Author Biography

Mark Danner has written about foreign affairs and American politics for three decades, covering Latin America, Haiti, the Balkans, and the Middle East. He was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker, and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Bard College and speaks widely about America's role in the world. Among his books are Spiral, Stripping Bare the Body, Torture and Truth, and The Massacre at El Mozote.

Excerpt from Book

Spiral INTRODUCTION We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. --President Barack Obama, May 23, 2013 America must move off a permanent war footing. --President Barack Obama, January 28, 2014 I came upon the half-destroyed truck atop a highway overpass outside Fallujah, the cab shot to hell, the trailer bloodstained and propped up at a crazy angle on its blown tires. On the highway below a great black burn scarred the concrete and over it a rust-red slash, the soot and blood marking the spot where, earlier that day in October 2003, the insurgents had used a cheap remote control to ignite barrels of concealed explosives just as the U.S. armored patrol rumbled by, killing one paratrooper, wounding several. Insurgents, hidden in houses nearby, followed with bursts from their AK-47s. The Americans promptly dismounted and with their M16s and M4s began pouring lead into everything they could see, starting with the truck that happened to be passing on the highway above, eviscerating the unfortunate driver, and then fired into the houses. How many Iraqis had the troops killed and wounded? The more the better, as far as insurgent leaders were concerned. "The point is to get the Americans to fire back," the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne told me the next day, "and hopefully the bad guys''ll get some Iraqi casualties out of that and they can publicize that." By week''s end scores of family and close friends of those killed and wounded would join the insurgents, for honor demanded they kill Americans to wipe away family shame. American firepower plus Iraqi deaths equals more insurgents: an axiom in the strategy of provocation. Provoke your enemy to kill civilians and thereby call to battle the sleeping population. You have no army? Use the aggression of the occupiers to help raise one of your own. In Iraq, insurgents have used that strategy to grow and prosper, recognizing the characteristic American quickness to react with overwhelming firepower as their best friend. Across continents, al Qaeda used it as well, blowing up towers in New York to create an indelible recruiting poster for the worldwide cause while provoking self-defeating responses. Lure the Americans into Afghanistan, where they''ll sink into the quagmire that had trapped their superpower rival two decades before. Such was Osama bin Laden''s strategy. Could he have dared dream that the Americans would prove so cooperative as to invade Iraq as well? Like a celestial slot machine daily pouring forth its golden bounty, the September 11 attacks had led the administration of President George W. Bush not only to an assault on Afghanistan but, scarcely a year later, to a wonderfully telegenic invasion of a major Muslim country. To an attack by a small insurgent group that called for Muslims to rise up and throw off American oppression, the United States had responded by dispatching 150,000 Americans to oppress Muslims. Now the tiny Islamic fringe movement could point to television screens as American tanks rumbled down the streets of an Arab capital, as American soldiers rousted Muslims from their beds, threw them to the ground, placed unclean boots on their backs: as they stripped them and tortured them at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, as they had hooded them and forced them to their knees at Guant

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