This was one of the very first high-quality pieces of writing that I did in my life. I wrote it during the first two weeks of the Gulf War in 1991. I was living in New York City at the time. I tried to balance the perspectives of Chomsky and Baudrillard/Virilio. The essay was originally published by Robert Roth and Arnie Sachar in their small literary journal And Then. I mourn the death of Arnie Sachar, a passionate anarchist-existentialist intellectual in the tradition of Paul Goodman. Arnie died in 2009. I knew him in New York in the late 1970s.
The anti-war protest movement will paint itself into a corner if it depicts its goal exclusively as the demand to the government to withdraw armed forces from the Persian Gulf. Instead of trying to recycle the anti-Vietnam War movement, let us face that the movement of that time did not go far enough in that it did not sufficiently articulate a cri tique of a society and foreign policy bent on militarism as a solution. The mark of that movement’s inadequacy was not that it failed to end the Indochina War, but that it failed to establish any significant intellectual or political current in its wake to affirm the alternative values that found some expression in the sixties. It is fortunate that Saddam Hussein’s fascist-like regime can inspire no sympathy like that which many felt for Hanoi and the NLF during that era. Although the United States atrocities in Vietnam made that sympathy somewhat comprehensible, seduction into the Hollywood game of “good guys” and ‘bad guys” distracted from understanding the realities of all the mortifying political systems which the twentieth century has spawned. Instead of becoming enmeshed in debate about the merits of war against the “pure evil” Saddam Hussein, let us see the present situation as an opportunity to examine the priorities of institutions and ways of thinking which lead our culture to the fascination and practice of war.
Since at least the beginning of the Reagan years, the U.S. political system has become increasingly akin to the Soviet model of channeling immense resources into the military establishment, and concomitantly engaging in the under-development of civilian society. What must be addressed is the obsession with slick and abstract projections of power beyond our frontiers while the actual conditions of life for most non-elites within U.S. society continue to deteriorate.
Newspapers, television, the government, and the Pentagon all try to play down the euphoria which occurred on the very first night of the Persian Gulf War, but those few hours of propagandistic non-reality actually happened, and it is worthwhile to analyze them. Shortly before 7 PM on the evening of January 16, 1991 (January 17, early AM, in the Gulf), Network nightly news viewers were informed that heavy bombing of strategic targets inside Iraq had been initiated. At 9 PM, President Bush enthusiastically told the viewing audience that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.” Pentagon spokespersons explained that massive pinpoint strikes by high-tech planes against carefully selected military sites and command headquarters had caught the Iraqis entirely off guard. Reports of great suc cess came in. The nation rejoiced. In a way, it was an expression of relief that, after weeks of tense waiting, the action had finally started. But, in another sense, it was our grand cel ebration. We feted our triumph in the Cold War. The glamorous high-tech weapons, developed and paid for over years, could finally be used in the real thing, and the Soviets were nowhere in sight. We were back. After the wrenching stalemate of Vietnam, we could finally start again. It was magnificently simple. On that one night, the war had, in effect, begun and ended at the same time. The enemy was an inert physical installation, a blip on a radar screen to be methodically darkened. It was as if there was no one alive out there and we could fire at will. As in the preludes of Grenada, Libya, and Panama, our economic and technological superiority could be systematically applied, and neatly trans lated into swift and exultant action.
People actually went around the next day saying that we had completely surprised the Iraqis. It was a nice illustration of how people can believe anything that the mass media tells them. That the Iraqis had months to prepare a strategy, that they were known to have immense arsenals, that the night of the l6th was one of the most likely times for the initial attack to occur – all this counted for little in the willful denial of common sense. The moment was too blissful to be interfered with by reality.
Later it was discovered that only a tiny fraction of the Iraqi Air Force had been destroyed, that Hussein had most of his airplanes hidden in camouflaged concrete bunkers with fortified doors, or had scattered them to several airbases in the north of Iraq. There were reports that U.S. aircraft were bombing pieces of cardboard and fiber glass painted as decoys to look like missiles and missile launchers. It was said that the Iraqi military were astute students of the Soviet military doctrine of sitting back and wait ing, and then striking later, when faced with an adversary of superior strength.
The military gains of the “massive pinpoint bombing” of that first night were minimal. But military gain had not been its purpose. Its purpose had been political – or rather propagandistic in the classic Orwellian sense. “We have reason to believe that Saddam Hussein’s military capability has already been disabled,” we were told. Public opin ion, yearning for a quick and decisive war, fell into line behind President Bush.
