[Reader-list] Iraq War Culture by Joe Lockard

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Readers,

Here is an excellent voice from within the United States talking about the 
"domestic" consequences of the war againts Iraq. This is the editorial 
statement of the latest (special Iraq issue) of 'Bad Subjects : Political 
Education for Everyday Life', written by Joe Lockard. I have always profited 
from looking at Bad Subjects, (http://eserver.org/bs/)and would recommend its 
excellent content to all on this list.

This issue (no 63) contains the following excellent articles, and each of 
these is available online from the Bad Subjects website.

Joe Lockard, issue editor
Iraq War Culture

Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Collective Suicide? 

Leslie Roberts 
When the Enemy Is Me

Dickie Wallace 
Defending the Homeland War:
A View from Croatia

David Manning 
A Tale of Two (or Three) Marches

Niaz Kasravi and A. Rafik Mohamed 
Freedom of Speech...Just Watch What You Say

Michelle Renee Matisons 
Saying Something:
Academia's Normalization of Crisis

Max Fraad-Wolff and Rick Wolff 
The Empire's War on Iraq

Debra Benita Shaw 
Making Starship Troopers

Arturo Aldama 
The 'Reality' Video Game of War:
Loose Reflections on the Invasion on Hope

Cynthia Fuchs 
The War Show

Babak Rahimi 
Social Death and War: US Media
Representations of Sacrifice in the Iraq War

Michael Hoffman 
War as a Sporting Event

Steven Rubio 
"War! Blog! Good Gawd, Y'all!
What Are They Good For?"

Jo Rittenhouse and Elisabeth Hurst 
Operation Iraqi Freedom:
Misdirection in Action

Nathan Snaza 
Reflections Toward Visibility

Binoy Kampmark 
Riddles of Disarmament:
Saddam and the Washington Sniper

Claire Norton 
Marines versus Fedayeen:
Interpretive Naming and Constructing the 'Other'

tobias c. van Veen 
Affective Tactics:
Intensifying a Politics of Perception

 
I am sure that readers will remember what Arundhati Roy said in her recent 
article in the Guardian on Iraq, (posted on to this list by Rana Dasgupta 
some days ago) -  "Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of 
American people on the streets of America's great cities - Washington, New 
York, Chicago, San Francisco...American citizens have a huge responsibility 
riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not 
only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our 
friends."

So here is something that I think tells us more about how the war is 
affecting our friends and allies in the United States.

cheers

Shuddha
____________________________________________________-
Iraq War Culture Joe Lockard 
Bad Subjects, Issue # 63, April 2003
http://eserver.org/bs/63/editors.html

Cutbacks and Repression
The US political landscape of the Iraq War is characterized by massive 
cutbacks in social expenditures, together with tax structures that underwrite 
capital accumulation by a narrow alliance of social allies. Corporate, 
military and government leadership have become an integrated, interlocking 
circle, one that promotes an ideological culture of the nation-state as the 
fundamental source of progress and power to consume. Yet this is a 
crisis-bound society in need of affirmations of its superiority. Since the 
inauguration of the Bush administration, the US economy has lost 2.1 million 
jobs. The US educational system is in the middle of financial crises 
generated by astonishing military expenditures, corporate welfare, and tax 
giveaways to the rich.

According to a January survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, 
US states had cut $49.1 billion in public services, health and welfare 
benefits, and education in their fiscal 2003 budgets, and were due to cut 
another $25.7 billion. That $74.8 billion in cutbacks represents 
significantly less than the Bush administration's initial $80 billion budget 
request for the Iraq War, with many billions of future supplementary requests 
certain to follow. This is a war that is quite literally being fought on the 
backs of schoolchildren and university students, the working poor, single 
mothers, hospital and home-care patients, and now-unemployed teachers, health 
workers, and other public employees.

