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If you want to know where President Donald Trump came from, if you want to trace the long winding road (orescalator) that brought him to the Oval Office, dont look to reality TV or Twitter or even the rise of the alt-right. Look someplace far more improbable: Iraq.

Donald Trump may have been born in New York City. He may have grown to manhood amid his hometowns real estate wars. He may have gone no further than Atlantic City, New Jersey, to casino-ize the world and create those magical golden letters that would become the essence of his brand. He may have made an even more magical leap to television without leaving home, turning Youre fired! into a household phrase. Still, his presidency is another matter entirely. Its an immigrant. It arrived, fully radicalized, with its bouffant over-comb and eternal tan, from Iraq.

Despite hisdenialsthat he was ever in favor of the 2003 invasion of that country, Donald Trump is a president made by war. His elevation to the highest office in the land is inconceivable without that invasion, which began in glory and ended (if ended it ever did) in infamy. Hes the president of a land remade by war in ways its people have yet to absorb. Admittedly, he avoided war in his personal life entirely. He was, after all, a Vietnamno-show. And yet hes the president that war brought home. Think of him not as President Blowhard but as President Blowback.

Go Massive. Sweep It All Up

To grasp this, a little escalator ride down memory lane is necessary all the way back to 9/11; to, that is, the grimmest day in our recent history. Theres no other way to recall just how gloriously it all began than amid the rubble. You could, if you wanted, choose the moment three days after the World Trade Center towers collapsed when, bullhorn in hand, President George W. Bush ascended part of that rubble pile in downtown Manhattan, put his arm around a firefighter, andshoutedinto a bullhorn, I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

If I were to pick the genesis of Donald Trumps presidency, however, I think I would choose an even earlier moment at a Pentagon partially in ruins thanks to hijacked American Airlines flight 77. There, only five hours after the attack, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, already aware that the destruction around him was probably Osama bin Ladens responsibility, ordered his aides (according to notes one of them took) to begin planning for a retaliatory strike against yes, Saddam Husseins Iraq. Hisexact words: Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not. And swept almost instantly into the giant dust bin of what would become the Global War on Terror (or GWOT), as ordered, would be something completely unrelated to 9/11 (not that the Bush administration ever admitted that). It was, however, intimately related to the deepest dreams of the men (andwoman) who oversaw foreign policy in the Bush years: the elimination of Iraqs autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein.

Yes, there was bin Laden to deal with and the Taliban and Afghanistan, too, but that was small change, almost instantly taken care of with some air power, CIA dollarsdeliveredto Afghan warlords, and a modest number of American troops. Within months, Afghanistan had been liberated, bin Laden had fled the country, the Taliban hadlaid downtheir arms, and that was that. (Who in Washington then imagined that 15 years later a new administration would be dealing with arequestfrom the12thU.S. military commander in that country for yet more troops to shore up a failing war there?)

Within months, in other words, the decks were clear to pursue what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Co. saw as their destiny, as the key to Americas future imperial glory: the taking down of the Iraqi dictator. That, as Rumsfeld indicated at the Pentagon that day, was always where they were truly focused. It was what some of them haddreamed ofsince the moment, in the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, when President George H.W. Bush stopped the troops short of a march on Baghdad and left Hussein, Americas former ally and laterHitleriannemesis, in power.

The invasion of March 2003 was, they had no doubt, to be an unforgettable moment in Americas history as a global power (as it would indeed turn out to be, even if not in the way they imagined). The U.S. military that George W. Bush wouldcallthe greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known was slated to liberate Iraq via a miraculous, high-tech,shock-and-awecampaign that the world would never forget. This time, unlike in 1991, its troops would enter Baghdad, Saddam would go down in flames, and it would all happen without the help of the militaries of28other countries.

It would instead be an act of imperial loneliness befitting the last superpower on planet Earth. The Iraqis would, of course, greet us as liberators and we would set up a long-termgarrison statein the oil heartlands of the Middle East. At the moment the invasion was launched, in fact, the Pentagon already hadplanson the drawing boards for the building of four permanent U.S. mega-bases (initially endearingly labeled enduring camps) in Iraq on which thousands of U.S. troops could hunker down for an eternity. At the peak of the occupation, there would bemore than 500bases, ranging from tiny combat outposts to ones the size ofsmall American towns many transformed after 2011 into theghost townsof a dream gone mad until a few were recentlyreoccupiedby U.S. troops in the battle against the Islamic State.

