War on Terror | Benjamin Studebaker

April 17, 2023

Citizen-Eject

I have a new piece out for Sublation on the failure of liberal and left-wing conceptions of citizenship to adequately protect citizens from denationalization. Prominent recent cases include Shamima Begum in the UK and Suhayra Aden in Australia. Both liberal and left-wing accounts increasingly center individual agency, and this emphasis makes it easy for states to deny the role they’ve played in creating the conditions for terrorism and to concretize this denial in the form of denationalization. There are discussions of Althusser and especially Balibar, whose book Citizen Subject is referenced in the title. It’s available here, with no pay wall:

https://www.sublationmag.com/post/citizen-eject

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September 21, 2021

The Wrong Kind of Unity

On the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the American media reflected on the war on terror. It was just a month after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and you might think that the American press would be introspective about its own role in promoting our expensive blunders in the Middle East. But instead, the press expressed nostalgia for the “unity” the country experienced in the years immediately following the attacks.

Post-9/11 “unity” enabled our government to start a series of expensive, destructive wars. More than 200,000 people died in Afghanistan. More than 200,000 people died in Iraq. All told, the war on terror cost $8 trillion and killed an estimated 900,000 people. Both parties were culpable. Democrats voted to authorize these wars, and President Obama’s disastrous intervention in Libya cut that country’s per capita GDP in half:

Unity has value, but this is not the right kind of unity. What is the right kind?

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November 14, 2015

Ignore the Paris Terrorist Attack

Last night, in a series of horrible attacks, at least 128 people in Paris were killed. The attacks were committed by the Islamic State with internal help from homegrown French terrorists. The best way we can respond is by completely ignoring the attack and paying no attention to it whatsoever. Here’s why.

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October 2, 2014

Why Congress Will Not Declare War on ISIS

In recent days, a lot of commentators have been deeply upset by the fact that Barack Obama has been ordering military strikes against ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) without congressional authorization, and that congress has not held a vote on the issue. Indeed, even house speaker John Boehner does not think the administration legally requires further authorization. The US constitution says that:

The Congress shall have Power To… declare War

So what’s going on here?

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June 26, 2014

What Happens if ISIS Wins in Iraq?

Those arguing for US military action in Iraq to stop the advance of ISIS/ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria/Iraq and the Levant) frequently claim that if the United States does not take action and ISIS prevails, Iraq will become a launching pad for terrorist attacks against the United States. This argument frequently gets run whenever anyone wants to intervene in a Middle Eastern country, but does it really stand up? Let’s investigate.

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Tag: War on Terror