Sometimes it seemed that only two issues mattered in the midterm election campaigns just ended. No, I'm not talking about Obamacare, or the inequality gap, or the country's sagging infrastructure, or education, or energy policy. I mean two issues that truly threaten the wellbeing of citizens from Kansas, Colorado, and Iowa to New Hampshire and North Carolina. In those states and others, both were debated heatedly by candidates for the Senate and House, sometimes almost to the exclusion of anything else.
You know what I'm talking about -- two issues on the lips of politicians nationwide, at the top of the news 24/7, and constantly trending on social media: ISIS and Ebola. Think of them as the two horsemen of the present American apocalypse.
And think of this otherwise drab midterm campaign as the escalation election. Republican candidates will arrive in Washington having beaten the war and disease drums particularly energetically, and they're not likely to stop.
In 2015, you're going to hear far more about protecting Americans from everything that endangers them least, and especially about the need for a pusillanimous president (or so he was labeled by a range of Republicans this campaign season) to buckle down, up the ante, and crush the Islamic State, that extreme Islamist mini-oil regime in the middle of an increasingly fragmented, chaotic Middle East.
You already know the tune: more planes, more drones, more bombs, more special ops forces, more advisers, and more boots on the ground. After 13 years of testing, the recipe is tried and true, and its predictably disastrous results will only ensure far more hysteria in our future. And count on this: oppositional pressure to escalate, heading into the presidential campaign season, will be a significant factor in Washington "debates" in the last years of the Obama administration.
The Coming of a Terror Disease
Speaking of escalation, don't think Congress will be the only place where escalation fever is likely to mount. Consider the pressures that will come directly from the Islamic State and Ebola. Let's start with Ebola. Admittedly, as a disease it has no will, no mind. It can't, in any normal sense, beat the drum for itself and its dangers. Nonetheless, though no one knows for sure, it may be on an escalatory path in at least two of the three desperately poor West African countries where it has embedded itself. If predictions prove correct and the international response to the pandemic there is too limited to halt the disease, if tens of thousands of new cases occur in the coming months, then Ebola will undoubtedly be heading elsewhere in Africa, and as we've already seen, some cases will continue to make it to this country, too.
Not only that, but sooner or later someone with Ebola might not be caught in time and the disease could spread to Americans here. The likelihood of a genuine pandemic in this country seems vanishingly small. But Ebola will clearly be in the news in the months to come, and in the post-9/11 American world, this means further full-scale panic and hysteria, more draconian decisions by random governors grandstanding for the media and their electoral futures. It means feeling like a targeted population for a long time to come.
In this way, Ebola should remain a force for escalation in this country. In its effects here so far, it might as well be an African version of the Islamic State. From Washington's heavily militarized response to the pandemic in Liberia to the quarantining of an American nurse as if she were a terror suspect, it's already clear that, as Karen Greenberg has predicted, the American response is falling into a "war-on-terror" template.
Keep this in mind as well: we're talking about a country that has lived in a phantasmagoric landscape of danger for years now. It has built the most extensive system of national security and global surveillance ever created to protect Americans from a single danger -- terrorism -- that, despite 9/11, is near the bottom of the list of actual dangers in American life. As a country, we are now so invested in terrorism protection that every little blip on the terror screen causes further panic (and so sends yet more money into the coffers of the national security state and the military-industrial-homeland-security-intelligence complex).
Now, a terror disease has been added into the mix, one that -- like a number of terror organizations in the Greater Middle East and Africa -- is a grave danger in its "homeland," just not in ours.
IS's Escalatory Bag of Tricks
The preeminent terror outfit of the moment, the Islamic State (IS), which has declared itself a "caliphate" in parts of Iraq and Syria, seems to grasp the nature of the mental landscape in the U.S. far more clearly than we do. Whatever pain we cause it (and our bombing campaign is undoubtedly causing it some pain), we're its ticket to the big time. Our war against it confirms its singular sense of importance in the world of jihadism. We have helped not just to bring it into existence (thanks to the invasion of Iraq and subsequent events there), but also to give it just the credentials it needs to thrive. Washington and the Islamic State are now attached at the hip and so the pressures for escalation will only grow. Or put more accurately, they will be quite consciously stoked by the IS itself.
Bloody and barbaric as it may be, it's also a remarkably resourceful movement with a powerful sense of how to utilize its propaganda skills, especially on the Internet, to attract recruits, gain support in worlds that matter to it, and drive the U.S. national security state and Washington over the edge. It can act or react in ways that will only lead the Obama administration to up the ante in its war.
As it has already done, it can continue to produce beheading videos and other inflammatory online creations, which have had a powerful escalatory effect here. It has also learned that it may, after a fashion, be able to call out the "lone wolves," the loose nuts and bolts of our world, to act in its name. In recent weeks, there have been three such possible acts, one in New York City and two in Canada by stray individuals who might have been responding, at least in part, to IS calls for action (though we can't, of course, be certain why such disturbed people commit acts of mayhem). Such acts, in turn, trigger the usual sort of over-reporting and hysteria here as well as further steps to lock down our world.
What we do know is that the damage such individuals can do is modest at best, no more, say, than what a high school freshman with a pistol can do in a crowded cafeteria. Strangely, however, while mass shootings, which are on the rise in this country, get major headlines, they lead to few changes in our world. When it comes to the far less common phenomenon of the "lone wolf terrorist," however, congressional figures are already raising a hue and cry and the national security state is mobilizing.
And then, of course, there's what the militants of the Islamic State can do in Syria and Iraq to put further escalatory pressure on Washington. Despite the Obama administration's bombing campaign, from the town of Kobane on the Turkish border to the outskirts of Baghdad the Islamic State has generally either held its ground or continued to expand incrementally in the last two months. Its militants are now within range of Baghdad International Airport, a key supply and transit point for the U.S., and recently dropped several mortar shells into the fortified Green Zone in the heart of the capital, which houses the gargantuan U.S. Embassy.
