----------------------------------------------------------- Ordering the New World: Violence and its Re/Presentation in the Gulf War and Beyond Simon Chesterman Magdalen College--Oxford University simon.chesterman@magdalen.oxford.ac.uk © 1998 Simon Chesterman. All rights reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------- Overture: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place Since this war was won in War is peace. advance, we will never know Freedom is slavery. what it would have been like Ignorance is had it existed. We will strength. never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of --Nineteen fighting would have been Eighty-Four like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like. We have seen what an ultra-modern process of electrocution is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of an experimental enemy away from the field of battle with no possibility of reaction. But this is not a war, any more than 10,000 tons of bombs per day is Be it thy course to sufficient to make it a war. busy giddy minds Any more than the direct With foreign transmission by CNN of real quarrels. time information is sufficient to authenticate a --Henry IV, Part 2 war. --Baudrillard (The Gulf War 61) 1. Less than two weeks before the American and British air attack on Baghdad and Iraqi positions in Kuwait in January 1991, Jean Baudrillard published an article in Libération entitled "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place" in which he wrote that this war would never happen.[1] 2. Baudrillard argued that war as a deterrent in the traditional sense had been internalised by the Western powers, producing a form of self-deterrence that left them incapable of realising their own power through the expressive medium of force. The unreal build-up, the asymptotic prelude that would allow a brush with war but no encounter, was symptomatic of hostilities in which it is the virtual that functions to deter the real event. In such a régime, all that is left is the simulacrum[2] of war: We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual. (27) 3. With the passage of war into the virtual, the potentiality of the Gulf Among the War was said to exist ultimately as a calamities of figment of mass-media simulation, war may be war-games rhetoric, or imaginary jointly scenarios. In no "real" sense could numbered the these virtual preparations manifest in diminution of war. Like the political leaders, the love of military personnel knew not what to truth by the make of their function of death and falsehoods destruction: "They are pledged to the which interest decoy of war as the others are to the dictates and decoy of power" (The Gulf War 28). credulity encourages. 4. Surely, as diverse critics pointed out, Baudrillard was directly contradicted --Samuel by the facts.[3] Surely the massive Johnson aerial bombardment of Iraqi military and civil infrastructure, the ensuing air and land assault, the "turkey shoot" (Freedman and Karsh 402-03)[4] of the retreating troops on the road to Basra which left in the order of 100,000 Iraqi casualties demonstrated that there had, in fact, been a war. Surely Baudrillard could not have been more wrong. 5. This paper takes Baudrillard's The surgical discussion of the Gulf War qua strikes non-event as the departure point for a against Iraq consideration of the presentation and engendered a representation of violence in the running sore post-Cold War era. I argue that which, though although the deployment of violence has contained, been transformed, as Baudrillard continues to argues, this (re)formation is be picked at meaningless absent a conception of the by a Western space violence occupies in the coalition hypothesis of international order. In resentful of this way, my interrogation of the face Saddam's of violence merges into a critique of failure to violence as such--a dynamic whose "play ball." relationship to order is at once The sterilised antagonistic and symbiotic. images of video war in 6. This critique has implications for the the Gulf were analysis of international relations, succeeded by but may also open up a more productive the orgiastic engagement between international fury of Bosnia relations and international law. In and its distinct ways, each discourse holds eroticisation statism as axiomatic--as the unitary of atrocity. locus of power and legitimacy And crisis in respectively. A critique of violence the Gulf has may provoke a doctrinal reassessment of given rise to the a priori equation of order and law a crisis of that presently legitimates the realist sorts in presumptions of international relations postmodern and forecloses an interrogation of the theory. theoretical bases of international law. ----------------------------------------------------------- The Clean War: A Just War or Just a Game? Was this a just war or just a game? For the winners, both: for the losers, neither. To suggest... that it could be both or neither simultaneously is to challenge the US effort to construct out of this war a new world order based on one truth, one winner, one loser.... [T]his cyberwar is the result of the US effort to fill and to delimit the new void left by the end of the Cold War, the end of the old order, the 'end of history'. While the architecture of the new world order may be built of simulations, its hegemonic effect will be all too real for those nation-states that have little to gain from it. (Der Derian 196-7) 7. The Gulf War was the archetypal [T]he brutal authorised expression of force designed aggression of to usher in a New World Order.[5] The Saddam Hussein logic of deterrence (Desert Shield) . . . . It's gave way to a righteous vengeance black and (Desert Storm) presaged and pursued by white. The a logic of representation that came to facts are define the 'war' itself. More than any clear. The other conflict in human history, this choice authorised bloodshed was scripted for unambiguous. consumption by a willing global Right vs audience. wrong. 