How
to Wage War the American Way
Malathi de Alwis
Located in
Sri Lanka, which has been in the throes of a civil war for the
past twenty years, I have found it particularly instructive to
observe how a superpower such as the US, wages war. In this essay,
I would like to explore certain visual and linguistic strategies,
adopted by the US military establishment and the media, which
I wish to argue have been crucial for the perpetuation of the
war industry in the US.
“Images are not just representations
but weapons of war”, Tim Mitchell noted recently (2001: 21). We
are familiar with tales of how Athena used Medusa’s head on her
shield to paralyse the enemy; combatants in modern wars have surpassed
her ingenuity a thousand fold to produce what Mitchell aptly calls
the ‘Military Entertainment Complex.’ One must not forget that
photography, cinema and television –the very media technologies
that create and circulate spectacular images of war—were first
developed in conjunction with media technologies of actual warfare:
radar, sonar, surveillance photography, rapid-fire weapons, smart
bombs, electronic battlefields (Virilio quoted in Ibid). Indeed,
we live in a ‘mediasphere’ (newspapers, radio, TV, internet) today
which is capable of circulating images of trauma throughout “a
global nervous system”, either within minutes of it taking place
or ‘live’.
In this sense, the visual record of a war, notes
Judith Butler is no longer a reflection on the war, “but
the enactment of its phantasmatic structure, indeed, part of the
very means by which it is socially constituted and maintained
as a war” (1992: 11). The smart bomb, first introduced to a global
audience during the attack of Iraq in “Operation Desert Storm”
is a particularly fine and terrifying example of this aspect as
it not only records its target as it hones in on it in order to
destroy it but the film it relays can be fed to our television
screens constituting the television screen and its viewer as extensions
of the bomb itself. “[B]y viewing, we are bombing, identified
with both bomber and bomb,…and yet securely wedged in the couch
in one’s own living room” (Ibid). However, since the bomb’s screen
is destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, this
becomes a recording of a thoroughly destructive act which never
records that destructiveness thus effecting a “phantasmatic distinction
between the hit and its consequences” (Ibid). By framing-out the
blood, the annihilation, the possibility of a reverse strike,
the smart bomb “systematically derealizes” (Ibid: 12).
Butler uses the enactments of the smart bomb as analogous
to the operations of the “demigod of a U.S. military subject ”who
euphorically enacts the fantasy that it can achieve its aims with
ease without understanding that his/her actions “have produced
effects that will far exceed its phantasmatic purview” (Ibid).
In an eloquent and prescient passage she noted in 1992: “The effects
of its actions have already inaugurated violence in places and
in ways that it not only could not foresee but will be unable
ultimately to contain, effects which will produce a massive and
violent contestations of the
Western subject’s phantasmatic self-construction” (Ibid).
In the following sections, I would like to briefly
explore some images and metaphors which were mobilised during
“Operation Desert Storm” and “Operation Enduring Freedom” and
attempt to understand how they enable the continued re-iteration
of such a phantasmatic purview and systematic derealization.
I
By harnessing imagery that is part of
our everyday discourse, in a situation of war, all those participating
in these discourses can
more easily distance themselves from the bloody realities of it.
For
example, we are all familiar with the metaphor of the “theatre”,
that wonderfully sterile and sanitized operating room where scientific
Reason holds sway, or that equally wonderfully cultured and cultivated
space where we go for our entertainment. The major players in
the “theatres” of Iraq and Afghanistan were the Americans and
their ‘allies’. Whatever was orchestrated here was done according
to a Master plan unfolded in unison with American needs and on
an American schedule
[1] . Along with the sanitized metaphor of the
operating theatre, we kept hearing and seeing demonstrations of
the “clean”, “absolute accuracy” and “surgical precision” of the
latest laser guided ‘smart bombs’ and tomahawk cruise missiles
that could locate and descend elevator shafts or cave networks
within granite mountains.
Along the vein of entertainment, we
also had the movie metaphor, the video game metaphor and the even
more powerful sporting metaphor. With old war movies and “Westerns”
saturating TV, the U.S. Marines began the ground war in Iraq by
storming “Indian” country at “High Noon”. Bomber pilots referred
to ‘the enemy’ as “blips on their radar screens”, one of them
noting, “I don’t want to know my enemy, I just want to make that
blip go away” (quoted in the Reader 2/1/91). Triumphant
pilots claimed “scoring touchdowns” after bombing missions while
Norman Scwartzkopf, the hero of Operation Desert Storm, proudly
noted: “Our team came to play ball” (NYT 3/27/91). A Vietnam
Vet sorrowfully confided to me that during the 24 hour coverage
of the attack of Iraq, people in his neighbourhood would switch
the TV set on and off to “check the score” and to see whether
“we [the U.S.] were still winning”.
Then again, the war was an aggressive
business “venture”. You used all your “assets” to neutralize
the enemies’ “assets” and soldier after soldier kept reminding
us that there was a “job” to be done and that they were there
to do it. The war was also an especially wonderful opportunity
for the Weapons Industries both to advertise and test their goods.