Culture, conceived in the broadest sense as the social exegesis of mass 
phenomena, assembles, integrates and responds to these profound and rapid 
social developments. Iraq War culture is much more than its imagery of 
Homeland Security orange alert warnings, proliferating global protests, video 
shots of nighttime blasts in Baghdad, or the still image of a wounded Iraqi 
woman caught in cross-fire. This culture represents a revolving economy 
between violent imagery and US political hegemonism that reinforces itself 
through reference to the same violent imagery. As a culture, it is an 
accumulation of adverse phenomena at crisis point, a continuing social 
cross-fire created by capital making markets and un-making labor rights. It 
is the clearance of shared communities ? from villages in the occupied West 
Bank to cohesive but impoverished working-class neighborhoods in Cairo that 
send workers to the Gulf ? and labor migrations endured by peoples of color 
without alternatives, the unrecognized neo-slaveries that support 
contemporary economies. This is a culture of exhibitionist violence and 
invisible labor.

A key linkage exists here, because the Iraq War marks the emerging division 
between global domains where interventionist violence is visible and labor 
invisible, and those where violent intervention is invisible and elite labor 
visible. Iraq is the site of permissible imperial violence and majority un- 
or underemployment, whereas military violence is nominally impermissible in 
the United States and its economy responds either favorably or less so to the 
success of overseas violence. We have reached a new high tide mark in the 
consolidation of global economic inequalities and the compounding advantages 
of Western economies that can finance information-driven and superior war 
technologies. Such is the cultural hierarchy that information labor has 
produced. Iraq War culture is the cutting edge of American economic, military 
and information culture, with its techno-aesthetic and assertion of universal 
dominion under an ideological banner of Freedom Incarnate. The truly 
liberated class today is the mercenary migrants of state violence, the global 
warrior class that asserts its rights of mobility and occupational freedom, 
with digital video uplinks from the front lines to document its work product.

Simultaneously, at a domestic level in the United States ? one that can no 
longer be described accurately as domestic given its global integration ? a 
set of repressive legal enactments adopted in the name of national security 
have been establishing new models for international imitation. Where 
Britain's Emergency Regulations once established the legal mechanisms for 
colonialism in India, Hong Kong, Kenya, Palestine and other locales, in this 
still-new century the United States is framing the security legislation that 
is already being promulgated by other West-allied nations. If enacted, the 
Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 ? also known as the USA/Patriot Act 
II ? will radically alter constitutional legal protections, already in 
substantial decline since the first Patriot Act. Should John Ashcroft 
prevail, Fourth Amendment protections against domestic security surveillance 
will fade into a ghostly remnant, where surveillance would be conducted 
entirely at the Attorney General's discretion without judicial review. Secret 
warrantless searches would expand; nearly any private record would be subject 
to investigative demands; secret detentions would be permitted without 
criminal charge, and habeas corpus would be annulled by provisions to prevent 
such litigation and even forbid release of basic information about detainees; 
lawful residents could be deported without a hearing; and federal and state 
orders limiting police spying on community activists would be cancelled.

A new culture of systematic automated surveillance and Total Information 
Awareness has established itself, one that points to a vista of unending 
conflict as its self-justification. There is no particular note of social 
apocalypse here, only a gray statement of the rationales of perpetuation 
required in order to integrate an information economy with an economy that 
produces and exports violence, then must guard against its return. If this 
information culture attempts to transform the transactions that constitute 
social life into a security database, it treats absence of information as an 
identified object of suspicion. Non-integration into the global database 
signs either ungoverned or ungovernable; it signs the presence of an 
atavistic and potentially barbaric subject. The discipline of market control 
? and social cutbacks ? cannot be exerted where citizens remain unintegrated 
into the dominant information culture. To be outside control, whether as 
nation-state or citizen-subject, is to invite the discipline of information 
technology and its potential forms of destruction.

Iraq War culture is a culture that promotes the objectivity of a consensus of 
power. The test of cultural validity comes in its conformity with information 
power. When Iraq's minister of information, Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, looks 
into an al-Jazeera camera and speaks of crushing US forces, while 3rd 
Division tanks are moving at will through Baghdad, he occupies a paradoxical 
? and deeply antiquated ? position as a political fabulator whose rhetorical 
disinformation meets simultaneous disproof via live feeds from the same city. 
The minister is reduced to arguing that these are Associated Press rather 
than Arab-owned media feeds. It is as though the minister has been 
transplanted from the Nasserite rhetorical world of the late 1960s, part of a 
once-collapsed and now-revivified rhetorical bubble. Al-Sahaf's extraordinary 
denial of reality was in part a retreat into a fictional, could-be, and 
might-still-be world, a familiar reaction to the imminence of cultural 
defeat. Validity and falsity are now functions of transmissibility and 
integration into technological networks. The information flow that matters in 
Iraq today comes from US Army colonels in P3 Orion intelligence planes, 
riding electronic shotgun with laptops and streaming video, flying over their 
advancing columns. An incorporative disciplinary culture stretches today 
between the US and Iraq, one based on the absorption of unincorporated 
territory into the infosphere.Necrophilic Speech