In the wake of the friendly occupation of now-democratic (and grateful) Iraq, the hostile Syria of the al-Assad family would naturally be between a hammer and an anvil (American-garrisoned Iraq and Israel), while the fundamentalist Iranian regime, after more than two decades of implacable anti-American hostility, would be done for. The neoconquipof that moment was: Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran. Soon enough it was inevitable Washington would dominate the Greater Middle East from Pakistan to North Africa in a way no great power ever had. It would be the beginning of aPax Americanamoment on planet Earth that would stretch on for generations to come.

Such was the dream. You, of course, remember the reality, the one that led to a looted capital; Saddams armytossed outon the streets jobless to join the uprisings to come; a bitter set of insurgencies (Sunni and Shia); civil war (and localethnic cleansing); a society-wide reconstruction program overseen by Americanwarrior corporationslinked to the Pentagon thatresultedin vastboondoggle projectsthat achieved little and reconstructed nothing; prisons from hell (includingAbu Ghraib) thatbredyet more insurgents; and finally, years down the line, the Islamic State and the present version of American war, now taking place in Syria as well as Iraq and slated to ramp up further in the early days of the Trump era.

Meanwhile, as our new presidentreminded usrecently in aspeechto Congress, literallytrillions of dollarsthat might have been spent on actual American security (broadly understood) were squandered on a failed military project that left this countrys infrastructure indisarray. All in all, it was quite a record. Thought of a certain way, in return for the destruction of part of the Pentagon and a section of downtown Manhattan that was turned to rubble, the U.S. would set off a series of wars, conflicts, insurgencies, and burgeoning terror movements that would transform significant parts of the Greater Middle East intofailedor failing states, and their cities and towns, startling numbers of them, into so muchrubble.

Once upon a time, all of this seemed so distant to Americans in a Global War on Terror in which President Bush quickly urged citizens to show their patriotism not by sacrificing or mobilizing or even joining the military, but byvisitingDisney World and reestablishing patterns of pre-9/11 consumption as if nothing had happened. (Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.) And indeed, personal consumption wouldrise significantlythat October 2001. The other side of the glory-to-come in those years of remarkable peace in the United States was to be the passivity of a demobilized populace that (except for periodicthank-yousto its military) would have next to nothing to do with distant wars, which were to be left to the pros, even if fought to victory in their name.

That, of course, was the dream. Reality proved to be another matter entirely.

Invading America

In the end, a victory-less permanent war across the Greater Middle East did indeed come home. There was all the new hardware of war thestingrays, theMRAPs, thedrones, and so on that began migrating homewards, and that was the least of it. There was themilitarizationof Americas police forces, not to speak of the rise of the national security state to the status of an unofficialfourth branchof government. Home, too, came the post-9/11 fears, the vague but unnerving sense that somewhere in the world strange and incomprehensible aliens practicing an eerie religion were out to get us, that some of them had near-super powers that even the worlds greatest military couldnt crush, and that their potential acts of terror were Topekas greatest danger. (It mattered little that actual Islamic terror was perhapsthe leastof the dangers Americans faced in their daily lives.)

All of this reached its crescendo (at least thus far) in Donald Trump. Think of the Trump phenomenon, in its own strange way, as the culmination of the invasion of 2003 brought homebigly. His would be a shock-and-awe election campaign in which he would decapitate his rivals one by one. The New York real estate, hotel, and casino magnate who had long swumcomfortablyin thewatersof the liberal elite when he needed to and had next to nothing to do with Americas heartland would be as alien to its inhabitants as the U.S. military was to Iraqis when it invaded. And yet he would indeed launch his own invasion of that heartland on his private jet with itsgold-platedbathroom fixtures, sweeping up all the fears that had been gathering in this country since 9/11 (nurtured by both politicians and national security state officials for their own benefit). And those fears would ring a bell so loud in that heartland that it would sweep him into the White House. In November 2016, he took Baghdad, USA, in high style.

