The war on terror suspended ordinary empirical rules in favor of political expediency

Evidence

In the years immediately after 9/11, as the war on terror geared up, one could be forgiven for feeling a strange disconnect between appearance and reality. It was not just that the attacks seemed to visit an unprecedented anxiety on a still powerful United States but also that a governmental response calculated to capitalize on the trauma and desire for retribution led normal empirical rules to be suspended. Fact and political expediency appeared to have gone their separate ways, and the Bush and Blair governments’ insistence in early 2003 that Saddam Hussein had so-called weapons of mass destruction squirreled away somewhere in Iraq, despite the failure of United Nations weapons inspectors to find any, was only the most egregious example. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 201

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Context-setting for the reader’s own chapter on how Hamid and Naqvi respond to this post-9/11 reality-shaping — the suspension of empirical rules is the cultural terrain their novels contest.

Related

• The war on terror fought a parallel battle over the nature of reality (similarity 0.81)