8. The defining images of the Gulf War --George Bush, remain those viewed through the the morning cross-hairs of a smart bomb's targeting after (qtd. in system: the New World Order was to be Yant 54) established by precision violence that could follow street maps to a target By God, we've and enter an underground bunker through kicked the the front door (Freedman and Karsh Vietnam 312). It was a perverse postlude to the Syndrome once sepia-toned horror of the Second World and for all. War and the sprawling realism of Vietnam--a knowing prelude to the prime --George Bush, time marine landing in Somalia. the morning after (qtd. in [Image] Der Derian 9) Cokie Roberts (ABC): "You Gen Norman Schwarzkopf: "You see a building in a don't see me treating it sight--it looks more like like a game. And you didn't a video game than see me laughing and joking anything else. Is there while it was going on. There any sort of danger that are human lives being lost, we don't have any sense and at this stage of the of the horrors of game [sic] this is not a war--that it's all a time for frivolity on the game?" part of anybody." This Week with David Brinkley (qtd. in Der Derian 183) 9. But the 43-day Gulf War was "clean" only in terms of the images that constituted it. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney has stated that the U.S.-led international military assault was spearheaded by "the most successful air-campaign in the history of the world" (Middle East Watch 1). In terms of the coalition's strategic interests this claim is perhaps justified. Airborne superiority was quickly and easily established with more tonnage of Should we high explosive being dropped on Iraq consider during the first month of the conflict multiplying than was used the entire Second World clean wars in War (Gerbner 252). order to reduce the 10. The result was that coalition murderous casualties in the eventual ground war death toll of were low, with official figures listing peacetime? 240 dead and 776 wounded (U.S. Department of Defense 411). Of these, a --Baudrillard quarter of the American deaths and more (The Gulf War than half the British were caused by 69) "friendly fire" (Triumph Without Victory 373). If such deaths are subtracted from the total, there were more casualties in the war exercises leading up to "G-Day" (the beginning of the ground war) than during the war itself (Der Derian 196). As Baudrillard wryly points out, it seems probable that of the half a million American forces involved in seven months of operations in the Gulf, three times as many would have died in road accidents had they remained in civilian life (The Gulf War 69). 11. It is instructive that in a "war" characterised by its precision and detail, the only aspect of the conflict over which much serious doubt remains is the number of Iraqi forces and civilians who perished or were wounded. In his postwar briefing (quickly renamed by the wags in the press "the mother of all press briefings"), General Schwarzkopf told reporters that "there were a very, very large number of dead in these [front line combat] units, a very, very large number of dead" (qtd. in "The Persian Gulf War" A36). When pressed, the U.S. Central Command plucked the figure of 100,000 out of the air, with a margin of error of 50 per cent (Freedman and Karsh 408). While the Pentagon subsequently released exact numbers of Iraqi military hardware destroyed down to the last tank, the calculation of Iraqi casualties was said to remain "impossible" (Freedman and Karsh 408). When the three-volume, 1300-page official history of the Gulf War was published, it made no mention of Iraqi deaths and a draft chapter on casualties is reported to have been deleted (Baker 13).[6] 12. In the following sections, I consider We believe the implications of this successful that they transposition of images during the war, immorally a transposition that reduced public pervert perception of the conflict to a black images. Not and white morality play, enacted on a so. They alone two-dimensional representation of are conscious distant "other" lands (Link 55). of the profound ---------------------------------------- immorality of images. Burying the Dead --Baudrillard [F]ormer Secretary of Defense (The Gulf War Richard Cheney hid behind the law 47) when confronted with reports that United States and Saudi forces used combat earthmovers and tanks fitted with plows to bury alive thousands of Iraqi soldiers, asserting that such tactics were not illegal unless the Iraqi troops formally surrendered. (Normand and af Jochnick 387) 13. A central point of concern for the Pentagon during the Gulf War was what I have may be appropriately euphemised as absolutely no "necrology." The Pentagon's suppression idea what the of the "body count" was part of a Iraqi broader projection of the military as casualties possessing the technology to win war are, and I without killing, with minimal killing, tell you, if I or with visually innocuous killing have anything (Margot Norris 228-30). The ground to say about attack, which began with the it, we're unprecedented tactic of ploughing live never going to Iraqi soldiers into trenches in the get into the desert, provides a grim metaphor for body-count the results.[7] business. 14. The generally high approval of the Gulf --Gen. War seems clearly linked to the success Schwarzkopf of the military's censorship of its (NY times human cost (Margot Norris 231). article name, Apparently simple language games in the page) reportage of the war were seen to be disturbingly effective in blunting public sentiment for Iraqi civilian dead. An American poll found that only 21% of those polled were "very concerned" about the amount of "collateral damage" produced by the war. By contrast, 49% were "very concerned" about "the number of civilian casualties and other unintended damage" in Iraq (Rosenstiel A9). 15. Those dead whom the U.S. military did allow the press to see were often [Y]ou avoid placed in carefully scripted scenes. talking about The soldiers killed while retreating lives lost, from Kuwait City had been travelling in and that Iraq vehicles packed with serves both an loot--reporters obediently criminalised esthetic and a the dead as burglars, thieves, and practical thugs (Margot Norris 235). News reports purpose. of this, the major story of the ground war, gave as much space to inventories --Loren of the plundered goods as descriptions Thompson of the human carnage (Margot Norris (NYTimes 243).