The New Order of War (At the Interface Probing the Boundaries)

The New Order of War

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Nancy Billias

Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Dr Jones Irwin Professor Asa Kasher

Owen Kelly Dr Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 64 A volume in the At the Interface series ‘War and Peace’

Probing the Boundaries

The New Order of War

Edited by

Bob Brecher

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2941-5 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2942-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

Table of Contents Introduction: The New Order of War Bob Brecher Questioning Just War Thinking: A Critique of Walzer Tarik Kochi Torture and the ‘Ticking Bomb’: Fantasy and the So-Called War on Terror Bob Brecher The Language of War: George W. Bush’s Discursive Practices in Securitising the Western Value System in the ‘War on Terror’ Janicke Stramer Is the War on Terror Real? Should it Be? Avery Plaw The Laws of War in Outer Space: Some Legal Implications For Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello of the Militarisation and Weaponisation of Outer Space Arjen Vermeer Yugonostalgia and the Post-National Narrative Stephenie Young

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Veterans, Vietcong and Others: Enemies and Empathies In Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story David Boulting

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The Immediacy of Narrated Combat: Operation Iraqi Freedom as Public Spectacle Jason T. McEntee

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Ethical Crossings in War Writing: Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Sri Lankan Civil War Elke Rosochaki

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The Unlisted Character: Representing War on Stage Julia Boll

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Confessing Complicity and Embracing Victimhood: Negotiating the Meaning of the Border War in Post-Apartheid South Africa Gary Baines A Psychosocial Perspective on Support for Terrorism In the Wake of Attacks Kiran Sarma

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Non-Lethal Warfare Seth B. Scott

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Teaching Non-Violence Helen Fox

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Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: The New Order of War Bob Brecher At the beginning of the 1990s, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was possible to think - sincerely, albeit in retrospect naïvely that the end of ‘actually existing communism’ heralded hope of real and immediate improvement in at least one area of the global dispensation. Of course this was nothing like the brief glimmer in 1968 of something like ‘socialism with a human face’, when it seemed for a brief moment that the hopes of 1917 might become some sort of reality, rather than the Stalinist disaster into which they had transmuted. No one was any longer quite as naïve as that. Nonetheless, even if the economic future were certain – exemplified by Russia as a re-run on a massive scale of late 1920s Chicago, with Al Capone played, generally at several removes, by ‘the new oligarchs’ – it seemed that another certainty had dissolved: the certainty that war was always just around the next corner. For war, as Clausewitz had insisted, and the Cold War had amply illustrated across the entire so-called Third World since 1945, is the continuation of politics by other means. But with the ‘end of history’, as announced by Francis Fukuyama, must also come the end of politics; indeed, history had come to an end precisely because liberalism had triumphed and so the era of ideology - of politics - was no more. And so there would be no more war. What was largely overlooked, however, was that the end of politics did not at all signal the end of politics, but rather the end of acceptable oppositional politics, the end of ideology described as such - and not at all the end of ideology. The triumph of liberalism and the defeat of socialism, far from heralding a new era of freedom, in fact ushered in a totalitarianism no less thorough-going, if of course rather more sophisticated in its modes of operation, than that which had collapsed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The fact that ‘we’ were all good neo-liberal free-marketers now did not entail either that ‘we’ included all of us or that neo-liberalism would not stand in need of determined political, economic and cultural defence if its vision of the new order, and indeed the new individual arising from the ashes of the Welfare State, was to become embedded in people’s consciousness as well as in the world’s political structures. In short, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism would appear only some fifteen years later. Politics did not come to an end. Far from it. The ruling ‘common sense’ of neo-liberalism could neither be imposed without challenge nor remain unchallenged once imposed. War continued; in fact, wars spread. What happened, as we can now see all too clearly, was that, instead of ‘the

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______________________________________________________________ end of history’ enshrining a new-found will to prevent international, and indeed intra-national, conflict and to uphold international law, conventions and agreements as a guarantee of peace and security, the world was plunged into new wars and new forms of war. First, the early 1990s saw nationalist and internecine wars spread across Africa and Europe on an unprecedented scale. And then came 11 September 2001 and its attendant ‘war on terror’. ‘They’, it turned out, were not willing to subsume themselves in ‘us’; and the new world order of neo-liberalism rampant was not entirely to the liking of all those it sought to envelop in its corporate embrace. None of that is controversial. How it is to be understood and evaluated, however, is quite another matter. To take just a few examples: the former Yugoslavia disintegrated into what would have been civil war had the outcome been different; central Africa, and Rwanda in particular, witnessed a neighbourly carnage which in terms of efficiency eclipsed even Auschwitz; the United States and its coalition partners invaded and continue to occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq; and torture, whether conducted by the forces of democracy and freedom as at Baghram, Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, or by their proxies across Europe and the Middle East through the medium of ‘rendition’, is a fact of ‘the war on terror’. So is what might euphemistically be described as the attendant ‘re-ordering’ of international law as something the substance of which the world’s sole super-power has derogated to itself. The studies that follow explore central aspects of this new order of war, inviting readers to consider what is really going on, how to understand it and how one might respond to it. Taken as a continuous argument, they thus constitute a deconstruction of the ideologies -- the constructions, at once conceptual, linguistic and material -- that make this new order possible: its forms, its tools and its determinations. Tarik Kochi’s analysis of the assumptions underlying Walzer’s magisterial and so often taken for granted conception of a just war exposes both how and how much it proceeds on the basis of Walzer’s taking for granted assumptions that, apart from anything else, violent conflict itself undermines. His writing on, and conception of, ‘just war’, therefore - far from constituting a means of distinguishing justifiable from unjustifiable violence - disingenuously seeks our assent to exactly what we need to be questioning. I myself argue that the prosecution of unjustified war, and in particular the so-called war on terror, is reliant on its proponents engendering fantasies, and their necessary linguistic vehicles, in those whose support such conflict requires. He offers an analysis of the ‘ticking bomb scenario’, used by civil rights lawyer Dershowitz in his attempt to justify interrogational torture, as an example of one such fantasy – a fantasy that is internally incoherent and which cannot, therefore, legitimately justify such torture even on Dershowitz’s own utilitarian grounds. Janicke Straemer’s study of George W. Bush’s rhetoric uncovers the extent to which the United States’ prosecution of the ‘war on terror’ requires

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______________________________________________________________ that the values on the basis of which that war is said to be conducted – democracy, freedom – be themselves suborned in the service of securitising everyday language and life. Its religious nature and basis should afford us particular pause in light of its characterization of Al-Qaeda, and of its presentation of the struggle in which it takes itself to be engaged, as apocalyptic. Avery Plaw invites us to consider that ‘war’ from another, but complementary, angle: its legal status. For the exceptionalism that a ‘struggle between good and evil’ invokes, and that is furthered by an understanding of the ‘war on terror’ as a new sort of war altogether, and one not subject to the rule of law just because of its ‘exceptional’ nature, constitutes a concomitant material danger – not least, for example, the incarceration of civilian citizens without charge or trial. The underlying question of course concerns how we ought to go about deciding what the law ought to be: should we be guided by pragmatic concerns about likely outcomes given the way the world is; or by differently pragmatic concerns about changing the way the world is? Arjen Vermeer’s argument that law is needed to govern the apparently unavoidable fact of the militarisation of outer space certainly makes a convincing case. Yet one might respond by insisting that outer space ought not to be militarised and that what is apparently unavoidable will only be made to seem more so if brought under the ambit of the law. But would not such a response in fact be wholly irresponsible? While there is indeed a new order of war in the making, the fundamental issue that it raises remains what it has always been: accommodation on the best possible terms versus rejection on account of those terms being inevitably unacceptable. But philosophical, political and legal analyses are not the only means of understanding either the nature of war or its possible justification. Stephenie Young’s study of the Croatian novelist’s Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain at once explores and contributes to the ambiguities of narratives and understandings of ‘nation’, of the identities created by them, and of the wars they have at least helped to initiate. She reminds us of how deeply rooted those ambiguities and understandings have become, at least for those of us in the west, in the notion of nationality, however that is constructed and however ambiguous it may remain. The problem is not, perhaps, that we need to recognize and respect ‘the Other’, but rather that we should be in a position in the first place where that characterization of it has become necessary. The nature of that ‘Other’, and its intimate relation to ourselves, is the theme of David Boulting’s analysis of Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam War novel, Paco’s Story, as emblem of the pathological masculinities – not of course unconnected to the rhetoric and the realities alluded to above – that characterise the pursuit and conduct of war. Atrocity, he suggests, is not so much the psychological aberration of particular individuals, but rather a constant possibility for any of us, constructed as we, citizens of the west, have increasingly become in relation to an atrocious

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______________________________________________________________ enemy: we are who we are only by contrast with who we are not. Jason McEntee, in asking us to consider the ambiguities of both the content and the contested reception of soldiers’ raw narratives from and of Iraq, offers perhaps a somewhat more optimistic possibility. The ‘immediacy of narrated combat’, as he puts it, might constitute a material means whereby those on ‘the home front’ might counter the ideological impact of that other element of the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’: the media narratives that sustain, among other things, the pathological masculinities discussed by Boulting. In her analysis of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, set in Sri Lanka’s continuing civil war, Elke Rosochaki argues that the totalising narrative and impact of the ‘war on terror’ variously explored by earlier contributors, is one that renders highly problematic the very idea of disinterested observer or reporter. We are always already on one side or another, so that the distance required if judgements made are to be in any sense objectively valid is no longer possible in the new order of war: even to report is already to have been made to play a part. We are indeed who we are only by contrast with those who we are not. But that is not the whole story. In attempting to respond to that truth, we become in part also who we were not. Julia Boll’s study of how the dramatic presentation of the experience of being caught up in a war that is nebulous, apparently never-ending and above all almost impossible to distinguish from ‘normality’ invites us to consider the extent to which it may be possible to understand experiences not our own. Might drama literally be able to show us something in a way that helps us to understand it, and that we could otherwise not understand? And if so, how does such an understanding relate to ‘knowing about’ war? Gary Baines’s analysis of the experience of veterans, and of their later experience of that experience – especially as they relate to the experience of their erstwhile opponents – asks us to think about what the conditions might be of a ‘reconciliation’ that is more than superficial. In particular – and this picks up on Boll’s theme – does that require some sort of empathetic understanding of ‘their’ experience, both ‘then’ and ‘now’? If so, then might that very fact not imply that reconciliation is necessarily a far more fragmentary business than one might have hoped? Kiran Sarma’s attempted construction of a psychological paradigm of acts of terror, while focusing specifically on various relations between experience of, and support for, such acts, raises a parallel issue: how might different sorts of understanding of what people do be brought together into some sort of whole on the basis of which a rational policy towards various forms of violence might be proposed? Indeed, is any sort of unitary understanding possible here, or must the analyses proposed from different perspectives - political, moral, religious, psychological, sociological and so on – remain necessarily partial and thus in certain respects irreconcilable?

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______________________________________________________________ The volume ends with two proposed antidotes to ‘the new order of war’: war without death; and a commitment to non-violence. In offering the possibility of war without death, Seth Scott attacks a very common assumption, namely that war is fundamentally about killing ‘the enemy’. Certainly the thought that that need not be so appears at first sight to offer some much-needed optimism. And yet, even if we are not overly cynical about the likelihood of such a possibility in practice, there is an unsettling question lurking in the background. Is death the worst that can happen to us? First, the disabling weapons systems he discusses raise the prospect of one group of people’s establishing total physical control of another, along the lines of the dystopias explored by writers such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Margaret Attwood. And second, just how ought we to weigh, for example, economic sanction, physical blockade and cultural destruction against physical death? Finally, Helen Fox asks us to reconsider the equally common assumption that war is inevitable, that it is, so to speak, an inescapable feature of human nature. Again, her thought – that it is not – is an optimistic one: perhaps war could be eliminated. But should it be? Might not the ‘internal’ peace of Fox’s student at the end of her chapter signal a dystopian acquiescence rather than a utopian rejection of violence? For might there not be some things that it really is worth fighting – and dying and killing – for? Is war always the worst thing we do to each other? Or are there forms and means of oppression worse than physical violence and even death, and which have sometimes – all too often, perhaps – to be violently resisted? And should those of us who wish the world to be a better place than it is not focus on those forms and means of oppression, and on arguing about which and whose violence might be justified, if not – speaking from the UK - our own?

Bibliography Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Allen Lane, London, 2007.

Questioning Just War Thinking: A Critique of Walzer Tarik Kochi Abstract Under the shadow of the so-called war on terror, this chapter questions the manner in which a broad and ambiguous notion of just war appears to dominate much of contemporary thinking and opinion about war and terror. I ask whether a number of differing approaches within the just war tradition, like that of Michael Walzer’s just war theory, really do take the problem of war seriously, or, of whether, shying away from central questions lying at the heart of the problem of war, many accounts of just war, only really treat war as nothing more than a game. Key Words: Aquinas, Augustine, just war, legitimacy, ordering, right, terror, violence, Walzer, war ***** For many the ‘war on terror’ is a just war. The conflict is described as representing a legitimate moral struggle in the defence of freedom, human rights and the values of modern, Western liberal civilisation against those (i.e. the ‘terrorists’) who desire to destroy this. Very often the ‘war on terror’ is portrayed by Western media agencies as one, which represents a battle of Western values of freedom, human rights and democracy pitched against the forces of evil. President George W. Bush’s response to the bombings in New York and Washington in 2001 framed the ‘war on terror’ within a broad moral sense of representing a just war in defence of freedom and civilisation. He argued: This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.1 Continued statements of many prominent Western political leaders have echoed this broadly and ambiguously moral just war language. Yet there are many others who are highly sceptical of a grand, moral just war language and argue that it operates as a mere rhetorical and propaganda device that hides the interests of political, economic and social power.2 One manner of coming to terms with the competing claims over the justness of the ‘war on terror’ is to turn towards an intellectual tradition known as the just war tradition. At first glance this tradition might offer some

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______________________________________________________________ assistance in addressing the ambiguity of the moral concepts and language bound up with competing justifications and condemnations of war. In recent history one of the popularisers of the just war tradition has been Michael Walzer.3 He argues for the contemporary importance of the notion of just war and his work has been highly influential in reviving this tradition of thought against legal positivism and ‘reason of state’ theories. For Walzer, just war involves a set of moral arguments about the moral legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular acts of war and the manner in which they are conducted. Just war theory is normally seen to involve two elements: the question of the right of war, and the question of rightful conduct within war. Here I shall focus only on the former, albeit noting its fundamental connection with the latter. Walzer’s version of just war theory makes the assumption that there exists something called a ‘common morality’ and that the content of this common morality is ‘human rights’. Judgments about the rightness or wrongness of going to war are to be based upon an assessment of how the use of violence relates to the common morality of human rights. Walzer’s just war theory operates, then, in two senses. In one sense, the theory operates negatively or critically, in that wars normally legitimated by political, economic and power interests, and even those justified by positive law or notions of utility, may be condemned as unjust because they threaten a common morality of human rights. In another sense, the theory operates positively, in that it offers a ground for legitimating war in the name of protecting and safeguarding the rights of individuals who are threatened by some form of violence or coercion. Walzer sets out a number of arguments under which the positive sense of just war is limited and restricted: the notion is generally limited to instances of self-defence. However, Walzer also outlines other broader possibilities of the use of force as being just in the context of a perceived immediate threat, the necessity of humanitarian intervention; and, he argues, in situations of ‘extreme emergency’ each allow exceptions from the more restrictive aspect of his theory. It is at the point of these exceptions to a restrictive just war theory, and their opening onto a more proactive use of the intellectual discipline of just war theory to legitimate sometimes aggressive acts of international violence, that brings a popular just war theory like Walzer’s into question. It is worth here drawing attention to what Walzer describes as the sphere of ‘morality’, which informs a notion of just war: I want to account for the ways in which men and women who are not lawyers but simply citizens (and sometimes soldiers) argue about war, and to expound the terms we commonly use. My starting point is the fact that we do argue, often to different purposes, to be sure, but in a

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______________________________________________________________ mutually comprehensible fashion: else there would be no point arguing. We justify our conduct; we judge the conduct of others. Though these justifications and judgments cannot be studied like the records of a criminal court, they are nevertheless a legitimate subject of study. Upon examination they reveal, I believe, a comprehensive view of war as a human activity and a more or less systematic moral doctrine, which sometimes, but not always, overlaps with established legal doctrine.4 Further: I shall always refer to the laws of international society (as these appear in legal handbooks and military manuals) as positive laws. For the rest, when I talk of law, I am referring to the moral law, and to those general principles that we commonly acknowledge, even when we can’t or won’t live up to them. Throughout the book, I treat words like aggression, neutrality, surrender, civilian, reprisal, and so on, as if they were terms in a moral vocabulary – which they are, and always have been, though most recently their analysis and refinement have been almost entirely the work of lawyers. I want to recapture the notion of just war for moral and political theory. My own work, then, looks back to that religious tradition within which Western politics and morality were first given shape, to the books of writers like Maimonides, Aquinas, Vitoria, and Suarez – and then to the books of writers like Hugo Grotius who took over the tradition and began to work it into secular form.5 With regard to what Walzer precisely means by ‘morality’ or the ‘moral law’, he argues: There is a particular arrangement, a particular view of the world that seems to me the best one. I want to suggest that the arguments we make about war are most fully understood (though other understandings are possible) as efforts to recognise and respect the rights of individuals and associated men and women. The morality I shall expound is in its philosophical form a doctrine of human rights, though I shall say nothing here of the ideas of personality, action and intention that this doctrine probably presupposes. Considerations of utility play into the

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______________________________________________________________ structure at many points, but they cannot account for it as a whole. Their part is a subsidiary to that of rights; it is constrained by rights. That is above all true of the classical forms of military maximisation: the religious crusade, the proletarian revolution, the ‘war to end all war’. But it is true also, as I will try to show, of the more immediate pressures of ‘military necessity’. At every point, the judgments we make (the lies we tell) are best accounted for if we regard life and liberty as something like absolute values and then try to understand the moral and political processes through which these values are challenged and defended.6 It should be noted that Walzer positions his work as a ‘practical morality’7 and he tries to develop his moral account of war through the use of case studies and by contrasting historical examples. This said, however, Walzer makes many very broad assumptions about what constitutes ‘morality’ and thus about what should be drawn upon as a notion of right when judging the legitimacy of an act of war. He assumes that there is a ‘common morality’ and asserts that the content of this common morality is human rights. On the basis of his notion of morality as human rights, Walzer passes judgment on particular acts of war in history. It is questionable whether such an approach is an example of what it means to take the problem of war seriously, however. Is it enough for a scholar simply to assert what a ‘common morality’ is and then say ‘I think’ that such and such an act of war is just or unjust? Does this kind of approach lead thinking out of the ambiguous use of moral statements all too often made by politicians in their justification of killing, or does it lead straight back into a realm of moral ambiguity? By simply declaring what he thinks morality is and then proceeding to judge the justness of war on this basis, Walzer overlooks a deeper question lying at the heart of war. This question is centred on a relationship between war and right. The term ‘right’ refers here not to the limited sense of legal rights or human rights, but denotes a broader concept encompassing differing notions of ethics, morality, law, justice and the good.8 In this latter sense, the term refers to a broader sphere of thinking about the ethical or normative arrangement of human lives in the world. A broader concept of right could thus be seen to involve a number of differing historical and social conceptions, which might stand in conflict with one another. For example, the concept of right can be seen to include, among other things: a set of claims by the state against its citizens and against other states; a set of claims by an individual relating to dignity, freedom or property linked to the fact of being human; a particular thick conception of the ‘good life’; animal rights. The arguments that underlie these differing formulations within a broad

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______________________________________________________________ concept of right may be in conflict and may draw upon differing theoretical, philosophical and historical ideas. In this respect differing formulations within a broad concept of right are grounded in very different ways. Some of these grounds may be seen to include, for example: legal texts and constitutions; historical and cultural traditions; philosophical arguments (such as social contract theory or utilitarian and deontological arguments); and theological and secular myths (such as divine hierarchies of creation or the law of nature). Viewed from the perspective of a broad concept of right, when we say that a particular act of violence is ‘right’, there are a variety of meanings and justifications which may be drawn upon and thus a variety of ways in which someone might attempt to justify or condemn a particular act of violence. What is being overlooked by thinkers such as Walzer (and by politicians who speak in a similar language) is the possibility of a deeper relationship between war and right, which marks, frames and even organises our thinking about war in general. This relation has developed historically over a process of ongoing attempts of human ethical thinking to come to terms with the role and status of killing and violence in general and the act of war in particular. Certainly Walzer argues that his concern is not with a historical question, but is focussed upon the ‘present character’ of the moral world.9 Yet, in making such a claim and attempting to name the present character of morality as human rights, Walzer confuses one form of right (human rights) with the whole of right (containing a number of different, inter-related forms). Further, he suppresses the continuing role and significance of other forms of right, which are essential to his judgments upon the justness of particular acts of war. By not acknowledging the role these other forms of right (the state, sovereignty, legal violence and coercion, political community, differential forms of ethical life, historical and sacred territorial boundaries) within his own ‘moral’ judgment about war,10 Walzer presents only a thin, surface-level account of just war which does not differ substantially from much of the just war rhetoric of state propaganda. There is a deeper set of questions involving the complex relationship between war and right that lies beneath the just war language of theorists such as Walzer or politicians such as Bush. While certain theoretical approaches, such as Walzer’s, give the appearance of engaging with these questions, what they are in fact doing is suppressing them in an effort to present an account of just war that is useful and digestible. It would seem that if we are to make sense of the current language of just war, and its use of terms such as ‘humanity’, ‘freedom’, and ‘democracy’, to justify violence, it is necessary to move beyond contemporary populist accounts and perhaps look towards more historical accounts of just war.11

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______________________________________________________________ Two central historical figures within the just war tradition are the Christian thinkers St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. While Augustine did not develop a comprehensive theory of just war as such, his comments have been highly influential. In City of God (426)12 Augustine responds to the initial prohibition of killing contained within the Decalogue and the Christian Gospels and in this sense engages with an early Christian tendency towards non-violence and pacifism. With regard to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, Augustine states: But the divine authority itself has made certain exceptions to the rule that it is not lawful to kill men. These exceptions, however, include only those whom God commands to be slain, either by a general law, or by an express command applying to a particular person at a particular time. Moreover, he who is commanded to perform this ministry does not himself slay. Rather, he is like a sword, which is the instrument of its user. And so those who, by God’s authority, have waged wars, or who bearing the public power in their own person, have punished the wicked with death according to His laws, that is, by His most just authority: these have in no way acted against that commandment which says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’.13 With regard to an express command by God to kill, Augustine gives the example of Abraham, who was commanded by God to kill his son.14 In this biblical story - something of a cruel test of faith - the prophet Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice his son but is at the last moment reprieved and told to sacrifice a goat or sheep instead. For Augustine, the story operates as an example of an instance where killing is justified by divine command. In his account, with its ambiguous mirroring of divine and earthly cities, the sovereign is often positioned as holding something of a God-like position, or at least the sovereign exhibits aspects of divine authority. One consequence of this for Augustine is a certain exemption of sovereign power from the prohibition upon killing. With regard to those bearing public power, Augustine seems to impute that the role of public office (or at least that of the Christian monarch) - necessary for maintaining public peace and order against crime and civil war - allows a legitimate use of violence exempt from the prohibition on killing.15 For Augustine, such acts of justified killing are bound up with the ‘wretchedness of man’s condition’.16 This involves not only the misery of living in the condition of sin but relates also to the necessary error contained within human judgments and the consequences of public authorities often torturing and killing the innocent.17 In this respect,

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______________________________________________________________ while a war fought against a harmful or threatening enemy may be a ‘just war’, it is certainly not celebrated or romanticised by Augustine: But the wise man, they say, will wage just wars. Surely, however, if he remembers that he is a human being, he will be much readier to deplore the fact that he is under the necessity of waging even just wars. For if they were not just, he would not have to wage them, and so there would then be no wars at all for a wise man to engage in. For it is the iniquity of the opposing side that imposes upon the wise man the duty of waging wars; and every man certainly ought to deplore this iniquity since, even if no necessity for war should arise from it, it is still the iniquity of men. Let everyone, therefore who reflects with pain upon such great evils, upon such horror and cruelty, acknowledge that this is misery. And if anyone either endures them or thinks of them without anguish of the soul, his condition is still more miserable: for he thinks himself happy only because he has lost all human feeling.18 Elements of Augustine’s account were inherited and developed by Aquinas and organised around the notions of authority, just cause and intention. In the Summa Theologiae (1266-1273)19 Aquinas, in response to the question of whether war is always sinful, argues: There are three conditions for a just war. First the ruler under whom the war is to be fought must have the authority to do so. A private person does not have the right to make war since he can pursue his rights by appealing to his superior. In addition a private person does not have the right to mobilize [convocare] the people as must be done in war. But since the responsibility for the commonwealth has been entrusted to rulers it is their responsibility to defend the city or kingdom or province subject to them. And just as it is legitimate for them to use the material sword to punish criminals in order to defend it against internal disturbances -- as the Apostle [Paul] says in Romans 13 ‘He does not bear the sword without cause, for he is a minister of God, an avenger in wrath against the evildoer’ – so they also have the right to use the sword of war to defend the commonwealth against external enemies...

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______________________________________________________________ Secondly, a just cause is required - so that those against whom the war is waged deserve such a response because of some offence on their part. Augustine says, ‘Just wars are usually defined as those that avenge injuries, when a nation or city should be punished for failing to right a wrong done by its citizens, or to return what has been taken away unjustly’. The third condition that is required on the part of those making the war is a right intention, to achieve some good or avoid some evil. St. Augustine says in his book, On the Words of the Lord, ‘For the true followers of God even wars are peaceful if they are waged not out of greed or cruelty but for the sake of peace, to restrain evil doers and assist the good’. Yet it may happen that even if the war is initiated by a legitimate authority and its cause is just, it can become unjust because of evil intentions.20 This latter point relates to what is sometimes called the doctrine of double effect and to the notion of proportionality. Aquinas argues: One act may have two effects only one of which is intended and the other outside of our intention. Moral acts are classified on the basis of what is intended, not of what happens outside of our intention since that is incidental to it.... The action of defending oneself may produce two effects - one, saving one’s life, and the other, killing the attacker. Now an action of this kind intended to save one’s own life cannot be characterised as illicit since it is natural for anyone to maintain himself in existence if he can. An act that is proportionate to the end intended. This is why it is not allowed to use more force than is necessary to defend one’s life. However, if moderation is used in repelling violence this is justified self-defence, for according to the [canon] law, ‘It is legitimate to meet force with force if it is an act of innocent self-defence and exercises restraint.’ It is not required for salvation that a man not carry out actions of proportionate self-defence in order to avoid killing another person, for a man is more obliged to provide for his own life than that of another. However, because killing is only allowed by action of public authority for the common good, it is not lawful for someone who is acting in selfdefence to intend to kill another man - except for those who

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______________________________________________________________ in the exercise of public authority justify the act of selfdefence as related to the public good. This is the case of a soldier fighting against the enemy or an officer of the law combating robbers - although these too commit a sin if they are motivated by private animosity.... 21 The accounts presented by Augustine and Aquinas move much closer towards taking the problem of war seriously. One way they might be seen to do this is through their positioning of the act of war within a broader question of killing. By relating the question of war to a religious prohibition on killing and then setting out the exceptions to this prohibition, the line of thinking developed by Augustine and Aquinas opens onto a set of issues, which mediate the relationship between war and right. Following on from the accounts of Augustine and Aquinas we can see how a discourse of just war is linked very closely to a set of arguments about when it is right to engage in acts of killing. The rightness or justness of war is shown to sit within a wider context concerning arguments about the legitimacy of the city or state and its control over the lives and deaths of its citizens and non-citizens. The just war tradition as initiated by Augustine and Aquinas presupposes, and cannot be separated from, a set of arguments about the source of the legitimacy of a legal-political community, the extent and limits of the power of the sovereign and the technical and juridical distinctions between war and murder. In this sense, when an individual argues that a particular act of war is ‘right’, their statement implies and draws upon a whole range of arguments about the legitimacy of killing and the legitimacy of a particular legalpolitical community. Arguments about war and those about the legitimacy of the city are linked. If we suppress this link and ignore the range of acts of killing and violence that are commonly pushed out of our juridical definitions of war, we hide a set foundational arguments and justifications that are already implicit and contained within our claims about just war. For thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas this link was obvious, albeit sometimes tenuous – legitimate violence is linked to the way particular legal and political institutions are given legitimacy by God. Today, while many assumptions are made about the legitimacy of particular, Western, legal-political orders (i.e. the so-called democratic legitimacy of Western states), within popular just war thinking the links between the question of the legitimacy of the city and of its killing, and the legitimacy of war are less often explored and more readily passed over. Part of the responsibility of taking war seriously involves drawing out and examining the issues, which mediate the relationship between war and right with the intention of obtaining a thicker, more concrete picture of how the rightness of war is formulated. In the accounts given by Augustine and Aquinas, a number of issues, or lines of mediation, might be identified.

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______________________________________________________________ By invoking the authority of God and a divine law or divine justice, the rightness of war is linked to a notion of transcendent authority. In this respect the relation between war and right, and the claim that a particular act of war is ‘just’, is mediated through a third transcendent aspect which is partly understood in terms of the infinite and unknowable operation of God’s justice, and which is partly understood through the interpretation of religious texts and religious law. In another respect, the relation between war and right is mediated by the role and status of the public authority of the empire or the city. This authority, which keeps the peace and punishes crime, holds a particular legitimacy over violence and killing, which is not necessarily held by private citizens. Further, (in Aquinas) the relation between war and right is mediated by a (particular Aristotelian)22 notion of the common good of the city or political community. In determining what constitutes an act of ‘just war’, the notion of the common good might be seen at times to conflict with divine justice or the legitimacy of the public authority. Particularly in the situation of conflicts between elements of the Church and particular monarchs or magistrates, or between the monarch and citizens who view the monarch as a tyrant and thus its law as ‘unjust’, the questions of what is a ‘just war’ and, of who makes such a determination is not unproblematic. In this respect, the classical linkage between just war and the legitimacy of the city leads almost naturally to the pairing of just war in the form of revolutionary violence (or even ‘terrorism’) and the illegitimacy of the city. In yet another respect, the Christian notion of subjective intention further complicates the relationship between war and right. Within this notion the idea is introduced that a war is ‘just’ not because it furthers the interest, glory or common good of a city, but rather that the justness of war is linked to the motivations of rulers. What can be seen within this older just war tradition is a variety of differing grounds that are drawn upon to justify killing and violence. The limitation of this older tradition is that these differing grounds are not explicitly recognised or drawn into central focus in the moment of religiousmoral decision-making about the legitimacy of a particular act of war. Any contemporary approach to the question of the justness or rightness of a particular war must grasp the differing grounds upon which killing and violence is legitimised within Western thinking and show how these differing grounds reside and are ordered in terms of value within every moral decision about the rightness or justness of an act of war. In other words, contemporary approaches to just war thinking need openly to consider the problem of just war with reference to a broader concept of right. It is not enough to claim that a war is justified in the name of a socalled common morality, or even in the name of human rights. Every such claim already contains within it forms of the ordering of violence which are hidden by a grand moral language. What are these different ordered

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______________________________________________________________ relationships between notions of right and acts of killing and violence? Well, in Western social and political life there are many, of which I shall here name just a few. Some different orders of war include: the notion that it is right to kill plants and animals; the notion that a monarch or city official has a certain limited monopoly upon the legitimacy of violence for the purpose of protecting of maintaining peace and civil order and in protecting the populace from outside threat; the notion that there is a right of public officials to punish criminals; the notion that there is a right of a political community to protect itself and at times to use violence to realise its conception of the good life; the notion that violence is legitimated for the purpose of fulfilling the some form of divine will; the notion that violence might be legitimised by the futural promise of international law; the notion that violence may be drawn upon to protect and realise human freedom and human dignity both at individual and social levels; the notion that forms of institutional and social violence may have legitimacy as a consequence of particular forms of economic organisation; the idea that using violence in the present is justified by a notion of historical progress. This list is not exhaustive, but it is enough to outline a number of different modes of thinking that reside within our historical and contemporary conceptions of when it is right to use violence and to kill. These differing justifications are in constant conflict and it is these moments of conflict and contradiction that make up the underlying content of a notion of just war. Why just war thinking - in the manner in which it is presented by Walzer - should be questioned is because it fails to give an account of how a moral decision about the justness of a particular act of war already assumes that certain questions about the legitimisation of violence have already been decided: i.e. the killing of animals, or the monopoly on the legitimacy of violence held by the sovereign. If just war theory were properly a moral theory, it would consider all of these orders of violence as open questions, and as ones which impact upon all moral decision-making. However, just war theory only pretends to be a moral theory: in reality it is merely a form of window-dressing, a language of sorry comfort and apology which stands upon the back of different orders of killing so that it might appear righteous when speaking about others. The argument being put forward here is not that an individual cannot hold views about whether a particular act of war is well justified or not. Rather, what is at issue is a concern with how an individual arrives at a particular conclusion about whether it is right or not to engage in or support an act of killing. What is required when an individual considers the rightness or justness of war is a moment of reflection upon how one’s view of war takes place within a conceptual, historical and social background in which justifications about the legitimacy of killing and violence have already been arranged, organised or ordered. The moment of judgment about the rightness

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______________________________________________________________ of war does not take place within an intellectual space abstracted from these orders of the legitimacy of violence, but is intrinsically connected to, and often dependent upon, them. When making a judgment about war the individual should consider their own reasons for or against an act of war with a wider framework that includes the differing social-historical orders of the legitimacy of violence. It is very easy to be arrogant when talking about war. It is very easy to claim that one’s view of history or factual circumstances is superior and that an act of war is clearly justified. It is very easy to say ‘I think’ that a particular war is right on account of human rights, or because the enemy are crazy religious fanatics, or because the enemy is ‘evil’. It is harder to be humbler in one’s approach to considering the justness of war. It is harder to move past the initial arrogance of the ‘I think’ and to consider how the notions of legitimate violence which appear so vivid and complete to the thinking individual are only moments and snapshots of a wider history concerning the different ways in which humans have ordered their arguments and practices of legitimate violence. Humility in this context does not mean weakness. It involves a concern with the implicit danger of adopting an arrogant approach to the problem of war. The danger stems not simply from the arrogance of presidents, but emerges also from academics, intellectuals, bureaucrats and military personnel who refuse to reflect upon war as a question of killing linked to all aspects of social and political life. In response to the arrogant and dangerous arises the demand to challenge, question and criticise their ‘I think’ in a manner that attempts to undermine the words, which they use to justify violent and bloody deeds.

Notes 1

http:www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html,accessed 11 December 2005. 2 See the various critiques within: V I Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in Essential Works of Lenin, H M Christman (ed.), Dover Publications, New York, 1987; C Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, G Schwab (tr.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996; C Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Routledge-Cavendish, London, 2007. 3 M Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 2nd ed., Basic Books, New York, 1992; M Walzer, Arguing About War, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004. 4 M Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. xxvii. 5 Walzer, p. xxvii. 6 Walzer, p. xxx.

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______________________________________________________________ 7

Walzer, p. xxix. With regard to his account of morality Walzer at p. xxix argues: I am not going to expound morality from the ground up. Were I to begin with the foundations, I would probably never get beyond them; in any case, I am by no means sure what the foundations are. The substructure of the ethical world is a matter of deep and apparently unending controversy. Meanwhile, however, we are living in the superstructure. The building is large, its construction is elaborate and confusing. But here I can offer some guidance: a tour of the rooms, so to speak, a discussion of architectural principles. 8 In this sense ‘right’ refers to also the ethical norms contained within both subjective morality and within positive law. 9 Walzer, p. xxvii. 10 Walzer does engage with these questions to a degree, and in his later work, Arguing About War, he pays more attention to them. The problem is however, that Walzer never examines these questions as foundational questions and does not acknowledge their place within his conception of morality and justice. 11 This is not to say that the just war tradition should be dismissed only that populist accounts should be treated with caution. For a scholarly accounts of the just war tradition see: J T Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200-1740, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975; J T Johnson, The Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981. 12 Augustine, City of God against the Pagans, R W Dyson (tr. and ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. 13 Augustine, p. 33; I, 21. It should be noted that these comments are made within the context of Augustine’s discussion of suicide and his condemnation of suicide as murder. At this point Augustine also makes an important distinction between the killing of humans and the killing of plants and animals. For Augustine the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ does not extend to the killing of plants and animals whose ‘life and death are subject to our needs’. 14 Augustine, p. 33; I, 21. 15 Augustine, pp. 944-5; XIX, 16. 16 Augustine, p. 928; XIX, 6. 17 Augustine, pp. 927-8; XIX, 6. 18 Augustine, p. 929: XIX, 7. Augustine at p. 104; III,10, with regard to a number of wars carried out by Rome in defence of its territory, argues: Clearly, however, the Romans did have a just defence for undertaking and waging such great wars. They were compelled to resist the savage incursions of their enemies; and they were compelled not to do this by greed for human

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______________________________________________________________ praise, but by the necessity of defending life and liberty. Augustine at p. 39, I, 26, exempts soldiers from the prohibition on killing. He argues: But when a soldier, obedient to the power under which he has been lawfully placed, slays a man, he is not guilty of murder according to any laws of his city. On the contrary, if he does not do so, he is guilty of desertion and contempt of authority. If he had done this of his own will and authority, however, he would have fallen into the crime of shedding human blood. Thus, the deed which is punished if he does it when not commanded is the same as that for which he will be punished if he does not do it when commanded. 19 Aquinas ³Summa Theologiae 1266-1273² in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, Sigmund, P. tr. ed. (New York: Norton & Co.: 1988). 20 Ibid, pp. 64-65. 21 Ibid, pp. 70-71. 22 There are other Greek and non-Greek traditions that order the rightness of war which influence and lie behind the Christian just war tradition. These numerous traditions which stretch backwards into history cannot be addressed here.

Bibliography Aquinas, T., ‘Summa Theologiae 1266-1273’, in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics. P. Sigmund (tr. and ed.), Norton & Co., New York, 1988. Augustine, City of God against the Pagans. R. W. Dyson (tr. and ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. Douzinas, C., Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism,.Routledge-Cavendish, London, 2007. Johnson, J. T., Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200-1740. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975. _____

, The Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981. Lenin, V. I., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Essential Works of Lenin. H. M. Christman, (ed.), Dover Publications, New York, 1987. Schmitt, C., The Concept of the Political. G. Schwab, (tr.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.

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______________________________________________________________ Sigmund, P., (tr. and ed.), St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics. Norton & Co., New York, 1988. Walzer, M., Arguing About War. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004. _____

, Just and Unjust Wars: Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. Basic Books, New York, 1992.

Torture and the ‘Ticking Bomb’: Fantasy and the So-Called War on Terror Bob Brecher Abstract The creation and exploitation of fantasy is a key component of the so-called war on terror; and calls for the legalisation of interrogational torture play a central part in that policy.1 The fantasy of the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario therefore needs to be exposed as such. I argue, first, that its time and effectiveness constraints run against each other; that the likelihood of accurate information is very far from certain; and that the necessity, which the circumstances are said to press upon the relevant authorities, can only ever be retrospective. Second, I argue that what ‘we’ would do is beside the point: all ‘we’ could do is to employ, for use in just such cases, professional torturers. Torture remains wrong, and calls for its legalisation in ‘ticking bomb’ cases are at best disingenuous, serving merely to further the ‘war on terror’. Key Words: Dershowitz, fantasy, ticking bomb, torture, war on terror ***** Governments, including our own, have exploited the fear of terrorism to excuse actions that in normal circumstances would never be thought of as acceptable.2 Amnesty UK’s comment is entirely apt. But in keeping to Amnesty’s ‘apolitical’ remit, it tells only half the story, and it is the other half that is even more important. Governments not only exploit people’s fears: they deliberately create them. Whatever else the so-called war on terror may be, it is first and foremost a manufactured fantasy. Empirically, its prosecution rests in large part on untruths: from Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, to the British government’s insistence that the terrorist attacks in London of 7 July 2005 had nothing to do with the invasion and occupation of Iraq; from its ‘advice’ to universities on how to combat ‘Islamic extremism’, to the United States’ corporate administration’s creating a ‘democratic’ Iraq; from its denial - despite building five ‘enduring’ super-bases across Iraq to ensure its continuing control of Iraqi oil - that such control was ever part of its raison d’etre for the occupation,3 to its association of Saddam Hussein with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001. Conceptually, the very idea of terror’s being something on which it is possible literally to wage war is a nonsense: for that

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______________________________________________________________ would be to misconstrue terror as an end, rather than a means, to suppose that a war may be fought against someone’s weapon rather than against them, whether that agent be a state or an ideology (and even the latter at least begins to be an analogical use of the term ‘war’, closer to such metaphors as ‘the war on drugs’ or ‘the war against obesity’).4 The very declaration and prosecution of the ‘war on terror’, then, depends on engaging in, and appropriating, a whole range of fantasies. That is uncontroversial. No serious commentator can pretend otherwise. What is no less the case is that fantasy plays a crucial role in the creation of the public fear that is a necessary condition of its giving its support for such a policy. The United States’ pursuit of its agenda is set out in the Project for a New American Century’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, published in 2000 and thus composed well before September 2001. It is an agenda that depends on public fear for support, not only in the USA but among all its allies. My claim here is that fantasy is a key element in feeding that public fear. With the end of the Cold War, a new enemy needed to be found or created; and preferably an enemy endowed with the most fantastic capabilities, an almost superhuman enemy that knows no limits, which can strike anyone, anywhere and at any time without warning. For it is only such an enemy that can be used to justify the measures necessary, no less at home than abroad, that the neo-liberal project increasingly requires to secure its position against those whom it excludes, and on whose exclusion its ‘success’ relies. None of that, of course, is to deny the reality of attacks such as those in Bali, London, Madrid or New York. It is, however, to deny the truth of the accounts given of the cause and nature of those attacks; and thus the appropriateness of policy decisions they are said to demand. Consider just a few examples. Consider the US Patriot Act, which may be cited as the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001’,5 and which provides for governmental powers of surveillance, interception and incarceration well beyond anything known before in the United States; or the UK Terrorism Act (2006), which ‘contains a comprehensive package of measures designed to ensure that the police, intelligence agencies and courts have all the tools they require to tackle terrorism and bring perpetrators to justice’.6 Or think of measures such as ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) in the UK, introduced in 2002 and recently ‘updated’, which empower local authorities to ban young people from entering certain areas of their home towns or villages or from leaving their homes at certain times - effectively a form of house arrest; or reflect on the size of the UK’s prison population, already proportionately the highest in Europe and still rising; or of CCTV, again, more widespread in the UK than anywhere else in Europe (currently one camera per 14 of the population). All these are designed to engender fear, and to do so by means of creating

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______________________________________________________________ fantasies for those fears to play upon: the fantasy of hordes of young people rampaging the streets; the fantasy of an epidemic of crime; the fantasy of the need for constant vigilance. And of course the solution in each case is itself a further fantasy: that ASBOs will solve problems of social disaffection; that prison works; or that the all-seeing government or corporate eye can in fact keep people safe. I am not of course claiming that this is new: it has been a central feature of authorities’, whether state or otherwise, social policy from, I daresay, time immemorial. Certainly the medieval Church’s efforts in this direction were far from amateurish: just look at fourteenth- or fifteenthcentury frescoes in, say, Italian churches; or the eighteenth-century ‘epidemics of vampirism’ in eastern Europe;7 or nineteenth-century AngloAmerican medical strictures on masturbation; or the centuries-old European blood calumny against the Jews, to say nothing of the Nazis’ campaign, involving as it did the whole gamut of such fantasies, from the religious to the medical. Fantasy has long been a weapon of first resort in the effort to gain support for a political policy of slaughter. The case of the so-called war on terror is no exception in that respect. At the same time, however, the ‘war on terror’ is indeed something new. It is new in respect of its being presented as knowing no bounds by the leader of the most powerful state the world has ever known, and a state that regards itself as having a mission to convert the rest of the world to its own vision of the good life. For President George W. Bush, and for all too many others, it is a permanent war and a war that knows no moral or legal bounds. And what is being done under its aegis reflects exactly that: we are told that the enemy, ‘the terrorists’, are potentially everywhere and nowhere; they are potentially anyone and no one; and there is no end to the pseudo-causes such dedicated addicts to terrorism may take up as an excuse for their murderous pursuit of evil for its own sake. The ‘war on terror’ is a war for freedom and against tyranny … a war against those who favour death and by those of us who favour life. We are fighting against nihilists, against agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself, although they disguise this with social crusades.8 It is one thing for those words to be spoken by Admiral Massera, a member of the ruling triumvirate of the Argentinian military junta from 1976 -1983. It is another when such words are so closely mirrored by the President of the United States in 2001.9 In such a war for our very survival, fought against an enemy that literally knows no bounds, none of the traditional rules apply. The Geneva Convention, for example, is something merely ‘quaint’;10 ‘enemy

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______________________________________________________________ combatants’ are suddenly invented in order legally to circumvent such ‘quaint’ requirements as the legal obligation to treat prisoners of war decently and those accused of criminal acts according to due legal process. Guantanamo Bay, surely unthinkable just a few years ago – unthinkable, that is, as an overt torture camp, the open and deliberate creation not of some military dictatorship but of the US government – is testament to the ways and senses in which the so-called war on terror really is a new development. This, together with clandestine and not-so-clandestine torture ‘facilities, ‘rendition’ and their associated practices, is where torture enters the scene. For centuries, torture has been the bottom line for civilized values. ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, in human or degrading treatment or punishment,’ according to Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights insists in Article 4 that its prohibition of torture (Article 7) is not derogable, even ‘during time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation’; and the Convention against Torture applies such prohibition to acts inflicted or instigated by, or with the acquiescence of, public officials (Article 1) as well as reasserting its absolute standing (Article 2).11 Not least for symbolic reasons, the concerted attack on the prohibition against torture mounted by the United States government after its declaration of the ‘war on terror’ is central to its pursuit of its ends. Of course the United States, like the great majority of other countries, has a long and dishonourable history of torturing its enemies, real or perceived.12 But to make torture open, an instrument of state is something different. The public’s sensibilities need seriously to be reeducated. Nor is that all. This logic also works in reverse, so to speak. If you can get the public to approve torture as a legal instrument, then there is no limit on what else you can get people to support, or at least acquiesce in: for torture really is the bottom line. Shift that, and everything changes. The point of torture, of course, is as a weapon of terror: as a method of obtaining accurate information, it is universally recognised as useless. But even the United States government is not going to have the nerve, or perhaps the political idiocy, to admit that. So torture has to be promoted at the point its opponents are perceived - by the public, by the politicians and by the great majority of academics – as having the most difficulty in justifying an absolute prohibition. Richard Posner, for example, a respected judge and eminent academic lawyer, insists that ‘if the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible’ and that ‘No one who doubts that should be in a position of responsibility.’13 And so the fantasy of the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario is wheeled in to justify torture. In what follows, I aim to show that that scenario is indeed a fantasy, and thus to offer at least one antidote to the poisonous fantasies feeding the so-called war on terror.

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______________________________________________________________ 1.

Dershowitz’s Version Dershowitz has: always challenged (my) students with hypothetical and real-life problems requiring them to choose among evils. …The classic hypothetical case involves the train engineer whose brakes become inoperative. There is no way he can stop his speeding vehicle of death. Either he can do nothing, in which case he will plough into a busload of schoolchildren, or he can swerve onto another track, where he sees a drunk lying on the rails. (Neither decision will endanger him or his passengers.) There is no third choice. What should he do?14

We have to choose; the only question is how that choice is to be made. Should we take into account the number of people involved; who they are; both; none of these; or what? Even deciding to leave it to chance is to make a decision. However you decide, someone is going to suffer. And so, Dershowitz would have it, with torture to prevent catastrophe: there are some extraordinary cases where interrogational torture is the least bad option; and, since torture is here to stay, it is better to drop the hypocritical pretence that it is something ‘we’ don’t do and legalise its use in relevant cases. Whatever our view of the morality of using torture in these circumstances – and Dershowitz is careful to register his moral disapproval of torture despite his advocating its legalisation - this would at once eliminate the hypocrisy and serve to limit and regulate the use of torture.15 But the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario is a deceptive fantasy. When unpacked, the argument falls apart. Its time and effectiveness constraints run against each other (section 2); the likelihood of accurate information is very far from certain (section 3), so that the necessity which the circumstances are said to press upon the authorities can be established only retrospectively (section 4). Crucially, furthermore, what ‘we’ would do is entirely irrelevant: all ‘we’ could do is to empower an elected government to employ professional torturers on ‘our’ behalf (section 5). Calls to legalise interrogational torture merely serve the prosecution of the ‘war on terror’ and the prosecutors’ attempted legitimation of their longstanding terroristic use of torture in their determination to subjugate the rest of the world to their own ends. 2.

Time and Effectiveness Field Manual 34-52, the rulebook of American military interrogators (updated after the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib), ‘prohibits the use of coercive techniques because they produce low quality

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______________________________________________________________ intelligence.’16 Dershowitz, however, argues that ‘It is precisely because torture sometimes does work and can prevent major disasters that it still exists in many parts of the world and has been totally eliminated from none.’17 So what about the specific circumstances of a ‘ticking bomb’? Such evidence as we have is inevitably anecdotal and contradictory. For instance, I have personally been told that members of the Israeli security forces claimed that a bomb was found and defused as a result of torturing the person who had planted it.18 On the other hand, such claims are also denied. What is striking, however, is that Dershowitz’s own examples, of Egypt and Jordan, to whom of course ‘the U.S. government sometimes ‘renders’ terrorist suspects’,19 are not remotely of the ticking bomb variety. Furthermore, his examples of Abu Nidal and the 1993 World Trade Centre attacks in his explicit defence of the claim ‘that torture sometimes works, even if it does not always work’20 are blatantly irrelevant. ‘Jordan,’ he tells us, ‘apparently broke the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s, Abu Nidal, by threatening his mother. Philippine police reportedly helped crack the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings by torturing a suspect’ (my emphasis).21 The first case is obviously not one where physically torturing a terrorist, or a suspect, worked; it was when his mother was threatened that Abu Nidal ‘broke’, and that is quite another matter. Nor was there any ticking bomb waiting to be defused in either case. Odder still is this attempt to show that torture is effective in extracting genuine information: There are numerous instances in which torture has produced self-proving, truthful information that was necessary to prevent harm to civilians. The Washington Post has recounted a case from 1995 in which Philippine authorities tortured a terrorist into disclosing information that may have foiled plots to assassinate the pope and to crash eleven commercial airliners carrying approximately four thousand passengers into the Pacific ocean, as well as a plan to fly a private Cessna filled with explosives into CIA headquarters. For sixty-seven days, intelligence agents beat the suspect. … 22 Sixty-seven days? So what on earth has this report to do with any ticking bomb, or with any imminent catastrophe? So much for the empirical evidence offered by Dershowitz. Still, as the only evidence we have about real ticking bomb cases is anecdotal, probably speculation is all that is open to us. So, accepting for the moment that the captive really does know where the bomb is, what is their strategy likely to be? The important point is that only interrogational torture is permitted. The captive’s position, then - as Dershowitz himself recognizes -

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______________________________________________________________ is that ‘the torturee will know that there are limits to the torture being inflicted’.23 So they know, first, that unless they reveal where the bomb is, they will be (non-lethally) tortured; second, that the torture will stop immediately they give the information required; and third that, since the torture will stop immediately the bomb explodes (and remember that that is imminent), the time for which they have to endure the torture is comparatively short. It is obvious that the best course of action is to lie; to deny knowing where the bomb is, or to try to persuade the interrogators that someone else knows where it is. But let us assume, whether or not reasonably, that such an attempt would not last very long; or that the captive would calculate that it was after all not worth trying, since they knew that the interrogators knew that they knew where the bomb was - the interrogators had, after all, persuaded the relevant authorities to issue a torture warrant on the basis of the evidence of such knowledge. What now? The critical issue here is time. And one pretty obvious way of buying time in these circumstances is simply to lie about the whereabouts of the bomb, and in as complicated a way as possible, hoping that by the time it was discovered that they had lied. the bomb would be that much closer to going off - and the torture, remember, therefore that much closer to stopping. So why not lie repeatedly? And that is so far to say nothing of lying out of desperation (hence the Field Manual). Note too, that since only strictly interrogational torture is to be used, the torture would have to stop while the authorities checked the captive’s story - however cynical one might be inclined to be about interrogators actually behaving in such a ‘gentlemanly’ way, or about observers insisting on this condition. The less time there is, the more likely it is that lying, whether deliberately or desperately, would work. So the more urgent the situation and thus the more justified the torture and the warrant authorising it - the smaller the chance of stopping the bomb going off. So what we are being invited to weigh is not the torture of one person against the death and maiming of hundreds, or even thousands, of innocent civilians. Rather, it is the torture of one person against the possibility of the death and maiming of hundreds, or even thousands, of innocent civilians. How high is that possibility? We do not know. But we do know that, assuming you agree with the utilitarian approach on which the argument is based in the first place, the higher you think the possibility is of death and mutilation, the more heavily you will take it to weigh on the side of torture; and the lower you think it is, the less heavily you will take it to weigh. So unless you do know what the possibility is, at least roughly, you cannot be in a position to judge its weight against torture. Your position therefore has to be that torture is justified by even the possibility of catastrophe - not by its certainty.

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______________________________________________________________ Furthermore, if there really is good reason to suppose that there is a bomb about to go off very soon then, as Levinson points out, ‘anyone who believes that torture is acceptable with a warrant would, I suspect, waive the requirement when time is truly of the essence’.24 Nor is that all. To the extent that time really was pressing, then surely ‘it seems all too likely that a genuinely stringent process of scrutiny would slow the process down to the point of ineffectiveness. … it would take time to compile evidence, and time for judges to sift through it (and even) [I]f authority to issue warrants was reserved to a small set of highly qualified judges, it might well be difficult to obtain rapid access to (them)’.25 Or to put it rather more bluntly: these are ‘classic cases of emergency or exigent circumstances in which the police generally do not have time to obtain warrants’.26 The more deeply a conscientious judge inquires as to whether or not the matter really is sufficiently urgent, the more time will turn out to have been wasted if it does turn out to be urgent. On the other hand, the louder the ticking, so to speak, the less time for a judge to consider the matter. Under these inevitable counter-pressures, it is a reasonable expectation that judges’ default position would be to issue a warrant lest it turn out that they be accused of having blood on their hands. 3.

Knowledge and Necessity Jonathan Allen sets out the situation regarding knowledge succinctly: we would have to know: (a) that we are holding the right person; (b) that the person being tortured really does possess the information we need; (c) that acquiring the information the captured terrorist possesses would be very likely to put us in a position to avert a disaster, and that his accomplices haven’t already adopted a contingency plan he knows nothing about; (d) that the information we obtain through torture is reliable.27 Even Levinson, who reluctantly semi-endorses Dershowitz’s proposal - since we ‘are staring into an abyss, and no one can escape the necessity of a response’28 - notes that ‘there is no known example of this actually occurring, in the sense of having someone in custody who knew of a bomb likely to go off within the hour’.29 As we saw earlier, Dershowitz offers in response only his unreferenced claim that in Israel ‘There is little doubt that some acts of terrorism - which would have killed many civilians - were prevented. There is also little doubt that the cost of saving these lives measured in terms of basic human rights - was extraordinarily high.’30 Nor is he alone. Others who countenance torture in extremis are even vaguer.

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______________________________________________________________ Walzer, for example, writes of authorising ‘the torture of a captured rebel leader who knows or probably knows the location of a number of bombs …’31 (my emphasis): note here how easy it is to slide from knowledge to suspicion. Again, the empirical question of how likely it is that a given captive has the requisite knowledge remains uncertain. We have to speculate. It seems reasonable to suppose that any bomb-planter will have taken care to leave as little time as possible between planting the bomb and its going off. Unless they had already been under surveillance, therefore, their being taken into custody in the interval between planting and explosion must be extraordinarily unlikely; and of course, if they had been under surveillance, then those conducting the surveillance would be very likely to know where the bomb was or who the person was who knew where it was. To put it succinctly: ‘we cannot usually be certain of guilt if we do not have all the information. If we did have it, we would not be tempted to resort to torture.’32 In the United States, as Elaine Scarry points out, ‘In the two and a half years since September 11, 2001, five thousand foreign nationals suspected of being terrorists have been detained without access to counsel, only three of whom have ever eventually been charged with terrorism-related acts; two of those three have been acquitted.’33 So how likely is it that in the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario the authorities should come to be blessed with the near-omniscience they lack elsewhere? 4.

