The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
him “a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue,” the official revealed that top figures had begun wresting control of important foreign policy decisions from Trump. If the anonymous author was to be believed, then the national security state had effectively conducted a soft coup inside the White House, just as had been done against so many foreign governments.
“This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state,” the official claimed, referring to the unelected and opaque chambers of government that spanned the Pentagon to the intelligence services to America’s diplomatic corps. “It’s the work of the steady state,” the writer insisted.
The irony behind this claim could hardly be overstated, though it was probably lost on most readers of the op-ed and certainly on its author. The national security state that the anonymous official claimed to represent had certainly maintained a steady continuity between successive administrations, regardless of whether the president was Republican or Democrat. However, the ideology that animated its agenda has spread unsteadiness around the globe, especially in the Middle East, where American-led regime change wars had unleashed refugee crises of unprecedented proportions and fomented the rise of transnational jihadism. The toxic effects of the West’s semi-covert intervention in Syria—where the United States and its allies contributed billions of dollars to the arming and training of Islamist militias that ultimately fought under the black banners of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—continue to reverberate to this day.
The backlash from America’s proxy wars and direct interventions has begun to destabilize the West as well. In Europe, a new breed of ultra-nationalist political parties are extracting a record number of votes out of a growing resentment of Muslim migrants, and swinging elections from Italy to Sweden while driving the Brexit agenda in the UK. Trump, too, owes much of his success at the polls to the anti-Muslim hysteria whipped up by a well-funded Islamophobia industry that grew dramatically after the 9/11 attacks, but whose existence predated the traumatic daylight assault.
For several days after the attacks, while George W. Bush and top Bush officials shrunk from public view, Trump absorbed the belligerent sensibility of New York’s tabloid media. He preserved his image as a B-list celebrity through regular appearances with nationally famous shock jock Howard Stern. And he likely listened as Stern translated the outrage of ordinary New Yorkers into a genocidal tirade that was delivered live as the Twin Towers came crashing down. Trump also watched carefully as a shell-shocked Dan Rather, the trusted voice of network news, appeared on David Letterman’s late-night talk show days after the attacks to spread rumors of Arab Americans celebrating on rooftops across the Hudson River.
Trump learned the crude lessons delivered to the American public through trusted mainstream voices after 9/11 and distilled them into the 2016 campaign with his trademark flair. On the campaign trail, he gave the ideologues of the Islamophobia industry a charismatic voice they had never enjoyed before, pledging a total ban on Muslim travelers from seven nations before a captive audience of millions of CNN viewers. On the debate stage, meanwhile, he channeled the rage of Middle American families who had suffered the moral injury of Iraq and Afghanistan by humiliating the national security state’s great white hope, Jeb Bush, over his brother’s failed wars. Insincere as he might have been, Trump was willing to tap into the deep wellsprings of anti-interventionism across the country while his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was clamoring for a no-fly zone in Syria.
This book makes the case that Trump’s election would not have been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place. And if the Twin Towers were still standing today, it is not hard to imagine an alternate political universe in which a demagogue like Trump was still relegated to real estate and reality TV.
Tragically, after laying the groundwork for the worst terrorist attack on American soil, the US national security state chose to repeat its folly in Iraq, collapsing a stable country run along relatively secular lines and producing a fertile seedbed for the rise of ISIS. Libya was next, where a US-led intervention created another failed state overrun by jihadist militias. The regime change machine then moved on to Syria, enacting a billion-dollar arm-and-equip operation that propelled the spread of ISIS and gave rise to the largest franchise of Al Qaeda since 9/11. In each case, prophetic warnings about the consequences of regime change were buried in a blizzard of humanitarian propaganda stressing the urgency of dispatching the US military to rescue trapped civilians from bloodthirsty dictators.
It should be considered a national outrage that so many of those who have positioned themselves as figureheads of the anti-Trump “Resistance” were key architects of the disastrous interventions that helped set the stage for Trump and figures like him to gain power. But in the era of Russiagate, when so many liberals cling to institutions like the FBI and NATO as guardians of their survival, the dastardly record of America’s national security mandarins has been wiped clean. This book will excavate their crimes and expose the cynicism behind their appeals to democratic values.
A 2004 paper by a pseudonymous jihadist ideologue in Iraq, Abu Bakr Naji, provided the inspiration for this book’s title. Entitled “The Management of Savagery,” Naji’s paper outlined a strategy for building an Islamic State by exploiting the chaos spawned by America’s regime-change wars. He urged jihadist forces to fill the security vacuum opened up by Western intervention by establishing “administrations of savagery” at the state’s outer reaches, while waging ruthless “vexation operations” against the central institutions of the state. Naji’s paper dovetailed neatly with the regime-change blueprints conceived by national security hard-liners in Washington, and it hints at the symbiotic relationship that these two extremist elements have enjoyed. In Libya and Syria, where the CIA provided arms and equipment to jihadist insurgents, this ideological symbiosis was consolidated through direct collaboration. But as I will demonstrate in the coming pages, savagery by its very definition cannot be managed. In fact, it has already found its way back home.
—Max Blumenthal
Washington, DCSeptember 11, 2018
On February 11, 1979, the West lost its frontline client government in the Middle East when Iranians ousted the corrupt, repressive monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The shah was and ultimately replaced with a glowering theocrat, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As Khomeini declared full support for the Palestinian national struggle and swore to repel the West’s imperial designs across the region, American media overflowed with Orientalist commentaries on “the Persian psyche.” “American television treated the Iran crisis either as a freak show, featuring self-flagellants and fist-wavers, or as a soap opera,” Wall Street Journal columnist Morton Kondracke observed in January 1980.
The anxiety over Iran’s revolution was also palpable in Israel, where the right-wing Likud Party had wrested power for the first time from the Zionist movement’s Labor wing. In Jerusalem, just months after Khomeini swept to power, a young Likud Party upstart named Benjamin Netanyahu organized a conference under the auspices of the Jonathan Institute, a think tank he named after his brother, who had been killed while leading the legendary 1976 Israeli raid at the Entebbe airport in Uganda.
In attendance was George H.W. Bush, neoconservative standard bearers like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, staff from newfangled conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and sympathetic policymakers and journalists from across the West. Netanyahu’s goal was to internationalize the Israeli understanding of terrorism. In short, he sought to deny rational motives to the Arabs, who had been militarily occupied for decades or had seen their nations ravaged by Western colonialism, casting their violence