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Yes, in October 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan began. It would, after a fashion, prove to be a disastrous repeat of the Soviet war there in the 1980s (which the CIA did so much to make far worse). And from that moment on, this country's war-making only ramped up horrifically for what seemed like endless years.
It's a story that TomDispatch has covered since it first began in 2001 in response to the American bombing of Afghanistan. Eighteen years later, Andrea Mazzarino -- co-founder of the remarkable Costs of War Project to put America's twenty-first-century wars, their costs, and their casualties, on the record and in much-needed (if grim) perspective -- wrote her first piece for TomDispatch. As a co-founder of that site and a military spouse, she focused then on a video that continued to haunt her "of a screaming young Iraqi child with open burn wounds covering his face and body, a relative clutching him in her arms as they hustled through a crowd." Today, with her 42nd piece for this site, she remains in some fashion haunted (as are so many of us) by those all-American wars that, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, came to be cumulatively (and grimly) known as the Global War on Terror.
In fact, it almost couldn't be stranger that, after 20-odd years of disastrous war-making across significant parts of the planet, Americans don't seem to blink at the nearly trillion tax dollars that "we" continue to pour yearly into our vast military establishment. Given the circumstances in this century, that certainly continues to display what Mazzarino might call "a remarkable lack of restraint" -- and now, as she reminds us, we (or at least almost 50% of us) have voted into the presidency (again) a man who gives "a remarkable lack of restraint" new meaning.
Consider us all, whether we know it or not, whether we recognize it or not, "haunted" by the devastation we've caused on this planet of ours in these years and let Mazzarino return to the subject of the way war has indeed made it back to "the home front" with -- yes -- Donald Trump and what continues to haunt her (as well it should). Tom
The Return of War to the Home Front
Don't Look for Restraint from Donald Trump's Military
In the early 1990s, doctors in Hiroshima, Japan, discovered a stress-induced syndrome they called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or "broken heart syndrome" -- a condition in which the heart's left ventricle, responsible for pumping blood, loses its capacity in response to extreme stressors like war, natural disaster, and the loss of loved ones. Prevalent among older women, that acute condition involves heart attack-like symptoms, including chest pain and pressure, light-headedness, and dread.
More recently, Israeli doctors in Tel Aviv noted a spike in the condition after the October 7, 2023, attack by the militant group Hamas and Israel's subsequent incursion into (and devastation of) Gaza in response. The mothers of Israeli soldiers in particular have been affected, as have many who didn't directly experience or witness the ravages of October 7th against that country's civilians. (Undoubtedly, something similar has been happening in Gaza, too, but given the disastrous situation of the medical profession there, we have no way of knowing.)
Examples like these remind me of one of the most valuable things I've learned from studying my country's endless foreign wars as both an anthropologist and a military spouse: armed conflict transforms the bodies and minds of people far beyond its battlefields, including in the country that launched such wars in often distant lands.
As Americans await the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself thinking that it couldn't be more important to understand the culturally transformative impact of war. My vantage point is a strange but (I think) salient one. I'm the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters "like Daddy." Yet I'm also someone who, through my involvement in Brown University's Costs of War Project, has long critiqued this country's warfighting efforts and the culture that sustains them.
In short, I find myself in an awkward position in this fragile democracy of ours. After all, I'm someone who has devoted unpaid labor to our military-industrial complex, yet can't resist the impulse to critique it for its impact. How's that for a conflict of interest?
Having risked plenty in this position, I might as well keep at it. One thing I can say is that all too many Americans, whatever their political leanings, agree on the benefits of funding our military with ever more hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that disproportionately benefit weapons contractors rather than us or our social safety network.
In fact, decades of federal budgets have favored war fighting with all too lax human-rights standards in dozens of foreign countries, hostility and violence against vulnerable people within the ranks of our own troops, antiterrorism policies that have encroached on domestic civil liberties, and the flow via police departments of military assault rifles and armored vehicles onto America's city streets. And don't forget the Veterans Day celebrations that propagandize military service to young children or the military recruiters in public schools. All of that is yet more evidence of what Americans value most. Yes, many of us have balked at school shootings and spiking child death rates, or at the servicemen and veterans who helped lead the rampage to overturn the 2020 election certification, but it's clear that ever more of us, in or out of uniform, agree, in some fashion, on the sanctity of armed violence.
In a sense, the fact that we just voted back into the presidency someone who embodies a lack of restraint might be considered the climax of America's decades-long War on Terror that began in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Twenty-odd years later, we have a president-(re)elect who doesn't believe in the peaceful transfer of power. He's already used the bully pulpit of his presidency and then his candidacies to demonize federal workers and journalists. He's called his political opponents "vermin" and "the enemy within," while conjuring up specific images of violence against them. And he's accused immigrants of "poisoning the blood" of our country -- language that, in other settings like Hitler's Germany or early 1990s Rwanda, led to upsurges in extralegal violence even before the first official orders to kill were given.
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