Necessity That takes us to the issue of necessity. The whole point of the ticking bomb fantasy is to engender a sense of necessity: ‘the terrorist’ who knows where the bomb is has to be tortured in order to prevent the death and maiming of thousands of innocent people. But what sort of necessity is this? How do we know that the torture is indeed necessary, that the disaster is imminent and unavoidable other than through the use of torture? Dershowitz might argue that of course empirical knowledge can never be certain, and that ‘necessity’ here is to be understood in the ordinary, everyday, sense, and not in some philosophical sense. That seems quite reasonable: but precisely because certainty is unavailable, what we are actually being invited to accept, once again, is that interrogational torture is morally justifiable because it might avoid a catastrophe. The issue here is the possibility of having the knowledge that time is sufficiently short to make the case a matter of necessity. If it is not known that time is (sufficiently) short, then it cannot be known that the case is a matter of necessity. So how does the interrogator know that time is (sufficiently) short? It is logically possible that the detainee has told them - but of course the knowledge that the interrogators’ knowing this leads to torture would make this even less likely than it already is: can you seriously imagine a prisoner’s admitting that there is a bomb set to go off at a particular time but then adamantly refusing to say where it is, knowing

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______________________________________________________________ that they will be tortured to make them give that information?34 I suppose someone else might have told them that there is a ticking bomb, which they themselves do not know where it is, but that they do know that this other person knows where it is. But then how do the interrogators, or the authorities charged with issuing or withholding a torture warrant, know that that information is reliable? It is inordinately unlikely, to say the least, that they could have the knowledge that is a logical condition of invoking necessity. To argue, then, that the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario is one where torture is necessary is misleading. It is only in the everyday, non-philosophical, sense that we can, in the real world, say in advance that something or other is necessary. But in that case all we really mean, is that - for example - taking an umbrella when it’s raining is one way of not getting wet. You could take a mac; or you could stay at home. You could also choose to get wet. The necessity of torture in any particular instance can’t be known in advance. That is why the ticking bomb scenario remains radically underspecified. Probability is all there can be. So how strong a probability would be required to generate a torture warrant? If the standard were set too high - say 99% - then the whole practical point of legalising interrogational torture would disappear. Again, Dershowitz himself rightly points out that no legal sanctions or processes are 100% effective. Perhaps, then, a 90% likelihood would be sufficient. But in that case, why not 89%? After all, the circumstances are so extreme as to justify what even the advocates of torture and/or its legalisation agree is a last resort. The more convincing the urgency, the lower it makes sense to set the threshold of torture. So why not 51%? Or less? So of course there has to be some risk, and very probably an increasingly considerable one, of torturing the wrong person, or of torturing a person when torture might not have been necessary after all. No wonder that the best evidence Dershowitz can cite is that ‘the Israeli security services claimed that, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, at least one preventable act of terrorism had been allowed to take place, one that killed several people when a bus was bombed’ (my emphasis). In fairness, he clearly recognises the shortcoming: ‘Whether this claim is true, false, or somewhere in between is difficult to assess’,35 he says. But yet again, what he does not recognise is the impact that that admission should have on his argument. The best that can be claimed is that it may be necessary – no more than that. Substitute this more cautious phrase and any initial plausibility the ticking bomb fantasy might have quickly disappears.

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______________________________________________________________ 5.

Who Tortures? Back in 1971, when the British army’s ‘interrogation techniques’ in the north of Ireland were eliciting at least some disquiet, Anthony Quinton commented: I do not see on what basis anyone could argue that the prohibition of torture is an absolute moral principle. … Consider a man caught planting a bomb in a large hospital, which no one dare touch for fear of setting it off. It was this kind of extreme situation I had in mind when I said earlier that I thought torture could be justifiable.36 Oddly, Quinton himself sees the obvious problem, but fails to see that it rules out just the sort of example he puts forward. He rightly points out that ‘any but the most sparing recourse to [torture] will nourish a guild of professional torturers, a persisting danger to society much greater, even if more long-drawn-out, then anything their employment is likely to prevent’; and that ‘If a society does not professionalise torture, then the limits of its efficiency make its application in any particular extreme situation that much more dubious.’ The inevitable ‘limits of its efficiency’, however, do not ‘make its application … much more dubious’ (my emphasis):37 they rule such application out, simply because the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario requires just that efficiency which the amateur torturer could not bring to it. The train driver is a train driver, not a trained torturer. Nor are Dershowitz’s students. Nor is Dershowitz or other lawyers or philosophers. Nor are you. Nor am I. The ready acceptance of the ticking bomb scenario without distinguishing between what you or I might do in that imagined case, what you or I could do in an actual case and what ‘someone’ would be expected to do in an actual case has been disastrous. Its irresponsible use by philosophers engaged in thought experiments to test moral theory has in fact had a profound effect even on those who offer a detailed critique of other aspects of this sort of argument. Perhaps Michael Walzer’s is the most galling example. In a recent interview, conducted in 2003, he quite reasonably objects to Dershowitz’s use of his (Walzer’s) treatment of ‘the problem of dirty hands’ to justify torture warrants because ‘extreme cases make bad law’, yet immediately goes on to accept the case itself, apparently without noticing exactly what he is committing himself to: ‘[Yes], I would do whatever was necessary to extract information in the ticking bomb case - that is, I would make the same argument after 9/11 that I made 30 years before. But I do not want to generalise from cases like that; I don’t want to rewrite the rule against torture to incorporate this exception.’38 Or has Walzer recently undertaken torture training?

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______________________________________________________________ You or I can imaginatively put ourselves in the position of Dershowitz’s train driver, at least to the extent of knowing how to operate the controls so as to ‘swerve onto another track.’ But we cannot put ourselves in the position of a torturer, and for two reasons. First, there is the sort and the precision of the skills required; second, and far more importantly, there is the question of the depths to which the acquisition and practice of such skills requires the torturer to sink,39 to realise the absurdity of asking the question, ‘What would you do in a ‘ticking bomb’ case?’ Even if you were there when the person you knew to know where the bomb was, you would not know what to do. The train driver example and the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario are radically different cases. The latter requires us not to imagine what we would do, but to imagine what we would require someone else - a professional torturer - to do on our behalf; and not, furthermore, as an act of supererogation or altruism, but as the practice of their profession. What remains puzzling is why neither Dershowitz and other proponents of the legalisation of interrogational torture, nor Posner and other proponents of illegal interrogational torture, address themselves in any systematic manner – or indeed in any manner at all, apart from Dershowitz’s few comments - to these obvious and fundamental empirical issues surrounding the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario in their published writing on these matters. Most disturbing of all is that even where they recognise, as Dershowitz does, that there is a danger that ‘If we create a legal structure for limiting and controlling torture, we compromise our principled opposition to torture in all circumstances and create a potentially dangerous and expandable situation’,40 the issue is one towards which they do no more than gesture. Simply to remark that ‘The strongest argument against any resort to torture’ is ‘that if torture, which has been deemed illegitimate by the civilized world for more than a century, were now to be legitimated –- even for limited use in one extraordinary type of situation –- such legitimation would constitute an important symbolic setback in the worldwide campaign against human rights abuses’41 is offset by the advantages of legalisation is wholly inadequate – not least because that setback would be a good deal more than symbolic. It would be also logical, and thus physical. In legally permitting interrogational torture on the basis of the fantasy of the ticking bomb scenario, fantasy-based policy would become even more widespread – and in that process, more and more people and their bodies would be subjected to torture. As a weapon of terror, it works. And if the danger posed by ‘the terrorists’ is great enough, whatever works must be used: as in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Guatemala, Brazil, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, to name but a few, so wherever else.

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______________________________________________________________ 6.

Conclusion Not only is the alleged necessity of the case spurious; its consequentialism blithely ignores the most important consequence of all - the impact of the institutionalised practice of torture on any society adopting it. The institutionalisation of the profession of torturer is a necessary condition of the example’s even getting off the ground. Basing public policy on individuals’ likely visceral responses to fantasy is the last resort of those whom power has utterly corrupted. Here as elsewhere, the so-called realists’ fantasy is a fundamentally dishonest one, serving, whether disingenuously or not, the purposes of the United States government and their allies in at once creating and exploiting fantasies to create public fear and complaisance in their pursuit of the war on terror, itself a fantasy created as a cover for realpolitik – and a realpolitik whose proponents have been and remain content to use torture in the pursuit of their ends.

Notes 1

A version of this chapter was first published in Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte vol. 1, 2008, pp. 110-124: my thanks to the editors - Tessa Debus, Regina Kreide, Michael Krennerich and Anja Mihr – and the publishers – Wochenschau Verlag – for publishing it in order to reach a German audience, in the knowledge that it had already been commissioned to appear in this volume. 2 ‘Don’t sign up to terror: unsubscribe’, Amnesty Magazine, vol., 145, September/October 2007, p.15. 3 J Holt, ‘It’s the Oil’, London Review of Books, 18 October 2007, pp. 3-4. 4 I pursue these issues elsewhere. See also R Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005, esp. pp. 113-118. 5 www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html. 6 www.homeoffice.gov.uk/security/terrorism-and-the-law/terrorism-act-2006/ 7 Brilliantly analysed by P Cole in his The Myth of Evil, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006, p. 78ff. 8 Admiral Massera, quoted by M Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998, p. ix. 9 See Jackson, esp. pp. 47-51, 124-150. 10 A Gonzales, ‘Draft memorandum for the President from Alberto R Gonzales: Decision re application of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war to the conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, 25 January 2002, accessed 25 December 2005, <msnbc.msn.com/id/4999148/site/newsweek>.

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______________________________________________________________ 11

See, respectively, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A.Res. 217A (III), U.N. GAOR, 3rd Sess., U.N.Doc. A/810 (1948); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Dec. 19, 1996, 999 U.N.T.S. 171; and Convention Against Torture, Dec. 10, 1984, G.A.Res. 39/46, 39 U.N. GAOR, Supp. No. 51 at 197, U.N.Doc. A/39/51 (1984). The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture was passed with no dissenting voice in 1975: G.A. Res. 3452, 30 GAOR, Supp. (no.34) 91, U.N.Doc.A/1034 (1975). 12 See esp. J Harbury, Truth, Torture, and the American Way: the History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture, Beacon Press, Boston, 2005; and, for a profound analysis of the parallels between neo-liberal economic ‘shock therapy’ for the body politic and the physical and psychical shock of torture on people’s bodies, N Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Allen Lane, London, 2007. 13 R Posner, ‘Torture, terrorism and interrogation’, in Torture: A Collection, S Levinson (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp. 291-298, p. 295. 14 A Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 132. 15 I explore this aspect of Dershowitz’s position in B Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007, p. 45 ff. 16 D Rose, Guantánamo: America’s War on Human Rights, Faber & Faber, London, 2004, p. 95. 17 Dershowitz, 138. 18 Dershowitz’s claim, incidentally, that ‘There is little doubt that some acts of terrorism - which would have killed many civilians - were prevented’ (140) is unreferenced. 19 Dershowitz, 138. 20 Dershowitz., 137. 21 Dershowitz, 249, n. 11. 22 Dershowitz, 137. 23 Dershowitz, 249, n. 11. 24 S Levinson, ‘The debate on torture’, Dissent, Summer 2003, unpaginated, n. 1, viewed 25 December 2005, <www.dissentmagazine.org>. 25 J Allen, ‘Warrant to torture? A critique of Dershowitz and Levinson’, ACDIS Occasional Paper (2005), Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, p.13, accessed 29 December 2005, <www.acdis.uiuc.edu>. 26 K Roach, September 11: Consequences for Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal/Kingston, 2003, pp. 101-102; quoted in M Plaxton, ‘Torture warrants, hypocrisy, and supererogation: justifying bright-

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______________________________________________________________ line rules as if consequences mattered’, paper delivered to The Barbarisation of Warfare conference, University of Wolverhampton, 27-28 June, 2005, p. 8. 27 Allen, p. 9. See also C Tindale, ‘Tragic choices: reaffirming absolutes in the torture debate’, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 19, 2005, pp. 209-222, p. 216. 28 Levinson, ‘The debate’, unpaginated. 29 Levinson, ‘The debate’, n. 1. 30 Dershowitz, 140. 31 M Walzer, ‘Political action: the problem of dirty hands’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, 1973, pp. 160-180, p.167. Reprinted in Levinson (ed.), pp. 61-75. 32 R Trigg, Morality Matters, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p. 64. 33 E Scarry, ‘Five errors in the reasoning of Alan Dershowitz’, in Levinson (ed.), pp. 281-299, p. 284. 34 Consider the gratuitously silly fantasy of having captured ‘one of the terrorists who admits to having planted the bomb, but who smugly refuses to reveal its location’ - G Jones, ‘On the permissibility of torture’, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 6, 1980, pp. 11-15, p.13. Even Anthony Quinton, usually a careful thinker, invites us to ‘Consider a man caught planting a bomb in a large hospital, which no one dare touch for fear of setting it off.’ - Views, The Listener, 2 December, 1971, pp. 757-8, p. 758, n. 5. But the knowledge which is a necessary condition of the necessity of torture precludes the relevance of the example: how likely is it that ‘no one’ -– not even the bomb disposal unit - dare touch the bomb? And if it really were the case that only this man can defuse the bomb, then it is not for information that he would be tortured, but rather to force him to defuse the bomb; and that is quite a different matter. 35 Dershowitz, 150. 36 Quinton, 758. 37 Quinton, p.758. 38 M Walzer, ‘The United States in the world – just wars and just societies: an interview with Michael Walzer’, Imprints, vol. 7, 2003, viewed 3 January 2006, . 39 R Crelinsten, ‘In their own words: the world of the torturer’, in The Politics of Pain: Torturers and their Masters, R Crelinsten, and A Schmid (eds), Westview Press, Boulder, 1995, pp. 65-97. 40 Dershowitz, 153. 41 Dershowitz, 153.

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______________________________________________________________

Bibliography Allen, J., ‘Warrant to torture? A critique of Dershowitz and Levinson’. ACDIS Occasional Paper, Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Accessible at . Amnesty Magazine, vol. 145, September/October 2007: ‘Don’t sign up to terror: unsubscribe’, p.15. Brecher, B., Torture and the Ticking Bomb, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007. Cole, P., The Myth of Evil, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006. Convention Against Torture, Dec. 10, 1984, G.A.Res. 39/46, 39 U.N. GAOR, Supp. No. 51 at 197, U.N.Doc. A/39/51 (1984). Crelinsten, R., ‘In their own words: the world of the torturer’, in The Politics of Pain: Torturers and their Masters. R Crelinsten, and A Schmid (eds), Westview Press, Boulder, 1995, pp. 65-97. Crelinsten, R. and Schmid, A. (eds), The Politics of Pain: Torturers and their Masters, Westview Press, Boulder, 1995. Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture: G.A. Res. 3452, 30 GAOR, Supp. (no.34) 91, U.N.Doc.A/1034 (1975). Dershowitz, A., Why Terrorism Works, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002. Feitlowitz, M., A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998. Gonzalez, A., ‘Draft memorandum for the President from Alberto R Gonzales: Decision re application of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war to the conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, 25 January 2002. Accessible at . Harbury, J., Truth, Torture, and the American Way: the History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture, Beacon Press, Boston, 2005.

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______________________________________________________________ Holt, J., ‘It’s the Oil’. London Review of Books, 18 October 2007, pp. 3-4. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Dec. 19, 1996, 999 U.N.T.S. 171. Jackson, R., Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and CounterTerrorism. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005. Jones, G., ‘On the permissibility of torture’. Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 6, 1980, pp. 11-15. Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine. Allen Lane, London, 2007. Levinson, S., ‘The debate on torture’. Dissent, Summer 2003, unpaginated. _______

, (ed.), Torture: A Collection, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.

Plaxton, M., ‘Torture warrants, hypocrisy, and supererogation: justifying bright-line rules as if consequences mattered’. Paper delivered to The Barbarisation of Warfare conference, University of Wolverhampton, 27-28 June, 2005. Posner, R.,, ‘Torture, terrorism and interrogation’, in Torture: A Collection. S. Levinson (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp. 291-298. Quinton, A., ‘Views’. The Listener, 2 December, 1971, pp. 757-8. Roach, K., September 11: Consequences for Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal/Kingston, 2003. Rose, D., Guantánamo: America’s War on Human Rights. Faber & Faber, London, 2004. Scarry, E., ‘Five errors in the reasoning of Alan Dershowitz’, in Torture: A Collection. Levinson (ed.), pp. 281-299. Tindale, C., ‘Tragic choices: reaffirming absolutes in the torture debate’. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 19, 2005, pp. 209-222. Trigg, R., Morality Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

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______________________________________________________________ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A.Res. 217A (III), U.N. GAOR, 3rd Sess., U.N.Doc. A/810 (1948). Walzer, M., ‘Political action: the problem of dirty hands’. Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, 1973, pp. 160-180. Reprinted in Levinson (ed.), pp. 61-75. _______

, ‘The United States in the world – just wars and just societies: an interview with Michael Walzer’. Imprints, vol. 7, 2003. Accessible at . <www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html>. <www.homeoffice.gov.uk/security/terrorism-and-the-law/terrorism-act-006>

The Language of War: George W. Bush’s Discursive Practices in Securitising the Western Value System in the ‘War on Terror’ Janicke Stramer Abstract The phrase, ‘western values’, is a broad one, which includes matters such as democracy, freedom, libertarian values (both economic and political) and free speech. The American version of freedom is ambiguous and far from self-evident or straightforward. What is particular about President George W. Bush’s rhetoric during the ‘War on Terror’ is that it has a strong religious element. This chapter will examine his securitising speech acts as a means of promoting ‘western values’. In order to assess these discursive practices and expose the role of religious rhetoric in securitising the latter, I shall follow the approach of the Copenhagen School of Security Studies. Key Words: Copenhagen School, religious rhetoric, securitisation, U.S. foreign policy, ‘war on terror’, ‘western values’ ***** 1.

Introduction ‘Western values’ is a broad notion, which covers matters such as democracy, freedom, libertarian values (both economical and political) and free speech. The American version of freedom is ambiguous and far from self-evident and straightforward: although a very prominent element of presidential rhetoric, it generally remains implicit under cover of a strongly religious tone and content, rather than being made explicit. Bush seeks to sanctify the United States by stating that America’s strength and resolve is to advance freedom, which is God’s gift to the world: hence America is doing God’s work in its export to, and imposition of ‘western values’ on, the rest of the world, and the Middle East in particular. But, I shall seek to show; Bush's claims about religion and terrorism in fact create a major internal problem for his own religious rhetoric. Focussing on his religious rhetoric and its importance for the strategy followed in the so-called war on terror, I shall first argue that, although Iraq was an intended target well before 9/11, it was religious rhetoric that was used as the means of focussing on it in the context of 9/11. I shall map three important issues about Bush's religious rhetoric: the religious tradition his rhetoric stems from and how and why it changed during his presidency; how that rhetoric was used and to what effect; and how exactly his claims about

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______________________________________________________________ terrorism and religion create an internal problem for that rhetoric. Second, I shall discuss how the vagueness of his language, in particular regarding ‘democracy’, enabled him to forge a fictional link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to target Iraq. Finally I turn to the Copenhagen School's conception of the facilitating conditions of securitising issues: the use of security grammar; the role of social capital - the securitising actor must hold a position of authority that allows her or him to securitise the relevant matter; and the supporting external or historical conditions - tanks on the border, verbal threats from the enemy or a history of attacks from that enemy. 2.

Bush’s Language of War After 9/11, the Bush administration declared war on terrorism, referring to the struggle between the good represented by Western values and evil as represented by terrorism - and immediately extended to the so-called rogue states of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. However, there had been plans to invade Iraq long before 9/11, as evidenced by The Project for the New American Century.1 9/11 offered the perfect platform from which realistically to put this war plan in motion. Bush was already started thinking about Iraq as part of his response to that attack as early as the Camp David war cabinet meeting on 15 September 20012 - the only dissent came from Colin Powell. Donald Rumsfeld made it very clear that ‘any argument that the coalition wouldn’t tolerate Iraq argues for a different coalition’,3 thus demonstrating that the U.S. was willing to act unilaterally if need be. Dick Cheney concurred: as Bob Woodward puts it, ‘it was as if nothing else existed’4 for him. At the same meeting Rumsfeld advised the group that they would need to control information by, for example, exercising tighter control over public affairs, and further advised the Administration to treat Iraq as a political campaign with daily talking points, reminding them that ‘sustaining requires a broad base of domestic support. Broad, not narrow. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It will be years and not months.’5 Public support was vital. A few days later, at another war cabinet meeting, when Bush outlined his plan to give the Taliban leaders an ultimatum, he ended the debate by saying, ‘I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.’6 Clearly Iraq was already a target. From this point on Bush and his war cabinet would slowly but surely build their case on a fictional link between Hussein and bin Laden in order to persuade the public that war in Iraq was necessary. The first public step was the famous state-of-the-union-address in 2002, in which Iraq was named part of an axis of evil. There was, however, no such axis: the three states did not share similar political goals, nor did they share a similar ideology. The ‘axis of evil’ was born of the need to create an argument for going after Iraq. David Frum, the speechwriter charged with the

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______________________________________________________________ task, was inspired by World War II rhetoric: but since Iraq alone could of course be no axis, he simply added Iran and North Korea on account of their common contempt for the West. Originally, Frum had termed it an ‘axis of hatred’, but his boss, Michael Gerson, changed this to ‘axis of evil’.7 This was neither an accident nor surprising: Gerson was not only Bush’s chief speechwriter, but a fellow Evangelist. Their shared religious convictions are evident in Bush’s speeches, in which he often draws on gospel hymns that resonate deeply among the faithful in his electoral base. The speeches immediately following 9/11 spoke of good versus evil and the righteousness of God in a more abstract way: after Iraq had become the overt target, they focused increasingly on the predestination of America as an agent of God in the war against evil represented by Hussein's regime and terrorist networks. Since Bush appeared on the political scene, he has been quite open about his religiosity. Early on, he was inspired by a largely Wesleyan theology8 of ‘personal transformation’, such as his born-again post-alcoholic experience. One of the most important components of that theology is experiential faith; today’s Wesleyan churches insist on the centrality of the conversion experience. The core of Wesleyan theology thus lies in the individual's private faith and relationship with God. Bush, a convert at 39, saw his later elevation to the presidency as an extension of the personal to the political: after all, if, to quote Deborah Caldwell’s perspicuous analysis ‘we serve one greater than ourselves’, 9 then we do so as office-holders no less than as private citizen; and of course his decision to run for President, as he later told Richard Land,10 was itself an act of obedience to God’s will. Since his election, Bush's theology has shifted towards a Calvinist theology of the ‘divine plan’ laid out by a sovereign God for both country and himself. According to Deborah Caldwell, he is (at the time of writing) not only talking more about God, but talking differently about ethics. The main differences between Wesleyan and Calvinist theology lie in the way they view human nature. For Wesleyans, although humans are sinful, they can choose to avail themselves of God's grace in order to redeem themselves. Events are not predestined: all human beings have the possibility of salvation. According to Calvinism, however, human nature is sinful and irredeemably incapable of righteousness. God's grace therefore falls only upon those few chosen by God: events are predestined and there is nothing human beings themselves can do to redeem themselves in the eyes of God to ensure salvation. Their salvation, or otherwise, is entirely a matter of God’s will. The shift in a Calvinist direction appears to have taken place quite suddenly, after 9/11, and since then Bush has made several statements to the effect that God is directly involved in world events and that he, and by implication the American people, are God’s tools in his refashioning of the world. Bush shifts from the nation’s being the agent of history - as in his claim in the carefully scripted religious service in which he declared the ‘War

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______________________________________________________________ on Terror’ from the pulpit of the National Cathedral: ‘[o]ur responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil’11 to claiming that it is the agent of God. While very different in content, however, these claims are remarkably similar in form. Indeed, Calvinist predestinarianism makes it very difficult to maintain even a substantive difference: for history is whatever God chooses to make it, and ‘history’s call’ is simply that of God differently expressed. Bush in fact started with the USA as agent of history, and then went on to the USA as agent of God. So, for example, there is evidence of increasing Calvinism in Bush’s rhetoric as we move closer to the invasion of Iraq, as in this statement just a few months earlier: ‘And we will continue to fight terror. It’s our obligation, our duty. History has called us into action.’12 By the time of his 2003 National Prayer Breakfast speech, however, the term ‘history’ takes on an explicitly religious meaning: ‘events aren’t moved by blind change and chance. Behind all of life and all of history, there’s a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God.’13 By now, God has predestined America to undertake the mission of ridding the world of evil; and from that it is only a short road to Baghdad. With this subtly changing theology came an increasing predilection in Bush’s rhetoric for pre-emption and unilateralism in American foreign policy, and thus an encouragement of a national mission against terrorism with or without the help of the international community.14 Consider this example. In Bush’s speech to Congress on September 20, 2001 just after 9/11, he claimed that ‘[f]reedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them’.15 Here God will exercise his agency and intervene in the world to mediate between good and evil. By the time of Bush’s second inauguration speech, however, in which he states that ‘[h]istory has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty’,16 the claim is that there is no question of mediation since God has set the course of events from the very outset. It is no longer a matter of God’s intervening in the world (on America’s side), but one of America’s was having been predestined by God to fulfil his will on earth. By now, Americans are a ‘special people watched over by a benevolent God’.17 And so as long as Americans believe they are God’s chosen people, of course, they need not worry about the outcome of the conflict: for it is directed by the hand of God. Not only that. Since Americans are God’s chosen people, it follows that their values are also God’s own. And so to say that God is on America’s side is no longer to invoke the hope of a divine being who will come to America’s aid, but rather to make a statement of the logically inescapable. From this, it follows that there can be no doubt about the righteousness of exporting those same values:

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______________________________________________________________ We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.18 Yet this statement, highlighting as it does the core of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy - the export of Western values of freedom and liberty - raises an interesting theological problem at the root of Bush’s rhetoric. Calvinist predestinarianism allows no logical space for ‘hope’, or for the contingencies implied by the alleged increasing dependency of ‘our’ liberty on ‘theirs’. For Calvinists, ‘Whatever will be, will be’: and that’s that. But here is not the place for a theological deconstruction of Bush’s speech acts. Let me return, then, to my central argument. The use of Christian biblical rhetoric has been a facilitating condition in Bush’s speech acts, inasmuch as it has moved the security threat from the military into the social sector by playing on the ideological aspects of the conflict instead of its pragmatically military aspects. We are being told to fear not only a terrorist attack on physical targets, but also an attack on our value system - freedom and liberty. Furthermore, the answer to terrorism is to expand this same freedom and liberty as embedded in our democratic ideals. Central here is the biblical imagery of good versus evil and the specific use of the term ‘evil’ with regard to terrorism. In his short press briefing at the White House just a few days after 9/11, Bush referred to ‘evil’ or ‘evildoers’ nine times.19 Originally a biblical term relating to the never-ending struggle of good versus evil and light versus darkness, ‘evil’ is a clear facilitating condition in the staging of an existential threat to freedom and freedomloving nations from Hussein and al Qaeda. Religious scholars such as Gaddy and Pagels have expressed concern that Bush is using religious rhetoric to manipulate unfavourable public reaction to his policies, by making them an issue of (theologically based) morality and thus ensuring that the only way for Americans to be ‘morally right’ is to agree with Bush. By naming Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an axis of evil, he is by implication naming himself as head of an axis of good: again, anyone who disagrees with his policies is in the moral wrong.20 Furthermore, this sort of religious rhetoric in times of conflict also helps motivate people to violent action, something far easier to do if they feel they occupy the moral high ground. The other side of this state of affairs is of course obvious: Gaddy and Pagels are not alone in voicing concern that the portrayal of the United States as a Christian nation doing God’s will is bound to make it a target for Islamic terrorist groups. To be described as ‘evil’ is, to say the least, provocative, and especially so when directed at those espousing a set of religious beliefs in which such a description resonates. That is why,

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______________________________________________________________ they argue, this kind of religious rhetoric is dangerous and has no place in American politics: ‘It discourages political discourse, disenfranchises members of other faiths and puts the country at greater risk of attack by nonChristian militants.’21 It is dangerous because it plays right into the rhetoric that the Islamists themselves are using, and so demands that people choose between Christian and Muslim in the so-called war on terror. This in turn will inevitably alienate the entire Muslim populations of the world who feel their religion is being attacked. Thus Bush's language of religion and terror creates a major internal problem for his own rhetoric; he is using the same language as the enemy, in this case the terrorists. Bush and bin Laden, then, both analyse their opponent in exactly the same formal terms. They both invoke God and ‘good versus evil’, and each does so from his own perspective. The result is that sometimes Bush comes close to crossing the line between President and Preacher, just as bin Laden regards himself not only as Preacher but also as leader: on their very similar accounts, the Caliphate and the USA turn out to be remarkably similar. 22 Consider for instance Bush’s frequent use of old gospel hymns and biblical passages to explain current events: the trope is one of Americans carrying out the will of God,23 just as Islamic radicals make use of the similar rhetoric of their religious tradition to ‘sanctify the cause and demonise the enemy’.24 This brings us to the core dilemma of Bush's rhetoric, namely his attempts to exploit the emotionally charged religious rhetoric in his language of war to gain support for the war, while at the same time insisting that it is not a religious war. So, for example, Bush does not speak of religion as being the cause of the terrorism directed at the U.S.; instead he argues that the bin Laden terrorists ‘fear’ Western freedom and democracy, as if their hatred were motivated by rejection of positive Western values.25 In other words, Bush uses religion positively by emphasizing that God is with people of faith, while at the same time trying not to alienate Muslims by referring to Islam negatively. It is interesting to note here that he most often refers to terrorists as ‘evildoers’ and speaks of their ideology without mentioning Islam, referring to it rather as an ‘ideology of hatred’; and that he makes an effort to separate Islamic Radicalism from mainstream Islam, differentiating in his speeches the ideology behind Islamic Radicalism from the religion of Islam. While this demonstrates the careful deliberation behind every word in order not to turn the ‘war on terror’ into an open war between Christianity and Islam, it demonstrates at the same time the internal contradiction in his rhetoric. For such careful deliberation notwithstanding, he continues to use Christian biblical references to justify military action; and the clearly implied contrast here is not with ‘Islamic Radicalism’, but with Islam itself. And then we are back with the so-called war on terror as a religious war.

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______________________________________________________________ 3.

Linking Iraq with the ‘War on Terror’ In extending the ‘war on terror’ to include Iraq, Bush used securitising speech acts to link Hussein with bin-Laden and thereby the war in Iraq with the ‘war on terror’, as the following interview clearly illustrates. When asked by a reporter, ‘Mr. President, do you believe that Saddam Hussein is a bigger threat to the United States than al Qaeda?’, Bush answered: The war on terror, you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. And so it’s a comparison that is - I can’t make because I can't distinguish between the two, because they’re both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive.26 This demonstrates the external facilitating condition of Bush’s securitising speech act at work: according to Bush, if action were not taken immediately, an attack by Hussein and al Qaeda was imminent. The history, briefly described above, of the aftermath of 9/11 supports such a hypothesis and makes it credible in the minds of much of the American population. His basic message is that al Qaeda and Hussein are one and the same - despite the fact that he has no proof that they share the same ideology and that there is in fact plenty of evidence to the contrary. Thus, while it is frightening, it is by no means surprising that a large percentage of the public let themselves be convinced that such a link existed, with sixty percent saying they believed Iraq had provided direct support to al Qaeda,27 despite extensive evidence that Hussein was not cooperating with bin Laden’s terrorist network. During the autumn of 2002, Bush continually warned the American people that ‘Iraq has longstanding ties to terrorist groups, which are capable of and willing to deliver weapons of mass death.’28 On another occasion Bush made this statement: Countering Iraq's threat is also a central commitment on the war on terror. We know Saddam Hussein has longstanding and ongoing ties to international terrorists . . .. We must confront both terror cells and terror states, because they are different faces of the same evil.29 The message could not be clearer. Bush forges a connection between the two in order to gain legitimacy for the attack on Iraq by characterizing Hussein and bin Laden's terrorist network as two faces of the same evil. Nor is this offered as a best guess or a plausible hypothesis; the connection is presented as fact, a device greatly assisted by the non-specificity of the ‘terror cells’ of al Qaeda and the ‘terror states’ that indicate Iraq. One of the

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______________________________________________________________ most effective persuasive strategies in politics is to repeat short, catchy statements that are easy to understand but the meaning of which remains at least greatly under-specified. And so the sentence ends by bringing under one ‘simple’ head - ‘the same evil’ - two crucially different phenomena. The term ‘evil’, of course, lends itself all too readily for such manipulation, with its pulling together of theological and moral understandings, as well as its allencompassing designation of what it is said to describe as being somehow beyond ordinary understanding and explanation. Of all the ready-made facilitating conditions of securitisation in this context, this is surely the most powerful. ‘Evil’ is the social threat par excellence. Taking on the project of ridding the world of evil is a vague foreign policy goal at best, and obviously presents a considerable array of difficulties in assessing what constitutes the enemy and determining when the battle is won. At the same time, declaring war against evil confers moral legitimacy on the nation’s foreign policy - and even on a contested presidency.30 The ‘war on terror’ gave the Bush administration an ideal opportunity not just to initiate the long-planned attack on Iraq, but at the same time to wash away any discussion about the democratic legitimacy of the Bush presidency as simply irrelevant, not to say unpatriotic. Just forty-three days after 9/11, the Patriot Act was passed - with minimal debate.31 This was not the time to question the legitimacy of the presidency, but rather a time for Americans to rally behind their President and, of course, their own values. As history has shown, wars always achieve that. 4.

The Felicity Conditions Placing the elements of Bush’s rhetoric thus far discussed into the framework of the Copenhagen School has shown how securitising grammar the first facilitating condition - plays its part, through religious rhetoric, in the general securitising process necessary for Bush’s prosecution of the ‘war on terror’; and how he has been able to use his authority as Commander in Chief to extend that securitising process by fulfilling the second facilitating condition, that of invoking social capital. (Admittedly the latter could only ever be partially fulfilled through rhetoric: it is the central fact of realpolitik the United States is clearly the world’s major political power - that allowed Bush convincingly to speak of unilateral action against Iraq as a means of enlisting a ‘coalition of the willing’ for the act itself.) The third facilitating condition - external/historical factors - has several facets. In relation to al Qaeda and bin Laden, the external condition was fulfilled by the 9/11 attacks. Operation Enduring Freedom was launched in Afghanistan as retaliation against the terrorists behind 9/11 and the regime harbouring them, an attack fully supported by the United States’ allies as well as the United Nations on account of 9/11’s being regarded by all concerned as an act of war against the United States. Operation Iraqi Freedom, however,

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______________________________________________________________ was another matter. Unlike the attack on Afghanistan, it required an enormous rhetorical effort to draw Iraq into its allotted role as an essential part of the ‘war on terror’, a role carefully scripted as part of a larger plan originating long before 9/11, namely ‘The Project for a New American Century’. 5.

Conclusion When looking at how all three felicity conditions were fulfilled it becomes even clearer how carefully directed Bush's language of war was from the beginning, and how events played into the policymakers’ hands, as well as how powerful a role this language has in the Iraqi case. An attack on US soil by Al Qaeda, an organisation quite unrelated to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq - indeed, in crucial ways, political and religious, utterly antithetical to it, and sharing only one thing in common, namely an antipathy towards the west in general and the United States in particular - was able to be rhetorically manipulated to ‘justify’, at least to the majority of the American population, and certainly to just about its entire political élite, an attack on a target identified years earlier: Iraq. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the rhetoric used to accomplish that does not survive analysis; indeed, such an analysis lays bare precisely the differences between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, as well as the intellectual contradictions underlying that religious rhetoric itself. Nonetheless, it has achieved its purpose: to gain, and to a considerable extent to maintain, support for the attack on Iraq (if not necessarily for the resulting wars in Iraq - but that remains to be seen). But not only that, it has also enabled the US administration to implement the Patriot Act, with its attendant denials and withdrawals of freedom in the name of Freedom. Perhaps nothing less than a religious framework would have sufficed to achieve that, whether theologically presented and understood as calling on Americans to heed the voice, whether of History or of God entreating them to defend and to spread freedom - or simply to realise themselves as the vehicle of God’s unchangeable will. This analysis has demonstrated in particular how the shift towards Calvinist theology added a strongly predestinarian element to Bush’s securitising grammar; and the cost of that shift. What the implications will turn out to be of Bush’s securitising speech acts, not just as Commander in Chief, but as spiritual leader, and of the irony of that parallel with Osama bin Laden, remains to be seen.

Notes 1 2

For more information see < http://www.newamericancentury.org/>. B Woodward, Bush at War, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002, p. 81.

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Woodward. Woodward, p. 346. 5 Woodward, p. 88. 6 Woodward, p. 99. 7 M Reynolds, ‘Axis of evil' rhetoric said to heighten dangers’, Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2003, accessed 15 September, 2007, . 8 The Methodist doctrines, polity and theology developed from a Protestant Christian movement founded in England by John Wesley in the 18th century. 9 D Caldwell, ‘An Evolving Faith: Does the President believe he has a divine mandate’, Beliefnet, 7 February 2003, accessed May 25, 2005, . 10 A friend of Bush, and President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. 11 J Wallis, ‘Dangerous Religion’, Sojourner’s Magazine, vol. 32, 2003, p. 20, accessed 15 September, 2007, . 12 G W Bush, ‘Remarks by the President at the National Prayer Breakfast,’ 6 February 2003, accessed September 4, 2007 White House News Releases, . 13 Bush, ‘Remarks’. 14 D Bostdorff, ‘George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 89, 2003, pp. 293-319. 15 Caldwell. 16 G W Bush, ‘Inaugural Address’, 20 January 2005, accessed May 10, 2007, The American Presidency Project, . 17 Bostdorff, p. 302. In its predestinarianism, Calvinism is of course particularly susceptible to the notion of a ‘chosen people’ - whoever they may be. 18 G W Bush, 'Second Inaugural Speech,' 20 January 2005, accessed September 23, 2007, 19 G W Bush, ‘Remarks upon arrival at the White House,’ 16 September 2001, accessed 31 May 2005, White House News Releases, . 20 E Pagels and Rev Dr C W Gaddy, ‘President or Preacher: Audio News Conference on the President’s Irresponsible Use of Religious Language’, 11 February 2003, accessed May 25, 2005, 4

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______________________________________________________________ , pp. 13 – 14. 21 B C Neff, ‘Bush and God-talk’, National Catholic Reporter, vol. 39, 2003, p.4. 22 D Kellner, From 9/11 To Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy, Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, New York, 2003, p.61. 23 C Hedges, ‘War, Love, and the Divine,’ Beliefnet, accessed 4 February 2005, . 24 Hedges. 25 Kellner, p. 63. 26 G W Bush, ‘President Bush, Colombia President Uribe Discuss Terrorism,’ 25 September 2002, accessed June 7, 2005, White House News Releases, . 27 D Balz & R Morin, ‘2 Years After Invasion, Poll Data Mixed: Bush’s Approval Ratings’, Washington Post on-line Edition, 16 March 2005, accessed 20 May 2005, . 28 G W Bush, ‘Radio Address: Iraqi Regime Danger to America is ‘Grave and Growing’’, 5 October 2002, accessed 7 June 2005, White House News Releases, . 29 G W Bush, ‘President, House Leadership Agree on Iraq Resolution’, 2 October 2002, accessed 7 June 2005, White House News Releases, . 30 See Wallis. 31 For more information see The Patriot Act: .

Bibliography Balz, D., and Morin R., ‘2 Years After Invasion, Poll Data Mixed’. Washington Post, 16 March 2005, on-line edition. Accessible at . Bostdorff, D., ‘George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation’. Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 89, 2003, pp. 293-319.

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______________________________________________________________ Bush, G. W., ‘Inaugural Address’. The American Presidency Project, 20 January 2005. Accessible at . _______

, ‘President Bush, Colombia President Uribe Discuss Terrorism’. White House News Releases, 25 September 2002. Accessible at .

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, ‘President, House Leadership Agree on Iraq Resolution’. White House News Releases, 2 October 2002. Accessible at .

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, ‘Radio Address: Iraqi Regime Danger to America is ‘Grave and Growing’’. White House News Releases, 5 October 2002. Accessible at .

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, ‘Remarks by the President at the National Prayer Breakfast’. White House News Releases, 6 February 2003. Accessible at . _______

, ‘Remarks upon arrival at the White House’. White House News Releases, 16 September 2001. Accessible at .

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, ‘Second Inaugural Speech’. 20 January 2005. Accessible at . Caldwell, D., ‘An Evolving Faith: Does the President believe he has a divine mandate?’. Beliefnet, 7 February, 2003. Accessible at . Hedges, C., ‘War, Love, and the Divine’. Beliefnet., 4 February 2005. Accessible at .

Kellner, D., From 9/11 To Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, New York, 2003. Neff, B. C., ‘Bush and God-talk’. National Catholic Reporter, vol. 39, 2003, p. 4. Accessible at .

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______________________________________________________________ Pagels, E., and Rev. Dr. Gaddy, C. W., ‘President or Preacher: Audio News Conference on the President’s Irresponsible Use of Religious Language’, February 11, 2003. Accessible at . Patriot Act. Accessible at . Project for a New American Century. Accessible at . Reynolds, M., ‘‘Axis of evil’ rhetoric said to heighten dangers’. Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2003. Accessible at . Wallis, J., ‘Dangerous Religion’. Sojourner’s Magazine 32, Iss.5, 2003, pp. 20. Accessible at Proquest, via . Woodward, B., Bush at War, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002.

Is the War on Terror Real? Should it Be? Avery Plaw Abstract Should the war on terror be conducted as a vast law-enforcement operation; as a conventional international war subject to existing humanitarian law; or as a new kind of war to be prosecuted according to a new and evolving set of rules? On legal, political and moral grounds this essay argues for the middle course: the war on terror should be recognized and conducted as a real war fully subject to existing international conventions and customs of armed conflict. Key Words: Armed conflict, counterterrorism, humanitarian law, war on terror. ***** 1.

Introduction Is the ‘War on Terror’ currently being waged by the United States and other states, including Israel, a war in the sense of triggering the laws of armed conflict (i.e., humanitarian law)? Or is the expression ‘War on Terror’ better understood, as Human Rights Watch Director Kenneth Roth and others have suggested, as intended ‘metaphorically’, as ‘a mere hortatory device’, similar to the ‘war on drugs’ or Lyndon Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’.1 Or is it, as Condoleezza Rice put it while commenting on an American targeted killing in Yemen, ‘a new kind of war … [to] be fought on different battlefields’, and according to new rules?2 The question of the legal status of the ‘War on Terror’ is not mere hairsplitting. It has serious implications for the way that the campaign against terrorism is being conducted. As Roth notes, for example, ‘the rules that bind governments are much looser during wartime than in times of peace’.3 For one thing, ‘humanitarian law accepts that one of the legitimate objects of warfare is to disable enemy combatants (and in many cases this necessarily involves killing)’, as Christopher Greenwood aptly put it in the Handbook of Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts.4 On the other hand, if the ‘War on Terror’ is only a rhetorical trope, as Roth suggests, then the deliberate killing of terrorists (as in, for example, American and Israeli targeted killings) would be a violation of the human right to life guaranteed under article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) as well as in many domestic legal codes; in short, it would be murder. The difference lies in the legal status applicable to the situation.

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______________________________________________________________ There are at least three basic positions on the legal status of the current war on terror that have been widely articulated and defended. In the first place, the traditional response to terrorism has been that it is a crime subject to normal criminal law enforcement. Some commentators, like Roth, argue that no fundamental legal change has occurred, and assert that talk of ‘war’ really signals a commitment to be rigorous about law enforcement in the same way that the ‘war on poverty’ expressed the intent rigorously to confront the social problems connected with economic deprivation. A second widely articulated view (and the one that will be defended here) holds that it is a real war that invokes the laws of armed conflict in their conventional form.5 A third position is that it is a real war in the legal sense, but also a new kind of war that needs to be fought under new rules that will be developed as it unfolds.6 American and Israeli policy-makers in particular have tended to vacillate between positions two and three, sometimes framing the war on terror in the traditional language of war, sometimes arguing that it is different from other wars and permits them to employ policies that would not normally be permitted: former Vice-President Dick Cheney, for example, has defended the United States’ interrogation and rendition of prisoners by arguing that it is ‘vital for us to use any means at our disposal to, basically, achieve our objective’, regardless of Geneva Convention protections for POWs.7 Alberto Gonzalez, the then White House Counsel (and later Attorney General) confirmed the Bush Administration’s belief that the Geneva Conventions ‘do not apply to American interrogations’ at least of prisoners in the War on Terror held overseas. This chapter argues that there is a convincing legal and normative case for rejecting the first, ‘traditional’, position in favour of the second, ‘conventional war’, perspective. However, the same arguments that make the move to the second position compelling undermine the case for embracing the third. In essence, then, I argue primarily on legal, but also moral and political, grounds that the war on terror should be viewed as a war in the traditional sense and should therefore be conducted according to the existing law of war (allowing for its gradual adjustment to the new condition of asymmetrical armed conflict through the established mechanisms of agreement among states and decisions of judicial authorities). It begins with an examination of the legal case for applying humanitarian law and then turns, more briefly, to questions of politics and morality. It focuses primarily on the policy of the United States and Israel as the two states most closely associated with the war on terror. 2.

The Question of Humanitarian Law The American and Israeli government positions, that they are literally at war with terrorist groups, is not without some initial plausibility. On the American side, for example, both al-Qaeda and the United States

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______________________________________________________________ government appear to regard themselves at war with one another. Bin Laden has, in his own words, has ‘declared jihad against the US government’ repeatedly since 1996.8 On the other hand, on the morning of September 12, 2001, a little before noon, President Bush responded with a declaration of his own: ‘the deliberate and deadly attacks that were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror, they were acts of war’.9 With this statement President Bush launched what he termed a ‘global war on terrorism’,10 leaving little doubt that this was to be a new type of war, fought in novel ways. In his words of 29 September 2001, ‘our war on terror will be much broader than the battlefields and beachheads of the past. The war will be fought wherever terrorists hide, or run, or plan.’11 Similarly, Israel and the armed Palestinian resistance organizations, which it and many other states designate as terrorist groups consider themselves at war with one another – or, as it has more typically been put in recent years, in a state of ‘armed conflict’. Palestinian organizations such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Hamas consider themselves engaged in legitimate armed struggle (or jihad) against an illegal foreign (Israeli) occupation. (e.g., Article 7 of the Hamas Convenant (1988)). Moreover, they characteristically explain their use of atypical military tactics – such as suicide bombing – by reference to what Fathi Shaqaqi called the ‘unequal balance of power’. In Hamas leader Sayeed Siyam’s words, ‘we do not own Apache helicopters ourselves, so we use our own methods’.12 In other words, like the former American President, they see themselves as pursuing war by novel means. On the other side of the conflict, the Israeli Government has recognized a state of armed conflict with the Palestinian resistance organizations at least since early in the second intifada. In the words of Colonel Daniel Reisner, the Head of the International Law Branch of the Israeli Defence Force Legal Division, in a press conference on the 15th of November, 2000: The current situation, the fact that now a large percentage of the attacks involve live weapons … that we are facing a Palestinian Security Service which in part is taking part in hostilities, has brought us to the conclusion that we are no longer in the realm of peace. ... We are definitely in the realm of armed conflict.13 Moreover, the Israeli government’s reassessment of the legal situation in the occupied territories has been consistently reflected in its public defence of its policies. As Michael Gross observes, for example, where before 2000 Israel defended its policy of ‘targeted killing’ as a justified form of law enforcement, the subsequent intensification of the conflict ‘led Israeli

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______________________________________________________________ officials to relinquish the claim to law enforcement and [to] argue instead that assassinations are an acceptable means of armed conflict’.14 So again, both sides see themselves as engaged in armed conflict. However, the validity of the claims raised by the American and Israeli governments does not turn on politics or perceptions. They are rather legal claims. The American and Israeli governments claim to be in a legal situation of armed conflict, and that therefore the body of law which has primary application is international humanitarian law rather than human rights law or domestic criminal law. The question then is not how the different sides portray their use of armed force, but whether the violence meets the legal definition of ‘armed conflict’.15 As noted above, a great deal hangs on this legal question. The answer, in short, is that the US and Israeli governments’ claims are controversial but ultimately plausible. Their arguments are controversial because the application of humanitarian law has traditionally been limited to situations of war, and war was traditionally defined as armed conflict between the forces of two sovereign states: for example, in a frequently quoted 1905 definition, Lawrence Oppenheim held that ‘war is a contention of two or more states through their armed forces, for the purposes of overpowering each other and imposing such conditions of peace as the victor pleases’.16 This narrow conception of war, and consequent narrow understanding of the application of humanitarian law, held sway throughout the first half of the century. In the latter half of the century, however, the ambit of humanitarian law broadened considerably. As Greenwood notes, for example, whereas the older humanitarian treaties applied only to a ‘war’, today humanitarian law is applicable in any international armed conflict, even if the parties to that conflict have not declared war and do not recognize that they are in a state of war.17 Moreover, the 1977 First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 addresses ‘armed conflict in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination, foreign occupation and against racist regimes’ (Article 1.4), while the Second Additional Protocol addresses ‘non-international armed conflict’. Both these latter cases involve states fighting armed nongovernmental organizations rather than other states. The key question in relation to the war on terror is whether the legal definition of ‘armed conflict’ is now broad enough to encompass a low-intensity, asymmetric conflict between a state (or coalition of states) and an elusive international terrorist organization (or group of similar organizations), and therefore whether

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______________________________________________________________ humanitarian law should have primary application in relation to states’ use of armed force against such terrorist organizations. Some leading commentators have expressed doubt about the application of humanitarian law to the war on terror. In her 2005 The ‘War on Terror’ and the Framework of International Law, for example, Helen Duffy raises doubts about whether it ‘can meet the criteria for the contemporary definition of armed conflict’.18 For one thing, in order to trigger the laws of armed conflict, a conflict must involve at least two clearly identifiable parties with recognizable armed forces engaged in the conflict. Duffy, however, doubts that terrorist organizations and their armed forces can be identified and distinguished with adequate clarity. She asks, for example, ‘how one can define and identify with sufficient clarity the relationship between disparate individuals and their membership, support, or sympathy for al-Qaeda’.19 In other words, how can we be certain who does and who does not qualify as an enemy combatant? The difficulty in clearly specifying ‘al-Qaeda… as an identifiable and distinct party to a conflict’ leads Duffy to conclude that ‘asserting that an armed conflict can be waged with an entity such as alQaeda may not be an accurate assessment of the law as it stood at the time of the September 11th attacks, or indeed as it stands in the first few years thereafter’.20 Nonetheless, she recognizes that ‘the law has been moving toward recognizing’ armed conflicts with non-governmental ‘organizations’, and that September 11th has now sown ‘the seeds of debate… as to whether it may be, or should be, possible for an armed conflict to arise between states and entities such as al-Qaeda’. Noting some arguments in favour of such recognition, she remarks that ‘this is an area deserving of further analysis’ where ‘legal development’ might unfold.21 Other leading legal commentators, however, contend that the war on terror clearly fits within the contemporary understanding of international armed conflict and is primarily subject to international humanitarian law. In particular, they stress that terrorist acts such as those of September 11th constitute ‘armed attacks’ that trigger a state’s right of ‘self-defence’ under Article 51 of the UN Charter, including the legitimate use of armed force, and hence invoke international humanitarian law. Yoram Dinstein, for example, in the fourth edition of his War, Aggression and Self-Defense (2005), writes that The simple proposition that forcible action taken against a state may constitute an armed attack, even if the perpetrators are non-state actors [e.g., a terrorist group] operating from a foreign state … was categorically upheld in previous editions of the present book. ... All lingering doubts on this issue have been dispelled as a result of the

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______________________________________________________________ response of the international community to the shocking events of 11 September 2001.22 Dinstein cites three international responses in particular, each of which recognizes an American right of self-defence which, as he notes, is under the UN Charter legal only in response to an ‘armed attack’ and which in turn triggers the application of international humanitarian law. First, he notes UN Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373, passed in the wake of September 11th, which both affirm the ‘right of individual and collective selfdefence in accordance with the Charter’ in the context of the ‘horrifying terrorist attacks’.23 Second, Dinstein notes that NATO voted to invoke, for the first time, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (1949), which provides that ‘an armed attack against one or more of the Allies … shall be considered an attack against them all’. He stresses that ‘armed attack’ is employed with specific reference to Article 51 of the UN Charter and the right of selfdefence. Finally, Dinstein notes that in September 2001 the members of the Organization of American States similarly declared that ‘These terrorist attacks against the United States are attacks against all American States,’ again with specific reference to Article 51 of the UN Charter as well as Article 3 of the Rio Treaty and the right of self-defence. Dinstein’s evidence from the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks illustrates a clear willingness on the part of states to recognize a right of self-defence against attacks by international terrorists, and hence a corresponding right to employ armed force in self-defence under the auspices of international humanitarian law. The organizations and member states he cites were not deterred from authorizing the use of force against al-Qaeda because of any doubts concerning whether the entire membership of the organization could be precisely and uncontentiously established, as Duffy feared. The fact that there may have been some marginal cases of peripheral participation in al-Qaeda activities was not seen as a serious obstacle to recognition that terrorist organizations exist and have carried out transnational attacks triggering a right of self-defence, and that the membership and active participation of many individuals in such groups can be established beyond reasonable doubt. Moreover, in using force to prevent further attacks by terrorist organizations, attacked states, and in some cases their allies, enter into an armed conflict with terrorist aggressors and are thus subject to humanitarian law. Duffy’s point that there may be some ambiguity surrounding the combatant status of some alleged members of terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda does warrant care and precision in applying military force, and possibly judicial review of the procedures by which dangerous terrorists are identified and the means to neutralize them are chosen; but it provides no compelling reason to doubt that states can find themselves in armed conflict with terrorist groups.

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______________________________________________________________ Moreover, the UN’s recognition that armed conflict can arise between states and armed organizations employing terror was not a response solely to the horror of the September 11th attacks. The possibility of such conflict was already strongly suggested in international criminal jurisprudence in the mid-1990s. It already seems implicit, for example, in the general definition of armed conflict offered by the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1995: We find that an armed conflict exists whenever there is a resort to armed force between States or protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups within a State. International humanitarian law applies from the initiation of such armed conflict and extends beyond the cessation of hostilities until a general conclusion of peace is achieved; or, in … internal conflicts, a peaceful settlement is achieved.24 It is not entirely clear from the foregoing decision whether the second criterion of armed conflict - ‘protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups’ - is intended to relate to international in addition to non-international armed conflict. The ICTY Appeals Chamber was not required carefully to distinguish between international and non-international armed conflict in order to resolve the jurisdictional question that was before it. It simply decided that ‘the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have both international and internal aspects’.25 Its decision suggests, however, that in at least some cases ‘protracted armed conflict between governmental authorities and armed groups’ can generate conditions of international armed conflict. Whether it was an international or non-international matter, however, the key point for present purposes is that the legal definition of ‘armed conflict,’ and hence the ambit of humanitarian law, already included anywhere where there was ‘protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups’. This might well be interpreted to cover, for example, the campaign of terror waged by armed Palestinian organizations like Hamas and the PIJ against Israel as part of the second intifada – resulting in 1084 Israeli fatalities (525 from suicide bombings) and 7484 injuries between September 2000 and the end of 2005.26 In this context it is worth noting that the September 11th attacks were similarly not wholly isolated incidents, but part of a larger pattern of attacks on American installations and citizens that included the attacks on the USS Cole on 12

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______________________________________________________________ October 2000 (17 fatalities and 40 injuries) and on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on October 7, 1998 (in which at least 235 people were killed and over two thousand injured). Both the Israeli and American governments responded with military campaigns that have resulted in literally thousands of fatalities. Both cases, then, appear to meet the standard of protracted violence between armed organizations and governments, and therefore to meet the ICTY’s definition of ‘armed conflict’ - and thus to invoke humanitarian law. It is historical precedents like this that Helen Duffy seems to have in mind when she writes of the slow movement of international law towards recognizing protracted violence between states and terrorist organizations as armed conflicts subject to humanitarian law. But the most powerful rejoinders to her insistence that the law has not yet passed this critical threshold comes neither from the ICTY nor from the declarations of international organizations in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, as emphasized by Dinstein, but (first) from the carefully considered and argued decisions of the respected Supreme Courts of both the United States and Israel years after the initial shock of the September 11th attacks, and (second) from the reaction of the international community to Israel’s war with Lebanon’s Hizbullah movement in the summer of 2006. The Israeli Supreme Court has unambiguously accepted in a series of decisions the notion that a state of ‘armed conflict’ exists, and has existed from the start of the first intifada, between the Israeli state and Palestinian terrorist organizations. In its December 14, 2006 decision in The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. the Government of Israel, Aharon Barak, giving the court’s consensus position, wrote as follows: The [Court’s] general, principled starting point is that between Israel and the various terrorist organizations active in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip… a continuous situation of armed conflict has existed since the first intifada. The Supreme Court has discussed the existence of that conflict in a series of judgments. ... In one case I wrote: Since late September 2000, severe combat has been taking place in the areas of Judea and Samaria. It is not police activity. It is an armed conflict. (HCJ 7015/02) This approach is in line with the definition of armed conflict in the international literature…. Humanitarian law is the lex specialis which applies in the case of armed conflict.27

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______________________________________________________________ This pattern of decisions invoked by Judge Barak forms an important legal precedent for recognizing that a state of armed conflict can exist between states and terrorist organizations. The US Supreme Court has also weighed in on this question and indicated that it regards the war on terrorism as a genuine armed conflict subject to international humanitarian law. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, et al., decided on 29 June 2006, the Court ruled that an alleged enemy combatant was not subject to trial by military commission because, among other things, the trial would violate his rights under international humanitarian law. Specifically, the Court ‘conclude[d] that the military commission convened to try Hamdan lacks power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate both the [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and the Geneva Conventions’.28 There can be no doubt, then, that the Court considers the United States to be engaged in a war on terror; and thus subject to international humanitarian law, in which al-Qaeda is at least one of the enemy parties. Indeed, in a dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas went so far as to specifically ‘treat Osama bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of Jihad against Americans as the inception of the war. The majority, however, ‘focus on the September 11th, 2001 attacks that the government characterizes as the relevant ‘acts of war,’ and on the measure that authorized the President’s deployment of military force [i.e., Congress’s Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF)]’. They ‘do not question the government’s position that the war commenced with the events of September 11, 2001’.29 The US Congress’ AUMF cited by the Court is notable not only as an effective declaration of war, but as explicitly authorizing war with ‘organizations or persons’, rather than exclusively with terror sponsoring states. Specifically, Congress authorized the President to ‘use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organization or persons he determines planned, authorized or aided’ the September 11th terrorist attacks. The Supreme Court merely added that, regardless of whether this legitimate exercise of force in self-defence were to be directed against a sponsoring nation, a terrorist group or an individual, it remained fully subject to the law of armed conflict. These judicial decisions by the Supreme Courts of the United States and Israel provide jurisprudential support for the practice of international institutions and states cited by Dinstein. Together the precedents go a long way towards establishing a new rule of international humanitarian law. The new rule, moreover, seems to have been validated by the response of leading states and international institutions to an event in the Middle East in the summer of 2006. The event in question is the war in Lebanon between Israeli forces and Hizbullah fighters. What was revealing here was Israel’s behaviour and

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______________________________________________________________ the international community’s reaction to it. The war was precipitated by a Hizbullah incursion across the Israeli-Lebanese border on 12 July, resulting in the killing of three soldiers and the kidnapping of two others. The Israeli government reacted by sending IDF units over the border in an attempt to rescue the kidnapped soldiers. The operation failed to free the captured soldiers but resulted in the deaths of five more Israeli soldiers. The Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, then declared that the Hizbullah attack was an ‘act of war’ and launched a full scale military campaign against Hizbullah, beginning with extensive air strikes across Lebanon and leading to a major ground campaign in the South.30 The fighting continued until a UN ceasefire went into effect on 14 August. There can be no doubt that Israel’s war was, as Israeli leaders continually stressed, against Hizbullah, not against Lebanon. On 16 July, for example, the Israeli Cabinet issued the following statement: ‘Israel is not fighting Lebanon but the terrorist element there, led by Nasrallah and his cohorts, who have made Lebanon a hostage and created Syrian- and Iraniansponsored terrorist enclaves of murder.’31 Israel’s operations were directed specifically against suspected Hizbullah militants (although arguably with insufficient precision), and deliberately sought to avoid confrontation with the Lebanese army, which equally sought to avoid engagement. Hizbullah, for its part, flung defiance at the Israeli government, daring Israel to launch a ground assault against its forces in southern Lebanon, and launching over 4000 missiles into northern Israel. The final list of fatalities included somewhere between 250 and 600 Hizbullah fighters, 119 Israeli soldiers, and somewhere between 850 and 1191 Lebanese civilians.32 It was clear to all observers, then, that the fight was between Israel and Hizbullah - with unfortunate Lebanese civilians too often trapped in-between. What is critical for present purposes is that there was widespread support in the international community for Israel’s right to defend itself by pursuing a military campaign against Hizbullah under the laws of war, and while the international community became increasingly critical of the manner in which Israel prosecuted the armed conflict, its criticism was almost entirely framed in terms of humanitarian law. In an address to the UN Security Council on 30 July, for example, the Secretary General, Kofi Annan, affirmed that ‘no one disputes Israel’s right to defend itself’ but noted that there was growing concern about ‘its manner of doing so’, and in particular about what appeared to be ‘grave breaches of humanitarian law’. Finally, he recalled that ‘the UN High Commissioner for human rights had reminded both sides that they may be held accountable for any breaches of international humanitarian law’.33 Similarly, the G8, meeting in St. Petersburg, recognized Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ against Hizbullah

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______________________________________________________________ aggression but cautioned Israel ‘to be mindful of the strategic and humanitarian consequences of its actions,’ calling on Israel in particular to avoid ‘casualties among innocent civilian’.34 At the national level, most countries focused their criticisms exclusively on what India called Israel’s ‘disproportionate and excessive use of force’ and what Turkey called ‘bombing civilians’ – that is, on its failure to fully comply with humanitarian principles of proportionality and distinction.35 Similarly, NGOs such as Amnesty International complained that Israel’s ‘widespread attacks against public civilian infrastructure’ was ‘deliberate and an integral part of the military strategy, rather than collateral damage,’ and called upon Israel to uphold the humanitarian principle of proportionality.36 In essence, the international community accepted that a country attacked by a terrorist organization had a right to go to war with that organization provided that it complied with the humanitarian law of armed conflict. The war in Lebanon, then, not only established an additional precedent of armed conflict between a state and a terrorist organization, but indicated a growing international consensus that terrorist organizations could take actions that warrant a military response and that that military response should be subject to the law of armed conflict. In combination with the precedents cited above, international reaction to this event strongly suggests that the legal threshold for recognizing the applicability of humanitarian law to armed conflicts between states and terrorist organizations has now been passed. In summary then, while the question of whether a war on terror can qualify as an armed conflict in the legal sense cannot be described as definitively settled, both Israel and the United States maintain that it can and does, and their case seems to be strong and getting stronger. Not only can they point to a clear pattern of legal development and some highly supportive expert opinions before 2001, but also to a transitional event in the September 11th attacks and then to a clear set of precedents from states and international institutions in the wake of that event, confirmed in relation to more recent armed conflicts. Most importantly, they can point to strong support in judgments of their own Supreme Courts (as well as the US Congress). Obviously, these courts are the final arbiters of American and Israeli law. They are also, however, respected and influential sources of precedent for the larger international legal community, and it may well be that the judgments rendered by the courts effectively settled the controversy over the legal status of the war on terror. After all, even Helen Duffy, who raised doubts in 2005 over whether the law could be said to have made the transition to recognizing ‘armed conflict against an organization’ such as a terrorist group (or groups), was prepared to acknowledge that ‘this perspective, while not perhaps reflecting current law, signals a possible direction for future legal development’.37

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______________________________________________________________ 3.

