The Global War on Terror: A Narrative in Need of a Rewrite (Essay‪)‬

Much of the legal and ideological infrastructure that would later constitute the war on terror was introduced onto the U.S. political scene in the 1990s. Osama bin Laden was on President Clinton's intelligence and law enforcement radar screens; antiterrorism legislation that would significantly expand presidential and police powers was debated in Congress; and conservative advocacy groups such as the Project for a New American Century urged a more assertive projection of American power, including forcible regime change in Iraq. But it was the George W. Bush administration that provided these diverse events with a holistic superstructure in the form of the "global war on terror." Almost overnight, following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, this narrative became the prevailing organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy, taking the attacks as its starting point and scripting the final act as an American victory in some undetermined future. The global war on terror acted as what, in the language of semiotics, is called a "floating signifier," able to be attached at will to a wide range of actions and policies. Thus, the al-Qaeda perpetrators of September 11 and Saddam Hussein were organized into seamless and coherent chapters in the same account. The war on terror narrative led directly to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the establishment of an archipelago of detention camps, and to a vast expansion of surveillance systems inside the United States.