Rhetoric, Fantasy, and the War on Terror

Vaheed Ramazani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000224627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Retorica

Drawing on psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives, this book examines discourses mediating the global War on Terror, including governmental speeches, legal documents, print and broadcast journalism, and military memoirs.

The book argues that these discourses motivate, and are motivated by, a myth of imminent harm that purportedly justifies a series of "preemptive" measures such as war, torture, and targeted killing, as well as an array of intrusive domestic security procedures such as profiling and mass surveillance. Dominant themes include selective compassion in the mainstream media, the language of war and the sacrificial sublime, asymmetrical warfare and the nostalgia for total war, weaponized drones and just war theory, and the role of American exceptionalism in normalizing endless war.

Scholars and students alike will take interest in this original contribution to the fields of cultural studies, psychoanalysis, media studies, rhetoric, critical international relations, and international humanitarian law and ethics.

1 Introduction

“No Moment for Deliberation”

If the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency seems to have ushered in our “post-truth” era—an era in which virtually anyone can aspire to “control the narrative” via the cyber-technics of tweeting and trolling, sockpuppets and memes, deepfakes, bots, and so on¹—we would do well to recall that the habitual unmooring of signs from any reference to semantically coherent contexts or to empirical facticity² was already well under way with the George W. Bush administration, where the abuse of signification arose, for example, in the tortured reasoning of the “torture memos,” the deliberately misleading association of Al Qaeda with the Iraqi Baathist regime, a war of choice masquerading as preemptive self-defense, and the legally incoherent designation “unlawful combatant.” Under the Obama administration as well, albeit to a lesser degree, legal-terminological finagling was at times pressed into service, particularly, as we shall see, in support of the administration’s attempts to justify its extrajudicial policy of targeted assassination. One significant difference between President Trump and his recent predecessors is that they cared enough about the appearance of legitimacy to resort to various forms of “state law” or “counter-law.”³ Trump, with his overt disdain for the Constitution, for political norms and protocols, and for any distinction between fact and opinion, seems to be trying to shift the ground of power away from a Foucauldian regime of governmentality toward an impossible dream of pure sovereignty.

That said, the primary focus of this book is on popular, political, legal, and journalistic discourses mediating the War on Terror under the Bush and Obama administrations, with only occasional reference to the Trump administration’s peculiar approach to geopolitical hegemony. What interests me is how different kinds of visual and verbal rhetoric came to naturalize the fantasy of a global War on Terror, a hybrid military and policing operation with no temporal or spatial limit, a “war” conducted anywhere and everywhere (including inside the Homeland itself), and announced to last, if need be, forever. How, I ask, was the desire for war aroused and sustained in the American public? I interpret broadly the notion of desire, allowing it to govern feelings ranging from passionate belligerence at one extreme to the passive consent to war at the other. As such, desire traverses both the spectacularization and the banalization of violence; it embraces not only the enthrallment aroused by aestheticized, technologized, and even (porno)graphic images of war but also the blasé response to news of a war that has become routinized and remote from civilian life. Indeed, these two seemingly antithetical affects may coexist—when, say, we repeatedly witness the same, endlessly broadcast clips of the collapsing Twin Towers, or when we watch a Hollywood action film with a certain degree of kinetic arousal, despite already being overfamiliar with the highly conventional codes endemic to the genre.

What triggered (or served as a pretext for) endless war was of course the national crisis commonly known in the United States as “9/11,” a signifier intended to fix in public memory the singular atrocity of a particular moment, an epochal event unlike any other. Yet it is at the same time widely recognized that this event was not altogether unique or wholly self-identical, that it, or the general public’s experience of it, pointed at once back in time—to Hollywood disaster films (“it was like a movie”) and to historical memories such as “Pearl Harbor” and “Ground Zero”—and forward in time, as the anticipation of similar or worse calamities to come. As Jacques Derrida has said, describing the psychological impact of 9/11: “There is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from the possibility to come of the worst, from the repetition to come—though worse.”⁴ Caught up in iterability, divided between retention and protention, the uncanny figure of 9/11 marks a traumatic encounter with the Real, a symptomatic rending of everyday reality that gives rise, through repression, to compensatory fantasies. The signifier “9/11” functions, in other words, as a (Lacanian) point de capiton, which weaves together a constellation of reactively stabilizing, securitizing, or empowering signs such as the nation, freedom, democracy, or justice. Folded into this knot of empty master signifiers (“empty” because their ideological meaning is at once overdetermined and undecidable) is the myth of the virtuous American war, a transcendental object-cause of imperialist desire.

The utopian narrative of American exceptionalism has always been underwritten by the romance of war: war as a glorious adventure driven by noble ends; war as the defense of the civilized world’s highest values against the gratuitous depredations of depraved barbarians; war as the triumph of advanced technology over primitive savagery; war as a zero-sum, sports-like contest in which military superiority is self-evidently cognate with the moral and political superiority of our uniquely blessed nation. These metaphysical and theological assumptions are manifest in George W. Bush’s speeches shortly after 9/11 and leading up to the loftily named “Operation Enduring Freedom”: The purpose of the War on Terror, we are told, is to “rid the world of evil” (beginning, of course, with the “Axis of Evil”).⁵ “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”⁶ Americans are “peaceful,” “generous,” and “compassionate” people,⁷ while the Taliban and Al Qaeda are cowards who “burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places.”⁸

The strain of messianic Manichaeism that runs through these speeches is of course entirely compatible with the American tradition of colonial expansion, frontier “justice,” Manifest Destiny, and the Monroe Doctrine, just as the 2003 invasion of Iraq (which neocons had been planning well before 9/11) is fully consistent with America’s history of foreign intervention, in which covert action and military force have served to topple a long list of regimes deemed inimical to US economic or ideological interests.⁹ The United States’ contempt for international law in general is evident, moreover, not only in its unprovoked invasion of Iraq but also in its rejection or violation of a whole series of international humanitarian treaties and conventions. As we shall see in Chapter 4, President Trump’s decisions to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris agreement on global warming and from the Iran nuclear deal (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) are only the latest avatars of US “exemptionalism.”