New War, New Rules? If, however, there is a strong legal case for recognizing that the war on terror triggers the application of humanitarian law, there is an equally strong legal case for denying that it should be conducted according to new and evolving rules, as exemplified in the American policy towards prisoners, a policy that included secret detention, aggressive interrogation and extraordinary rendition - all in defiance of the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, the very qualities which lend strength to the legal case for the recognition of a state of war militate against allowing special exceptions or new rules in regard to state conduct. The first key point in support of the legal designation of armed conflict was the strong support of many states and leading international organizations. The situation is the opposite, however, with regard to claims for exemption from the existing laws of war, such as the USA’s claim that its treatments of prisoners is not subject to international conventions including the Geneva Conventions. These claims are widely rejected both by other states and international organizations. To cite just one dramatic example, on 14 January 2004, 175 parliamentarians from Britain (America’s closest ally) submitted an Amici curiae brief in support of the petitioners in Rasul v. Bush challenging the legality and morality of the Guantanamo Detainment Centre – a facility that even the State Department has described as a ‘lightning rod for international criticism’38 and which President Obama undertook to close within a year the day after his inauguration. What is even more striking is that both the American and Israeli courts, which are the second source of support for the claim that the laws of war apply to the war on terror, have themselves insisted that international conventions, including the Geneva conventions, apply to detainees in the war on terror. Indeed, the US Supreme Court decided against the US Government in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in part on the specific ground that US policies violated the Geneva Convention. The third ground of the legal case was the 2006 war in Lebanon, and the international community’s reaction to it. As already indicated, the bulk of the international community was willing to accept that Israel was within its rights (under article 51 of the Charter) to conduct a military campaign specifically against Hizbullah (rather than against Lebanon) under the laws of armed conflict. On the other hand, as noted above, many states and international organizations became virulent in their criticism of Israel for what they perceived to be violations of the laws of armed conflict, particularly in terms of the way that Israel responded to Hizbullah operatives allegedly hiding among civilian populations or using civilians as shields. Specifically, Israel was criticized for responding too aggressively and therefore visiting disproportionate harm on civilians. All of this criticism, however, reconfirms the international community’s commitment to the full

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______________________________________________________________ applicability of the entirety of international humanitarian law to armed conflicts between states and international organizations – even when the illegal behaviour of terrorists (such as failing to distinguish themselves visibly from civilians) in fact imposes serious difficulties for the prosecution of military campaigns against them. Thus each of the three key precedents that strengthens the case for recognizing the war on terror as a legal armed conflict subject to humanitarian law militate against the legality of claims to exemption from those laws or that the war on terror may legally be fought according to new laws appropriate to a new kind of warfare. In the final analysis there is little to be said from a legal perspective either for the first widely held position that the war on terror is merely a hortatory device and that the struggle with terrorism must be conducted wholly within a law enforcement paradigm, or for the third familiar perspective which held not only that the war on terror is a real war, but that it is a new kind of war to be fought according to new rules (which the belligerent states would evolve over time). Rather, the balance of evidence clearly indicates that international law currently recognizes the war on terror as a real war that is fully subject to humanitarian law. This conclusion does not exclude the possibility that some of the existing humanitarian law may have to be adjusted over time to properly address an armed conflict between states and terrorist groups, but it suggests that the international community must agree upon adjustments before they can be legally applied to actual conflicts. In addition to arguing that the law of war applies fully and rigorously to the war on terror, this essay concludes by arguing that it is fortunate that it does so: for legal clarity and restraint is exactly what is most needed today in the prosecution of the War on Terror. 4.

Conclusion Even if there is a compelling case that the war on terror has come to be legally recognized as a real war, a normative question can still be raised over whether this is a desirable development, or whether it ought perhaps to be resisted and, if possible, eventually reversed. This question has both political and moral dimensions. I shall conclude by arguing that the war on terror is indeed best approached as an armed conflict constrained by existing humanitarian law. The war effort has been deeply compromised in recent years – not only in terms of breadth of international support, but also in terms of its perceived legitimacy - by policies that have strayed beyond the bounds of the laws of war, including American programmes of detainment, torture and rendition and aggressive Israeli counterterrorism tactics that have imposed disproportionate harm on civilians (such as the 22 July 2002 targeted killing of Salah Shehadeh that resulted in the deaths of fifteen civilians including

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______________________________________________________________ nine children). A clear public declaration to abide by the laws of war and demonstrated commitment to uphold this pledge would contribute significantly to arresting or reversing declining international support and legitimacy. Moreover, American and Israeli actions outside the law of war have lent a degree of legitimacy to terrorist organizations and have thus contributed to their popularity in certain parts of the world (the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian legislative election of 25 January 2006 is perhaps the most spectacular manifestation of this trend). If the states purportedly fighting terrorism regularly violate the law, how can they credibly condemn terrorists for doing the same thing? This legitimising effect is most evident in parts of the world that sympathize with terrorist organizations’ announced objectives (such as freeing Palestine or forcing American influence out of the Middle East), if not necessarily with their means. Lending growing legitimacy in these regions to terrorist groups threatens to contribute to the nurture of a new, larger and more extreme generation of terrorists, and hence to the increasing unlikelihood of a successful outcome to the war on terror. This war is clearly not a contest solely of armed forces, but also a competition for hearts and minds, and little could be more detrimental to that struggle than to allow the distinction between terrorism and counterterrorism to become blurred. The United States and Israel need to mobilize international law to clearly distinguish their policies from those of terrorists, and to do that they need to be able to point to clear, well-established, broadly supported rules and distinctions: they need existing humanitarian law. On the other hand, the credibility and authority of international law has taken a terrible beating in the last eight years, particularly at the hands of the United States, the world’s superpower.39 In particular, in its policy on detainees and its invasion of Iraq, the United States has publicly flouted international law, and correspondingly diminished the force of that law in dealing with cases like Iran’s nuclear programme. There is an enormous need today for a re-commitment on the part of important states, and particularly the United States, to compliance with the provisions of international law. A public declaration of commitment to humanitarian law in prosecuting the war on terror followed by sustained fulfilment of that pledge would be an important step in the right direction. Finally, what is at stake from a moral perspective? Considering the issues raised it hardly seems fit to belabour the question: secret detention, rendition, torture and disproportionate killing of civilians, are categorically illegal in part for obvious moral reasons, whether deontological or consequential. On the one hand, they all violate the most widely recognized and accepted moral duty to others: to treat them as ends rather than means to one’s own ends. On the other hand, permitting such policies, particularly in secret, invites abuses and even atrocities: as has already been amply

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______________________________________________________________ demonstrated at Abu Ghraib. And having facilitated the conditions for immoral action, we all bear complicity for the consequence. Some weapons, Benjamin Constant observed, ‘are too heavy for human hands’.40 We share a moral responsibility to ensure that they are not made available, either to terrorists’ intent on their use (by failing to confront and deter them) or to powerful states in conducting a war on terror (by exempting them from the constraint of the law). Not only on a legal basis then, but also on a normative basis – that is to say, whether emphasizing international politics and the health and stability of the international order, or from a moral perspective stressing individual and collective agency in the performance of rights and wrongs - the answers dovetail with the evolution of international humanitarian law. The war on terror should be recognized and conducted as a real war, and correspondingly must be constrained within the existing law of war.

Notes 1

K Roth, ‘The Law of War in the War on Terror’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 83, 2004, pp. 2-3. 2 A Dworkin, ‘The Yemen Strike: The War on Terror Goes Global’, Crimes of War Project, accessed 5 June 2007, . 3 Roth, pp. 2-3. 4 C Greenwood, ‘Historical Development and Legal Basis’ in The Handbook of Humanitarian Law, D Fleck (ed.) , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 19-20. 5 See, Justice H Jilani in M Vorkink and E Sheik, ‘The ‘War on Terror’ and the Erosion of the Rule of Law’, Human Rights Brief, vol. 14, 2006, p. 5. 6 E. Posner, ‘Terrorism and the Laws of War’, Chicago Journal of International Law, vol. 5, 2004, p. 423. 7 J Mayer, ‘Outsourcing Torture’, New Yorker, 14 February 2005, accessed 24 June 2007, , italics added. 8 B Lawrence (ed.), Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama bin Laden, Verso, New York, 2005, pp. 46-47, 23-30, 41-2, 48, 52, 61, 69-70. 9 G W Bush, ‘President Meets with National Security Team’, White House, 12 September 2001, accessed 6 February 2007, . 10 G W Bush, ‘President Discusses Global War on Terror’, White House Press Secretary, 5 September 2006, accessed 7 February 2007, .

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______________________________________________________________ 11

G W. Bush, ‘Radio Address of the President to the Nation’, White House Press Secretary, 29 September 2001, accessed 6 February 2007, . 12 R Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Random House, New York, 2005, pp. 31-3. 13 Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Press Briefing by Colonel Daniel Reisner’, 15 November 2000, accessed 1 February 2007, . 14 M Gross, ‘Fighting by Other Means in the Mideast: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Assassination Policy’, Political Studies, vol. 51, 2004, p. 354. 15 H Duffy, The ‘War on Terror’ and the Framework of International Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 218-9. 16 Y Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, p. 4. 17 Greenwood, p. 10. 18 Duffy, pp. 250-1. 19 Duffy, p. 252. 20 Duffy, p. 254. 21 Duffy, pp. 252-4. 22 Dinstein, pp. 206-7. 23 Dinstein, p. 207. 24 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ‘Tadic Interlocutory Appeal’, 1995, paragraph 70, accessed 14 February 2007, , italics added. 25 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, paragraph 77. 26 Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, ‘Palestinian Terrorism in 2005’, 31 December 2005, accessed 22 January 2007, . 27 Israeli High Court of Justice, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel, HCJ 7609/04, 2006, accessed 7 January 2007, . 28 Supreme Court of the United States (2006), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 126 S.Ct.2749, 2004, p. 2, accessed 11 February 2007, . 29 Supreme Court of the United States, Opinion of the Court, p. 35fn. 30 C Urquhart, and C McGreal, ‘Israelis Invade Lebanon after Soldiers are Seized’, Guardian, 12 July 2006, accessed 27 May 2007, .

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______________________________________________________________ 31

Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Hizbullah Attacks Northern Israel and Israel’s Response’, 2006, accessed 27 May 2007, . 32 For example, Amnesty International, ‘Israel/Lebanon Deliberate Destruction or ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure’, MDE 18/007/2007, 2006, accessed 27 May 2007, . 33 UN News Centre, ‘Security Council Must Condemn Israeli Attack, Demand Cessation of Hostilities, Annan Says’, 30 July 2006, accessed 8 June 2007,www.un.org/apps/ news/story.asp?NewsID=19345&C r=Leba n& cr1. 34 G-8, ‘St. Petersburg Declaration on the Middle East,’ 16 July 2006, accessed 26 July 2007, . 35 Kuwait News Agency, ‘World Efforts Continue to Stop Escalating Israeli Violence in Middle East’, 14 July 2006, accessed 28 May 2007, ; CNN Turk (2006), ‘Erdogan: Israil’in Derdi Nedir?’, accessed 28 May 2007, . 36 Amnesty 2006. 37 Duffy, p. 252. 38 See S Tisdall, ‘White House Close to Guantanamo Decision’, Guardian Unlimited, 22 June 2007, accessed 6 August 2007, ; and ‘Brief of 175 Members of Both Houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners,’ accessed 6 August 2007, . 39 Vorkink and Scheik, p. 2. 39 Quoted in I Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in The Proper Study of Mankind, H Hardy and R Hausheer (eds), Pimlico, London, 1998, p.234.

Bibliography Amnesty International, ‘Israel/Lebanon Deliberate Destruction or ‘Collateral Damage’?’, MDE 18/007/2007, 2006. Accessible at .

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______________________________________________________________ Berlin, I., ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in The Proper Study of Mankind. H Hardy and R Hausheer (eds), Pimlico, London, 1998. ‘Brief of 175 Members of Both Houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners’, 14 January 2004. Accessible at . Bush, George W., ‘President Meets with National Security Team’, White House, 12 September 2001. Accessible at . Bush, George W., ‘President Discusses Global War on Terror’, White House Press Secretary, 5 September 2006. Accessible at . Bush, George W., ‘Radio Address of the President to the Nation’, White House Press Secretary, 29 September 2001. Accessible at . CNN Turk, ‘Erdogan: Israil’in Derdi Nedir?’, 2006. Accessible at . Dinstein, Y., War, Aggression and Self-Defence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. Duffy, H., The ‘War on Terror’ and the Framework of International Law. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. Dworkin, A,. ‘The Yemen Strike: The War on Terror Goes Global’. Crimes of War Project. Accessible at . G-8, ‘St. Petersburg Declaration on the Middle East’, 16 July 2006. Accessible at <,http:/e,n.g8russia.ru/docs/21.html>. Greenwood, C., ‘Historical Development and Legal Basis’, in The Handbook of Humanitarian Law. D Fleck (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 1-43.

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______________________________________________________________ Gross, M., ‘Fighting by Other Means in the Mideast: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Assassination Policy’. Political Studies, vol. 51, 2004, pp. 350-368. Israeli High Court of Justice, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel, HCJ 7609/04, 2006. Accessible at . Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Press Briefing by Colonel Daniel Reisner’, 15 November 2000. Accessible at . Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Hizbullah Attacks Northern Israel and Israel’s Response’, 2006. Accessible at . Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, ‘Palestinian Terrorism in 2005’, 31 December 2005. Accessible at . International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. ‘Tadic Interlocutory Appeal’, 1995. Accessible at . Kuwait News Agency, ‘World Efforts Continue to Stop Escalating Israeli Violence in Middle East’, 14 July 2006. Accessible at . Lawrence, B. (ed.), Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama bin Laden. Verso, New York, 2005. Mayer, J., ‘Outsourcing Torture’. New Yorker, 14 Feb. 2005. Accessible at . Pape, R., Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Random House, New York, 2005. Posner, E., ‘Terrorism and the Laws of War’. Chicago Journal of International Law, vol. 5, 2004, pp. 423-434.

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______________________________________________________________ Roth, K., ‘The Law of War in the War on Terror’. Foreign Affairs, vol. 83, 2004, pp. 2-7. Supreme Court of the United States. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 126 S.Ct.2749, 2004. Available at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/ 05pdf/05184.pdf>. Tisdall, S., ‘White House Close to Guantanmo Decision’. Guardian Unlimited, 22 June 2007. Accessible at . UN News Centre, ‘Security Council Must Condemn Israeli Attack, Demand Cessation of Hostilities, Annan Says’, 30 July 2006. Accessible at . Urquhart, C. and C. McGreal, ‘Israelis Invade Lebanon after Soldiers are Seized’. Guardian, 12 July 2006. Accessible at . Vorkink, M. and E. Sheik, ‘The ‘War on Terror’ and the Erosion of the Rule of Law’. Human Rights Brief, vol. 14, 2006, pp. 2-6.

The Laws of War in Outer Space: Some Legal Implications for Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello of the Militarisation and Weaponisation of Outer Space Arjen Vermeer Abstract The military use of outer space has been integral to national security strategies since the space age began, almost 50 years ago. Recent developments in technology and military doctrine have led to states’ being increasingly interested in deploying weapons in space. An assessment of the situation in terms of international law is therefore necessary. Contrary to common belief, the arms control provisions of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty reserve only celestial bodies for peaceful purposes’: it thus limits military activities in the space between them - outer void space – only in respect of prohibiting weapons of mass destruction applying general international law, including the UN Charter. But force application by space weaponry challenges the regime governing the use of force in international relations, jus ad bellum. First, the concept of force needs to be revisited. Second, the differentiated regimes of outer void space and celestial bodies have a significant impact on the lawful exercise of the right of self-defence, including the deployment of spatial missile defence shields. Thus I shall explore a possible jus in bello spatiale. Military activity in space is likely to increase in wars to come. We therefore need a framework for applying the norms of international law in outer space. Key Words: Ballistic missile defence, environmental protection, law of armed conflict, militarisation and weaponisation of space, outer space treaty ***** 1.

Introduction The ascent into space of man-made objects made it possible to use space as a medium for military purposes. Space militarisation can be described as any activity in space, which is executed by a man-made object incorporated de jure or de facto in the military organisation of a State.1 Satellites, for instance, may perform a number of military tasks, including communications, weather information, remote sensing and navigation (e.g. GPS and missile guidance). Space weaponisation describes the introduction of operational weapons systems in outer space, such as Kinetic Energy Weapons (KEWs) and Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs). The object of Kinetic Energy Weapons is simple: a ‘kill’ is being achieved through high

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______________________________________________________________ velocity impact (hit-to-kill). Directed Energy Weapons include a broad variety of technologies such as lasers, particle beams and signal interference technologies, the latter including high-powered microwaves or high power radio frequencies. Electromagnetic and Radiation Weapons (ERWs), a subcategory of DEWs, operate through the emission and/or creation of an electromagnetic pulse or radiation. The device that brings about both consequences at once is a nuclear weapon. Lastly, Explosive Proximity Weapons (EPWs), also referred to as space mines, explode upon contact or in proximity. Despite these technological development, political realities have prevailed to the extent that apart from the USA, all states involved in space are very careful not explicitly to include space capabilities in their national military doctrines.2 Nevertheless, the weaponisation of space by these, and other, nations looms no less.3 This chapter focuses on whether and to what extent force application by space weapon systems is, or ought to be, regulated under existing international law, in particular the Outer Space Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations and the laws of armed conflict. 2.

Obligations Arising from Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty (OST), consisting of two paragraphs, has significant bearing on military activities in space.4 A. Article IV(1): Weapons of Mass Destruction The first paragraph prohibits putting ‘nuclear and any other weapon of mass destruction’ in orbit or in outer space. However, the treaty leaves crucial terms undefined, in particular ‘outer space’ and ‘orbit’. It is generally understood that ‘outer space’ comprises celestial bodies, including the Moon,5 and all space in between, so-called outer void space.6 ‘Orbit’ means at least one full orbit around the Earth in order to exclude from the scope of the provision intercontinental ballistic missiles (possibly carrying nuclear warheads) passing through space.7 Further, the object of the prohibition is objects carrying weapons of mass destruction, not the weapons per se. Nonetheless, for the purposes of the OST, nuclear weapons that do not have the characteristics of a weapon of mass destruction and a fortiori do not contain nuclear material intended for use as a weapon are excluded from the prohibition.8 Thus, space weapons that use nuclear energy, such as some DEWs, but that does not possess the characteristics in effect or design of a weapon of mass destruction fall outside the scope of Article IV(1). B. Article IV(2): The ‘Peaceful Purposes’ Debate Article IV(2) is concerned with the demilitarisation of ‘the Moon and other celestial bodies’ only.9 It is important to keep in mind that in 1967 neither the US nor the Soviet Union attempted to bring about a complete

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______________________________________________________________ demilitarisation of the whole of outer space.10 The omission of any reference to outer space sensu lato is therefore deliberate. Nevertheless, Article IV(2) arguably has the effect of establishing a regime of complete demilitarisation, albeit spatially limited to celestial bodies. The main debate, however, focuses on the interpretation of the term ‘peaceful’ in the context of the use of outer space for ‘peaceful purposes’. The USA argues that ‘peaceful’ means ‘non-aggressive’, but this is erroneous.11 Replacing ‘peaceful’ by ‘non-aggressive’ in Article IV(2) would mean - if one accepts the limited spatial application of Article IV(2) - that outer void space may be used for aggressive purposes.12 This conclusion cannot be warranted, however, particularly as Article III makes the UN Charter and its provisions on the prohibition of the use of force applicable to outer space. In other words, the American interpretation would make Article IV(2) redundant. According to the customary rules of treaty interpretation, treaty terms are to be interpreted according to their ordinary meaning in their context and in the light of the object and purpose of the treaty concerned. ‘Peaceful’, therefore, should be understood as ‘non-military’.13 First, the ordinary meaning of ‘peaceful’ implies ‘non-military’. Second, in the context of the OST there are several references to ‘peaceful purposes’ hinting at a non-military point of view.14 Third, other treaties with a similar nature can be referred to for interpretation purposes, as the practice of the ICJ has shown.15 There are a number of treaties that, according to their object and purpose, understand ‘peaceful’ to denote ‘non-military’.16 Admittedly, none of these treaties provides a definition of ‘peaceful’. But there is no indication that the parties intended to attach any special meaning to it; hence it is reasonable to argue that the ordinary meaning of ‘peaceful’, as ‘non-military’, should also be applied to Article IV(2). C. Military Space Activities in Outer Void Space The OST regulates military activities in differentiated regimes; one addresses the Moon and other celestial bodies (Article IV(2)), and the other the outer void space (Article III).17 In light of the above, one may reasonably conclude that the use of force in outer void space should therefore be judged by general international law, including the Charter of the United Nations and the law of armed conflict. 3.

The Threat or Use of Force in Outer Space The cornerstone provision on the regulation of the use of force between states is the well-known Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibiting the use of force in international relations.18 Article 2(4) is a declaration of customary international law and even considered to be jus cogens,19 thus binding upon all states in all their international relations, including those in outer space. However, Article II of the OST excludes appropriation in outer

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______________________________________________________________ space sensu lato and, thus, negates the possibility of the use of force against territorial integrity.20 Without an associated terrestrial attack, the political independence of a State is not threatened.21 Hence, all uses of force in outer space are necessarily subject to the ‘in ‘any other manner inconsistent’ with the UN Charter’ clause. It is generally accepted that ‘force’ denotes armed force.22 However, signal interference weapons, for instance, do not apply force in the ‘classical’ sense that is to say, as kinetic weapons do.23 To make Article 2(4) applicable, then, Brownlie argues that new types of force application devices would be covered if ‘the agencies concerned are commonly referred to as ‘weapons’ and forms of warfare’ and if ‘these weapons are employed for the destruction of life and property’.24 This re-interpretation of the notion of force seems justified in light of the generally accepted understanding of ‘force’ as ‘armed force’. 4.

Chapter VII of the UN Charter The only generally accepted exceptions to prohibition on using force are a Security Council authorisation and forcible measures taken in the lawful exercise of the right of self-defence. The United Nations system provides the Security Council with coercive means under Chapter VII of the Charter. Though the drafters of the Charter may not have been concerned with the inclusion of space limitations, it would seem perverse not to extend this application to outer space. Prior to applying these means, however, the Security Council has to determine a situation pursuant to Article 39 of the UN Charter, most likely a threat to the peace. This could involve either a threat to mankind (e.g. weapons of mass destruction, space debris, or theoretically even space weaponisation as such) or a threat to another state’s national security (threat or use of force against a state’s space assets). Interestingly, Article 41 provides for the possibility of interrupting ’telegraphic, radio and other means of communication’.25 This could include space-based assets, such as communication and GPS satellites. Lacking any reference to space or space forces, however, Article 42 would not automatically bar military measures from or in outer space. But even if such a literal approach were adopted, there are no grounds on which to assume that the Security Council could not change this interpretation by subsequent practice.26 To a certain extent, in fact, this has already been achieved with regard to military space activities. Moreover, technological advances in space could serve as an asset in UN peacekeeping missions.27 Space assets, then, may not only be called upon to support Earth-based measures, but force application in or from outer space may come within the purview of the envisaged actions as well.

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______________________________________________________________ 5.

Self-Defence Article 51 of the UN Charter does not conclusively define the right of self-defence: rather, it sets out the conditions under which measures in self-defence are lawful.28 Basically, it requires an armed attack and prescribes a temporary response until the Security Council steps in. Customary international law places two additional constraints upon the lawful exercise of this right, namely necessity and proportionality.29 How exactly might this right of self-defence apply to outer space, given the common acceptance that the principle of self-defence should apply?30 A. Self-Defence in Outer Void Space The right of self-defence would need to be activated in the event of an attack on a military space asset wherever it were located.31 However, there is considerable controversy as to whether the individual right of self-defence extends to the protection of civil assets owned by either a state’s own nationals or by another state’s nationals outside the territory where they are registered.32 Since space assets - military or civil – have to be registered in a particular state, these may benefit from diplomatic protection by the state concerned.33 Support can thus be found for the claim that the protection of any state-registered asset falls within the ambit of protection afforded by the right of self-defence.34 B. Self-Defence On Celestial Bodies The issues related to the interpretation of ‘peaceful purposes’ can be put in the context of the place of self-defence in the regulation of a demilitarised zone in general, and of celestial bodies in particular. A socalled non-aggressive approach would argue in favour of military installations on celestial bodies for the exclusive purpose of self-defence.35 But such individual self-defence would preclude the demilitarisation of celestial bodies as a collective act tailored precisely to prevent threats to peace quite generally, and thus to each individual state. Celestial bodies are best thought of as res communis and denoted as demilitarised zones to achieve precisely such collective self-defence. Were this to be accepted, then – as in other areas – this could not be derogated from, even in wartime. Hence I would argue that Article IV of the OST can, and should, be understood as precluding any military activity whatever on celestial bodies, whether it be offensive or defensive. C. Ballistic Missile Defence A ballistic missile defence system seeks to defend the state through, among other things, military deployment in outer space that aims to track and intercept incoming missiles. It may be characterized as a magnified effort of the generally accepted concept of ‘interceptive self-defence’.36 The issue

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______________________________________________________________ involved here does not so much concern the orbit of those components - this is an entirely legal activity when compliant with Article IV of the OST - but rather that some of these components would undoubtedly claim a protection, identification or exclusion zone around them, so that any space asset coming within such a zone would risk being targeted. The question then is this: does the apparently permanent nature of the associated ‘keep out zones’ of these assets run counter to international law? On the high seas, states have arguably acquiesced in the declaration of such zones, at least for the duration of a conflict.37 Interestingly, the claim that such a deployment of assets would contradict the principle that outer space cannot be occupied appears to be losing ground, but state practice here is at best inconclusive.38 Yet a strong argument can be presented that such a zone - be it in peace- or wartime would be contrary to the freedom of navigation in space.39 Thus it seems that permanent ‘keep out zones’ would indeed fall outside the legal framework and limit current initiatives for the unilateral deployment of ballistic missile defence when assets used for it make peacetime use of such zones. 6.

The Law of Armed Conflict in Outer Space The use of force is judged both by the regime governing the legal resort to armed force, jus ad bellum, and by the law applicable to the conduct of armed conflict, jus in bello. Over time, several significant principles have been accepted as applicable to any type of armed conflict: military necessity, humanity, proportionality and discrimination. But it cannot be simply assumed that this corpus applies in toto to armed conflict in outer void space, just because of the unique environment that the latter presents. However, to assume that hostilities will not arise in outer space would be entirely unrealistic. How, then, might the customary laws of armed conflict be attuned to that environment minimally shaped as they are by the OST? I shall focus here on two important applications of the principles underlying that treaty’s provisions: the protection of the space environment and targeting in space. A. Means of Warfare: Protecting the Space Environment The concern of the law of armed conflict for the protection of the environment is evident in its dealing with the effect of warfare on the environment and with the use of the environment as a means of warfare.40 Article 35(3) and Article 55 form the direct protection regime of the environment afforded by the 1977 Protocol I Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions (AP I). It is safe to assume that both provisions are now entrenched in the body of customary law, although there is some disagreement about this.41 The place of Article 55(1) in the section on the protection of the civilian population on land may suggest that its application is confined to land warfare. However, Article 35(3) is less limited and

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______________________________________________________________ extends such protection to all types of warfare, including space warfare. However, although both articles mention the ‘natural environment’, it is nowhere in AP I defined. Thus one could interpret the term in such a way as to make these provisions applicable to all orbits around celestial bodies 42 in the event that future generations may inhabit, at least be present on or in orbit around, celestial bodies. While those bodies and orbits would on this account be covered by the regime protecting the environment of space, the rest of outer space would however remain excluded; and this would need in the long run to be remedied. Turning to the 1977 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD Convention), this is concerned with the deliberate manipulation of the natural process (Article I) and is explicitly applicable to outer space (Article II). Nevertheless, the treaty’s utility in the context of space weapons is doubtful, as current space weapon technology does not focus on deliberately manipulating the natural process.43 Be that as it may, force application in space will leave its traces during and long after any armed conflict in the form of space debris. Furthermore, debris in space can also have the same effect as a weapon.44 Since, then, it would take an enormous effort by belligerents to limit the production of space debris a future law of armed conflict in space should reflect this appropriately. B. Targeting Issues For the most widely accepted contemporary definition of a military objective, one has to consider Article 52(2) AP I of the Geneva Convention.45 This article is intended to give effect to the principle of distinction, contained in Article 48 AP I, between civilian and military objects. It sets out a twopronged test for an object to qualify as a military objective. First, it must by its nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action. The ‘nature’ of a military object is established by its integration in the military structure. Its ‘location’ generally refers to either a construction located at a strategic point or a designated area as a whole: interestingly, the latter could include an orbit.46 The criterion of ‘purpose and use’, generally indicating as it does a dual-use (military and civilian) object, speaks for itself. Second, the objective’s total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization must offer a clear military advantage in the circumstances as they prevail at the time. The question thus arises whether a civilian satellite or spaceship that provides information for military purposes, or performs military functions, can be considered to be a military objective, as a dual-use object.47 Interestingly, it was proposed that certain means of communication, including satellites, fall under Article 52(3), where it is stated that in case of doubt a civil object is presumed to be so used; but these were ultimately excluded precisely on account of their more probably being used for military

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______________________________________________________________ purposes in wartime.48 Hence, the general rule of Article 52(2) should apply, that in the case an object has a military purpose or use, it constitutes a legitimate target, notwithstanding its registration as a civil space asset. There are also a number of proportionality issues, which serve to make targeting a legal labyrinth. These issues are further complicated, it seems, by multi-ownership and neutrality issues. However, all that the law requires (Articles 51(5)(b) and 57(a)(ii) AP I) is to weigh the concrete and direct anticipated military advantage against the anticipated loss of civilian lives; the latter must not be excessive in relation to the former.49 The foreseeable long-term or reverberating effects - except environmental concerns - are, even if identifiable, not considered as part of the current legal restraints on targeting. They appear clearly to worry states nonetheless, as they increasingly rely on sophisticated and (civil-military) integrated systems, networks and infrastructure.50 These systems often use satellites which, in turn, are the likely objectives of space weapons; and since attacking these satellites may damage large civil segments of any contemporary state, dependant as these are on satellite data and communications, they too need to be brought into the ambit of the law of armed conflict. 7.

Conclusion Technological developments and states’ interest in the weaponisation of space call for a legal appraisal. The OST’s regulation extends only to its prohibition of weapons of mass destruction and its nonmilitarisation provision applies only to celestial bodies. The OST thus leaves it to other norms to fill the gaps but determines through its differentiated regimes the framework in which other sources regulate the use of force. Moreover, space weaponry itself poses a challenge to existing norms. The prohibition on the use of force requires an acknowledgment of this challenge. In particular, an extension of the powers of the Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter is clearly needed, and the reach of the legal right of self-defence has to take account of the division of regimes in the OST. However, a law of armed conflict in space - a jus in bello spatiale – is unlikely to emerge in the near future: laws of armed conflict tend to be shaped after a conflict rather than in advance. Nevertheless, the issues identified above are central in the shaping of such a legal regime.

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Notes 1

J F von Bentzien, ‘Die militärische Nutzung des Weltraums in Friedensund Kriegszeiten aus rechtlicher Sicht’, Zeitung für Luft- und Weltraumrecht, vol. 35, 1986, p. 324. 2 ‘In order to … enhance national security, the United States must have robust, effective, and efficient space capabilities (in order to) [E]nable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interests there’. - National Science and Technology Council, Fact Sheet: National Space Policy, 19 September 1996, accessed 6 April 2006, . This was followed a recommendation made by a 2001 congressional commission, chaired by later to be Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld: ‘[W]e know from history that every medium-air, land and sea-has seen conflict. Reality indicates that space will be no different. Given this virtual certainty, the U.S. must develop the means both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space. This will require superior space capabilities.’ - Report of the Commission to Access United States National Security Space Management and Organization, 11 January 2001, p. 100, accessed 6 April 2006, . 3 T Hitchens, ‘Developments in Military Space: Movement toward space weapons?’, accessed 4 April 2006, . See also J W Heath, ‘The Vanishing Horizon: Will the Asymmetric Battlefield Make Space-Based Weapons a Reality?’, Proceedings of the Forty-fifth Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space, vol. 45, 2003, p. 206 ff. 4 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, 610 UNTS. 205, entered into force, October 10, 1967. Article IV OST reads: ‘1. States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner. 2. The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the Moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.’

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______________________________________________________________ 5

The Moon has always been treated as a celestial body in the framework of the UN. In resolutions and agreements subsequent to GA Resolution 1884(XVIII) explicit reference was made to ‘the Moon and other celestial bodies’ (emphasis added). See for example C Q Christol, The Modern International Law of Outer Space, Pergamon Press, New York, 1982, p. 22. In the case of Article IV(1) of the OST this exclusion should be attributed to poor drafting: compare Article IV(2). 6 The term ‘outer void space’ was introduced by B Cheng, ‘Introducing a New Term to Space Law: ‘Outer Void Space’’, Korean Journal of Air and Space Law, vol. 11, 1999, p. 321 ff. Outer space in the sense of Article IV(1) of the OST is, thus, outer space sensu lato. 7 See L Condorelli, and Z Mériboute, ‘Some Remarks on the State of International Law Concerning Military Activities in Outer Space’, It.YIL, vol. 6, 1985, pp. 20-25. 8 Compare Article 5 of the 1967 Treaty For The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (Treaty of Tlatelolco), 634 UNTS 326, entered into force 22 April 1968. See also Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, Weapons of Terror - Freeing the World from Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms, 2006, pp. 17, 32 and 42, accessed 9 April 2007, < http://www.wmdcommission.org >. 9 Even though in the second sentence of Article IV(2) there is a reference only to ‘celestial bodies’, the Moon is clearly such; it therefore cannot be excluded from the scope of that sentence. But see R J Zedalis and C L Wade, ‘Anti-Satellite weapons and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967’, California Western ILJ, vol. 8, 1978, p. 461. 10 This became apparent when both superpowers rejected a proposal to that effect, see UN Doc. A/C.1/PV.1493 and UN Doc. A/AC.105/C.2.SR.66 of August 1, 1966. 11 Initially, both the USA and the Soviet Union aimed at a complete demilitarisation of outer space. See D Goedhuis, ‘An Evaluation of the Leading Principles of the Treaty of Outer Space of 27th January 1967’, NILR, vol. 15, 1968, p. 23. However, it was already in 1958 that the availability, use and potential of satellite systems prompted the USA to change its interpretation of ‘peaceful’ from ‘non-military’ to ‘non-aggressive’: see C M Petras, ‘The Use of Force in Response to Cyber-Attack on Commercial Space Systems - Reexamining ‘Self-Defense’ in Outer Space in Light of the Convergence of U.S. Military and Commercial Space Activities’, J. Air L.&Com., vol. 67, 2002, p. 1253. 12 Thus Vlasic concludes that ‘[i]f ‘peaceful’ means ‘non-aggressive’, then it follows logically – and absurdly - that all nuclear and chemical weapons are

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______________________________________________________________ also ‘peaceful’, as long as they are not used for aggressive purposes’: I A Vlasic, ‘The Legal Aspects of Peaceful and Non-Peaceful Uses of Outer Space’, B. Jasani (ed.), Peaceful and Non-Peaceful Uses of Space: Problems of Definition for the Prevention of an Arms Race, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Geneva; Taylor & Francis, UNIDIR, Geneva, New York, 1991, pp. 44-45. 13 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), 1155 UNTS 331; 8 ILM 1969, 679, Article 31(1). Article 31 VCLT reflects customary law: see ICJ Reports 1999, Case concerning Kasikili/Sedudu Island (Botswana v. Namibia), Judgment, 1999, p. 4, para. 18. 14 Following Article 31(2) VCLT, see OST, preambular paragraphs 2 and 4, Articles IX and XI. 15 See ICJ Rep. 1980, Advisory Opinion on the Interpretation of the Agreement of 25 March 1951 Between WHO and Egypt case, p. 73, paras. 45-47. 16 1956 Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 276 UNTS 3, entered into force October 26, 1956; 1959 Antarctic Treaty; 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty; 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 729 UNTS 161, entered into force March 5, 1970; 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention; 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. The object and purpose of those treaty provisions referring to ‘peaceful purposes’ are similar to that of the Article IV OST, namely of an arms control or disarmament nature. The notable exception is the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1833 UNTS 3, entered into force November 16, 1994, which refers to ‘peaceful purposes’ in its Article 88, but which is nevertheless generally considered to denote ‘non-aggressive’. 17 B Cheng, ‘Properly Speaking, Only Celestial Bodies Have Been Reserved for Use Exclusively for Peaceful (Non-Military) Purposes, but Not Outer Void Space’, M.N. Schmitt (ed.), International Law Across the Spectrum of Conflict: Essays in Honour of Professor L.C. Green on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, International Law Studies vol. 75, Naval War College, Newport, 2000, pp. 81-117 and G Zhukov and Y Kolosov, International Space Law, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1984, p. 224. 18 Article 2(4) UN Charter reads: ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.’ 19 See for example ICJ Reports 1986, Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, 27

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______________________________________________________________ June 1986, p. 14 (Nicaragua case), para. 83. Note that the Court did not acknowledge this status but underlined its support thereof. 20 It has, however, been argued that territorial integrity may, in addition to land mass, be interpreted to include human and natural resources in space: see R L Bridge, ‘International Law and Military Activities in Outer Space’, Akron L.Rev., vol. 13, 1979, p. 660. 21 See I Brownlie, ‘The Maintenance of International Peace and Security in Outer Space’, BYIL, vol. 40, 1964, p. 8 and R Higgins, ‘The Legal Limits to the Use of Force by Sovereign States: United Nations Practice’, BYIL, vol. 37, 1961, p. 283. 22 Support for this interpretation can be found for instance in the preambular paragraph 7 of the UN Charter and UN Doc. GA Res. 2625 (XXV) of October, 24, 1970 Declaration On Principles Of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations And Cooperation Among States In Accordance With The Charter Of The United Nations. 23 See for example W von Kries, ‘Die militärische Nutzung des Weltraums’, K-H. Böckstiegel and M. Benkö (eds.), Handbuch des Weltraumrechts, Carl Heymanns Verlag, Köln, 1991, pp. 337-338. 24 I Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, p. 362. He further argues that ‘it would be in accordance with general principles of law to include intended and direct consequences in the prohibition of the use of force in international relations’ - p. 25. 25 Article 41 UN Charter reads: ‘The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.’ 26 See R J Lee, ‘The Jus ad Bellum in Spatialis: The Exact Content and Practical Implications of the Law on the Use of Force in Outer Space’, J. of Space Law, vol. 29, 2003, p. 110, in particular fn. 32. 27 See R A Morgan, ‘Military Use of Commercial Communication Satellites: A New Look at the Outer Space Treaty and ‘Peaceful Purposes’’, J. Air L.&Com., vol. 60, 1994-1995, p. 309. This applies not just to UN SC authorized missions but also to those pursuant to UN Doc. A/Res/377(V) of 3 November 1950, Uniting for Peace and to regional arrangements under Articles 51-53 of the UN Charter. 28 Article 51 UN Charter reads: ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self defense if an armed attack

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______________________________________________________________ occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of selfdefence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain international peace and security.’ 29 Nicaragua case, para. 176; ICJ Report 1996, Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons case, p. 226 (Nuclear Weapons case), para. 226; and, ICJ Reports 2003, Oil Platforms (Islamic Republic of Iran v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment of 6 November 2003, para. 76. 30 See Morgan, pp. 307-308; N Ronzitti, ‘Problemi Giuridici Sollevati dale Iniziative in Materia de Disarmo Spaziale’, F. Francioni e F. Pocar (eds.), Il Regime Internazionale dello Spazio, Dott. A. Giuffrè Editore, Milano, 1993, pp. 79-87; E.S. Waldrop, ‘Weaponization of Outer Space: US National Policy’, AASL, vol. XXIX, 2004, pp. 18-21; L Haeck, ‘Aspects Juridiques de Certaines Utilisations Militaires de l’Espace’, AASL, vol. XXI, 1996, pp. 9297. For an early recognition of this right, see J C Cooper, ‘Self-Defense in Outer Space and the United Nations’, I.A. Vlasic (ed.), Explorations in Aerospace Law: Selected Essays by John Cobb Cooper 1946-1966, McGill University Press, Montreal, 1968, pp. 412-422. For an example of a certain confusion about this at the beginning of the space age, see M Chandrasekharan, ‘The Space Treaty’, Indian JIL, vol. 7, 1967, p. 61 ff, where the application of the right of self-defence to outer space is denied. 31 Compare A V Lowe, ‘Self-Defence at Sea’, W.E. Butler (ed.), The NonUse of Force in International Law, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht, 1989, p. 188: ‘the extension of the right of self defense to cover warships is arguably necessary for the practical survival of the right to defend the State itself’. 32 That collective self-defence would permit such action seems clear from the text of Article 51 itself: see Haeck, p. 84. 33 See Article VIII of the OST. The 1975 Registration Convention requires every man-made space object to be registered by the launching State: see ICJ Rep. 1955, Nottebohm case (Liechtenstein v. Guatemala), p. 24, in which the Court held that a State ‘assumes the defense of its citizens by means of protection as against other States’; A Hurwitz, The Legality of Space Militarization, North-Holland, Amsterdam/New York, 1986, p. 74, fn 84; and Brownlie, International Law, p. 4. This matter may be complicated by the

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______________________________________________________________ fact that space assets may be registered in one state but owned by an entity in another . 34 See for instance H H Almond, ‘Military Activities in Outer Space - The Emerging Law’, Proceedings of the Twenty-third Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space, vol. 23, 1981, p. 150 and Haeck, p. 89, fn 88. 35 See for instance Almond, p. 150 and idem, ‘Demilitarization and Arms Control: Antarctica’, Case Western JIL, vol. 17, 1985, p. 250. 36 Y Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence, 3rd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 172. 37 See C Michaelsen, ‘Maritime Exclusion Zones In Times Of Armed Conflict At Sea: Legal Controversies Still Unresolved’, JCSL, vol. 8, 2003, p. 363 ff and W J Fenrick, ‘The Exclusion Zone: Device in the Law of Naval Warfare’, Can.YIL, vol. 24, 1986, p. 91 ff. 38 It has been argued that if such a defence is required, it should be constructed cooperatively: for example D Wolter, Common Security in Outer Space and International Law, UNIDIR, Geneva, 2006, pp. 126-127 and T Graham Jr., ‘Space Weapons and the Risk of Incidental Nuclear War’, Arms Control Today, vol. 35, 2005, p. 12 ff. 39 Article I OST. See Bentzien, pp. 322-323. 40 ICRC Commentary, Article 35, para. 1450, accessed 2 April 2007, . See also P J Richards and M N Schmitt, ‘Mars Meets Mother Nature: Protecting the Environment during Armed Conflict’, Stetson L.Rev., vol. 28, 1999, p. 1049. 41 See M Bourbonnière, ‘Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) and the Neutralisation of Satellites or Ius in Bello Satellitis’, JCSL, vol. 9, 2004, p. 43 ff and L Henkaerts and L Doswald-Beck, ICRC Study on Customary Rules of International Humanitarian Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, CIHL Rules 44-45. For a xcontrary view, see Y Dinstein, The Conduct of Hostilities Under The Law Of International Armed Conflict, Cambridge University , Cambridge, 2004, p. 185: Dinstein cites the authority of the ICJ in the Nuclear Weapons case to argue that these provisions ‘have not yet crystallized as customary international law’. 42 Note that a direct reference to the stability of the ecosystem on Earth was rejected; nonetheless, the definitions mentioned in the text above appear to pursue precisely this purpose, as opposed to the characterization of the environment as a ‘human environment’: see ICRC Commentary, Article 35, para. 1451. 43 See N Jasentuliyana, International Space Law and the United Nations, Kluwer Law International, The Hague/London/Boston, 1999, p. 114 and R A Ramey, ‘Armed Conflict on the Final Frontier: The Law of War in Space’,

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______________________________________________________________ AFLR, vol. 48, 2000, p. 58: ‘So long as space weapons do not change the outer space environment ‘through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes’, the treaty is not likely to serve as a bar to the deployment or use of space weapons.’ 44 M Benkö, ‘The Problem of Space Debris: A Valid Case Against the Use of Aggressive Military Systems in Outer Space?’, in Benkö and Schrogl (eds), Space Law: Current Problems and Perspectives for Future Regulation. Eleven International Publishing, Utrecht, 2005, p. 167. 45 Article 52(2) reflects customary law: see CIHL, Rules 40-45. 46 See M Bourbonnière, ‘National Security Law in Outer Space: The Interface of Exploration and Security’, J. Air L.&Com., vol. 70, 2005, pp. 5960. 47 Regarding the lawful military use of satellites, see Morgan. On the International Space Station, see C M Petras, ‘‘Space Force Alpha’, Military Use of the International Space Station and the Concept of ‘Peaceful Purposes’’, AFLR, vol. 53, 2002, p. 135. The answer to this question pertains equally to multi-owner space assets: see Ramey, pp. 144-150. 48 ICRC Commentary, op. cit., Article 52, note 3. These communication means included broadcasting and television stations, and also telephone and telegraph exchanges of fundamental military importance. 49 CIHL, Rule 14. 50 M Sassòli, ‘Legitimate Targets of Attacks under International Humanitarian Law’, Background Paper prepared for the Informal High-Level Expert Meeting on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law, Cambridge, June 27-29, 2003, p. 7, accessed 3 April 2007, .

Bibliography Almond, H.H., ‘Demilitarization and Arms Control: Antarctica’. Case Western JIL, vol. 17, 1985, pp. 229-284. _______

, ‘Military Activities in Outer Space - The Emerging Law’. Proceedings of the Twenty-third Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space, vol. 23, 1981, pp. 149-157. Benkö, M., ‘The Problem of Space Debris: A Valid Case Against the Use of Aggressive Military Systems in Outer Space?’, in M. Benkö and K-U. Schrogl (eds.), Space Law: Current Problems and Perspectives for Future Regulation. Eleven International Publishing, Utrecht, 2005, pp. 155-172.

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______________________________________________________________ Bentzien, J.F. von, ‘Die militärische Nutzung des Weltraums in Friedensund Kriegszeiten aus rechtlicher Sicht’. Zeitung für Luft- und Weltraumrecht vol. 35, 1986, pp. 319-334. Bourbonnière, M., ‘Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) and the Neutralisation of Satellites or Ius in Bello Satellitis’. JCSL, vol. 9, 2004, pp. 43-69. Bridge, R.L., ‘International Law and Military Activities in Outer Space’.Akron L.Rev., vol. 13, 1979, pp. 649-664. Brownlie, I., International Law and the Use of Force by States. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963. _______

, ‘The Maintenance of International Peace and Security in Outer Space’. BYIL, vol. 40, 1964, pp. 1-31.

Chandrasekharan, M., ‘The Space Treaty’. Indian JIL, vol. 7, 1967, pp. 6166. Cheng, B., ‘Introducing a New Term to Space Law: ‘Outer Void Space’’. Korean Journal of Air and Space Law, vol. 11, 1999, pp. 321-327. _______

, ‘Properly Speaking, Only Celestial Bodies Have Been Reserved for Use Exclusively for Peaceful (Non-Military) Purposes, but Not Outer Void Space’, in M.N. Schmitt (ed.), International Law Across the Spectrum of Conflict: Essays in Honour of Professor L.C. Green on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday. International Law Studies, vol. 75, Naval War College, Newport, 2000, pp. 81-117. Christol, C.Q., The Modern International Law of Outer Space. Pergamon Press, New York, 1982. Condorelli, L. and Mériboute, Z., ‘Some Remarks on the State of International Law Concerning Military Activities in Outer Space’. It.YIL, vol.6, 1985, pp. 3-32. Cooper, J.C., ‘Self-Defense in Outer Space and the United Nations’, in I.A.Vlasic (ed.), Explorations in Aerospace Law: Selected Essays by John Cobb Cooper 1946-1966. McGill University Press, Montreal, 1968, pp. 412422.

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______________________________________________________________ Dinstein, Y., The Conduct of Hostilities Under The Law Of International Armed Conflict. Cambridge University , Cambridge, 2004. _______

, War, Aggression and Self-Defence, 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. Fenrick, W.J., ‘The Exclusion Zone: Device in the Law of Naval Warfare’. Can.YIL, vol. 24, 1986, pp. 91-126. Goedhuis, D., ‘An Evaluation of the Leading Principles of the Treaty of Outer Space of 27th January 1967’. NILR, vol. 15, 1968, pp. 17-41.

Graham, T. Jr., ‘Space Weapons and the Risk of Incidental Nuclear War’. Arms Control Today, vol. 35, 2005, pp. 12-16. Haeck, L., ‘Aspects Juridiques de Certaines Utilisations Militaires de l’Espace’. AASL, vol. XXI, 1996, pp. 65-103. Heath, J.W., ‘The Vanishing Horizon: Will the Asymmetric Battlefield Make Space-Based Weapons a Reality?’. Proceedings of the Forty-fifth Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space, vol. 45, 2003, pp. 206-215. Henkaerts, L. and Doswald-Beck, L., ICRC Study on Customary Rules of International Humanitarian Law. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. Higgins, R., ‘The Legal Limits to the Use of Force by Sovereign States: United Nations Practice’. BYIL, vol. 37, 1961, pp. 269-319. Hitchens, T., ‘Developments in Military Space: Movement toward space weapons?’ Available at < http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/space-weapons.pdf>. Hurwitz, A., The Legality of Space Militarization. North-Holland, Amsterdam/New York, 1986. Jasentuliyana, N., International Space Law and the United Nations. Kluwer Law International, The Hague/London/Boston, 1999.

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______________________________________________________________ Kries, W. von, ‘Die militärische Nutzung des Weltraums’, in K-H. Böckstiegel and M. Benkö (eds.), Handbuch des Weltraumrechts. Carl Heymanns Verlag, Köln, 1991, pp. 307-349. Lee, R.J., ‘The Jus ad Bellum in Spatialis: The Exact Content and Practical Implications of the Law on the Use of Force in Outer Space’. J. of Space Law, vol. 29, 2003, pp. 93-119. Lowe, A.V., ‘Self-Defence at Sea’, in W.E. Butler (ed.), The Non-Use ofForce in International Law. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht, 1989, pp. 185-202. Michaelsen, C., ‘Maritime Exclusion Zones In Times Of Armed Conflict At Sea: Legal Controversies Still Unresolved’. JCSL, vol. 8, 2003, pp. 363-390. Morgan, R.A., ‘Military Use of Commercial Communication Satellites: A New Look at the Outer Space Treaty and ‘Peaceful Purposes’’. J. Air L.&Com., vol. 60, 1994-1995, pp. 237-326. National Science and Technology Council, National Space Policy. Available at . Petras, C.M., ‘‘Space Force Alpha’, Military Use of the International Space Station and the Concept of ‘Peaceful Purposes’’. AFLR, vol. 53, 2002, pp. 135-181. _______

, ‘The Use of Force in Response to Cyber-Attack on Commercial Space Systems - Reexamining ‘Self-Defense’ in Outer Space in Light of the Convergence of U.S. Military and Commercial Space Activities’. J. Air L.&Com., vol. 67, 2002, pp. 1213-1268. Ramey, R.A., ‘Armed Conflict on the Final Frontier: The Law of War in Space’. AFLR, vol. 48, 2000, pp. 1-158. Report of the Commission to Access United States National Security Space Management and Organization, January 11, 2001. Available at .

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______________________________________________________________ Richards, P.J. and Schmitt, M.N., ‘Mars Meets Mother Nature: Protecting the Environment during Armed Conflict’. Stetson L.Rev., vol. 28, 1999, pp. 1047-1090. Ronzitti, N., ‘Problemi Giuridici Sollevati dale Iniziative in Materia de Disarmo Spaziale’, in F. Francioni e F. Pocar (eds.), Il Regime Internazionale dello Spazio. Dott. A. Giuffrè Editore, Milano, 1993, pp. 79-87. Sassòli, M., ‘Legitimate Targets of Attacks under International Humanitarian Law’. Background Paper prepared for the Informal High-Level Expert Meeting on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law, Cambridge, June 27-29, 2003, unpaginated,. Available at . Vlasic, I.A., ‘The Legal Aspects of Peaceful and Non-Peaceful Uses of Outer Space’, in B. Jasani (ed.), Peaceful and Non-Peaceful Uses of Space: Problems of Definition for the Prevention of an Arms Race. United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Geneva; Taylor & Francis, UNIDIR, Geneva, New York, 1991, pp.37-55. Waldrop, E.S., ‘Weaponization of Outer Space: US National Policy’. AASL, vol. XXIX, 2004, pp. 1-28. Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, Weapons of Terror - Freeing the World from Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms, 2006. Available at . Wolter, D., Common Security in Outer Space and International Law. UNIDIR, Geneva, 2006. Zhukov, G. and Kolosov, Y., International Space Law. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1984.

Yugonostalgia and the Post-National Narrative Stephenie Young Abstract This chapter examines Croatian writer Dubravka Ugre_i’s book The Ministry of Pain (2005), as a narrative of the relationship between nation, 1 narrative and the so-called phenomenon of Yugonostalgia. The latter is defined as a certain disorientation that occurs under the transitional process of ‘new’ political and/or ideological circumstances, functioning as a cæsura in the way that national literatures are read. It starts with an examination of how Ugreši’s work questions how exiles struggle to witness the past while trying to build a new life in the present; of the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ historical discourse; and of the exile in relation to Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’. It then explores the relationships between history, memory and justice. How may ‘post-national narrative’ describe these? How does literature grapple with the relation between memory and the recent history of a nation while creating a narrative of a community beyond national boundaries? Finally, does contemporary literature’s attempt to go beyond the border of national literatures add to an understanding of discourses of memory, history and justice or does it only expose a crisis of literature’s role in a so-called transnational setting? Key Words: Exile, justice, memory, nation, ‘post-national’, Ugreši, Yugonostalgia, Yugoslavia ***** Memory aids survival. - Proust2 1.