[8] article name, 10) 16. This muted representation--the war won without death--seems at odds with the Unlike the war essentially symbolic function of the in Vietnam, dead body in warfare, a material fact progress in that is needed to realise the discourse the Gulf war of military conquest: can be clearly measured as [T]he outcome of war has its the front substantiation not in an absolute lines move inability of the defeated to forward or contest the outcome but in a retreat, and process of perception that allows body count extreme attributes of the body to will fade into be translated into another the oblivion language, to be broken away from it so richly the body and relocated elsewhere deserves. at the very moment that the body itself is disowned.... The force --Col Harry of the material world is separated Summers, Jr from the fifty-seven thousand or (Ret) (A5, fifty million bodies and conferred A13) not only on issues and ideologies that have as a result of the first function been designated the winner, but also on the idea of winning itself. (Scarry 124) In this way, the corpse as sign has traditionally served to mediate between The gradual the perception and the reality of shrinking of winning. the destructive 17. In the Gulf War, the corpse was used in part of smart ever more subtle ways; the "veiled, bombs was not vague, but indisputable Iraqi dead done for served the substantiation of pure U.S. humanitarian power" (Margot Norris 239), but it was purposes. a power that lacked instrumentality Planners except in its own symbolic simply supererogation. The control over calculated violence was thus augmented by control that pound for over its representation; crucially, it pound, enabled a double victory that computers, demonstrated virtually unlimited U.S. sensors, and power to produce death, while escaping fuel were its political and moral consequences. often worth more to 18. This was the expiation of America's overall "Vietnam syndrome," a condition that effectiveness makes no sense without seeing Vietnam than blast as a defeat on both military and moral power. fronts. Herman and Chomsky describe earlier U.S. attempts to reconstruct --The New ideology and overcome "what Norman Republic Podhoretz, echoing Goebbels, calls 'the (Easterbrook sickly inhibitions against the use of 17-18) military force'" (Manufacturing Consent 236-37),[9] but it was the Gulf War It is the that "revived [the] self-confidence of unreality of Americans," who felt "relief and anywhere pride--relief at remarkably few U.S. outside the casualties and pride in the brilliant U.S., in the performance of the allied forces" eyes of its ("Gulf War, and Peace" A26). Chilling citizens, words in an editorial of the New York which must Times. frighten any foreigner. ---------------------------------------- Like an infant who has yet to Virtual War learn there are other The real warmongers are those who centres of live on the ideology of the self, this veracity of this war, while the culture sees war itself wreaks its havoc at others merely another level by trickery, as fodder for hyperreality, simulacra, and by its dreams and the entire mental strategy of nightmares. deterrence which is played out in the facts and in the images, in --The Guardian the anticipation of the real by (Williamson the virtual, of the event by 21) virtual time, and in the inexorable confusion of the two. All those who understand nothing of this involuntarily reinforce this halo of bluff which surrounds us. (Baudrillard, The Gulf War 67) [Image] 19. Gradually the images of the bombs more smart than their Iraqi targets blur into one another. 20. The ghostly green images of night-vision technology introduced a Manichean quality to the opening scenes of the attack (Der Derian 180). Similarly, the tracking cameras of smart bombs presented the war as a voyeuristic fantasy: a sick parody of "America's Funniest Home Video." But the more closely we examine the images of this "war," we realise that there is nothing but the image. And if we look closer still, the image itself begins to dissolve into pixels of light and dark--a pixelated/pixilated (literally "pixie-led") bastard child of the "mother of all wars." 21. What are the implications of taking Baudrillard's thesis seriously? 22. This is not, of course, to suggest that he should be taken literally. His One is argument is not that nothing took place reminded of in January and February 1991, but that Capricorn One, it was unlike any war that had gone in which the before, and that in a very real sense flight of a we are unable to verify precisely what manned rocket took place--direct transmission by CNN to Mars, which of real time information only took notwithstanding (Baudrillard, The Gulf place in a War 61). desert studio, was relayed 23. Thus far, his argument finds much live to all support. Chomsky, for example, also the television questions the use of the term "war" to stations in describe events, because "there never the world. was a war, at least, if the concept involves two sides in combat. That --Baudrillard didn't happen in the Gulf" (Deterring (The Gulf War Democracy 409).[10] Even official 61) reports ultimately acknowledged that the size of the Iraqi army had been overestimated,[11] and that the eventual battle was one-sided (Freedman and Karsh 407-9). 24. There is also widespread acknowledgment of the limitations of media reports at the time. In addition to the wealth of U.S. law review articles undertaking a First Amendment analysis of media access to the conflict[12] (an endearingly isolationist response), only the most devoted CNN correspondent would deny that military censorship and the concentration of sources distorted the information that was ultimately published.[13] This ranged from the strategic to the absurd. At one extreme, media reports of U.S. Marines on the Saudi border and on amphibious ships off the coast were part of a calculated (and effective) strategy to deceive Iraqi intelligence as to the likely direction of the attack (Taylor and Blackwell 234). At the other, the charade of media hegemony nearly collapsed in those moments when the CNN cameras crossed live to a group of reporters assembled "somewhere in the Gulf"--only to have them confess that they too were sitting around watching CNN to find out what was happening.