4. The Religious Roots of the Air Wars of (and on) Terror: Obviously, while there was a political aspect to al-Qaeda's air war on America, there was also a deeply religious aspect to it. Hence, the ability to convince 19 men that self-immolation was a righteous way to go. Whether you call it jihad or fanaticism, at the heart of al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks was a deep core of religiosity.
How then would you categorize an activity that repeatedly produces negative results and that a government nonetheless continues to engage in for 15 years with no end in sight? Let's add that, in six of the seven countries the U.S. has bombed or missiled, its planes had full control of the air space from moment one, and in the seventh (Iraq), it took mere hours, or at most days, to establish it. In other words, during almost every second of this decade and a half of war, American pilots were in next to no danger in enemy skies -- or, in the case of drone pilots thousands of miles away from their targets, none at all. They were, that is, in little less than godlike positions above those they were sent to kill, the -- as drone pilots reportedly like to put it -- "bug splat."
How could that godlike sense of dominance not gain an almost religious intensity over that long decade and a half -- even if the deity in question was of an imperial kind? That would undoubtedly hold, by the way, not just for the pilots pursuing the war, but for the generals planning and overseeing it, and the political leaders who ordered or endorsed it. That feeling of having so much uncontested power in one's hands must induce an essentially religious sense of omniscience and potency, hard to resist even when the results prove so unsatisfying.
What we undoubtedly have in the American air war, as in al-Qaeda's, is a deeply embedded belief system that no real world evidence seems capable of shaking. This is, in other words, an American form of jihad, which is why it shows no sign of ending anytime soon.
Washington's Thirty Years' War
A child born on September 11, 2001, is now only a couple of years away from being able to sign on as a pilot in the air wars that began just after her birth. There are reasonable odds that her child, born several years from now, might be entering junior high school when those conflicts officially become America's Thirty Years' War.
I can still remember first coming across that moniker for an endless set of forgotten European religious wars of the seventeenth century. I found the thought of such a long period of warfare almost unimaginable, not to say antediluvian, given the power of modern weaponry. Well, as the phrase goes, live and learn.
Perhaps this September 11th, it's finally time for Americans to begin to focus on our endless air war in the Greater Middle East, our very own disastrous Fifteen Years' War. Otherwise, the first explosions from the Thirty Years' version of the same will be on the horizon before we know it in a world possibly more destabilized and terrorizing than we can at present imagine.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
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