Exiled in Babylon: why the US invasion of Iraq still governs our lives

Last week, I wrote about contagions, zombies, and mindless horde behavior.

To wit, one of the top banks in the US, Silicon Valley Bank, was being trampled to death by a panicked mob as I was writing.

But, this is a newsletter on peace, not finance. So, on this 20-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq—which was the O.G. “bank run” of this century—I want to go deeper into the psychology of panic, animism, and self-fulfilling prophecies.

But first… let’s go back in time.

The Beginning of the End

I remember right where I was when I learned about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. I remember the rubble, the “we’ll rebuild”, and “hell to pay” speeches.

You know what I don’t remember?

I don’t remember anyone saying, “Don’t panic.”

I’m sure it was said. And the projection of force was certainly intended to help. But hindsight has made one thing crystal clear: we engaged in a global freak out.

9/11 and the Destruction of the Temple

But should one event change a nation—indeed the world—forever? I got this key insight from scholar Walter Brueggemann.

In 587 BCE, the Babylonians burned the city of Jerusalem to the ground, destroying the Temple of Solomon, the center of Jewish worship. Those who survived were forcibly displaced into the kingdom of Babylon.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Islamic jihadists attacked the the centers of American worship: our Temple of Finance and Temple of Defense. As we glued ourselves to our TVs, we were displaced politically, morally, and spiritually.

God’s chosen peoples, attacked in their fortresses, and sent into exile, forever changing their identity and practice of both God and self.

The Jews were hauled away by an invading army.

We Americans got carried away through our own panic.

By the Rivers of Babylon

After 9/11, endless media coverage on Arabs, Islam, and Osama created a snowball effect; or as I’m now seeing it, a bank run on nuance. The next 9/11 was always right around the corner. So we pulled generations’ worth of growing trust out of society and left those who needed our benefit of the doubt holding the bag.

It was the classic prisoner’s dilemma: betray another to save yourself; or ride together into a shared experience of suffering.

The choice was clear.

Seven days later, when the vote was taken to authorize military force against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the resolution passed 518-1.

Muslims were rounded up in a surveillance dragnet and locked into digital internment camps.

Parachutes for office workers went on sale in case another skyscraper was hit.

The Jews sat by the rivers of Babylon and reimagined their faith. America was carried away into Babylon in a riptide of our own panic that left up to 1,000,000 dead between the Tigris and Euphrates.

"Here, take my brain.”

I remember Edward Snowden saying something like, “Panic makes us vulnerable.” Snowden went on to explain how, in our season of collective panic after 9/11, we all but asked the powers over us to strip us of agency in the name of “security”.

And this is how it often works.

Something happens, we turn to our media to understand what happened, and the echochamber of our own curation hypes us into hysteria. Soon, we’re running like lemmings off a cliff (or throwing each other to the sharks) in the name of survival.

The Patriot Act passed in just 45 days. Today, similarly consequential changes for both personal relationships and public policy are being executed in just 45 minutes, long before the facts can catch up to the speed of transmission.

Panicked Attack

“Discourse be damned” may be the central tenet of the panicked attack. And if it was hard in 2001, the deluge of information available to us all has not exactly made things any easier.

So now, the terrorism problem, where angry young men kill powerful old ones, has mutated. Today, angry people everywhere feel something they dislike and take reflexive aim at that which does not conform to their moral entrepreneurship.

Complex realities are reduced to discrete, bumper sticker solutions.

From Ground Zero to Zero Tolerance

For our lack of imagination to anticipate 9/11, we have developed a knee-jerk proclivity to over-imagine nearly everything. The 1990s had been a great run of American expansion. And then, our fortress fell. To compensate, no rock could be left unturned, no scenario unaccounted for, and no phone or email untapped. If we had to cheat, lie, steal, and torture our way back to our feelings of impurviousness, then we must.

Welcome to the Age of Panic, where everything is a global catastrophe and a moral judgement.

From Ground Zero, we gave ourselves over rather easily to zero tolerance—for each other, for disagreement, and for diverse understandings of morality, patriotism, and goodness. As we watched our brothers, sisters, and neighbors go to war, we all became militants.

We stood by as our local police started to look like our soldiers abroad—after all, there were “sleeper cells” among us.

Even our activists embraced the language of militance over diplomacy: “waging” this, and “warring” that; defunding, denouncing, and occupying.

We were swept up.

Who Then Shall We Blame?

Obviously the media is to blame for all of this, right? Or Facebook and Twitter? Or the politicians?

Well, they play a role. But the philosopher Taylor Swift may have said it best:

Why are the most strident voices of society in our heads in the first place? Yes, the platforms have engineered us all toward rage and panic to increase their ad revenue. But we are the ones who let them.

When dissecting each other’s rage, we may find any number of culprits at the center of the story. But no one can make us panic or overreact. That is something we do entirely on our own.

So, here are 5 principles I use to steel myself against panic.

Life Beyond Panic

We Americans call it the “Iraq War”. But here in Iraq, where I still live, it's more likely to be called the “US Occupation”. And it's from this vantage point that I’ve spent almost my entire adult life studying the impact of carpet bombs, terrorist sniping, troop surges, and propaganda on identity and psychology.

On this 20th anniversary, this conviction remains: we cannot bomb ideas out of existence.

The panicked attacks we are committing against each other today look to me like so many 9/11s, Pearl Harbors, and Salem Witch trials, stuck in a kind of animism that sees evil spirits under every rock and and embodied monsters around every corner.

Our greatest threat is not Muslims or Evangelicals; or Russia; or Democrats or Republicans; or Black men or cops; or the LGBTQ community. It’s our own anger; our story of each other.

But what do you think would happen if we took that enchanted view of the world and started looking for the good in each other, instead of the bad?

I bet my life we’ll find more Love.

Jeremy
@thejcourt