Ferguson, Iraq, and the Legacy of 9/11

Over the past two weeks, two
events have consumed the national news: the authorization of
renewed American strikes in Iraq, and the heavily militarized
police response to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after a police
officer shot and killed an unarmed teenager.

The two events, a domestic story about municipal law enforcement
in a St. Louis suburb and an international conflict on the other
side of the world, might not seem related. But they both stem at
least in part from America’s response to 9/11, and they parallel
each other in a variety of revealing ways.  

In a brief response last week to the situation in Ferguson,
which has featured nightly showowns between local activists and
cops in armored vehicles, Obama made
no mention of the militarized police presence. But
over the weekend, in a memo
to Congress, he would quietly indicate where he did want to
see weapons of war: in Iraq—again, still, and
more—as part of an escalation of the recently authorized strikes
against Islamic State militants.

Obama’s original Iraq operation, announced the prior week in a
primetime speech, had been pitched to the nation on narrow terms,
as support for a humanitarian objective that was necessary to
prevent genocide. There were helpless people trapped on a mountain;
authorization for strikes was necessary to ensure safe delivery of
food, water, and other aid.

But mission creep set in almost immediately. “I don’t think
we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” Obama said a few days
after the initial announcement. “This is going to be a long term
project.” Administration officials then
said they were considering sending in ground troops, absurdly
claiming that they would merely be there for protective services,
but not be in a combat role. And starting this week, according to
Obama’s
memo to Congress, American airpower will be used to support the
Iraqi Security Force to “retake and establish control” over a large
local dam that had been captured by militants.

The humanitarian pretext lasted less than two weeks. Cover for
aid-drops has turned into strikes in support of a regional military
force. The defensive mission now has an offensive objective.

In 2008, President Obama campaigned vehemently against President
George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in the Middle East, and
against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s more hawkish
approach. He would be different. “Since before this war in Iraq
began, I have made different judgments, I have a different vision,
and I will offer a clean break from the failed policies and
politics of the past,” he
said. “Nowhere is that break more badly needed than in
Iraq.”

Obama was supposed to end the war in Iraq, not continue it. Yet
this was how he had eventually chosen to conduct foreign policy in
the country: by selling a long-term military project as a
limited-scope mission, by claiming that troops in a combat zone
would somehow not be engaged in combat, by starting a war and then
pretending that it is not really a war at all.

That unacknowledged, unended war is the legacy of America’s
expansive, extended response to the attacks of September 11, 2001,
and the global war on terror that followed. So too is
the police response in Ferguson.

As President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, the nation’s
police departments were preparing for it at home. The arming of
cops that began decades earlier with the drug war was given a
massive federal boost. A federal
program began transferring large military grade equipment from
the Pentagon to local law enforcement—giving away
almost $450 million worth of equipment originally intended for
conducting war last year alone. Since 2002, a separate program run
by the Department of Homeland Security has provided $35 billion in
grants to law enforcement around the country, funding the purchase
of tactical gear, storm-trooper-style armor, and mine-resistant
vehicles.

These programs were supposed to be limited in scope, intended to
help local law enforcement fight the extraordinary threats many
believed were looming after 9/11. But there were no restrictions
placed on how the equipment could be used, and so the scope was
rapidly widened.

That’s what led to the sort of martial images we’ve seen this
week in Ferguson, in which clashes between heavily armored cops and
upset protestors look eerily like scenes from a war. Police arrive
in armored vehicles, post snipers on rooftops, and have shot tear
gas and rubber bullets at the crowd. Change a few of the
background details, and some of the scenes could be mistaken for
Iraq.

The programs that helped supply cops in Ferguson and elsewhere
with military equipment were intended to help fight terror at the
local level. Instead they have helped create it.

What we’re seeing in Ferguson also represents a kind of quiet
escalation of wars that never seem to be won, and that we do not
like to acknowledge: the war on drugs and the war on terror, which
in Ferguson combined into a frightening show of militarized
force—the ugly result of endless, unwinnable wars turned
inward.

These are just some of the ripple effects and consequences of
our bungled responses to 9/11: weapons of war pointed at citizens
and escalating tensions on our own streets, and an overseas
conflict that even an anti-war president refuses to end.

Obviously there are ways in which the two stories diverge, and
of course, both can be traced back to events prior 9/11. But
combined and juxtaposed, these two seemingly unrelated events offer
a reminder of the way that political choices made years in the past
continue to weigh on the present. And they illustrate, among other
things, how hard it is to reverse complex policies even
when they are widely regarded as failures, how easily initiatives
intended to be narrow in scope and purpose can expand when left
unchecked, and how years of simmering tensions can suddenly boil
over in response to a single unexpected incident, resulting in
unintended and unforseeable consequences.

Which is to say that they offer a sprawling and
practically comprehensive lesson in the perils of government gone
wrong. And they suggest that in so many parts of government, local
and state nd federal, and so many policies, foreign and domestic,
we are still in need of what Obama promised in 2008 but, like so
many government officials, has struggled to deliver: different
judgments, a different vision, and a clean break from the past,
both at home and abroad.