Is the War on Terror a Self-Fulfilling Prophesy?
Kritdikorn Wongswangpanich
“He [President Bush] claimed that September 11, 2001, changed everything and that was a self-fulfilling prophesy.” said George Soros. (2006: 78)
I normally find myself somewhere between disagreement and strong disagreement with George Soros, but in the notion above, at least in this very sentence, I totally agree with him. For me both the threat of terrorism and the war on terror are self-fulfilling prophesies, particularly for the United States. Although there were so many attempts to construct a myth about the threat of terrorism long before, the event of September 11, 2011, is hardly deniable, in my opinion, that it is not the originating point of this prophesy. Therefore, I’d like to propose that the war on terror is nothing but a self-made illusion of the United States, that it not only cannot eliminate the threat of terrorism, but also it is the main reason that helped construct such a threat of ‘terrorism’ to become a real threat. How? I presume that the state of hyperreality helps originate this situation. The hyperreal world that was first created by the US government has, at last, left the government no other alternatives but to wage a war on ‘nothing’, which will at last create the hatred enough to make such a tiny threat become significantly important. Although one could hardly say that the threat of acts of terrorism has increased, because the interpretation of ‘terrorism’ is subject to the culture and perspective of each person. With the difference in the sensitivity to the acts of terrorism, at the same time, the threat of terrorism in the eyes of Americans and most Westerners may be increased whilst most of the Arabian world may view it as in decline. However, what we can see is that, after the war on terror began, the number of organisations under the name of al Qaeda, such as al Qaeda of Yemen (A Report to the United States Senate, 2010), has drastically increased. This is what this essay tries to elaborate, that the war on terror is an American self-fulfilling prophecy that gives birth to the threat that they fear, before the threat even exists. More importantly, when saying ‘self-fulfilling prophesy’, I tend to imply the ‘self’ as the product of the hyperreal world, not the ‘self’ in common understanding. So what the war has fulfilled is the self of the hyperreal world (hyperself?), not the self of common understanding.
Hyperreality and the Creation of the American War on Terror as its Self-Fulfilling Prophesy
In this essay, I would like to purpose that the inability to distinguish the actual reality from the artificial reality, the state generally known as hyperreality, is the main origin of the war on terror, and in a way makes it a self-fulfilling prophesy. The intermixture of actual reality and artificial reality has framed both the government, in making such a strategy, and the society, in demanding political policies to counter the ‘threat of terrorism’.
Language gives rise to meanings, and the meanings will give the reason for the existence of all things which will, at last, construct the world, the language of counter-terrorism included. Whenever people accept these discourses, they have become those people’s reality although they may never really happen. The power of political language, media and culture that have been created by the US government become the biopolitical power which gains control over those people who accept these sets of discourses. These discourses construct a whole new world for them, and the new (visual) reality that superimposes itself upon the actual reality will constantly assemble the hyperreality which will implant itself, structurally, in the perceptions and thoughts of those who hear it. In the hyperreal world, you are incapable of distinguishing the ‘visual or artificial reality’ from ‘actual reality’, so in this world both artificial and actual realities become your own reality that you live in and exchange value with. In the world of consumerism, people tend to consume the both the product and the cultural power of the sign that helps create the artificial reality. With the fantasy and the actual phenomenon blending together, once you see a man in the back seat of a Bentley car, you will automatically, and structurally, consume and produce the artificial belief that he is wealthy, although the car by itself is nothing but a mere car, but the myth that has been cast upon it makes it become more than just a car, an ‘artificial car of the fantasy world’. Moreover, since the producer of the discourses of war on terror is the United States, and as the product is this consumerist world, the discourses have been constructing the artificial reality to be implanted and blended with the actual reality, that the fantasy of terrorism and reality have become one. Hereafter, when the consumers consume the discourses, they will, in turn, reproduce the artificial reality over again along with the state that firstly produced them. Therefore, in the hyperreality world, the process of producing and reproducing will be repeated back and forth, from the state to society and back to the state, continuously. I presume that is one of the main reasons that the war on Iraq had to be waged in actuality, because the war being waged by artificial reality made the threat become actual reality.