The war occasions more than the war; it is a beginning of progressive 
regimentalization. It supplies rationales of repression, demands for the 
subordination of counter-argument, delimitations between permissible speech 
and silence that knows its place. War culture is speech in its own right, one 
that functions in rhetoric of demand and conquest. Yet the geist of attempted 
homogenization of opinion is unworkable home-front psy-ops, one that will 
fail because mass political opinion is chaotic in nature and hysterias are 
transitory phenomena. War culture, in all its efforts to heroicize and 
memorialize the dead, embraces state violence as the apogee of citizenship. 
Public speech responds to the demands of citizen-sacrifice.

Russ Castronovo argues in Necro Citizenship that "While US political culture 
revolves around intercourse with the dead ? from suicidal slaves to injured 
white male sexual subjects, and from passive female clairvoyants to generic 
though lifeless citizens ? the dead do not remain eternally estranged. No 
matter how enamored the state and its citizenry are of passive subjects, 
political necrophilia is also charged with an impossible desire to forget the 
dead." Iraq War culture expands the discourse of state-sanctified death, but 
that same vision of an ennobled battlefield requires symbols, codes and 
ideologies to mask its barbarism. Memorialization of the fallen-to-be 
proceeds before the fact and to dissent is to disgrace the memories of 
citizen-soldiers who have not yet died but must die. Speech that opposes 
unnecessary death is itself unnecessary, and political necrophilia waves its 
flags. But as Babak Rahimi points out, there is a collective shared 
experience of death that demands transformation through public rituals and 
ideological appropriation of citizen 'sacrifice.' "All of America is grateful 
for your sacrifice," George Bush tells Marines at Camp Lejeune, honoring the 
collaboration pact with civil suicide promoted by classes that remain alive 
to make speeches.

Where opposition to necrophilic citizenship was once limited to combatant 
nations, the last century's history has witnessed an ever-expanding 
international public assertion of entitlement to oppose state violence. 
Jurisdictional assertions have followed, entrained on that developing 
international consciousness, as the inauguration of the International 
Criminal Court evidences. Despite this development, the US invasion of Iraq, 
undertaken in defiance of world opinion, has been underwritten by State 
Department assertions of international legal exceptionalism for the US 
military and its actions. The American Empire is being underwritten by claims 
that a national willingness to promote and engage in a harmonization of 
collective necrophilia and destructive techno-worship entitles it to a higher 
standing in international citizenship. The transparent inadequacies of such 
US claims to national exceptionalism contribute both to immediate antagonism 
and to the continuation of global efforts to create and enforce preventative 
mechanisms based in international law.

In the world of opposition, Iraq War culture is the raw emotion of street 
demonstrations; of myriad coffeehouse discussions of energy-driven US 
imperialism and corporate colonialism; of popular intellectual 
counter-hegemonism in formation and yet-to-form; of experimental thought and 
democratic expression. Global contempt towards the US cites its transparent 
imperial interests, the hypocritical distance between its idealistic 
advocacies and barbaric means, and the transformation of a post-World War II 
model-nation (undeserved as this reputation may have been) into a 
twenty-first century Dirty Harry nation-state. Oppositional culture has found 
its anti-model, the sole remaining superpower operated as a fundamentalist 
Christian franchise licensee. In the days of its greatest success, US war 
culture has generated its greatest and most energetic opposition. Yet because 
'culture' cannot be understood in itself as immanent and self-explained, its 
originating political and historical frameworks intertwine themselves 
throughout that expression. Without this simultaneity of understandings, an 
opposition remains inadequate to its purposes. Sloganeering critiques of US 
war culture mirror the simplifications and hollow cultural 'knowledges' that 
enable US policymakers to model a world that will appreciate its heroic 
necrophilia.Anti-war Cultural Criticism

