Phantom Empire

Phantom Empire:A Feminist Reflection Ten Years After 9/11 Rosalind Petchesky (bio) On May 1, 2011, close to ten years after Al Qaeda suicide bombers had used jet airplanes to demolish three targets in the eastern United States—most unforgettably blowing the World Trade Center twin towers up in smoke—the United States, having at last managed through its intelligence sources to locate the Pakistani hill refuge where Osama bin Laden had been hiding, secretly dispatched its Navy SEAL team to go there and shoot him dead. There are many both tragic and farcical things we might remark on about this momentous yet peculiarly anticlimactic event. On the tragic side of course are the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilian and young U.S. military lives lost, displaced, or permanently maimed, and trillions of dollars of U.S. public resources squandered, on the murderous path to hunting down Al Qaeda and its leader. Representing the farcical, we have U.S. mass culture's schizophrenic response to the announcement that "we got him"—the hysterical football cheers for Our Side and frat boy street celebrations quickly followed by pious quotations from Proverbs and Facebook posts about doing as Jesus would and forgiving our enemies (Sullivan 2011). And for combined elements of both tragedy and farce, consider the deliberate timing and staging of bin Laden's execution as a racialized and gendered propaganda tactic in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election and the certification of Barack Obama as a Real (honorary white Christian) Man, whose valor in exterminating the Islamist foe will go down as unassailable. But I prefer to focus on another, less noticed sequel to the U.S. security apparatus's Top Assassination. Within two weeks, a strange follow-up episode occurred when the government of Pakistan made the gesture of [End Page 288] returning to the United States the tail of the damaged stealth helicopter that the navy had used to perform the commando operation. Mainstream U.S. media reported this act in the light of strained U.S.-Pakistani relations following the killing. Pakistan faced tremendous criticism in the U.S. Congress for, if not deliberately harboring terrorists, then its leaders' apparent ignorance of bin Laden's whereabouts all those years and not doing enough to show support for the U.S.-led "War on Terror" while receiving billions in U.S. military and economic aid. Internally, President Asif Ali Zardari came under strong attack for abetting the violation of Pakistani sovereignty by, as the Washington Post put it, not having been "informed of the raid in advance" (as if being "informed" of U.S. unilateral action would be any less indicative of imperial fiat). But I propose we shift our vantage point to look more closely at what this Return of the Tail signifies, both materially and symbolically, with regard to U.S. positioning in the world and the shape of masculinist militarism ten years after 9/11. In so doing, we may find that, in ways newly configuring the fall of the twin towers ten years ago, this piece of tail returns as a kind of fetish embodying the decline of American empire in the twenty-first century. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks in September 2001, I imagined a new geopolitical scenario "arising in the smoke clouds" through the symbolism of phantom twin towers: the American imperial colossus confronting Al Qaeda and its jihadist partners and counterparts across the globe (Petchesky 2002). My point was to counter the prevailing Manichean Good versus Evil narrative that resounded at the time—certainly among the U.S. right wing and George W. Bush administration but also, in a kind of reverse fashion, among certain elements of the Left; a narrative of either righteous defenders of the Homeland and Christian values versus crazy jihadist terrorists; or, alternatively, resistant anti-imperialists (the "chickens coming home to roost") versus arrogant Western oil interests. Rather than opposites, I argued, these two adversaries mirrored each other like fratricidal twins in their capitalist wealth, nationalist imperialist ambitions, manipulation of religion, staunch militarism, masculinism (even if, in the U.S. case, with a feminine face), and racism. But

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• Bibliography of Books and Articles Published in English on Colonialism and Imperialism in 2011

  Marcella Fultz•Journal of Colonialism and…•2012

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• Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others

  Open Access•Lila Abu‐lughod•American Anthropologist•2002

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