The real war news are the exploits of technology, be it the precision of air strikes, the heroics of the Patriot anti-missile missile, or the global sophistication of the mass media in bringing us a real time war. What is more fascinating than the intelligent journey of the Tomahawk cruise missile, as it traverses sea, air, and land in a self-correcting and strobe-lit advance toward impact with an enemy target? The new “smart weapons” are computer-assisted, and they bring into focus our enchantment with software, with the automatic, yet highly complex, domain of the computer program.
We have moved in our imagination from hardware to software, from the savage and mechanic immediacy of face-to-face combat to the aesthetic of controlled destruction. This tendency towards automatic and self-guided weapons systems was already apparent in the Cold War. Missiles carrying nuclear warheads were programmed to launch auto matically towards key Soviet targets as soon as it was detected that a similar strike had been initiated towards the United States. This way, should the President have already been killed in an attack on Washington, retaliatory strikes could proceed without human intervention. This image of automatic nuclear weapons simultaneously heading towards their targets in adversarial countries is one where there is no longer any conceptual dif ference between “offensive” and “defensive” actions, nor is there any sense of war having actually been declared.
Unfortunately, this tendency towards automatic war appears to have spilled over into the procedures which lead to the initialization of war. By setting a deadline of a certain date by which the adversary must undertake Action A, or else war will be initiated as con sequence, the dynamic takes on the quality of objective inevitability independent of human actions. Politics and negotiation are eliminated from the scene, as the war machine appends the war declaration machine to its arsenal. The one political body (the U.S. Congress) with the actual authority to declare war was reduced to the comic role of carefully situating itself (for public relations purposes) in a position where it could not be determined by anyone whether it had declared war or not. This is different from Vietnam. At least in that case we knew that they had not.
The Bush Administration enveloped its refusal to negotiate or compromise in high moral principles and posturing. The Iraqis had committed aggression against a neighboring state and had broken international law. Since this was a “rare, transforming moment of history” (James Baker, Secretary of State), high principles could not be compromised, nor could aggression be rewarded.
But, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, United States foreign policy has never opposed international aggression per se,only when it interferes with U.S. interests and objectives.1 Since World War II, U.S. foreign policy has been perfectly consistent on this point. Our government did little or nothing to oppose the South African occupation of Namibia, the Turkish invasion of Northern Cyprus, the Moroccan invasion of the Western Sahara, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, nor the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, to cite only some of the examples which Chomsky explicates. We support or condemn aggres sion in a given case, depending upon whether or not it serves U.S. interests and goals.
Some observers have intimated that U.S. government policymakers do not know more about the sociological and historical realities of the Middle East than they did about those in Indochina when they plunged deeper into that debacle in the sixties. It is not their strong suit to base their actions on perceptions and analysis of the internal workings of other countries. They are more inclined, for example, to base the U.S.’s China policy on considerations of Realpolitikthan on that dictatorship’s repression of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.
If government policymakers had cared to pay attention to what was going on in Iraq over the last four decades, they would have been more attuned to the realities of Saddam Hussein’s regime. They would not have led the U.S. to support Iraq in the very bloody Iraq-Iran War, they would not have allowed Western companies to help build up his arsenal of ‘Total War’, and they would not be so surprised by some of the moves that he has made since the beginning of the current war. And this is not a matter of mere neglect or failure to hire some historians. U.S. foreign policy simply does not care about dictators until they cross us. As Chomsky so aptly puts it, Saddam Hussein was the same torturer, murderer, and gangster on August 2, 1990 that he had been on August 1, 1990. But on that fine day, he became Son of Hitler, whereas the day before he had only been a strange guy with a funny moustache.
Baathist ideas began to develop in Syria (one of the U.S.’s current “allies”) in 1943. The doctrine was brought to Iraq and the Iraqi Baath Party was organized in 1951. The Baathists took control of the Iraqi state for good in July, 1968, after having held power for nine months in 1963. In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president. The Baath system has been compared to Soviet Stalinism in its classical form: a highly organized bureaucratic state coupled with the personality cult of a single leader; relentless terror, purges, and secret police inspiring generalized fear in the population, a political theology which justi fies all the atrocities in the name of a higher good or teleological historical direction.2 In the case of Stalinism, the theology was, obviously, Communism, and in the case of the Baath, it is pan-Arabism, a doctrine that posits the existence of a single Arab nation, and calls for the construction of a single Arab state. Pan-Arabism is related to a pervasive anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist rhetoric. As with Stalinism, the Baath invent their own enemies, and then root them out. The body politic is the “people” and the Revolution which has been made in their name. Dissent and difference must be attacked as antigens by the antibodies which protect the corporeal entity. In Iraq, anyone hostile to the regime and its ideals is excluded from citizenship and the legal system. This exclusion was the basis for the Baath’s genocidal policy against the large Kurdish population. The most sig nificant difference between Stalinism and Baathism is probably that the Iraqi Baathist state enjoyed much more success in integrating all of civilian society into itself. The cur rent leadership in Washington probably did not grasp the degree to which the Iraqi state is embedded in all levels and institutions of Iraqi society. In such a system, party organi zation is civilian society, and everything outside of it ceases to exist.