This special issue of Bad Subjects is born in political anger and the need to 
develop a critique. Like millions of others worldwide, many Bad Subjects 
editors have turned out for demonstrations and demanded international justice 
and peace. Most of those same millions demonstrated and marched with few 
illusions about either the nature of the Bush administration's plans or the 
Iraqi regime. Despite overwhelming opposition from international opinion and 
the refusal of the United Nations to sanction an Anglo-American imperial 
expedition, a twenty-first century version of Lord Kitchener's Nile campaign, 
the war proceeded, driven inexorably by the preemptive and militaristic 
unilateralism that has been brewing in right-wing US policy circles for a 
full generation and more. Prosecution of this war represents the defeat of 
international democracy, not the vision of Baghdad's liberation that emerges 
in the Napoleonic rhetoric voiced by George Bush.


The Gordon Memorial Service, September 4, 1898, held by military chaplains 
for British forces after the Battle of Omdurman and the capture of Khartoum. 
"Well, we have given them a good dusting," spoke Lord Kitchener as he looked 
out over a battlefield at Omdurman littered with over 10,000 enemy corpses 
killed by British Maxim guns.

Even as such aggression contravenes international law, it also constitutes a 
window of publishing opportunity for cultural politics, for that aggression 
emerges from US culture that desperately needs analysis. No one journal or 
special issue can pretend to offer more than a glimpse, a provocation, or a 
public rumination. To publish an emergency issue at this time is a collective 
re-assertion of the same democracy that has been abused by Iraq War culture; 
it speaks towards an alternative culture based on values of dialogue, reason, 
and repugnance towards militarism. In short, this issue affirms the global 
social justice that the Iraq War attempts to deny but cannot.

When Theodor Adorno wrote "Cultural criticism rejects the progressive 
integration of all aspects of consciousness within the apparatus of material 
production," he specified the task of cultural criticism in the contemporary 
US where the integration of global production functions to supply the means 
of empire and its military policing. Inasmuch as social justice begins with 
the framing of grievances and their rationales, cultural criticism is 
integral to anti-war politics in the Iraq War era. Criticism's function 
becomes to disassemble a consciousness based on what, in his excellent essay 
that opens this issue, Portuguese critic Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes 
as "a political logic [based] on the supposition of total power and 
knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives." de Sousa Santos 
argues that the Iraq War has its roots in the prevailing climate of 
neo-liberal globalization and that violent domination on behalf of the West 
is an endemic force of these politics. Adorno speaks here to a role for 
cultural criticism as a mobile force, as a resistance to immobilizing 
ideologies and pseudo-knowledges, as a discourse that floodlights intolerant 
antagonisms and privilege embedded within claims to an objective and 
non-ideological knowledge. Where there is a repressive surveillance and 
suppression of dissent, normalized as broad public agreement, cultural 
criticism has an irreplaceable function in developing critiques of that 
consciousness.Protest and Resistance Narratives

American cultural insularity is arguably a major contributing factor to the 
Iraq War, one that enables and animates a nationalistic mono-perspective. A 
counter-tradition, identifiable in American narrative since at least the 
eighteenth century, emphasizes the social enlightenment and 
self-understanding gained from distance. To be profoundly 'American' does not 
necessarily correspond with physical location within the United States.

Two US academics, Leslie Roberts and Dickie Wallace, contribute essays from 
New Zealand and Croatia respectively. As Roberts joins a peace march in 
Christchurch with her daughter, she discovers that, against her own desire, 
she wears the unwanted identity of 'enemy.' Wallace writes from the Croatian 
town of Knin where news of war crimes trials dating from the Yugoslav 
break-up form a paradoxical and very current backdrop against which to view 
news of the US invasion of Iraq. Both essays evidence the profound discomfort 
of US citizens abroad who are contemptuous of their government's 
international behavior and who need to voice their alienation. If US 
globalism represents an empire of privilege, it also creates a space from 
which its subjects can construct new civil visions from the outside, from 
places that are not America and better off for it.