[14] Other studies have detailed the use of propaganda in the conflict: a falsified eye-witness account of Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them to die;[15] uncritical CNN footage of a "bombed baby milk factory" that boasted a camouflaged roof, high-security fence, and armed guards (Rennie 17). 25. But Baudrillard goes much further than this. He argues that more than simply All political questioning the nature of this war and and the media's complicity in its ideological exposition, there is a need to speculations interrogate the very notion of truth fall under qua simulacrum itself. Assuming a mental position for or against the war denies deterrence inquiry into "the very probability of (stupidity). the war, its credibility or degree of By virtue of reality" (The Gulf War 67). Rather, it their is necessary to resist the probability immediate of the image (26-7, 66). consensus on the evidence 26. It is this argument that provoked a they feed the book-length response from Christopher unreality of Norris.[16] He argues that this war, they Baudrillard's essays constitute a reinforce its definitive exposure of the political bluff by their bankruptcy of postmodern scholarship unconscious and "the depth of ideological dupery. complicity that exists between such forms of extreme anti-realist or --Baudrillard irrationalist doctrine and the crisis (The Gulf War of moral and political nerve" that 67) presently afflicts Western intellectuals (27). Attacking the "frivolous" exercise of making the Gulf War into a pretext for arcane disputes about the "politics of theory," he links such theoretical exercises to a prevailing mood of "cynical acquiescence" that fails to contest the official version of events (29). 27. Norris's warnings as to the dangers of dissociating theory from praxis are, of course, important. But his reading of Baudrillard's scepticism as demonstrative of moral and political nihilism (194) assumes an opponent of straw. For the challenge that Baudrillard presents is not the rejection of political purchase, but a rigorous resistance to the acceptance of the virtual as or in place of the real: Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than events themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they come. Turn deterrence back against itself. Be meteorologically sensitive to stupidity. (Baudrillard, The Gulf War 66-67) 28. Norris reads this reference to "stupidity" as denying any "operative If Mattel difference between truth and falsehood, brought out a veridical knowledge and its semblance" doe-eyed doll (12), and precluding any form of called Iraqi ethico-political accountability that Baby, it could depends upon a notion of the "real" be guaranteed (194). Nevertheless, Baudrillard's to evoke pity. position is more properly seen as Meanwhile on denoting a profound and abiding the national suspicion of a "reality" whose primary news, shots of referent is the simulations of American birds caught war games. in 'Saddam's oil slick' 29. Moreover, the tone of Baudrillard's have been essays is far from equivocal. At times presented more his writing exhibits a very black poignantly reductio ad absurdum humour: So you say than the human this was a clean, minimalist war with victims of our little "collateral damage"? Why stop bombing. there--war? what war? (Patton 7). The prevailing tone is ironic, however. The --The Guardian logic of deterrence (the sustained (Williamson denial of the possibility of war) has 43)[17] come to supplant the actuality of war; violence can only take place as a It is not for sterilised simulation of itself.[18] In lack of an extended sexual metaphor, the brandishing military--which thrives on particular the threat of forms of male sexuality--is emasculated a chemical by its dependence on virtual war, a bloody pornography.[19] war, a world war--everyone 30. Baudrillard also appears to be aware of had their these criticisms. In stating, as he did say--as though just a few weeks before the UN deadline it were expired, that the proposed war would necessary to not take place, he acknowledged the give ourselves dangers of such an approach in a a fright, to postscriptum: maintain everyone in a To demonstrate the impossibility state of of war just at the moment when it erection for must take place, when the signs of fear of seeing its occurrence are accumulating, the flaccid is a stupid gamble. But it would member of war have been even more stupid not to fall down. seize the opportunity. This futile (Baudrillard, The Gulf War 28) masturbation was the 31. In pursuing such a "fatal strategy," delight of all Baudrillard plays upon his own belief the TVs. that writing should be less a representation of reality than its --Baudrillard transfiguration (Patton 6). He has (The Gulf War subsequently suggested that in time and 74) with a little imagination, it may be possible to read The Gulf War Did Not Take Place as if it were a science fiction novel (qtd. in Gane 203). 32. James Der Derian, by contrast, argues that such an approach may be more [A]rmchair effective than that presented by the strategists can modernist school of criticism. Der now fly over Derian states that theorists who the virtual attempted to construct a critical and battlefield. . . universal counter-memory were easily during any isolated as anti-American and moment of the dismissed as utopian (177). Adopting a battle. They poststructuralist approach to such can even change political encounters may well bring the with it the danger that no new parameters--give pragmatic basis for justice and truth the Iraqis will emerge. Nevertheless, he argues, infrared targeting ...better strategically to play scopes, for with apt critiques of the instance, which powerful new forces unleashed by they lacked at cyberwar than to hold positions the time. with antiquated tactics and nostalgic unities. (178) --Wired (Sterling 33. But just how new is this notion of a 95-96)[20] "cyberwar"? And what implications does it have today, now that the smart bombs are yesterday's toys and the rhetoric of the New World Order lies in the ruins of Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda? ----------------------------------------------------------- Virtual Order The first and most obvious lesson of the Gulf War to date is that technology works. --Naval Institute Proceedings (qtd. in Margot Norris 232) 34. Margot Norris considers the Gulf War-inspired thesis that "technology Buck Rogers or works" as inaugurating an Enlightenment Luke Skywalker fascination with the progressive would be at rationalism of smart weaponry. Coupled home in the with a corresponding apathy and Gulf War. disavowal of human suffering, she argues that death at the hands of such --Naval "modern" tools of destruction takes on Institute the pornographic contours of de Sade Proceedings (232).