The left-field substitution of Iraq as the focal point for our post-9/11 rage could never have happened in another region. ~Ezra Klein

This seems very doubtful to me.  Iraq was subjected to frequent bombings and air strikes in the twelve years between the end of Desert Storm and the 2003 invasion.  Iraq was targeted for “regime change” three years before 9/11, and there was a shockingly broad (and wrong) consensus in this country that Hussein’s government represented a serious threat to the region and the world.  It wasn’t at all difficult for those interested in a war with Iraq to refocus the new post-9/11 rage on the old enemy, since Iraq’s government and Hussein personally had filled the “new Hitler” space in hegemonist rhetoric for years by the time of the attack.  The public had been conditioned to fear and hate Iraqis for a full decade, and Hussein was genuinely villainous enough to lend some credibility to the propaganda about the Iraqi “threat.”  In the looney fringes (e.g., The Wall Street Journal) long before 9/11, all evil things allegedly came from or went through Baghdad–the first WTC bombing, the OKC bombing, etc.  Of course, it made the sale slightly easier that Iraqis were also predominantly Muslim, but all that really mattered to persuade a sizeable portion of the public was that Hussein was a dictator and had fought against the U.S. in the past.  If we had randomly invaded Algeria or Oman in response to 9/11, then maybe Kamiya might be onto something. 

The same thing could have easily happened in another region, if the political class were dedicated to projecting power in another region as they are in the Near East.  Just consider the precedent of the Philippine War.  It originated in the initial conflict between the Filipino rebels and U.S. Army forces sent to occupy the archipelago after the victory at Manila Bay and escalated into a major, brutal counterinsurgency campaign.  The expedition to the Philippines itself was a fairly random diversion and only very tangentially related to the immediate goals of defeating Spain and, as the imperialists desired, supporting Cuban nationalists.  The war against the “Dons” ended and still the U.S. kept fighting in the Philippines, presumably to acquire a base for naval and commercial shipping in Asia.  Fighting the Philippine War made absolutely no sense as a follow-up to the Spanish War, unless you consider the strong interest the establishment of the time had in the China trade and the powerful influence of vocal imperialists and naval power advocates.   

Kamiya’s argument relies on a vast majority of Americans having some clear sense of differences between the Islamic and Arab worlds and other regions, which they do not have.  Kamiya says:

No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East. 

In fact, there would be a small army of pundits and activists suggesting this very thing.  It doesn’t hurt that Chavez and Castro are politically aligned, but you wouldn’t even need it to be Venezuela for this to work–replace Venezuela with Peru or Paraguay and it would still be only too possible.  Actually, invading Iraq after 9/11 would be a bit like invading Colombia to strike at Latin American communism.  It would be like portraying Bogota as an evil communist-supporting government with close ties to Castro (while the Uribe government, as everyone knows, is actually vehemently anticommunist and anti-FARC).  As it is, right now there are people who might be inclined to call for an attack on Venezuela as a way of getting at Iran (!).  Fostering Veneuzuelophobia has become the latest thing in certain Republican foreign policy circles.  You can already hear them now: “You have to knock out Castro’s economic and political ally to bring his regime down.  On to Caracas!”  

The government and interventionist pundits engage in this kind of vilification of foreign governments and of whole nations in every region of the world.  They are equal-opportunity imperialists.  It just happens that the primary focus has been and will continue to be on the Near East, which means that the irrational fearmongering about Near Eastern governments will be especially intense.  It doesn’t mean that there are not efforts to do the same thing for other regions.  Unfortunately, similarly “random” bait-and-switch deceptions of the American public would not fail.  Who’s going to uncover the deception?  The press?  Ha, that’s a good one!        

Consider: Suppose for a moment that NATO did not intervene in 1999 in Kosovo, and some Albanian Muslim terrorists carried out a major attack on American territory or U.S. bases while Milosevic was still in power in Belgrade.  I can very easily imagine the same kind of unfocused hysteria directed at “those people” in the Balkans.  I could very easily see how the same sorts of people would cook up some roundabout rationale for invading Serbia and overthrowing Milosevic in the name of fighting Albanian terrorism.  “Drain the swamp” probably would have been the slogan then as well.  It would make exactly as much sense as attacking Hussein to strike at Al Qaeda. 

The point of the “left-field substitution” was to pursue a policy that the supporters of the invasion had been wanting to pursue for years.  It was not coming out of left field as far as they were concerned.  Of course, it is an irrational, crazy move judged on the facts in the real world, but since when have those mattered in determining whether or not we invade another country? 

It isn’t so hard to imagine something similar in the Balkans, since this is another region about which Americans know next to nothing and which they perceive as a place of unrelenting, irrational bloodfeud and barbarous peoples.  Our general colossal ignorance of and prejudice against Slavic peoples made it extremely easy to vilify some as the “bad” Slavs and others as the “moderate” and “pro-Western” ones.  We’re still doing it in media coverage of Ukrainian politics.  The Serbophobia of the ’90s was made possible by the steady drumbeat of media coverage casting Serbs as the villains of the conflict in the Balkans, just as Iraqis were made out to be the villains of the Near East throughout the same decade.  Being able to draw on old Western prejudices against communists, Slavs and Orthodox Christians didn’t hurt, either, since all of these things made the Serbs seem alien and Eastern, and thus, following the logic of this sort of prejudice, more likely to be involved in something sinister.  Of course, there was no good reason for the United States to go to war with Yugoslavia in 1999, but our government did so anyway.  Imagine how much easier it would have been to do the same under some general pretext of fighting “tyranny and terrorism.”  

We have played this game before, and many of the same people were involved then as now.  Once again: the point of the “left-field substitution” was to pursue a policy that the supporters of the invasion had been wanting to pursue for years.  The substitution worked because the public had been prepared by years and years of conditioning to accept any attack on Yugoslavia or Iraq as basically a good, defensive or righteous war against the new Hitler.  Who knows?  Perhaps Venezuela will be the next target in another decade.  The groundwork is already being laid today.    

P.S. While there is much else in the article that I would agree with, I have to add that Kamiya’s claim that the “war on terror” is a “crusade, a Holy War” is basically entirely wrong.  Those who prattle on the most about Evil and moral clarity are those who are most likely to deny very strongly any religious or theological significance to the conflict.  They go out of their way to deny that “Islamofascists” are motivated by anything that is actually religious, and insist that they are effectively Muslim versions of the Nazis, as numerous presidential speeches and pundits’ articles have claimed.  This talk of an enemy as the embodiment of evil is the talk of identitarian politics and total war.  It is only all too secular and far removed from any Christian or other religious source.