Cultural Critique

I

A conceptual distinction can be made between normal enemies—those who act as enemies are expected to act, positioning themselves within the mental landscape of the existing political imaginary—and the absolute enemy whose attack threatens the imaginary landscape itself.¹ The enemy action by nineteen young men within the United States on September 11, 2001 was an attack on this second, metalevel. It did not play by the rules. It put the rules out of play. Its damage was profound not only physically but also conceptually, striking at the collective imagination as a whole. The globally transmitted spectacle signaled that U.S. superpower status is far from invulnerable and its self-nomination to world hegemony is not an immutable fact.

It is a Hobbesian prejudice to presume that self-preservation is the motive and loss of life the issue where war is concerned. The United States is sending to their death in Iraq a number of soldier–citizens that is almost equal to, and will likely surpass the 2,986 persons who died on September 11 (as of August 16, 2006, the number of soldiers killed was 2,595).² They will die not defending America, which was in no way under military threat from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, but as a sacrifice to the idea of American sovereignty and the rightness of its power.

I am not suggesting that Bush’s foreign policy was driven purely by mental representations. Imperial interests, oil interests—power on all of its cynical levels was and remains in play. But I am saying that what has enabled him to get away with this policy, and what still enables him to garner the patriotic support of tens of millions of Americans, is not imperial or oil interests, but his interpolation of the collective on this metalevel where its own self-understanding is [End Page 145] under siege. Moreover, the threat to the imaginary that he addresses rhetorically is itself not imaginary, but real.

On June 11, exactly three months before the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon, Timothy McVeigh was put to death in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Capital punishment was the retribution for his crime against the federal government, the deliberate bombing on April 19, 1995, of the Oklahoma federal building, that killed 168 persons. McVeigh, a decorated soldier in Operation Desert Storm, claimed his deed was politically motivated as a protest against two specific cases of U.S. state violence—one domestic: the use of deadly force in Waco, Texas, when federal troops stormed the ranch of the Dravidian apocalyptic sect, killing 80 men, women, and children on April 19, 1993; the other foreign: what he called U.S. hypocrisy in the (first) war in Iraq, including the massacre of surrendered and retreating prisoners. He referred with brutal irony to the babies and toddlers he killed in the Oklahoma federal building attack as “collateral damage.”

McVeigh’s last statement was a handwritten copy of the poem “Invictus” by the British Victorian poet and racial imperialist William Henley, Rudyard Kipling’s contemporary. It ends: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” McVeigh showed no signs of remorse. He saw himself as an isolated hero, even though he did not act totally alone and his political critique, which applied to both Republican and Democratic administrations, was shared among members of Aryan and Christian–Apocalyptic groups to which he had connections. Nonetheless, he was a normal enemy, whose crime and punishment fell under federal law. With the event of his execution, national sovereignty was vindicated. McVeigh “met the fate he chose for himself six years ago.” President George W. Bush declared at the time, “Under the laws of our country, the matter is concluded.”³

Mohammed Atta, a leader of the September 11 attack, was born in 1968, the same year as Timothy McVeigh. Like McVeigh, his politicization occurred in response to the U.S. government actions in the first Iraq War. McVeigh identified with the victims at Waco, Atta with those in Palestine. McVeigh was trained to kill at...