As Kiren Chaudhry pointed out, the Defence Department was delighted
because finally “all these strange and very expensive weapons
systems got to be tested ...The whole question of who they [were]
working against [was] moved off the agenda” (The Reader
2/1/91). On the basis of the “fine performance” of the patriot
missile (which was used for the first time in the Gulf war), George
Bush Sr proposed a 1.6 billion increase for the Star Wars anti-missile
program (Chicago Tribune 2/4/91). And though George Bush
Jr noted that America would know better than to aim a “2 billion
cruise missile at a $10 empty tent” or “up a camel’s arse” (as
the BBC first reported it), he also succeeded in getting the Democrats
in Congress to support his ridiculous ‘missile shield’ programme
in preparation for waging war against Afghanistan.
However, the
most sickening imagery that was mobilised was the invocations
of holiday celebrations that are supposedly so sacred within the
American family. When describing the first air attack on Baghdad,
John Holliman of CNN enthused that it was “like the fireworks
finale on the Fourth of July at the base of the Washington Monument”
(NYT 1/17/91). TIME magazine reported “cool young pilots”
returning from bombing sorties noting that Baghdad was “lit up
like a Christmas tree” (1/28/91).
Military discourses have especially
developed these distancing mechanisms into a fine art. Take for
example those wonderful euphemising acronyms such as KIA (killed
in action), WIA (wounded in action) and MIA (missing in action).
In these past two wars, troops succumbed to “friendly fire”,
civilian deaths were referred to as "collateral damage"
while weapons were humanized through names such as “Patriots”,
“Apaches”, and “Smart” bombs.
Such linguistic frills conveniently
allow one to skate upon the 'rational' and de-humanized surface
of abstractions and euphemisms without having to face up to the
reality that is hidden beneath these words. Carol Cohn's analysis
of the rhetoric of defense intellectuals refers to this type of
language as "technostrategic." As she insightfully points
out, such language only articulates the perspective of the users
of these weapons and not that of the victims (1987: 690 &
706).
II
In the above section, I discussed how
a ‘phantasmatic purview’ was constituted by placing out of the
frame, of erasing, of papering over, the bloody realities of war.
However, also integral to the constitution of such a purview
is the “seamless realization of intention through an instrumental
action”(Butler 1992: 10. We thus return to Butler’s “masculinized
Western subject”, the “demigod of a U.S. military subject” whose
will “immediately translates into a deed, whose utterance or order
materializes in an action …and whose obliterating power at once
confirms the impenetrable contours of its own subjecthood” (Ibid).
This was typified in some measure, she notes, by the looming heads
of retired generals framed against a map of the Middle East (during
the Gulf War), “where the speaking head of this subject is shown
to be the same size, or larger, than the area it seeks to dominate.
This is, in a sense, the graphics of the imperialist subject,
a visual allegory of the action itself” (Ibid).
During the war against Afghanistan, the imperial
subject was further conflated with a divine one. This was exemplified
in the original name for the war -- “Operation Infinite Justice”
(it was only changed after Muslim Americans protested and 3 Christian
clergymen warned that “infinite” presumed divinity, the “sin of
pride”, Petchesky 2001: 5) and continues to be re-iterated through
George Bush Jr’s “Axes of Evil” pronouncements. It was also embraced
by media services in the US who took it upon themselves to censor
the ‘evil’ and ‘biased’ footage broadcast by the Arab news service,
Al Jazeera.
This image of the autonomous masculine
Western subject who determines his world unilaterally is of course
constituted through a series of exclusions, differentiations and
repressions which are subsequently concealed and covered over
by what Butler describes as “the effect of autonomy” (Butler
1992: 12). In Butler’s formulation, the autonomous subject can
maintain the illusion of its autonomy “ insofar as it covers over
the break out of which it is constituted” (Ibid). This constitutive
outside, she notes, is a “domain of abjected alterity” which is
conventionally associated with the feminine, but not exclusively
(Ibid). In both recent wars, “the Arab” figured prominently as
America’s abjected other –(1) de-humanized, (2) emasculated and
(3) feminized.
(1) Holly Sklar reported
in Z Magazine how a U.S. pilot described bombing
Iraqi tanks along the Kuwaiti border: “It’s almost like you flipped
on the light in the kitchen late at night and the cockroaches
started scurrying, and we’re killing them” (1991: 60).
(2) Both Michael Bronski (1991) and
Judith Butler (1992) have commented on the abundance of bad jokes
which were premised on the linguistic sliding from Saddam to Sodom.
A similar word play on bin Laden produced another set of jokes
ending with the punch line: “Oh Sam, a bin laid” (the Sam here
being Uncle Sam, of course). Similarly, while “penetrating” Baghdad
with American missiles was normal and manly, Iraqi missiles “molested”
Israel and “sodomized” Kuwait through “rape” and Taleban soldiers
were derisively described as “always running away and hiding”
without coming out into the open and fighting like “proper men”
(US Marines reported in the NYT).