[21] (qtd. in Margot Norris 35. If the distinctive characteristics of 232) the Gulf War were (merely) improved killing capacity and public apathy, [M]odern war however, the only novel aspect would be is a cyborg the scale on which it was conducted. It orgy. is precisely this modernist conception of order through technology that has --Haraway (66) long dominated international relations theory. Among other things, it underpinned the arms race, plaything of the (ana)logic of game theory.[22] Similarly, the scientific use of propaganda has played a significant role in armed hostilities since at least the First World War.[23] 36. But it is the deeper critique in Baudrillard's analysis that isolates the peculiarities of the Gulf War as a "postmodern" conflict.[24] Here it is important to read his work in the context of an international system that had only recently passed from "dualistic (East and West) deterrence" (The Gulf War 84), and in which a pax Americana seemed to be a distinct possibility. The truth claim that Baudrillard contests is that which would posit the "war" as "the first consensual war, the first war conducted legally and globally with a view to putting an end to war" (The Gulf War 83).[25] In this light, far from being apolitical, his work can be read as a challenge to the view that the world can be reduced to the global common denominator of democracy, with the lowest common multiplier being information in all its forms: [I]n this electronic war there is no longer an enemy, there is only a refractory element which must be neutralised and consensualised. This is what the Americans seek to do, these missionary people bearing electroshocks which will shepherd everybody towards democracy. (The Gulf War 84) 37. This of course rails against conservative reactions to the end of This argument the Cold War, most notably the flies in the "unabashed victory of economic and face of the political liberalism" posited by shibboleth Francis Fukuyama in his "End of that America History" thesis (3).[26] In more cannot be the explicitly populist terms, the way "we world's won the Cold War"[27] has reinforced policeman what "we" knew all along: that Western [sic]. In domination of the world was truth, it must historically necessary and morally be more than justified.[28] that. A policeman gets 38. Unlike critics of the Left who attack his [sic] the political hegemony of the U.S.,[29] assignments however, Baudrillard's approach is to from higher focus on the informational hegemony authority, but that he sees as legitimating and to in the some extent making this political community of dominion inevitable. This approach in nations there particular casts a critical light on is no contemporary movements within authority international relations theory. Much of higher than the current literature on the present America. . . . "crisis" of theory in the discourse America is points to the intellectual poverty of akin to the realism and the precarious position of philosopher in the state as founding myth of Plato's international order.[30] Broadly parable of the speaking, these tend to focus on the cave. Only the globalising and fragmenting trends in man who has international relations that challenge achieved the position of the state as a unitary philosophic body whose territorial borders remain knowledge is as inviolable as the abstract notion of truly fit to sovereignty that legitimises them.[31] rule, said However, while these analyses are Plato, but instructive in so far as they open up having the discipline of international achieved it, relations to factors other than he will resist documenting the behaviour of states, being drawn they ultimately retain the perceptions back down to of order and power that tied realism to the mundane the level of diplomatic history, tasks of working within the modernist ruling. epistemology whose political manifestations they seek to --Muravchik challenge.[32] (1-2) 39. In this way, these approaches may be We may have compared to two other attempts to won the Cold "displace" the realist paradigm while War, which is explicitly working within the same nice--it's conceptual framework: Kenneth Waltz's more than "neorealist" structural theory of world nice, it's politics in the late 1970s[33] and wonderful. But Samuel Huntington's facile "Clash of this means Civilizations" thesis (Huntington 22). that now the What these approaches have in common is enemy is us, the assumption that the contemporary not them. problems faced by international relations are empirical rather than --Kristol (28) theoretical,[34] a trend that finds its epitome in the much-heralded arrival of neorealism as presenting a more "scientific" approach to politics--that is, an approach that is more "operationalizable."[35] In the case of neorealism, the answer was seen in increasing abstraction of the state as actor; in Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" it was the search for a definitive and static paradigm to end the uncertainty left by the post-Cold War world: In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was "Which side are you on?" and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?" That is a given that cannot be changed.[36] 40. This desire to replace the state and sovereignty (taking form in the Only in the balance of power) as the ordering state does man principle of international relations have a rational with another structural determinant existence.... fundamentally misses the point of Man owes his current uncertainties, merely entire re-placing new currency into an old existence to economy.