Synthetic Realities In The Hague there exists an ‘S/M porno club […] called the Ministry of Pain’ - or so Croatian Dubravka Ugreši tells us in the opening pages of her 2005 book The Ministry of Pain [Ministarstvo boli].3 The narrator’s students, exiles from the war ravaged Yugoslavia who now live in Amsterdam not far from The Hague International Tribunal, work in a sweatshop where they make exotic outfits for the local sex shops. The work was simple, the students said: ‘all you had to do was assemble items of sadomasochistic clothing out of leather, rubber and plastic’.4 Because of its proximity to both the sadomasochistic porn club and the famous court that metes out its own version of punishments to the most notorious of international criminals, their nickname for the sweatshop is ‘The Ministry’. A

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______________________________________________________________ name that turns the reader’s attention to justice-related issues such as memory and truth, and hints at the parallels between the artificial reality created in the porn club, the life of an exile who works in the sweatshop to create costumes that aid and abet that false reality, and the synthetically conceived transnational space of the war crimes tribunal. The Hague is also a space that attempts to go beyond traditional national boundaries and as Ugreši says, it is ‘a place meant to make everybody feel at ‘home’’. War criminals, but also exiles from that same war, come to the same place to begin the next stage of their life.5 Thus, the victim and victimiser have both left the scene of the crime, but the spectre of nationalism follows them wherever they may go. This play with exile, synthetic realities, memory and the attempt to conceptualise a place that transcends national boundaries (such as the international war tribunal) in the opening pages of The Ministry of Pain, shows us that in the literature of the former Yugoslavia, narrative is called upon to carry out a complex task. It is asked to function as a disruption of epistemic thought, such as the accepted definition of nation, and to represent a post-war malaise evident during the transitional period both for those who remain in the Balkans and for those who have left for a ‘new’ life. The Ministry of Pain then is a response to, or a thinking-through of war and its haunting ‘afterlife.’ Here, literature is used as an arbiter between trauma and recovery. At the same time Ugreši’s narrative exposes the fragile and synthetic façade of the nation-state and its effort to control and contain national narratives - to delineate and have power over its own history - while it simultaneously makes a claim to be a transnational project that attempts to shatter preconceived notions of the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’. Thus, Ugreši’s text in particular must be studied for its focus on the ongoing struggle for control over historical memory, and the use and abuse of the concept ‘Yugonostalgia’ in this bitter skirmish to delineate national identity during the transitional period. Accordingly, this chapter considers how The Ministry of Pain examines the ways in which one writes the after-life of a particular war and of a nation. The novel is a consideration of the politically charged neologism Yugonostalgia, and of how exiles, in the attempt to counteract the silence imposed upon them by the state, endeavour to construct histories and communities beyond the state toward something called the post-national narrative. It is a narrative that recognizes the role of official discourse, but attempts to move beyond that discourse and create an alternative space of enunciation. Thus the central question I address here is this: how does literature grapple with the relation between memory and the recent history of a nation while it attempts to create a narrative of a community that is beyond national boundaries? Is there a replacement for what we know as national literature? If so, might there be such a thing as a ‘post-national narrative’ that

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______________________________________________________________ functions as an epistemic break in this continuum about the way that nation and literature are related? Finally, does contemporary literature’s attempt to go beyond the border of national literatures add to what one understands about discourses of memory, history and justice or does it only expose a crisis about what literature’s role is in a so-called transnational setting? 2.

Yugonostalgia and Cosmetic Surgery To better understand Ugreši’s book, one must first consider the concept of ‘Yugonostalgia’ - an idealistic longing for a time before the war in the Balkans, which occurs during the transitional period in which new political and/or ideological circumstances have arisen. Ugreši argues that Yugonostalgia is primarily a political weapon used by the state as a response to silence alternative histories. In the Balkans this strangulation of voices has been widespread both during and after the war. This phenomenon of Yugonostalgia that Ugreši grapples with in The Ministry of Pain can be better comprehended if one considers the historical circumstances both leading up to and during the war in the former Yugoslavia. With the death of Tito, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and vast economic decline in the 1980s, it seemed inevitable that the idea of a unified Yugoslavia would dissolve and newly delineated regions would rise up to identify their ‘particular nationalism’.6 As the Balkan states attempted to separate and establish themselves as autonomous, Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman, who was also the former general of Marshall Tito, along with Serb leader Slobodan Milosevi, attempted to ‘re-tailor history’.7 For example, history did not evolve, so to speak, in Croatia. Rather ‘[i]n order to provide Croatian statehood with the legitimacy of historical continuity, Tudjman skipped fifty years of ‘Yugoslavdom’ and grafted the new Croatia directly to the Independent State of Croatia of the 1940s, a Fascist state’.8 This was both confusing and devastating for those caught in the middle of this swift dissolution. Citizens of these newly formed states were asked to disregard the past that they yearned to return to in the wake of the war (idyllic or not), and instead to look toward the future in which new histories would be written by new powers who, according to Ugreši, would manipulate that past at any cost. She writes: They claimed that Yugoslavia was a gigantic lie. The Great Manipulators and their well-equipped teams (composed of writers, colleagues, and even generals!) began to take the gigantic lie apart. . . . They threw ideological formulae out of the dictionary (‘brotherhood and unity’, ‘socialism’, ‘titoism’, etc.) and took down the old symbols (hammer and sickle, red start, Yugoslav flag, national anthem, and Tito’s busts). The Great Manipulators and their teams

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______________________________________________________________ created a new dictionary of ideological formulae: ‘democracy’, ‘national sovereignty’, ‘europeanisation’, etc. The Great Manipulators had taken apart the old system and built a new one of the identical parts.9 Essentially nothing had changed; it was only the existing parts (such as the language, place names and borders) that had been rearranged by the so-called Great Manipulators. In the midst of this rearrangement the people of the former Yugoslavia struggled to hold onto their memories of the pre-war past that they knew as a community, but as Ugreši asserts, ‘[t]he right to collective memory was taken from [exiles, refugees, survivors of the war] and all reminiscence about the former life was termed jugonostalgija by ideologists of the new (Yugoslav successor) states’.10 History was strongarmed by the latest leaders, and their vision of nationalism became the new language. This inability to validate the past made the population even more desperate to construct its own history. Moreover, it did not matter whether that history be based on a ‘real’ past or a synthetic mythological Yugoslavia just as false as any that might be construed by leaders such as Tudjman. It was a matter of memory aiding survival. It became a tug of war over history, where both sides realized that those with the control over the narratives of the past would have power over those of the present and the future. As is well known, the attempted manipulation of the discourse of historical memory is not an uncommon occurrence during transitional eras or in other times. For example, the desire to whitewash the recent past exists in many postdictatorship societies in which the aim of neoliberal power is to present the population with an official history whose structure and content resembles that of what Baudrillard calls a ‘cosmetically corrected’ face.11 With a bit of cosmetic surgery behind closed doors, the object in question historical discourse - exits with a more beautiful visage. In this surgically corrected narrative, past, present and future are all synchronized and compatible because they are rewritten to create a synthetic linearity and cohesiveness. The layering of the real and the hyper-real creates an uncanny moment where the border between the real and the imaginary blurs. Like Baudrillard’s ‘cosmetically corrected’ face, the historical narrative results in a synthetic, plastic version of history determined by the desire of the present. Consequently be it el blanqueo in post-Pinochet Chile or Yugonostalgia in the Balkans, we see how the uncanny aspect of whitewashing attempts to function a corrective tool and is evident during periods when a cosmetically corrected historical discourse is used to cover or deride alternative histories. As a politically charged neologism, ‘Yugonostalgia’ is used by politicians in the Balkans to undermine the reminiscences of a past that they would rather the populace forget. It deems memories of a past, united Yugoslavia to be inane and is a derogatory term, which refers to those who

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______________________________________________________________ are nostalgic for the past (often the exile) rather than willing to face what the newly formed government has deemed ‘truth’ and the ‘improved’ reality of the present. Yugonostalgia then stands in for the sustained desire of the state to control historical memory and to create an official version of history. Thus, it has been used as a political tool in Croatia and other Balkan states to exclude those whose past is not relevant to the present or future needs of that newly formed nation-state. Yugonostalgia is also exploited as a way to divide the population between those who fit into the new nation states’ discourse and those who do not. In other words, the state appears to use Yugonostalgia as a way of excluding citizens who are not willing to adapt the new discourse. Yet this exclusion from the state appears to be logically impossible because those who are excluded from the vision of the new state are still a sector of bodies that identify with and are included by that nation-state through the act of exclusion. These people might be dubbed as what Agamben refers to as ‘bare life’ - someone who exists in the law as an exile. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben examines the homo sacer, the figure in Roman law who ‘may be killed but not sacrificed’ for his analysis of notions of sovereignty in postmodern nation-states.12 Agamben refigures homo sacer as the bare life that is held in a position of simultaneous inclusivity and exclusivity through the declaration of a state of exception. The homo sacer exposes an unnatural, man-made birth of the sovereign nation-state. In a hierarchical conjunction, the two, homo sacer and the sovereign, are reliant on one another. Without the homo sacer, there is no affirmation of the sovereign, yet the affirmation of the sovereign creates homo sacer, the one who is not sovereign. Hence, in order for a nation-state to define itself, it must define its borders - inclusivity and exclusivity - both aspects essential to the paradigm. Those who exist both inside and outside of the law (i.e. the jurisdiction of the state) are necessary to the body that excludes them. In the case of a transitional state such as Croatia in the 1990s under Tudjman, the relationship between the sovereign (the state) and the homo sacer (the exile) is one of mutual need. The state is able to transform a human into a homo sacer through the revocation of citizenship, for example, leaving the homo sacer in a state of confusion and lost identity. Yet at the same time that the state excludes them, it needs these bodies of evidence to show what is included and what is excluded. For these reasons Yugonostalgia as a means of historical discourse is important not only to those who are outcast from the state, but also to the state itself because the state needs an enemy to counter as it rebuilds its past in sight of the present and future. As with Baudrillard’s reading of cosmetic surgery, there must be something before (the imperfect visage) that needs to be fixed, manipulated and ultimately beautified. This would be the past that

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______________________________________________________________ Yugonostalgia is said to evoke, and therefore must be fixed, cleaned up, and rewritten for the new order. The exile and his or her attempt to write memories of the time before the war, problematises the relation between nation, the exile and claims in historical memory, and should be further examined. 3.

The Exile, Yugonostalgia and Nation The relationship between the exile, Yugonostalgia and nation can be better understood through the first person account of the Yugoslavian exile Tanja Luci in Ugreši’s The Ministry of Pain. It should be noted that Luci clearly acts as a political conduit for the author who herself fled the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and now lives in Amsterdam and that the life of the protagonist loosely parallels that of Ugreši. Assigned to teach SerboCroatian literature at the University of Amsterdam, Luci’s story is a clever polemic about the psychological and physical state of the exile that must live with the traumatic past, while she attempts to establish a new life abroad. In a classroom filled with other twenty and thirty something exiles like herself, Luci decides that rather than teach a language that no longer officially exists, Serbo-Croatian, she will encourage her students to reconstruct their pasts by writing essays that guide their Yugonostalgia and therefore their memories of both Yugoslavian culture before the war and the subsequent disintegration of it. There would be no such thing as an a-political classroom because according to Luci, politics had already decided the fate of her discipline. She says, I was naturally well aware of the absurdity of my situation: I was to teach a subject that officially no longer existed. What we once called jugoslavistika at the university - that is, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian literature - had disappeared as a discipline together with its country of origin.13 Nevertheless, she and the students would travel to a time before the war to recuperate memories that the leaders of the newly formed nation-states would rather they forget. By the end of the book the reader will come to see that her project to subvert authority and redesign her class around Yugonostalgia in the hopes that her student-exiles will create a new type of community will ultimately fail, and what the reader understands of Luci and she of herself will radically changes as she comes to realize her own fate. Yet, the first half of the book is an exploration of the collected memories of these fellow exiles as they are offered an opportunity to tell personal stories which in other more politicised contexts (such as back ‘home’ in Croatia or Serbia) would be

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______________________________________________________________ framed as subversive histories and exorcised from the discourse of post-war nations as mere utopian myths. In an attempt to witness the trauma of war The Ministry of Pain follows the lives of the students and their interactions with Luci by way of the ‘Yugonostalgias’ they present for their homework. Each student is asked to draw from his or her own memory, from his or her own familiar past, and to write about what stands out in that personal history. At first this seems simple. Though varied in subject matter, their stories that recall the times when there was a so-called unified nation of Yugoslavia before Tito’s death in 1980 and the decade leading to the war appear to unify the diverse classroom space and, to some extent, calm the underlying national tensions that occasionally surface amongst the students. With each story prefaced by its author’s name, the subject matter ranges from ‘Meliha: Bosnian Hotpot’14 (directions for how to make a traditional dish), to ‘Dakko: My Mother Holds Hands with Tito’15 (a memory of his mother as a Pioneer who meets Tito) to ‘Igor: Horror and Horticulture’16 (comments on the demographics of Yugoslav poetry).17 Yet as one reads more of these, it can be seen that they get darker and gloomier in tone. For example, in ‘I Wish I Were a Nightingale,’ Uroš tells the story about how as a very young child he was assigned to write a poem to Tito after the leader had had his leg cut off and was recovering from the operation.18 Uroš wrote that he wished that he ‘were a nightingale so [he] could fly to Comrade Tito’s hospital bed . . .’.19 What begins as a somewhat charming story, a small child writing to his national leader, quickly spirals downward into a critique of the hypocrisy of the student’s own family and culture, and ends with the telling lines: ‘Yugoslavia was a terrible place. Everybody lied. They still lie of course, but now each lie is divided by five, one per country.’20 As Luci urges the students to write their memories, a forum develops in the classroom, which extends to after hours meetings in the pubs and streets of Amsterdam that appears to function as an alternative space for the exchange of personal histories and the recuperation of memory. The extended classroom acts as a depository of memories in which the exiles can immerse themselves in their ‘Yugonostalgias’ beyond the institutional walls of the university. Early on though, Luci has her doubts about such a utopian project both in and outside of the classroom. She writes: I realized I was walking a tightrope: stimulating the memory was as much a manipulation of the past as banning it. The authorities in our former country had pressed the delete button, I the restore button; they were erasing the Yugoslav past, blaming Yugoslavia for every misfortune,

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______________________________________________________________ including the war, I reviving that past in the form of the everyday minutiae that had made up our lives, operating a volunteer lost-and-found service, if you will.21 Even as she makes the decision to go ahead with her project of Yugonostalgia she is wary of the affects it might have and aware of the subjectivity of memory. Whether or not this exchange helps the exilestudents in matters such as how to work through personal pain or how to obtain some form of justice for the crimes that led to their condition, will never be clearly resolved. Yet, even here in the beginning Luci is wary that ‘Perhaps by stimulating memories of the past [she] would destroy its halo. Or perhaps [her] attempt to reconstruct the past would end in no more than a pale imitation, thus exposing the poverty of the ‘baggage’ we deemed so powerful.’22 Nevertheless, she goes ahead with the classroom project, because, as she says ‘it was too late: I had set the gears in motion and could no longer stop them’.23 As the exile-students in The Ministry of Pain attempt to recuperate memories while they form a new community in exile, they also embark on a project that reconsiders the nuances of their own identities alongside the meanings of nationality and nation. This identity crisis is reflected in the daily lives of the students and their attempt to control language. For example, they no longer know what to call themselves: ‘Yugoslavia, the country where they’d been born, where they’d come from, no longer existed. They did their best to deal with it by steering clear of the name, shortening it to Yuga … or playfully transforming it into Titoland or the Titanic. As for its inhabitants, they became Yugos or, more often, simply ‘our people.’24 Yet in exile in the Netherlands they have little control over the language that defines them - they are written off as those who have no control over their identity. As Luci remarks, ‘they were stigmatised as ‘the beneficiaries of political asylum’’, as ‘refugees’, as ‘children of post-Communism’, ‘the fallout of Balkanisation’, or as ‘savages’.25 This identity crisis is a micro-reflection of the immense amount of discourse that has been produced about Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the war. This conversation is consumed with questions about the relation between historical memory and national identity, which often have conflicting answers. For example, how does one shrug off a national identity that he or she has been indoctrinated into and begin again? It is not easy, but as Andrew Baruch Wachtel points out in Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, it might be possible that national identity can be unlearned and re-learned. Wachtel writes: It is, after all, a fiction to think that most people independently choose their national identity. Rather, people

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______________________________________________________________ have to be taught what a nation is in the first place (for the very concept of a nation is modern, dating back at the earliest to the seventeenth century) and then how to identify with ‘their own nation’. Given that this is so, they can also be retaught, and their national identity and ways of viewing it can change . . . .26 If one can be ‘retaught’ national identity, as is the desire of the newly formed Balkan states, he or she may be able to create other kinds of identities in other communities that are not necessarily based on nationalism. As Benedict Anderson writes in Imagined Communities, communities ‘are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the way in which they are imagined’.27 It is a matter of re-imagining oneself, and through this act perhaps opening up a space for a new definition of community. Both the loss of national identity and the way that both that lost nation and the new community are imagined, is a central concern that arises in The Ministry of Pain which attempts to create a narrative that elucidates the complexities of the experience of a community of exiles. As the students tell their stories, Luci comes to the realization that what they were saying was ‘untranslatable’. She states, ‘we were speaking an extinct language comprehensible only to ourselves’.28 The language of Yugonostalgia had become a private language among Luci’s exiles. And if communication to ‘outsiders’ was seemingly impossible, it was also becoming apparent that the same problem existed amongst themselves to a certain extent. They were only an ‘imagined community’ of discontinuity brought together as a result of their political status and perhaps united by nothing more than their desire to sustain their imagined relationship. For this community to work, it had to keep re-imagining itself. Thus, there arises a self-awareness about the peculiar community of exiles suffering from so-called Yugosnostalgitis, if you will, in which they have found themselves. As Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians and even a Dutch woman who spoke ‘the language’ of the student-exiles with a Bosnian accent, they are aware of both the seriousness and the absurdity of Yugonostalgia to ‘fix’ anything. They all make light of the idea repeatedly. For example, in a critique of the nostalgia for another time and place, the Dutch student Johanneke29 who had been married to a Bosnian but is now divorced with two children, comes to class with Bosnian food that she has bought from a delicatessen during a trip to Rotterdam which she labels, ‘First-Aid Kit for Yugonostalgitis’.30 As one might use sterilizer to clean the bacteria out of a fresh wound, the students eat the food, temporarily medicate the festering of an internal wound, and momentarily the yearning for a return to the past. Therefore, even as they interact in the classroom and meet socially in different parts of the city to exchange stories, there is always the underlying

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______________________________________________________________ reality that most of them are, in one way or another, refugees from a nation and a history that is no longer allowed to exist. They have temporarily been thrown together like a group of addicts searching for a quick fix of the past on the streets of Amsterdam. Even as the student-exiles become conscious of the weaknesses of Yugonostalgia, they appear to be motivated to continue the practice to establish a space of enunciation outside of the nation in which they grew up. This leads to a question that becomes even more entangled in the obscure relationship between exile and nation. Is there a possibility to create a language and a community that functions beyond the nation-state paradigm? Or is this only a literary utopia in which the aggressor (the State) is demonised, and the victims (the student-exiles) are held up as the possessors of truth? These are struggles that arise in the first half of the book in which there seems to be no way to move beyond the hegemonic voice of nation for the exile. Hence a conflict becomes apparent. For the exile, there is the need to move away from nation, but at the same time the exile must continually revert to references about the nation as he or she attempts to create a ‘new’ language that re-imagines a community that transcends nation. It is not surprising that Ugreši explores ways to rise out of these paradoxes. As a vehement polemicist against the manipulation of historical memory and the dangers of ‘forgetting’, she asserts that Croatians in the postwar period have been scorned for any mention of a Yugoslav past that might injure the fragile historical discourse of the present. It is supposed that the post-war re-structuring would create radically different and separate nation states but as Wachtel aptly says: Perhaps if one is a true Croatian or Serbian nationalist it is possible to convince oneself that the sacrifices - political, economic, and moral - have been worth it, but most others would probably agree that the ravaged economies, the millions of refugees, the thousands of rapes and murderers, and the incalculable psychic damage sustained by both the victims and victors was a high price to pay for the creation of five independent South Slavic states. This is particularly true given the fact that so little has actually changed in the new countries, for in great measure the new is merely a repackaged but far less creative version of the old . . . . 31 After the horror of the war, the actual changes are few and slight in many cases. The violent physical restructuring of Yugoslavia, was intended to coincide with, or be closely followed by, a psychological and linguistic restructuring that would parallel the new countries’ identities. No matter how subtle the distinction was between the new nation-states, it was necessary to

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______________________________________________________________ accentuate difference, and language was often at the centre of this positioning. Ugreši shows us just how easily language can both create and obliterate a concept of so-called national unity: Language was a weapon, after all: it branded, it betrayed, it separated and united. Croats would eat their kruh, while Serbs would eat their hleb, Bosnians their hljeb: the word for bread in the three languages was different. Smrt, the word for death, was the same.32 Thus, this reorganization was coupled with the stifling of a hard-won unified Yugoslav tradition and a rejection of anything that hinted at a united Yugoslavia. For Ugreši the only thing that they have left in common is their mortality. No matter how hard the student-exiles try to live in the present and create a new space of community, the past continues to haunt the present. The thing they share, smrt (death), hits hard at the beginning of the third section of the novel when Luci returns from the break in which she had spent a bittersweet week in Croatia with her mother. When she arrives to campus she is told in an offhand manner by a secretary that one of her students was dead. He had committed suicide over the break. She immediately starts to collect the bits and pieces of the story of Uroš’s death from her students. Yes, they’d heard that Uroš had killed himself. No, they didn’t know how it had happened. . . . Oh, and that Uroš’s father was suspected of war crimes and was currently under interrogation at the Hague Tribunal. No, they’d had no idea, no idea about his father.33 As they slowly bring the fragments together, the students admit that they really never knew Uroš well. His life was a secret to them. The only remnant they have is his story about Tito and the Nightingale. Hence, Uroš is just another casualty of the war that they are all trying to escape but that continually haunts them. Their imagined community is not immortal. It is not untouchable. It has limits which can be trespassed and violated, and which are as unstable as their new lives in Amsterdam. Thus, even as they try to create a reality outside of the former Yugoslavia, the former reality that they tried to leave repeatedly impacts them - sometimes fatally. As the lives of the characters in The Ministry of Pain unfold so does Ugreši’s biting critique of nationalism as she strives to untangle some of the complexities of memory and the construction of history in Yugoslavia. According to Anderson, the nation can be defined as ‘an imagined political

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______________________________________________________________ community . . . which is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ and nationalism as that which ‘invents nations where they do not exist’.34 One must remember that essentially the nation and state are distinct entities yet the dream of the state is to become conflated with the dream of the nation and this is where nationalism is created. It is the fantasy for this corrupt marriage to become naturalized to the point in which ethnicity, race etc. and citizenship (or even the biological and the political) have become one psychotic union of identity in which one believes it cannot exist without the other. Ugreši considers what lies behind the different masks that both the exile and the modern day nation wear as she attempts to break down the myths on all sides without creating new ones in their place. Nationalism, Ugreši asserts, serves many different needs and ‘. . . is a struggle for the control of collective memory’.35 She continues: . . . at certain moments nationalism becomes an ideological refuge for those who do not have anything else. Nationalism is also a collective therapy . Nationalism also means being in power to change cultural memory, to rewrite it, touch it up, falsify it and contract it, all in order to preserve the ‘truth’ and ‘history’.36 Ultimately, she says, it is similar to a disease that kills many, yet whose origin and disseminators remain largely unknown, and ‘Yugonostalgia’ is one of the most deadly strains of this disease.37 As she explains, … we had been deprived of what was our right to remember. With the disappearance of the country came the feeling that the life lived in it must be erased. The politicians who came to power were not satisfied with power alone; they wanted their new countries to be populated by zombies, people with no memory.38 Ugreši paints a picture of an apocalyptic society whose leaders wish for the population to return to a glorious past that never existed in the first place. Perhaps what has happened in newly-formed nation-states in Yugoslavia is not as radical as something like the Khmer Rouge’s desire to turn the clocks to year zero in Cambodia. Yet historical discourse in the Balkans would be splintered and compartmentalized to erase the past (a ‘unified’ Yugoslavia) to fit the new self-image of each nation-state. Ugreši employs the term ‘confiscated memories’ to describe this attempt at erasure. ‘Confiscated’ is often used in situations that are lawrelated, or include some kind of authority figure. To have something

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______________________________________________________________ confiscated is to unwillingly release a personal possession to an authorial figure, for example. As children, our parents ‘confiscated’ our toys when we acted out in some way or misused them. As adults, confiscation takes a more serious turn. Our passport is confiscated if we are accused of breaking a law and going beyond the boundary of acceptability. To confiscate a memory then is to violently strip that memory of one jurisdiction and shift it to another to satisfy the other’s desire that others desire for a certain historical memory. Memory, personal and subjective, is used as a political tool when it subsumed by a nation-state and deemed to be the memory of a people, when it is in fact only the newly written narrative of a nation-state that exists in the hope that no one will attempt to look behind the façade to find only emptiness. As a consequence, in The Ministry of Pain it becomes apparent that Ugreši wishes to identify the power struggles over memory and history on all sides but privileges the exile. Yet, the question is whether the exile can move beyond the circumscribed idea of nation in which he or she has been socialized to create some other space of enunciation that does not necessarily hearken back to the nation. In other words, in all of these literary and linguistic games of memory and history, one must ask a key question: Is it possible to move outside of ‘nation’, or is that merely the unfulfilled yet ongoing dream of the exile? It is seemingly a dream because the exile in The Ministry of Pain is caught in a paradox. When he or she is accused of Yugonostalgia by the newly-formed state, he or she is simultaneously recognized by the state, and enveloped into its discourse as the necessary other - the outsider who attempts to create his or her own way of speaking about the after-life of war, (such as with the ‘First-Aid Kit’) who the state must counteract. The state bases its functionality on the forgetfulness of its citizens and its ability to ‘confiscate’ memories. The way that The Ministry of Pain highlights the function of state in its relation to historical discourse, and how it points out what the state must both include and exclude to exist is what marks this text as one that attempts to break new literary ground. It is a narrative that creates a caesura or epistemological break in the accepted framework of the traditional national narrative and creates new ground and possibility for historical discourse that speaks to something beyond the restrictions of the national space and nationalism. That is to say, The Ministry of Pain points to something that might be called the post-national narrative which refers to a caesura in the embedded tradition of national literatures and the role they are expected to play as representatives of the state to some extent. Post-national narrative, as read here, is one which draws attention to the synthetic relationship between the state and literature and looks for different ways to write about exile, human rights, systematic violence, physical displacement and psychical trauma. It is deemed ‘post’ because it

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______________________________________________________________ distinguishes itself in the attempt to create narratives that do not speak for or from a particular nation, and as that, which takes into account the fluidity of borders in the postmodern world. Thus, while it is understood that literature is always engaged to some extent in a conversation with nationalism, the post-national narrative calls attention to the inability to mark a complete rupture with that relation (the relation with the state) while it simultaneously opens onto new possibilities for a type of literature that creates narratives that go beyond traditional parameters and definitions of the national narrative. The possibility for the post-national narrative can be further elucidated in a discussion about the role of justice in the contemporary world, and how this abstract concept that is still undefined is used in The Ministry of Pain as another way to call to attention the imagined relation between the nation-state in the Balkans and the exile. 4.

[Yugo]Nostalgic Justice In his discussion about politics and the State39 in Metapolitics, Alain Badiou breaches the question of what justice is and how it functions in the state apparatus. More specifically, he hones in on a question that concerns human rights’ theorists: We must set out from the following premise: injustice is clear, justice is obscure. For whoever endures injustice is its indubitable witness. But who can testify for justice? There is an affect of injustice, a suffering, revolt. But there is nothing to indicate justice, which presents neither spectacle, nor sentiment.40

According to Badiou there exist witnesses to ‘injustice’ who can speak to that injustice to some extent because injustice has some kind of suffering attached to it. Even if the affects are psychological rather than physical, it still has an object. Yet ‘justice’ is unclear as it has no object. It is abstract. Justice may only show itself in some form of punishment, for example, in the imposed suffering on those who committed the injustice in the first place. In other words, there is a physical consequence that can be seen. In this reading one might believe that something such as the enactment of Hammurabi’s Code on the violator of the law was effective for the way that it showed the implementation of a form of justice, subjective as the punishment might be, for unjust acts to the citizens. It is through this method that the population came to understand that there was a given and therefore accepted equivalence between a crime and its punishment, no matter how abstract. Similarly, one can see this acceptance in modern times in which money as the payment of a fine often replaces corporeal punishment for the very same crime. What this means is that essentially for justice to function successfully the non-relation

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______________________________________________________________ between the crime and the punishment must be forgotten and there must be belief that there is equivalence between the two. Yet, as Badiou discusses the historical development of the concept of ‘justice’ he also surmises that ‘. . . even by drawing on a history . . . we still have no clear idea of what this word [justice] means today’.41 In The Ministry of Pain the examination of justice and memory add to the book’s development of the possibility for a post-national narrative. Not so subtly hinted at in Ugreši’s book is the way the relationship between exile, memory and justice are posited to create an identity that it not necessarily connected to one specific nation state but yet somehow moves beyond the restricted borders established by politics to another space of enunciation. Yugonostalgic justice, if one can call it that, is the attempt to gain justice through remembering. It is through the creation or recreation of a history before the war (although as fallible as any history) that there is an attempt to indicate justice. The narrator Luci believes that she is subverting the institutions that try to control her, including the nation-state and the university to some extent, and attaining justice when she changes the course curricula from the study of Serbo-Croatian literature and language to journal writing that concentrates on Yugonostalgia. Her exile-students must not only remember, but they must write these memories down, and by doing so create a space of enunciation that is privileged to the exiles from Yugoslavia and which turns its back on the state’s supposed control of historical discourse. For Luci, to remember the past is to make sense of the present and go on to the future. To remember is to open the way for the exile-students to create narratives not directly connected to Yugoslavia before, during or after the war. Part of moving past the trauma of the war and its aftermath lies in Luci’s theory that if the students can reminisce about the time before the war began, they can also aid the process of healing, and perhaps attain some kind of justice, by showing evidence that something else exists beyond the petty fights between the Balkan states. This is exactly the opposite of what the new states mean by healing. Healing in a place such as the newly formed Croatia would mean forgetting about the past, about any notion of a unified Yugoslavia, and instead following the re-written historical discourse of the newly formed state. In the attempt to obtain justice through the recuperation of memory, there is the expectation that the staunch nationalism that was one of the causes of the war will be replaced with a world, an environment, in which former national identities fade, and the border lines are obscured and blended, toward an existence that is neither based nor dependent on national identity, but that moves beyond this trope. Justice as viewed through the lens of a narrative that does not depend on the new order, but creates a community outside of that order, becomes one more way to subvert or deride the national narrative.

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______________________________________________________________ This can be better understood in a turning point in The Ministry of Pain, which involves a trip to see ‘justice in action’. The suicide of her Serbian student Uroš and the discovery that his father is accused of war crimes and will be tried leads Luci to take a day trip with another student, Igor, to the Hague Tribunal to visit the ICTFY (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia). Once there the two hope to gain some insight into what actually goes on between the walls of this famous institution that Luci remarks looks like ‘Yugoslav socialist architecture of the sixties and seventies’ but ‘UN style’.42 What the two find there is another institution that has no answers for the exiles of the former Yugoslavia, a place that exposes the fallibility and perhaps incomprehensibility of justice, and therefore another piece in the game of naming alongside empty promises of truth, justice and reconciliation for all involved. Luci remarks: The words we heard, switching channels from time to time to hear how things sounded in English, French, or Dutch, were in any case unreal. The reality the glass wall separated us from inspired no more confidence than ‘real’ reality: both of them - the one that churned out lies, lies, and more lies and the one that promised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - were equally fantastic, if that is the word for it.43 Luci paints a picture of the Tribunal as a synthetic space that has established itself as both supranational i.e. judges without bias, and also as transnational i.e. it judges specific nations and the crimes committed in those nations according to a globally based legal code. Parallel to this, Yugoslavia was also synthetically created after World War I in the hopes that it would overlook its differences and become a transnational space that celebrated unity. The regions of the now defunct nation shared a language and were therefore brought together according to this logic to share an identity - even if this identity was not a natural relation. In order for this unification to work, the synthetic origin of its conception, its birth, if you will, had to be forgotten and faith had to be put into the new order of a unified Yugoslavia just as with the Tribunal. One has to have faith in the courts in order for them to work.44 One has to have faith in the nation for it to work. Yet forgetting difference is a very difficult thing to do. The war in the former Yugoslavia, which lasted roughly from the siege of Sarajevo in April of 1992 until February 1996, left the country in ruins. After the death of Tito Yugoslavia quickly broke apart, and in the rearrangement of the different states, thousand of its inhabitants, including Bosnians, Croatians and Serbians, were subject to the newly formed states who would decide their future. Furthermore, the people of the former nation would be subjected to

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______________________________________________________________ the minute details of the crimes against humanity committed, which would slowly seep into the public sphere, and ultimately be played out in the most public theatre on earth: The Hague international tribunal for crimes against humanity which also promises a type of transnational justice. Ugreši’s exiles who live in the shadow of The Hague, which seems to function symbolically as a sieve for pain in the book, and another failed institution, would like to attain justice and to believe in the institutions that have informed their lives; the nation-state of Yugoslavia; The Hague; and now the classroom in Amsterdam. Yet, nothing is what it seems. The act of justice in The Hague is merely a ‘fantastic’ spectacle without substance in The Ministry of Pain. This impossible dream of true justice and real retribution is underscored by Badiou who writes that ‘[w]e have too often wished for justice to fund the consistency of the social bond, whereas in reality it can only name the most extreme moments of inconsistency’.45 Instead of acting as a bond to bring together society, as happens with many institutions, those presented by Ugreši begin to be seen through or to break down as time passes and instead of displaying substance they reveal ‘extreme moments of inconsistency’. The experiences of the student-exiles parallel to some extent what Luci and Igor see on their visit to the Hague - only a synthetic reality - a violent spectacle of lives that have been ruptured. This break down of the world as they know it grows even more serious in Ugreši’s book as Luci suffers multiple shocks including Uroš’s suicide; the university administration’s undermining of her course by informing her that one of her students has reported on her; and her own militant reaction to that information that she sublimates into the classroom environment. In the final section of The Ministry of Pain any hope of the formation of a real communal bond between Luci and her exile-students is completely eradicated when she is held prisoner and tortured in her own apartment by one of her now ex-students, Igor. In a violent scene, Igor ties her up and slashes her wrists with a razor blade - not to kill her, but to permanently mark her, while he tells Luci that he and the other exilestudents made up all of their Yugonostalgic stories. He asks: Tell me, has it occurred to you that all that time you may have been torturing us? Has it occurred to you that the students you forced to remember were yearning to forget? That they made up memories to indulge you the way that Papuans made up cannibalistic myths to indulge the anthropologists?46 In the first half of the book Ugreši leads the reader to believe that he or she is witnessing the act of witnessing through these Yugonostalgic stories. The

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______________________________________________________________ reader is lead to believe in the power of the past and historical memory and that there are narratives which can counteract state controlled discourse. But this gesture is undermined by the suggestion in the end that, seemingly like every other institutional space presented in the book, it is more lies made up in the space of a synthetic academic institution. If we are to believe Igor, the students only act to appease. Luci has become an institutional figure, her classroom yet another ministry of pain. The student-exiles narrate not to live as Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, but merely to survive yet another institution of pain - one that asks them to indulge their Yugonostalgia and therefore the pain of something they would rather forget. If what Igor says is true, then they were forced to create memories that they had never experienced in the first place. Ugreši leaves it open as to whether Igor is telling the truth. In doing that she shows us the fallibility of language, justice, memory and history. Yet whether what Igor say is true or not, The Ministry of Pain points to the impossibility of communal memory in such circumstances, and to the complexities of the discourses of war and their relationship to literature. If it is indeed a post-national narrative, then it is a literature, which attempts to go beyond nation, and in this gesture establishes perhaps a small opening toward a literature that does not necessarily rely on the comfort zone or the traditional parameters of the national narrative. 5.

Conclusions In one of her books, [Ugreši] recalls being stopped at customs in Western Europe and asked to fill in the blank for ‘nationality’, She wanted to be called ‘anational’ or at least ‘other’, but such a category was not part of the bureaucratic repertoire.47

There is no doubt that Ugreši carries her own trauma of exile and loss of nation like an indecipherable identity card, which will never name who she is. Thus, The Ministry of Pain reflects her own pain as she tries to understand the past and the present, and to find her own space in a postYugoslavian world that has gone through radical change during her lifetime. Although it is written through the eyes of a fictional character, it is a very personal narrative that speaks to a turbulent era in world politics. In light of this, what does Dubravka Ugreši’s book about Yugonostalgia add to the conversation about the relationship between the nation-state, memory and justice? Upon reflection, The Ministry of Pain is a narrative of the pain of a former nation-state acted out through the bodies of its people within the auspices of other institutions including the justice system, the university and

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______________________________________________________________ even the book. This text further problematises our dependence upon and belief in the intuitions that we have available for better understanding war, transition and justice. The court, the classroom, the country and the book are all institutionalised forms of organization that try to make sense senselessness and to give a name, a form, an object to that which has no name. Yet in an era when the viability of literature as a mode to understand issues such as justice and politics is often questioned and academics attempt to rename and reclassify it as ‘transnational’ or ‘post-national’ does a text such as The Ministry of Pain account for the deflation of the false value attached to, and the politicisation of, national literature? It is true that many want literature to refer back to a certain politics - issues of the state interactions with that state - and this author does not call for the obliteration of national literatures or their agency - if that were even possible. One must recognize the need to address writing about and by those who reject the nation-state paradigm or who are rejected by it, yet, (as in the case of Agamben’s homo sacer), are intimately connected to it. The Ministry of Pain addresses some of these questions about the role of literature to act as an effective and powerful conduit for expanding one’s understanding and knowledge of memory, history and politics in the 21st century. Hence, we may read The Ministry of Pain as a post-national narrative which marks the possibility that literature’s conversation, its dialogue with the state, has shifted to place the importance of the state on trial and to break down its synthetic façade for what it is. Post-national narratives may simply be the caesura that alters or pushes the position of what is thought possible in the study of literature. The Ministry of Pain points to the institutionalisation of the discourse of pain and justice and the spectacle of it, whether the action plays out in The Hague, the classroom or the novel. Thus, as a post-national narrative The Ministry of Pain does not offer an end to the pain of war, nor does it presume to be the answer to the on-going questions of how to write memory and attain justice in the face of injustice and the hegemony of nation-states. Yet in the milieu of post-war discourse, here is a case in which literature might succeed or at least better communicate abstract concepts about certain issues where the milieus of history or political science, for example, may sometimes fall short. Oftentimes these disciplines make a claim to truth rather than problematising it. Ugreši does not make a claim to truth except in the impossibility of it, but attempts to bridge a gap between the written word and experience without assuming too much. It is literature which poses questions about truth and events thought to be incongruous and takes a risk by placing them side by side (such as a porn shop and the ministry of justice) to create new relations and new angles from which to think through complex issues that plague humankind in the 21st century.

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______________________________________________________________ The answers may not necessarily lie in this act itself, but from this literary gesture and others like it we may begin to see new relations and ideas that we had not thought before. Ugreši’s work on Yugonostalgia and narrative then is radical for the relations that it attempts to think through and for the possibilities that it opens onto in regard to memory, history and nation. She does not suppose that we all would like to witness or to tell our horror stories. She does not even presume that we all even have stories to tell. Rather, Ugreši attempts to peel away the synthetic façades of the institutions that we find comfort in and present a meditation that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but perhaps realistic.

Notes 1

I would like to thank Kate Jenckes and Patrick Dove for organizing the ACLA seminar ‘Post-Literature’ in Puebla, Mexico in April 2007, and to the participants whose astute comments guided the development of this paper in its initial stages. I would also like to thank those in attendance at the Interdisciplinary.net conference in Budapest in May 2007, and to acknowledge Bob Brecher, Graeme Goldsworthy and Rob Fisher for their significant contribution to the publication of this essay. 2 D Ugreši, The Ministry of Pain, HarperCollins, New York, 2006. 3 Ugreši, p. 12. 4 Ugreši, p. 12. 5 Ugreši, p. 139. 6 A B Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, p. 230. 7 D Ugreši, ‘The Souvenirs of Communism: Home as Marketplace or Deletion of the Past’, The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, vol.7, 2005, p. 29. 8 Ugreši, ‘Souvenirs’, p. 29. 9 D Ugreši, Kultura Lazi (Antipoliticki Eseji), Arkzin, Zagreb, 1996. 10 Ugreši, Kultura, p. 115. 11 J Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, Verso, New York, 1993, p. 45. 12 G Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, p. 83. 13 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 34. 14 Ugreši Ministry, p. 63. 15 Ugreši Ministry, p. 66. 16 Ugreši Ministry, pp. 71-74. 17 Ugreši Ministry, pp. 75-76.

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In the beginning of 1990 Tito’s left leg was amputated owing to circulation problems. He died in May 1980 in a clinic in Slovenia. 19 Ugreši Ministry, p. 75. 20 Ugreši Ministry, p. 75. 21 Ugreši Ministry, p. 52. 22 Ugreši Ministry, p. 58. 23 Ugreši Ministry, p. 58. 24 Ugreši Ministry, p. 13. Ugreši went into exile in 1993 after the death of Tudjman. This is when she realized that the ‘Yugoslavian heritage she had grown up with - a pan-slavian communality, held together by the firm Titoist hand - was suddenly gone.’ See http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ ugresicd/museum.htm>. 26

Wachtel, p. 3. B Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983, p. 6. 28 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 57. 29 The entire section reads as follows: ‘Johanneke was Dutch. She spoke ‘our language’ fluently and with a Bosnian accent. Her parents were Dutch leftists who had built roads and railway tracks with international youth brigades after World War II. Later they went to the Dalmatian coast as tourists. During one of their stays, Johanneke visited Sarajevo, fell in love with a Bosnian, and was stranded there for awhile’ - Ugreši, Ministry, p. 10. 30 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 83. 31 Wachtel, p. 231. 32 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 36. 33 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 126. 34 Anderson, p. 6. 35 S Boym, ‘Dubravka’, Bomb, 2002, p. 74. 36 Boym, 79. 37 Boym, pp. 78-79. 38 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 52. 39 Badiou capitalizes ‘State; in his work. 40 A Badiou, Metapolitics, Verso, London, 2006, p. 96. 41 Badiou, p. 102. 42 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 139. 43 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 141. 44 See Wachtel for further discussion. 45 Badiou, p. 104. 46 Ugreši, Ministry, p. 207. 47 Boym, p. 74. 27

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Bibliography Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998. Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London, 1983. Badiou, A., Metapolitics. Verso, London, 2006. Baudrillard, J., The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Verso, New York, 1993. Boym, S., ‘Dubravka’. Bomb, 2002, pp. 74-80. Hopkin, J., ‘The Side of Paradise’, TimesOnline, 24 September 2005. Accessible at . Ugreši, D., Kultura Lazi (Antipoliticki Eseji). Arkzin, Zagreb, 1996. Ugreši, D., The Ministry of Pain. HarperCollins, New York, 2006. Ugreši, D., ‘The Souvenirs of Communism: Home as Marketplace of Deletion of the Past’. The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, vol. 7, 2005 pp. 29-36. Wachtel, A. B., Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998.

Veterans, Vietcong and Others: Enemies and Empathies In Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story David Boulting Abstract The paper examines the shifting figure of the enemy in Larry Heinemann’s 1986 Vietnam War novel Paco’s Story and the proliferation of sites and states of conflict in the narrative. It analyses the novel’s construction of a complex hierarchy of enemies and threats facing both the American combat infantryman in Vietnam and the returning veteran in America. Although the paper makes reference to the representation of the Vietnamese enemy in the novel, its principal concerns are the themes of internecine conflict, ‘friendly fire,’ and the interrogation of American enemies that are the focus of Heinemann’s novel. Paco’s Story, it is argued, functions both as an indictment of the ideological manipulation of the figure of the Vietnam veteran in a range of American social, cultural and political discourses, and, via its intensely gender-conscious account of war and (American) atrocity in Vietnam, a critique of the pathological masculinities that are inscribed in and dominate much of American culture and society. It is further argued that Heinemann generates relationships and interactions between reader, writer, narrator and character that are themselves often marked by enmity, ambiguity and distrust. Through a series of discomfiting moral and empathic entanglements, the reader is ultimately challenged to reconsider his/her own relation to the events narrated and to the master narratives - of self, of nation, of gender - within which enemy images are constructed. Key Words: Empathy, enmity, gender, homosocial bonding, misogyny, representation, Vietnam veterans. ***** First published in the United States in 1986, Larry Heinemann’s novel Paco’s Story appeared in the same year as Oliver Stone’s Platoon and at a time when popular (and, increasingly, the academy’s) interest in the Vietnam War was sufficiently intense for Philip Caputo to remark the advent of ‘Vietnam chic’.1 Indeed, Paco’s Story’s surprise defeat of Toni Morrison’s Beloved at the 1987 National Book Awards seems to have been attributed by some to the then ‘current fad for works about Vietnam’.2 Nevertheless, while Beloved now occupies a formidable position in the ‘new’ canon of contemporary American literature and forms a staple of American literature courses at universities the world over, academic interest in Paco’s Story appears to have steadily diminished. From a working-class Chicago

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______________________________________________________________ background, Heinemann was drafted into the army in 1966 at the age of 22 and served in Vietnam from March 1967 to March 1968 with the 25th Infantry Division.3 With the exception of his third novel, Cooler by the Lake (1992), his literary output (three novels, a play, a substantial body of short fiction and a non-fiction account of his various journeys to Vietnam since the war ended) is dominated by the war and the experience of its oftenmisrepresented veterans. What follows examines the shifting figure of the enemy in Paco’s Story and the proliferation of sites and states of conflict in the narrative. It analyses the novel’s construction of a complex hierarchy of enemies and threats facing both the American combat infantryman in Vietnam and the returning veteran in America. Principally set in small-town America in the 1970s, the novel repeatedly returns to themes of interior and internecine conflict, ‘friendly fire’, and the returning veteran’s rejection (or perceived rejection) in American communities. The category of ‘enemy’ is populous and prone to mercurial shifts and inversions in Paco’s Story and I have chosen to focus here on the enemies inscribed in the novel’s discourse on gender and its account of enmity and conflict between veterans and nonveterans more fully than its depictions of the ‘conventional’, Vietnamese enemy. In arguing that the novel functions as an indictment of the ideological manipulation of the figure of the Vietnam veteran in a range of discourses, I have sought to illuminate the text by exploring aspects of the broader cultural context of popular representations of the Vietnam veteran, focusing on a few central examples. Though Paco’s Story is not as overtly self-reflexive as some of the later American novels that address the Vietnam War (notably Tim O’Brien’s metafictional novel The Things They Carried (1990)), it is profoundly concerned with issues of representation and misrepresentation, reading and ‘misreading’. These concerns dominate Heinemann’s deployment of enemy images in the novel both in relation to its account of American attitudes towards the Vietnamese enemy - and indeed Vietnamese culture, society and history in toto - and in its indictment of the treatment of the Vietnam veteran in American culture and society, which has repeatedly figured the vet as a dangerous and unpredictable ‘enemy within’. Furthermore, Heinemann explores the interrelation of story-telling and enemy-making practices by seeking to generate relationships and interactions between reader, writer, narrator and character that are themselves often marked by enmity, ambiguity and distrust. The reader is steered into discomfiting or unfamiliar moral alignments, symbolically tainted by the war via a series of empathic and affective entanglements, and pressed into challenging not only the novel’s narrative (which is delivered by a narrator or narrators who are guilty of atrocity) but the relentless narrativisation of ‘Vietnam’ in American social, cultural and political life. Sheltering master narratives - of self, of nation, of

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______________________________________________________________ gender - are repeatedly breached in Paco’s Story, ultimately forcing the reader’s confrontation with interior rather than ‘foreign’ sources of violence and the enemy-making acts that facilitate it. 1.

Inscribing Culture, Gender, Trauma Vietnam veteran Paco Sullivan, wandering westward in search of work and what the novel’s narrator calls a ‘liveable peace’,4 resembles a walking map of America’s war in Vietnam. The names, symbols and elevation lines ‘crinkled and curlicued and squeezed together’5 of a French colonial map of Vietnam described on the novel’s third page have their counterpart in the dozens of ‘swirled-up and curled-round’6 scars that cover Paco’s body, described elsewhere in the novel as a ‘mosaic of scars’,7 ‘an endless mosaic’,8 or as resembling ‘Braille, as if each scar had its own story’.9 Paco’s scars are the novel’s central motif, charged with polysemic potential through the author’s recurring efforts to associate them with signifying practices and systems of representation: maps, mosaics, Braille. Despite this vivid association of his body with communication or narration, however, Paco is largely silent about his war, only rarely recounting the event that so marked him physically and psychically that he needs a hickory cane to walk and heavy doses of alcohol and painkillers to rest. His story is told instead by an omniscient and unnamed narrator who habitually addresses the reader as ‘James’ - a practice that derives ‘from the custom of street folks engaging total strangers by calling them ‘Jim’ or ‘Jack’ in a jivy sort of way’, the author explains in his Foreword. Through the narrator’s repeated use of the first person plural and his rich and dissonant mixing of registers, vernaculars and vocabularies, Heinemann suggests a kind of composite speaker comprising the competing voices and discourses of Paco’s dead comrades. The apocalyptic event that wiped out his unit and literally left its mark on Paco is the (fictional) Fire Base Harriette massacre. When Paco’s company is almost over-run by a North Vietnamese battalion, the company commander calls in every available round of air and artillery support, only for this ‘friendly’ fire to immolate American defenders and Vietnamese attackers alike. Paco alone (and only barely) survives the cataclysm, just as Ishmael is left at the end of Melville’s Moby Dick: sole witness, both guardian and ward of the Pequod’s story. Whether the mistake is the company commander’s or someone else’s remains unclear, but the possibility that the massacre stems from the ‘mis-reading’ of a map is especially apposite in the light of subsequent mis-readings of Paco himself by those (among both the novel’s characters and its readers) who will later anticipate of Paco a cathartic descent into violence. The massacre functions as a metonymic distillation of the war and its power to inscribe trauma on those who come into contact with it. That inscription, in the form of the myriad

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______________________________________________________________ scars that cover Paco’s body, is echoed elsewhere in the narrative in the ‘huge, red mark’10 impressed upon the body of a captured female sniper as she is raped by the men in Paco’s company, and in the detailed description of a dragon tattoo sported by the rape’s instigator, Gallagher. The gang rape and murder of this Vietcong prisoner constitutes, with the Harriette massacre and the events of the novel’s final chapter, one of three pivotal moments about which the narrative is structured. The girl is the only Vietnamese enemy in the novel to be described in detail and inevitably she takes on a special symbolic weight. We are told that she has the hard, wiry body of a ‘sharecropper’,11 of someone who has worked hard and often gone hungry. That this peasant girl has been able to kill two of Paco’s company clearly gestures towards the overwhelming of ‘First World,’ ‘male’ America by ‘Third World’, ‘female’ Vietnam (and recalls one of the great iconic images of the war: the photograph of female militia fighter Kim Lai escorting into captivity an American airman who seems almost a giant beside her).12 The beating, rape and murder of the sniper, while sufficiently detailed and explicit to stand as a realistic example of American atrocity in Vietnam, also suggest, via the conventional designation of both nature and nation as feminine, the destruction wrought in Vietnam by American weapons and defoliants. Alpha Company’s vengeful atrocity constitutes a futile attempt (after all, there will be others like her) to re-feminise the enemy fighter and to re-assert their active male dominance, to erase - or overwrite - their own recent feelings of fear and impotence. There are, however, other sites of gendered conflict and threat at work in this scene, other enemies to be engaged or evaded. Traditional cultural and genre-conventional notions of the honourable brotherhood of soldiery are first established and then fatally undermined in Paco’s Story: the ghosts of Paco’s dead comrades are a constant presence in the text, either as the narrating voice or, intra-diegetically, infiltrating Paco’s life in nightmares and sudden flashes of recollection (the latter closely resembling the ‘intrusive re-experiencing’ associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).13 The ghosts are, at best, an ambiguous source of guilt, nostalgic longing and psychic threat - enemies, then, as much as allies. ‘And when Paco is most beguiled, most rested and trusting,’ the dead men tell us, ‘at that moment of most luxurious rest, when Paco is all but asleep, that is the moment we whisper in his ear, and give him something to think about - a dream or a reverie. Some nights he dreams escape dreams: being chased, sweating and breathless into a large and spacious warehouse … And never far behind Paco is the grumbling of many voices, the heavy click of many boots, the hard tapping of many ax handles on the rough floor or the pipes that festoon the walls.’14 Though it remains implicit, the possibility is clearly signalled to the reader that the men in the lynch mob of which Paco dreams are the same

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______________________________________________________________ dispossessed dead soldiers who narrate his story, coming to reclaim the freak survivor of Fire Base Harriette. The complex and problematic nature of the homosocial bond in the combat zone is most starkly demonstrated in Paco’s Story in the pivotal act of rape and execution that occurs within the confines of this same brotherhood and is made possible by a tacit exchange of consent among the rapists. The absence of dissent among them and the measured and impassive way in which the atrocity is carried out (uncomfortably resonating other tasks elsewhere in the narrative, including Paco’s menial work in a small-town diner years after the war) imply that the rape has been enabled not only by the brutalising milieu of the war but by the more permanent and firmly established conditions of male hegemony in American gender politics, popular sexism and racism, and the systematic commodification and exploitative representation of women with which these men have been conditioned both in American society and throughout their military training and socialisation (the novel’s complex gender politics here echoing Gustav Hasford’s 1979 novel, The Short-Timers, the basis for the 1987 Stanley Kubrick film, Full Metal Jacket). 2.