President Bush has labeled the Scud missile attacks on Israel, the brutalizing of captured POWs, and the oil dumping as terroristic “no military gain” actions. To label them as such is to fail to grasp Saddam Hussein’s conception of Total War, which is obviously different from the U.S.’s concept (to be explained below) of Pure War (although we tried to practice something likeTotal War in Vietnam). Total War is a prac tice rooted in violence and high ideals (state religion), ruthlessness and absolute serious ness of purpose.Total War was the impetus for the Iraqi attack on Iran in 1980. This attack led to an eight-year war in which close to half a million people were killed. This war was misrepresented in the Western press as a ‘border’ war, when it was really an all-out bloodbath impelled by the very ideology of the Iraqi regime as well as deep-seated histor ical conflict. It brought to the region such hideous developments as the ‘human wave strategy’ (already used in the Korean War). The United States and Western Europe ’tilted’ towards the Iraqis in this war (just as our government now shortsightedly assists anyone who joins it in opposing Iraq).
Total War, according to the Baath, is the struggle between the infinitely good and the infinitely bad. Total War affirms its power in the very exercise of cruelty and the effortless ness of violence. There is no tactic which is too unethical to be employed in pursuit of the deeper historical truth. The Bush Administration probably provoked the Iraqi leadership (a coterie of deadly serious men) by not taking them seriously. Bush’s final letter, which Foreign Minister Aziz refused to take to his president, had an aura of treating them like children who maybe ‘need to be reminded of what you’re up against’. The tone of high morality about international law (which began beforethe annexation of Kuwait) alienated them, and made them vow to make good on all of their nastiest promises.
The Bush Administration is characterized by an almost total lack of domestic agenda, combined with a search for a patriotic cause to unite the troubled nation. Bush is not even comfortable with Reagan’s agenda of dismantling Federal government activism and regulations, which fulfilled the decades-old goal of the conservative Republicans. Bush is most moved by an event like World War II, and it is to the imagery of that monumental conflict that he reaches back, beyond Vietnam and Korea, to find the scenario of a Pure Waragainst an unambiguously evil adversary.3 With a single magisterial stroke, Bush hopes to efface the haunting memory of Vietnam, deflect attention away from civilian society’s harrowing problems, incite the economy out of recession, and get himself re-elected.
As appealing as it may be to our collective psyche to re-enact the heyday of the anti fascist struggle, this ‘Pure War thing’ is straight out of George Orwell’s1984. In that mas terful novel of political satire, the citizens of a society of lies and multifarious internal problems are distracted from all of it by warfare with a hated enemy. Our version of Orwell’s ‘personality cult’ is the mythologizing of heroes and anti-heroes (fostered by a culture all but defined by its entertainment industry), which distracts us from the reality of the destruction of the country we are so proud of bombing.
Pure War is the model to which modern warfare must aspire in order to distinguish itself from the cataclysms of the twentieth century which have led many to conclude that war itself is immoral. Its features are the proclamation of ethical purity in the portrayal of a loathsome enemy, the claim that one is fighting a war in order to prevent future wars (Orwell: “War is Peace”), the separation of tactical logistics from the background and con text of the war, and the ecstatic allure of high-speed instruments of “destruction from a distance.” All post-World War II military technology (after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the construction of the H-bomb) is designed in reference to the fascination of the techno logical total solution. There is a kind of war when soldiers come tearing after each other’s flesh with pointed bayonets, and another kind of war when I push a button next to my desk and faceless people on the other side of the planet are liquidated. Pure War is the invisibility of the victims. The millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians who died in Southeast Asia are hardly mentioned in the same breath as the lament over the thousands of Americans who died.
