The Management of Savagery The Management of Savagery How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump Max Blumenthal First published in English by Verso 2019 © Max Blumenthal 2019 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-229-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-743-2 (EXPORT) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-228-4 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-227-7 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, UK Let’s remember here, the people we are fighting today, we funded twenty years ago, and we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union … There’s a very strong argument, which is—it wasn’t a bad investment to end the Soviet Union, but let’s be careful what we sow because we will harvest. —Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the House Appropriations Committee, April 23, 2009 AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria. —Jake Sullivan in February 12, 2012, email to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote. —President Donald Trump, June 6, 2017 Contents Introduction: The Unstable State 1. The Afghan Trap 2. At the Dawn of the Forever War 3. Waves Flanked by Arrogance 4. In for the Rudest of Awakenings 5. The Counter-Jihad 6. The Next Dirty War 7. Until We Meet in Damascus 8. Regions of Savagery 9. Collateral Damage, Indirect Benefits 10. Attacking Our Team 11. Extinction of the Grayzone Afterword: Active Measures Notes Index Introduction The Unstable State It was the week after Labor Day and Washington was filling up again with its chattering class, just back from summer sojourns up and down the coast. President Donald Trump was in town as well, paying the White House a visit after a series of golf trips and rowdy rallies before his Rust Belt loyalists. The White House, however, had been in a state of siege throughout the summer, as former FBI director Robert Mueller had led an investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and an allegation that the Russian government had subverted the presidential election in his favor. Though the Russiagate inquiry had produced nothing so far to demonstrate collusion, with the political season kicking back into high gear, the stage was set for two dramatic events carefully timed to turn up the heat on the president. The first event was the funeral of John McCain, a former prisoner of war turned Republican senator. Branded as a “maverick” by the Beltway press corps, which he half-jokingly referred to as his political base, McCain had operated throughout his career in complete lockstep with the military- intelligence apparatus. Over the years, he had junketed from one theater of conflict to the next, marketing jihadist insurgents and far-right militiamen to the American public as “freedom fighters,” clamoring for military intervention and enriching his donors in the arms industry. A budget- busting $717 billion defense bill authorized days before his death on August 13 was appropriately dedicated in his name. Days later, the authors of some of the most destructive wars in recent history, from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama, filed into the National Cathedral to pay homage to the late senator. Trump was pointedly uninvited, a snub that prompted the New Yorker to dub the event “the biggest Resistance meeting yet.” The president was persona non grata among the guest list, which represented a bipartisan establishment that he had ridiculed, denigrated and menaced to the delight of millions of ordinary Americans. From the dais, McCain’s daytime talk show host daughter, Meghan, delighted her audience with twenty minutes of nationalistic cant peppered with subtle digs at Trump—“America was always great.” A line in her eulogy that repackaged the Vietnam War as a fight for the “life and liberty of other peoples in other lands” passed by without controversy. The spectacle had gone off just as McCain had planned: as a celebration of American empire and a rebuke to the rogue president who was viewed by its architects as a clear and present danger to its survival. The following week, a second attack on the president was launched— this time from within his administration. An anonymous figure, self- described as a “senior administration official” and posing as “the Resistance inside the administration,” published an editorial excoriating Trump’s “amoral” leadership. The author homed in on Trump’s supposedly sympathetic posture to Russia and his fulsome and utterly unexpected support for a peaceful resolution to the six-decade-long conflict between North and South Korea. The president had crossed red lines in both areas, the official argued, breaking from the Washington consensus of regime change in North Korea and resisting the aggressive containment of Russia. Summoning the spirit of McCain and branding him “a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue,” the official revealed that top figures had begun wresting control of important foreign policy decisions from Trump. If the anonymous author was to be believed, then the national security state had effectively conducted a soft coup inside the White House, just as had been done against so many foreign governments. “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state,” the official claimed, referring to the unelected and opaque chambers of government that spanned the Pentagon to the intelligence services to America’s diplomatic corps. “It’s the work of the steady state,” the writer insisted. The irony behind this claim could hardly be overstated, though it was probably lost on most readers of the op-ed and certainly on its author. The national security state that the anonymous official claimed to represent had certainly maintained a steady continuity between successive administrations, regardless of whether the president was Republican or Democrat. However, the ideology that animated its agenda has spread unsteadiness around the globe, especially in the Middle East, where American-led regime change wars had unleashed refugee crises of unprecedented proportions and fomented the rise of transnational jihadism. The toxic effects of the West’s semi-covert intervention in Syria—where the United States and its allies contributed billions of dollars to the arming and training of Islamist militias that ultimately fought under the black banners of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—continue to reverberate to this day. The backlash from America’s proxy wars and direct interventions has begun to destabilize the West as well. In Europe, a new breed of ultra- nationalist political parties are extracting a record number of votes out of a growing resentment of Muslim migrants, and swinging elections from Italy to Sweden while driving the Brexit agenda in the UK. Trump, too, owes much of his success at the polls to the anti-Muslim hysteria whipped up by a well-funded Islamophobia industry that grew dramatically after the 9/11 attacks, but whose existence predated the traumatic daylight assault. For several days after the attacks, while George W. Bush and top Bush officials shrunk from public view, Trump absorbed the belligerent sensibility of New York’s tabloid media. He preserved his image as a B-list celebrity through regular appearances with nationally famous shock jock Howard Stern. And he likely listened as Stern translated the outrage of ordinary New Yorkers into a genocidal tirade that was delivered live as the Twin Towers came crashing down. Trump also watched carefully as a shell- shocked Dan Rather, the trusted voice of network news, appeared on David Letterman’s late-night talk show days after the attacks to spread rumors of Arab Americans celebrating on rooftops across the Hudson River. Trump learned the crude lessons delivered to the American public through trusted mainstream voices after 9/11 and distilled them into the 2016 campaign with his trademark flair. On the campaign trail, he gave the ideologues of the Islamophobia industry a charismatic voice they had never enjoyed before, pledging a total ban on Muslim travelers from seven nations before a captive audience of millions of CNN viewers. On the debate stage, meanwhile, he channeled the rage of Middle American families who had suffered the moral injury of Iraq and Afghanistan by humiliating the national security state’s great white hope, Jeb Bush, over his brother’s failed wars. Insincere as he might have been, Trump was willing to tap into the deep wellsprings of anti-interventionism across the country while his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was clamoring for a no-fly zone in Syria. This book makes the case that Trump’s election would not have been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place.