Victims and Executioners Turning to representations of the (male) Vietnam veteran and his positioning in American culture and society, we find a further category of enemies and a new site of conflict emerging in Paco’s Story. In American popular culture, representations of the Vietnam vet have ossified around a set of conventions that are now firmly embedded in the popular imagination. From his earliest appearances in films like 1965’s Motor Psycho through to the arrival of Rambo in the early eighties, Hollywood’s vision of the Vietnam veteran is dominated by troubled and violent individuals, so damaged by the war as to be doomed to relive it - and sometimes re-enact it - on American soil. Contaminated and alienated by his war, the Vietnam veteran is often nothing less than American Vietcong: simultaneously alien and indigenous, a spectral and volatile presence capable of visiting sudden and terrible violence where before there had been calm and order. Like Rambo in Kotcheff’s 1982 film, First Blood, the vengeful and trauma-crazed veteran conventionally employs the methods of his erstwhile enemy. When his violent capabilities are unleashed he fights fanatically, he commonly uses guerrilla weapons and tactics (ambushing, assassinating, booby-trapping), he draws advantage from his superior knowledge of the local terrain - his ‘closeness to nature’– and he is self-reliant and able to live off the land, unlike his weak and decadent enemies. He is either unconcerned at the prospect of killing non-combatants or is too ‘crazed’ to be able to make such distinctions anyway. This ‘style’ of warfare links the rampaging veteran not only to the Vietnamese enemy but to the archetypal American enemy - the Native American (Rambo, we learn, is

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______________________________________________________________ of German-Indian descent - an ethno-mythic cocktail of martial expertise if ever there was one). The reactionary re-imagining of the war in the eighties (in which Rambo again played a part, in 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II) broadly saw its veterans rehabilitated from hair-trigger psychotics and dead-eyed sociopaths to the sanctified victims of a mass sell-out perpetrated by ‘gutless’ Washington politicos and bureaucrats. The political currency of the Vietnam veteran has since been repeatedly demonstrated in American politics, not least, of course, on the campaign trail. As H. Bruce Franklin has shown, the dissemination of the myth of American POWs secretly held in Southeast Asian prison camps constitutes one of the most cynical and highly effective examples of this exploitation. The image of the veteran as victim of government betrayal, the soldier stabbed in the back by double-dealing politicians and bureaucrats, achieves its apotheosis in this powerful if utterly irrational discourse that permeates the highest and deepest reaches of American politics: the iconic black and white POW/MIA flag has been raised over the White House annually since 1982 and is the only flag ever to be displayed in the Rotunda of the US Capitol.15 The flag depicts in silhouette a gaunt and shaven-headed POW with a guard tower in the background and a strand of barbed wire spanning the foreground. The figure’s head is bowed to further signify his status as abandoned sufferer. Its sparse iconography - as black and white semiotically as it is chromatically - evokes a sacred victimhood that references not only the American POWs of World War II (particularly those who were starved and abused by Japanese forces in the Pacific) but the victims of the Nazi death camps. The MIA myth has always coalesced around these two archetypal functions: the secular worship of an idealised suffering American, and an imaging of the enemy as a monstrous and unfeeling other (General William Westmoreland, then commander of US forces in Vietnam, famously claimed on camera in 1975 that ‘Orientals’ placed a lower value on human life than ‘we’ do).16 The black and white world of the MIA fantasy is one in which essential American ideals are placed beyond threat of contamination: since these super-Americans do not exist and can never be recovered, they cannot be sullied by the loss that ‘Vietnam’ has come to signify. The political potency both of veteran status and of the MIA myth were further exemplified in the attacks on John Kerry launched by the 527 group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, during the 2004 presidential election campaign.17 The political value of Kerry’s record as a decorated Vietnam veteran was the specific target of the Swift Boat attacks, which claimed that, in his active role as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he had ‘betrayed’ American troops, and especially POWs still in Vietnam. Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver is concerned, in part, with the proximity and instability of the two images captured in the bistable figure

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______________________________________________________________ of the culturally-produced vet: the ‘victims’ and ‘executioners’ to which Robert Jay Lifton referred in his seminal study of the Vietnam veteran, Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973).18 Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) turns aside at the last moment from a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate, instead turning his private arsenal on the low-level criminals who run a brothel, which, for Bickle, serves as emblem of the city’s festering corruption. The film’s coda begins with a close-up of a number of press clippings that Bickle has pinned up in his room, one of which reads ‘Taxi Driver Hero to Recover.’ Bickle’s transformation from murderous sociopath to unassuming champion of traditional American values anticipates the popular reinvention of the Vietnam veteran in the Reaganite eighties from feared enemy within to sanctified unsung hero, from contaminated other to agent of social cleansing. Ultimately, the difference between Bickle the civic hero and Bickle the murderous psychopath resides not in the man himself but in his portrayal by the press. An abstract, generic and pre-existing notion of the quietly heroic Everyman is validated in the press merely by coupling it to the name ‘Travis Bickle’ and his photographic likeness. That the fictional construct ‘Travis Bickle’ created on screen by Scorsese and Schrader (whose objective is, after all, the creation of plausible fictions) is more ‘real’, more authentic, than the fictional construct ‘Travis Bickle’ created within the film’s diegesis by the newspapers (whose ostensible function is to disseminate facts), reveals a post-modern archness at play among these contrasting layers of representation and a profound concern at a widespread American unwillingness to separate tarnished fact from glittering fiction. Like Paco, Travis Bickle becomes the receptacle or vehicle for an externallymanufactured identity, his superficial and exterior self effectively colonised by a media construct. Not least, the viewer might perceive in this representational hall of mirrors that the figure of the Vietnam veteran is extraordinarily malleable in a culture so enthralled by mythic (and often martial or violent) fantasies of itself. Paco’s Story was published at a time when the images of Vietnam veterans circulating in mass culture had polarised into a stark binary opposition: the image of the psychotic veteran ‘bringing the war home’ like some virulent tropical disease; and the heroic and victimised veteran sold out by his government and spat upon by anti-war protestors - the latter charge almost certainly a myth, as Jerry Lembcke argues in his book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998). Paco’s Story is an indictment of the ideological exploitation of the iconic figure of the Vietnam veteran in American culture, a practice that is referenced in the author’s description of Paco’s scars in terms of ‘maps’, ‘mosaics’ and ‘Braille’, ironically transforming the arbitrary imprints of the war’s overwhelming violence into a system of signs whose meaning can be interpreted, controlled

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______________________________________________________________ or contested. In common with other fictional Vietnam veterans idealised or demonised in American culture between the mid sixties and the late eighties, Paco threatens to become a text written by everyone but himself, a palimpsest subject to endless ideological revision and re-use. Paco’s reception in small-town America in the late seventies is characterised by a fear and suspicion entirely consonant with the cultural constructions of the Vietnam veteran then in circulation. The townsfolk of Boone are ‘powerfully curious’ about Paco, who becomes ‘something of a public spectacle’,19 though most are careful to keep their distance. Paco is marked by his all-too-visible association with the war; his cane, his limp, the lexicon of his scars, serve as stimuli in his reflexive rejection by most of those he encounters. Once these signifiers have been coupled to the signified of America’s tarnished war in Vietnam, and thence to the rampaging Vietnam veteran trope so prevalent in its aftermath, Paco’s abjection is complete. Heinemann works hard to ensure that Paco occupies a similar status in the reader’s mind as he does in the collective anxieties of the townspeople: the more we learn of his violent past, and the more we sense his barely-contained frustrations at his treatment in Boone, the more we come to anticipate of him a brutal atavism. Just as the hostilities in Vietnam are rendered in microcosm in the novel in the encounter between Paco’s company and a female enemy, those on the home front are distilled in the interactions between Paco and his landlord’s niece. Cathy’s exhibitionistic and voyeuristic games with Paco are a synecdochic rendering of his relations with the other townspeople since they are characterised by an oscillating fascination with and horror of Paco, and they consist in the scopophilic operations of the gaze, in the realms of fantasy and projection, rather than in actual interaction. When, in the novel’s final chapter, Paco comes to suspect Cathy of trespassing in his room, he responds in kind. This invasion, like the rape of the sniper, constitutes a futile attempt to re-assert male dominance, to put Cathy ‘in her place’ and again functions as a reconfiguration and dramatisation of ‘First World,’ ‘male’ America’s invasion of and defeat by ‘Third World,’ ‘female’ Vietnam. The sequence is broken by an extended narrative flashback describing Paco’s skill as a booby-trap specialist and his killing at close quarters of a Vietnamese man (perhaps a combatant, perhaps not) who disturbed him in the act of booby-trapping a jungle trail. It includes the following passage: [Paco] took his Chicago cutlery filleting knife and insinuated it there, first pricking the skin, then stabbing down firmly … The guy gasped and wiggled, fighting. Paco, holding him by the shirt with a knee in his groin, worked the knife into the guy’s heart … the knife keenly burning … the heart muscle jerked the knife in Paco’s grip

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______________________________________________________________ … Paco pushed the keen carbide blade. The man gasped as if the wind were knocked out of him … Paco held him firmly, one knee in the guy’s groin. Blood welled up through the knife slit into Paco’s fisted grip: Paco felt the desperate clutch of the guy’s heart; felt the twitches of pulse in his hand and up his sweaty arm. The plain wooden handle of the fillet knife was sloppy with blood, jerking.20 The intimate and sexually-charged language in which the killing is related acts in combination with other reference points in the narrative, particularly the gang rape, to encourage the reader to anticipate a calamitous encounter between Paco and Cathy, the veteran’s re-enactment of ‘foreign’ atrocity on home ground that countless films and television shows have conditioned the reader to expect. However, the narrative’s (anti-)climax ultimately refuses the anticipated violent reversion to type of the Vietnam vet. And just as the reader’s expectations now rebound, so Paco’s own distorted image is flung back at him as he invades Cathy’s (unoccupied) bedroom. Finding her diary, Paco reads her account of her fascination with, and then revulsion towards, him; it is, we are told, ‘as if he’s met his wraith’.21 Paco the booby-trap expert himself walks into a ‘mechanical ambush’.22 Reading Cathy’s monstrous imaging of him as indicative of the whole town’s, he packs and leaves. Heinemann’s guerrilla attack on the practice of projecting cultural fantasies and anxieties onto the figure of the Vietnam vet is finally accomplished by means of this narrative booby trap: the weight of the reader’s anticipation of violence triggers an encounter with the prejudice and stereotyping that underlie it. 3.

Gender and the Enemy Even a brief overview of the representation in Paco’s Story of the Vietnamese enemy and the Vietnam veteran as a potential ‘enemy within’ in post-Vietnam America reveals the central, if not defining, role played by gender. Looking briefly beyond Paco’s Story, the central importance of gender and sexuality in Vietnam War narrative has been widely remarked by the academy. So dominant and pervasive is this role that Susan Jeffords has argued that: [G]ender is not simply another of the many oppositions that mark Vietnam representation. It is the difference on which these narratives and images depend … While friends may be uncertain, enemies unidentifiable, and goals unclear, the line between the masculine and the feminine is presented in Vietnam representation as firm and unwavering.23

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______________________________________________________________ For Jeffords, gender ‘is what Vietnam narrative is ‘about’ … [it] is the matrix through which Vietnam is read, interpreted, and reframed in dominant American culture’.24 While fundamentally agreeing that gender is a defining feature of Vietnam War narratives, I would argue that feminist and post-feminist readings have tended to side-step negative treatments of normative and martial masculinity in these texts, understandably focusing on depictions of oppression and violence towards women or considering the ways in which male bonding validates and empowers men. The prevalence and intensity of a murderous misogyny in the Vietnam War narrative clearly demanded scholarly attention, but that attention has sometimes served to displace an engagement with the constricting and self-destructive aspects of the homosocial bond, hypermasculinity and homophobia; or the violence wrought on the male psyche in the combat zone or in basic training. In sharp contrast to Jeffords’ claim that ‘the line between the masculine and the feminine is presented in Vietnam representation as firm and unwavering,’ I would contend that the masculine in Paco’s Story (and, indeed, in certain other Vietnam War novels including Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried) is not merely under threat from the feminine, but has been hopelessly invaded and eroded by it. The massive explosive force that wipes out Paco’s unit at Harriette and leaves him critically injured also effects a less immediately apparent disintegration and reconfiguration in the narrative: from active alpha male in Vietnam, Paco is reduced to crippled outsider in America. Having killed and raped in Vietnam with apparent impunity, Paco the veteran must live either with constant pain or drug-induced stupor. Largely passive, silent and forced to undertake low-paid menial work, Paco feels like ‘a piece of meat on the slab’.25 He is marked out by his physical difference and exploited and patronised because this appearance is ‘read’, among other things, as an index of physical inferiority. Clearly, Paco is thus feminised, linked to gendered codes of behaviour and experience and to forms of prejudice and abuse commonly associated with women, especially working class women - an idea underscored by the fact that Paco’s job sees him almost literally chained to the kitchen sink in Boone’s diner, where he works ‘with his belt buckle hooked over the lip of the tub’.26 Furthermore, Paco’s remark concerning ‘meat on the slab’ is prefigured by a strikingly similar entry in Cathy’s diary eight pages earlier: ‘All those guys staring at me … Makes me feel like a piece of meat. When I walk across the campus what is it they imagine under the ski jacket and sweater …?’27 At the same instant that the shrapnel and debris entered Paco’s body at Harriette, a second and invisible penetration also occurred: the previously alien realm of the feminine has breached the citadel of the narcissistic masculine ego. Paco the soldier - rapist and man-hunter - shows no

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______________________________________________________________ inclination to show clemency and exhibits no flicker of empathy or remorse, no slightest sign of the hated ‘feminine within’.28 This Paco inhabits a world in which women are enemies, commodities, receptacles for male lust and aggression. At Harriette, however, Paco is so immersed in pain and loss that this remote and unfeeling self becomes unsustainable. Paco the injured veteran, helpless in a hospital bed or struggling to subsist in America’s backwaters, is also often at the mercy of others. The soldier without empathy or the capacity for mercy ironically finds himself pursued westwards across America from one settlement to the next by these same negativities, repeatedly stymied by imaginative and communicative failures. In an interview with Barry Silesky in 1993, Larry Heinemann remarked: ‘The men of our generation have a lot to talk about. That isn’t to say the women don’t - but this is really a man thing.’29 This suggests that we should read Paco’s Story as an open letter to the men of America - and the narrator’s habit of fraternally addressing the reader as ‘James’ assumes a new significance in this light.30 Heinemann has seen the awful destructiveness inherent in and dependent upon men’s inscription of a warlike and womanhating masculinity on the male self, a masculinity commonly characterised by aggression rather than interaction, by enmity rather than empathy. Like Gallagher’s tattoo of a vast, phallic, snarling dragon, it is the inscription of a destructive and, in some measure, a self-inflicted fiction. The writing of this violent text facilitates a second and more explicitly violent inscription like that impressed upon Paco’s body or that of the girl-sniper ‘ground … into the rubble’ by Paco and his comrades.31 4.

Empathy and Enmity It seems that there is an exponentially intense mutual distrust that separates Paco from the majority of the non-veterans he encounters, a twoway street of empathic failure: the more they regard him as an outsider, the more he withdraws from interaction, the more he therefore appears an outsider and invites suspicion and rejection. The failure of understanding, broken lines of communication, the inability to empathise, the externalisation and projection of in-group negative traits onto convenient outsiders, narcissism, prejudice and ignorance: the encounters and experiences that define Paco’s life in America, are governed by the very same factors that made American victory in Vietnam impossible. After all, what kind of relationship and what level of empathy (and thus comprehension) could Americans offer while withdrawn behind the perimeters of massively defended enclaves (the antecedents of Baghdad’s Green Zone)? Saigon government forces also habitually retreated to fortified camps and blockhouses at dusk, allowing the forces of the National Liberation Front to flow back into ‘government-controlled’ territory. The ‘Strategic Hamlet’ programme that was rolled out across South Vietnam (after its 1962 trial) was

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______________________________________________________________ intended to deny the Vietcong resources and the opportunity to radicalise the rural population by forcibly relocating the villagers behind defensible perimeters. Predictably, such agrarian communities resented their dislocation from ancestral lands and family graves, especially as corrupt provincial officials frequently charged them for the privilege, and sympathies for the NLF cause were often strengthened rather than weakened. Many strategic hamlets were freely infiltrated by the NLF or were to varying degrees populated by supporters or active members (with the latter in some cases even serving in the government-armed hamlet militia). While absolute distinctions between Vietcong and Vietnamese civilian were thus often impossible, MAAG (Military Assistance and Advisory Group) and its successor MACV (Military Assistant Command, Vietnam) continued to believe that it could insulate the people from the guerrillas and, more tellingly, itself from its Vietnamese allies. The war was steadily ‘Americanized’ after 1965 and as US troop strength grew, so General Westmoreland relied increasingly on these forces for offensive operations while, as George C. Herring notes, ‘the ARVN was largely shunted aside’, damaging relations between the two armies and exacerbating the ‘problems of morale and leadership’ that had become a serious obstacle to ARVN effectiveness.32 In the political sphere, too, senior US diplomats and advisers often expressed anger and frustration with their South Vietnamese counterparts and American war aims came increasingly (after Diem’s overthrow in a 1963 coup fostered in US diplomatic and intelligence circles) to revolve around the belief that any Saigon leadership must be willing to toe the Washington line. As Marilyn B. Young observes: Since Vietnamese realities were irrelevant to American policy, failures of policy were generally analysed as merely tactical. Thus Diem was a tactical failure, readily replaceable by a junta whose origin, far more than was the case with Diem, made it entirely dependent on the United States and therefore ready to follow its advice without a quarrel. Now at last, the Americans thought, the war could proceed in earnest.33 Vast tracts of South Vietnam were converted into free-fire zones where anything that moved was a legitimate target. Neil Sheehan argues that ‘[t]he wholesale killing cheapened the value of Vietnamese life in American eyes’ and fostered the attitudes that made the 1968 My Lai massacre possible.34 Or, as Heinemann himself put it in an interview with Kurt Jacobsen: ‘the spirit of atrocity was in the very air’.35 Just as Paco’s public identity is appropriated, colonised and put to work in the service of the townsfolk’s own personal, communal and cultural

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______________________________________________________________ fantasies and anxieties, America’s war in Vietnam was increasingly about American, not Vietnamese, needs. When the then US ambassador to South Vietnam, General Maxwell Taylor, dismissed, in 1964, the option of either freezing escalation or reducing US involvement, he framed it in the following terms: ‘If we leave Vietnam with our tail between our legs, the consequences of this defeat in the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America would be disastrous’36 (analogous arguments are heard today, suggesting that a US withdrawal from Iraq would invigorate America’s enemies the world over). Taylor’s choice of metaphor is instructive: the war was not about the Vietnamese people, it was about America’s global reputation, its virility and prowess, the erectness of its ‘tail’. Furthermore, the failure to comprehend the Vietnamese - friend or enemy - and their history, culture and aspirations, was endemic in the Byzantine network of American diplomatic, military, advisory and aid structures. Like Paco’s inscription as increasingly illegible palimpsest, Vietnam’s complex and traumatic history was overwritten and blotted out beneath an alien American and Western epistemology in which everything proceeded from the grand narrative of the Cold War struggle against a monolithic evil empire, and America’s ‘natural’ status as leader of the free world (recalling the Puritans’ conception of their New World community as a ‘City on a Hill’ on which the eyes of the world are fixed for guidance and example). In short, the inability to see things from the other’s point of view, and to sustain that perspective for more than a disoriented instant, guaranteed the failure of America’s ‘mission’ in Southeast Asia. The image selected for the cover of the 1987 Faber and Faber edition of Paco’s Story was a close-up photograph showing two adjacent panels of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington (dedicated in November, 1982). As Marita Sturken points out, ‘the black stone gives the memorial a reflective surface … that allows viewers to participate in the memorial; seeing their own images in the names, they are thus implicated in the listing of the dead’.37 Susan Jeffords describes Paco as ‘a walking memorial’,38 and Paco’s experiences of alienation and marginalisation are in large part a measure of his - and specifically his injuries’ - capacity to remind Americans about the pain and loss the war wrought on individuals, communities, and on the divided nation itself. In Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam, Heinemann also discusses the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and, echoing Sturken, he writes: Stand at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the energy comes from you, and you must touch it. The invitation to touch is more than an intimacy with familiar names, brothers of the blood; everyone is compelled. When the memorial was first built, it was heavily, even bitterly opposed … I suspect that the real reason for the opposition

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______________________________________________________________ was an edgy and skittish, sentimental reluctance to involve oneself physically with the memorial; much less personally or spiritually ... All energy comes from you; and this because of the peculiar phenomenon of the reflections discovered only after the memorial was built.39 Heinemann’s comments about a widespread reluctance to engage with the memorial, literally to see oneself in it, are readily applicable to Paco unwilling ‘walking memorial’ and mirror to America’s projected prejudices (like the warped reflection of himself he sees in Cathy’s diary). Heinemann plays on the powerful popular stereotypes associated with Vietnam veterans contemporary to the novel’s publication, before his narrator finally reminds us, in deceptively simple terms, that Paco is, after all, ‘just a man like the rest of us, James’.40 If Paco is ultimately ‘just like the rest of us’, then we must recognise the potential in ourselves to do, under similar conditions, what Paco has done, and, even more importantly, ask ourselves frankly whether, how, and at what personal cost we would seek to resist the spiral into atrocity. Fred Emil Katz notes in relation to the massacre at My Lai that came for many of the war’s opponents to stand as emblem and distillation of American involvement: The My Lai events demonstrate in a unique and critical way how, at a particular point in time and space, a context can so mould persons, temporarily at least, that they will engage in activities that go entirely against the grain of their own upbringing. Persons who, to the best of our knowledge, were entirely decent, well-brought-up human beings, one day slaughtered hundreds of innocent people, and they did so with joy. I include their story, not because I believe these persons were different from the rest of us but, on the contrary, because they were probably very much like the rest of us. Not only are the American soldiers who served in Vietnam our kinspeople, our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers. In their makeup they are us. They are ourselves. And so, too, are the particular soldiers who were in My Lai on March 16, 1968. We cannot distance ourselves from these soldiers. In them we are obliged to confront a side of our own human nature that really exists.41 And, describing his two Vietnam War novels, Close Quarters (1977) and Paco’s Story, Heinemann has since claimed: ‘I wrote those two books in an attempt to make clear that this is what awaits you - or something like - that

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______________________________________________________________ the work of the war will transform you into something you don’t recognise.’42 Heinemann asks us to attempt to do what Cathy cannot: to wear Paco’s scars, however painful their ‘suffocating burn’,43 to see ourselves in Paco and thus to see Paco in terms of a universal human Self rather than as threatening and unrecognisable Other. In conclusion, if enmity and conflict proliferate in Paco’s Story then we should not forget that their exploration in the narrative serves as a call to empathy. Heinemann invites us to make the perspective shifts that none of his characters are ultimately capable of, to attempt the impossible, to breach what another Vietnam veteran writer, Tim O’Brien, has called ‘the implacable otherness of others’,44 and seek imaginatively to span the unbridgeable voids - biological, cultural or experiential - that separate us not only from our enemies but also from those closest to us. Near the end of the novel, Paco seems momentarily to see through Cathy’s eyes, ‘looking back from the vantage point where Cathy usually stands in the doorway, staring at him … when he comes into the hotel from work’.45 The account of the gang rape also includes a sudden and violent perspective shift in which the reader is compelled to witness the attack from the victim’s point of view. Crucially, however, in each case the shift is only momentary; it lacks the sustained intellectual and emotional engagement that would be necessary to develop it into something more than a phenomenon of ‘the mind’s eye’. Neither Paco nor the ghost narrator can ‘see’ enough of the world through enemy eyes to redeem their own fractured humanity. And, as we have seen, Heinemann closes the gap between the reader and his protagonist by reminding us how easily, given the right cultural background, we, too, can place others beyond the reach of empathy, withdraw into enclaves of one sort or another … and make enemies. Few of the people Paco encounters in the novel can see beyond the surface trace of his veteranhood. Ultimately, the ‘mosaic’ of Paco’s scars will not resolve, like an impressionist painter’s pointillism, into a comprehensible image if only viewed from the right vantage point; this ‘Braille’ text or ‘curlicued’ contour map can never be made legible. The marks on Paco’s body are the impress of a massive and arbitrary violence and the only thing that can be read there, beyond the scars’ medical denotation of injury and healing, is whatever flickering image has unconsciously been projected there either by Larry Heinemann’s characters or by his readers. Paco’s body has been transformed not into the bearer of a coherent image, a legible screed or palimpsest, but into an endlessly ‘open’ text: a mass of meaningless marks onto which the reader or viewer can impose whatever meaning they desire. Less elegant or symmetrical than Rorschach’s inkblots, the effect of gazing at Paco’s scar-marbled body is nevertheless similar in that it invariably exposes to view more of the spectator than it reveals of the object of the gaze. This, I would argue, is precisely wherein the value of Paco’s Story lies: it is a novel

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______________________________________________________________ that exposes the viewer to view (the novel frequently returns to themes of voyeurism and scopophilia), that invites the reader to read the Self, that promotes discomfiting but profoundly necessary self-examination, and encourages us to seek a renewed consciousness not only about who and what we are, but about how our attitudes to others are formed and manipulated. And if there is a dark and inimical dimension to the figure of the ghost narrator(s) of Paco’s Story, then perhaps this signals the necessity of approaching all story-tellers, all makers of narrative, with a keen eye for the mechanism on which the tale turns.

Notes 1

P Caputo, ‘Writers Try to Make Sense of Vietnam Book Boom’. The New York Times, 4 Aug. 1987, C17. 2 G F Scott, ‘Paco’s Story and the Ethics of Violence’. Critique, vol. 36, 1994, p. 80, endnote 1. 3 K. Jacobsen, ‘Larry Heinemann in Conversation with Kurt Jacobsen’. Logos, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 141-160. 4 L Heinemann, Paco's Story, Faber and Faber, London, 1989, p. 174. 5 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 5. 6 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 174. 7 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 136. 8 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 199. 9 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p.101. 10 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 181. 11 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 179. 12 The photograph of Kim Lai and the captured American airman is reproduced (courtesy of the Ngo Vinh Long Collection) in Marilyn B. Young’s The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (plate facing page 51). 13 J Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Scribner, New York, 2003, p. 169. 14 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p.138-9 (author’s italics). 15 H B Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2000, p. 173. 16 R Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and EmpireBuilding, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1997, p. 448. 17 Named after a section of the federal tax code, ‘527’ groups are tax-exempt organisations that engage in political activities. It is illegal for such groups to co-ordinate their activities with a presidential candidate’s campaign. On 20 August 2004 The New York Times published an article delineating in detail the ‘web of connections’ between Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and ‘the Bush family, … high-profile Texas political figures and … President Bush’s

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______________________________________________________________ chief political aide, Karl Rove’ (see bibliographical entry below under Zernike and Rutenberg). The substance of the claims made in that article were subsequently cited as supporting evidence in the complaint made by the Kerry campaign to the Federal Election Commission. 18 The diagnostic category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was recognised by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 in response to the efforts of Lifton, Chaim Shatan and other psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers who had studied or worked with Vietnam veterans. 19 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 151. 20 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 194. 21 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 209. 22 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 192. 23 S Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1989, p. 53. 24 Jeffords, Remasculinization, p. 53 25 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 209. 26 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 131. 27 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 201. 28 Though it relates to the Vietnam-era Marine Corps rather than the Army, an illuminating - if appalling - account of the manipulation of gender constructs, and particularly of the feminine as threat, can be found in (ex-Marine) R W Eisenhart’s ‘You Can’t Hack It Little Girl: A Discussion of the Covert Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training’ (published in 1975 in the Journal of Social Issues: see bibliography for details). 29 B Silesky, ‘Larry Heinemann: A Conversation’. Another Chicago Magazine, vol. 25, 1993, p. 186-187. 30 Similarly, L K Greiff speculates: ‘[p]erhaps by telling Paco’s story to ‘James’, both narrator and author, like Paco himself, are reaching out to a brother or to a collective brotherhood of male American readers’ in pursuit of ‘closure and cure’ to heal the divisions between the American men who fought the war and those who opposed it. - L K Greiff, ‘In the Name of the Brother: Larry Heinemann’s Paco's Story and Male America’. Critique, vol. 41, 2000, p. 387. 31 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 180. 32 G C Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 4th edn., McGraw-Hill, New York, 2002, p. 190. 33 M B Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, Harper Collins, New York, 1991, p. 104. 34 N Sheehan, ‘A War Without End,’ New York Times. 27 Aug. 2004: A21. 35 Jacobsen, p. 145. 36 Young, p. 126.

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______________________________________________________________ 37

M Sturken, ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.’ Representations, vol. 35, 1991, p. 120. 38 S Jeffords, ‘Tattoos, Scars, Diaries and Writing Masculinity’, in The Vietnam War and American Culture, J. Rowe and C. Berg (eds.), Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, p. 208. 39 L Heinemann, Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam, Doubleday, New York, 2005, p. 236 (author’s italics). 40 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 173. 41 F E Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: a Report on the Beguilings of Evil, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993, p. 102. 42 Heinemann, Black Virgin Mountain, p. 45 (author’s italics). 43 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, p. 209. 44 T O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods, Flamingo, London, 1995, p. 103n. 45 Heinemann, Paco’s Story, 189.

Bibliography Caputo, P., ‘Writers Try to Make Sense of Vietnam Book Boom’. The New York Times, 4 Aug. 1987, C17. Drinnon, R., Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and EmpireBuilding. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1997. Eisenhart, R. W., ‘You Can’t Hack It Little Girl: A Discussion of the Covert Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training’. Journal of Social Issues, vol. 31, 1975, pp. 13-23. Franklin, H. B., M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America. Lawrence Hill, New York, 1992. _______

, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2000. Greiff, L. K., ‘In the Name of the Brother: Larry Heinemann’s Paco's Story and Male America’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 41, 2000, pp. 381-388. Hasford, G., The Short-Timers. Bantam, London, 1979.

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______________________________________________________________ Heinemann, L., Paco's Story. 1986. Faber and Faber, London, 1989. _______

, Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam. Doubleday, New York,

2005. Herring, G. C., America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. 4th edn., McGraw-Hill, New York, 2002. Jacobsen, K., ‘Larry Heinemann in Conversation with Kurt Jacobsen’. Logos, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 141-160. Jeffords, S., The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1989. _______

, ‘Tattoos, Scars, Diaries and Writing Masculinity’, in The Vietnam War and American Culture, J. Rowe and C. Berg (eds.). Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, pp. 208-225. Katz, F. E., Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: a Report on the Beguilings of Evil. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993. Lembcke, J., The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York University Press, New York, 1998. Lifton, R. J., Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims Nor Executioners. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1973. O’Brien, T., In the Lake of the Woods. 1994. Flamingo, London, 1995. Scott, G. F., ‘Paco’s Story and the Ethics of Violence’. Critique, vol. 36, 1994, pp. 69-81. Shay, J., Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Scribner, New York, 2003. Sheehan, N., ‘A War Without End’. New York Times. 27 Aug. 2004: A21. Silesky, B., ‘Larry Heinemann: A Conversation’. Another Chicago Magazine, vol. 25, 1993, pp. 179-196.

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______________________________________________________________ Sturken, M., ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’. Representations, vol. 35, 1991, pp. 118-142. Young, M. B., The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990. Harper Collins, New York, 1991. Zernike, K. and J. Rutenberg. ‘Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Attack on Kerry’. New York Times. 20 Aug. 2004: A1.

Filmography First Blood (Anabasis, 1982), Ted Kotcheff (dir.). Full Metal Jacket (Warner Brothers/Natant, 1987), Stanley Kubrick (dir.). Motor Psycho (Eve Productions, 1965), Russ Meyer (dir.). Rambo: First Blood Part II (Anabasis, 1985), George Pan Cosmatos (dir.). Taxi Driver (Italo-Judeo, 1976), Martin Scorsese (dir.).

The Immediacy of Narrated Combat: Operation Iraqi Freedom as Public Spectacle Jason T. McEntee Abstract: From the Vietnam War to Operation Desert Storm to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Americans have seen a dramatic shift in the ways they see combat countless, and often dubious, images certainly impact how they interpret their warriors’ actions. Iraqi Freedom presents an interesting shift in the immediate availability of numerous fiction and non-fiction narratives often stemming from the accounts of the soldiers themselves. I refer to this shift as the immediacy of narrated combat. Iraqi Freedom, unlike Vietnam and Desert Storm, has seen an almost immediate response in terms of the narratives we see and read, including movies, television programs, CD-ROM compilations, video games, numerous videos brought back with, and blogs posted by, our men and women serving in, and subsequently returning from, Iraq, and literary non-fiction accounts of combat. Much as the Bush I Administration used a mass-mediated, pro-war narrative to spin a decisive Gulf War victory into a restoration of national zest for armed combat, the Bush II Administration, despite its efforts to create, deliver, and maintain a massmediated, pro-war narrative, has seen this narrative beset by counternarratives that have eroded its credibility and ultimately revealed more rational and sober accounts of Iraqi Freedom. Key Words: Narrated combat, Operation Iraqi Freedom, war/combat media representation. ***** 1.

Introduction On the Kuma\War web-site, one sees the tagline ‘Kuma Reality Games - TV for a Generation Raised on Games’; however, a somewhat contradictory, though nonetheless ironic, rebuffing of ‘reality’ appears on its ‘Legal’ information page: ‘Kuma games are works of fiction. Any Kuma game that is based on real-world events is only representational and not an accurate depiction of real-world events.’1 Despite this discrepancy in the use of the term - or, rather, the idea of - realism, Kuma\War maintains its painstaking recreation of actual Operation Iraqi Freedom missions, which one can ‘join’ and play in chronological order. The action can begin with the raid on Baghdad, continue with the capture of Saddam Hussein, move to such cities as Sadr, and, more recently, can include such scenarios as the ‘Abu Ghraib Mission’.2

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______________________________________________________________ Some four years after the onset of the war in Iraq, the April 2, 2007, Newsweek ‘Voices of the Fallen’ issue features letters home from nowdeceased American soldiers in Iraq. Several actual ‘death’ letters appear in the magazine, capturing the last thoughts of warriors who sense that death is near.3 What does one do if after undertaking a mission on Kuma\War, she or he should read the Newsweek article? Would one feel guilty taking pleasure in ‘reliving’ an event that cost soldiers’ lives? Or does one feel as though she or he can honour the dead by learning more about the combat experience? Conversely, would soldiers of this and other American wars use the game as a form of therapy or release? The Kuma\War game’s ability to keep players in close temporal and mock spatial proximity to the war and its warriors, some of whom will return home and wish to erase these memories, serves as a fascinating bookend to the Newsweek issue. A citizen/warrior binary emerges: American citizens (some of whom undoubtedly are veterans of this and/or other wars) plunge themselves into ‘reality-based’ combat while American warriors fight in Iraq. Ironically, American scientists recently discovered drugs that can effectively ‘erase’ traumatic memories, and how they - along with therapy - would be useful for PTSD-suffering soldiers who have returned from Iraq.4 A tension between remembering/learning and dis-remembering/unlearning underpins the ways Americans receive and assess war/combat narratives and information. That is, why would the warrior wish to forget that which the nation’s citizenry is told to accept as noble and true in the defense of all things ‘democratic’ and ‘free’? 2.

Tracing the Immediacy of Narrated Combat The questions raised in the ‘Introduction’ are troubling because technological advances in information dissemination have redefined the ways Americans receive information about war. Mainstream media sources such as Newsweek are subservient to the bottom line of producing revenue, and they often rely on sensationalized stories of death - regardless of the means – to be ‘cash cows’, even if the story comes across as a thoughtful homage to the deceased’s legacy. War/combat narratives ranging from The Iliad to the photographic essays of the American Civil War to the 20th century’s sad legacy of world wars privilege death more so than heroism, rendering death, as a public experience, one of the – if not the - dominant themes in war/combat narratives. The loss of lives, not coincidentally, has driven the collective American attitude toward Iraqi Freedom, ranging from widespread support for war in the wake of 9/11 to waning support as the war pushes into its fourth year and nears its four thousandth American warrior casualty. Surprisingly, the Newsweek issue signals a clear shift in mainstream American attitudes toward the war – a shift from accepting as the dominant

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______________________________________________________________ war narrative the jingoistic ‘us or them’ rhetoric of the Bush Administration to allowing other, more critical and Bush-contradicting narratives to share the stage. The Bush Administration, following Bush, Sr.’s, lead and in conjunction with the Pentagon, has worked hard to suppress, or at the very least to sanitize, personalized discussions and images of warrior deaths that would emerge from mainstream American media outlets. Many critics point to the ‘uncensored’ nature of Vietnam War reportage as the catalyst for the government to suppress and control American war information, as Mitchel Roth observes: ‘Unlike World War II there was no formal censorship. Compared to subsequent wars accreditation was relatively easy to secure in Vietnam, but correspondents were required to accept certain limitations’; these limitations, however, were easily overcome, as they involved verification procedures such as, among other things, possessing an up-to-date passport as well as a ‘letter from an employer in the realm of news reporting stating that the employer took full responsibility for the actions of the press representative’.5 To gauge how Americans have received information about Iraqi Freedom, one might recall the suppressed images of American flag-draped coffins containing fallen warriors returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. This policy of suppressing images of American warrior coffins has since been changed.6 Yet, for instance, when the media circus surrounding the vacuous ‘actress’ Anna Nicole Smith’s death in February, 2007, reminds one of the frustrating reality of death-as-public-spectacle, how does one contextualise a news story about soldiers’ deaths that receives a fraction of the time and attention of a celebrity’s demise? How can one assess this media dichotomy when the Pentagon stifles the ways Americans see and learn about the horror of combat? In this essay, I argue that much as the Bush I Administration used a mass-mediated, pro-war narrative to spin a decisive Gulf War victory into a restoration of national zest for armed combat, the Bush II Administration, despite its efforts to create, deliver, and maintain a mass-mediated, pro-war narrative, has seen this narrative beset by counter-narratives that have eroded its credibility and ultimately revealed more rational and sober accounts of Iraqi Freedom. This loss of control over a dominant war narrative has occurred in large part due to the technological advances (the Internet, for example) redefining information dissemination. Despite the limitations placed on the American media, Operation Iraqi Freedom, not unlike the United States’ wars before 9/11, has slowly begun to yield a massive amount of well-rounded and readily-available war news and general information; however, what distinguishes this war from its predecessors is that a massive amount of published narratives emanating from such sources as soldier accounts as well as mass-media driven products such as movies, CD-ROMS, and video games are appearing while the war takes place.

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______________________________________________________________ Thus, in building upon Stuart Allan’s insightful work on Iraqi Freedom news reportage, I refer to this change as the immediacy of narrated combat. The parameters of this change become evident when one considers that although riveting Vietnam War footage broadcast into American living rooms, newspaper, and magazine reports, and word-of-mouth warrior testimonies shaped American attitudes about the war, an immediate abundance of soldier accounts, fiction and non-fiction narratives, or other products such as movies, did not appear en masse until after the war’s conclusion.7 For example, aside from Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1969) and Don Oberdorfer’s Tet (1971), several years passed before serious-minded non-fiction literary texts, such as Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and Michael Herr’s Dispatches (both 1977), would address the war and capture the public’s attention. Not surprisingly, Robin Moore’s The Green Berets (1965) and the John Wayne movie version (1968), which were passed off as non-fiction at the time, were successful in terms of reaching audiences. Now challenged as shaky non-fiction at best, Moore’s and Wayne’s accounts serve as reminders of the United States’ early optimism about the war, while documentaries such as The Anderson Platoon (1966), Vietnam: In the Year of the Pig (1969), and Hearts and Minds (1974) serve as stark counterpoints to this optimism. A few history texts would emerge while the war still raged, including Felix Green’s Vietnam! Vietnam! In Photographs and Text (1966), David Halberstam’s The Best and Brightest (1969), and Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam (1972). Fiction narratives in print form (Daniel Ford’s Incident at Muc Wa [1967]) appeared, but fictional movies did not. For example, Ford’s book was made into the movie Go Tell the Spartans, but not until 1978. In contrast, Desert Storm, seen in millions of living rooms in what became known as the ‘CNN Effect’, ended almost as abruptly as it started, providing little time for narratives to emerge during combat.8 Those who chose to watch the war likely have formed their mostly positive opinions of it from CNN and other network coverage that showed images of American dominance and victory instead of carnage and destruction – a point that the movie Three Kings examines in trenchant detail in 1998, some seven years after the war’s conclusion. The war itself, defined by the Bush Administration’s carefully mass-mediated terms, ultimately served as a means for the administration to revitalize the American public’s zest for war to portray the American warrior as heroic and to put to rest the demons of that ‘other’ war, Vietnam. It would in fact end the Vietnam Syndrome, as Bush, Sr., infamously proclaimed.9 Viewers of mainstream Desert Storm news not only have missed incredible amounts of information, including American and Iraqi casualty statistics, Gulf War Syndrome cases, and media manipulation stunts pushed by the Bush Administration but also they have in

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______________________________________________________________ essence failed in their roles as discerning citizens. Allan connects the ‘immediacy’ of Operation Iraqi Freedom news reportage to the stifled and often manipulated news reportage of Operation Desert Storm thus: ‘[due to] improvements in news . . . as well as the use of reports from ‘embedded’ correspondents, [reporters] insisted that many of the criticisms first levelled at 24-hr news in the 1991 Gulf War had been laid to rest’.10 Several eye-opening reports about Desert Storm, including fullfledged book-length academic and non-academic studies as well as myriad fiction and non-fiction literary and filmic narratives, appeared after the war’s conclusion.11 Pilot Rhonda Cornum’s story, She Went to War, appeared in 1993 and was highly fictionalised in the movie Courage Under Fire (1996). Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, released in 2003, was made into a movie in 2005. David O. Russell’s Three Kings provided audiences with a fictional, highly cynical account of the war. Similarly, Larry Beinhart’s fictional novel American Hero (1993) criticizes the mass-media-manipulation that has become emblematic of the war, and this novel later appeared as the movie Wag the Dog (1997). Not surprisingly, the majority of these narratives provide alternative perspectives to the ‘overwhelming’, Vietnam Syndromeending victory in Desert Storm. Unlike the two wars that preceded it, Operation Iraqi Freedom has seen an immediate response in terms of fiction and non-fiction narratives we can see and read. Movies such as American Soldiers (2005) assess the war while it continues. Purportedly, it is based on real events occurring throughout one day in Iraq and includes typical lines of combat dialogue such as ‘I thought this war was over.’12 Documentary movies such as Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Gunner Palace (2005) examine the war and combat soldiers’ actions in various ways. The FX Network’s television drama series Over There (2005), while not an especially compelling narrative, becomes noteworthy for its attempt to narrate the war for mass audiences. The Progressive Management’s massive CD-ROM compilation the 21st Century Guide to Operation Iraqi Freedom (2006) contains thousands of pages of public documents, news articles, and images from Iraqi Freedom, 2003 to 2006 – a wealth of information that previously, in the absence of digital media, would have taken years to amass. Video games such as Kuma|War allow people to experience the war from the comfort of their own homes. One has access to numerous graphic novels such as Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq (2005) and War-Fix (2006), and literary non-fiction accounts of combat such as Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More than You (2005) Jessica Lynch’s propagandistic, I am a Soldier, Too (2003). Lynch’s narrative aired as a television movie, Saving Jessica Lynch, mere days before the book’s release. All of these allow Americans to immerse themselves in the same war taking place halfway across the world.

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______________________________________________________________ Numerous television and print advertisements as well as recruitment DVDs for the branches of the military, many of which employ a video-game visual style, entice potential warriors with narratives of success and heroism. To this end, the late Pat Tillman, who left the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals to fight in Iraq, possesses a personal narrative of heroicdeath-proved-death-by-friendly-fire. His narrative, promoted non-stop by mainstream American media, has played out as a sad reminder of how manufacturing heroes comes at the expense of honour amongst comrades and privacy for family. Tillman, much as Lynch before him, served an immediate purpose in generating support for the war - as American heroes consumed in a visual manner (photographs and news footage), their narratives helped drum up war support that swelled early in the campaign but has waned in its later stages. More specifically, in order to gauge the difference between Iraqi Freedom and its two predecessors, one can look at the sheer numbers of fiction movie narratives that have appeared or will be released soon and how these movies criticize the Iraq war. In August, 2007, at the Venice Film Festival, director Brian DePalma’s new movie Redacted ‘stunned’ audiences with its stark account of American soldiers who raped a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her and her family. According to reports, DePalma came across this narrative on the Internet, prompting him to state to reporters: ‘The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war.’13 Currently, one has access to several movies about the war: The Marine (2006; Iraqi Freedom stateside fantasy) and Home of the Brave (2006; coming-home melodrama), along with the documentaries Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and No End in Sight (both 2007), Why We Fight (2005); Big Storm: The Lyndie England Story (2006), Gunner Palace, and Control Room (2004). Several more movies about Iraqi Freedom are in production. These include: Stop Loss (soldier refuses to return to combat), Grace is Gone (man’s wife dies in combat), The Return (a veteran’s story), Absent Hearts (students with parents in the war), and The Hurt Locker (story about a bombdisposal unit in Iraq).14 To put this in perspective, as of 2007, the amount of released and soon-to-be-released movies about the war by far exceeds the amount of Vietnam War movies, fictional or otherwise, released during the entire ten-year duration of that war. 3.

Competing Narratives: The Alternatives to Mainstream Media Unlike they were in Vietnam and especially Desert Storm, mainstream news media resources, which served the dual roles of watchdogs for scandals and chroniclers of combat, are no longer the dominant means of generating war information even though they are ‘immediate’ in their

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______________________________________________________________ delivery. They often rely on the military’s official news releases for and responses to combat due to the overtly-patriotic cultural climate in the wake of 9/11 – a climate that the Bush Administration capitalized on in full, using its power to discredit reporters who did not tow the party line.15 For instance, embedded reporters, who are often entrusted with telling the real stories emanating from war, have seen a compromised collective ethos in large part due to the military’s control of their training; Stephen Reese discusses ‘controlled’ embedding in Desert Storm thus: ‘embedding was a form of control that created a strong dependency relationship between journalists and their units (not only for getting the story but for protection in a dangerous place)’.16 Not surprisingly, for Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon funded and controlled some 662 reporters who, at the war’s start, were embedded with military units only. They were given several amenities, including food and communications help, while they also obeyed the Pentagon’s fifty rules, ‘including a long list of things on which they could not report, such as dead bodies’.17 American actor/director/activist Tim Robbins critiques this instance of government-regulated media manipulation in his recent play, Embedded, which was met with mixed reviews but did manage to address the darker side of embedded war reporting.18 Similarly, American coverage of the Vietnam War started off as overtly patriotic until 1968 (Tet), when public opinion became deeply divided about the war, and its presentation on television changed to reflect that attitude. Desert Storm reporters were given access to official military briefings as well as expert analysis of these briefings, but their access to soldiers was limited so as to prevent another Vietnam-type shift in public opinion. Many intellectuals accurately argued that the images emerging from Desert Storm were carefully chosen by the military and the Bush Administration - much as the ‘press pools’ were carefully assembled, monitored, and ultimately controlled - so as to keep public support for the war from wavering.19 Without a doubt, Americans see Iraqi Freedom through countless, and often alarming and somewhat dubious, journalistic images such as those from Abu Ghraib as well as the felling of Saddam’s statue (itself staged, incidentally or not, as a public ‘lynching’), which is examined as yet another American publicity stunt in the Al-Jazeera-exploring documentary Control Room. The victory rhetoric of Bush’s infamous, rather ridiculous landing upon and ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on May 1st, 2003, has been chronicled as staged and in retrospect, inappropriate and irresponsible on several levels, including Bush’s suspect National Guard flying record and the fact that the war is not over.20 Despite the audacity of this publicity stunt coupled with the propensity of the Bush Administration to promote fabricated information with its warped and misguided optimistic appraisal (and re-appraisals) of the

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______________________________________________________________ war, Time magazine released a special ‘War Commemorative Edition’ entitled 21 Days to Baghdad: The Inside Story of How America Won the War Against Iraq. The issue was to be displayed until September 15th, 2003, giving audiences a chance to grab a copy on the anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks. Now, some four years into the war, the Bush Administration continues to profess, in rather troubling fashion, that we are winning in Iraq - or that we must not fail in Iraq - while the majority of mainstream news entities (the Newsweek article notwithstanding) choose not to run with stories that chronicle warrior deaths or defy the administration’s belief that the United States is winning the war.21 Immediate access to myriad forms of war narratives and information, through traditional embedded reporting, alternative news sources, and especially through blogs, allows Americans to challenge the administration’s positive/winning proclamations by affording Americans numerous and often contradictory ways to form attitudes about Iraqi Freedom. Serving as foils to the ‘controlled’ embedded reporters I mentioned earlier, embedded reporters such as Evan Wright of Rolling Stone and Katherine Skiba of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, still provide excellent, detailed accounts of combat action, as their published accounts indicate.22 In addition, these reporters, much as many others do, endured various degrees of harsh conditions, including being near to or immersed in combat and battling the insufferable conditions of the desert. Non-embedded reporters and correspondents, such as Martha Raddatz of ABC News, also offer narratives that are equally as compelling. Raddatz, in The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family, interviews warriors, commanding officers, and both stateside warriors and their family members to provide a detailed account of the harrowing battle of Sadr City in 2004. Many alternative news sources, such as tomdispatch.com, can be found on-line, and they regularly provide carefully researched and written counter-arguments to mainstream news coverage – a full list of alternative news sources can be found at www.alternativenews.net or www.vcn.bc.ca/bcla-ip/conf2002/koep.htm. These publications are prevalent, and they often appear in close temporal proximity to major Iraqi Freedom combat events, thus creating a trend that distinguishes this current war from its predecessors, especially Desert Storm. Along these lines, warrior blogs have challenged not only the Bush Administration’s portrayal of Iraqi Freedom but also the post-9/11 media’s role in war correspondence. Warrior blogs are not unlike ‘underground’ publications such as Vietnam GI. This newspaper stemmed from the communication between and organization of Vietnam soldiers, many of whom wanted to express their disdain for the war and the way it was reported as well as their disdain for their commanders and the American government.23 Similarly, Aaron Barlow, in The Rise of the Blogosphere, examines how blogs can challenge and subvert the problematic mainstream

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______________________________________________________________ media that in its inefficacy to accurately report war has: ‘reached a new low, unable to question the [Bush] administration . . . suddenly unwilling to be anything more than a means of transmittal of government-produced statements’.24 Warrior blogs are mostly public (some require passwords), and they can accomplish the same duplicitous watchdog/purveyor tasks once held by the media. Those who publish blogs want to be read, and they often refrain from any type of censorship in taking on an ‘adversarial’ role.25 They can uphold or expose both the military’s and the mainstream media’s truths and fabrications while they also, at times simultaneously, promote the positive ethos of the American warrior as, for example, patriot or rebel; protector of freedom or enslaver; as liberator or incarcerator. And, of course, they can be completely fictitious – manufactured stories to enrapture an audience. At this time, when they are not being shut down or closely monitored by the Department of Defense, existing warrior blogs fall into three distinct categories.26 First, one can access the Rebel Warrior Blog. Army warrior Colby Buzzell, an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, was among the first to begin posting blogs while ‘in country’. His award-winning book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq (2005), a collection of his blog (http://cbftw.blogspot.com/) posts from 2003 (with additional text to serve as background to the posts), ‘may be the last frank and open military blog book’, according to Paul Jones, the chair of the judges for the Lulu Blooker Blog Prize.27 In short, as an anonymous soldier going by ‘cbftw’ (‘Colby Buzzell Fuck the War’), he becomes, as the book jacket boasts, the ‘embedded reporter the Army couldn’t control, despite its best, and often hilarious, efforts to do so’. After he gains a great deal of attention stateside, Buzzell comes under ‘house arrest’ while his superiors try to determine if he has compromised the military’s operations. However, once the press starts asking questions about Buzzell, Buzzell is immediately released and begins his ‘First Amendment’ campaign by conducting an interview with National Public Radio. Though it is difficult to say that his is the ‘first’ warrior blog coming from Iraq, Buzzell’s serves as a model for other warriors who also began posting blogs. Second, Dutiful Warrior Blogs come from soldiers who do not compromise the military’s operations or go too far in their criticism of the warriors’ plights. Matthew ‘Blackfive’ Burden’s book, The Blog of War: Front-line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (2006), contains numerous excerpts from blogs that fit this description. Burden began his ‘milblog’ Blackfive on June 18th, 2003, and his book is a collection of posts not only to that site but also from various other warrior blogs that he has chosen. The collection’s mostly-’patriotic’ tone serves as a differing perspective and fascinating companion to Buzzell’s work and its ‘fuck it’ tone.28

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______________________________________________________________ Third is the Pornographic Warrior Blog, a warrior’s account of combat that often takes the form of ‘war porn’. In his recent essay ‘Accustomed to Their Own Atrocities in Iraq, U.S. Soldiers Have Become Murderers’, Chris Hedges – a former war correspondent – assesses war as ‘a pornography of violence’ in that: ‘War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings.’29 Hedges’ use of the term ‘pornography’ dovetails with the phenomenon known as ‘war porn’: On-line materials from warriors who post graphic or, although the terms are subject to much debate (much as the definition of pornography is), inappropriate or explicit images and/or footage of carnage and destruction, of torture and misery, of combat and warrior celebration/ glorification, and, although less frequent, of explicit or implied sexual acts (as in the Abu Ghraib case of warriors subjecting detainees to simulated rape). The sexual connotation of pornography is appropriate in defining ‘war porn’, for traditional psychological analyses of combat tend to assess it, much as Hedges does, as a form of physical and psychological release not unlike the physical and psychological ‘releases’ driven by libido and played out through sexual acts. Hence, in the ‘release’ of both gruesome and/or celebratory images and footage of soldiers and combat, warriors satisfy a need to share and in fact replay the events associated with war. A Pornographic Warrior Blog initially can appear as either of its Rebel/Dutiful counterparts, but what distinguishes it from them is its inclusion of the aforementioned types of images and footage. That is to say, in his or her blog, a warrior can write about and describe in detail the horrors of combat, but only when these written descriptions are accompanied by graphic images and/or footage do they become classified as ‘war porn’. One can access numerous ‘war porn’ sites, articles, blogs, and other similar posts by simply accessing a search engine and entering such terms as ‘war porn’, ‘Iraq war’, ‘war images’, and any combination of these and other related terms. 4.

Conclusion The immediacy of narrated combat as I have attempted to define and use it here allows one to gauge how, in addition to news about the war, alternative war narratives in various formats and genres reveal wide-ranging attitudes about the war in Iraq, and ultimately challenge the Bush Administration’s and the mainstream media’s oft-positive assessment of Iraqi Freedom. On the one hand, the immediacy of narrated combat suggests that the United States can be seen as a nation of voyeurs privy to representations of combat that, in a historical sense starting with WWII and, excluding the second half of the Vietnam War, were known only to the warrior and then carefully sanitized and revealed to the population at large after elongated

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______________________________________________________________ periods of time. Little doubt remains that what people see, read, and hear on a daily basis influences their behaviours and attitudes, for better or worse, depending on their individual literacy skills. This becomes especially true when narrativised information is shocking or repeated ad nauseam, much as Bush’s pro-war rhetoric is. On the other hand, analysing alternatives to mainstream methods of conveying information about the war (blogs, in particular) allow one to gauge how freedom of speech – the cornerstone of the free nation – can survive, and in many ways thrive, during wartime. From the Vietnam War to Operation Desert Storm to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Americans have seen a dramatic shift in viewing combat. Diverse narratives and images have impacted how Americans interpret both their warriors’ actions and the war itself. Indeed, the ‘triumphant’ journalistic images of Desert Storm served as a means for George Bush, Sr., to proclaim that the United States had finally overcome the Vietnam Syndrome. But viewers of Desert Storm combat footage and news stories did not see, as they did with stage two, post-1968 Vietnam War combat footage and news stories, horrific images of combat carnage involving American soldiers in a lost war. Of course, American casualties were low in Desert Storm, but they did exist, just not for consumption by the general American viewing population. By the time the expedient war was over, casualty rates on all sides would become afterthoughts for the masses. Now, in the fourth full year of Iraqi Freedom, Americans are witnessing and sharing in a collective Vietnam-like shift in attitudes about the war. Public opinion has begun to turn against the war as seen in the 2006 November elections and opinion polls as well as in reactions to soldier casualties and scandals involving US soldiers (Abu Ghraib, for example). The ‘immediate’, Desert Storm-like positives that Americans received – and continue to receive from the Bush Administration – actually have begun to work against those in power that promoted them. At least in part, Americans can attribute this shift to the wealth of alternative narratives about the war, though the shift has yet to yield the sustained, stateside anti-war movement that came to define the Vietnam era or an agreed-upon withdrawal from Iraq. However, the more Bush beats his war drums, speaks positively of the efforts in Iraq, and looks vaingloriously toward the future, he cannot erase one thing Americans learned from Vietnam: That soldiers are dying for reasons unclear both to the soldiers who carry on in their absence and the nation’s citizens who observe from a distance. Much as Americans saw a ‘near-immediate’ victory in Desert Storm, now they see the once-positive, ‘victorious’ Bush Administration/mainstream media-driven narratives giving way to more realistic, and often tragic, accounts of the American war efforts.

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Notes 1

Kuma\Reality Games, Kuma LLC, 2007, accessed 4 April, 2007, <www.kumawar.com>. 2 ibid. One also can ‘fight’ in Afghanistan as well as Korea and Vietnam. 3 A publication of this nature is not necessarily new, narrative-wise. American warrior narratives have been published both by the ‘popular’ presses, such as F Schaeffer’s collection of letters from warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Letters from the Front: Letters Home from America’s Military Family, Carroll & Graf, New York, 2004, and by the ‘serious’ presses, such as T Wiener’s Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the Front Lines, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 2004. 4 R Goldman, ‘Erasing the pain of the past’. ABC News, 20 March 2007, accessed 2 April 2007, . 5 See M P Roth, Historical Dictionary of War Journalism, Greenwood Press, Westport (CT), 1997, p. 326. For a counter-argument to the ‘uncensored war’ theory, see P Robinson, ‘Researching US media-state relations and twenty-first century wars’, in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, S Allan and B Zeliger (eds), Routledge, London, 2004. 6 See J Garofoli and M B Stannard, ‘Flag-draped Coffin photos released’. SFGate.com, 29 April 2005, accessed 22 July 2007, . Also see G Zoroya, ‘Return of U.S. war dead kept solemn, secret’. USA Today, 30 December 2003, accessed 22 July 2007, . 7 S Allan, ‘The culture of distance: online reporting of the Iraq war’, in Allan and Zeliger (eds), p. 349. Allan refers to television coverage of Iraqi Freedom as having ‘effectively demonstrated the immediacy of real-time reporting’. 8 L S Eagleburger, C Kleber, S Livingston, & J Woodruff, ‘The CNN effect’. in The media and the War on Terrorism, S Hess and M Kalb (eds), Brookings Institution P, Washington, D.C., 2003. 9 See P Mellencamp, ‘Fearful thoughts: U.S. television since 9/11 and the wars in Iraq’, in Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the ‘War on Terror’, A Martin and P Petro (eds), Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (NJ), 2006. Also see J Neuman, Lights, Camera, War: Is Media Technology Driving International Politics?, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996. 10 See Allan, op. cit.

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See D Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, Westview Press, Boulder, 1992, and P Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992. 12 Sidney J. Furie has directed many action movies with war/combat themes, including the Vietnam War classic, The Boys in Company C (1978). 13 See S Aloisi’, ‘’Redacted’ stuns Venice’. Reuters.com, 31 August 2007, accessed 31 August 2007, . 14 See M Cieply, ‘When real bullets fly, movies bring war home’. NYTimes.com, 26 July 2007, accessed 27 July 2007, ; and C Collis, ‘Reporting for duty’. Entertainment Weekly, 30 March 2007, pp. 7-8. 15 See D Dadge, The War in Iraq and Why the Media Failed Us, Praeger Publishers, Westport (CT), 2006. 16 S D Reese, ‘Militarized journalism: framing dissent in the Persian Gulf wars’, in Allan and Zeliger (eds), p. 261. 17 See O Boyd-Barrett, ‘Understanding: the second casualty’, in Allan and Zeliger (eds), p. 31. 18 Embedded Live, Cinema Libre, 2005, T Robbins (dir.). 19 See H B Franklin, ‘From realism to virtual reality’ and D C Hallin, ‘Images of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf’, in Seeing Through the Media: the Persian Gulf War, S Jeffords and L Rabinovitz (eds), Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (NJ), 1994. Also see Boyd-Barrett. 20 See J A Kuypers, Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham (MD), 2006. 21 See F Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Penguin, New York, 2006. 22 Generation Kill, Putnam, New York, 2004, and Sister in a Band of Brothers: Embedded with the 101st Airborne in Iraq, Kansas University Press, Manhattan, 2005, respectively. 23 See Sir! No Sir!: The Suppressed Story of the GI movement to End the War in Vietnam, Docurama, 2005, D Zeiger (dir.). 24 A Barlow, The Rise of the Blogosphere, Praeger Publishers, Westport (CT), 2007, p. 160. 25 For a discussion of ‘adversarial’ journalist, especially during Vietnam, see D K Thussu & D Freedman, ‘Introduction’, to War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7, D K Thussu,and D Freedman (eds), Sage, London, 2003, p. 5. 26 See R Weller (AP), ‘Defense Dept. Blocking MySpace, YouTube’. Yahoo! News, 14 May 2007, accessed 14 May 2007,

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______________________________________________________________ and P Carter, ‘Literary Battle Fatigue’. Slate, 9 May 2007, accessed 9 May 2007, . 27 See ‘War book wins Booker blog prize’. BBC News, 14 May 2007, accessed 29 July 2007, < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology /6653781.stm>. 28 Both Buzzell’s and Burden’s blogs are still up and running, and in the case of Burden’s book, one can easily enter blog names in a Google search and have immediate access to that soldier’s blog. In addition, blog publishing has become a mini-phenomenon in that ‘alternative’ collections are appearing. For example, see Baghdad burning: girl blog from Iraq, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, New York, 2006, a collection of ‘Riverbend’s’ posts from the heart of war-torn Iraq. Riverbend is an Iraqi computer programmer who lives in Baghdad. Her blog first appeared in 2003. 29 C Hedges, ‘Accustomed to their own atrocities in Iraq, U.S. soldiers have become murderers’. AlterNet, 27 July 2007, accessed on 29 July 2007, .