As I have mentioned earlier, the artificial reality of the hyperreal world will be given back and forth from government to society and society to the government. I would like to argue that the artificial reality or myth of terrorism, which has been constructed by the American government has given a multi-faceted picture of terrorism to the society, and made the society live in a terrorism-filled hyperreality world. Nevertheless, once the society consumes the artificial terrorism ‘product’, that becomes the ‘real world’ for them. Since the artificial reality/fact becomes the reality for the public in the hyperreal world, the public will continuously construct the beliefs, culture, habits, media and political demand according to the artificial reality they have consumed. With this in mind, the government will also need to react to the cultural and political demand from the public which has already been constricted and shaped by the artificial reality of the hyperreality world. Even the government knows that the threat of terrorism in the artificial reality is far more exaggerated than what it actually is, but with the hyperreal political demand from the citizens of the hyperreal world, the government will have no other alternative but to apply policies according to the artificial fact rather than the actual fact, although they are aware of that and in a way they like it to be this way. With no other alternative left for the government to react but following the hyperreality function, what they need to do is reproduce, again and again, the myth or artificial reality of the threat of terrorism which will endlessly be reproduced and given back from the public, just like playing Frisbee in a Möbius strip world.
Since 1986, during President Reagan’s administration, terrorism has been treated as America’s number one threat, and in response to the government’s proclamations, more than 80 percent of American citizens considered terrorism as an extreme danger. (Zulaika and Douglass, 1996) Although in that particular period the acts of terrorism that have been counted are so low, fewer people died in them than those who died by lightning or bee stings. (Ibid.) What can this kind of situation imply? Here, I’d like to point out that even though the threat of the terrorism is so low, but because of the artificial reality/truth that the Reagan administration has exposed, and that the American people, citizens and media, have consumed, they do feel like the threat is just in front of their very eyes. This is despite the fact that they have never really experienced or observed the threat of terrorism in actuality but the threat of terrorism becomes their reality which, eventually, generates the hyperreality world of terrorism. (Terashima, 2001: 4) The hyperreality of terrorism has haunted the United States, and many parts of the Western World, for so long, and since the society has already accept this artificial threat, it keeps reproducing the threat from time to time as we can see the trend in the media like movies or the ‘pre-emptive suspicion’ of Arabs in normal everyday life. So in the 1990s, we could see the parade of movies that show the threat of terrorism both directly and indirectly, like Air Force One (1997), Mission Impossible (1996), the series of ‘Die Hard’ (1990; 1995), or Jackal (1997); many of these blockbusters earned more than US$150 million. (IMDB, 2011)
With some level of hyperreality of terrorism being set since the Reagan period, the destruction of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, has truly become the explosive point of the (super) hyperreality of the terrorist threat, which led to the war on terror, as the fulfillment of the hyperreality of self prophesy. The fact that the attack killed more than 3,000 people is crucial and makes this hyperreal threat bound up with many myths. It is undeniable that an attack that intends to take a massive number of lives like September 11, 2001, is not the threat per se, however I do not think that I could concur with those who instantly jump from this tragic event to the conclusion that terrorism is such a severe threat.
If we look at the number of terrorism acts that have been counted in the past twenty years, the data will simply suggest that both in terms of number of casualties and the number of operations, the statistics are quite stable[1] even after the September 11, 2001, attacks. (Guelke, 2008) So at this point, following the data, the attack on September 11, 2001, alone could, in a way, be seen as a threat, especially when we put into consideration the fact that this is the largest number of people to have died in America in one single attack. However, the actual reality is not necessarily the ‘reality’ that has been perceived. By September 11, 2001, alone, the US government has created a gigantic artificial belief about terrorism that contributed to such a state of extreme panic and overreaction.
