War and the future: Iraq one year on.

Cooper, Simon

When the US administration first declared the possibility of a preemptive war in Iraq, ostensibly as a response to September 11, the pronouncement seemed both unbelievable and utterly consistent with a certain way of thinking. This dual response has remained as the war and occupation has unfolded. In a year we have moved from the triumphalism of a high-tech induced regime change and the spectacle of shock and awe, to the reality of a protracted conflict after 'the end of major hostilities'. The public case for the Iraq invasion, accepted by an overwhelming majority of the mainstream press at the time, has been revealed as illegitimate. The post-hoc humanitarian reasons for invasion and occupation have foundered after the Abu Ghraib revelations. And we now know that the United States has simply bought off and redeployed many sectors of the former Ba'athist regime. The handover of sovereignty has now installed a US-approved administration that changes little in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, many of whom simply wish the United States to leave. The possibility that Iraq might break up--that an independent Kurdistan, allied with Israel, might be declared by seizing Kirkuk and its surrounding oilfields--must also be entertained. Turkey, Syria and Iran would be drawn into this conflict, with devastating consequences for the entire region. (1)

If one had to find an overall theme that governed the war in Iraq, it would be the evasion of responsibility. We have high-tech weapons that distance aggressors from their actions; and we have the outsourcing and privatization of armies and gaolers able to avoid the Geneva convention. A war is being conducted in our name, yet our leaders deny any responsibility for the atrocities that have occurred. Even the ban on publicly displaying the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers suggests that the Coalition is unwilling to accept responsibility for their war. (2) Given that this orientation mirrors the distinctive way in which our sense of ethics is now constituted--via an intensive relation with image culture that both distances us and at times spectacularly involves us in the world--shouldn't we be asking just what it is that we are opposing?

Given that the Iraq venture has resulted in a protracted disaster it is easier for the anti-war movement to feel vindicated, but one has to be careful here. Have the wider assumptions behind the war been undermined, or is it simply that while the dysfunctional occupation represents a setback for US legitimacy, the assumptions that led to war remain intact?

We need only to reflect upon what has been made possible through the Iraq invasion: aggressive unilateralism; the weakening of international co-operation; a narrow conception of security based on order through military dominance; serious talk of the use of nuclear weapons; a lack of commitment to international human rights laws; while domestically, faith in the pronouncements of our leaders is at an all time low. The conditions are set in place for a kind of quasi-fascism. There is a disconnection between leaders who wield power and the populace, and a disturbing growth in cynicism and an alienated citizenry. There is also the cultivation of the worst kind of defensive patriotism based on the exclusion of others, the manufacture of fear, and a corresponding increase in the surveillance of populations.

The failure of the occupation in Iraq has not altered these conditions. Indeed the Iraq venture might be said to mark a transition from the neo-liberal globalization that dominated the 1990s to a geo-political and directly aggressive form of power, the imprint of US empire in the twenty-first century. (3) While the former period, however contradictorily, projected optimism and sense of renewal--renewal of international co-operation via institutions of the global market, or a renewal of society via 'Third Way' forms of association, shareholder capitalism and the like--the new empire brutally strips away illusions of renewal and begins to embed a new culture, defined by fear and insecurity.

The Abu Ghraib photographs reveal the ethical ambivalence that seems to now dominate contemporary culture, which is largely constructed though the image. The images of tortured prisoners reveal a nihilism at the core of the new empire, putting the lie to any talk of a 'civilizing mission' and a democratic project for the Middle East. The more we know about Abu Ghraib, the more we find evidence of a systematic torture campaign sanctioned from the very top of the US administration and passively acceded to by its allies. We discover that this torture has not simply inflicted physical pain but also a psychological terror, that is culturally specific--part home-grown abuse derived from an entrenched US prison culture and part Orientalism. We now know that the use of nakedness, sexual violation, female oppressors and female underwear as a means to assault the cultural identity of the victim had its genesis in a reading by the Bush Administration of Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind. (4) It is also a high-tech form of torture in that the victim's humiliation is recorded in front of them.