[37] The "interpretative the state, and crisis" recognised by many analysts his being is not a problem to be solved simply within it by finding "a new paradigm that alone. Whatever accounts for... facts in a more worth and satisfactory fashion" (Huntington spiritual 27). Rather, it represents a reality he challenge to the discipline itself, possesses are demanding a re-presentation not solely by merely of the state and its virtue of the anarchical society, but of subject state. and order.[38] --Hegel (94) 41. Baudrillard's questioning of the (emphasis reality of the Gulf War can be read added) as an ironic challenge to such conceptions of order. In particular, [T]his he offers a critique of the relationship political project of theorists such between law and as Fukuyama and Huntington, who in violence--the distinct ways posit a new post-Cold continued War order that is ultimately impossibility reducible to an opposition of the of law's West against Islam (Huntington premised 35-36, 49).[39] Baudrillard notes, alterity to however, that this is an opposition violence--focuses that will not be fought even in a our attention "cold" war. Western hegemony has upon the gone far beyond that. Instead, as terrain of the Gulf War illustrated, law's struggle--a [t]he crucial stake, the struggle which decisive stake in this whole we might better affair is the consensual think of as a reduction of Islam to the struggle with global order. Not to destroy itself. but to domesticate it, by Moreover... whatever means: modernisation, this terrain is even military, politicisation, institutional--the nationalism, democracy, the state in Rights of Man, anything at all international to electrocute the resistances society. and the symbolic challenge that Islam represents for the entire --Kennedy (283) West. (The Gulf War 85; emphasis added) Islam has bloody borders. 42. In such a régime, war is less a confrontation of warriors than the --Huntington domestication of refractory forces (35) on the planet. (Baudrillard, The Gulf War 86) Muslims contrasted 43. War, as Baudrillard observes, is no Western actions longer what it used to be. against Iraq with the West's ------------------------------------ failure to protect Reprise: The Gulf War Did Not Take Bosnians Place (Again) against Serbs. . . . A It was, from the American point world of of view, a lovely crisis. It clashing had the deep-dyed and familiar civilizations, villain, Saddam Hussein. It had however, is bold and decisive military inevitably a action from Commander Clinton, world of double without a single American life standards: put at risk. It featured a people apply reliable supporting actor, one standard to Great Britain, playing "loyal their little ally". The U.S. Air kin-countries Force and the Navy both got and a different leading parts. And it quite standard to knocked out of the national others. mind any scurrilous gossip about the presidential --Huntington political consultant Dick (36) Morris. All that, and the missile strikes won 81 per cent approval ratings in the first ABC poll. (Walker 6) 44. Perhaps the greatest irony of the Gulf War lies in the different fates of its Admittedly, two main characters. Saddam Hussein military remains in power, while George Bush was violence is in defeated in an election where his rival the first place directly challenged his approach to used quite foreign policy issues. In late 1996 directly, as Americans went to the polls once more, predatory with Bill Clinton trumpeting the same violence, slogans as Bush did four years earlier, toward its "Commander Clinton" at the helm of the ends. Yet it is new world order. very striking that even--or, 45. The moral issues that had seemed so rather, black and white to President precisely--in Bush[40]--the just war of freedom primitive against tyranny--soon dissolved into conditions that the post-conflict dilemmas presented by know hardly the the Kurds. As the Iraqi régime beginnings of recovered its strength (despite constitutional sanctions that continue to claim relations, and civilian lives), it was no longer clear even in cases what had been gained from the sacrifice where the of so many lives. A perfect semblance victor has of victory was exchanged for a perfect established semblance of defeat (Baudrillard, The himself in Gulf War 71). invulnerable possession, a 46. In a very "real" sense, then, the Gulf peace ceremony War did not take place. is entirely necessary. Even the last phase of this armed Indeed, the mystification will have changed word "peace," nothing, for the 100,000 Iraqi in the sense in dead will only have been the final which it is the decoy that Saddam will have correlative to sacrificed, the blood money the word "war" paid... to conserve his power. (for there is What is worse is that these dead also a quite still serve as an alibi for those different who do not want to have been meaning, excited for nothing:... at least similarly the dead would prove that this war unmeta-phorical was indeed a war and not a and political, shameful and pointless hoax the one used by (Baudrillard, The Gulf War 72). Kant in talking of "Eternal 47. Clearly, the Gulf War did not mark the Peace"), end of war as such. Bosnia and Rwanda denotes this a are stark reminders that history has priori, not ended, and that the same rages of necessary old are manifest in our New World sanctioning, Order. But the ambiguous start to the regardless of New World Order did herald the all other legal emergence of a new form of violence. conditions, of Violence that is unrecognisably every victory. sterilised or distorted to serve other This sanction ends. Violence justified by reference consists to a consensus reducible to a single precisely in voice. Violence that derives meaning recognizing the only from representation, which perfect new conditions representation emerges as the ordering as a new "law," principle of a world rendered pure quite through the disavowal of reality beyond regardless of the borders of the image. whether they need de facto Magdalen College--Oxford University any guarantee