The war on terror’s spatial reasoning silently depends on racial discounting of local peoples

Evidence

The interactive energies between these varying senses of occupation are evidenced in the ways the Bush administration has repeatedly rationalized its “war on terror.” “We are fighting them there,” George Bush has reiterated, “so we don’t have to fight them here.” If we can just seed democracy “there” we will not have to struggle with their disaffection “here at home.” But far from a democracy denuded of race, this articulation is quietly predicated on it. The price of blindness is blowback. The slippages between “war in Iraq” and “war against” and “on Iraq” offer the terrain of “race war” in denial, war through racial proxy rendered invisible. Occupation and the making of permanently temporary states are conceivable only in the case of local indigenes whose fullness of being, claim to sanctity of place and dignity of person can be racially discounted. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1855

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the Iraq-war-as-proxy framing in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and resonates with the broader ‘occupied as racialized’ claim from Naqvi’s Home Boy; the ‘permanently temporary states’ concept also connects to Goldberg’s own earlier discussion of the state of exception. — connects to: Fighting-‘them-there’ war logic is race war in denial relying on racial discounting — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1855; Threat-based racial governance relies on distance and incapacitation, not engagement with its targets — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 152
• SEED: Article angle: the phrase ‘we fight them there so we don’t fight them here’ as spatialized racial reasoning — how foreign-policy geography quietly reproduces a colonial division between full and discounted persons.