Social Science Research Council

AMERICAN GROUND ZERO
By Hugh Gusterson

Some years ago I was interviewing a senior manager who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the field of counterproliferation. He told me that one of his motives in working on counterproliferation was his fear of the kind of society the United States would become were it ever to be attacked by terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. At the time I assumed he was referring to the domestic consequences of a terrorist attack - the understandable temptation to eviscerate the Bill of Rights in pursuit of the Other within American borders - but the aftermath of 9/11 has left me thinking more about the implications of such an attack for American foreign policy.

Debates in mainstream international relations theory in the United States presume a separation between the logic of domestic and international politics, and discussions of foreign and military policy lean heavily on such emotionally colorless terms as "rational actors," "rational choice," "national interests," "balance of power," and "strategic calculation." Such terms as "grief," "rage," "victim consciousness," and "national trauma" hardly figure in the pages of American international relations journals as important forces in foreign policy formation - or at least not in regard to the formation of foreign policy in the West. But when the American people see commercial planes deliberately flown into their tallest buildings at the cost of 3,000 lives, the implications for international affairs are not limited to recalculations of national interest and strategic priorities by military planners; such an event, especially in a media-saturated society, also produces mass changes in popular consciousness, which themselves become powerful forces in the international system.

In a recent lecture my MIT colleague John Dower compared the impact of 9/11 on American consciousness with one of his own research specialties, the effect of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on postwar Japanese consciousness. Both traumas, he argued, produced powerful discourses of victimization. In the Japanese case a discourse of atomic victimization helped stabilize a powerful postwar Japanese consensus, first constructed under American occupation, that Japan should strictly limit its military spending, should not deploy Japanese troops abroad and, above all, should not seek nuclear weapons - in short that Japan should seek a non-military route to security and greatness. This national consensus, which embodied a renunciation of prewar Japanese imperial militarism, has used commemorations of the atomic bombing to construct a national identity for Japan as a victim of militarism and as a nation therefore dedicated to avoid the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction at home and military adventures abroad.

This postwar consensus, anchored by the cult of atomic victimization, has proved powerfully enduring over five decades. In particular, although Japan has the plutonium and the scientific infrastructure to develop its own nuclear weapons, and although it certainly has the kind of neighbors that might lead a nation to acquire the best military hardware available, it has eschewed the nuclear option. On the few occasions that Japanese politicians have hinted that this orientation should be reconsidered, their remarks have produced considerable public outcry.

In some ways there is no comparison between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the one hand, and 9/11 on the other. Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the culmination of Japan's complete defeat in an exhausting total war, whereas 9/11 merely injured the most powerful nation on earth as it was in the midst of consolidating a liberal global political and economic system in the wake of the Soviet bloc's collapse. Moreover, in terms of scale, while the attacks of 9/11 were tragic and brutal, they hardly compare with Hiroshima, where 200,000 Japanese civilians lost their lives in another meticulously choreographed attack from the air.

And yet, as John Dower put it, "now Americans think they own Ground Zero." Americans now enjoy a sense of victimization that, like all things American, is bigger than everyone else's. This sense of victimization has been nurtured and exacerbated by the orgy of patriotic sentimentality around the martyrs of the World Trade Center in the public discourse of the American government and media that has left us flooded with images of the weeping bereaved, the smoking and collapsing World Trade Center towers, and the martyrs themselves before they were taken from us - all incessantly intermixed with every imaginable image of the American flag with a visual panache that makes Leni Riefenstahl look crude.

9/11 and the discourse of patriotic victimization it has engendered have important consequences in the international system. For one thing, 9/11 has exacerbated a pre-existing tendency in the Bush Administration to see the world in Manichean terms as composed of good and evil, friends and enemies, and to demand unswerving loyalty from the former while preparing attacks on the latter. It has also left the American public feeling more viscerally vulnerable than they have felt in many years, less willing to criticize their government and, in some quarters, hungry for revenge against the terrorists - or, if they are not available, against plausible surrogates. And it has produced a kind of injured national shrillness - a preoccupation with the nation's wounds as stigmatic emblems of unique greatness and a refusal to engage in national self-examination - that can be dangerous in a great power.

In what I believe will turn out to be a very unfortunate historical conjuncture, the events of 9/11 befell the American people just as their government, with a little help from the Supreme Court, was taken over by a foreign policy cabal that was already determined for its own reasons to break with the liberal internationalism of the Clinton Administration and the bipartisan consensus of postwar foreign policy makers. The officials in this Administration are, on the whole, quite different from the conservatives who peopled the earlier Bush Administration and even the Reagan regime. As is clear from their withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and their attempts to destroy the Kyoto Treaty and the new International Criminal Court, they dislike international treaties. They seek to militarize space without restraint. They have broken with the three previous administrations in their policy of almost entirely favoring Israel against the Palestinians. And instead of following the balance-of-power policies of Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Warren Christopher, they are foreign policy revolutionaries - Robespierres of the right - who assume that the U.S. can depose regimes that displease it (Iraq), force U-turns on other governments where it pleases (Pakistan), and reshape entire regions (the Middle East) at will.

Absent 9/11 one would expect considerable opposition, both in Congress and on the streets, to such policies. Instead a national media still preoccupied with the national cult of victimization has pulled its punches, Congress has legitimated the new doctrine of preemptive defense, and the American people, terrified that the next terrorist attack may make 9/11 look small, have clung on for the ride through the high-speed 180 degree turn in foreign policy. Although many future historians will argue that the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein was, at best, symbolic, 9/11 has won George Bush a mandate to invade Iraq and, more generally, to supplant Clintonian internationalism with a determined unilateralism. We shall have to wait and see the consequences of this foreign policy revolution, but it would be a mistake to construe the causes solely in terms of national interest and rational choice.


Hugh Gusterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science Studies at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University in 1991. He was an SSRC-MacArthur Fellow 1989-1991 and has also received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Grant in Peace and International Security as well as MIT's Levitan Prize. He writes about the political culture of the nuclear weapons laboratories and the antinuclear movement and, more generally, about theoretical topics in security studies. He is the author of Nuclear Rites (UC Press 1996) and co-editor of Cultures of Insecurity (Minnesota Press, 1999).