THE WAR ON TERROR IN POSTMODERN MEMORY: EXPLANATION, UNDERSTANDING, AND MYTH IN THE WAKE OF 9/11 A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of The School of Continuing Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Liberal Studies By Paul Douglas Humphries, M.S. Georgetown University Washington, D.C. October 15, 2014 Copyright 2014 by Paul Douglas Humphries All Rights Reserved ii DISCLAIMER All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or any other US Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or ODNI or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the ODNI and the CIA to prevent disclosure of classified information. iii THE WAR ON TERROR IN POSTMODERN MEMORY: EXPLANATION, UNDERSTANDING, AND MYTH IN THE WAKE OF 9/11 Paul Douglas Humphries Chair, Shannon Brown, PhD ABSTRACT War, like all human endeavors, is at some point of consideration a cultural event; understanding it fully requires an appreciation of war’s events, its cultural context, and the interaction between them. In all wars there is a simultaneous and reciprocal process by which culture and war inform each other. What this means for the War on Terror is that how the United States conducts counterterrorism is not merely an expression of policy, security, or other typical understanding of modern conflict, but also an expression of culture—the ways in which the war has been explained, understood, and mythologized. Traditional approaches in political science, international relations, and security studies can be supplemented and amplified by methods more familiar in philosophy, history, and cultural studies for a deeper insight into events and their meaning, specifically in the war’s mythologization and the power of its narratives to help shape and be shaped by events. Explaining and understanding the war are central to the narratives we have created about counterterrorism. These narratives are the foundations for the War on Terror’s myths—storyline accounts we articulate that impart meaning to events independent of their observable circumstances. Five key myths support our explanations and understandings of the war. They focus on who our enemies are and why they attack us, what sort of effort we must mount in our defense, what type of methods this effort will require, what effects this effort will have on us, and how and under what conditions this iv effort will end. Examining them shows how their explanations and understandings inform the War on Terror and its events, how perceptions of the war’s conduct help reshape the narratives as they are told in popular culture, and how these reshaped narratives go on to continue informing the war. The inter-informative nature of narratives and events may be familiar to the literary or cultural historian examining the past, but is an atypical line of inquiry for the political scientist or security specialist examining the present—including conflict in general and US counterterrorism efforts specifically. In this way this procedure can be seen as introducing a new paradigm in the study of security issues and contemporary conflict. The evaluation proceeds first from the narratological and epistemological realities of the general association of myth and events and the specific interdependence of cultural narrative and war. It goes on to examine the War on Terror’s five identified guiding myths and how each in their own ways inform and are informed by the war’s developments. Included in the examination are such events as suicide bombing, the invasion of Iraq, torture, surveillance, and drones and such pop cultural expressions as movies, television, video games, and music. A useful examination of implications includes not only some keys ways in which to mitigate some of the worst effects of the inevitable influence of myth on rational cognition in specific understandings of security affairs and counterterrorism issues, but also how a few useful circumstances of this reality in human ideation and epistemology might be protected and sustained. In this way, the import of the overall inquiry can itself be explained, understood, and placed in the service of a deeper, more meaningful, and practically useful knowledge and appreciation. v DEDICATION To SFC Steven Michael Langmack, US Army, shot dead on Objective English, Anbar Province, Iraq, June 1, 2005 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS COPYRIGHT ii DISCLAIMER iii ABSTRACT iv DEDICATION vi INTRODUCTION: THE WAR ON TERROR AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY TOPIC 1 CHAPTER I: WAR, TERROR, AND MYTH 7 DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXTUALIZATIONS CHAPTER II: MYTH, MEANING, AND THE WAR ON TERROR 41 NARRATIVE’S POWER AND ITS EFFECTIVE FORMS CHAPTER III: MYTH INFORMS ACTION 79 NARRATIVE’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE WAR ON TERROR CHAPTER IV: ACTION RE-INFORMS MYTH 113 THE WAR ON TERROR SHAPES ITS OWN NARRATIVE CHAPTER V: THE RESHAPED NARRATIVE RE-INFORMS THE WAR 151 AND THE PROCESS CONTINUES CHAPTER VI: THE SYMBIOSIS OF MYTH AND THE WAR ON TERROR 190 EVALUATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS ENDNOTES 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY 248 vii INTRODUCTION: THE WAR ON TERROR AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY TOPIC War, like all human endeavors, is at some point of consideration a cultural event, and understanding it fully requires an appreciation of war’s proceedings, its cultural context, and the interaction between them. Therefore, all wars are multi-faceted subjects that can be understood not only through deep analysis within a particular academic perspective, but also—and more fully—through broader examinations that intersect scholarly fields. For the 20th century’s wars alone, for instance, every single-discipline work by a John Keegan, a Charles Moskos, or an Erich Maria Remarque may be matched by an interdisciplinary one by a Winston Churchill, a Paul Fussell, or a T. E. Lawrence.1 This is not to say that these separate historical, sociological, literary, or other focused views are not cultural in a strict sense, but instead to suggest that specialists in these fields tend to conform their work in ways consistent with the sources, methods, and other approaches to scholarship specific to these fields and separate from others. This in turn tends to reinforce separate perspectives, understandings, and values owing to how security specialists, political scientists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc. see the multi- faceted circumstance that is war through the peculiar prism their own field imposes. Freeing the study of warfare from a single-discipline view and engaging an analysis of broader scholarship, however, helps illustrate conflict’s cultural nature and shows how in all wars there is a simultaneous and reciprocal process by which culture and war inform each other. What this means for “The War on Terror,” the popular name for the defining conflict of the young 21st century, is that how the United States conducts counterterrorism is not merely an expression of policy, security, or other traditional idea 1 of modern conflict—which, at a certain level of appreciation, it most assuredly is—but also an expression of culture. Therefore, the War on Terror is both a function of a rational weighing of cause and effect, benefits and trade-offs, political goals, legalities, costs, and other practicalities, and at the same time a product of the ways in which the war has been explained, understood, and mythologized in American culture. Indeed this interplay exerts such a powerful pull on human thought and action that many of the key aspects of the War on Terror can be understood fully only in this context. This is not to say that realist, idealist, or other accepted scholarly approaches to conventionalize or in other ways gain insights into conflict are misplaced or mistaken; indeed such approaches are central to how any war, including the War on Terror, traditionally is explained and understood. It is to say, however, that these accepted approaches in political science, international relations, and security studies can be supplemented and amplified by approaches more familiar in sociology, literature, and cultural studies for a deeper appreciation of events and their meaning—specifically in the war’s mythologization and the power of its narratives to shape and be shaped by events. The challenge to this view is strong, at least in the academy, where scholars who have developed, found places, and spend time producing within specific disciplines tend to stick close to these disciplines’ tools and perspectives in offering their contributions to scholarship. This is natural, and we are all richer from the specialists’ deeper mining of their particular academic veins. But at the same time we bear lost opportunity costs that accrue from failing to see when the contents of these different veins can be forged together to produce stronger alloys.2 This study will focus on how explaining and understanding the war are central to the narratives we have created about counterterrorism, and that these narratives are the 2 foundations for the War on Terror’s myths—storyline accounts we articulate that impart meaning to events independent of their observable circumstances. These narrative conventionalizations inform US counterterrorism efforts, and how these efforts are seen to unfold informs the narratives, which go on to re-inform the efforts. The notion of the inter-informative nature of narratives and events—of myth and action—in the context of our explanations and understandings of the terms may be familiar to the literary or cultural historian examining the past, but are atypical for the political scientist or security specialist examining the present—especially present conflict in general and recent and current US counterterrorism efforts specifically. In this sense this approach can be seen as introducing a new paradigm.