The American culture of militarism is woven from a web of simulacra in which the conduct of war itself is inseparable from the remediations of what James Der Derian has called the “military-industrial-media-entertainment network.”¹⁰ Within this self-sustaining and self-replicating ecology, the interface between war, entertainment, and news is both technological and ideological. Simulated combat, enhanced by the same digital technology as actual combat, is the stock-in-trade of the military’s war games, commercial video-games, and the action-adventure genre of television and film. Leading up to the first Gulf War, war games were even fare for the nightly news, with military scenarios being staged by Tom Brokow on NBC News and by Ted Koppel on ABC Nightline.¹¹ At the same time, the precision-guided weapons, communications technology, surveillance devices, robotics, and remotely guided aircraft of real warfare are designed by the Pentagon in collaboration with academia, tech firms (Microsoft, Intel, and IBM), and media giants such as Disney, Time Warner, Sony, and NewsCorp.¹² The University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, which was founded in 1999 with a $45 million grant from the army (the army contributed $100 million in 2004), uses virtual reality technologies to train soldiers in tactical and strategic methods related to asymmetrical warfare. Shortly after September 11, moreover, the Institute organized a series of panel discussions between military officials and Hollywood screenwriters and producers for the purpose of imagining and anticipating possible terrorism scenarios.¹³ Reciprocity between entertainment media and the military can likewise be seen in the reliance of big-budget war films on the Pentagon for technical advice or assistance and for access to military equipment, vehicles, aircraft, warships, and so on—the provision of which is normally contingent on the films’ portrayal of American troops as heroic and self-sacrificing.¹⁴

Whether in a Hollywood extravaganza, a TV series, a video game, or a news broadcast, the figure of the noble American warrior requires, both as its antithesis and as its very raison d’être, an adversary—a scapegoat or an alien intruder who threatens to disrupt the beatific American fantasy of democracy and freedom at home and abroad. Historically, a variety of racialized stereotypes has filled this role—“Indians,” “Japs,” “Gooks,” and so on. The current staple of the Middle Eastern terrorist (usually indiscriminately tagged as “Arab” or “Muslim”) took root in the American Imaginary well before the events of September 11, 2001.¹⁵ After 9/11, “the” Islamic terrorist was incarnated first by Osama Bin Laden (identified by Bush as “The Evil One”), then by Saddam Hussein (who was routinely equated with Hitler), and, more recently, by swarms of nameless, faceless insurgents belonging to “shadowy” groups scattered across Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere. As portrayed both in the mainstream media and in popular entertainment venues,¹⁶ the menacing, Orientalized Other is often a cartoonish, one-dimensional incarnation of evil, bent on destruction in the name of revenge, Islam, or totalitarian world domination (as opposed to the United States’ “full spectrum dominance” and “New World Order”). If this enemy has legitimate grievances, whether with respect to local conflicts or vis à vis the United States, those claims tend to be ignored, distorted (“they envy our freedoms”), or dismissed as irrational.¹⁷

Object of paranoid foreclosure, resurgent face of the Real, the enemy as such is needed by the soldier, as well as by the mass audience that identifies with her or him. On the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan (as well as those of Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva), narcissistic identification and fantasies of omnipotence are inescapably haunted by aggressivity, hate, splitting, or the death drive.¹⁸ Following this theoretical line of thought, I would suggest that, in seeking to define himself in relation to what he ostensibly is not, the heroic warrior nevertheless remains dialectically bound to the image of the persecutory other, an image that is all the more threatening for being ambivalently marked by both attraction and repulsion, fascination and disgust. Indeed, as I argue in my analysis of military memoirs in Chapter 3, the “good” soldier, by way of a kind of reaction-formation, may come to resemble his evil doppelganger, particularly in his willingness to “do whatever it takes” to win. This reversal is especially ironic when we consider that the soldiers depicted in these biographical or autobiographical narratives tend to be either cynical or indifferent toward the geopolitical ends for which they are supposed to be fighting. For the most part, the protagonists understand themselves to be on an individual quest to prove their manhood. Accordingly, one has the impression that, for these eager warriors, any enemy will do. Indeed, in the absence of a genuine threat to national security, the enemy would simply have to be invented, to fill in the obligatory adversarial role in the culturally pre-scripted scenario of conflict. In other words, the archetypal romance of war as a personal crucible—a trope that the soldiers themselves have gleaned from comic books and movies—precedes, motivates, and overdetermines the firsthand (or “real”) experience of war.

It would be difficult to overestimate the role that the dominant media play in shaping the public’s perception of both the threat to national security and the necessary means for responding to the threat. For the “good” war fantasy to sustain our incursions into Afghanistan, Iraq, and the far-flung territories subject to drone strikes, the bogy of anti-US terrorism must be made to appear both constant and imminent. It is the claim of imminent but forestallable harm t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: “No Moment for Deliberation”
• 2 War fatigue: Ethics in reporting on Afghanistan and Iraq
• 3 War, simulation, and the sacrificial sublime
• 4 Exceptionalism, metaphor, and hybrid warfare
• 5 Killer drones and the language of international humanitarian law
• Index