Groundhog Day and the repetitive failure of western counterterrorism policy in the Middle East.

• Author: Jackson, Richard
• Position: COMMENTARY

In the popular Hollywood film, Groundhog Day (1993), Phil, the central character played by Bill Murray, is condemned to live the same day over and over again until he learns from his mistakes and changes his values and behavior towards his fellow human beings. Only then is he permitted to wake up to a new day and resume his life again. It is no exaggeration to suggest that Western counterterrorism policy in the Middle East is caught in a similar kind of existential purgatorial loop: day after day, year after year, it seems to be pursuing the same goals, with the same attitude, fighting the same wars, and intervening in the same countries, over and over again, and always with the same predictable results. President Obama is the fourth US president in a row to authorize the bombing of Iraq, and his successor will undoubtedly be the fifth. In particular, fourteen years after launching the "war on terror" in Afghanistan, and twelve years after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, few if any lessons have been learned from the disaster that has ensued, and the same ideologically-blinkered, counterproductive approach continues to be applied in every new stage of the ongoing conflict. From this perspective, Western counterterrorism in the Middle East is no less than a self-fulfilling prophesy (1); it creates and sustains the very violence it aims to eliminate. However, unlike the Hollywood version, in the West's version of Groundhog Day, there seems little hope of waking up to a new day and starting over because the same attitudes and underlying assumptions --and the same hubris--continues to characterize the West's approach.

This is not to suggest that there have been no changes at all in Western counterterrorism in the region since 2001. It was one of President Obama's election promises that US ground forces would be withdrawn from Iraq and more focus would be given to fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was largely achieved by the end of 2011. More recently, there has been another draw-down of ground forces in Afghanistan, although it has been announced that a core force will stay on for the foreseeable future. These withdrawals are indicative of an evolution in Western counterterrorism from the Bush-era large-scale boots on the ground approach, to a more remote-controlled, so-called "light footprint" kind of counterterrorism based on the use of drones, airpower, and the use of local proxy forces (2). Under Obama, for example, the drone-killing program started by Bush has greatly expanded, along with the training of local security forces, which are then expected to lead operations against "terrorist" insurgents. A short-lived change was the so-called "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency approach that characterized operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan for a time. However, this has quietly been abandoned, as Western troops have been withdrawn and replaced for the most part by remotely operated drones.

At the level of discourse, the Obama Administration also appeared to make a break with his predecessor by abandoning the term "war on terror" for the slightly more nuanced "war on violent extremism." Even more importantly, in June 2009, Obama outlined in a major speech in Cairo a seemingly new framework for US relations with the Islamic world based on mutual respect and understanding. While some commentators have suggested that these rhetorical changes represented a major alteration in course and approach, and a new post-Bush framework for counterterrorism, others have argued that they represent only minor rhetorical changes in emphasis, which reflect the different contexts in which they articulated their policies (3). That is, both administrations are committed to the same broad counterterrorism approach, but Obama has had to "sell" his policies to an American audience in the context of a long, costly war; thus, he has had to reframe his policies in a slightly less triumphalist and more cautious manner, which accounted for the loss of more than 6,000 US military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding the relatively modest variation in rhetoric between Bush and Obama, the continuities in Western counterterrorism in the Middle East are depressingly obvious, not least because they are rooted in an intellectual and discursive paradigm that defines the threat and the response to terrorism in a very simplistic and highly limited way. Western counterterrorism discourse views terrorism as a new kind of warfare, as religiously-motivated (and therefore non-political), as inherently "evil" and irrational, and as posing an existential threat to the West and the current global order (4). Consequently, the fight against terrorism is viewed by policymakers as a global struggle between the forces of civilization and the forces of medieval barbarism, similar in nature and intensity to the global struggle between...