Bibliography Allan, S., ‘The culture of distance: online reporting of the Iraq war’, in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, A. Allan & B. Zeliger (eds). Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 347-365. Aloisi, S., ‘‘Redacted’ stuns Venice’. Reuters.com, 2007, 31 August 2007. Accessible at . American soldiers, PeaceArch, 2005, Sidney J. Furie (dir.). Barlow, A., The Rise of the Blogosphere. Praeger Press, New York, 2007. Boyd-Barrett, O., ‘Understanding: the second casualty’, in Allan and Zeliger (eds), pp. 25-42. Burden, M., The Blog of War: Front-line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq andAfghanistan. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006.

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______________________________________________________________ Buzzell, C., My War: Killing Time in Iraq. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2005. Carter, P., ‘Literary battle fatigue’. .

Slate,

2007.

Accessible

at

Cieply, M., ‘When real bullets fly, movies bring war home’. NYTimes.com, 2007, 26 July 2007. Accessible at . Collis, C., ‘Reporting for duty’. Entertainment Weekly, 30 March 2007, pp. 7-8. Dadge, D., The War in Iraq and Why the Media Failed Us. Praeger Publishers, Westport (CT), 2006. Eagleburger, L.S,. Kleber C., Livingston S., & Woodruff, J., ‘The CNN effect’, in The Media and the War on Terrorism, S. Hess, & M. Kalb (eds). Brookings Institution P, Washington, D.C., 2003. Edelman, B. (ed), Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam.,The New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, New York, 1985. Embedded Live, Cinema Libre, 2005, T Robbins (dir.). Franklin, H. B., ‘From realism to virtual reality’, in Seeing Through the Media: the Persian Gulf War, S. Jeffords & L. Rabinovitz (eds). Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (NJ), 1994. Garafoli, J. & M. B. Stannard, ‘Flag-draped coffin photos released’. SFGate.com, 2005. Accessible at . Goldman, R., ‘Erasing the pain of the past’. ABC News, 20 March 2007. Accessible at . Hallin, D. C., ‘Images of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf’, in S Jeffords and L Rabinovitz (eds), pp. 45-58.

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______________________________________________________________ Hedges, C., ‘Accustomed to their own atrocities in Iraq, U.S. soldiers have become murderers’. AlterNet, 27 July 2007. Accessible at . Kellner, D., The Persian Gulf TV War. Westview Press, Boulder, 1992. Koepp, S. & Saporito , B., (eds), Time: War Commemorative Edition: 21 days to Baghdad: the inside story of how America won the war against Iraq. Time Books, New York, 2003. Kuma ,L. L. C., Kuma\reality games. Accessible at <www.kumawar.com>. Kuypers, J. A., Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham (MD), 2006. Mellencamp, P., ‘Fearful thoughts: U.S. television since 9/11 and the wars in Iraq, in Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the ‘War on Terror, A. Martin & P. Petro (eds). Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (NJ), 2006. Neuman, J., Lights, Camera, War:Is Media Technology Driving International Politics? St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996. Raddatz, M., The Long Road Home: a Story of War and Family. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2007. Rich, F., The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Penguin Press, New York, 2006. Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, New York, 2006. Reese, S. D., ‘Militarized journalism: framing dissent in the Persian Gulf Wars’, in Allan & Zeliger (eds), pp. 247-265. Robinson, P., ‘Researching US media-state relations and twenty-first century wars’, in Allan & Zeliger (eds), pp. 96-112. Roth, M. P., Historical Dictionary of War Journalism. Greenwood Press, Westport (CT), 1997.

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______________________________________________________________ Schaeffer, F. (ed.), Voices from the Front: Letters Home from America’s Military Family. Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2004. Skiba, K., Sister in a Band of Brothers: Embedded with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. University Press of Kansas, Manhattan, 2005. Sir! No sir!: The suppressed story of the GI movement to end the war in Vietnam,Docurama, 2005, D Zeiger (dir.). Taylor, P., War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992. Thussu, D. & Freedman, D., ‘Introduction’, in idem, War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7. Sage, London, 2003. ‘War book wins Blooker blog prize’. BBC News 14 May 2007,. Accessible at . Weller, R. (AP), ‘Defense Dept. Blocking MySpace, YouTube’. Yahoo! News, 2007, 14 May 2007,. Accessible at . Wiener, T. (ed), Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the Front Lines. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 2004. Wright, E., Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2004. Zoroya, G., ‘Return of U.S. war dead kept solemn, secret’. USA Today, 2003. Accessible at .

Ethical Crossings in War Writing: Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Sri Lankan Civil War Elke Rosochacki Abstract This chapter offers a reading of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost - set during the Sri Lankan civil war - in which the ethical crossings that are entailed in operations of both beneficence and destruction conducted by parties at war with one another is examined. Ondaatje's novel exposes the ethical complexity and ambiguity that mark human relations during a time of war and as such poses a significant challenge to the global ideology of justice and the universal human rights discourse upheld by institutions of the West such as the United Nations. Not only are the participants of war and those directly affected by the work of its destruction implicated in the ethical disaster of war, but so are those who occupy the position of observer, independent investigator, reporter or indeed anyone who delivers an account of the event of war by means of text or visual representation. According to Giorgio Agamben the ethical imperative to bear testimony to extreme events such as war or genocide can paradoxically be undertaken only from an ethically compromised position or ‘grey zone’. It is just such an ethical ‘grey zone’, occupied by writer and independent observer alike, that Ondaatje exposes in Anil's Ghost.1 Key Words: aesthetics, Agamben, Anil’s Ghost, Bauman, ethics, globalisation, Levinas, Ondaatje, war writing, witnessing. ***** The condition that ‘truth alone is the justification of any fiction which makes the least claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture of men and women of its time’2 as set out by Joseph Conrad in the preface to his political novel Under Western Eyes may equally, I should like to suggest, apply to literary fiction today. The question then arises, what form of truth does Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost offer the people of Sri Lanka whose experiences in the continuing war are the subject of this book? Furthermore, what kind of truth does this fictive work bring to the global readership who, through the act of witnessing the devastation of war from afar, becomes implicated in the disaster? In posing these questions I hope to uncover a series of issues that relate to the specific, historically determined conditions that shape ethical relations within contemporary wars.

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______________________________________________________________ In particular, I wish to examine the ethical position occupied by the war writer under current global conditions. My understanding of ethics is informed by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who locates the ethical in the face to face encounter between self and other. Ethics is not understood as a set of ideas or moral precepts but as lived in the bodily relation between people in the world. That Anil’s Ghost does not deliver truth in terms of an empirical account of Sri Lanka’s protracted internecine war is made evident by its most noticeable omissions. The reader is not furnished with any hard facts about the conflict, there are no clear demarcations between the warring groups, political objectives are never mentioned and no attempt is made to adjudicate between just or unjust causes. For this reason, it would seem that the novel’s reception has been both ambivalent and complicated. Although receiving laudatory reviews and garnering several literary prizes in the months following its publication in Canada, it did come under fire from some quarters in the West.3 Tom Leclair, in The Nation, denounces the ‘author’s apolitical gaze’ as ‘irresponsible’4 given the violence of the turmoil in Sri Lanka. Writing for the New Leader, Tova Reich goes further still in her dismissal of the novel by claiming that its ‘existence in the present is essentially little more than an enchantingly rendered evocation of a troubled remote place, unfamiliar landscapes, unusual occupations and rites, and highminded truisms’.5 The perception that the novel’s overt aestheticism, its eschewal of facts and seeming lack of political engagement are at odds with the severity of the Sri Lankan situation is registered with even greater urgency by several ‘local’ or Sri Lankan-born diasporic critics, who as Chelva Kanaganayakam points out in her discussion of the novel’s dichotomous East/ West reception, ‘see the novel as a shameless act of appropriation, essentialism, distortion or blatant prejudice’.6 The grounds of the novel’s reception are thus straddled uneasily across two vastly different life worlds: the affluent and politically dominant West and the war-torn island of Sri Lanka, explicitly marked as the novel’s referential ground. For this reason, any claims of truth or relevance that the novel may be expected to bring towards the understanding of a seemingly intractable civil war is complicated. Before discussing the position of the war writer positioned between, on the one hand, the literary text as the domain of the aesthetic and the world of lived realities as the domain of ethics on the other, I look at the particular nature of war as disclosed by the novel itself and as it has been observed in various places in the world today. What the novel makes clear from the beginning is the understanding that the longstanding and still unresolved civil conflict in Sri Lanka cannot be organized into any tidy binaries in which the just and the unjust or victims and perpetrators are clearly distinguishable. Unlike the novel’s protagonist

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______________________________________________________________ Anil, who after living in the West for more than a decade allows herself ‘to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze’ and for whom the ostensibly objective procurement of forensic fact is tantamount to uncovering political truth, the novel insists on presenting an altogether ‘more complicated world morally’.7To the newcomer or outsider the moral chaos or incomprehensibility of war is experienced as a shock of sorts. This recalls Primo Levi’s description of the disorientation and surprise felt by the new detainees on their arrival in a Nazi concentration camp. Expecting the Lager to contain a ‘terrible but decipherable world’,8 they encountered instead a situation which: did not conform to any model, the enemy was all around but also inside, the ‘we’ lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier, but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us.9 Similarly disorientated, the Sri Lankan doctor in Anil’s Ghost, working in the ‘war rooms’ of Colombo’s Accident Services Hospital during the crisis, hopes in vain to discern ‘some kind of human order’10 within the chaos of his unassimilated traumatic experience: ‘The only reasonable constant was that there would be more bodies tomorrow - post-stabbings, post-landmines. Orthopaedic trauma, punctured lungs, spinal cord injuries . . . .’11 Within a world undone by the disaster of war, the local archaeologist in the novel is equally adamant that nobody can assume a position unencumbered by the fetters of guilt: ‘Now we all have blood on our clothes’,12 he explains. For ‘Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side . . .. There is no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are’:13 It was a Hundred Years’ War with modern weaponry, and backers in the sidelines in safe countries, war sponsored by gun- and drug-runners. It became evident that political enemies were secretly joined in financial arms deals. ‘The reason for war was war.’14 The reasons for war thus collapsed in the above tautology signal the novel’s resistance to political solutions as the most useful means of dealing with the crisis. This is underscored by the failure of Anil’s UN sponsored mission to pin down political truth by means of her positivist forensic investigation. It had been while completing her training as a forensic specialist in the United States, the novel tells us, that Anil had ‘become caught up in the application of the forensic sciences to human rights’.15 Such an ideological ‘application’ of scientific discourse in order to deliver

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______________________________________________________________ irrefutable and objective ‘truths’ in the service of politics is debunked by the novel. The ‘permanent truths, same for Colombo as for Troy’16 that Anil was looking for in her investigation of bones were clearly not to be unearthed in the killing fields of Sri Lanka. The idea of a war tribunal, set up ‘under pressure, and to placate trading partners in the West’,17 and to which Anil’s ‘facts’ were delivered, is equally discredited and along with this, the notion that the ends of justice are met by meting out blame and retribution. The law issued in the form of the universal human rights discourse enshrined by the ‘international authority of Geneva’ in 1948 is rendered impotent or out of place within the splintered and altered realities of this civil war: ‘So much for the international authority of Geneva. The grand logos on letterheads and European office doors meant nothing where there was a crisis.’18The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes that ‘jurists well know, law is not directed towards the establishment of justice. Nor is it directed at the verification of truth. Law is solely directed toward judgement, independent of truth and justice.’19 Anil, as emissary of the law given by Geneva, must then discover within the altogether more complex reality of the Sri Lankan civil war that ‘law is on the side of power and not truth’20 and that any form of judgement the international tribunal might come to cannot be equated with justice. This falls in with Agamben’s cautionary reminder that ethical categories are frequently, but erroneously, conflated with the juridical. 21 The right to assume the role of judgement in the extreme situation of war by an outsider is also called into question by Primo Levi, who remarks that the ‘condition of the offended does not exclude culpability, and this is often objectively serious, but I know of no human tribunal to which one could delegate the judgement’.22 If such a judgement is to be undertaken at all, Levi suggests, it would be a ‘judgement that we would only like to entrust to those who found themselves in similar circumstances’.23 Levinas holds a similar view: ‘Justice is impossible without the one that renders it finding himself in proximity. His function is not limited to the . . . subsuming of particular cases under the general rule. The judge is not outside the conflict, but is in the midst of proximity.’24 Judgement is therefore to be contained within what Levinas calls the face to face relation, namely within the domain of ethics, and is not to be shifted into the sphere of politics. What the novel offers as insight or truth is evidently not given in terms of the empirical or the juridical. Its concern is rather with what it calls the ‘archaeological surround of fact’25 or, in theoretical terms, the conditions that underlie what can be asserted about a given state of affairs in the world. In particular, it seeks to uncover the ethical relations that women and men are cast into during a time of war; and, along with this, what defines ‘the ethical’ within the specific, historically determined conditions that prevail in a war of the globalisation era.

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______________________________________________________________ No longer waged between sovereign states, such wars are, according to Zygmunt Bauman, best described as ‘hit-and-run affairs’26 conducted by smaller mobile military outfits or war machines27 that operate regionally as independent economic units sustained by a transnational exchange in arms and local resources. Their power is entrenched by exercising the right to kill and to let live over the local civilian population, turning such geographical enclaves ruled over by war machines ‘into privileged spaces of war and death’.28 By deploying the notion of biopower as developed by Michel Foucault and recently taken up by Giorgio Agamben, the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe provides a detailed analysis of the workings of biopolitical power in contemporary wars in his ‘Necropolitics’. In Anil’s Ghost such war machines, as described by Mbembe, are seen to operate not just as agents of destruction but also as agents of humanitarian beneficence. Accounts are given in which death-dealing squads are transformed into life-saving outfits within the contingencies of war. In this way the novel underscores its position that no clear lines are to be drawn between the innocent and the guilty. Such a blurring of distinctions is exemplified in the following incident involving the doctor Gamini, who functions throughout the novel as a flawed but nevertheless exemplary ethical subject. While on holiday at a seaside resort to recover from his speed addiction and symptoms of over-work, he is abducted by armed ‘guerrillas’. As the ‘tourist who was supposed to be a doctor’,29 he is then brought into a makeshift ward to operate on wounded soldiers, many of them little more than children. As he tends their injuries, Gamini is forced to remind himself that ‘[b]ombs on crowded streets, in bus stations, paddy fields, schools had been set by people like this’.30 Nevertheless, after several hours of work he orders ‘ten large meals to be shared among them and made sure the cook put it on his bill. This had an influence.’31 Gamini’s gesture of hospitality towards the war-time killers, which overrides the strictly moral considerations of the situation, underscores the novel’s general orientation towards ethics over morality. By showing that the issues of morality in the lived experience of war are superseded by the material needs more immediately at hand -- as well as complicating the ready distinctions between guilt and innocence so habitually imposed by outsiders -- the novel opens new ways of thinking through the dilemmas and impasses of war. The consistent foregrounding of the visceral reality of war calls to mind Elaine Scarry’s influential analysis of the structure of war, in which she maintains that the main purpose and outcome of war ‘is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves’.32 Although this fact is self-evident and incontestable, she writes, it is nevertheless frequently hidden from view or elided in accounts of war. The novel’s similar identification of the human

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______________________________________________________________ body as the chief marker of war is both apt and timely. On a theoretical level it allows for an analysis in which the notion of biopower can most usefully be deployed. That the complex and ambivalent workings entailed in the exercise of biopower include both destructive and beneficent corporeal transactions has been pointed out with regard to the operations of contemporary war machines. These corporeal relations, ranging between the destruction and the preservation of human lives, also clearly belong to the domain of ethics, thought of not in the traditional sense, as a set of abstract moral precepts, but understood in the terms set out by Levinas, namely as the embodied relation between self and other, the face to face encounter. The event of war, according to Elaine Scarry, is ‘the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate’,33 is then one, which throws what can be understood as the ethical into sharp relief. Thus, by placing ethics alongside the operations of biopower, both instantiated by actions that range between the destruction and preservation of human bodies, the novel is able to forge a conceptual inroad into the dilemma of war outside the conventional realm of morality. So far, it has been argued that the categories of moral life applicable to a non-threatened life world are rendered obsolete under the extreme conditions of war. Furthermore, the attempt to understand the conditions under which women and men are forced to live and act at such a time is best undertaken by locating the project of such thinking in the domain of the ethical, which includes the workings of biopower made so crudely manifest in a time of war. Both these concepts are deployed in Agamben’s philosophical engagement with the phenomenon of the Nazi death camps, which he theorizes as the fundamental paradigm of biopolitical power. He notes that in the falling away of ordinary moral life, a ‘new ethical element’ comes to the fore. His observations are based on the accounts of survivors and draws mainly from the writings of Primo Levi. In his collection of essays, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi describes the conditions in the Lager as giving rise to an ethical ‘grey zone’. This is a situation, Levi writes, in which the ‘long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner’34 comes loose and where, in the words of Agamben, ‘the oppressed becomes the oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim. A grey incessant alchemy in which good and evil and, along with them, all the metal of traditional ethics reach their point of fusion’.35 Anil’s Ghost discloses a world in which the distinctions between the guilty and the innocent have become equally blurred. In a similar way, the relation between the novel itself and the world beyond to which it makes reference is marked by ethical ambivalence. Not only are the participants of war and those directly affected by the work of its destruction implicated in the ethical disaster of war, the novel

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______________________________________________________________ suggests, but those who occupy the position of observer, independent investigator, reporter or fictional writer are also drawn into the ambit of this troubled territory. As it has done so far, the discussion locates itself both within and outside the margins of the text, with the aim of showing that the war writer -- and in the final instance the reader too -- is subject to the pressures of ethical responsibility that arise within the present era of globalisation. That this is indeed so has already been intimated in the discussion of the novel’s divided and troubled reception across the different political and material conditions of the Western and non-Western life worlds. Such an ambivalent ethical position, undermining or complicating the position of writer and independent observer alike, is occupied in the novel by the figure Anil, the UN forensic investigator whose ‘long-distance gaze’ of the Sri Lankan crisis is implicitly shared by Michael Ondaatje. Both are expatriate Sri Lankans who visit the country with the express intention of observing the war in order to write about it. The enterprise of conducting such an investigation into a conflict abroad rests, however, rest on shifting grounds. First, the objectivity and independence that Anil assumes in the role of scientific investigator and human rights activist is shown to be spurious. This has already been pointed out with regard to Anil’s forensic investigation and the failure of the war tribunal she has been sent to participate in. Second, the novel also makes it abundantly clear, as Theresa Derrickson convincingly shows, that Western states have material interests in peripheral wars and that the human rights discourse is not infrequently deployed as the ideological front of Western expansionism or becomes inadvertently implicated in its project.36 The novel also raises an equally serious objection to the universalism the West is inclined to assume, as well as to its ideological deployment of scientific empiricism to serve its own political ends. The claims of objectivity, impartiality and the right to make moral judgements by the West are rejected in no uncertain terms. By way of its meta-fictional utterances the novel also evinces an awareness that the author who produces a fictional account of an ongoing war outside their own territory cannot be excluded from the culpability the West is prompted to acknowledge here: ‘American movies, English books – remember how they all end?’ asked Gamini that night. ‘The American or Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war to all purposes is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of

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______________________________________________________________ Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’37 Anil's story plays out to the predictable end of an already outworn script as she sticks to the part she has so passionately taken on. As her project is sunk by the reality of the Sri Lankan war, and her own life is in danger, she, like others before her, ‘gets on the plane and leaves.’ In an interview with Maya Yaggi, Ondaatje admits that ‘I didn't want to have that kind of ending’.38 But just as Ondaatje cannot write Anil out of such a plot, he cannot easily escape the ethical dilemma she necessarily faces as a human rights activist. Locked into ‘the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing,’ Ondaatje too, will ‘Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’ His literary success and the material rewards to be had from his project will, in effect, have been gained by disclosing and aestheticising the suffering of others whose life-world he has encountered only in passing. A similar insight is offered by the war reporter and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi when he observes that it is not the names of the war victims that will be writ large in his news report, but ‘that it will be his own name on top of the newschapter page, and, when the time comes, on the cover of the book he will extract from all that’.39 This makes good on Hegel’s claim that ‘History is made less by those who make it than by those who tell about it.’40 A further point raised by the novel regarding the ethical compromise entailed in the position of the outside investigator or writer arises out of the discrepancy between the considerable material well-being of those living in the West and the raw struggle for survival of most Sri Lankans. By witnessing the disaster of war and then leaving the victims to their inescapable and harsh fate, the outside observer is enacting a desertion of sorts. Registering the discomfort of leaving those behind who are not at liberty to leave the country at war, Bernard-Henri Levi observes that war reporters like himself, humanitarians and the Blue Berets know well that the instant they leave the war zone, despite all risks they may have taken, and whatever return may be planned (‘by parachute, yes, but with exit guaranteed’) marks the ‘the limit of [their] fraternity’.41 In an argument with Anil, Sarath warns implicitly that the all too clearly demarcated ‘limit of fraternity’ upheld by outside investigators and reporters, undermines the authenticity and value of their work especially within the country whose war or humanitarian disaster is the object of their investigative efforts: ‘You know, I'd believe your arguments more if you lived here’, he said. ‘You can't just slip in, make a discovery and leave.’ ‘You want me to censor myself’ [Anil replies].

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______________________________________________________________ ‘I want you to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you'll be like one of those journalists who file reports about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame.’ 42 By means of his meta-fictional commentary, however, Ondaatje does in a way ‘censor [himself’ by means of his meta-fictional commentary. Anil evidently feels she should, but does not. The writer’s self-reflexive gesture goes some way towards dismantling the moral high ground assumed in ‘the last two hundred years of Western political writing’ but does not provide a complete safeguard against the ‘literary tourism’ he may be charged with here. In an interview with Maya Yaggi, Ondaatje concedes that ‘it's a real problem. I am sure I am as guilty as anyone’.43 Ondaatje is, however, not alone in his predicament, as it is one that encumbers the now ubiquitous world traveller or tourist who, according to Bauman, embodies a particular mode of being in the present world of globalisation. The contemporary tourist, Bauman writes, ‘lives his extra-territoriality as a privilege, as independence, as the right to be free, free to choose; as a licence to restructure the world’.44 That Ondaatje has claimed such privileges, rights and an independence of a kind -- which makes ‘him as guilty as anyone’ -- is brought squarely into the open and need no longer be a sticking point as such. Of greater interest here are the questions raised about the nature of authorship and the ethics of writing entailed in this situation. On a pragmatic level, it would appear that such ‘extra-territoriality’ as Ondaatje has made claim to is indeed a necessary condition that makes the actual writing and publication of a novel like Anil's Ghost possible in the first place. On a philosophical level, such ‘extra-territoriality’ is necessitated by more complex workings, which may be understood within the framework of biopower and which disclose, on closer examination, an entirely different set of ethical dynamics regarding the role of the author in this situation. Agamben traces such a dynamic in the writings of Primo Levi who, as survivor of a death camp, was able to return to the outside world to tell of what he had witnessed on the inside. The fact of his return does however, Levi writes, detract from his status as a ‘true witness’. He explains as follows: We who were favoured by fate tried, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate, but also that of the others, indeed the drowned; but this was a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties’, the story of things seen close at hand, but not experienced personally. The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to describe his own

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______________________________________________________________ death. Even if they had chapter and pen, the drowned could not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy.45 The act of witnessing and delivering testimony - and indeed any act of writing about an extreme manifestation of destructive biopower such as that seen in the Nazi death camps and seen again, albeit in mutated form, in the mass destruction of human life in contemporary wars - is caught in a moral double bind. This is so because such testimonies can be only, as Levi writes, a ‘discourse on behalf of a third party’. The responsibility of testimony thus rests, ironically, on those who are not the ‘true witnesses’, namely the survivors or the returnees, the literary tourist or journalist, the war photographer and foreign correspondent, the ones in short, ‘favoured by fate’ or by a favourable passport and whose exit from the war zone or death camp is thus made possible. The privilege of survival, escape, independence or extraterritoriality is in turn paid for by carrying the responsibility of speaking for those ‘who saw the Gorgon’ and ‘have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute’.46 According to Agamben, the workings of biopower produce, by means of inflicting severe bodily suffering and mass death, ‘the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios’.47 The imperative to fill the space left open by the mute or forever silenced ‘true witness’ must then be heeded by an ‘outsider’, an ‘extraterritorial’, who delivers testimony on behalf of others. ‘Testimony is thus always an act of an ‘author’, writes Agamben, ‘it always implies an essential duality in which an insufficiency or an incapacity is completed or made valid’.48 It may then be argued that the imperative to deliver testimony founds the very the notion of authorship itself and that the aesthetic practice of writing is grounded in the ethical imperative of being for the other. Agamben also points out that authoring can never be an act of creation out of nothing, but is a ‘setting into being’ according to the original meaning of the word ‘augere’. He elaborates as follows: Every creator is always a co-creator, every author a coauthor. The act of the auctor completes the act of an incapable person, giving strength or proof to what in itself lacks it and granting life to what could not live alone. It can conversely be said that the imperfect act or incapacity precedes an auctor's act and that the imperfect act completes and gives meaning to the word of the auctorwitness. An author's act that claims to be valid on its own is

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______________________________________________________________ nonsense, just as the survivor's testimony has truth and reason for being only if it is completed by the one who cannot bear witness.49 The extensive list of acknowledgements that appends Anil’s Ghost points to the fact that Ondaatje's text has indeed been assembled from diverse fragments of lived experiences and accounts collected from various sources directly related to the ongoing war in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje thus undertakes just such a task of speaking on behalf of others whose incomplete or inarticulate accounts provide the grounds of his multi-voiced text. Distancing himself from writing that amounts to what he calls an ‘advertisement of the self’, he tells Maya Jaggi in an interview that ‘I believe books are communal acts’, and that like Herodotus he too believes that writing is a process of ‘receiving stories and then structuring them into shape’:50 You go down unexpected alleys, you discover a responsibility to diverse voices, and realize you owe them the deepest intricacy. Anil’s Ghost - of all my books - was the one where I felt that responsibility most.51 The kind of ‘responsible’ writing practiced by Ondaatje in this case establishes the literary text as an ethical space in which the experience of war is brought into the open and the main outcome of war, the dead and injured human body, lodges its ethical claim on the consciousness of the reader. The text, then, orients the reader towards the ethical as well as disclosing what may be considered a particular ‘truth’ about war. So far, it can be said that the ethical and the aesthetic are fundamentally linked or grounded in one another. This may be elaborated as follows: because the experiences of war and atrocity are of an extreme nature, they can on the whole not be conveyed adequately in language of the everyday and must unfold in newly apprehended linguistic forms, namely in aesthetic or literary language. Agamben explains that ‘poets - witnesses found language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking’.52 Access to the domain of ethics is then achieved by means of such an aesthetic ‘founding’ of language. At this point, the question which surely needs asking is this. Can such aestheticised ‘remnants’ or reformulated fragments of the real horror that constitute the experience and the spectacle of war brought into view by means of an artistic ‘structuring . . . into shape’ - as Ondaatje describes the process whereby he moulds people’s stories into his fiction - actually prompt or motivate ethical action in the real world? In other words, does the literary text or the work of art offered as testimony to the horror of war not perhaps open a space for the ethical only to close it off in the very act of doing so?

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______________________________________________________________ J. M. Bernstein mounts a most compelling critique of Agamben’s idea of witnessing understood as aestheticising the ‘remnants’ of human disaster. He concedes that ‘recording, documenting and accurately portraying the extent and character of these atrocities is itself a moral form of work’ and that such works ‘become a touchstone of wrongness, of where the ethical begins’.53 There are however, he argues, several elements of such work ‘which suppress the very ethical space it means to elaborate’.54 To substantiate this claim Bernstein discusses the photographic work of James Nachtwey published by Phaidon Press in a volume titled Inferno. The collection of photographs constitutes, he writes, a ‘lacerating and relentless survey of the horrors of the present’ in which each of the ‘exquisite images’ provides a ‘piercing record of things broken and ruined, dismembered and dead’. 55 In a certain sense Ondaatje’s aesthetic approach to the disaster of war that holds the dead and injured body human body in such close view subscribes to a similar ethos of witnessing. For the purposes of the present argument, I therefore allow the criticism levelled at Nachtwey’s photographic work to bear on Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. Bernstein makes the point that there is a distinctly negative dynamic that unfolds in beholding such a spectacle of horror that is akin to the negative element in viewing sexual pornography. This element, he explains, ‘derives from [the latter’s] framing of its recruitment of the female body for the delectation of the male gaze’. The ‘pornography of horror,’ in turn, involves in an analogous way the ‘framing of devastation for the moral satisfaction of the liberal gaze’.56 On a theoretical level the troubling aspects of the ‘liberal aestheticisation of horror’ have to do, according to Bernstein, with the abstraction, isolation, decontextualisation and detemporalisation of human devastation brought into view by the work of art. The aesthetic event in which the ‘remnant’ of horror is dislocated from its context (‘the result of barbarity without barbarity itself’57) is framed, bound and in effect closed off within the aesthetic space of the gallery or within the pages of the literary text so that what it may stand in danger of feeding is ‘our sentimental attachment to our moral sensitivity’58 rather than our ability for ethical reflection and action. Although there must be an ethic of witnessing, Bernstein writes, it cannot be viewed as the ground of the ethical in itself. Theodor Adorno’s imperative in Negative Dialectics that we arrange our thoughts and actions in a new way following the disaster of World War II, so that an event like Auschwitz will not repeat itself - is well served by the art work as venue for ethical reflection, according to Bernstein. But it should not be forgotten that the ethical response for Adorno, and certainly for Levinas, I should like to add, demands a bodily orientation towards the suffering of others: ‘Dealing with it discursively would be an outrage’, Adorno says, ‘for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum’.59 Just how the reader of a novel like Anil’s Ghost, cast as witness to the suffering of others exposed to the visceral onslaught of war

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______________________________________________________________ in distant quarters of the world, is to respond both reflectively and bodily opens the final point of discussion. Zygmunt Bauman writes that in the ‘incurably polyphonic world of ‘liquid modernity’, 60 inundated by visual media and news reports and in which occasionally literary fictions also bring the human disasters of the day into view, we are all cast as witnesses to what is going on in far away places, be this virtually or not. Thus like the war writer, literary tourist, photographer, reporter and human rights worker (or indeed because of them), the reader too is framed as witness and bystander to the suffering of others across the globe. For Bauman the distinction between bystander and perpetrator is at best a legalistic one. What may therefore be inferred is that the reader occupies a similarly ‘grey’ ethical zone as has been mapped out for the war writer. ‘Responsibility for human misfortune, however distant the misery may be from its witnesses, can hardly be denied – at least not with any degree of conviction’, 61 writes Bauman. This he says gives rise to a particularly grave ethical dilemma in the present: Ethically motivated and informed global action has no adequately global instruments. In the absence of proper levers and vehicles of effective action, we all seem to be each one of us individually and all the individuals together - cast in the role of bystanders and bound to carry that guilt for an unbearably long time to come .62 The only way out the ethical quandary outlined here is, Bauman suggests, by means of contributing towards a form of ‘committed speech,’ as envisaged by Hannah Arendt, in the hope that it might eventually give rise to responsible action, however nebulous the possibility may seem at present. Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is arguably a work of such commitment, positing as it does a tentative blueprint for a new ethical awareness and suggesting other ways of facing human disaster in the present time. Apart from risking the crossfire of global politics, the novel shows an uncommon awareness of its paradoxical incapacity to speak and the ethical compromise upon which its enterprise rests. Despite laying bare the twisted trajectories of its project, the novel cannot, however, untangle the ambivalences and irreconcilable contradictions that mark its position. ‘There is no decent place to stand in a massacre’,63 as Leonard Cohen reminds us - and as both the reader and writer of Anil’s Ghost must come to know.

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Notes 1

I wish to thank the University of Stellenbosch Department of English for assisting me financially to attend the fourth Global Conference on War, Virtual War and Human Security in Budapest. 2 J Conrad, Under Western Eyes, Penguin Books, London, 1985, (1910), p. 50. 3 C Kanaganayakam lists these prizes as including the Governor-General’s award in Canada, the Prix Médicis for foreign literature, and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. Anil’s Ghost was also the co-recipient of the prestigious Giller Prize. See idem, ‘In Defence of Anil’s Ghost’, Ariel, vol. 37, 2006, p. 22. 4 T Leclair, ‘The Sri Lankan Patients’, Nation, vol. 270. 2000, p. 32. 5 T Reich, ‘All Those Lost Voices’, New Leader, vol. 8. 2000, p. 38. 6 Kanaganayakam, p. 25. 7 M Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, Picador, London, 2000, p. 11. 8 P Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Abacus, London, 1989, p. 23. 9 Levi, p. 23. 10 Levi, p. 128. 11 Levi, p. 120. 12 Levi, p. 48. 13 Levi, p. 17. 14 Levi, p. 43. 15 Levi, p. 145. 16 Levi, p. 64. 17 Levi, p. 16. 18 Levi, p. 29. 19 G Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books, New York, 2002, p. 18. 20 Ondaatje, p. 44. 21 Ondaatje, p. 18. 22 Levi, p. 29. 23 Levi, p. 29. 24 E Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Marthinus Nijhof, The Hague, 1981, p. 248. 25 Ondaatje, p. 44. 26 Cited in Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, vol.15, 2003, p. 30. 27 The term used by Mbembe is taken from G Deleuze and F Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrenie, Editions de minuit, Paris, 1980, p. 434- 527. 28 Deleuse and Guattari, p. 33. 29 Ondaatje, p. 218.

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Ondaatje, p. 220. Ondaatje, p. 220. 32 E Scarry, The Body in Pain/ The Making and the Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1985, p. 62. 33 Scarry, p. 71. 34 Levi, p. 60. 35 Agamben, p. 21. 36 T Derrickon, ‘Will the ‘Un-Truth’ Set You Free? A Critical Look at the Global Human-Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’, Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 15, 2004, pp. 131-152. 37 Ondaatje, pp. 285-286. 38 S Nasta (ed.), Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, Routledge, London and New York, 2004, p. 253. 39 B-H Levi, War, Evil and the End of History, Melville House Publishing, London, 2004, p. 276. 40 B-H Levi, p. 291. 41 B-H Levi, p. 173. 42 Ondaatje, p. 44. 43 Nasta (ed.), p. 253. 44 Z Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, p. 241. 45 Levi, pp. 33-34. 46 Levi, cited in Agamben, p. 33. 47 Agamben, p. 156. 48 Agamben, p. 150. 49 Agamben, p. 150. 50 Nasta (ed.), p. 260. 51 Ondaatje, ‘Pale Flags: Reflections on Writing Anil’s Ghost’, Wasafiri, vol. 24, 2004, p. 62. 52 Agamben, p. 161. 53 J M Bernstein, ‘Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror’, Parallax, vol. 10, 2004, p. 11. 54 Bernstein, p. 3. 55 Bernstein, p. 10. 56 Bernstein, p. 11. 57 Bernstein, p. 12. 58 Bernstein, p. 12. 59 T Adorno, cited in Bernstein, p. 15. 60 Z Bauman, ‘From Bystander to Actor’, Journal of Human Rights, vol. 2, 2003, p. 138. 61 Bauman, ‘Bystander’, p. 139. 62 Bauman, ‘Bystander’, p. 148. 63 L Cohen, ‘The Captain’. 31

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Bernstein, J. M., ‘Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror’. Parallax, vol. 10. 2004, pp. 2 – 16. Conrad, J., Under Western Eyes,. Penguin Books, London, 1985. Derrickon, D., ‘Will the ‘Un-Truth’ Set You Free? A Critical Look at the Global Human-Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’. Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 15, 2004, pp. 131 – 152. Jaggi, M. ‘Michael Ondaatje in Conversation with Maya Jaggi’. Wasafiri, vol. 32, 2000, pp. 5 – 11. Kanaganayakam, C., ‘In Defence of Anil’s Ghost’. Ariel, vol. 37, 2006, pp. 5 – 22. Leclair, T., ‘The Sri Lankan Patients’. Nation , vol. 270, 2000, pp. 31 – 33. Levi, B.-H., War, Evil and the End of History. Melville House Publishing, London, 2004. Levi, P., The Drowned and the Saved. Abacus, London, 1989. Levinas, E., Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Marthinus Nijhof, The Hague, 1981. Mbembe, A., ‘Necropolitics’. Public Culture, vol. 15, 2003, pp. 11 – 40. Nasta, S. (ed), Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. Routledge, London and New York, 2004. Ondaatje, M., Anil's Ghost. Picador, London, 2000.

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, ‘Pale Flags: Reflections on Writing Anil's Ghost’. Wasafiri, vol. 24, 2004, pp. 61 – 62. Reich, T., ‘All Those Lost Voices’. New Leader , vol. 8, 2000, pp. 37 – 39. Scarry, E., The Body in Pain/ The Making and the Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1985.

The Unlisted Character: Representing War on Stage Julia Boll Abstract This chapter discusses the theatrical representation of both the individual and war in a time of disintegrating national states and the dramatisation of destruction versus survival as the driving forces on stage. Springing from the discussion about ‘new wars’ in the age of globalisation, it is demonstrated here how these ‘new wars’ also bring forth new plays about war, illustrated by Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) and Zinnie Harris’s Midwinter (2004). Both works incorporate the experience of a continuous state of war and terror into the dramatic text. Their characters struggle for survival in the midst of nameless wars controlling their lives, confronted with random enmities and absurd frontlines. The surreal and apocalyptic visions presented in both works mirror the experiences of those who have lived through war: it seems to happen far from reality, ‘far away’. The chapter examines the possible connections between the results of political and sociological research and the artistic representation of war and warlike conflicts on stage. Leading away from the more common theatrical antagonisms between the dramatic characters, the new war plays show their protagonists in confrontation with an unlisted character: the war machine. Key Words: Drama, Far Away, Midwinter, new wars on stage, war play ***** War, it seems, is no longer the exceptional state, but ‘the primary organising principle of society’, thus apparently returning to Heraclitus’ observation that ‘war is the father of all things’.1 In a study on empire and global war it has been suggested that instead of progressing into a peaceful future, we have slipped back in time into the nightmare of a perpetual and indeterminate state of war.2 It is thus of particular interest to examine how the performing arts, which have always been sensitive and receptive to society’s currents and fears, react to the present circumstances. This chapter examines how the observations and – in the field of political science at times quite disputed – new theories of contemporary war-scholars are mirrored by the representation of war and conflict on the contemporary British stage. The two plays to be compared show people who threaten to lose their integrity in the traumatising situation of civil war. They imply that war, especially civil war, does not always happen ‘far away’, but could very well break out in the midst of our homelands. The focal point is not heroes, but survivors, whatever survival might mean for the individual.

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______________________________________________________________ In the past decade, a number of scholars in international political relations have discussed the possibility of a new form of war, the so-called ‘new wars’, a term prominently used in this context by Mary Kaldor. She makes out disintegration of states as the context of these wars, which are fought by networks of state and non-state actors, ‘where battles are rare and where most violence is directed against civilians as a consequence of counter-insurgency tactics or ethnic cleansing’, characterised by the breakdown of distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, legitimate violence and criminality.3 It is the aim of this chapter to demonstrate how these new wars also produce new plays about war. Tragedy, argues the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, was not born out of the spirit of music,4 but originates from politics and war. The first drama known, but not handed down to us, had been provoked by war, by a political catastrophe: Phrynichus’ The Capture of Miletus (ca. 492 BC), which re-enacted for the state of Athens the fall of a flourishing Ionian metropolis, the murder of the men, and the barbarian evacuation of the women and children.5 The first written record of Western theatre tradition can be found in Aeschylus’ The Persians (ca. 472 BC), which treats the Persians’ defeat in the Battle of Salamis.6 The status of war as a subject for drama, however, has changed. While William Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599)7 has long been regarded as the ‘benchmark war play’ in British theatre, Shakespeare did not write a single play on contemporary conflict. The wars depicted in his work either concern foreign nations, or they lie in the past – often both. Succeeding playwrights have largely followed his example.8 Throughout the centuries, many plays have used war as a backdrop, but it rarely constitutes subject matter. But there are exceptions. In 2000, Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away confronts the British audiences with the possibility of war in their home country, followed by Zinnie Harris, who in Midwinter (2004) explores the fragile peace after civil war Total War: Caryl Churchill, Far Away (2000) Caryl Churchill’s allegorically encoded Far Away had its world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London on November 24, 2000. In shortly under one hour, one of the most significant British political playwrights conjured a grotesque dystopia on an Orwellian scale. The drama is divided into three acts. In the first, young Joan accidentally witnesses violent assaults outside of her aunt Harper’s farmhouse: people are loaded into a truck, there is blood on the floor, and someone is being hit. Harper convinces her niece that in fact something revolutionary and good is happening on the farm. In the second act, the now older Joan works in a hat factory. She and her colleague Todd design elaborate hats, whose purpose is revealed in the middle of the act: prisoners 1.

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______________________________________________________________ exhibit the hats during a bizarre death march on the way to their execution. The third act is again set in Harper’s house. As Joan is sleeping, Harper and Todd, who is now married to Joan, talk about the global war, in which not only all peoples but also the animals and even the elements are involved. Joan wakes up and reports of her dangerous journey to Harper’s house in the middle of a war that has long lost all dimensions. Far Away returns to the widening gap between people’s daily lives and the political sphere that Churchill had dramatised in her 1997 play This Is a Chair.9 While the latter showed a society eerily disconnected from political realities and blatantly self-indulgent, Far Away documents the slow escalation of underground guerrilla action via official state barbarism to a world at war, tying in the acceptance of violence in a ‘closed society’. The exact social and political circumstances, however, are only hinted at and never fully explained. For the members of the audience, it is therefore as impossible to position themselves within this intricate framework of alliances and antagonisms as it is for the characters, who are caught helplessly within a despotic system, the ideology, power centre, and international relations of which remain ambiguous and unstructured: Harper: The cats have come in on the side of the French. Todd: But we’re not exactly on the other side from the French. It’s not as if they’re the Moroccans and the ants. Harper: It’s not as if they’re the Canadians, the Venezuelans and the mosquitoes. Todd: It’s not as if they’re the engineers, the chefs, the children under five, the musicians.10 In the characters’ imagination, new groups are constantly formed and dissolved again, but their interconnectedness remains indistinct and opaque, consequently leading to paranoia and isolation.11 The randomness of enmities and absurdity of frontlines demonstrates what contemporary paranoia is made of: a statement of particular importance in a world which one year after the drama’s première, in September 2001, became engaged in a global war on terror and thus in the original sense on fright.12 The dialogue between Todd and Harper encapsulates the rhetorical process that enables the cultural construction of the fear of everything strange; the manner in which a demonised, dehumanised, or otherwise threatening ethnically defined ‘other’ is forged through narratives, myths and the deliberate planting of rumours. ‘Once such ethnically focussed fear is in place’, state the sociologists Brubaker and Laitin in their discussion of ethnic and nationalist violence, ‘ethnic violence no longer seems random or meaningless but all too horrifyingly meaningful’.13 The characters lose control of their lives in these

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______________________________________________________________ chaotic circumstances, having long lost track of what the conflict is about and where they themselves stand: Joan: […] everyone’s moving and no one knows why […] But I didn’t know whose side the river was on, it might help me swim or it might drown me.14 Far Away does not show any explicit violence on stage; it is only implicit – diffuse even. What exactly Joan has seen in her aunt Harper’s house never becomes clear;15 what kinds of repression the state exercises against its citizen is only hinted at;16 even Todd’s descriptions of his deeds in the war are brief and in any case remain so surreal that a haunting, violent atmosphere is transmitted, but the shock is a second-hand experience for the spectator.17 The only scene depicting an unfiltered occurrence, without transformation by a character’s narrative, is Act 2, Scene 3, the prisoners’ death march: Next day. A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution. The finished hats are even more enormous and preposterous than in the previous scene.18 Churchill herself stresses the importance of this scene by placing the following request into the list of characters: ‘The Parade (Scene 2.5): five is too few and twenty better than ten. A hundred?’19 This scene, standing in for all death marches and other processions of victims, conjures associations of prisoners being transported to the concentration and extermination camps in Hitler’s Third Reich, the expelled Armenians’ march in the Middle East, streams of refugees fleeing the war-torn former Yugoslavia, the train of prisoners on their way to Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, the Rwandan exodus.20 Refugees, prisoners, asylum-seekers, slaves or forced labourers are all possible interpretations; and due to the restrained wording of the stage direction, a production may also choose to reference a more contemporary event. The prisoners in the Dublin production in 2004, for example, wore the orange-coloured overalls of American detainees, mostly known to the international public from footage from the American detention camp in Guantánamo Bay on Cuba.21 The monstrous and frightening images, with the prisoners wearing elaborately designed hats that, in a grotesque way, are reminiscent of fashion shows or the crowd at horse races; counteract the friendly chatter between Todd and Joan during the second act. Neither watches the parade, but it is obvious from Joan’s casual remark, ‘It seems so sad to burn them with the bodies’,22 that both know of their hats’ significance. However, they both react indifferently to these horrible

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______________________________________________________________ circumstances. They are proud of their work, but do not comprehend that they personally contribute to the regime’s atrocities.23 Refusing to allow a clear-cut interpretation or any specificity of location within the recipient’s reality, the drama may be read as an allegory. It uncovers social structures that benefit the development of violence and war. Harper’s willingness and ability to deceive herself and her niece and to convince both of them that the manhandling of others will ultimately lead to good is mirrored in Joan’s readiness to stoically accept and ignore the drawbacks in the hat factory and the bigger grievances within her country. Her silence is also an image of the average citizens’ confusion, which bemusedly turn away from international happenings – just as Joan does not watch the parades and the executions, allowing herself to ignore their existence.24 The play comes full circle in the last scene, as the action returns to Harper’s house and the bellicose results of the events described in the beginning are shown. Joan’s life as a fellow traveller and her silence are broken only with her decision to tear free from society’s constraints and to dare the step towards freedom, when she recognises that it is impossible to maintain a simple alliance, or even to separate the dangerous from the absurd. Peacekeeping: Zinnie Harris, Midwinter (2004) As if it was a continuation of Churchill’s play, Zinnie Harris’ Midwinter (2004) is set during the fragile peace between one outbreak of fighting and the next in an endless war. It was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, on October 5, 2004. Deliberately avoiding any specification of time or place, the play opens with middle-aged Maud feeding on a dead horse. She is approached by Leonard and his grandson Sirin, who have been lured to her by the smell of the meat. Maud strikes a deal with Leonard: she will keep Sirin alive with the meat, but in return, Leonard will give him to Maud as a replacement for her dead son. That same night, the soldier Grenville returns from the war. Maud presents Sirin to him as their child and learns that all soldiers have returned carrying a mysterious parasite that will ultimately result in blindness. Leonard comes to visit Sirin and reveals that he knows Maud: she has taken on the identity of her twin sister Magda who has drowned years ago. Grenville, realising that he is with the wrong twin and Sirin is not actually his son, assaults the boy. As Grenville goes completely blind, Maud kills him with the ointment for his eyes. In the last scene, Sirin and Maud are playing outside the house when Leonard arrives with the news that the war has started again – even without the soldiers that have become blind. Refusing to acknowledge this, Maud decides that her house is a peaceful zone where war does not exist. 2.

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______________________________________________________________ In the thirteen scenes, sides and causes for the war are not even mentioned; a nameless major conflict controls the characters’ lives, who we first see starved and craving for food as they meet over the carcass of the dead horse one has found and defends fervently against the others. Hunger and sickness are constant themes in Harris’ play, depicting the exhausted and starved regions predicted in analyses of the specific economy of the new wars and their long-term impact on the exhausted and devastated regions they affect:25 Leonard: We smelled the meat. Maud: Don’t move. Leonard takes a step forward. Leonard: Couldn’t smell anything else for miles. Half the city will be following us. A noise in the bushes makes them both start. Maud holds up the stone again. Maud: Who is there? Leonard: It’ll be half the town. They’ll have smelled it, I told you. Maud (to the bushes) Don’t move. I’m armed. Leonard: It won’t make a difference. They are starving. They’ll storm you.26 Throughout the first few scenes, the audience witnesses the creeping dehumanisation of people who have lived through deprivation. Yet, as in Churchill’s play, there are only a few actual signs of war: Grenville brings back his war medals for his son to play with,27 and at night, Maud finds a soldier’s hat with a distinctive bullet hole in the river.28 Each character’s focus is on regaining ‘normality’, on forgetting the horrors of war that seem to dance behind Grenville’s eyes whenever they are closed, memories he tries to ignore and that yet follow him into his post-war life.29 When fishing with Sirin, he makes careful attempts at being ‘normal’ again; only just holding back when he catches himself recounting what the river was to him during the war: possibly a mass grave, echoing the countless occasions during civil wars when bodies drifted down local waterways.30 Grenville: The point isn’t to catch fish anyway. That isn’t why people come fishing. You’ll understand that in time. They go fishing because it is what they do. Because it is a normal father-and-son-thing to do, because they are seen to be normal if they do it. Because everyone thinks, ah yes, fathers and sons, that is what they do. […]

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______________________________________________________________ I’ve never seen a fish here, certainly not in winter, and I have practically lived in it for ten years. I’ve seen just about everything else. Things I wouldn’t want you to see. Things I wouldn’t ever want you to see. It’s funny, isn’t it? Within days it just looks like a river again. But further upstream, where we were, you couldn’t see the water for…31 Harris explains she wanted to demonstrate how people have to ‘reforge’ their identity after a war in order to leave it behind. The deep hatred and the prejudices often found in people with a background of war are very difficult to shift.32 Maud, who is trying to create a domestic set-up, has to sacrifice a lot to maintain it. By assuming her sister’s identity and taking her childhood friend’s son as her own, she has formed a new identity and found a way to allow peace to happen. Grenville, on the other hand, ultimately fails at reclaiming his civilian life, because he ‘has turned back into a soldier’, as Maud observes with alarm.33 In the character of a soldier unable to leave the war behind, bringing it with him in the form of a parasite that is literally eating him from the inside and rendering him blind towards a new perspective, veterans are here depicted as carrying the seed of war inside themselves, not only in the form of shell-shock, but also as a possible male urge to (self-) destruction. Midwinter ends with a new war fought without soldiers, hinting at the findings of some new-war theorists: that war is fought ‘for war’s sake’: ‘Megalothymia is such a powerful part of the soul that even if a just cause is won, men may begin to struggle against it simply for the sake of struggle.’34 It can thus be said that war genuinely becomes a character, as it fights for and by itself, resuming Hobbes’ thesis that war will ultimately always turn against the state, as the state is against war, and thus aims at rendering the war machine obsolete.35 In the last scene, the main character of Midwinter simply refuses to acknowledge the re-entry into the cycle of violence by eliminating the elements of war from her life: Maud: In this house, whatever happens out there, in this house Peacetime. That’s all I know. Pause. It’s peacetime here, you understand. There is no more of this, not here. Not just as Sirin is learning to talk. No, not now. We are in a different land to out there. They’re in one season, but we are in another. You understand? In the four walls of the garden —

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______________________________________________________________ Leonard: I don’t even understand it. Maud: So don’t mention it. It’s gone. […] That is it. It’s over, do you understand me? There is no war. Leonard: Even as…? Maud: Peacetime.36 War truly has transformed the identities of the characters. Once they have internalised the state of constant conflict, there is no critical vantage point from which to judge the politics and circumstances of the conflict; the plays’ social reality is not mediated for the audience because it is ‘too real’ for the characters, who do not experience warfare as something extraordinary. This may be one of the main differences between contemporary plays and earlier plays that depicted war: there is no recognisable conflict. ‘Any war’ is also the defining force for the shaping of the characters, to which an external description of their surrounding horror does not matter when they are struggling to survive. They only react to the act of war and thus may have also internalised the mechanics of the ‘new’ wars they are confronted with, the fragmentation, the changing loyalties and the decentralisation. The characters are probably less shocked by the signs of the raging conflict that surrounds them than the audience is, as the characters can only react to the new events in their lives. The surreal and apocalyptic visions of these plays combine the experiences of those who have lived through war – it seems to happen far from reality, ‘far away’. Churchill’s main character Joan has adapted herself to the ways of propaganda as an adult, even though she was still questioning them as a young girl, while Midwinter’s Sirin, as a child, has become so accustomed to the constant drifting, the search for food and other means of survival that he behaves like an animal when presented with food and water: he will not stop feeding as long as there is nourishment. Grenville’s war trauma has manifested itself in the form of his parasite fighting him from the inside. But of all the characters in the two plays discussed here, Maud most literally internalises the war in Midwinter. Unable to overcome the loss and deprivation, she ravenously consumes a dead horse, reminiscent of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine and death,37 thus making war a part of herself, and alluding to the generation of a trauma in the Freudian sense. The plays show how the disturbing experience of war may be represented on stage and mediated to an audience that, for the most part, does not have its own war experience. By locating the civil war in an undefined reality that we perceive nevertheless as uncannily familiar, these plays force a western audience to confront the possibility of war in their midst, and to question the idea of it only happening in ‘uncivilised third-world countries’. The roots of violence and conflict are always to be found in peacetime society – even in Western Europe, as these examples demonstrate.

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______________________________________________________________ Due to its immediacy, theatre might be the appropriate form to communicate the state of war. It is particularly able to react to current events and may use the theatrical space for a public act of mourning for war. At the same time, these new plays about war depict destruction versus survival as the driving forces on stage, between which the protagonists are involuntarily and almost helplessly caught. The most influential and unpredictable character is missing from the list preceding the play text. It is the actual antagonist confronting the characters: the war machine.

Notes 1

M Hardt & A Negri, Multitude, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2005, p. 7; Heraclitus fragment no. 53: ‘War is both father and king of all, some he has shown forth as gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free.’ - W. Harris, Heraclitus. The Complete Fragments. Translation and Commentary and The Greek Text, accessed 23.03.2007, . 2 Hardt & Negri, p. 7. 3 M Kaldor, New and Old Wars, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 3. The term ‘new wars’ was coined by Kaldor in the same study (p. 6). Earlier studies had already done research into similar areas, such as M v Creveld, The Transformation of War, The Free Press, New York, 1991; R D Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’. Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Politics, vol. 273, 1994, pp. 44-76; and K Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. The interest in establishing a new category with its own typology and the ensuing publication grew rapidly, so that Henderson and Singer in their critique of various of these approaches speak of ‘new war’ theorists: E A Henderson & D J Singer, ‘‘New Wars’ and Rumours of ‘New Wars’’. International Interactions: Empirical and Theoretical Research in International Relations. Vol. 28, 2002, pp. 165-190, p. 165. 4 See F Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, E.W. Fritzsch, Leipzig, 1872. Nietzsche argues drama and thus tragedy had come from Dionysian musical festivities. While I do not intend to argue against the Dionysian roots of the genre and form of drama, one cannot dispute a possible thematic origin from the experience of war. 5 R Hochhuth, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Krieg. Frankfurter PoetikVorlesungen. Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 2001, pp. 12-14. 6 J Law, D Pickering & R Helfer (eds), The Penguin Dictionary of Theatre. London, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 462. 7 Date of first performance: first quarto, 1600; first folio, 1623.

