"The Gulf War is responsible for the huge and horrifying rise in Islamic terrorism"
About this Quote
Blame, in Salinger’s formulation, isn’t a moral verdict so much as a causal chain with a ticking fuse. By pinning “the huge and horrifying rise in Islamic terrorism” on the Gulf War, he’s arguing that violence doesn’t materialize from some eternal civilizational pathology; it metastasizes in response to policy choices, military footprints, and the humiliations nations inflict and absorb. The sentence is built to shock a Western listener into recognizing agency: not “they hate us,” but “we did something that predictably changed incentives, narratives, and recruitment.”
The intent is corrective, almost prosecutorial. “Responsible” functions like a legal term, reallocating guilt away from an abstract, monolithic “Islam” and toward a specific historical event managed by states. That framing also invites a taboo implication: counterterrorism isn’t only about raids and intelligence; it’s also about reviewing interventions that generate grievances and symbolism extremists can weaponize.
The subtext, though, is slippery. “Islamic terrorism” compresses wildly different movements into a single label, inadvertently echoing the very essentialism he’s trying to resist. It can read as if Islam itself is the actor, even as he claims the war is the catalyst. The rhetoric leans on scale words (“huge,” “horrifying”) to win urgency, but it risks overclaiming a single origin story for a complex phenomenon.
Context matters: Salinger came out of the mid-century national security and communications world, where public narratives are treated as instruments of power. He’s speaking from inside the machinery, warning that wars don’t end when the ceasefire holds; they echo in propaganda, bases, sanctions, and a generation’s memory.
The intent is corrective, almost prosecutorial. “Responsible” functions like a legal term, reallocating guilt away from an abstract, monolithic “Islam” and toward a specific historical event managed by states. That framing also invites a taboo implication: counterterrorism isn’t only about raids and intelligence; it’s also about reviewing interventions that generate grievances and symbolism extremists can weaponize.
The subtext, though, is slippery. “Islamic terrorism” compresses wildly different movements into a single label, inadvertently echoing the very essentialism he’s trying to resist. It can read as if Islam itself is the actor, even as he claims the war is the catalyst. The rhetoric leans on scale words (“huge,” “horrifying”) to win urgency, but it risks overclaiming a single origin story for a complex phenomenon.
Context matters: Salinger came out of the mid-century national security and communications world, where public narratives are treated as instruments of power. He’s speaking from inside the machinery, warning that wars don’t end when the ceasefire holds; they echo in propaganda, bases, sanctions, and a generation’s memory.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by Pierre
Add to List