simon.chesterman@magdalen.oxford.ac.uk of their continuation. If, therefore, conclusions can --------------------------------------- be drawn from military COPYRIGHT (c) 1998 BY SIMON CHESTERMAN, violence, as ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS TEXT MAY BE being USED AND SHARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE primordial and FAIR-USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT paradigmatic of LAW. ANY USE OF THIS TEXT ON OTHER all violence TERMS, IN ANY MEDIUM, REQUIRES THE used for CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR AND THE natural ends, PUBLISHER, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY there is PRESS. inherent in all such violence a THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS lawmaking ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE character. UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS --Benjamin ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL (283) HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. ----------------------------------------------------------- Notes I would like to thank Wayne Morgan for his comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. This article is reprinted in Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995): all subsequent citations from the article will be from this edition. The essay also appeared in an early translation entitled "The Reality Gulf" in The Guardian, 11 Jan. 1991. 2. See generally Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. 3. See, for example, Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War 11. 4. Cf. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy 410. 5. See, for example, George Bush, "The Possibility of a New World Order," Speech at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. Cf. Oscar Schachter, "United Nations Law in the Gulf Conflict" 452, 472. 6. In January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the United States Census Bureau, publicly released unclassified estimates that a total of 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and 32,195 children died as a direct resu lt of the Gulf War. Daponte estimated that 13,000 civilians had been killed during the Coalition's air and land campaigns, with other deaths attributable to the post-war Kurd and Shi'ite rebellions and to disease and malnutrition caused by the war (Jones 12). She claimed that her report on casualties had been rewritten, with the death toll lowered and data on women and children removed. The Census Bureau fired Daponte, claiming that her figures had not received "proper peer review." She was reinstated a fter alleging in a lawsuit that her dismissal was politically motivated (see "Agency Reinstates Tabulator of Iraqi War Deaths" A14 and Gellman A5). Daponte later published a more comprehensive study, in which she estimated that 110,000 Iraqi civilian dea ths resulted from war-induced health effects (Daponte 57, 62) 7. See Patrick Sloyan, "Buried Alive: US Tanks Used Plows to Kill Thousands in Gulf War Trenches" 1, and Chomsky, Deterring Democracy 410-11. In its final report, the Pentagon justified this action at some length, arguing not only that "there is a gap in the law of war defining precisely when surrender takes effect or how it may be accomplished in practical terms," but also that "military necessity required that the assault through the forward Iraqi defens ive line be conducted with maximum speed and violence" (Conduct of the Persian Gulf War 629-30). A similar legal rationale was used to justify the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi soldiers attempting to flee from Kuwait City to Basra along the Matla Ridge during the ground assault without formally surrendering (631-32). 8. See, for example, Laurie Becklund and Stephen Braun, "A Rallying Point for Iraqi Exiles." 9. See also Chomsky, Deterring Democracy 148. 10. Cf. Chomsky, "The Media and the War: What War?" in Mowlana et al. 51. 11. General Schwarzkopf had stated that the Coalition strategy for the ground war was to achieve an "end run" around Iraqi troop concentrations in order to overcome a two-to-three disadvantage in manpower ("The Persi an Gulf War" A36). By contrast, a congressional report released in April 1991 concluded that due to depleted units, desertions, and casualties from the air war, Iraq actually had fewer than 183,000 soldiers in the Kuwaiti theater of operations compared t o 800,000 military personnel from 36 nations in the Coalition at the start of the ground assault (See Draper 38, 43 and Sachs 17). 12. See, for example, Mark Radhert, "The First Amendment and Media Rights During Wartime: Some Thoughts After Operation Desert Storm" 1513; "Lost Testimony: The Gulf War, Restricted Access, and the First Amendment" 26 1; "Press Censorship and Access Restrictions During the Persian Gulf War: A First Amendment Analysis" 1073. 13. Cf. Begleiter, "The Impact of the Media on International Law and Relations" 119-23. (Begleiter was an international affairs correspondent with CNN.) 14. Cf. Paul Patton, 'Introduction' in Baudrillard, The Gulf War 2. 15. It was later revealed that the witness, who testified before a Congressional Human Rights Caucus, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and that she had been coached by a public relations firm hi red by the Kuwaiti government (Kellner 67-8). 16. Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory. 17. In another layer of irony, this oil slick was subsequently determined to have been caused by Allied bombing of inshore installations (Christopher Norris 24). 18. This is perhaps the logical extreme of Vegetius' dictum, "Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum" [Let him who desires peace, prepare for war] (Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Epitoma Rei Militaris, book 3). 19. See Baudrillard, The Gulf War 62, 74-5, 77. 20. Sterling discusses a gaming simulation of one of the tank battles from the closing stages of the conflict, produced by army historians and simulation modelers. 21. Curiously, Norris suggests that this sadism lacks erotic content and imagery (232-3). 