictum on the interaction of war and politics is the key to successful modern guerrilla operations. The guerrillas’ motive for fighting is at least partly political—or, to put it differently, ideological.”24
The domestication of the counterinsurgency is the marriage of warfare and politics. That union is what we now face in the United States. A few months after he proclaimed a national emergency in the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush declared that “the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm.”25 At the time, the new paradigm was framed in military terms. It has, however, far exceeded the laws of war. Over time, it has matured into a full-blown paradigm of governing.