The ability of such images to condense our value judgements about the war (shock, disgust) often comes at the cost of extended analysis. Indeed as James Der Derian has pointed out, the sheer number and flow of media images now causes them to lose their aura of authenticity (contra the wisdom of Barthes) and they go the way of any other information, which is subject to manipulation and dismissal. Der Derian reminds us that the images of the Rodney King beating, even the images of the September 11 planes crashing into the WTC, were subjected to widespread forms of denial, for example, the failure to indict police officers in the former case and the growth of conspiracy theories, even a bestseller in France, in the latter. (5)

The context in which such abuse was allowed to occur is equally significant. It is now apparent that the United States has used a global network of prisons and interrogation facilities--in Egypt, Syria and Pakistan (not just Guantanamo Bay)--where suspected enemies have been handed over for interrogation and torture. The appalling human rights record of such countries allows the United States to avoid humanitarian scrutiny. (6) In a similar vein the US has made extensive use of private contractors to run interrogation centres. Again, this has allowed the US administration to avoid responsibility with respect to human rights laws. The outsourcing of incarceration that has occurred with domestic prisons and detention centres has simply been extended to the terror war being waged abroad. (7) The gradual collapse of any distinction between war and peace, a collapse evident in increased surveillance and 'state of emergency'-type legislation against civilian populations finds a natural counterpart in the use of private firms to conduct military interrogations and methods of incarceration.

Despite this, there are still many who believe that the Iraq venture can be redeemed. And not all of them belong to the neo-conservative camp. Perhaps most relevant, now that the reasons for invading Iraq have been invalidated, are the arguments of those we might call the 'liberal imperialists', which includes academics and journalists like Michael Ignatieff and Christopher Hitchens and the historian Niall Ferguson. (8) Whatever their differences, they all believe in the concept of a liberal empire--ushered in and maintained by the United States, with a degree of international approval. This is also likely to be the position of John Kerry if elected.

These commentators represent a serious challenge to the anti-war movement. Sophisticated, urbane, liberal, untainted by connections to corporate power or infected with religious fervour, they are capable of providing a considered rationale for the occupation. Essentially, they claim that the war on terror and the occupation in Iraq is a right course of action and that scandals like the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib are aberrations that can be rectified. Liberal imperialists such as Ignatieff argue that we now inhabit a 'world of terror in which only dirty hands can get the job done'.(9) From his point of view, it may be necessary to carry out assassinations, conduct wars, engage in aggressive regime change and so on, but this is the 'lesser evil' compared to the greater evil of a world provoked to extremes by further terror attacks. The war on terror can be carried out in a reasonable way, provided the principle of the open society is maintained. Thus for Ignatieff the war's potential for excess will be checked by 'public debate, mutual trust, open borders and constitutional restraints on executive power'. In this way the liberal empire can spread.

This may sound reasonable, but trying to reign in the war on terror and the excesses of the Iraq occupation by appealing to the principles of liberal democracies simply ignores the current settings of social life generally, which have moved well beyond liberalism. In much the same way that global capital cannot be civilized because it is crucially implicated in ushering in a new set of social and cultural arrangements that are fundamentally barbaric, so too the war or terror cannot be civilized by appealing to the principles of liberal openness: we are witnessing a fundamentally reconstitutive process, upon individuals, communities, and the very institutions of liberal governance.

