Reps don’t cause war---political logics outweigh and empirics go aff

In chapter four, “Biosecurity Noir: WMDs in a World without Borders,” Masco singles out concrete evidence of the amplification of the invisible biothreat triggered by the receipt of a few anthrax letters in 2001 to support his argument about the made-up ambiguous link to WMD. The author highlights that by proliferating visions (depictions) of catastrophic danger, biosecurity created a militarized response of global preemption in the name of domestic defense. Masco argues his case well and sharply, providing compelling evidence, but his interpretations of evidence at times seems exaggerated and biased. Though Masco does not deny the existence of the real threats, his recognition of them is too brief, while consideration of an alternative view is rather weak. He acknowledges that terrorist violence is not fictitious but insists that for the most part the United States inflated threats and politically exploited potential danger to declare and maintain the state of emergency. Such focus on the amplification of threats seems to suggest that for the most part the threats are not that real. Masco suggests that the link between terrorists and WMD is mainly inflated. Yet there is a real global concern about 2,000 tons of highly-radioactive nuclear materials being stored in poorly secured civilian locations around the world. The book never mentions the threat of a dirty bomb, which today is viewed as a more likely occurrence than an atomic bomb explosion. The IAEA cites a hundred reported thefts of nuclear materials on average each year. There is a good chance terrorists can get their hands on enough nuclear materials to produce a dirty bomb. The United States meets these challenges with increased international cooperation. Masco’s main argument that “the US is no longer constrained by territorial limits” is exaggerated. The only two cases cited when the United States appeared unconstrained were the invasion of Iraq. Though the invasion of Iraq was opposed by some U.S. allies (France, Germany, and New Zealand), it was still a combined force coalition from the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Poland. The United States does not have an unrestricted reach as Masco wants to depict. It is constrained by sovereignty and territorial integrity of other stable states. The unstable nuclear regimes in North Korea and Iran present that existential nuclear threat to the U.S. described by Masco, but the United States is in no rush to invade these countries. According to the anticipatory and preemptive logic Masco prescribes to the United States, it could have already invaded those states to prevent the disaster. Another limitation of his argument is that he paints the nuclear and counterterror states as consistent through all the presidencies, thus, drawing all administrations under a common denominator. Under Obama, the counterterror state became a liberal democracy again. The ‘unrestrained’ theater of operation has shrunk by ending the presence in Iraq and withdrawing from Afghanistan, even though our presence there could have been extended based on the preemption logic. Obama recognized the faults of the Bush administration in acting unilaterally, scaled back stability operations, and emphasized sharing the costs and responsibilities of global leadership. The emergence of the real ISIL threat undermines the book’s core argument of threat amplification, the U.S. preemption logic of response, and unconstrained global reach. The U.S.-led global effort against ISIL amounts to more than 50 nations, which shows the unified nature of the fight. Masco asserts that U.S. superpower depends on the ability of the state to monopolize a discourse of danger, but he doesn’t discuss how the United States succeeded in doing that. Masco could have developed his argument by tracing how the United States was able to use its soft power to mobilize like-minded states to agree with U.S. hegemony on WOT. It will be interesting to trace the U.S. internalization of fear and terror. He could have examined how allies responded to U.S. domestic mobilization of its population and whether other states imitated U.S. emotional management projects to mobilize their own populations. This would boost his argument that the U.S. was able to project its power on the global scale. In Theatre of Operations, Masco makes a compelling argument about the creation of the unrestrained theater of operations via domestication of fear and terror carried over from the Cold War days. His anthropological study reveals the extent to which a democracy is willing to use fear to assure the core principle of the social contract, defined by Hobbes as the exchange of public obedience for collective security. A democracy that chooses to be preoccupied with security risks to forgo core democratic values resulting in the lack of transparency, restriction of free flow of information, and negligence of non-military threats—no less threatening than nuclear terrorism. Making criticism of U.S. actions the main focus of the book, however, Masco’s interpretations are not properly balanced and sometimes appear biased. Still, reading Masco’s insight of the purpose of U.S. actions in the post-9/11 context offers opportunities to think critically about the effects of 9/11 emotional reprogramming of society and state of emergencies in U.S. history.