During the first two years following the attack on September 11, 2001, the US Department of State has produced more than 6,000 speeches, interviews, or press releases, published on its website. These official artificial truths have been widely consumed by the public as we can see from the President’s Address to Congress and the American People on September 20, 2001 which has accrued more than 80 million views, a very high number for a clip from a politician, not a musician. (Woodward, 2002: 108 cited in Jackson, 2005: 17)
If we take a quick look at the President’s Address to Congress and American People, September 20, 2001, we will find that most of the content, actually almost every sentence, tries to emphasise the threat of terrorism that America has encountered. It has constructed a picture of the exaggerated threat, the focus of the threat being the ‘perverted Muslim’ who betrays Allah, or the envious mindset of the terrorists towards the peaceful democracy of America, and so on. Here I’d like to quote some statements from the speech which I have found very interesting (the whole script of this speech can be found at CNN, 2001):
” The terrorists’ directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans and make no distinctions among military and civilians, including women and children.” (Ibid.: 2)
As a result, President Bush has addressed his “sophisticated” means of tackling this fearsome threat as follows:
“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” (Ibid.: 4)
As the speech was delivered, we clearly see the extravagance and plethoric of degrees of truth in both the objective or threat of terrorism and the way to counteract it. Just by employing ordinary common sense, it is (approximately) impossible to kill every single human being in the United States of America or, similarly, to eliminate every single terrorist group in the entire world. However, aside from any kind of human instinct, most Americans agree with it! Eighty million views alone is quite concrete evidence, however, that we can also observe the American consumption in many other ways.
Stuart Croft (2006) has thought-provokingly pointed out the power of culture in American society that, to some extent, indicates the level of consumption of artificial reality in American society, and at the same time shows the potentiality of the American people to send the message back to their government of how immense they fear the danger from terrorists to be. Croft has thoroughly investigated and analysed the influence of the media as the means to reproduce the artificial reality of threat of terrorism, the way that it has been implanted in the public’s mind, and how can it pave the way to the war on terror. He has analytically examined the movies The Incredible and The Last Samurai. Both movies have shown the growth of cultural production in the United States in terms of the influence of those events on the construction of meaning, concerning threats both inside and outside American territory. (Croft, 2006: 22; see also Thefullwiki, Films about Terrorism: Trending Topics, 2011) Moreover, we can also see it in many other forms such as the TV series 24, and novels like The Turner Diaries or The Clansman (see Appelbaum and Paknadel, 2008)
Not only in the movie industry, but every news channel in the United States and worldwide has also repeatedly shown images of ultimate terror from the September 11, 2001, attack. (please see The September 11 News, 2001) The image of the collapsing twin towers indicates the sign of the apocalypse for almighty America, especially from the monster that they once helped create, the Taliban and Bin Laden. The World Trade Centre towers, which by themselves symbolise both the vertical American imperialistic power structure of the world and the centralisation of global politico-economic power, are actually located in the very centre of what these symbols reflect. So the apocalyptic scene of the tumbling towers, which has been repeatedly and almost unavoidably broadcast by means of the media, is ingrained in the American people’s mind, not only consciously but also at the subconscious level.
Thus, with this implantation of artificial reality of threat, despite the fact that President Bush’s claim that the terrorists’ objective is to kill every single American, and his promise to eliminate every terrorist in the whole world, are very unlikely by any standard of analysis, they were accepted by the American society. More importantly, it is not only that they accept it, but they also push for such policies to be enacted. The American people not only accept, allow, and help maintain the policies but they should also be counted as part creators of those of these policies.
Why should we count them as creators too? It is simply because whenever they have consumed the artificial reality of the threat of terrorism, from both official sources and media industry sources, they will act according to the “reality” they have consumed. So, as they have consumed the exaggerated threat of terrorism, and it has become their own reality, they will consciously and subconsciously urge, or at least construct the atmosphere that permits for the revenge, protection, security, and their own old peaceful days. Thus with this kind of atmosphere and political demand, constricted by the hyperreal perception of terrorism’s threat, it does not permit its government to choose any other alternative but to wage war. Although the government may know from the start that this threat is not that credible, they decide to present it in such a way; however they cannot decide to act in any other way. So in this sense, the American people also share the burden as the producers of the war on terror.
