W&J HIS 336: 9/11 & The War on Terror Fall 2018

“These struggles, and the undisputed governmental failures that have exacerbated them, raise two significant questions that persist well after the wars’ end: What are veterans’ needs, and what is the nation’s obligation to meet them?” This chapter discusses the collection of challenges and struggles that a minority of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans face following their return home. It is explained that the pairing of these struggles with governmental shortcomings work to further elevate these issues. While reading this chapter, it became apparent to me that the failures by U.S. leaders and policy-makers to identify veterans’ needs and provide aid is not a new problem but one that has been present all throughout American history. This can be seen, for instance, after a wide set of wars -- including the Vietnam War, World War II, and even the Revolutionary War (262-264), and now the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. Despite the widely held notion that America should support its troops and ve...

While reading Williams, Counter Jihad , I never realized the full story behind what lead up to the attacks on September 11, 2001. As stated in Counter Jihad , the reasons that America was targeted by the Mohamad Atta and Al Qeada was partly because of American culture, such as foreign policy (Williams, 11). However, the larger picture is based around America being pro-Israel while other countries in the Middle East were (are?) pro-Palestine. I did not know much about the wars that happened in the Middle East after WWII and before 9/11 because most of them did not affect America, besides one war that President Johnson aided the Israelites and another that the Soviet Union got involved in over oil. Reading the passages from both books, I still have trouble understanding exactly what happened because many things happened before the turn of AD/ CE and even up to now. Also, I did not realize that Israel was holy grounds to both Jewish and Muslim people. I knew Israel was holy grounds for...

After the Bush administration ended in 2008, people assumed that with the Obama administration, the constant conflicts and wars held in the Middle-East would end. However, the focus changed towards Afghanistan instead of Iraq, and also Pakistan with the use of drones to target potential Al Qaeda allies, with the collateral damage of innocent civilians being dead.  In Obama’s speech on Drone Policy made on May 23, 2013, he justifies the attacks as a defensive strategy, using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as their main source to defend the policies (Stimson, 2015: 12). Making this war continue and using similar arguments as the former administrations used, such as: «We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first». Also, he states that their main goal is not to hurt civilians. However, the causalities and the constant attacks, which multiplied after 2008, increased the number of ...

The use of drones to wage the war on terror has shifted American policy. There is no longer the focus on counterinsurgency and winning territory. There has been a shift in the definition of the enemy from names and affiliations to patterns of lifestyle as described by Ian Shaw in Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare. Drones target people who are living in a fashion similar to the patterns previously found of terrorist groups such as ‘signature’ al Qaeda motorcade, or entering houses associated with al Qaeda. No longer was the CIA targeting names on a list but they are now targeting patterns of life. This reduced the meaning of life even in war. The use of drones allowed those operating the killing machines to do so from a screen on the other side of the world. In “Confessions of and American Drone Operator” the description of a drone strike is cold and precise. They follow a set order of operations and watch people die from a screen via the infrared...

#1 In “The Wars’ Entangled Roots,” it is so clearly evident that the United States had their hands in almost every nation in the Middle East. By helping Kuwait in eliminating Iraq’s presence in the nation, the United States had militarily planted themselves physically. Before they were just sending weapons and money for weapons and aid, but now the United States had fully committed. Their physical presence in the area caused some problems. The first being that they had to see whatever problem that they were trying to solve through to the end which means that they had to confirm that Iraq would not return. The second being that they furthered the narrative of the intervening Americans. Iran had already blamed the United States for uppending their cultural roots through the shah, and the ayatollah condemned the United States for attacking Islam. The third and most important being that the United States physical presence in Saudi Arabia disrespected the Islamic Holy Land because they we...

