U.S. War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation

I started reading Kelly Denton-Borhaug's U.S. War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation during a week of extended air travel. In four separate airports, CNN was a significant part of the ambient noise. News in Chicago and New York was of the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, mastermind of the attacks of 9/11. News in New York and Rochester was of an underwear bomb plot funded by al Qaeda in Yemen but disrupted before it could be carried out. It is easy in an information-saturated world, where we live and theorize the elision of truth and fiction, to treat the post-9/11 world as if 9/11 never happened, as if the past ten years of diplomacy, military policy, and war have been about bogeymen only. Yet it remains dangerous to lose sight of the fact that before 9/11 and now eleven years after, a small and shrinking group of Muslim extremists sought, succeeded, and still seeks to murder those who disagree with them and still recognizes no difference at all between uniformed soldiers, wedding celebrants, and children traveling to visit step-parents. None of this absolves the United States of its moral failings in war, but it should complicate analyses that posit war, the training of soldiers, and the production of weapons as always-and-everywhere evidence of moral failing.

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