The thing that I don't get about all this is how (easily?) distracted everyone seems to have gotten by this claim about "new war" and how the two primary wars being fought by US troops are anything but new.
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It's a mystery.
The Bush administration's greatest propaganda success has been convincing millions of people that Washington is engaged in a "new kind of war."
This "new war" narrative is the foundation of almost every extraordinary, open-ended power the administration has claimed since Sept 11 2001 - it is the ideological underpinning of the Viet Dinh authored PATRIOT ACT, for example.
'We must have broadly defined, novel abilities' the admin and its camp followers cry, 'because it was the *lack* of such powers that allowed Sept 11 to happen.'
This is how they create and justify a permanent state of exception.
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Facing a non-trivial amount of Congressional and "thought-leader" opposition in recent weeks, Team Bush has launched a re-branding campaign: their efforts to acquire greater authority aren't extra-constitutional power grabs but a sincere project to give "professionals" the tools they need to catch America's enemies.
Our enemies are using new techniques, Bush claims (bold innovations such as bombs and gunfire), so it follows that our "professionals" must have new powers.
But, as you noted, there's nothing particularly new about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (though the long-term consequences are likely to be packed full of unpleasant surprises). The counter-terrorist effort appears to be made up of some unknown percentage of real intelligence work and a whole lot of self-delusion (e.g. men caught in Iraq being 'questioned' about their ties to bin Laden) and flat out bullshit.
Not much new there.
Why then, are so many Americans (and a fair number of folk around the world) eager to believe in this fantasy of the new?
Not too long after Sept 11, Baudrillard wrote a little essay that argued, among other things, that the cinematic quality of the event - that is, the way it so closely resembled Hollywood disaster epics - inspired otherwise calm people to believe that anything was possible: if this "new" group, al Qaeda, could engineer a catastrophe that came straight out of our darkest fantasies, perhaps nothing was beyond them.
And if nothing was beyond them, the West generally and the U.S. particularly (as the standard bearer of Western values and modernity) faced an existential threat - one so new it required a hyphenated word to properly capture its unexampled evil, "Islamo-fascism".
All conjecture of course but intriguing nonetheless.
Indeed, when I've argued with people about the difference between actually existing terrorism and the phantasm of sinister, globally coordinated super-evil that troubles them the specter of the destroyed towers loom over the conversation like the ghost of Hamlet's father, inspiring belief in the most outrageous scenarios and support for the most extreme actions.
.d.
How should you approach life? Like a samurai, ready for death at any time.
Pater Monroe, 1978 ...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/