22. See, for example, Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics" 391; Robert Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Approaches" (1988) 379; Charles Lipson, "Int ernational Cooperation in Economic and Security Affairs" 69-70. 23. See Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927). On the use of rape for propaganda purposes in war, see Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape 40-58. Cf. Mackenz ie, Propaganda and Empire. 24. See above paragraphs 25-31. 25. On the Great-Power pressure diplomacy that achieved "consensus" on Security Council Resolution 678 (authorising the use of "all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent rel evant resolutions"), see Weston, "Security Council Resolution 678 and Persian Gulf Decision Making: Precarious Legitimacy" 516, 523-5. 26. Fukuyama was a deputy director of the U.S. State Department's policy planning staff at the time that this article was published; it has since been expanded into a book: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History an d the Last Man (1992). 27. Cf. Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues 61-4. 28. Cf. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism 313. 29. See, for example, Tom Mayer, "Imperialism and the Gulf War" 1, and Booker, Background to the Gulf War. 30. Cast from the failure of liberalism to prevent the Second World War and tempered by the exigencies of Cold War bipolarity, realism eschewed Wilsonian utopianism in favour of Machiavellian pragmatism--less a Kantia n theory of peace, it was a theory of Realpolitik. Axiomatic to this conception of international order-through-disorder was the population of international society by unitary, rational and power-seeking actors: states. See generally Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, and Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Cf. John Mearsheimer's discussion of realism's five assumptions about the internationa l system: (i) the international system is anarchic; (ii) states inherently possess some offensive military capability, making them potentially dangerous to each other; (iii) no state can ever be completely certain about the intentions of other states; (iv ) the most basic motive driving states is survival; and (v) states think strategically--that is, they are instrumentally rational (Mearsheimer 9-10). For a critical analysis of this paradigm, see James Der Derian, "Introduction: Critical Investigations" i n James Der Derian (ed), International Theory: Critical Investigations (1995). Cf. Rob Walker's discussion of realism's "parasitic" relation to idealism in Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. 31. See, for example, Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World. 32. See Simon Chesterman, "Review Essay: The Politics of Sovereignty" 175. The project of opening up international relations to meaningful interrogation requires an exploration of the self-evident divide between the "political" and the "international" that led to a history, rather than a theory, of international relations: see Hans Morgenthau's response to Wight's essay, "The Intellectual and Political Functions of Theory" Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays o f a Decade, 1960-1970 (1248-61), listing the reasons for this as being (i) the presumed self-evidence of the state as a natural form beyond human control; (ii) the 'reformist orientation that characterized theoretical thinking' of Wilsonian liberal ism and its ilk--the aim being "not in understanding the operation of the balance of power but in getting rid of it"; and (iii) the contingency of all political analysis that obviates the possibility of theoretical understanding. 33. Neo-realism describes the international system through two constants and one variable. The constants are the existence of an anarchical system of horizontally distributed power (as opposed to ver tical distribution within a state), and the population of that system by similarly functioning units (states) whose behaviour is determined according to that system (much the way that diverse corporations function similarly within an economic market). The variable is the distribution of power capabilities across the system, and much has been written concerning the inevitability (and, indeed, desirability) of a bipolar system epitomised by the Cold War. See generally, Waltz, Theory of International Politics. For a critique of neorealism's un- or anti-historical approach, see Paul Schroeder, "Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory." 34. Cf. Janice Thomson, "State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research" 213, 217. 35. Waltz argued that neorealism represents an advance of scientific rigour vis-à-vis the older realism, measured by the ability of a theoretical approach to generate propositions or predictions that are empir ically testable in such a way that the tests and their results may be replicated: see Steven Forde, "International Realism and the Science of Politics: Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Neorealism" 141, 142. The intellectual barrenness of this approach has be en attacked at length by various authors: see, for example, Fred Halliday's description of the "parsimonious and atemporal maxims of Waltz's neo-realism, "The Cold War and its Conclusion: Consequences for International Relations Theory" (12). See also t he collections of essays in Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics and Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate. 36. See also Huntington's analysis of his contribution to the discipline in terms of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "If Not Civilizations, What?" 37. Cf. Fouad Ajami's response to Huntington, 'The Summoning' 2, 9: "let us be clear: civilizations do not control states, states control civilizations." See also the other critiques of Huntington's thesis published in volume 72, number 4 of Foreign Affairs. Cf. Adam Tarock, "Civilisational Conflict? Fighting the Enemy Under a New Banner," and Jacinta O'Hagan, "Civilisational Conflict? Looking for Cultural Enemies." 38. See Simon Chesterman, "Law, Subject and Subjectivity in International Relations: International Law and the Postcolony." 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