The Management
of Savagery
How America’s National SecurityState Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda,ISIS, and Donald Trump
Max Blumenthal
First published in paperback by Verso 2020
First published in by Verso 2019
© Max Blumenthal 2019, 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-230-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-228-4 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-227-7 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Hardback Edition as Follows:
Names: Blumenthal, Max, 1977– author.
Title: The management of savagery : how America’s national security state fueled the rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump / Max Blumenthal.
Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019001125| ISBN 9781788732291 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788732284 (US ebook) | ISBN 9781788732277 (UK ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Foreign relations—Middle East. | Middle East—Foreign relations—United States. | Middle East—Politics and government—1979– | Qaida (Organization) | IS (Organization) | Imperialism. | United States—Politics and government—1989– | National security—United States. | Trump, Donald, 1946–
Classification: LCC DS63.2.U5 B58 2019 | DDC 327.73056—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001125
Let’s remember here, the people we are fighting today, we funded twenty years ago, and we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union … There’s a very strong argument, which is—it wasn’t a bad investment to end the Soviet Union, but let’s be careful what we sow because we will harvest.
—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the House
Appropriations Committee, April 23, 2009
AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.
—Jake Sullivan in February 12, 2012, email
to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.
—President Donald Trump, June 6, 2017
Contents
Introduction: The Unstable State
1.The Afghan Trap
2.At the Dawn of the Forever War
3.Waves Flanked by Arrogance
4.In for the Rudest of Awakenings
5.The Counter-Jihad
6.The Next Dirty War
7.Until We Meet in Damascus
8.Regions of Savagery
9.Collateral Damage, Indirect Benefits
10.Attacking Our Team
11.Extinction of the Grayzone
Afterword: Active Measures
Notes
Index
It was the week after Labor Day and Washington was filling up again with its chattering class, just back from summer sojourns up and down the coast. President Donald Trump was in town as well, paying the White House a visit after a series of golf trips and rowdy rallies before his Rust Belt loyalists. The White House, however, had been in a state of siege throughout the summer, as former FBI director Robert Mueller had led an investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and an allegation that the Russian government had subverted the presidential election in his favor. Though the Russiagate inquiry had produced nothing so far to demonstrate collusion, with the political season kicking back into high gear, the stage was set for two dramatic events carefully timed to turn up the heat on the president.
The first event was the funeral of John McCain, a former prisoner of war turned Republican senator. Branded as a “maverick” by the Beltway press corps, which he half-jokingly referred to as his political base, McCain had operated throughout his career in complete lockstep with the military-intelligence apparatus. Over the years, he had junketed from one theater of conflict to the next, marketing jihadist insurgents and far-right militiamen to the American public as “freedom fighters,” clamoring for military intervention and enriching his donors in the arms industry. A budget-busting $717 billion defense bill authorized days before his death on August 13 was appropriately dedicated in his name.
Days later, the authors of some of the most destructive wars in recent history, from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama, filed into the National Cathedral to pay homage to the late senator. Trump was pointedly uninvited, a snub that prompted the New Yorker to dub the event “the biggest Resistance meeting yet.” The president was persona non grata among the guest list, which represented a bipartisan establishment that he had ridiculed, denigrated and menaced to the delight of millions of ordinary Americans. From the dais, McCain’s daytime talk show host daughter, Meghan, delighted her audience with twenty minutes of nationalistic cant peppered with subtle digs at Trump—“America was always great.” A line in her eulogy that repackaged the Vietnam War as a fight for the “life and liberty of other peoples in other lands” passed by without controversy. The spectacle had gone off just as McCain had planned: as a celebration of American empire and a rebuke to the rogue president who was viewed by its architects as a clear and present danger to its survival.
The following week, a second attack on the president was launched—this time from within his administration. An anonymous figure, self-described as a “senior administration official” and posing as “the Resistance inside the administration,” published an editorial excoriating Trump’s “amoral” leadership. The author homed in on Trump’s supposedly sympathetic posture to Russia and his fulsome and utterly unexpected support for a peaceful resolution to the six-decade-long conflict between North and South Korea. The president had crossed red lines in both areas, the official argued, breaking from the Washington consensus of regime change in North Korea and resisting