Pure War is the thrill of the instant, the speed of the weapon’s deployment, the intelligence of the system, and the violence of the result (somehow, the rapidity of execution makes the violence less horrific by its having been done quickly). It is an activity beyond politics (overturning Clausewitz), with a distinct and definite set of rules (Saddam Hussein’s acts are terrorism because they are outside of these rules, whereas terrorism used to mean warlike acts committed in times of peace). Pure War has its own space. It is warfare as abstract essence, separated from its context and causes. It is an activity which entertains (like a good wrestling match, as a Saudi man-in-the-street observed), and an activity upon which we can speculate. The Financial Pages report that Wall Street investors are now on the hunt for a “pure war stock, one which will soar in direct relation to military progress in the Persian Gulf War.” Sunrise Medical Inc. is a manufacturer of crutches and custom wheelchairs for the physically disabled. Richard H. Chandler, the company’s chairman, takes pains to point out that his company wants to do its part to help out the war effort, and is not just interested in profit: “Our war wounded don’t have to experience the haunting images of Born on the Fourth of July, he says. “Just like high-tech weaponry is different than in Vietnam, you’ve also got high-tech products for the dis abled that can make a difference in the quality of life.” Was there ever a more “pure” pronouncement of how we go about convincing ourselves of the immaculateness of the war of the moment, and how it differs from some maligned and adulterated prior war?
It goes without saying that Pure War is also the machine of civilian society’s non development. Enumeration of the grave internal problems now facing U.S. society is beyond the scope of this essay. It is left to the reader to make his or her own list. It can also be surmised that, not only does the maintenance of a grotesquely large military budget make funds unavailable for the solving of critical social problems, but this neglect allows for the logic of war itself (agonistics, physical human concentration) to permeate the climate of these same problems. “War is at the horizon of every area of contemporary life.” (Virilio)
And let us not forget the Arabs and Muslims themselves, those people whom we seem unable to understand, like oil meeting water. Overlooking the political realities and human rights violations of the Iraqi Baath regime for decades was part of not asking the question of why such a brutal regime existed in the first place. What precisely did U.S. for eign policy (and Israeli policy) do all these years to promote constructive alternatives for indigent and disfranchised populations in the Middle East? What sort of desperation led these people to embrace such a pitiless system? For lack of having carefully thought through these questions in the past, we have now set about bombing a nation into sub mission. Might it not be that this deed will alienate multitudes of people in the region for decades into the future? Would we then have been correct in believing that this war is going to preventfuture wars?
It is now commonplace to say that President Bush made a mistake in leading the nation quickly into war (as opposed to giving economic sanctions more time to work or being more open to compromise), but that now that the war is under way, it must be sup ported. Saddam Hussein is a monstrously destructive force, and given the alternatives that reality offers, it is better that the allies win as quickly and decisively as possible rather than become mired in a stalemate which can only benefit the legend of Hussein the defiant pan-Arab hero. Proposals of a cease-fire or of the United States withdrawing from the conflict are dismissed as naive and embarrassing, or as disastrous for regional (and global) security. The only abiding debate (aside from the question of the use of ‘non-conventional’ weapons) concerns whether the goal of the war should be to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, or to remove Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party from power.
But these current truisms assume that politics is about identifying with the decision-making position of the powerful and elite. Most political discourse in the U.S. takes for granted the idea that we should clarify our politics by imaginatively putting ourselves in the shoes of national strategists choosing among the realistic policy options available at a specific juncture. It denies the responsibility and freedom of democratic citizens to take positions which articulate concerns transcending the choice of the day, and which relate to values and situations which are really their own. U.S. foreign policy in the Persian Gulf has for decades pursued a “what’s the best move now?”Realpolitikof destabilization, deal making, and abstruse winking and signaling. The weapons and oil industries have been the chief beneficiaries of this approach. If the time has finally come to pursue a saner course, it also means that we should not be deterred by the idea that there isno realistic chance of altering the government’s policyof the moment. Building a peace movement might educate us, not only to the fact that war is no solution for an already battered humanity, but to realize that democratic politics sometimes means not leaving everything up to the politicians and their institutions.
NOTES
1 – Noam Chomsky, “On U.S. Gulf Policy”, (Open Magazine Pamphlet Series: Westfield, N.J., 1990). See also Chomsky’s books At War With Asia: Essays on Indochina (New York: Pantheon, 1969); The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1983);Manufacturing Consent (with Edward Herrman), (New York: Pantheon, 1988); and Language and Politics (Boston: Black Rose, 1989).
2 – For a brilliant poliltical sociology of the Iraqi Baath system, see Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Inside Store of Saddam’s Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
3 – The term “pure war” is taken from Paul Virilio, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), although Virilio tends to use the terms “pure war” and “total war” interchangeably to describe the “archeology” of contemporary architecture, cinema, technology, and urban life. See also Bunker Archeologie (Paris, 1975) and L’espace critique (Paris: Bourgois, 1984).