Ghost in the Wire

I am constantly amazed by how impoverished is the discussion of victory in the war on terror. I don't just mean the very obvious discussion of what our supposedly inevitable victory will look like, a discussion thus far constituted by vague and insipid platitudes. We're told that this victory, our victory, will be at hand when freedom replaces fear, when democracy flourishes, when the terrorists have been eliminated as a threat (either through their death or incapacitation). We don't discuss how we'll know or measure any of those vague ascriptions and we don't spent much time or effort detailing the endgame by which these conditions will eventually obtain. And implicit within most of the discourse we do have on the subject is an assumption, one consistent with what Bush calls our "culture of life," that killing the terrorists and simultaneously preventing them from killing Americans is certainly the core of our anti-terror strategy and the best means we have of assessing whether we're winning.

But what of the terrorists' victory? What would it look like? How would we know if the terrorists are winning? Is it realistic to think that the terrorists measure success through merely the converse of the above, the successful killing of Americans and the survival of the terrorists? Given their celebration of suicide bombings, given their smaller numbers and distributed "cell" structure, and given much of the target selection thus far, it seems doubtful that this is the metric that Al Qaeda and its affiliates are using. Bush is right in saying that they do not follow a culture of life (and the disconnect between the West's biopolitics and the terrorists' celebration of death is, in fact, one of the reasons we have such difficulty responding, materially and rhetorically, to something like a suicide bombing), so why would we assume that their version of success would be measured by standards and metrics predicated on a culture they don't share?

Sure, their stated and purported goal is the destruction of America, the creation of a pan-Islamic theocratic order, and so on and so forth. But these are unrealistic goals, just as unrealistic as the elimination of terror itself (or even the total elimination of terrorism and/or terrorists), and so we should recognize that this goal, this telos, is not in and of itself synonymous or coterminous with what constitutes a terrorist victory. What if, instead of body counts and lives saved, the terrorists think of victories in the war on terror differently? Let me just quickly suggest two alternate possibilities, that of brand warfare and symbolic disruption. Brand Al Qaeda has done quite well for itself, in no small part because of the Bush administration's practice of lumping all terrorism under its auspices, in effect synecdochally elevating a small but effective terrorist group into the proper name of terror itself. Brand America, with its intelligence failures, its John Boltons, its stumbling diplomacy, has not flourished nearly as well.

And as for symbolic disruption? Well, with one attack on American soil - one! - Al Qaeda produced an America in which the executive willingly violates constitutional law on the basis of wartime necessity, maligns those who critiques or discusses this violation, tells the electorate that open debate on these issues aids our enemies, and who does all this only to find ardent support among party loyalists and media allies. With one attack, Al Qaeda supposedly declared themselves a new enemy, unlike any ever faced, and in doing so, changed substantively the symbolic charater of what makes America worthy of its name. What if this is exactly how they measure success, by charting the hysteria and the democratic collapse that followed the fall of the towers? What if, every time Bush declares that the world changed, Al Qaeda congratulates themselves, citing these declarations as proof of their succcess? What if they watch Bush defend secret laws and secret spying and the concomitant curtailment of the freedoms we are told the terrorists oppose, smile to each other and say to themselves, "we did that, we have won, we have remade America."