(3) After Saddam Hussein vowed to fight the “mother
of all battles”, Chief Warrant Officer Jim Keesee of the 82nd
Airborne came up with the rebuttal: “Tell him Dad’s coming to
kick Mom’s butt (quoted in Ms., March/April 1991: 87) U.S.
bullets fashioned from depleted uranium “penetrated” the “armored
plates” of the Iraqi tanks, detonated “on contact”, “squirting
a jet of molten metal through the armor” (TIME 2/25/91).
Ironically,
certain feminist critiques of Arab and Afghan patriarchyhelped
to further consolidate this image of the abjected other who is
understood to be radically ‘outside’ the universal structures
of reason, civility and democracy (Butler 1992: 7). This was particularly
evident during the Afghan War when the US produced itself as the
saviour of oppressed Afghan Women, a re-iteration of the colonial
agenda now made famous by Gayatri Spivak’s pithy formulation of
“white men saving brown women from brown men”! [2]
Such moralizing and reformist discourses which are supposedly
premised upon ‘universals’ merely set up their “own authorial
subjects as the implicit referent, i.e., the yardstick by which
to encode and represent cultural Others” (Mohanty 1985: 336).
Suggesting
that Saudi Arabian, Iraqi and Afghan women were more oppressed
than American women merely sought to quantify oppression and define
women only in terms of their object status For example, Ros Petchesky
points to the hypocrisy of the US military establishment which
is willing to send single mothers (who signed up for the National
Guard when welfare ended) to fight and die in its ‘holy war’ in
Afghanistan or refuses accountability before an International
Criminal Court for the acts of rape and sexual assault committed
by its soldiers stationed across the globe (2001: 9). “Masculinism
and misogyny”, she wisely observes, “take many forms, not always
the most visible” (Ibid).
III
One of the most visible markers of post-9/11 America
is the proliferation of American flags in both public and private
spaces. The unfurling of the American flag, remarks Tim Mitchell,
is almost a reflex of the US war of images. While noting its curative
powers in providing a collective, social meaning to trauma, Mitchell
also warns of the danger of “mobilizing national energies and
passions” (especially when there is no determinate enemy, i.e.,
when ‘terror’ is the enemy) so that it becomes “as much a part
of the illness as it is part of the cure” (2001: 22).
The deeper trauma mediated by the flag, further notes
Mitchell, “is its immediate appropriation by the state and the
ruling political party in the U.S. The flag becomes a rallying
point for the silencing of dissent and criticism in the name of
national unity” (Ibid). Indeed, jobs have been lost, careers derailed,
families harassed, characters assassinated and lives lost because
of assumptions that certain individuals were not adequately rallying
around the American flag. In fact, one of my most horrifying memories
of the Gulf War, as it unfolded upon my TV screen, was Dan Rather’s
delighted exclamation on first seeing the bombing of Baghdad:
“and now we see the star spangled sky of Baghdad”.
The US flag is an apt yet also disturbing image with
which to end this essay At this point in time, it seems to symbolize
a future New World Order in which “it will certainly be used as
a veil to shield [American] eyes from the reality of [America’s]
situation –not just the devastation in Afghanistan but the entire
history of U.S. foreign policy and [America’s] refusal to learn
from mistakes” (Mitchell 2001: 22).
***************
Works Cited
Bronski, Michael.
1991. “War Culture” in Z Magazine, March 1991.
Butler,
Judith. 1992. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question
of ‘Postmodernism’” in Feminists Theorize the Political,
eds. Judith Butler and Joan Scott. New York/London: Routledge.
Cohn, Carol.
1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals”
in Signs 12 (4).
Hartsock, Nancy.
1982. “Prologue to a Feminist Critique of War and Politics” inWomen’s
Views of the Political World of Men. Ed. Judith Stiehm. NY:
Transnational Publishers.
Lloyd, Genevieve.
1986. “Selfhood, War and Masculinity” in Feminist Challenges.
Eds. Carole Pateman & Elizabeth Gross.
Mitchell, W.J.T.
2001. “The War of Images” in University of Chicago Magazine,
December 2001.
Mohanty, Chandra
Talpade. 1985. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses” in Boundary 2.
Petchesky,
Rosalind. 2001. Phantom Towers: Feminist Reflections on the
battle between global capitalism and fundamentalist terrorism.
Unpublished mss.
Sklar, Holly.
1991. “Buried Stories from Media Gulf” in Z Magazine,
March 1991.
Spivak, Gayatri
Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture eds. Judith Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Spretnak, Charlene.
1989. “Naming the Cultural Forces that Push Us Toward War” in
Exposing Nuclear Phallacies. Ed., Diana Russell. NY: Pergamon.
Strange, Penny.
1989. “It’ll Make a Man of You: A Feminist View of the Arms Race”
in Exposing Nuclear Phallacies. Ed., Diana Russell. NY:
Pergamon.
Senior
Research Fellow, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo
Visiting
Professor of Anthropology, New School University, New
York.
This
Paper was presented at the Panel on “Power of Image and Global
Hegemony of the US” ICA
Pre-Conference Symposium, Tokyo July 11-12th 2002.
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