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Schnierer observes the main portion of English literary approach to war consisted of war poetry, not plays: P P Schnierer, ‘The Theatre of War: English Drama and the Bosnian Conflict’ in Drama and Reality. Papers given on the occasion of the third annual conference of the German Society of Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, B Reitz (ed.), Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 1995, pp. 101-110, p. 102. 9 E Aston, Caryl Churchill, Northcote House Publishers Ltd, Horndon House, Horndon, Tavistock, Devon, 2001 [1997], p. 116. 10 C Churchill, Far Away, Theatre Communication Group, New York, 2000, pp. 35-36. 11 For a list of frontlines in Far Away see the whole third act: Churchill, pp. 34-44. 12 C Quint, ‘Terror of the Contemporary Sublime: Regional Responses to the Challenges of Internationalism and Globalization in the Drama of Caryl Churchill and David Edgar’, in Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English. Papers given on the occasion of the eleventh annual conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, J Achilles, I Bergmann & B Däwes (eds), Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 2003, pp.178-179; also J R Prado Pérez, ‘Issues of Representation and Political Discourse in Caryl Churchill’s Latest Work’, in (Dis)Continuities. Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. Papers given on the occasion of the tenth annual conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. M Rubik & E Mettinger-Schartmann, (eds), Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 2002, p. 103. 13 R Brubaker & D D Laitin, ‘Ethnic and Nationalist Violence’. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1998, pp. 423-452. 14 Churchill, pp. 43-44. 15 Churchill, pp. 12-21. 16 Churchill, p. 23, p. 37. 17 Churchill, pp. 40-41. 18 Churchill, pp. 30: italics as in the original to denote a stage direction. 19 Churchill, p. 8. 20 Prado Pérez, p. 98, p. 101. ????? 21 H Meany, ‘Far Away’. The Guardian, 06.07.2004, accessed 21.06.2005, <www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/story/0,,1254681,00.html>. Detainees in American prisons wear the orange overalls when being transferred etc. The June 2001 production of Far Away in Berlin showed 60 handcuffed prisoners whose eyes were sealed shut with black duct tape: see U Kahle’s review in Theater Heute 06, 2001, p. 15. In hindsight, this seems eerily anticipatory:

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______________________________________________________________ similar pictures were transmitted only one year later from Afghanistan, showing the seizing of alleged Taliban fighters by US-American troops. 22 Churchill, p. 31. 23 Quint, p. 180. 24 Prado Pérez, p. 99. 25 H Münkler, The New Wars, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 74-98 and S M Murshed, ‘Conflict, Civil War and Underdevelopment: An Introduction’. Journal of Peace Research, vol. 39, special issue on Civil War in Developing Countries, (July) 2002, pp. 387-393. Kaplan predicts that ‘[f]uture wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades – and with it the states’ ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other states – peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them.’ - Kaplan, p. 62. 26 Z Harris, Midwinter, Faber and Faber, London, 2004, pp. 3-10. 27 Harris, p. 49. 28 Harris, pp. 54-55. 29 Harris, p. 42. 30 See for example Prunier’s study of the Rwandan genocide 1994: ‘Some rivers, such as the Kagera, were filled with bodies and this in the end seriously polluted Lake Victoria where 40,000 bodies were eventually picked up and buried on the Ugandan shore.’ - G Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis 19591994. History of a Genocide, Hurst & Company, London, 1995, p. 255. 31 Harris, p. 34. 32 Harris, quoted in A Burnett, ‘War baby. For Zinnie Harris, having a baby brought home the reality’. The Sunday Herald, Oct. 3, 2004, accessed on 17.03.2007, . 33 Harris, p. 64. 34 Curtis, p. 63. 35 As taken up and widely discussed by G Deleuze, & F Guattari, Nomadology. The War Machine, Semiotext(e), New York, 1986, p. 11. 36 Harris, pp. 76-77. 37 See New Testament, Revelation of St. John, chapter VI, 1-

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Bibliography Plays Churchill, C., Far Away, Theatre Communication Group, New York, 2000. Harris, Z., Midwinter, Faber and Faber, London, 2004. Secondary Sources Aston, E., Caryl Churchill. Northcote House Publishers Ltd, Horndon House, Horndon, Tavistock, Devon, 2001 [1997]. Brubaker, R. & Laitin, D. D., ‘Ethnic and Nationalist Violence’. Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 24, 1998, pp. 423-452. Burnett, A., ‘War baby. For Zinnie Harris, having a baby brought home the reality’. The Sunday Herald, 3 Oct. 2004. Accessible at . Creveld, M. v., The Transformation of War. The Free Press, New York, 1991. Curtis, N., War and Social Theory. World, Value and Identity. PalgraveMacmillan, Houndmills, 2006. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., Nomadology. The War Machine. Semiotext(e), New York, 1986. Hardt, M. & Negri, A., Multitude. Hamish Hamilton, London, 2005. Harris, W., Heraclitus. The Complete Fragments. Translation and Commentary and The Greek Text. Accessible at . Henderson, E. A. & Singer, D. J., ‘‘New Wars’ and Rumours of ‘New Wars’’. International Interactions: Empirical and Theoretical Research in International Relations, vol. 28, 2002, pp. 165-190.

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______________________________________________________________ Hochhuth, R., Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Krieg. Frankfurter PoetikVorlesungen. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 2001. Holsti, K., The State, War, and the State of War. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. Kaldor, M., New and Old Wars. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999. Kaldor, M., ‘Old Wars, Cold Wars, New Wars, and the War on Terror’. Lecture given to the Cold War Studies Centre, London School of Economics, 2 Feb. 2005. Accessible at . Kaplan, R. D., ‘The Coming Anarchy’. Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Politics, vol. 273, 1994, pp. 44-76. Law, J., Pickering, D. & Helfer, R. (eds), The Penguin Dictionary of Theatre. Penguin, London, 2001. Meany, H., ‘Far Away’. The Guardian, 6 July 2004. Accessible at <www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/story/0,,1254681,00.html>. Münkler, H., The New Wars. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2005. Murshed, S. M., ‘Conflict, Civil War and Underdevelopment: An Introduction’. Journal of Peace Research, vol. 39, special issue on Civil War in Developing Countries, 2002, pp. 387-393. Nietzsche, F., Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. E.W. Fritzsch, Leipzig, 1872. Prado Pérez, J. R., ‘Issues of Representation and Political Discourse in Caryl Churchill’s Latest Work’, in (Dis)Continuities. Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. Papers given on the occasion of the tenth annual conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. M. Rubik & E. Mettinger-Schartmann, (eds), Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 2002, pp ?91-104.

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______________________________________________________________ Prunier, G., The Rwandan Crisis 1959-1994. History of a Genocide. Hurst & Company, London, 1995. Quint, C., ‘Terror of the Contemporary Sublime: Regional Responses to the Challenges of Internationalism and Globalization in the Drama of Caryl Churchill and David Edgar’, in Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English. Papers given on the occasion of the eleventh annual conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. J. Achilles, I. Bergmann & B. Däwes (eds), Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 2003. Schnierer, P. P., ‘The Theatre of War: English Drama and the Bosnian Conflict’, in Drama and Reality. Papers given on the occasion of the third annual conference of the German Society of Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. B. Reitz (ed), Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 1995, pp. 101-110.

Confessing Complicity and Embracing Victimhood: Negotiating the Meaning of the Border War in PostApartheid South Africa Gary Baines Abstract For some fifteen years scant attention has been paid to South Africa’s Border War and the memories of soldiers who fought therein. Forgotten by the apartheid state, ex-combatants have been marginalised in the new political dispensation. But the recent controversy over the exclusion of the names of SADF soldiers from the Freedom Park memorial wall and the involvement of ex-combatants in violent crimes has received media coverage. The spate of publications and the existence of internet sites that host personal accounts of the war also suggest that there is significant public interest in these matters. And the discovery of mass graves and the questions about the treatment of detainees in SWAPO camps has kept the war in the public eye in Namibia. This paper seeks to explain why the silences existed in the first place and why ex-soldiers are negotiating the meaning of the Border War now. Key Words: Border war, complicity, memorials, silences, South Africa, trauma. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. ***** The phrase ‘Border War’ was ubiquitous in white South African public discourse during the 1970s and 1980s. As a social construct it encoded the views of (most) whites who believed the apartheid regime’s rhetoric that the South African Defence Force (SADF) was shielding its citizens from a military threat posed by enemy forces massing on the country’s borders. These borders were primarily equated with the frontiers of Namibia/Angola where SADF troops and collaborators waged war against the guerrillas of the South West Africa Peoples’ Organisation (SWAPO) and fellow freedom fighters based in neighbouring states. Here the SADF waged a low-key counter-insurgency war against SWAPO and also engaged in large-scale battles with the Angolan armed forces and its Cuban ally. But the conflict was not confined to the borders as SADF soldiers were deployed in the townships to combat insurrection. The conventional, guerrilla and street wars were actually part of a single conflict of which it might be said that the black majority’s national liberation struggle was the white minority’s Border War. The meaning of the Border War is not inscribed in the event itself but shaped by interpreters that come after it. Different interpretative communities will

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______________________________________________________________ construe the event in different ways. South Africans are currently engaged in a process of re-evaluating the meaning of their memories of this conflict. And scholars are only just beginning to catch on. If scholars have paid scant attention to the Border War in recent years, does this imply that the subject is taboo? Does academic ‘silence’ necessarily mean that the subject is out of bounds to society at large? Is it like a shameful family secret that South Africans have been loath to acknowledge, even privately? Has South Africa’s quest for reconciliation meant that society has placed a premium on former adversaries forgiving and forgetting the past at the cost of full disclosure? Is truth a casualty of political correctness rather than war? Has the peaceful political transition invalidated the memory of the war waged by the apartheid regime as far as former SADF conscripts are concerned? There are those who believe that the Border War is best forgotten as the country focuses on building a new future. But the memories of former combatants and the legacy of an often-brutal conflict cannot simply be wished away. Soldiers’ stories need to be told for the sake of individual healing and the well-being of society. So it is significant that ex-combatants should have recently begun to negotiate the meaning of the Border War in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper seeks to understand why this is so. 1.

Opening and Closing Ranks The Border War was waged away from the public eye. The SADF learned the (mistaken) lesson of Vietnam from the United States forces that unrestricted media coverage of war could be demoralizing and selfdefeating.1 Censorship and disinformation served to create a conspiracy of silence. Thus there was a ‘black out’ of coverage by local media of Operation Savannah in 1975 when SADF forces came within 120 kilometres of the Angolan capital, Luanda.2 That local media were kept in the dark whilst the story was broken by their international counterparts occasioned acute embarrassment for the former. Subsequently, the SADF attempted to win over the local media by inviting carefully vetted (photo) journalists and military correspondents to accompany units in the field. Fact-finding trips to the ‘operational area’ were also arranged for members of parliament. These public relations exercises clearly convinced the correspondents who duly reported that the SADF’s prowess and superior training ensured victory (provided that it was linked to a political settlement). Thus the mainstream media – the Afrikaans and English press, as well as the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) that monopolised radio and television broadcasts (the latter from 1976) – lent their support to the ‘boys on the border’. Propaganda and disinformation was employed by the apartheid state in the battle for hearts and minds of citizens and conscripts alike.

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______________________________________________________________ However, the Nationalist Party (NP) government and the SADF did not take the soldiers or their families into their confidence. The authorities disclosed information about military matters only on a need to know basis. They repeatedly refused to disclose the nature and exact number of the armed forces’ (often self-inflicted) casualties.3 Reports released to and published by the media were often contrived versions of what had actually caused the deaths of servicemen.4 This was compounded by the SADF’s reluctance to disclose the circumstances of individual soldier’s deaths to their next of kin.5 Even the troops themselves were seldom informed about the strategic objectives of military operations in which they were involved. For instance, troops were not briefed beforehand when they were bound for Angola, and officers were instructed not to divulge the enemy’s logistical and numerical superiority to their own troops at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.6 Clandestine operations carried out by the SADF’s elite reconnaissance forces are not the only ones that warrant the appellation the ‘Silent War’.7 For the undeclared war was generally conducted amidst considerable secrecy and wild rumours. Secrets can reveal much about society and governance, as ‘they are more about a kind of information than a kind of concealment.’8 SADF national servicemen were sworn to secrecy in terms of the Defence Act and had to sign declarations not to divulge information pertaining to military operations.9 This bound veterans of the Border War to refrain from telling the stories even to friends and family (although they undoubtedly swapped tales with one another and shared their memories of their experiences). For some ex-SADF soldiers the camaraderie of cyberspace has largely replaced bonding/drinking sessions in pubs and reunions of veterans’ associations. In fact, the reach and scope of the informal networks (often via email listservers or websites hosted outside of the country) serve as a kind of virtual veteran’s association. These veterans who have served in the SADF, belonged to a specific unit, or performed border duty, have established a network of sites to exchange memories and, in some cases, provide platforms for advice on matters like PTSD.10 They constitute ‘cyber-communities’ in which hyperlinks, multiple postings, and cross-citation facilitate communication between individuals who hold similar views. Certain Web authors and their readers share membership of a ‘virtual’ community and provide social support for one another. Why should former SADF national servicemen have gravitated to the internet in order to share their stories? Do they see themselves as contesting their invisibility in post-apartheid South Africa occasioned by their forgotten war and what Sasha Gear calls the ‘silence of stigmatised knowledge’?11 This presumably implies that the experiences and stories of veterans represent what Michel Foucault has described as discredited or ‘illegitimate’ forms of knowledge.12 Such knowledge maintains an uncertain

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______________________________________________________________ status even though it might enjoy wide circulation in the ether or other unregulated networks of communication. This suggests that groups sidelined in the realm of realpolitik are able to challenge the consensus or hegemonic silence established by political elites. However, Michael Barkun believes that virtual communities remain on the fringes of the power brokering of interest groups and political elites.13 Thus SADF veterans have ventured into the apparently neutral terrain of cyberspace to tell stories that might be deemed ‘politically incorrect’ in the ‘new’ South Africa. They have created internet sites that mostly disclaim political affiliations, although a few webmasters advertise their (invariably right-wing) political orientations and reminisce nostalgically about their time in the army. They have arguably contested the prevalence of legitimate/official knowledge, and created the (cyber) space to make their voices heard in post-apartheid South Africa. The apartheid regime’s officially-imposed amnesia led some exsoldiers to find alternative forms of remembering such as writing fiction. A few veterans with literary pretensions told their stories in thinly disguised fictionalised autobiographical works, especially in short stories, through the medium of Afrikaans. In a somewhat oblique fashion these writings interrogated the myth of the Border War as a necessary struggle to preserve the imagined community of the white Afrikaner nation. Some of this grensliteratuur (frontier literature) produced during the 1970s and 1980s achieved canonical status and won the recognition of an educated elite,14 but it was not widely read. However, Mark Behr’s novel Die Reuk van Appels (1993) which was translated as The Smell of Apples (1995) proved popular. The story tells of a young white Afrikaans-speaking boy being groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps as a soldier in the militarised society that was apartheid South Africa. It frames the Border War within ‘a brutal patriarchy that victimizes mothers and sons’.15 The author’s well-publicized acknowledgment that he served as a spy for the security forces during the 1980s while a student at the University of Stellenbosch, as well as the publication of the text of his confessional narrative, function as acts of exculpation on his part. But Rita Barnard reckons that whereas the author seeks moral absolution he refuses to offer the liberal reader the same.16 We should also note Michiel Heyns’s comments on the ‘ambivalence of confessional fiction’ that frequently accommodates rather than confronts the culpability of the author.17 For confessing complicity is not the same as admitting culpability. Since the political transition, there have appeared a number of publications in English penned by former SADF conscripts who relate stories about aspects of military service. It would appear that the passage of time for reflection has given soldier-authors the space to make sense of their experiences and construct narratives thereof. A number have undoubtedly sought to achieve healing and reintegration into society through their

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______________________________________________________________ writings.18 These confessional texts of (sometimes) reluctant soldiers often admit complicity in upholding the apartheid system not on account of ideological convictions or patriotism but rather because they believed that they had little choice in the matter.19 The most popular text has proved to be a collection of reminiscences published under the inappropriate title An Unpopular War.20 The Border War was not unpopular amongst the majority of the white populace until after 1984 when conscripts were called up to patrol the streets of the townships. Even then it was still regarded by the majority as a necessary price to pay for white hegemony. The moral ambiguity conferred on the war by white South Africans has happened retrospectively. Even those who once supported the war do not now think it was worth fighting and this is evident in many of the stories told to Thompson. These stories are recounted with a blend of honesty and selfdelusion, candour and scepticism, and self-deprecating humour. Many of these stories are suffused in nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ while, contrarily, evincing a modicum of guilt about the part that the narrators played as perpetrators of violence and terror. But the overwhelming impression is that these ex-soldiers see themselves as having simply performed their duties as national servicemen. Obviously not all personal accounts of the Border War have been written by former national servicemen. There are a number of accounts by army career officers that express few qualms about their actions such as killing ‘terrorists’ or leading cross-border raids into South Africa’s neighbouring states.21 The memoirs of retired SADF generals are noticeably devoid of self-recrimination. For instance, the chief of the army and then the SADF between 1985 and 1990, Jannie Geldenhuys, published A General’s Story22 that is anything but a mea culpa. Geldenhuys insisted on his own professional integrity and defended the impartiality of the SADF, maintaining that its function had not been to support a particular political party but rather to ensure the security of all the citizens of the state. Magnus Malan’s more recently published memoir is also an evasive and self-serving justification of his role in the SADF and of the military in creating the requisite stability to enable the transfer of power.23 In fact, Malan was not merely a professional soldier who served the government of the day but accepted an appointment as a cabinet minister thereby becoming a representative of a white minority government actively supported by the security establishment. It might be true that the SADF under the leadership of General George Meiring desisted from staging a military coup and effectively prevented the right wing from sabotaging the negotiated settlement. But as a quid pro quo the newly installed African National Congress (ANC) refrained from prosecuting apartheid-era politicians and generals. Instead, middle-ranking securocrats were targeted and, consequently, believed themselves to have been subjected to a witch-hunt. When the generals closed ranks so as to look after their own

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______________________________________________________________ interests they ignored the plight of the foot soldiers who felt betrayed by their political masters.24 2.

Transition, the TRC and Trauma SADF veterans’ acute sense of betrayal was partly attributable to the outcome of the war and negotiated settlement that, undoubtedly, devalued their memories. The silence imposed by the apartheid state was compounded by the veterans’ own wish to forget. Official invisibility intensified individual amnesia. Under such circumstances, veterans tended to repress their traumatic memories so as not to admit recollections too painful to recall. The marginalisation of ex-combatants can be seen not only in difficulties faced by veterans of notorious SADF units such as 32 Battalion,25 but also in society’s failure to acknowledge the hardships that ‘regular’ soldiers who were not necessarily involved in war crimes faced in working through their memories. Soldiers were seldom afforded any opportunity to come to terms with their frequently traumatic and distressing experiences. One account relates how troops involved in some of the fiercest fighting in Angola in 1988 were rounded up before the uitklaar (demobilisation) parade and given a pep talk by their commanding officer, offered a perfunctory prayer by the military chaplain, and a superficial collective counselling session by a clinical psychologist.26 There was no debriefing whatsoever and the soldiers were sent home to resume their lives in civvy street. SADF veterans of the Border War are unlikely to heal their (psychological) wounds until such time as they receive therapy. Since its recognition by the American Psychiatric Associations’ Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM), PTSD has become the dominant discourse in the area of the psychological impact of violence. Joanna Bourke contends that the invention of PTSD in the 1980s made it admissible for US soldiers who had tortured and raped Vietnamese to be portrayed as victims. She also insists that the language of psychological trauma has been co-opted by the perpetrators of violence.27 If Bourke is correct, then psychiatry not only condoned the actions of the US government for inflicting psychological damage on members of the country’s armed forces but absolved perpetrators by turning them into victims equally deserving of compassion and pity. Consequentially, psychiatry’s profession of objectivity and political neutrality has a hollow ring. The profession in South Africa was no less apolitical when the apartheid state sponsored repression and political violence to maintain the status quo. Under these circumstances ‘progressive’ psychiatrists lent their expertise and emotional support to the victims of institutionalised violence such as those subjected to detention without trial and torture whereas their ‘conservative’ counterparts tended to testify on behalf of the perpetrators. Thus ‘expert’ witnesses testified before the TRC that members of the security

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______________________________________________________________ forces were traumatised by their assassination and torture of ‘enemies’, and the apartheid state’s most notorious agent Eugene de Kock applied for amnesty on grounds of diminished responsibility because he exhibited symptoms of PTSD. This amounted to to valorising perpetrator’s trauma. On the other hand, certain psychiatrists justified gross human rights violations committed in the name of the liberation struggle. Thus parties on both sides invoked PTSD in mitigation of their deeds. Indeed, trauma discourse was employed to minimise individual agency and abdicate political responsibility for deeds that should be regarded as unsanctionable even in times of war. For Gillian Eagle this poses a conundrum inasmuch as ‘[o]pening the door to the employment of PTSD as a diagnostic justification for the enactment of violence conceivably provides the basis for blurring the boundaries between victims and victimisers’.28 The collapse of this distinction appears to make for an undifferentiated victim culture. Yet, not all groups of victims and/or victimisers have received equal attention. For instance, scant attention has been given to war trauma of either the statutory (i.e. SADF) or non-statutory (i.e. MK, APLA) forces. Judith Herman’s claim that ‘[t]he study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war’ made with respect to American veterans of the Vietnam War,29 is equally true of this country. Now, some fifteen or so years after the end of South Africa’s conflict, former combatants are asking anew what they fought for and whether their sacrifices were worthwhile. Tony Eprile’s novel The Persistence of Memory, addresses the manner in which the memories of ‘ordinary’ soldiers come back to haunt them. Eprile has his narrator-protagonist (an inept soldier and something of an anti-hero), Paul Sweetbread, testify before the TRC as a rebuttal witness to former SADF Captain (now Major) Lyddie who claims amnesty for atrocities committed after a ceasefire had effectively terminated South Africa’s occupation of Namibia. Lyddie had implicated Sweetbread in a calculated massacre of PLAN (Peoples’ Liberation Army of Namibia) combatants returning home from across the border following the announcement of the ceasefire. Lyddie’s self defence amounted to offering stock answers and abjuring responsibility for his actions: ‘War is war. It is not a picnic. When elephants fight, the grass and trees suffer.’ He claimed to regret any loss of life but insisted that his job was to defend his country and his people: ‘We all believed in what we were doing’, he says pointedly; ‘That’s why we gave the best years of our lives to the army.’30 The story serves to illustrate the dilemma faced by conscripts if they fingered their superior officers in atrocities in which they themselves were implicated. They were not about to admit culpability when their superior officers washed their hands of any responsibility for the atrocities committed in the name of the apartheid state.

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______________________________________________________________ If the old order was not inclined to admit the distresses of its foot soldiers, then at least the TRC acknowledged the existence of the problem. However, SADF conscripts were wary and suspicious of the TRC despite its assurance that the testimonies given during its hearings were ‘neither an attempt to look for perpetrators, nor a process that will lead to the awarding of victim status’,31 Karen Whitty explains their reluctance to testify in the following terms: Bound by a sense of honour to their fellow troops, and the patriarchy still espoused by white South Africa, few men have come forward and spoken about their experiences, however barbaric and mundane, in South Africa's border wars.32 Some reported that the lack of public knowledge about the war created suspicion of their stories, while others were summarily dismissed as sympathy seekers or outright liars by former SADF generals and their apologists.33 Thus ex-soldiers felt betrayed when the very authorities that they were convinced would protect them and provide security left them in the lurch. If trauma involves a betrayal of trust and the abuse of relations of power,34 then it is not surprising that many veterans embraced silence and victimhood. Consequently, the TRC left the experiences of ‘ordinary’ soldiers largely invisible - not merely forgotten but ‘wished away’, as a report of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) avers.35 For their part, the former SADF generals sought to exculpate themselves of any wrongdoing before the TRC. They remained steadfastly convinced that the TRC was biased against the SADF and predisposed to finding it guilty of ignoring the rules of engagement in South Africa’s conflicts. The generals showed their true political stripes (should that be stars?) when they refused to testify before the TRC and feigned ignorance of war crimes sanctioned by the government. They displayed a singular lack of willingness to take responsibility for their acts of commission and omission.36 The TRC deplored the intransigence of the SADF hierarchy and its reticence to supply documents or acknowledge its responsibility for flaunting the international community’s rules for the conduct of war. It opined that this attitude hindered the healing of the nation’s traumas. However, the intransigence of the SADF was emulated by the leadership of the ANC’s armed wing. Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that also failed to make full disclosure before the TRC, arguing that it should not be held accountable for atrocities committed while waging a legitimate armed struggle. In its concern about the casualties of war, the TRC Report acknowledged the need to ‘raise public awareness about the reality and

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______________________________________________________________ effects of post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) and to encourage former conscripts and soldiers who participated in the conflict ‘to share their pain and reflect on their experiences’.37 Aside from proposing projects aimed at rehabilitating and rebuilding the lives of ex-combatants, the TRC envisaged that they could possibly be ‘help[ed] to tell and write their stories’.38 Some have begun to do so although not necessarily as a result of the TRC’s suggestion. Rather, they obviously believe that the time is right for a reevaluation of their roles in South Africa’s past conflicts and that recounting their experiences will effectively validate their yearning for acknowledgment of the sacrifices they made for their country. Conversely, they wish to rid themselves of the shame of being regarded as vanquished soldiers. And they have also sought reaffirmation of their place in post-apartheid society by belatedly recasting themselves as victims rather than perpetrators. The earnestness of this quest by white conscripts for reaffirmation of their contribution to the ‘new’ South Africa is suggested by the recent controversy over the Freedom Park memorial wall. Rather than adopt the SADF memorial at Fort Klapperkop built to honour all those who had lost their lives in defence of the Republic of South Africa39 as their own, veterans have ignored its very existence. Indeed, many would now probably regard it as a symbol of the futile sacrifices made to sustain the apartheid regime. Notwithstanding its superficial resemblance to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall in Washington D.C., it does not serve as a place of remembrance or mourning for friends and families of the deceased as the American site does. The Fort Klapperkop memorial is barely known to exservicemen’s organization, let alone the general public. Thus a forum for veterans of the Border War has sought to have the names of those killed fighting for their country included in the roll of honour compiled for the Sikhumbuto memorial wall in Freedom Park which was erected as a tribute to those who died in the struggle for liberation from white minority rule. The veterans also objected to the fact that the memorial wall is to include the names of Cuban soldiers who died in Angola fighting the SADF. At the time of writing, their request for ‘fair treatment’ had been rejected by Wally Serote, the CEO of the Freedom Park Trust, on the grounds that the SADF soldiers were fighting to preserve apartheid and not freedom and humanity.40 This snub was regarded by the former conscripts as further testimony that their neglect by the NP government would continue under the ANC. They would remain marginalised in the ‘new’ South Africa. Certain ex-combatants in the ranks of the liberation movements feel equally betrayed by the post-apartheid state. Groups comprising excombatants or veterans of the liberation movements also attest to being sidelined during the scramble for power and patronage in the new dispensation. They regard their treatment by the authorities as discriminatory in that it has favoured ex-SADF members rather than freedom fighters. And

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______________________________________________________________ within the newly integrated South African National Defence Force (SANDF), there have been tensions between former MK and APLA cadres, as well as between returned exiles and ‘stay-at-homes’.41 According to Thula Bopela and Daluxolo Luthuli in their co-authored Umkhonto we Sizwe,42 ethnic divisions were rampant in the ranks of MK and are still exploited in postapartheid South Africa. Manifestations of anomie and high levels of alienation amongst ex-combatants have been confirmed by studies produced by the CSVR. Indeed, a main finding of one such report was that: ‘Former combatants nowadays tend to receive public attention only in relation to real or imaginary security threats,’43 a point confirmed by the attention paid to the violence that accompanied the recent security employees strike.44 When excombatants make the headlines they tend to be stigmatised and stereotyped. Public perceptions about former MK and APLA combatants have been shaped by media coverage of their alleged involvement in high profile violent crimes. News items routinely showcase their apparent participation in cash-in-transit heists, family killings, unruly protests demanding their grievances be addressed, and their recruitment as mercenaries. Even the Deputy Minister of Defence has reified this stereotypically poor image.45 A perception exists that ex-combatants are more prone to violence than other citizens. So public attention is paid to the lives of these ex-combatants in direct proportion to the perceived threat they pose to stability and security.46 However, these perceptions are based on anecdotal evidence rather than rigorous studies of the involvement of ex-combatants in violence. Neither have there been any investigations into the effects of ex-combatant’s militarised pasts on their family lives. And claims that SANDF army bases are vectors for the spread of HIV/AIDS have been advanced in alarmist terms rather than examined with academic scepticism.47 It needs to be established whether or not ex-combatants have been unfairly maligned; whether they have effectively become scapegoats for certain problems in post-apartheid South Africa. Is it a case of blaming the victims? 3.

Beyond the Borders Perhaps in part because of the silence surrounding the Border War and because of its remoteness for most of the South African public, the hearings on the atrocities committed in Angola and Namibia do not seem to have attracted as much attention as similar acts committed at home. Unlike the TRC’s treatment of South Africa’s domestic matters there were no victim hearings whatsoever for human rights violations outside of the country. The TRC Report stated that ‘South Africa’s occupation of South West Africa would merit a separate truth commission of its own.’48 The same might be said of the SADF’s actions in Angola. However, the Report amounted to little more than a survey of South Africa’s acts of aggression against neighbouring states based largely on the perpetrator’s own incomplete

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______________________________________________________________ records.49 The TRC had neither the co-operation of these governments nor the resources to conduct an in-depth investigation into human rights abuses and war crimes committed in these territories. In Namibia a fact-finding commission to uncover the country’s violent past was rejected by SWAPO as contrary to the spirit of reconciliation. One consequence of this, as Justine Hunter reveals,50 has been the refusal of SWAPO to own up to the abuses and atrocities committed in its name, especially the mistreatment, torture and even execution of detainees in military camps established in neighbouring states during the war. This constitutes ‘illegitimate’ knowledge in Foucault’s sense but enjoys wide currency in the public domain. Hunter rightly observes that unless this ‘wall of silence’ is addressed in a transparent fashion, it will continue to bedevil the political process in post-war Namibia. Equally noteworthy is the recent discovery of unmarked mass graves of SWAPO cadres who were killed in the last months of the war. The public outcry caused by this revelation was compounded by the disavowals of former SADF generals who failed to acknowledge or assume responsibility for the massacres on their watch. In fact, the incident is a matter of public record,51 but had not previously attracted the same degree of public attention. The recent media coverage reflects a renewed interest in the ‘unfinished business’ of the Border War. As is the case with ex-combatants,52 Namibia’s civilian population has been neglected by the SWAPO government since independence. In some cases they risked an enormous amount in order to support PLAN cadres. Heike Becker illustrates how their stories have been marginalised in the Namibian narrative of the liberation struggle, which is entirely dominated by the stories of SWAPO leaders.53 Notwithstanding the erection of a giant bronze statue of a PLAN soldier in Heroes’ Acre, Windhoek in 2002 (modelled on its namesake in Harare);54 Namibian national history has effectively ignored civilians and rank and file soldiers. Whereas SWAPO leaders have been lionised, Becker shows that attempts by writers to insert civilians into the founding history of the Namibian nation have all but been ignored.55 Their stories have been sidelined in the triumphalist narrative of the War of National Liberation and their ongoing plight suggests the inequities of apartheid have not been overcome in post-war Namibia. The SWAPO detainees and mass graves issues in Namibia suggests considerable sensitivity in respect of matters relating to ex-combatants in that country.56 In South Africa the Freedom Park memorial wall controversy has occasioned the mobilisation of a civil society pressure group. This group consists mainly of white Afrikaans-speaking ex-conscripts which points to the saliency of identity politics and a residual sense of victimization in postapartheid South Africa. Yet media coverage, as well as feedback in phone-in talk shows and letters to newspaper editors, suggests that public interest in these matters goes beyond the fault lines of language and even gender. Thus,

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______________________________________________________________ political/public discourse about the ‘unfinished business’ of the war reflects a preoccupation with the past in the public imaginary. This paper has attempted to map out some of the contours of the debate and show how the meaning of the Border War is being negotiated in post-apartheid South Africa. If for the veterans or ex-combatants the question remains: ‘What did we fight for?’, then for the rest of the nation it is: ‘Whether and how should the war be remembered?’

Notes 1

G N Addison, ‘Censorship of the Press in South Africa during the Angolan War: A Case Study of News Manipulation and Suppression’, MA Thesis, Rhodes University, 1980. The myth perpetuated by the US military was that media, especially television, coverage of the Vietnam War caused the tide of public opinion to turn against the intervention and that this, in turn, caused the politicians to scale down and eventually withdraw American forces thus effectively admitting defeat. For a critique of this perception, see D Hallin, The Uncensored War: the Media and Vietnam, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986. 2 R Hallett, ‘The South African Intervention in Angola 1975-76’, African Affairs, vol. 77, July 1978, pp. 347-68. A Gavshon, Crisis in Africa: Battleground of East and West, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981, pp. 223-57. 3 With good reason, the SADF has been called ‘the world’s most accidentprone army: T Eprile, The Persistence of Memory, Double Storey Books, Cape Town, 2004, p. 171. 4 J H Thompson, An Unpopular War: Voices of South African National Servicemen, Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2006, p. 149. 5 W Steenkamp, South Africa’s Border War 1966-1989, Ashanti, Gibraltar, 1989, p. 29. 6 C Holt, At Thy Call We Did Not Falter, Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2005, pp. 122, 137; Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples, Abacus, London, 1998, p. 82. 7 P Stiff, The Silent War: South African Recce Operations 1969-1994, Galago, Alberton, 1999. 8 G Minkley and M Legassick, ‘‘Not Telling’: Secrets, Lies and History’, History and Theory, vol. 39, 2000, p. 8. 9 Section 118(4) of the Defence Act of 1967 rendered it an offence for a person to disclose any secret or confidential information relating to the defence of the country which came to his/her knowledge by reason of his membership of the SADF or employment in the public service. See K Satchwell, ‘The power to defend: an analysis of various aspects of the Defence Act’ in War in Society: The Militarisation of South Africa, J Cock & L Nathan (eds), David Philip, Cape Town, 1984, p. 48.

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See, for instance, Army Talk at , which hosted a chatline utilised mainly by ex- Citizen Force SADF members (i.e. conscripts). But it is likely that such sites are also accessed by military buffs, as well as veterans of South Africa’s and other recent wars. These sites are obviously male domains. Recently, this site seems to have been shut down or relocated, and its mailing list discontinued. 11 S Gear, ‘The road back: Psycho-social strains of transition for South Africa’s ex-combatants’ in Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late-Cold War Conflicts, G Baines & P Vale (eds), Unisa Press, Pretoria, 2007. 12 M Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Select Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77, Random House, New York, 1980. 13 M Barkun, A culture of conspiracy: apocalyptic visions in contemporary America, Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 185-6. 14 H van Coller, ‘Border/Frontier Literature’ in Space and boundaries in literature: Proceedings of the 12th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, R Bauer, D Fokkema & M de Graat (eds), Ludicium, Munich, 1990, pp. 254-9. 15 L Marx, ‘Bodies and Borders: Vietnam/Namibia’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 8, 2007, p. 100. 16 R Barnard, ‘The Smell of Apples, Moby Dick, and Apartheid Ideology’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 46, 2000, pp. 210-1. 17 Cited in H Roos, ‘Die Afrikaanse Prosa 1998 – 2003’, in Perspektief en profiel Deel 3, H P van Coller (ed.), Van Schaik, Pretoria, 2006, p. 98. 18 Others include the short stories collected in B Fowler (ed.), Pro Patria. Sentinel Projects, Halifax, 1995; A Feinstein, In Conflict, New Namibia Books, Windhoek, 1998; R Andrew, Buried in the Sky, Penguin, Johannesburg, 2001; and C Holt, At Thy Call We Did Not Falter. Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2006. 19 White male conscripts faced difficult options: answer the call-up and spend two years or more (if camps are included) in uniform, object on conscientious or religious grounds and face a stiff jail sentence, or flee the country. 20 Thompson’s An Unpopular War went through six reprints in almost as many months. 21 (Colonel) Jan Breytenbach has published They Live by the Sword, Lemur, Alberton, 1990; Eden’s Exiles: One Soldier’s Fight for Paradise, Queillerie, Cape Town,1997; and The Buffalo Soldiers: The Story of South Africa’s 32 Battalion, 1975—1993, Lemur, Alberton, 2002. As a conservationist, he is at least critical of the senior politicians and SADF officers who benefited from the pillaging of animal resources in Angola. See also P Nortjie, 32 Battalion, Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2004.

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J Geldenhuys, A General’s Story: From an Era of War and Peace, Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg, 1995: originally published in Afrikaans as Dié wat wen: 'n generaal se storie uit 'n era van oorlog en vrede, (1993). 23 M Malan, My lewe saam met die SA Weermag, Protea Bookhuis, Pretoria, 2006. 24 F Van Z Slabbert, The Other Side of History, Jonathan Ball, Cape Town, 2006, pp. 17-19. 25 In the particular case of 32 Battalion, these difficulties include deprivation, an uncertain future as a refugee community shuttled from camp to camp within some of the most desolate areas of the country, unsympathetic treatment by the ANC government, and easy prey to mercenary recruiters. A brief summary of their conditions can be found at . 26 B Fowler, Grensnvegter? South African army psychologist, Sentinel Projects, Halifax, 1996, pp. 123-7 outlines the SADF’s ‘model’ debriefing session. Holt, At Thy Call, pp. 116-20 reproduces it and at p. 122 relates how it worked in practice. 27 J Bourke, ‘When the torture becomes humdrum’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 10 February 2006, accessed 13 March 2006, . 28 G Eagle, ‘The Political Conundrums of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, in Psychopathology and Social Prejudice, D Hook and G Eagle (eds), University of Cape Town Press, Cape Town, 2002, p. 87. 29 J Herman, Trauma and Recovery, Pandora, London, 2001 [1992], p. 9. 30 T Eprile, The Persistence of Memory, Double Storey Books, Cape Town, 2004, 252. 31 TRC Report, vol. 4, pp. 221. 32 K Whitty, Review of Holt, At Thy Call We Did Not Falter, accessed 22 August 2005, . 33 For instance, the testimony of conscript Kevin Hall has been carefully scrutinised and rebutted by H Hamann, Days of the Generals, Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2001, pp. 221-3 and by Magnus Malan, pp. 474-6. 34 J Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 4. 35 S Gear, Wishing Us Away: Challenges facing ex-combatants in the ‘new’ South Africa, Johannesburg: CSVR, 2002, accessed 14 June 2006, .

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A clique of former SADF generals did make a submission to the TRC. It was co-ordinated by General Dirk Marais, former Deputy Chief of the Army, under the title: ‘The Military in a Political Arena: the SADF and the TRC’: see Hamann, p. 130. 37 TRC Report, vol. 4, p. 221. 38 TRC Report, vol. 4, p. 242. 39 Paratus Special Supplement, vol. 30, 1979. 40 Pretoria News, 17 January 2007 (‘Include us, says ex-SADF members’). 41 Gear, Wishing Us Away, pp. 123-5 42 T Bopela and D Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe: Fighting for a divided people, Galago, Alberton, 2005. 43 Gear, Wishing Us Away. 44 Many ex-combatants have left the armed forces and have found employment in the burgeoning privatized security industry, others have resorted to providing such services as far afield as Iraq or have been engaged as mercenaries. See Gear, Wishing Us Away. 45 M George. Opening Address of the Deputy Minister of Defence on the Occasion of a Symposium on Military Veterans. University of South Africa, Florida Campus, 25 August 2004, accessed 24 February 2007, . 46 Gear, Wishing Us Away. 47 R Shell et al, HIV/AIDS: A Threat to the African Renaissance? KonradAdenauer-Stiftung, Johannesburg, 2000. 48 TRC Report, vol. 2, p. 62. 49 C Saunders, ‘South Africa’s Role in Namibia/Angola: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Account’, in Baines and Vale. 50 J Hunter, ‘No Man’s Land of Time: Reflections on the Politics of Memory and Forgetting’ in Baines & Vale. 51 P Stiff, Nine Days of War: South Africa’s Final Days in Namibia, Lemur Books, Alberton, 1991. 52 D LeBeau, An Investigation into Namibian Ex-soldiers Fifteen Years after Independence, Peace Centre, Windhoek, 2005. See . 53 H Becker, ‘Remaking Our Histories: The Liberation War in Postcolonial Namibian Writing’ in Baines and Vale. 54 R Kössler, ‘Public Memory, Reconciliation and the Aftermath of War’, in Re-examining Liberation in Namibia, H Melber (ed.), Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala, 2003, p. 107. 55 There have been a few exceptions. These include some stories in C Leys and S Brown (eds), Histories of Namibia: Living through the liberation

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______________________________________________________________ struggle -- Life histories told to Colin Leys and Susan Brown, Merlin Press, London, 2005. 56 L Metsola and H Melber, ‘Namibia’s Pariah Heroes: SWAPO ExCombatants between Liberation Gospel and Security Interests’, in The Security-Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa, L Buur, et al. (eds), HSRC Press, Cape Town, 2007.

Bibliography Addison, G.N., ‘Censorship of the Press in South Africa during the Angolan War: A Case Study of News Manipulation and Suppression’. MA Thesis, Rhodes University, 1980. Andrew, R., Buried in the Sky. Penguin, Johannesburg, 2001. Baines, G. and Vale, P (eds), Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late-Cold War Conflicts. University of South Africa Press, Pretoria, 2007. Barkun, M. ,A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003. Barnard, R., ‘The Smell of Apples, Moby Dick, and Apartheid Ideology’. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 46, 2000, pp. 207-26. Becker, H., ‘Remaking Our Histories: The Liberation War in Postcolonial Namibian Writing’, in Beyond the Border War. Baines & Vale (eds), pp. 281301. Behr, M., The Smell of Apples. Abacus, London, 1995. Bopela, T. & Luthuli, D., Umkhonto we Sizwe: Fighting for a Divided People. Galago, Alberton, 2005. Bourke, J., ‘When the torture becomes humdrum’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 10 February 2006. `Accessible at . Breytenbach, J., Eden’s Exiles: One Soldier’s Fight for Paradise. Queillerie, Cape Town, 1997.

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______________________________________________________________ ______

, The Buffalo Soldiers: The Story of South Africa’s 32 Battalion. 1975-1993. Lemur, Alberton, 2002. ______

, They Live by the Sword. Lemur, Alberton, 1990.

Edkins, J., Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. Eagle, G., ‘The Political Conundrums of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, in Psychopathology and Social Prejudice. D. Hook and G. Eagle (eds), University of Cape Town Press, Cape Town, 2002, pp. 75-91. Eprile, T., The Persistence of Memory. Double Storey Books, Cape Town, 2004. Feinstein, A., In Conflict. New Namibia Books, Windhoek, 1998. Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Select Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77. Random House, New York, 1988. Fowler, B., Grensnvegter? South African Army Psychologist. Sentinel Projects, Halifax, 1996. Fowler, B. (ed), Pro Patria. Sentinel Projects, Halifax, 1995. Gavshon, A., Crisis in Africa: Battleground of East and West. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981. Gear, S., ‘The road back: psycho-social strains of transition for South Africa’s ex-combatants’, in Baines & P Vale (eds), pp. 245-266. ______

, Wishing Us Away: Challenges Facing Ex-Combatants in the ‘New’ South Africa. Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, 2002. Geldenhuys, J., A General’s Story: From an Era of War and Peace. Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg, 1995. Hallett, R., ‘The South African Intervention in Angola 1975-76’. African Affairs, vol. 77, 1978, pp. 347-68.

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______________________________________________________________ Hallin, D., The Uncensored War: the Media and Vietnam. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986. Hamann, H., Days of the Generals. Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2001. Herman, J.L., Trauma and Recovery. Pandora, London, 2001 [1992]. Holt, C. ,At Thy Call We Did Not Falter. Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2006. Hunter, J., ‘No Man’s Land of Time: Reflections on the Politics of Memory and Forgetting’. Baines & Vale, pp. 302-321. Kössler, R., ‘Public Memory, Reconciliation and the Aftermath of War’, in Re-examining Liberation in Namibia,.H. Melber (ed.), Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala, 2003, pp 99-112. LeBeau, D., An Investigation into Namibian Ex-soldiers Fifteen Years after Independence. Peace Centre, Windhoek, 2005. Accessible at . Leys, C. and Brown, S. (eds), Histories of Namibia: Living through the liberation struggle - Life histories told to Colin Leys and Susan Brown. Merlin Press, London, 2005. Malan, M., My Lewe Saam met die SA Weermag. Protea Boekhuis, Pretoria, 2006. Marx, L., ‘Bodies and Borders: Vietnam/Namibia’. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 8, 2007, pp. 91-102. Metsola, L. and Melber, H., ‘Namibia’s Pariah Heroes: SWAPO ExCombatants between Liberation Gospel and Security Interests’, in The Security-Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. L. Buur, et al, (eds), HSRC Press, Cape Town, 2007, pp. 85-105. Minkley, G. & Legassick, M., ‘‘Not Telling’: Secrets, Lies and History’. History and Theory, vol. 39, 2000, pp. 1-10. Nortjie, P., 32 Battalion. Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2004.

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______________________________________________________________ Roos, H., ‘Die Afrikaanse Prosa 1998 – 2003’. Perspektief en profiel Deel 3. H.P.van Coller (ed.), Van Schaik, Pretoria, 2006, pp. 43-104. Satchwell, K., ‘The power to defend: an analysis of various aspects of the Defence Act’, in Society: The Militarisation of South Africa. J. Cock and L. Nathan (eds), David Philip, Cape Town, 1984, pp. 40-50. Saunders, C., ‘South Africa’s Role in Namibia/Angola: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Account’, in Baines & Vale (eds), pp. 267-280. Shell, R., et al. HIV/AIDS: A Threat to the African Renaissance? KonradAdenauer-Stiftung, Johannesburg, 2000. Slabbert, F. van Z., The Other Side of History: An Anecdotal Reflection on Political Transition in South Africa. Jonathan Ball, Cape Town, 2006. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vols 2 and 4, TRC, Cape Town, 1998. Steenkamp, W., South Africa’s Border War 1966-1989. Ashanti, Gibraltar, 1989. Stiff, P., Nine Days of War: South Africa’s Final Days in Namibia, Lemur Books, Alberton, 1991. ______

, The Silent War: South African Recce Operations 1969-1994. Galago, Alberton, 1999. Thompson, J.H. (ed.), An Unpopular War: Voices of South African National Servicemen. Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2006.

Van Coller, H., ‘Border/Frontier Literature’. R. Bauer, D. Fokkema & M. de Graat (eds), pp. 254-9.

A Psychosocial Perspective on Support for Terrorism in the Wake of Attacks Kiran Sarma Abstract This chapter examines the psychology of support for terrorism in the wake of terrorist attacks. It argues that dynamics involved are best conceptualised as a process of psychological disengagement in which the supporter accepts the moral legitimacy of the attack in the perusal of wider aspirations. A critical ‘point of psychological separation’ (PPS) exists within a spectrum of increasingly immoral terrorist behaviour and beyond which the supporter will be unable to psychologically disengage. Beyond this PPS lies the point of ‘backlash’. In the face of a particularly horrific incident, the supporter rejects the moral legitimacy of the terrorist campaign, withdraws support for the terrorists and accepts the need for State to act against them. The PPS and point of ‘backlash’ are in turn determined by a complex cluster of attitudinal determinants including the type of action involved, the propaganda waged by the terrorists, the actions of others in the theatre of conflict and set against a backdrop of prevailing experiences, attitudes and prejudices of supporter. Key Words: Moral disengagement, psychology, support for terrorism ***** 1.

Introduction While there are many variables that impact on the ability of terrorist organisations to survive and thrive, perhaps none is more important than the existence of a popular support base. On a most elemental level, terrorists rely on this supportive community as a source of new recruits for replacing retiring, incarcerated and eliminated members - a service that ensures the continued existence of the terrorist organisation and without which it would move towards extinction. On a less dramatic level, supporters provide financial, logistical, propagandist, political and moral support that ensures the smooth running of a terrorist campaign.1 Taking that popular support is required for terrorists to survive, one must wonder how normal members of society can support an organisation that inflicts horrendous acts of violence that lead to extensive human suffering? It would appear rational to conclude that acts of terrorism are incompatible with the moral values held by even the most alienated individual and would lead to his withdrawing support for the terrorist. Yet clearly this is not so. The most successful and prolific contemporary terrorists survived and thrived despite large scale atrocities leading to the widespread

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______________________________________________________________ and indiscriminate loss of life – actions covered widely, and often in realtime, by the media. This chapter offers a conceptual model for understanding how ‘normal’ individuals can accept the moral legitimacy of terrorism and continue to lend support to terrorists in the wake of an atrocity. As a starting point, it is argued that support for terrorism is best understood as a psychological manoeuvre in which some individuals can escape feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment, disgust and revulsion in response to acts of terrorism through the adoption of some moral justification(s) for the terrorist action. Support for terrorism, therefore, is perceived as being the product of psychological disengagement. Furthermore, it is suggested that this psychological disengagement is the product of the interpretation and assimilation of conflict-related information generated by the terrorists and others in the theatre of conflict and set against a back drop of prevailing socio-cultural attitudes and experiences. Finally, I argue that a ‘point of psychological separation’ (PSS) can be conceptualised on an scale of increasingly immoral terrorist actions. Actions that fall below the PSS will be morally acceptable to the supporters and will not lead to withdrawal of support. Actions that fall above the PSS will be seen as unjustifiable by the supporters, insult their moral values, and result in the erosion of the terrorist-supporter relationship. It is important to make a number of preliminary observations. First, the label ‘terrorist supporter’ is an extremely complex phenomenon. The varying social, political, cultural, theological and historical contexts of each conflict environment means that the psychological profile of the terrorist supporter varies widely across geo-political landscapes. Moreover, supporters can fulfil many different roles for the terrorist and can be either more or less committed to the terrorists’ political and military strategies. Second, the label ‘terrorist’ can often conceal the reality that different types of terrorist organisations exist and, in some instances, are almost wholly incomparable. They can be distinguished on such fundamental levels as structure, size, motivation, ideology, religiosity, survivability, methodology, political involvement and cohesiveness that a sky-scraper typological model would be required to cater for all nuances of terrorism and terrorist organisations. Third, the nature of the ‘relationship’ between terrorists groups and their supporters varies widely. Some terrorists groups require greater levels of popular support than others and invest greater resources in ‘selling’ justifications for their campaign of violence. They are particularly aware of the sensitivities of their support base and go to great lengths to avoid insulting their moral values. Others use social and political control (repression) and demand allegiance and loyalty. Inevitably this chapter draws on these over-simplified labels and it is important to clarify that this is done

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______________________________________________________________ with full acknowledgement that they tend to obscure much more complex issues. 2.

Moral Disengagement and Support for Terrorism Support for terrorism is perceived here as hinging on a psychological state of mind in which a member of the supportive community perceives some legitimate justification for the terrorist’s actions. In this ‘mind-set’, the individual can accept that the action results in horrific consequences for victims, yet truly believes that it is justifiable and that continued support for the terrorists is morally acceptable. In the absence of this ‘mind-set’, he is repulsed by the unjustifiable nature of the action, is embarrassed by his support for the perpetrators and seeks of avoid feelings of guilt by rejecting the terrorists. Albert Bandura offers a framework for understanding the psychological processes involved in justifying acts of terrorism in his work on Moral Disengagement - a theoretical framework offered as a way of understanding the psychology of the terrorist, but that lends itself to the understanding of the psychology of the supporter. Bandura suggests that normal individuals can engage in immoral actions when variables are in place that facilitates their moral disengagement from the attack. Moral standards and self-sanction are two concepts of particular importance for understanding Moral Disengagement. Moral standards, for Bandura, are acquired through the imitation or adoption of others’ morals, direct tuition from supervisors and the reaction of others to moral conduct displayed.2 The moral standards that result from this process of social learning subsequently serve as evaluative guides of, and deterrents to, action. Specifically, individuals engage in, or condone, activities that complement their moral standards but avoid, or refuse to support, those that violate those morals.3 The result is a self-regulatory system within which the individual monitors actions and judges their moral attributes taking into account situational factors. The resulting judgment elicits a reaction from the individual that is either positive (positive self-reaction) or negative (negative self-reaction) depending on the adherence to or violation of the moral standards held. When the individual engages in actions that elicit negative self-reactions, the result is negative affective states (guilt and embarrassment for example) that constitute selfsanctions.4 Of central importance here are the ‘many psychosocial processes by which self-sanctions can be disengaged from inhumane conduct’ or the many acts that would normally violate moral standards but in certain circumstances do not result in self-sanction when enacted.5 The resulting Moral Disengagement, according to Bandura, permits those with normal social standards to behave inhumanely without the self-regulatory system enacting a self-sanction.

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______________________________________________________________ Whilst Moral Disengagement provides a potentially fruitful avenue for understanding the psychology of terrorists, more importantly here, it lends itself towards understanding the willingness of some to support terrorists is the wake of terrorist attacks. Just as certain conditions can prompt individuals to engage in seemingly unjustifiable actions, the same processes can promote an audience’s moral disengagement from immoral acts and thus minimize loss of public support that would otherwise have resulted. In his examination of moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities and in justifying terrorism Bandura suggests that moral disengagement can result from a number of ‘psychosocial manoeuvres’. Below I briefly discuss each in the context of the psychology of support for terrorism: Moral Justification: In the wake of a terrorist attack the supporter may justify the action as necessary to protect moral and social norms that he holds in high esteem. For example, speaking before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Campbell (1998) argued that prejudice and religion ‘provide the moral justification and moral disengagement necessary to convince terrorists and supporters alike that using [weapons of mass destruction] is legitimate’.6 That is, moral standards can be circumvented when the act is seen to serve a higher moral purpose such as religion. Euphemistic Language: The terrorist supporter’s ability to morally disengage from the terrorist act may also be facilitated by exposure to emotive or otherwise affective language that justifies the attack.7 Such exposure can occur anywhere where information is conveyed. In group settings, for instance, euphemistic language can promote group-think and attitudinal extremity shifts leading to the formation of particularly extreme views. Propaganda, examined below, also draws heavily on euphemistic language labelling targets in emotive terms, accusing enemies of wrongdoings and otherwise legitimising the action. Advantageous comparison: Supporters may also legitimise the attack as being less reprehensible than similar actions perpetrated by the enemy. In his examination of denial and acknowledgement of Human Rights abuses, for example, Stanley Cohen reports that government replies to Human Rights criticisms often contain long lists of atrocities allegedly carried out by opposition groups. Comparing a normally reprehensible action with those that violate social standards on a much greater scale facilitates our moral disengagement from the former in what is also known as the Contrast Principle. Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, for instance, often justify terrorist actions as being a measured response to on-going Human Rights abuses by Israeli occupying forces.

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______________________________________________________________ Displacement of Responsibility: Bandura suggests that terrorists displace responsibility for their actions onto adversaries who repressed them or failed to recognise their desire for unity.8 Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam justify their campaign as being a necessary response to their inability to address grievances with the Sinhala majority governments through peaceful demonstrations.9 It is almost certain that similar victim-blaming justifications are harnessed by those who support terrorism. Diffusion of Responsibility: Experimental research conducted by Bandura, Underwood and Fromson reported a positive correlation between severity of punishment inflicted and number of punishers.10 They concluded that when an immoral action is perceived as having originated from a large number of individuals then the feeling of responsibility is diluted, the infringement of social standards is judged to be less severe and the overall aversion to the act is diminished. Bose provides an exampled of diffusion of responsibility in his examination of the morality of violence within Indian and Hindu culture when he suggests that normally immoral actions conducted to fulfil the goals of the enactor, can be deemed acceptable when they fulfil wider public aspirations or obligations.11 It is also likely that terrorist supporters who routinely attend large gatherings, such as religious ceremonies, diffuse responsibility more readily than those who do not. Disregarding or Distorting the Consequences of action: Terrorist supporters who disregard or distort the consequences of the terrorist action are less likely to feel guilt or shame in its wake. They suffer an attention deficit towards the immoral aspects of the action whilst simultaneously prioritising evidence that justifies the attack. Bandura notes that misrepresentation, or ‘active efforts’ to discredit evidence of immorality, can have the same effects as selective inattention and distortion resulting in moral disengagement and apathy.12 Kramer provides an excellent example of distortion or disregarding of truths to create moral disengagement and promote inhumane conduct. In his examination of justifications for suicide bomb attacks by Hizballah he notes that religious leaders provided dispensation to attackers despite the proscribing of suicide within Islamic law. When faced with this inconsistency a Hizballah spokesperson suggested that given the group’s inability to use conventional conflict they were justified in using such attacks. Moreover, in a clear distortion of the facts, the organization suggested that the morality of the attack should be judged on its intention rather than nature. Since the intention, an attack, was no different to that pursued during conventional warfare, suicide attacks could be seen as morally acceptable.13 Attribution of Blame: Moral disengagement can also arise through a tendency to attribute causal blame for the action to either the victim or uncontrollable

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______________________________________________________________ circumstances. The supporter may justify the consequences of a terrorist attack as being something that was unavoidable given the repressive actions of the enemy that forced the hand of the terrorist. A good example here is the willingness of Irish republicans to attribute responsibility for the execution of 71 alleged informers by the Provisional IRA to their handlers in the British Army’s Force Research Unit, the RUC’s Special Branch and MI5.14 Dehumanisation: Dehumanisation plays a very prominent role within terrorist campaigns. Kelman notes that ‘inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion’.15 Perceiving someone as human, for Kelman, involves two distinct attributions, individual identity and community association. Moral disengagement from inhumane and otherwise immoral acts inflicted on victims is less pronounced when the victim is perceived as devoid of individual feeling, personality, individuality and desire. Moral standards are difficult to circumvent when the acts are perpetrated against individuals with whom we can associate or whom we perceive as belonging to an interconnected network of people who ‘care for each other’.16 When they are denied individuality and community, the act of victimization is perceived as being less immoral and less inhumane resulting in moral disengagement. For example, Haritos-Fatouros notes that Greek military torturers were recruited at an early age and went through a comprehensive training program during which negative attitudes towards prisoners were maintained and reinforced. To facilitate torturer’s moral disengagement from victims they were portrayed as animal-like (worms) increasing negative attributions and increasing their willingness to inflict pain on the individual.17 Bandura, Underwood and Fromson were able to create similar attitudinal change under experimental conditions during which subjects imposed the most severe punishments on individuals described as ‘animalistic’.18 Osama Bin Laden made use of dehumanisation in propaganda directed at Muslim audiences. On October 10th, 2001, as US aircraft and specialist forces launched attacks on Taliban positions in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden addressed a message to the Islamic audience in which the attacks were labelled a ‘Crusader War’, playing on a long-established Folk Devil in the Muslim psyche: … the confederates have joined forces against the Islamic nation and the Crusader war, promised by Bush, has been launched against Afghanistan and against this people who have faith in God. We now live under this Crusader bombardment that targets the entire nation. The Islamic

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______________________________________________________________ nation should know that we defend a just cause… I address Muslim youths, men, and women and urge them to shoulder their responsibility. They should know the land of Afghanistan and the mujahidin there are really facing an all-out Crusader war.19 Each of these mechanisms has the potential to operate on moral agency four different ways. Moral justifications, Euphemistic language, and advantageous comparisons ‘centre on cognitive transformation of lethal conduct into an honourable and socially acceptable one’. Diffusion of responsibility and displacement of responsibility dilutes feelings of personal responsibility for the attacks. Disregarding or distorting the consequences of actions allows people to either completely ignore or distort the immoral consequences of actions. Finally, dehumanisation and attribution of blame reduce our ability to empathise with the victims in eroding their human status and holding them responsible for their own fates.20 3. The Origins of Support for Terrorism and Moral Disengagement from Terrorist Attacks At this point it is useful to identify some of the key features of the terrorist environment that are known to impact moral disengagement. Across terrorist campaigns it would appear that supporters of terrorism have at least some common experiences that facilitate their moral disengagement from terrorist actions and go some way towards explaining their willingness to lend support. For instance, it is likely that the ability of supporters to morally disengage from a terrorist act is based at least partially on the extent to which they can draw on justifications that are rooted in long-term experiences. Supporters of separatist terrorism, for instance, often rationalise their support as being at least partially motivated by cultural, economic, social, political and educational discrimination and repression at the hands of ‘occupiers’. Supporters of international terrorism point the impact of globalisation on the erosion of their cultural values, economic stability, local and national politics and military conflicts. In contrast, those being targeted by the terrorists often argue that support for terrorism is due to some dispositional weakness or psychological abnormality amongst supporters that is related to religiosity or religious training. Predictably much of the recent debate in the area has focused on support for Islamic fundamentalism. At the forefront of this debate has been the hypothesised link between religiosity and support for terrorism. Yet studies have largely failed to identify any clear-cut cause-effect relationship and we are left with more questions than answers. The 2002 World Values Survey, for instance, probed attitudes towards the 9/11 attacks amongst 1282

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______________________________________________________________ Algerians and failed to show any clear link between religiosity and support for the attacks.21 Subsequent research by Jeremy Ginges into support for suicide bombings amongst Palestinian Muslims living in Gaza found that the psychological dynamics inherent in attending Mosques was a better predictor of support than personal religious devotion.22 Socio-economic determinants of Islamic terrorism have also been examined. Kruger and Maloeckova examined the causes of terrorism in the Middle East and concluded that economic deprivation and lower levels of educational attainment were actually inversely related to support for terrorism.23 Testas conducted similar research drawing on a larger sample of 37 Muslim countries. His approach was to test the possible causal relationships between levels of terrorism (average number of terrorist attacks) and a number of variables including education (enrolment ratio in universities), economic conditions (Gross Domestic Product), political repression (by the host country) and civil war (simulated though a dummy variable comprised of a number of related variables). He concludes that higher levels of transnational terrorism are associated with higher education levels, low and high levels of repression (i.e. a U shaped relationship) and presence of Civil War.24 More consistent and conclusive findings have emerged in relation to support for the Provisional IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland. Most commentators agree that this support is based on contemporary and historical experiences of cultural, economic, social, educational and religious discrimination which generated an underlying predisposition towards supporting a violent campaign to secure a united Ireland. This predisposition became a reality in the wake of a number of critical incidents in Northern Ireland, including Bloody Sunday and the H-Block hunger strikes, that provided the flame that ignited the fuel of existing grievances and disenfranchisement from the establishment. Apart from these background determinants of popular support, other determinants play a more active role. Propaganda, for instance, plays an important role in creating the conditions that help a supporter to disengage from the inhumane consequences of a terrorist action. Cady sums this up appropriately when he notes that a conflict ‘produces homicide. Propaganda takes the enemy and puts them in such a light that they are to be viewed as animals that are not worthy of the same rights and privileges as our own society.’25 Every terrorist organisation wages propaganda in some form or another. The most prolific and well resourced maintain on-line and chapterbased propaganda outlets as well as hosting public meetings and disseminating messages by word of mouth. Research conducted in Northern Ireland has shown than messages disseminated through such media, and particularly in the wake of attacks, go to great lengths to vilify those targeted,

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______________________________________________________________ portraying them in ways that minimise the audience’s ability to empathise with their fate.26 Obviously propaganda campaigns waged by the opponents of terrorists will attempt to alienate supporters from the terrorists. Attacks against the terrorist organisation will be portrayed as morally justifiable given the need to protect society and ‘democracy’. Moral justifications for the terrorists campaign will be ridiculed or ignored. The range of euphemistic propaganda techniques will be employed in an attempt to firmly establish the human-suffering that results from terrorism and thus inhibit emotional disengagement. The terrorist will be demonised, dehumanised and vilified with the intention of alienating his supporters.27 Ability to morally disengage from an act of terrorism is also related to the intensity of the act involved. This at least partly explains why organisations like the IRA, with defined internal structures and accountability, army mentality and codes of conduct appear to use terrorism in a discriminative manner (and which place huge emphasis on popular support and political mandates). Military and symbolic targets are favoured and when economic targets are engaged, efforts are made to minimise civilian casualties because, as Kelman notes, the ‘psychological environment in which such massacres occur lacks the conditions normally perceived as providing some degree of moral justification for violence’.28 Between 1970 and 1972, for example, the IRA was responsible for 22 deaths. All were British Army, UDR or RUC. Attacks on such ‘military’ targets are more acceptable to the support base than attacks, such as Omagh, La Mon and Enniskillen that resulted in large-scale civilian casualties. This is the crux of Campbell’s proposition that the inverse relationship between increasing inhumanity of attack and decreasing support is one deterrent to the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction in acts of terrorism. That is, if the attack is unacceptable to the public to the extent that it withdraws support from the organization, it can be ‘convincingly selfdefeating’.29 The rational choice for the leadership of any paramilitary organization is to sanction attacks that minimise the risk to public support whilst simultaneously maximizing progression to desired long and short-term goals. Yet other terrorist groups pursue policies of attacking civilian targets and appear to have little consideration for the theorised inverse relationship between increasingly inhumanity of attacks and levels of popular support. Prior to the attacks on Washington and New York in 2001, many would have argued that this inverse relationship precluded such an action. Yet in the cold light of day, it is clear that some support bases can draw on the types of emotional avoidance that permit disengagement from even the most inhumane actions.