In this context, lets think for a moment about how strangely the invasion of Iraq, in some pretzeled form, blew back on America.

Like the neocons of the Bush administration, Donald Trump had long dreamed of his moment of imperial glory, and as in Afghanistan and again in Iraq in 2001 and 2003, when it arrived on November 8, 2016, it couldnt have seemed more glorious. We know of those dreams of his because, for one thing, only six days after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in the 2012 election campaign, The Donald firsttried to trademarkthe old Reagan-inspired slogan, Make America great again.

Like George W. and Dick Cheney, he was intent on invading and occupying the oil heartlands of the planet which, in 2003, had indeed been Iraq. By 2015-2016, however, the U.S. had entered the energy heartlands sweepstakes, thanks to fracking and other advanced methods of extracting fossil fuels that seemed to be turning the country into Saudi America. Add to this Trumps plans to furtherfossil-fuelizethe continent and you certainly have a competitor to the Middle East. In a sense, you might say, adapting his description of what he would have preferred to do in Iraq, that Donald Trump wants to keep our oil.

Like the U.S. military in 2003, he, too, arrived on the scene with plans to turn his country of choice into a garrison state. Almost thefirst wordsout of his mouth on riding that escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 involved a promise to protect Americans from Mexican rapists by building an unforgettably impregnable great wall on the countrys southern border. From this he never varied even when, in funding terms, it became apparent that, from the Coast Guard to airport security to theFederal Emergency Management Agency, as president he would becuttingintogenuine securitymeasures to build his big, fat, beautiful wall.

Its clear, however, that his urge to create a garrison state went far beyond a literal wall. It included thebuild-upof the U.S. military tounprecedented heights, as well as the bolstering of the regular police, and above all of theborder police. Beyond that lay the urge to wall Americans off in every way possible. His fervently publicized immigration policies (less new, in reality, than they seemed) should be thought of as part of a project to construct another kind of great wall, a conceptual one whose message to the rest of the world was striking: You are not welcome or wanted here. Dont come. Dont visit.

All this was, in turn, fused at the hip to the many irrational fears that had been gathering like storm clouds for so many years, and that Trump (and his alt-right companions) swept into the already looted heartland of the country. In the process, he loosed a brand of hate (includingshootings,mosque burnings, a raft ofbomb threats, and arisein hate groups, especially anti-Muslim ones) that, historically speaking, was all-American, but was nonetheless striking in its intensity in our present moment.

Combined with his highly publicized Muslimbans andprominently publicizedacts of hate, the Trump walling-in of America quickly hit home. A drop in foreigners who wanted to visit this country was almost instantly apparent as thewarning signsof a tourism Trump slump registered, business travel bookings took an instant$185 millionhit, and the travel industry predicted worse to come.

This is evidently what America First actually means: a country walled off and walled in. Think of the road traveled from 2003 to 2017 as being from sole global superpower to potential super-pariah. Thought of another way, Donald Trump is giving the hubristic imperial isolation of the invasion of Iraq a new meaning here in the homeland.

And dont forget reconstruction, as it was called after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In relation to the United States, the bedraggled land now in question whose infrastructure recently was given aD+ gradeon a report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers, Donald Trump promises a trillion-dollar infrastructure program to rebuild Americas highways, tunnels, bridges, airports, and the like. If it actually comes about, count on one thing: it will be handed over to some of the same warrior corporations that reconstructed Iraq (and other corporate entities like them), functionally guaranteeing an American version of thebudget-draining boondogglethat was Iraq.

As with that invasion in the spring of 2003, in 2017 we are still in the (relative) sunshine days of the Trump era. But as in Iraq, so here 14 years later, the first cracks are already appearing, as this country grows increasingly riven. (Think Sunni vs. Shia.)

And one more thing as you consider the future: the blowback wars out of which Donald Trump and the present fear-gripped garrison state of America arose have never ended. In fact, just as under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, so under Donald Trump, it seems they never will. Already the Trump administration is revving up American military power inYemen,Syria, and potentiallyAfghanistan. So whatever the blowback may have been, youve only seen its beginning. Its bound to last for years to come.

Theres just one phrase that could adequately sum all this up:Mission accomplished!

See the article here:
President blowback and the Iraq connection - Salon