To take one example: any call for more open processes of decision making runs counter to the erosion of truth-standards that plague current democracies. The erosion of truth in the war on terror (with respect to torture, WMDs, Iraq and al-Qaeda, the increasing/decreasing level of terrorism) extends beyond individual political opportunism or the wide-eyed incredulity of the mainstream media. Think of how neo-liberal forms of government necessarily lead to the break up of the public service as an autonomous institution. Think of the decline of journalism as an investigative practice due to a market-driven culture of immediacy. (10) The very institutions of liberal society that Ignatieff, Hitchens and others are so reliant upon have themselves been fragmented and corrupted. In advocating the new empire, liberal imperialists look back to the progressive consequences (such as the establishment of the rule of law) of previous empires--Roman and British in particular--while being unable to appreciate the degree to which US Empire today is simply power- rather than law-based. As Boyle notes, the United States is increasingly flouting international law, to the degree that it can be said to inhabit a state of 'international legal nihilism'. (11)

However, and irrespective of the above, the United States lacks the cultural make-up to invest in long-term Empire. The war on terror involves only a small segment of the population. One only need remember Bush's injunction after September 11 to US citizens to do their duty by shopping and spending to see the divorce between military action and the involvement of the US citizenry. On the one hand, historically the United States has been an inward-looking culture reluctant to acknowledge any role in foreign affairs. On the other, today's information society generates democracies that are largely based on a culture of the image and short-term expectations, and in doing so produces little of the long-term commitment needed to maintain an empire. A weakened democracy at home is unlikely to commit wholeheartedly to the maintenance of a new democracy elsewhere. If the 'positive' legacy of previous empires lay in the creation of industrial and technical infrastructure, it is unlikely that the United States is capable even of this, given the steady decline of its economy, its massive level of foreign debt and its parasitical relation to the physical assets of the globe.

Moreover, the idea that we could somehow maintain civil liberties and conduct an effective war against terror ignores the pervasive climate of insecurity now present. To be sure, this insecurity has been harnessed for political purposes: one only has to view the 'terror scale' to know that we are being cynically manipulated. (12) But we have to keep in mind that neo-liberal societies are themselves fundamentally insecure (witness the end of public health, of public education, of stable jobs and so on). The 'risk society' we now inhabit produces a climate that all too easily accommodates a fear of terror and transposes it onto a fear of the other, whether it is Islamic terrorists or refugees. In such a climate many civilians have seemed ready to accept massive increases in surveillance of themselves and the incarceration of foreigners. The strange parallels between the debasement of Christ in Mel Gibson's Passion and what went on at Abu Ghraib have been widely remarked upon; certainly a society in which so many seem willing to embrace a sustained cinematic destruction of their own Saviour seems unlikely to adopt that same Saviour's message of tolerance. The always difficult balance between civil liberties and surveillance, between reconstruction and oppression, is impossible in this new climate.

Of course, the whole question of any possible usefulness or the desirability of any empire is deeply problematic. Besides the historical disasters that have always resulted from imperialism and occupation, it is worth noting the social and cultural impact of the neo-liberal agenda--wholesale privatization, free-trade--which is clearly driving the reconstruction of Iraq. Putting aside the question of just who owns Iraq's assets, the 'shock and awe' economics that savaged so much of the former Soviet Union represent an even greater cultural shift for Iraqis to make. It calls upon them to remake their entire social formation: to form new kinds of subjectivity and to reject older forms of association and belonging. As Pieterse observes, the experiences of post-Soviet countries have revealed that 'if a one-party controlled economy is instantly opened up to unregulated capitalism, patronage networks rapidly turn into organized crime'. Furthermore, it simply 'doesn't work to first eliminate a country's social, political and cultural capital ... and then to count on people's "entrepreneurial spirit" to take over from scratch and create a middle class society'. (13) In essence, the move to force-feed democracy to Iraq enacts a culture war, analogous to the Abu Ghraib humiliations. Both fundamentally assault culturally embedded notions of Arab identity. Ultimately, those who propose a civilizing imperial mission as a lesser evil, regard the citizen of the 'failed state' with the same contempt as those who believe in the 'Axis of Evil'.

