The Global War on Terror was a lot of things. It led to a complete shakeup of US Military doctrine and training. Freed of fears from the Cold War we abandoned huge exercises and the mindset of REFORGER (REturn of FORces to GERmany) and instead turned our best and brightest into how to kill goat herders in high mountainous terrain. I kid, but only partially. The truth is that aside from the initial invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq much of the active armed conflict we have been engaged in is not large scale deployments and battles. It is driven by our special forces community. SOCOM has ballooned in scale and an awful lot of guys have gotten very good at a certain kind of light infantry style of fighting. For many the political machinations of these conflicts are messy and interlinked with things like supporting the kind of chaos that benefits Israel in the Middle East as well as securing oil fields. The law of unintended consequences reared its head multiple times as we spawned ISIS - both organically and deliberately it seems with hindsight.
All this is known about GWOT - it’s the forever war that is only sort of winding down. Your average extremely online person is about as ignorant as the general public when it comes to knowledge of just how far and deep the tendrils extend. Suffice to say there are still elements of GWOT continuing today, even if some of those spooky guys have been redirected to Ukraine as well. These actions happen in forgotten countries and are rarely disclosed. You’ll only hear about them fleetingly when say four Green Berets die in Niger. Otherwise it goes ignored, unseen. Recent events have certainly shifted the focus and there is much that can be written about that shift. Our military, specifically certain parts of our military got very good at slotting bad guys at night in extra-judicial style warfare. The battle field though is now changing.
These are all relatively conventional interpretations of GWOT but there is another that I have been mulling over for some time. That in reality GWOT was the muted half bite of racial war. It could never be admitted and perhaps my idea is madness but there exists an undercurrent that makes me think this could be true and argued to be the case. It goes without saying that the official line is always race blind, they were ‘terrists’ as Dubya said. For good measure the Axis of Evil conveniently also contained North Korea, and well North Koreans ain’t Hadji are they? Smart really but no one was going to invade North Korea, we were however comfortable taking on an older enemy of our civilization: Islam.
This interpretation no doubt matches more closely with the Islamists own version of events. Their own spin and take on what happened, it was inherent in their own reasoning to attack us and to carry out and wage jihad. We were interlopers in their lands, foreigners occupying them, dirtying everything. If they were honest we were their true enemy - we gave them reason to live, reason to die. Without us these young men across MENA would have nothing to rail against, perhaps their own corrupt governments. That part is well documented and discussed - the Saudis were known for exporting jihad lest it threaten the Kingdom itself. Smart, bought them enough time to placate their population (the latest attempt at that being the creation of a soccer league). Much as the white man gave the Native Americans the horse and then the enemy they so craved so too did we fulfill the same role for the Islamic world. Where we allowed the Native Americans to burn brightest before their flame was extinguished the results in the sandbox have not quite been the same.
Returning to conventional understandings of history and we see the NeoCons. Are they ex commies, probably. Are they true believers in the liberal order, probably. Did they just want to get filthy rich of the military industrial complex, certainly. Yet behind all these conventional explanations perhaps a deeper war lust lurked. Despicable on the one hand as none of the Rumsefelds or Wolfowitzs had sons who would die but on the other that urge for conquest of any kind is a curse to some men and others just want to fight. To some extent that is the true greyness of history, not in the leftist sense but in the reality of eternal struggle and conflict. Man is a beast of prey as Spengler once remarked. What evolved, what came of all their machinations was this overarching fight against a defined enemy: Islam.
It was ironic of course that these people in power pursued it, even as their rival power holders worked to import more of these people. The leftwing alliance with radical Islam is not new, and of course their mutant love of the brown outgroup is also known but these aren’t the same people as the NeoCons. We literally went to war with half our house committed to knocking doors and shooting people in their sleep whilst the other half was determined to open the flood gates to Abdul and co so he could stick it to whitey with a new ethnic group. It’s the shitty curse of the modern age - young hot headed men lust for a clearly defined enemy outgroup to fight against and you get one. It’s then executed half-heartedly by a civilization bereft of the power required to follow through and finish the job. The NeoCon ideology is ultimately another failure to execute and use power correctly, but it served to keep the leash on the need for vengeance. Making money came first…
Imagine if post 9-11 (and set aside your own beliefs about what REALLY happened for a moment) instead of invading to occupy Afghanistan to give girls new schools or some shit we instead invaded and just slaughtered a whole bunch of them, and withdrew. A bloody nose. A scar that would last. To be clear this isn’t some violent fantasy I have - this could have been a legitimate military operation using our SOCOM forces, naturally casualties of innocents would happen. We don’t need to genocide them as the Israelis are attempting to do but a solid fuck you might have been different. You see whatever you believe happened the urge for vengeance and use of force exists for all righteous men - it’s why so many joined up to fight GWOT. Ultimately many realized it was in vain - some had a good time - others stayed in and became something more than men, we likely bred a few modern day beserkers in the ranks.
The ideas that move and motivate men are hard to know. It could just be my wishful thinking (it probably is) but to some extent I wonder if those leaders some of them at least saw GWOT as it came into view as a last kind of struggle before the poz set in. Doubtful I know but there are elements that feel that way. You glimpse them even today with the power they have to motivate - the counter-jihad types. Astroturfed to a large extent from the small hat brigade but don’t be a complete idiot many of that was organic as well. Too many people forget that the Crusades were a thing, that the same blood runs in your veins that drove those men to the gates of Jerusalem once for a cause they believed in, to fight an enemy they knew. The scars of Tours, of the Siege of Vienna - these are buried histories, hidden from people who don’t know how close we came. The entire history of the birth of modern Spain is in fact around el Cid and his forceful remigration of the Moors.
Our racial war has happened, it was the GWOT. We just didn’t notice or know it at the time. The last muted attempt at grand conflict by a unified West. The barbarians are within the gates now, in part from that conflicts failures. It was not meant to be. Now collectively as our military forces shift back towards near peer conflicts we are even less united and stable. Once though, in the not so distant past we had a fleeting moment of racial unity - after all. Hadji don’t surf.