The 2005 elections in Iraq caused that the traditional group in power, the Sunni, lost the control of the government, leading to an unstable situation that created important insurgences and reinforce of support to Al Qaeda. This situation forces to the Bush Administration to change the approach in Iraq, focusing on a new military strategy called counterinsurgency: instead of destroying the enemy, put troops to help with security and stability, so Iraq could establish a legitimate government who would be able to build partnerships strong enough to «isolate insurgents form their cause and support» (Cohen, 2006, 50).  Nevertheless, due to the polemics and problems that the Iraq war caused. Both in American and Iraqi’s soil, when Barak Obama was elected as president in the United States after the SOFA determined the US should leave the country, he decided to leave the country and focus his efforts on Afghanistan instead. That decision created two different narratives, divide...

Operational Success, Strategic Failure: Charlotte F. Blatt, in Operational Success, Strategic Failure: Assessing the 2007 Iraq Troop Surge , displays two sides of a debate regarding the long-term failure of the US operation to reduce violence and stabilize Iraq. One group argues that the surge would have succeeded had it not been for a premature withdrawal of troops under the Obama administration. This side believes that this is evident in the initial success seen with the troops present and argue that the surge “shouldn’t have stopped before figuring out a way to maintain the progress” (44). On the other hand, another group argues that strategic success was not possible in this operation due to the failure to identify the major driving conflicts in Iraq, particularly sectarian divisions and weak governmental institutions. Blatt adopts this second argument, claiming that “operational success could not be translated into strategic success because corresponding intergroup reconciliatio...

“Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents, and there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.”  After reading that line in President Bush’s speech, I kind of chuckled because A) he was advised to use more troops and B) I’m going to assume, from all the other material I have read, he was referring to the ROE, which, debatably so, should be restrictive. With that being said, the reason the U.S. lost Iraq is because Iraq was a lost cause, much like the war in Vietnam. Granted, taking Saddam Hussein out of power was better for a lot of people, especially the Shia’s and the Kurds. Regardless, Iraq was unstable when the U.S. got there. According to Blatt, while the Sunni government was in charge since the Ottoman Empire, the Shia/Sunni struggle within Iraq and neighboring counties, coupled with Saddam’s brutal oppression...

            A very interesting point raised in the readings for Thursday, August 30, is the idea that the U.S. citizen perception of the players in the Middle East conflict is different from the reality of the situation. In Counter Jihad: America’s Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria , author Bryan Glyn Williams makes an interesting statement. He says, Many Americans have a hard time distinguishing between Iraq Socialist-Baathists, Afghan Taliban, and fundamentalist Al Qaeda (a difficulty compounded by the Bush Jr. administration’s tendency to deliberately blur the differences between the secular Iraqi government and Al Qaeda religious zealots), but the distinctions are of vital importance (Williams 47). Despite the fact that the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Baathists are very different groups with different ideologies, they are still blended in the average American’s mind. As Williams argues, a piec...

After these two classes talking about torture, both in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, I came to the conclusion of how important are words to define legal status and legalize things that, from a moral perspective, wouldn’t be appropriated. The vague definition of the August 1, 2002 memorandum (putting the limit of torture to almost immediate death), gives enough space to create documents and to follow actions that traditionally would have been considered torture. Because, it redefines the concept itself, allowing things that were not allowed before. Because, if that definition was followed, it was legally acceptable to torture. Also, a thing that concerned me a lot while I was watching the documentaries, and came back to what we talked about the book generation kill, is how the perpetrators are portrayed as victims too. Because you always have a choice. The experiment says at the beginning wanting to justify their actions, with the argument that “people follow orders” of higher peo...

The overarching connection that can be made between these three readings is that the current problem of termism has deep roots starting as far back as ancient history. The problems being faced today are rooted in complicated religious ideas and rivalries. The Arab Muslims and the Jews both battled over the same holy land for years. After ruthless persecution the Jews desired their own independent state and once they received it they defended it ruthlessly. However, the giving of such religiously important land was determined by the Western powers after WWII who had no rights to divide up such land. The Jews and Arabs desire the land for religious purposes but the Western powers such as the US desire control of the land for oil purposes. The abuse of this land contributed to the unrest in the Middle East. Continued interference by the US has caused distain for the United States in the area. American foreign policy has largely ignored the fundamental religious concer...