The option of 'staying the course' will further undermine all the stated reasons for going to war, but perhaps that does not matter. After all, the war is about a strategic appropriation of natural resources as much as anything else. Given the growing unrest in Saudi Arabia, and the fact that so many geo-political sites of importance (not simply oil but water, shipping lanes, trade routes and so on) are all located within the Islamic world, getting a minimum strategic control of Iraq remains vital to the United States and its allies, and they are likely to pursue any means to maintain such control. The control of strategic resources does not even necessarily depend upon a united or orderly state. Indeed some have read US policy as allowing for a kind of 'creative chaos' designed to undercut any larger project of nationalism. Hence, in this argument, the particular form of political representation instituted--that is, of ethnic and religious differences and emphatically not political parties--allows for the establishment of an ethnically divided state unable to unify.14Were this to be correct, it would indeed be a delicate balancing act, likely to be both unsuccessful and destructive, the entrenchment even of a culture of perpetual war.

On the domestic front, the growing unpopularity of the war, the increasing body count, and the moral disgust at the torture revelations, could actually lead to the opposite of a so-called 'liberal' war. The worst aspects of this war from an ethical standpoint might become entrenched: troops could be withdrawn as we moved toward an increase in high-tech military interventions--automated weapons, destruction at a distance, privatized regimes of gaoling and torture. It seems to be the case that the outsourcing of responsibility--technological, corporate and military--mirrors the growth of governmental powers that allow unprecedented degrees of civilian surveillance.

In a year we have moved from images of jubilant Iraqis in the streets to images of violated and tortured Iraqis in prison cells. Right now the United States is losing the war of images, and those of us opposed to the war might take some solace in that fact. But we need to think about the extent to which our sense of ethics and responsibility can be sustained in a world governed by high-technology, by weapons that divorce the aggressor from their violence, from images which condense our anxieties about the other, and more broadly, from a world where our lives are increasingly shaped by images and information. Perhaps this world grants us more freedom, but most certainly it makes us more insecure, more fearful and more amenable to the creation of authoritarian states. Ironically this is precisely the kind of world we are trying to foist upon the Iraqis, and other 'failed' states as well. This is worth pondering. In the event some kind of democracy is established in Iraq, we must ask: at what cost?

(1.) For more on this possibility see S. Hersh, 'Plan B: As June 30th Approaches, Israel Looks to the Kurds', New Yorker, 28 June 2004.

(2.) P. Jelenik, 'Senate Won't Overturn War Dead Media Ban', Associated Press, 22 June 2004.

(3.) For more on this transition see J. N. Pieterse, 'Neoliberal Empire', in Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 119-40, 2004.

(4.) R. Patai, The Arab Mind, New York, Scribner, c1983.

(5.) J. Der Derian, 'Moore or Less Morality', available at http://weekly.aham.org.eg/2004/697/cu5/htm.

(6.) See S. Grey, 'America's Gulag', New Statesman; 17 May 2004, vol. 17, pp. 22-4.

(7.) For more on this link between the privatization of domestic and international centres of detention, see T. Morton, 'The Detention Industry, Background Briefing, ABC radio, available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/.

(8.) Among their many works, see: M. Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2004; also Ignatieff, 'It's Time to Fight Dirty', The Age, 29 May 2004; N. Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, New York, Penguin, 2004; C. Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, New York, Plume/Penguin, 2003.

(9.) Ignatieff, 'It's Time to Fight Dirty'.

(10.) See J. Hinkson, 'Responsibility and Truth', Arena Journal, no. 21, 2003/4, pp. 3-4, for more on the structural erosion of truth-standards in Western democracies.

(11.) F. Boyle, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2002, cited in Pieterse.

(12.) The incidences of the ever shifting levels of 'terror' are many and varied but perhaps none so obvious as the inaccurate 'Patterns of Global Terrorism Report', released by the US State Department, which initially reported a dramatic drop in incidents of terror, only to be later revised to show that incidences of terror had in fact risen. See D. Eggen, 'Powell Calls Report a "Big Mistake"', Washington Post, 14 June 2004.

(13.) Pieterse, p. 133.

(14.) See L. Veracini, 'Interpreting a Settler-related Impulse in Today's Middle East', Arena Journal, no. 21, 2003/4, pp. 19-30.