In this interpretation of the causation of war, the war on terror is nothing but the war to fulfill the collective selves of the Americans, both governmental and non-governmental actors. Moreover, the collective selves that have been fulfilled are not ordinary selves, but they are selves that have already passed through the process of implanting and constructing an artificial reality. As a result, what the war has fulfilled is not their original selves but rather their hyperreal selves or the self of the hyperreality world. So, at the same time, the war on terror exists in at least three dimensions; as a production of hyperreality; as a producer and maintainer of the hyperreality; and as the originator of the actual threat of terrorism. This is because the war has been created from the hyperreal mentality as explained earlier, so in this context it exists as the product of hyperreality, but once it has occurred it also, at the same time, accentuates the already existing artificial threat of terrorism and fabricates a new and even greater artificial threat, such as the resistance in the war from the Afghan or Iraqi people; picturing the cruelty of torture by American soldiers, and so on. (Masters, 2009)
The last dimension of the existence of the war on terror deserves an accurate investigation, in my opinion, since it constructs something that is actually real, not a mere illusion. In actual reality, the war on terror itself has incalculably increased terror in the Arab region and killed both the Afghan and Iraqi people by a factor of more than ten times the attack on September 11, 2001. (Jackson Jarvis Gunning and Smyth, 2011) Jonathan Steele (2008) points out a very clear message and argument on this issue that the Iraqi people are even more suppressed by the US and UK’s military force than under the reign of Saddam himself until just recently. Steele (2008: 4) has also suggested one strong and solid stance in his work, as he states: “Saddam was indeed widely hated in Iraq by 2003. Yet it was too foolish to think this meant Iraqis would automatically welcome an invasion, treat occupiers as liberators, and be glad that the Westerners, with their own strategic agendas as long records of Middle Eastern interventionism, would stick around to tell them how to govern their country.”
With the difference in perceived worth of the life of a member of the US army and that of the Afghans or Iraqis, media attention is skewed. As the ‘virtue invaders’ the US armies hold tightly to their own version of value and (un)intentionally forget to appreciate Afghan or Iraqi cultures, while it turns out that the Afghans and Iraqis have been both physically and mentally tortured.
Furthermore, it was the Afghan or Iraqi women who were specified as the target of help, as one of the reasons to wage war[2]. They are normally perceived as ‘the other (women)’, the women who have been suppressed under the Taliban or Saddam’s regime, who cannot set foot outside their home unless they are accompanied by men. They are covered, veiled, have no right to vote or elect their own government or anything that puts them in opposition to ‘us’, in this wave of this hyperreal perception, “the Americans”. These are the women who are in need of us, the saviour, to wage war and protect them. (Masters, 2009: 41) However, many of these fragile and suppressed women, who are in need of help from the world’s saviour, namely the United States, have been raped by the saviour himself, from girls at the age of 14 to mature women in their 70s, during their detention in Abu Ghraib, some of them has been raped 17 times repeatedly. This should, perhaps, be called ‘being saved in US military-style’. (Ibid.: 41-2) Furthermore, similar in content but in a different context, Saad al-Mahdawi (2004 cited in Steele, 2008: 137) even states: “We’ve even lost our right to get undressed for bed.” (For more information please see Steele, 2008, 7-137). To conclude, the lives that seemed to be saved by the saviour, have been even more suppressed. They have been marginalised, dehumanised and selected (as the ‘good victims and bad victims’) even more than in the pre-war state, which turns them into the Femina Sacra. (Masters, 2009) Thus, with this kind of condition, it is not at all surprising that resistance groups will grow larger and larger, both in the number of groups or branches and in the number of members in each group. The greater the repression the invasion has caused, the more resistance groups, especially under the name of al Qaeda, will appear.
