Criticizing America's "universal allegiance" to the war on terror, former Dartmouth professor and current University of Pennsylvania political science professor Ian Lustick called the war on terror a political and economic tool in front of a packed audience during a Thursday night speech sponsored by the Rockefeller Center and the Dartmouth Lawyers Association.
The event centered on the question posed by Lustick's latest book: "Are we trapped in the war on terror?" The war, Lustick argued, grew out of efforts by a neo-conservative faction to use the 9/11 attacks to promote regime change.
"Although Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, the cabal was able to devise and implement the formula linking the September attacks to its long-cherished goal: forcible regime change in Iraq as a model for a series of quick, neo-imperialist wars to revolutionize American foreign policy and accomplish conservative political objectives at home," he said. Lustick explained, however, that the realities of the war in Iraq and the war on terror are not the same.
"The war in Iraq has become politically radioactive. It's a burden to any politician associated with it," Lustick said. "Not so the war on terror -- it continues to attract the allegiance of every politician in the country, whether as a justification for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to win in a central front in the war on terror or as a justification for withdrawing those troops to win the really crucial battles in the war on terror at home or in Afghanistan."
As a result, the war on terror serves as a political program, as a compass for governmental policy and as a justification for "increases in discretionary funding," Lustick said.
While the political effects of the war may be measurable, the economic results are "infinite," he explained.
"Across the country virtually every lobby and interest group cast their traditional objectives and funding proposals as more important than ever given the imperatives of the war on terror," he said.
He continued, "According to the National Rifle Association, the war on terror means more Americans should own and carry firearms to defend the country and themselves against terrorists. According to the gun control lobby, fighting the war on terror means passing strict gun control laws to keep assault weapons out of the hands of terrorists."
Such a situation is mirrored in Congress, Lustick said, where the number of potential terrorist targets recognized by the federal government has increased from 1,849 in 2003 to about 300,000 in 2006.
This is reflective of the fact that states and municipalities want funding from the government to cover their own "high risk targets" and can benefit from the money set aside for this purpose.
The only way for the country to exit the self-propagating cycle of the war on terror is for someone to speak the truth, Lustick said afterward in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"We are caught in a hysteria that is similar to the McCarthyist hysteria in the early 1950s when Eisenhower said that McCarthy was a thug, that there really weren't sleeper cells all over the United States," he said. "That popped a balloon and helped the country return to a kind of sanity."
