When Combat Is Performed
In 1944, German Lt. Gen. Hermann B. von Ramcke stared across the battle lines on the Brittany Peninsula in northwest France at Gen. George Pattonâs tanks, worried that the Americans might attempt an attack on his right flank. He had listened to the sounds of tanks clanging into position, their tires grinding against the soil, their engines churning. He had watched through binoculars as the US soldiers drew camouflaged net enclosures over the tanks, hoping to hide them. He knew about the heavy radio traffic coming from the other side. He guessed that the US force numbered in the thousands and needed to strategize accordingly.
Von Ramcke didnât know that Pattonâs Third Army was far away, poised to liberate Paris. The tanks he saw through his binoculars were inflatable and the audio of their movement came from loudspeakers blaring previously recorded sounds. The men in uniform bustling about the US camp consisted of actors, writers, radio experts, and fashion designers, and they put on an entirely convincing show; van Ramcke did not suspect that, rather than the Third Army, he was watching the United Statesâs Twenty-Third Headquarters Special Troops, dubbed by those who served as the âGhost Army.â A unit of 1100, the Ghost Army engaged in theatrics to divert attention away from core US military forces, saving thousands of Allied lives. The men of the Ghost Army never wore the insignia of their unit while they served; only forty years later, once their actions were declassified, did those men discuss their role in the war.
The Ghost Armyâs activities might be a stark example, but war waging has always relied on performance, which partly explains theaterâs preoccupation with it. The Ghost Army staged over twenty theatrical events, deceiving the enemy through visual, sonic, and radio tactics.1 While carefully controlling the production of visual and audio communications on the front lines requires scripting, masking, artifice, and other theatrical crafts, so too does controlling the representation of war back at the home front. In the information age, new wars are always waged with both weapons and the devices of theater and performance.
As technologies of war have evolved, war has become more impersonal, deadlier, and more integrated into the everyday. The attacks on 9/11 gave rise to new US militarization, an iterative process whereby âpractical operations of everyday life, from traffic light cameras to cellphone metadata connectionâ transform civilians into âsubjects of surveillance and counterinsurgency culture.â2 The attacks also gave rise to increased militarism, or the dominance of the military over civilian authority, and more generally, the prevalence of âwarlike values in a society.â3 This militarization manifested in two actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were subsumed under the umbrella of a metaphoric war on terrorâa metaphoric war that nonetheless produced very material violence.
Terrorism is physical and psychological violence displayed for public viewing in order to alter the behavior of people and states, which means that performance studies scholars are uniquely positioned to analyze it. Bread and Puppet Theatreâs John Bell puts it this way: âUsing the tools of Performance Studies to analyze how calculated violence is employed in a media-saturated society is [âŠ] an essential means of understanding the undeniably symbolic level at which global conflict is now being played out.â4 Numerous scholars, including Sara Brady, Cami Rowe, and Jenny Hughes, have analyzed the relation between the war on terror and performance; this project seeks to build on this growing field of work by investigating the relation between performance and violence in the 2003 Iraq War (2003â2011). I draw connections across its precursor, the Gulf War (1991), and the subsequent conflict in Iraq against the so-called Islamic State or Daesh (2014âpresent), examining the way post-9/11 warfare is waged and framed by military and government officials, and the way it structures public thought and feeling. I look at the way performance operates as a tool for twenty-first-century war waging and a methodology for understanding and resisting war. Drawing connections between a long, ongoing conflict in Iraq and broader US military engagements in this new post 9/11 era of militarization, this book asks whether performance can resist its role in perpetuating violence.
War as Performance contends that conflicts in Iraq have been particularly performative, which is to say that they uniquely combine political theater, censorship, propaganda, and spectacle, relying on the tools of performance as part of combat and media operations. As the United States and its allies continue to deploy military weapons and personnel to Iraq and the Middle East to fight Daesh, it is essential that we understand how performances, from Bushâs 2003 State of the Union to the Islamic Stateâs videos depicting the beheading of journalists, summon us to war. It is likewise important to analyze how theater responds to this drive toward forceâhow dance troupes choreograph representations of the physical and emotional trauma veterans experience, how actors embody Iraqi civilians and US politicians, how street artists rally citizens to protest, and how a grieving mother named Cindy Sheehan used street performance tactics to become a leading figure of the resistance. This book studies performance in the context of almost three decades of military conflict in Iraq, from political performances by military leaders to (post-)apocalyptic narratives imagining the end of days, and beyond. Working within a theater and performance studies lens, War as Performance analyzes conventional theater, political, and protest performance, popular culture, and the satiric performance of news in order to investigate the ways in which twenty-first-century warfare is waged, resisted, and understood in the contemporary sociopolitical landscape.
By considering performance in diverse contexts, the book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture and warfare, combining performance studies, media and communication studies, political science, American studies, and cultural studies. War as Performance argues that spectacular and banal aesthetics of contemporary warâmemorable images of the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein set against nondescript, almost interchangeable images of Middle Eastern towns reduced to rubbleâpositions performance as a practice struggling to distance itself from appropriation by the military for violent ends, and theater as a vital medium through which to examine international relations. The book approaches performance broadly and understands twenty-first-century warfare and performance as inextricably linked. By employing the metaphor of theater, military leaders use misdirection and spectacularity to rally supporters; by employing the practice and disciplinary lens of performance, artists and scholars attempt to understand and sometimes resist that call. As lines delineating the military and performance weaken, performance studies scholars have a vital role to play in analyzing and potentially shaping war and conflict in the new century. War as Performance offers such an analysis of the Iraq War, the conflict with the Islamic State, and the operations of twenty-first-century militarization.
Whatâs Old Is New Again
On March 19, 2003, the United States began dropping bombs on Iraq, beginning a military campaign that lasted nine years and claimed the lives of 4421 US soldiers and at least 461,000 Iraqi civilians. The war displaced as many as 1.6 million Iraqis and cost the United States over $802 billion.5 So much about this war was newâit was instigated with utterly false intelligence, and waging it involved new technologies and a new understanding of counterinsurgencyâbut it is essential to situate this conflict in a genealogy of US military violence in Iraq. In their lengthy tome about the behind-the-scenes negotiations that led to war, Cobra II, Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor describe the 2003 Iraq War as âone of the most covered but least understood episodes in recent history.â6 Understanding the US involvement in Iraq in 2003 as a continuation of the earlier Gulf War and as a direct cause of the rise of Daesh reminds us that invading the country was both politically and militarily innovative, on the one hand, and a return to old political grievances between Saddam and the Republican party on the other.
This tension between innovation and perpetuation was both political and aesthetic. This particular war produced images (think of the 2005 photographs of Iraqis proudly showing off their fingers, stained with the purple-ink, as evidence that they had voted) and sound bites (such as âMission Accomplishedâ and Ambassador L. Paul Bremer IIIâs âLadies and Gentleman, we got himâ declaration after Saddamâs capture) through which the United States could reclaim its place atop the global world order after the spectacular violence of 9/11. In this sense, the warâs objectives were theatrical, and the representation of it in the media was carefully controlled by the Bush administration. In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2010), Judith Butler points out that visual and discursive fields are part of waging and recruiting support for war. Military operations rely on practices rooted in theatricality to spread certain narratives and mask others. Butler asks us to reconsider what is meant by the notion of the âmaterial instruments of war,â which are often understood as guns and bombs, but might also include, for example, the camera. These material instruments, she determines, also invo...