So in this sense, the third dimension of the existence of war on terror is acting as a prophesy that has come true. The threat of America’s so-called terrorism, that was once just an illusion or the artificial reality of the American hyperreal world, has come true by the US’s own hands. In general, we may not able to call all of America’s resistance groups or organisations terrorist groups/organisations, since their nature is subject to individual interpretation. If we judge from their activities we cannot even really say that most of their activities have been dedicated to terrorism, as some of these organisations’ main activities are to contribute to social work, while a very low percentage has been directed towards political violence, so the evidence to call or judge them as ‘terrorists’ is hardly be found, if at all. However I think it is fair enough to say that they are, now, the main threat to the United States since the objective of these resistance groups is to resist the United States and/or the repression the United States has caused and/or get revenge from the United States. For this, we can observe the newly established branches of resistance groups under the name of al Qaeda, like al Qaeda in Pakistan, al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia or al Qaeda in Yemen. Furthermore, in 2009, the Yemen and Saudi Arabia branches have formally merged and formed the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to help organise and manage the resistance groups in the Arab region. (Critical Threats, 2011)
With their own hands, the Americans, in their hyperreal world, have fulfilled their “hyperselves” from hyper fear of hyper terror by sending troops and suppressions into the Arab region, under the flag of ‘war on (their own hyper-)terror’, and as a result the threat that was once only an artificial reality seems to become the actual reality, the prophesy seems to be correctly forecasted. Although the number of casualties of the American version of terrorism in general is not yet on the upturn (US Department of State, 2009 cited in Jackson Jarvis Gunning and Smyth, 2011: 259) and the probability of death from this threat per se is just about 1 in 80,000, approximately on a par with death by comet (Jackson Jarvis Gunning and Smyth, 2011: 133). However, at this rate, if Americans continue to live in their hyperreal world and make policies according to artificial reality like this, this tiny threat in actual reality will gain the potential to become a real threat that doesn’t need a lie to cause fear anymore.
Conclusion
This essay firstly tries to address the position and status of the threat of terrorism in American society, which has been continuously highlighted for decades since, at least, the Reagan administration. Although in fact, the threat of terrorism is nothing but a tiny threat. The work of over-emphasising the threat comes both from the government and the society (who firstly act as the consumer of the myth) in both the formal form, such as speeches, interviews and statements from US senators or governmental agencies; and in the mass media or cultural forms like Hollywood movies, TV series, or novels. Putting these excessively propagandistic elements together results in the American society perversely believing in the newly constructed set of reality, artificial reality, and superimposing it with the actual reality to the point that they are unable to distinguish these two realities again, and the hyperreality world of terrorism threat has been created. Once the tragic event of September 11, 2001, had occurred, the hyperreality of the threat has gone even deeper. The attempt to overly and overtly emphasise the severe threat of terrorism is a constant in the media like never before, and the Americans simply consume it. The events of September 11, 2001 have implanted so much fear into the Americans’ minds, thanks to the Reagan administration’s previous work planting enough seeds of the artificial truth of terrorism, the fear that the absolute and precious peace of American society will disappear. This peace must be defended at all costs, even if that means sacrificing other countries’ ‘peace’. With enough consumption of the artificial threat of terrorism, and a commensurate sinking deep into the hyperreality world, the Americans have lost both their ability to understand and even the ability to use their own common sense the logic and possibility of terrorism threat. So they simply create the atmosphere and political demand that does not leave any other alternative for the government, but to go to war, which is consistent with its own plan. The citizens simply accept the most impossible speeches claiming that terrorists aim to kill every single American, without the ability to think or even instinctively feel how impossible it would be to carry out this threat, and permit the war to be waged. So the war on terror is simply the war to fulfill the ‘self’ of the American society and therefore every American shares the burden of guilt, if they ever could recognise it. The prophesy of the threat of terrorism, which is indeed just a minute one, is so monstrous in the American’s (hyper)self-fulfilling (hyper)perception that it has caused such repression in the Arab region, even more ruthless than the old regimes in some respects. This suppression, this essay proposes, will eventually cause the prophesy of their own self-fulfillment to come true, as we can see from the growth in the number of groups aimed at resisting US imperialism.
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[1] However, I do not think that the statistic alone could precisely inform us about the number of terrorist acts because the statistic is strongly bound up with the interpretation of terrorism, which is utterly subjective. One may interpret the very similar action as an act of terrorism, while another may interpret it as an act of glory. (Croft, 2006: 18) Thus, to this point we should always ask ourselves; “Whose interpretation?” However, even though the data is not really that precise and universal, at the very least, it can show us some possible trends.
[2] There were, at least, three main reasons to invade Afghanistan and Iraq that the United States tried to delude the world with, which are; nurturing and manufacturing WMD (Director of Central Intelligence, 2002); sponsoring terrorist organisations (Winkler, 2006: 156); and hosting authoritarian regimes which suppress the Afghan and Iraqi people, especially women (Masters, 2009).
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