Runner

The story starts on an early anniversary of the September 11 attacks. On September 11, 2001, the terrorist organization al-Qaida (Deuker spells it like this; the common spelling is al-Qaeda or Al Qaeda) hijacked airplanes. They crashed two airplanes into New York City’s Twin Towers and another into the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania after the passengers fought to keep the aircraft from reaching its presumed target, the US Capitol. The attacks killed more than 2,900 people and precipitated the War on Terror. George W. Bush was president, and his administration swiftly established a Manichean foreign policy framework in which the US stood for freedom and any country that did not support US military actions was its enemy. This framework came to be called the Bush Doctrine—a set of policy positions that justified preemptive war against any entity deemed a threat to US security and emphasized the notion that, as Bush said in a speech before Congress on September 21, 2001, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (“Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People”). In October 2001, the United States and the United Kingdom led a multinational force in the invasion of Afghanistan, where al-Qaida trained. In the spring of 2003, the War on Terror expanded into Iraq.

The Iraq War was predicated on two key claims that both turned out to be false: That Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, had an active weapons of mass destruction program and was planning to use such weapons against the United States, and that Hussein’s government had an ongoing, collaborative relationship with  al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden. The latter claim was based in part on US intelligence showing a pattern of contact between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida that began when bin Laden was based in Sudan in the early to mid-1990s and continued after he moved to Afghanistan in 1996, but it relied most heavily on a report from Czech intelligence claiming that one of the 9/11 planners, Mohammad Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague just months before the attacks. This report turned out to be incorrect, but both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to tout it publicly months after Czech president Vaclav Havel had personally called Bush to tell him that the report could not be substantiated (“Prague Discounts an Iraqi Meeting,” NYT).

The justification for war in Iraq rested on intelligence reports that made Iraq appear to be a far greater threat than it actually was. The Bush Administration used these reports to argue for a preemptive invasion of a country that had not attacked the United States. Bush and other senior administration officials argued that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and planned to use them against the US, though subsequent reporting has made clear that this wasn’t true, and senior administration officials including Bush knew it likely wasn’t true when they said it. Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, nor did he maintain a relationship with Al-Qaida. Writing for Mother Jones in 2023, reporter David Corn notes that the Bush White House selectively emphasized intelligence reports suggesting a possible WMD program and ignored the far greater number of reports that indicated otherwise: “[They] were cherry-picking—choosing bad intelligence over good—and not sharing with the public the better information that undermined their ultimate objective” (“The Iraq Invasion 20 Years Later,” Mother Jones). Chance reflects these criticisms when he refers to the administration’s justifications for the invasion of Iraq as “crap.” He doesn’t believe the government is telling the truth.

As a part of the War on Terror, the government passed the Patriot Act (2001), making it easier for the president to strike suspected terrorist targets and creating a vast network of spying and surveillance. Chance highlights the paranoid atmosphere when he tells Melissa, “I’m not paranoid, Melissa. I just don’t like being spied on” (89). Chance has reasons for his paranoia—he has an illicit job. Chance’s dad sticks up for their rights when he refuses to let the police search Tiny Dancer without a warrant. Chance’s dad says, “I told them that this was America and that they could go to hell” (142).

In The Dark Side (2008), the journalist Jane Meyer details how American officials routinely abducted suspected terrorists in other countries. They took them to concealed locations (“black sites”) where they were often subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture—practices that the administration euphemistically termed “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The War on Terror led to violations of civil liberties and human rights both at home and abroad, perpetuated the cycle of violence, and in some ways made the world a more dangerous and suspicious place. As Chance becomes a part of a terrorist plot, he experiences the increased peril first-hand.