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______________________________________________________________ It may also be the case that some terrorist groups are self-financing, worry little about political development and draw support from other terrorist groups comprised of individuals who can disengage from even the most inhumane attacks (including those using weapons of mass destruction (WMD)). It is plausible that the inverse relationship between increasing inhumanity of attacks and levels of support unravels in such a context. Although, theoretically at least the organisation still relies on some level of support – in this case other terrorist groups. The intention here has been to identify some of the core factors influencing the extent to which the supporter can morally disengage from an act of terrorism. The discussion is not exhaustive largely due to the dearth of credible research into the nuances of the support dynamic. The reality, of course, is that the experiential variables contributing to support for terrorism are complex, many, varied and difficult to expose to the light of academic enquiry. Indeed it is likely that under certain conditions, each of the suggested contributing factors plays a role in moral disengagement. Other potential causal factors have been almost completely ignored in the literature, and in particular: the presence of a political wing; the extent to which the terrorists and their political allies act as the legitimate administrative authority in their heartlands and work to address the grievances of the supportive population; the ability to convey messages to supporters through controlled and uncontrolled media; the perceived repressive nature of the occupiers and critical incidents that led to marked alienation form the Administration; the role of martyrs; the impact of attending homogenous schools, clubs, societies and social groupings (Catholic for example); the impact of conformity and obedience; the willingness of international actors to lend credibility and legitimacy to the terrorists actions and objectives; the proximity of the supporter to the attack; and core characteristics of the victim. 4.

Moral Disengagement in the Wake of an Act of Terrorism Figure 1 provides a conceptual overview of the mechanisms of, and broader determinants of, Moral Disengagement as outlined above. The supporter’s experiences during the conflict provide the background determinants of support and are rooted in his cultural, social, economic and religious experiences and information on the terrorist’s campaign deriving from propaganda waged by the terrorists and their opponents (A). These background factors in turn provide the mechanisms of moral disengagement in portraying the terrorist campaign as honourable, in diluting the supporters feeling of responsibility for the action, in distorting the consequences of terrorist campaigns and in undermining the ability of the supporter to empathise with the victims. In the wake of a terrorist attack, these mechanisms of moral disengagement form a moral lense through which the

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______________________________________________________________ supporter views the incident and judges its morality (C). Where the mechanisms of moral disengagement are such that the supporter judges the action to be moral, he will continue to support the terrorist’s campaign. Where they are not, the supporter will be alienated from the action, experience a certain amount of guilt and embarrassment that he supported the terrorist’s campaign in the past, and will begin to withdraw support – often collectively manifest within a community in the form of ‘backlash’.

Propagan da

Portrayingact as honourable Euphemistic Language

History

Advantageous Comparisons Moral Justifications

Social Experience Culture Religion

Dilute feelings of responsibility Diffusion of Responsibility Displacement of Responsibility

Moral LenseCreated Evaluation of morality of attack based on compatibilityof attack with moral values created

Circumvent reality Economic Critical Incidents Group ics Dynam

A: Background factors

Disregarding or distorting the consequences of attack Dilute empathytowards victim Dehumanisation Attribution of blame

B: Mechanisms of moral disengagement

C: Moral evaluation of attack

Figure 1: Process of supporters’ Moral Disengagement in the wake of attack. Figures 2 and 3 present theoretical overviews of the relationship between support for terrorism and increasing immorality of terrorist behaviour and accommodates a critical point at which the supporter can no longer disengage from the action – a point where supporters psychologically separate from the terrorists, termed here ‘point of psychological separation’ (PPS). In Figure 2, the PPS occurs where the line-plot intercepts the x-axis

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______________________________________________________________

Level of Support in the wake of attack

(i.e. where support for terrorism reaches value 0). Where conditions are present that inhibit disengagement, this PPS will be negatively adjusted and activities normally seen as justifiable by the supporter will become unjustifiable (as illustrated in the PPS- line-plot). Conversely, where conditions facilitate disengagement, the PPS will be up-shifted and actions normally judged to be unjustifiable, will become morally acceptable (as illustrated in the PPS+ line plot). Figure 3 provides an extension to this overview. In the model more morally justifiable attacks are perpetrated without loss in levels of popular support. At some point in the rising scale of immorality of attack, however, the terrorists engage in quasi-justifiable actions that result in the supporter questioning their justifiability and resulting in gradual alienation from the terrorists (i.e. psychological separation from the terrorists commences). When attacks reach a critical threshold, the supporter can no longer accept their legitimacy, the process of moral disengagement fails, the PPS is reached, and he withdraws support from the terrorists. Finally, if the intensity of attack continues to increase, the former supporter will accept the necessity of taking action against terrorists in an effort to prevent further atrocities and ‘backlash’ will occur.

Disengagment inhibitors result in lower tolerance for terrorism and thus lower PSS

PSS-

Disengagment facilitators result in greater tolerance for terrorism and thus higher PSS

PSS

PSS+

Increasingly immoral behaviour

Figure 2: Impact of disengagement inhibitors and facilitators on the point of psychological separation (PPS).

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Level of Support in the wake of attack

______________________________________________________________

1. Psychological separation from terrorists Increasingly immoral behaviour 2. Point of psychological separation 3. Former supporters begin to accept actions against terrorists ('backlash')

Figure 3: Conceptual model of how increasingly immoral behaviour damages the ability of the supporter to morally disengage and resulting in ‘backlash’. Obviously the psychosocial processes of moral disengagement, the PPS and the point where ‘backlash’ occurs will vary considerably depending on the moral disposition of the supporter, the mechanisms of moral disengagement present, the relationship between terrorist and support, the terrorist organisation involved, the type of actions being perpetrated and a vast array of other contributory factors. During the Provisional IRA’s campaign, for instance, the PPS and point of backlash would have fallen very close to the point at which innocent non-combatants are killed in terrorist attacks and explains why the organisation, and similar terrorist groups like ETA, has attempted to minimise civilian casualties. It is clear that over the course of the 30 years of conflict the level of popular support enjoyed by the Provisional IRA ebbed and flowed. ‘Push Factors’ promoting support included the well documented social, political, economic and cultural inequalities experienced by the Catholic and nationalist population, which when coupled with the failure of the Civil Rights movement, fostered the moral acceptance of some form of armed campaign. Further actions by the State, including allegations of shootto-kill and torture, and an unwillingness to negotiate with H-Block strikers, would have also fuelled a extremity shift in the PPS. The Provisional IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein promoted the perceived moral legitimacy of the campaign through elaborate and sustained propaganda campaigns disseminated through a well-resourced and creative propaganda machine.

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______________________________________________________________ ‘Pull Factors’ include media coverage of the human suffering caused by acts of terrorism and propaganda campaigns by the State and international actors stressing the illegitimacy of terrorism as a political weapon. Most importantly, the vast majority of Catholics in Ireland are intolerant of any action that results in the deaths of non-combatants, and no amount of propaganda will create the conditions in which the community can morally disengage from a campaign that regularly results in widespread civilian loss of life. The PPS for supporters of Al Qaeda and affiliated extremists, on the other hand, appears to be high. In early 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Projects surveyed 17,000 Muslims and non-Muslims in 17 countries addressing aspects of Islamic fundamentalism. When asked about the justification of suicide bombings in the defence of Islam, 57% of Jordanians believed that such attacks were ‘often or sometimes’ justifiable, a figure somewhat higher than those reported for Lebanon (39%), Pakistan (25%), Indonesia (15%), Turkey (14%) and Morroco (13%). When asked about ‘confidence in Bin Laden to do the right thing in world affairs’, 60% of Jordanians stated that they had ‘a lot’ of confidence in the Al Qaeda leader, again higher than confidence levels reported amongst Muslims of other nations (Pakistan (51%), Indonesia (35%), Morocco (26%), Turkey (7%) and Lebanon (2%)).30 Such figures suggest a high level of moral disengagement amongst some Muslims and a relatively high PPS for the small sections of the Islamic community that would consider themselves ‘supporters’ of Islamic fundamentalism.31 Whilst the confidence with which we can use such statistics in drawing inferences about actual support for terrorism is uncertain, they would certainly appear to be compatible with observations of on-the-ground support. Groups like Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade appear to retain a significant level of popular support despite the large numbers of casualties although it is unclear if their supporters could disengage from more dramatic actions. The same cannot be said of Osama Bin Laden and his associates who appear to thrive on the support of affiliated international terrorists and on a ground swell of vehement and militant anti-West opinion amongst a small section of Islamic men and women. The active support base (other terrorist organisations) and passive support base would appear to be emotionally ‘hardened’ to the extent that they could morally justify or disengage from the most inhumane of attacks. Even if a large number or the passive support base was lost, Al Qaeda could draw on established terrorist networks as a source of new members.32 This has implications for the debate on the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by terrorist organisations. Under certain conditions terrorists will be able to employ weapons of mass destruction, inflict

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______________________________________________________________ widespread suffering, and maintain a level of popular support that ensures their survival. In addressing the thesis of this chapter, support for terrorist organisations in the wake of terrorist attacks can be rationalised within the framework presented here. Support will remain where the action falls below the PPS, but will be damaged when it is above this point. The further below the PPS, the more acceptable the action. At any stage in the evolution of a terrorist conflict, we can examine the current experiences of the terrorist’s support base, the types of actions that the terrorists engage in, their propaganda campaigns and the actions of their opponents and expect a correlation with both the PPS and the level of support enjoyed by the terrorist. We can anticipate that the terrorists will use propaganda and prepropaganda to foster and strengthen the relationship when it weans. Moreover, for terrorists who rely on popular support, we can use the PPS to predict the types of actions they are likely to engage in. 5.

Conclusion There has never been a more opportune time to delve into the complex nature of the relationships between terrorists and their supporters. Until the late 1990s many commentators argued that the need to protect popular support bases prevented the perpetration of large-scale atrocities. Indeed, as late as 1999 Alex Schmid noted that one of the accepted ‘truisms about terrorism’ was that ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead’.33 Recent evidence emerging on the treat posed by anti-Western terrorist groups, however, would appear to suggest that some terrorists at least, ‘want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead’. This clearly implies that not alone has the nature of the terrorist threat changed, but that established opinions on the moderating effect of supporters on terrorist actions also require reassessment. What emerges here is an impression that under certain conditions supporters can accept the moral legitimacy of even the most horrific attack. More specifically, under certain social, political, economic and theological conditions, and when reinforced by justificatory propaganda from terrorists and in the absence of effective contradicting messages from alternative sources, guilt-inhibitors will reign and popular support will remain. Initial forays into previously ignored areas tend to be, by their very nature, simplistic representations of more complex phenomena. In the context of this chapter, it is impossible at this early stage to accurately reflect every nuance of moral disengagement that explains the support-rationale for each terrorist group-type. A more complete review of terrorists and their supporters, complete with conceptual models, is some time away. Many holes in our knowledge remain. On a theoretical level, the concept of moral disengagement has simply not formed the subject of sufficient research and

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______________________________________________________________ debate. With the exception of a handful of chapters published by Albert Bandura, moral disengagement has been largely ignored in the psychological literature and requires further terrorism-specific consideration. On a second level, there is a need to engage in systematic research addressing the key determinants of support. Indicative of failings in the area is the plethora of studies that have examined the role of propaganda in revolutionary and terrorist conflicts, but that did not involve meaningful propaganda analysis. The result is that whilst we are aware that propaganda forms a cornerstone element of terrorist campaigns, we are largely unaware of the exact roles it fulfils, its importance to terrorist groups, how it is waged or how it can be countered. Research needs to be conducted that employs established propaganda analysis templates in the analysis of propaganda content to determine the types of euphemistic language used by terrorists in promoting moral disengagement amongst their supporters. Moreover, we need to know such messages are constructed: How techniques like name calling and glittering generalities work together; whether most messages revolve around a central allegation or label such as ‘Crusader’ with other propaganda techniques simply supporting this central allegation. But perhaps most importantly, we do now know enough about the key players in the equation, terrorists and their supporters. Even a cursory review of the different typologies of terrorism and terrorist organisation reveal that the label ‘terrorist’ has largely lost its usefulness as a discriminatory tool. ‘Terrorist organisations’ have such varying objectives, motivations, strategies, structures, operating environments, and membership, that without access to more specific research dealing with different types of terrorists and their supporters, it is difficult to move beyond general observation and comment. Similarly, the notion of ‘terrorist supporters’ obscures the fact that the nature of support for terrorism varies within terrorist campaigns and across terrorist campaigns. Some supporters are active, some passive and some uncommitted. For some, support is based on religious beliefs, for others political aspirations and others simply out of frustrating deriving from the inability to address grievances through legitimate means. Again research on moral disengagement amongst these varying support bases would be useful. This chapter provided a broad overview of some of the more obvious determinants of moral disengagement in the wake of terrorist attacks. Less visible determinants may be no less pertinent. Psychology should have much to say on these and related subjects. On one level, as a discipline concerned with the study of organisations, motivations, individual differences and attitudinal change, terrorists and their supporters should be of natural interest to psychologists. Second, as a discipline that stresses the importance of systematic research in the acquisition of knowledge, psychologists should

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______________________________________________________________ have the wherewithal to design research that makes a genuinely valuable contribution to knowledge in the area.

Notes 1

The importance of popular support in low intensity conflicts has been noted by counter-insurgency practitioners, academics and the terrorists themselves. See for instance R Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of CounterInsurgency, Pall Mall Press, London, 1964, p. 55; R Faligot, Britain’s Military Strategy in Ireland: The Kitson Experiment, Brandon Publishing, Dingle, 1983); M Crenshaw, ‘The logic of terrorism as the product of strategic choice, and questions to be answered, research to be done, knowledge to be applied’, in Origins of Terrorism, W Reich (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 247-260; M Crenshaw, ‘On how terrorism ends: U.S. institute of Peace working group report’ 1999; M Tsetung, On Guerrilla Warfare, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol.IX 1937, p. 67; C Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, Frederick A Praeger, London, 1961, p. 138; and IRA. (n.d). The Green Book (unpublished manuscript of the Irish Republican Movement), pp. 12-13. 2 A Bandura, C Barbaranelli, G.V Capara & C Pastorelli, ‘Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 71, 1996, pp. 364-374. 3 A Bandura, ‘Mechanisms of moral disengagement’, in Walter Reich (ed), op. cit., pp. 161-191. 4 Bandura ‘Mechanisms’. 5 Bandura et al., p. 364. 6 J K Campbell, ‘Chemical and biological weapons threats to America: Are we prepared?’ Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on technology, terrorism and Government information and the Senate Select Committee on intelligence, Hart Senate Building, Washington, April, 1998. 7 A Bandura, B Underwood, & M E Fromson. ‘Disinhibition of aggression through diffusion of responsibility and dehumanization of victims’, Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 9, 1975, pp. 253-269. 8 Bandura, ‘Mechanisms’. 9 See the LTTE’s website, , for this and similar justifications for their armed campaign. 10 See Bandura et al., ‘Disinhibition’, passim. 11 See N Bose, ‘Morality of the use of violence: A conceptual dichotomy in the Indian perspective’, in The Rationalisation of Terrorism, D Rapoport and Y Alexander (eds), University of America Publications, Frederick MD, 1982, pp. 161-177. 12 Bandura, ‘Mechanisms’.

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______________________________________________________________ 13

M Kramer, ‘The moral logic of Hizballah’, in W Reich, (ed), pp. 131-157 p. 146. 14 For a detailed examination of this see K Sarma, ‘Informers and the Battle against republican terrorism: A review of 30 years of struggle’, Police Practice and Research: An International Journal, vol. 6 2005 (Special Issue: Policing Revolutionary and Secessionist Violence), pp. 165-180. 15 H C Kelman, ‘Violence without moral constraint: Reflections on the dehumanization of victims and victimizers’, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 29, 1973, pp. 25-61, p. 48. See also C A J Coady, ‘The morality of terrorism’, Philosophy, vol. 60, 1985, pp. 47-71 and J M Darley & T R Shultz, ‘Moral rules: Their content and acquisition’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 41, 1990, pp. 525-556, p. 548. 16 Kelman, p.49. 17 M. Haritos-Fatouros, ‘The official torturer: A learning model for obedience to the authority of violence’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 18, pp. 1007-1120. 18 Bandura et al., ‘Disinhibition’, p. 258. See also A Bandura, ‘Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 3, 1990, pp. 193-209. 19 ‘In full: Al Quaeda statement’ (October 10, 2001). BBC News Online, accessed 15 December 2001, . 20 These distinctions are discussed in A McAlister, A Bandura and S Owen, ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in Support of Military Force: The Impact of 9/11’. Preprint provided by A Bandura. 21 M Tessler, ‘The Extent and Determinants of Approval of 911 Among Ordinary Citizens in Algeria’, Unpublished document of the Roots of Terrorism Initiative pp. 2-3, accessed 19 January 2006, . 22 J Ginges, ‘Devotion to God or to the Collective? Understanding the relationship between religion and popular support for suicide bombing’, University of Michigan’s Research Centre for Group Dynamics, Working Chapter, 1996. Retrieved January 17, 2006, from www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu/roots/religion.pdf 23 A B Krueger and J Malecková, ‘Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is there a Causal Connection?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 17, 2003, pp. 119-44. 24 A. Testas, ‘Determinants of terrorism in the Muslim World: An empirical cross-sectional analysis’, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 16, 2004, pp. 253-273.

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______________________________________________________________ 25

D M.Cady ‘Understanding conflict and warfare’, Anthropology, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 113-147. 26 See K Sarma ‘Defensive Propaganda and IRA Political Control in Republican Communities’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (forthcoming). 27 For useful research in this area see M Tugwell, ‘Revolutionary propaganda and possible counter-measures’, Unpublished Doctoral Defence Fellowship Thesis, Kings College, London 1979. 28 Kelman, p.25. 29 Campbell. 30 Surveys dealing with sensitive subjects are notoriously prone to various sources of error, and the actual predictive utility of the Pew Global Attitudes Project is likely to be no exception. This said, the research appears to have adhered to international best practice with sample sizes in most target populations exceeding 1000 respondents (yielding an error margin of between +-5% and +-3%). The survey was conducted under the guidance of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Questionnaires were administered by different research consultancies in different countries using probability based sampling designs (with Britain being the exception, where a quota based design was used). 31 Obviously neither having confidence in Bin Laden nor supporting the use of suicide bombings against civilians in the protection of Islam actually equates to supporting terrorism. Nonetheless, those who actually support Islamic extremism are likely to share these, or even more extreme, views on the justifiability of terrorism, thus accounting for the relatively high PPS. 32 Somewhat ironically, the media, fed by ‘intelligence’ from Western governments, have built Al Qaeda into a terrorists organisation of almost mythical proportions, with thousands of members, sleeper cells and a cunning and elusive leader. In short, rather than undermining ‘Al Qaeda’ in the eyes of its potential supporters, rather than understating its abilities, the West has generated a ‘hero’ figure head that offers direction to those with the most vehement anti-Western opinions. This contributes to the ease with which Osama Bin Laden can and will attract new members, associates, and affiliates. 33 A P Schmid, ‘Terrorism and The Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction: From Where The Risk’, in The Future of Terrorism, M Taylor and J Horgan (eds), Frank Cass, London, 2000, pp. 106-132, p. 106.

Bibliography Bandura, A., ‘Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities’. Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, 1990, pp. 193-209.

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______________________________________________________________ ______

, ‘Mechanisms of moral disengagement’, in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind . W Reich (ed),. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Capara, G. V & Pastorelli, C., ‘Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , vol. 71, 1996, pp. 364-374. Bandura, A., Underwood, B., & Fromson, M. E., ‘Disinhibition of aggression through diffusion of responsibility and dehumanization of victims’. Journal of Research in Personality 9, 1975, pp. 253-269. Bose, N., ‘Morality of the use of violence: A conceptual dichotomy in the Indian perspective’, in The Rationalisation of Terrorism. D Rapoport and Y Alexander (eds), University of America Publications, Frederick MD, 1982, pp. 161-177. Cady, D. M. ‘Understanding conflict and warfare’. Anthropology, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 113-147. Campbell, J. K., Chemical and biological weapons threats to America: Are we prepared? Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on technology, terrorism and Government information and the Senate Select Committee on intelligence, Hart Senate Building, Washington, April, 1998. Coady, C. A. J., ‘The morality of terrorism’. Philosophy, vol. 60, 1985, pp. 47-71. Crenshaw, M. ‘The logic of terrorism as the product of strategic choice, and questions to be answered, research to be done, knowledge to be applied’. Reich (ed.), pp. 247-260. ______

, On how terrorism ends, U.S. Institute of Peace working group report,1999. Available at http://www.usip.org/oc/sr/sr990525/sr990525 .html.

Darley, J. M., & Shultz, T. R., ‘Moral rules: Their content and acquisition’. Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 41, 1990, pp. 525-556. Faligot, R., Britain’s military strategy in Ireland: The Kitson experiment. Brandon Publishing, Ireland, 1983.

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______________________________________________________________ Ginges, J., Devotion to God or to the Collective? Understanding the relationship between religion and popular support for suicide bombing. University of Michigan’s Research Centre for Group Dynamics Working Paper, Michigan, 1996. Available at <www.rcgd.isr.umich .edu /roots /religion.pdf.>. Guevara, C., Guerrilla Warfare. Frederick A. Praeger, London, 1961. Haritos-Fatouros, M., ‘The official torturer: A learning model for obedience to the authority of violence’. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 18 , 1988, pp. 1007-1120. ‘In full: Al Quaeda statement’, BBC News Online, 10 October 2001. Available at . IRA.,The Green Book. Unpublished manuscript of the Irish Republican Movement, date unknown. Kelman, H. C., ‘Violence without moral constraint: Reflections on the dehumanization of victims and victimizers’. Journal of Social Issues, vol. 29, 1973, pp. 25-61. Kramer, M., ‘The moral logic of Hizballah’. Reich, (ed), pp. 131-157. Krueger, A. B., & Maleckova, J., ‘Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is there a causal Connection?, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 17, 2003, pp. 119-44. McAlister, A., Bandura, A., & Owen, S., ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in Support of Military Force: The Impact of 9/11’. Preprint provided by A. Bandura. Sarma, K., ‘Informers and the Battle against republican terrorism: A review of 30 years of struggle’. Police Practice and Research: An International Journal, vol. 6, 2005 (Special Issue: Policing Revolutionary and Secessionist Violence) , pp. 165-180. ______

, ‘Defensive Propaganda and IRA Political Control in Republican Communities’. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 30, 2007, 1073-1094.

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______________________________________________________________ Schmid, A. P., ‘Terrorism and The Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction: From Where The Risk’. The Future of Terrorism, M Taylor and J Horgan (eds),. Frank Cass, London, 2000, pp. 106-132. Tessler, M., ‘The Extent and Determinants of Approval of 911 Among Ordinary Citizens in Algeria’. Unpublished document of the Roots of Terrorism Initiative. Available at http://www.rcgd.isr.edu/roots/papers.htm. Testas, A., ‘Determinants of terrorism in the Muslim World: An empirical cross-sectional analysis’. Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 16, 2004, 2004, pp. 253-273. Trinquier, R., Modern warfare: A French view of counter insurgency. Pall Mall Press, London, 1964. Tse-tung, M., On guerrilla warfare. Selected works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol.IX , 1937. Available at . Tugwell, M., Revolutionary propaganda and possible counter-measures. Unpublished Doctoral Defence Fellowship Thesis, Kings College, London 1979.

Non-Lethal Warfare Seth B. Scott Abstract: This chapter explores the relationship between war and death and attempts ultimately to answer the question: can war be fought without death? 1 General Rupert Smith declared military force as having the basic purpose of ‘killing and destroying’;2 to measure war’s success, society tracks death and destruction. Despite these benchmarks, few wars have concluded due exclusively to the annihilation of all opposing fighters, so perhaps death and destruction are not the sole end of war. If not, is ‘killing and destroying’ necessary? I propose a re-evaluation of lethal warfare in favour of approaches using non-lethal weapons as a catalyst for non-lethal warfare. I examine the near-universal societal acceptance of death in war and explore how this hampers moves away from lethal warfare. I operate under the premise that conflict is inevitable but that death in conflict is unnatural. There are weapons technologies acting on the physiognomy of man which may eliminate death from the practice of war, and I discuss the pros and cons of this fledgling technology, asking finally how it might affect our ideology of war. Key Words: Death, killing, non-lethal weapons, war. ***** 1.

Introduction Carl Von Clausewitz wrote that war has three main objects:

1. 2.

To conquer and destroy the armed power of the enemy To take possession of his material and other sources of strength, and To gain public opinion.3

3.

Object 2 deals with preventing enemy access to materials. ‘Holding the ground’ has been the hallmark of military success throughout history. Success is defined by the denial of the use of territory and resources by the enemy. Traditionally this has meant the presence of men with guns to deter or repel the opposing force. Object 3 deals with the political exigencies of war. This is the ‘hearts and minds’ sought after equally by democracies, insurgents and revolutionaries. Of particular interest here, however, is 1. Clausewitz accurately pinpoints the destruction of ‘armed power’, in other words, the

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_____________________________________________________________ power of the enemy to resist, as a determining factor in warfare. Conspicuously absent from this list is the word ‘kill’. Historically speaking, once the military has engaged, killing is the object of war. Militaries measure progress by the number of enemy dead. When killing enemy combatants is not enough, they turn to killing the civilian population, as the Americans did in firebombing Japan in WWII. Yet, for all this killing, rarely has a war ended because there was no one left to kill. Clearly it is not killing that ends a war, but, as Clausewitz pointed out, the simple destruction of the enemy’s ability to fight back. If one can achieve this without killing, is killing necessary? But if war might not require killing, why does the notion of a bloodless war seem so strange? War is a form of conflict, and conflict is inevitable. But not all warfare ends in death. This has been demonstrated by the American Indian act of counting coup, or the New Zealand islanders’ practice of removing poison arrowheads from the fletch before going to war,3 or English noblemen giving up lands and rights based on an elaborate process of capturing opposing soldiers. What is it, then, that perpetuates the perception that war must involve killing one other? 2.

The Diminishing Right to War Humankind has moved away from killing as a form of dispute resolution. Of all competitive entities - governments, corporations, team sports, unions - only governments retain the legal right to lethal warfare. Even within government, not everyone can conduct wars. Cities, counties, and states cannot legally wage war against one another. In fact, we have reached the point in governmental evolution at which there are only two recognized entities legally entitled to engage in warfare: sovereign, recognized nations under attack from other sovereign, recognized nations and multi-national forces acting under UN Security Council resolution.4 This has not always been so. At one time, the Church had the right to kill. Corporations, too, such as the East India Company, armed their employees to protect their interests through the implementation of death. But over time, the right of these organizations to kill on their own behalf has become criminalized. Although we still use the terminology, the very idea of Wal-Mart engaged in military actions against Starbucks, or the Church of Latter Day Saints storming the Vatican seems patently absurd. Five hundred years ago this type of aggression was acceptable. Today, even an accumulation of weapons among these factions would trigger legal action. Nations are the last bastions of death. If any of the former entities are in disagreement, they can count on the state to intervene before hostilities commence. Nations alone accord themselves the right to lethal action. As the last century progressed, even this was called into question. An aggressor state invading a neighbouring country will often find swift

Seth B. Scott 225 ______________________________________________________________ retribution, not from their enemies, but from distant foreign nations. A state interested in accumulating certain weapons, such as nuclear or biological, will feel the eyes of the world upon them. The development of the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague set about to police even sovereign national leaders who do not follow globally accepted conduct. Gradually, humankind has begun to strip nations of their right to engage in warfare. As we further a global economy, the need to reduce governmental acceptance of the use of killing becomes increasingly apparent. Global markets make it harder to turn against one another. We are responsible for each other’s sustenance, as a team; the more people we have on our team, the better off we are, regardless of our national, religious, geographical or ideological differences. What we see is a gradual but definitive move away from the right to lethal warfare; and on the basis of this we might speculate that in future all lethal conduct on the part of any organization, including nations, will be abandoned and/or proscribed. Today, however, it is still impossible to outlaw war altogether – that would require an act of force to enforce, which in essence invalidates its own legality. One option on the horizon, however, is to outlaw the lethality of warfare. While wars may continue, the means to make death unacceptable have begun to take shape. Thereby, over time, perhaps war itself could become unacceptable. ‘Unacceptable’ seems an odd word, perhaps. After all, can anyone in full conscience say that war is acceptable? While individuals may not, nations certainly do. Even though there are fewer entities doing the killing, there were more people killed by the state and war in the twentieth century than in all our prior history. Approximately 203 million people in 100 years,5 roughly two thirds of the current population of the United States. That’s equal to the sum of the entire population of Tokyo, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, New York and the remaining fourteen largest cities in the world. 3.

The Universal Acceptance of Lethal Warfare In order to posit non-lethal warfare as a viable notion, we must first discredit the utility of death. Upon learning the topic of this chapter, most people react with confusion. The absence of death is anathema to our fundamental understanding of war. Most view the very term ‘non-lethal warfare’ as an oxymoron. Perhaps the greatest hurdle we must overcome to achieve nonlethal warfare, much less an end to war, is not technological, not governmental or institutional, but personal. We must look inside ourselves and ask why we find killing an acceptable aspect of war. So let us consider, briefly, the attitudes we have as a whole, the mental hurdles we face, before we discuss the technology. War is about death. We wouldn’t debate it so vigorously, be fascinated and horrified by it, if it weren’t for death. Airplanes, railroads,

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_____________________________________________________________ schools, government buildings - all of these can be rebuilt. A single human life cannot. However, this duality of horror and expectation creates a conundrum. How do we abhor killing on the one hand while supporting its use in national interests? As a result of this double standard, we have built up a wall of myth to justify the use of killing in warfare, either by us or in our names. I have encountered each of these reasons, from ultimately reasonable people, not only to debunk the possibility of the inception of non-lethal warfare but to preclude its very conception. All are legacy issues from millennia of warfare. The four most significant myths are these: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Killing is natural for humans. Killing is a horror necessary to end war. Killing provides for others the opportunity for ultimate sacrifice. Killing is the way the world works.

A. Killing is Natural for Humans What is most surprising about resistance towards non-lethal weapons is our attitude toward killing as natural, or normal. This is a selfperpetuating myth: we are killers because we believe we are; we kill because we are expected to; we kill because we believe it is in our nature to do so. Yet there is ample evidence to indicate the opposite is true. Whether or not killing is natural is constituted in terms of the nurture vs. nature debate. It may be impossible to prove empirically either way, for to do so would require a subject’s being raised in the absence of the knowledge of killing. Who among us has not been exposed to the wars of history, the purges of literature, the body counts of entertainment, the omnipresence of weapons in toy stores, the tragedy of murders reported widely beyond their affected audience? We most certainly have the capacity to kill, but capacity and compulsion are two separate creatures. By general estimates, only one percent of the human race has ever killed another human.6 If we reduce that number by homicides, as they are not instances of socially acceptable killing, this figure drops substantially. So, in essence, over 99% of humanity has managed to live out their entire lives without ‘acceptably’ killing. That is what is natural. The idea that killing is ingrained in human nature is a convenient way of dismissing the possibility that killing can be avoided. In some way, perhaps we are ashamed of our inability to prevent it. Waltz writes, ‘Aggressive tendencies may be inherent, but is their misdirection inevitable?’7 Perhaps the best answer to this has been given in studies of the military itself. The ‘natural’ argument for war has been widely researched. The vast majority of results of such research, carried out by anthropologists,

Seth B. Scott 227 ______________________________________________________________ sociologists and, remarkably, combat specialists, reveals that killing is in no way a naturally occurring phenomenon. It must be cultivated, trained and honed. The natural tendency of man is not to kill, and soldiers must be trained to overcome this before entering battle. In the animal kingdom, battles between species end in death (scorpions and spiders, lions and zebras) but battles within species (over mates and herd dominance, for example) almost never result in death. Instead, once dominance has been asserted, mercy follows. Even among the most heavily armed creatures, such as piranhas, rattlesnakes and sharks, the use of their poisons, teeth and other specialized weapons is absent from intraspecies battle. Only in rare cases, which are not clearly understood, such as that of a father killing its young, is intra-species killing observed in nature. Peter Marsh, an Oxford social psychologist, notes that most human cultures have rituals of aggression and posturing, but little actual violence. Soldiers under duress are given only four options: fight, flight, posturing and submission.8 Posturing is a form of intimidation, such as the loud rock’n’roll that American soldiers play when entering a battle zone. The intention of posturing is to intimidate the enemy into flight or submission without a fight. Flight, or desertion, is so well established among soldiers as a desirable option that nearly all-military structures have kept in place capital punishment as a deterrent. Submission, or surrender, is also common enough to require strictures against it, such as those that Japanese soldiers were held to during World War II. Simply put, regardless of the objectives or character of the war, soldiers have three options other than fighting, all of which work against the general purpose of their leadership. From the fact that such strong measures as death and dishonour are necessary to deter soldiers from pursuing these options, one can infer that killing is not a natural trait. Only fighting remains. During World War II the US noticed that hit rates in proportion to the number of bullets fired were extraordinarily low. In an effort to improve these numbers, it studied hit rates in general and interviewed soldiers in the field. The results were remarkable: soldiers admitted to deliberately firing over the heads of the enemy. They fired, in essence, to appease the desires of their superior officers or to appear to play a part in front of their fellow soldiers. Most often, and quite deliberately, they missed. Similar subsequent studies for other nationalities showed the same results. Hit rates were as low as 15-20%. Recent studies of hit rates in relation to bullets fired in wars ranging from the Napoleonic to the American Civil War up to World War II showed roughly the same 15-20% success rate. Since weapons improved dramatically in accuracy over that time, the only constant was the soldier himself. Soldiers, the military realized, weren’t killing. With that in mind, the US military, as well as other national militaries, set about to condition soldiers to kill. By the war in Korea, the hit rate had increased to 55%, and by Vietnam it had reached an amazing 95%.9

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_____________________________________________________________ It was during Vietnam that the ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’ method of training reached its zenith, as evidenced by field effectiveness. The best evidence that killing is conditioned, rather than natural, is what takes place during the eight weeks of basic training every soldier endures. If killing were natural, none of this would be necessary. Is there any more powerful argument against the nature of killing than that even soldiers try to avoid doing so? B. Killing is a Horror Necessary to End War One myth of war is that it must be terrible in order to act as a deterrent to future wars. This is similar to the equally statistically erroneous belief that capital punishment deters murder rates or that longer incarceration deters criminal activity. It is plainly false. Our wars have only become more horrible and destructive as a result of this belief. The threat of nuclear annihilation, short of a weapon that can singlehandedly destroy the earth or the universe, could be considered the perfect culmination of the art and technology of killing. However, wars were won and lost long before the art of killing was perfected. With the invention of more and more lethal weapons - the machine gun, nerve gas, artillery, long range bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads - we have become more effective at killing but, arguably, less effective at winning wars. It isn’t the reliance on remote weaponry that hampers us; but rather the false assumption that enemy casualty numbers equal success. The belief that death brings an end to war is simply not true. In reality, the greatest deterrent to war is time, which involves factors such as weather, disease and public opinion. These factors have played a large part in the outcome of wars throughout history and have nothing whatsoever to do with the effectiveness or horror of our weapons. The longer a war goes on, the less popular it becomes, regardless of the number of dead. Furthermore, war is almost always a feat of endurance - not against death or enemy guns, but against the nature of war itself: overextended supply lines, poor weather, deteriorating living conditions and disease. Studies have shown, for example, that the vast majority of death in war takes place during a retreat. C. Killing Provides the Opportunity for Ultimate Sacrifice General MacArthur once said that ‘The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for they most suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.’10 Soldiers who die in combat are considered heroes, monuments are erected to them, national holidays celebrate them, they are awarded medals posthumously, their families are proud of them and of their ‘sacrifice’ for their country. But would they not rather be alive? Soldiers die abstractly for their country and its way of life; however, the priorities of

Seth B. Scott 229 ______________________________________________________________ nations can change dramatically over time, as can national identities themselves. Consider the ‘enemy’. Everyone in war is the enemy of someone. In my (American) grandfather’s lifetime, the ‘enemy’ has been Italians, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Koreans and Vietnamese; and these are only the nations Americans fought against in war. All of them, with the exception of North Korea, are now ‘friends’, regardless of who won: American interests now seek business deals in Communist Vietnam and tourism abounds. The fact remains that most people outlive their ‘enemy’ status. With the exception of centuries-old local conflicts, enemies rarely remain enemies for long. This is not to say that soldiers were sacrificed in vain, nor that their actions were somehow less than heroic. Rather, I mention this only because it is a tragedy that soldiers die for a cause that would not have outlived them. In many ways, what they die for is an experiment in itself and, unlike drug companies or universities, only nations have the right to ‘sacrifice’ a ready stream of volunteers for their experiments. It is for this reason, if for no other, that we need to move away from lethal warfare. Preventing the death of soldiers for the relatively short duration of conflict should be a priority. If civilians can outlive their enemy status outside of combat, then soldiers, too, deserve to outlive those wars and the ideology and leadership behind them. D. Killing is the Way the World Works This is not a myth. Killing is the way the world works. However, the use of this argument to propose that killing will always be the way the world works would indicate that those who know their history are doomed to repeat it. Historically, the technology of war has not existed to produce any result other than death. Traditionally, killing has served to accomplish several goals including incapacitating leadership, clearing an area of occupants and selfdefence. In war, death is a tool, a simple, effective means of accomplishing the goals of war. But that does not mean it is either the best or the only method. If we find a means to accomplish these same goals without killing, killing will become unnecessary. How the world works – how it has worked – is one thing; how it can work is another. What then are the possibilities before us? What if we could invent an equally effective, non-lethal mechanism to accomplish the same goals? E. Non-Lethal Weapons and the New Technology of War From January to March 1995, the US 1 Marine Expeditionary Force evacuated 6,200 UN peacekeepers from Mogadishu, Somalia. Remarkably, this operation deliberately employed non-lethal weapons as the first means of defence. These weapons included pepper sprays, sticky foam, flash-bang grenades, 40mm beanbags, 12-gauge rubber pellets and other readily available crowd-control weapons. While these weapons were not intended to

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_____________________________________________________________ replace lethal weapons if the situation required it, the operation succeeded without a single coalition casualty – although there is no record of Somali casualties. Nonetheless, this was the first full-scale combat application of non-lethal weapons, and within military circles the action raised an awareness of the viability of non-lethal offensive weapons that may rival the effectiveness of traditional weaponry in stopping or repelling enemy forces.11 In particular, weapons under development include: Active denial; Phasers; Sonic units; and Electromagnetic Pulses. The US Department of Defense recently sent into field operations a microwave array designed to deter and dispel personnel. Known as Active Denial, the system emits millimeter waves, penetrating only 1/64th of an inch of skin, causing an intense burning sensation. Affected combatants naturally recoil from the 55C degree heat, much like the involuntary reaction after touching a stove, yet the beam does not, in fact, burn skin. It simply triggers the nerve endings into reacting. It is effective through clothing and on any exposed skin. Phasers consist in an ultraviolet laser beam that creates a conductive line in the air which allows an electrical current to travel along the beam. Upon striking the target, this current causes paralysis without loss of consciousness by contracting the muscles through a process known as ‘muscular tetanization’. Effective up to 200 metres, invisible to the eye, and capable of sweeping multiple targets, it nevertheless causes no damage to the skin or retina.12 Sonic units emit low frequency sound waves which cause internal reactions such as the instantaneous releasing of the bowels and severe stomach and intestinal pain. Unlike the Long Range Acoustic Device used for area denial in shipping, this device is not audible, causes no damage to the ear, and has no permanent biological effects. Electromagnetic Pulse weapons create an electromagnetic wave which overloads and destroys electronic circuitry without affecting human or infrastructure targets. As a weapon against communication systems especially those located in civilian population centres - and in cyber-warfare, it is increasingly effective in our wired battlefields.13 These are only a few of the weapons being developed by the US Department of Defense and private agencies. There are many others, ranging from malodorants (stink bombs) to oil-eating bacteria. The purpose of mentioning these four in particular is not to demonstrate that we currently have the ability to replace lethal weapons, but rather to point out progress already made with limited funding in this field,14 and to indicate what already exists. What makes non-lethal weapons a watershed in human history is not their current capabilities, but the direction they suggest. A bullet or a bomb is nothing more than an outside force acting on the human body in order to incapacitate or debilitate it to the point that it can no longer fight or resist for

Seth B. Scott 231 ______________________________________________________________ a given or indefinite amount of time. Non-lethal weapons designed with this purpose in mind will be no less effective than current lethal technologies. Non-lethal weapons are not kinetic. Unlike virtually any other weapon, they do not rely on propulsion or impact to affect their target. Instead, these weapons intelligently manipulate the human body’s natural reaction to stimuli. They can target the nervous system to induce severe but harmless pain, disrupt the bowels to create spontaneous and uncontrollable movements or even paralyze the body - all without permanent damage. Furthermore, non-lethal weapons discriminate between targets. Whereas kinetic weapons will destroy tissue as easily as concrete or glass, these weapons focus energy on a deliberately specific target. For example, an Electromagnetic Pulse bomb dropped on a city will render electronics useless without unintended collateral damage, firestorms or wanton destruction. These weapons are thus radically different in concept from traditional weaponry. They aim to defeat an enemy’s armed power alone and offer a dramatic range between the use of lethal force and no force at all. One of the reasons the military is pursuing the development of such weapons is to provide multiple force options in combat situations. A civilian child holding a weapon, for example, poses an immediate threat to troops, regardless of the child’s intentions. Traditionally, a soldier would shoot first to protect himself, with consequences both mortal (for the victim) and psychological (for the soldier). Non-lethal weapons offer the opportunity for both parties to survive contact. Non-lethal weapons used in civilian populations also help to achieve Clausewitz’s third aim - that of gaining public opinion. By not accidentally (or deliberately) killing innocent civilians, one prevents invoking the cumulative wrath of increasingly frightened and angry civilian populations. The death of civilians - and indeed of soldiers - perpetuates conflict through a reciprocal sense of retribution: to remove death from the equation would diminish the immediacy of tension among warring factions. 4.

Critiques Various objections might of course be offered to the development of non-lethal weapons. Some might point out that they will increase the number of prisoners of war, with all the attendant costs of internment and of the requisite logistics of movement. But how many POWs could be fed, clothed, and housed by the elimination of one multi-million dollar missile? And what better way to win over ‘the enemy’ than by refusing to kill them? Certain human rights activists have resisted their implementation owing to the ease with which less scrupulous states have used them as devices of torture. But any object, including parts of the human body, can be used as an instrument of torture, and attempts to limit the development and

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_____________________________________________________________ distribution of non-lethal weapons will only lead to the perpetuation of lethal weaponry and straightforward killing. Use is one thing; misuse another. More thoughtful activists, therefore, such as Amnesty International, while strongly opposing non-lethal weapons such as stun guns, do not voice opposition to the development of weapons, such as active denial, which - unlike stun guns are clearly and explicitly intended to diminish death in action.15 Other critics contend that non-lethal weapons can be transformed into lethal weapons. Well, doubtless some can: but again, we must distinguish use from misuse. As with all human action, it is intention that matters; and surely the intention here is benign, at least in terms of seeking to avoid killing people. To intend to temporarily disable, to capture or otherwise to defeat an enemy - and in doing so also to prevent them from killing people - is better than an intent to kill.16 Still other critics contend that non-lethal weapons are simply inappropriate for the type of large-scale warfare industrialized countries are likely to engage in. But in fact, the primary form of warfare today is Fourth Generation Warfare, that waged by comparatively small factions whose intention is to eradicate, even through genocide, those who oppose them;17 and non-lethal weapons are particularly useful in just these cases. Put in the hands of UN peacekeepers or evcn of occupying forces, non-lethal weapons will serve to defuse hostile situations and debunk the beliefs of those who feel that armed, lethal force represents their only recourse. Furthermore, as non-lethal weapons become more popular, and thus increasingly available, it is conceivable that such factions might themselves choose to pursue their goals by other than lethal means. Finally there is the perception that, without being lethal, these weapons are akin to toys. By removing the fear of death, we remove the role and fear of trauma as well and reduce warfare to the level of the proverbial chess game. But this is a misconception. Imagine yourself on a battlefield. Suddenly the person beside you starts screaming that their skin is on fire. On your other flank, comrades are dropping into spasms of paralysis. Others are evacuating their stomachs and intestines. Perhaps your own rifle is melting and the rubber components of the shoes on your feet are dissolving. All the while, there has not been a sound from the enemy, not one visual clue as to their location, not one indication of the cause of all this. Would that not be sufficiently traumatic? Might it not even serve as a considerable deterrent, inasmuch as the employment of such weapons could lead to soldiers - and others - coming to feel that war is quite literally impossible to fight? 5.

Conclusion: War Without Death Alice laughed, ‘There's no use trying,’ she said, ‘one can't believe impossible things.’

Seth B. Scott 233 ______________________________________________________________ ‘I daresay you haven't had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’18 There are many ways to accomplish military goals. Killing is currently the preferred one. To change that will require effort, invention and determination, but no less than has been seen in other major inventions. War and death are so closely linked in our collective consciousness, and in our collective practice, that we find the very idea of non-lethal warfare at best counter-intuitive. That need not be so. What makes non-lethal weapons worth discussing is that their recent development represents not just a technological advance but a potential revolution in our attitudes toward war and death. Ironically, it is the military itself, not the populace or politicians, that supports non-lethal weapons development. The military wants to expand its force options, not least in order to increase its flexibility in a time when the demands placed on it range from all-out war to policing and peacekeeping missions. Why not welcome the opportunity this gives to change the face of warfare? The military itself might help us come to recognize that war can be fought without death, and so play a part in what could be the most important change in military history the transition from lethal to non-lethal warfare. So long as we only shoot to kill, we have no real compassion for the enemy. To fight and die is normal, even honourable, after all. The instant we discuss non-lethal weapons, however, the enemy becomes more than a target - the enemy becomes a human being. Once enemies are human beings, they are entitled to certain rights and expectations. The development of non-lethal weapons would make possible a shift in our intentions, from killing people to temporarily disabling them. That in itself could encourage a view of our enemies as fellow human beings, with consequences in the long term not just in how we fight wars, but for whether we fight them at all.

Notes 1

R Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, p. 8. 2 C Von Clausewitz, Principles of War, Dover Publications, New York, 2003, p. 45. 3 D Grossman, On Killing, Back Bay Books, New York, 1996, p. 12. 4 I am deliberately discounting the legal right to revolution because its arbitrary and unexpected eventuality precludes its deliberate choice and adoption of weaponry. Revolutions are less relevant to this chapter in that

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_____________________________________________________________ they are more likely to be fought, by the revolutionaries, with the weapons available to them, i.e. those of the government they live under, rather than their developing new ones. 5 D Paige, Nonkilling Global Political Science, 2nd ed., Xlibris, Philadelphia, 2007, p. 27. 6 Paige, p. 27. 7 K Waltz, Man, The State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001, p. 9. 8 Grossman, p. 9. 9 Grossman, p. 10-12. 10 Grossman, p. xxxii 11 See F Lorenz, ‘Non Lethal Force: The Slippery Slope to War?’, Parameters, vol. 26, 1996, pp. 52-62. 12 J Herr, US Patent #5,675,103, 1997, accessed 8 February 2007, . 13 Global Security.org, accessed 5 January 2007, . 14 Current funding for these weapons is roughly equivalent to the budget for paving the parking field of the US Pentagon. 15 S Mihm, ‘The Quest for the Non Killer App’, New York Times, July 25, 2004, accessed 6 August 2007, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage. html?sec =technology&res=940DE3DA133AF936A15754C0A9629C8B63>. 16 An early entry in the category of non-lethal weapons was the laser. Strategists proposed that laser weapons, ‘dazzlers’, could be fired at eye-level across a battlefield, permanently blinding any soldier in its path. The international community quickly banned these weapons, classifying them in the same category as chemical weapons. It wasn’t their indiscriminate nature that caused this reaction, however (as it had been for chemical weapons), but rather the inherent inhumanity of their intended action. This is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, it clearly shows that we find death and permanent disability an acceptable outcome of warfare. Second, and counterintuitively, it demonstrates in some way the first instance of caring for the enemy. 17 See R Bunker, ‘Epochal Change: War Over Social and Political Organization’, Parameters, vol. 27, 1997, pp. 15-25. 18 L Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Wordsworth Editions Limited, Hertfordshire, 1993, pp. 210-211.

Bibliography Bunker, R., ‘Epochal Change: War Over Social and Political Organization’. Parameters, vol. 27, 1997, pp. 15-25.

Seth B. Scott 235 ______________________________________________________________ Carroll, L. Through the Looking Glass. Wordsworth Editions Limited, Hertfordshire, 1993. GlobalSecurity.org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munition s/non-lethal.htm Grossman, D., On Killing. Back Bay Books, New York, 1996. Herr, J., US Patent #5,675,103. 1997. Accessible at . Lorenz, F., ‘Non Lethal Force: The Slippery Slope to War?’. Parameters, vol. 26, 1996., pp. 52-62. Mihm, S., ‘The Quest for the Non Killer App’. New York Times, 25 July 2004. Accessible at . Paige, D., Nonkilling Global Political Science. 2nd ed., Xlibris, Philadelphia, 2007. Von Clausewitz, C., Principles of War. Dover Publications, New York, 2003. Waltz K., Man, The State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. Columbia University Press, New York, 2001.

Teaching Non-Violence Helen Fox Abstract In-depth interviews with undergraduates at a high ranking, politically liberal U.S. university suggest that young adults who are most likely to occupy future positions of influence are sceptical of the idea that a world without war is possible. Despite their aversion to war in general and the Iraq war in particular, these students nearly always said they believe that war is an integral part of human nature and that peaceful international relations will always be subverted by individuals and/or groups that insist on taking advantage of others. When students defended the need for war, they did not cite international terrorism or self defence as just causes, but rather the responsibility to protect defenceless others such as villagers in Darfur or Jews in Hitler’s Germany. However, students knew little about the prevalence and efficacy of non-violent movements or the range of diplomatic and political tactics that have been employed to deter violence. The author shares the content and methods of her seminar on non-violence, and concludes that more courses in secondary schools and universities need to fill the gaps in students' knowledge by teaching historical, social, political, and psychological information about both war and peaceful solutions to conflict. Key Words: non-violence, pacifism, peace education, peace activism, higher education, Quaker ***** I am a pacifist. My pacifism is rooted in my Quaker faith. In a letter to King Charles the Second in 1661, Quakers declared, ‘We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. This is our testimony to the whole world.’ It’s true that not all Quakers are pacifists. Many fought in World War II, after becoming convinced that this was a good war, necessary to preserve peace and freedom, and to free others from oppression. But many other Quakers have been conscientious objectors, opposed to all war as a matter of principle. I joined their ranks after the New York World Trade Center was attacked on September 11th 2001. This is how I came to that realization in my life. On September 10th I had just returned from Cambodia where I had talked to survivors of the Khmer Rouge, who, in the mid-1970’s, had sent most of the population into slave labour in the countryside, declared money invalid, blew up the central bank, burned books, executed the intelligentsia, and turned the local high

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______________________________________________________________ school into a torture chamber where they starved, mutilated, and executed seventeen thousand of their own people including many young children. Who were these monsters that inflicted such suffering? They were not an external enemy, nor were they a particular ethnic or religious group. They were Cambodians who had turned against their neighbours, their teachers, their colleagues, even their own families in their zeal to create a new society. This is what still haunts Cambodians today, that they did all this to themselves, that they became so brutalized by an idea and committed such atrocities out of fear, or revenge, or cold-blooded self-righteousness. Looking around as I walked through the streets of Phnom Penh and the villages and towns I visited, I realized that many of the people I saw had been young adults during those terrible years, and had either been very, very lucky, or had participated in some way in that system. But strangely enough, I did not see a nation of people degraded by evil. In fact, I found Cambodians to be some of the most gentle, hospitable, and delightfully sunny people I have ever met. As a nation of Buddhists, they are taught to revere all forms of life and deplore inflicting pain on others. To get angry in public - over a cab fare or some other petty complaint - is considered childish and embarrassing. Even raising one’s voice is culturally inappropriate. This is not something that arose recently, after the experience of such opposite sentiments. These values have been present throughout the country’s history. As I reflected on my Cambodian trip in the light of the newly declared ‘War on Terror,’ other examples of the mutability of good and evil came to mind. The Japanese, so incorrigible as to merit a nuclear holocaust at the end of World War II, are now our trading partners and esteemed colleagues. Vietnam, once a rogue state whose people could be maimed, burned, and genetically deformed with impunity, is now a traveller’s destination of choice. (‘Beautiful!’ say the American tourists. ‘Especially the North. And the people are so hospitable. You must go.’) Surely, it’s illogical to say, as my government does, and as all governments do when they want to prepare the people to commit unspeakable crimes of violence, that there are the bad people and the good people, the immoral countries and the responsible countries, and that if we annihilate or violently reform the ‘bad guys’, we - the good and responsible people - will be safe, and evil will be defeated forever, or at least kept under control. Shortly after September 11th, when the United States decided to protect itself from terrorism by attacking two defenceless countries, one, desperately poor, the other trying valiantly to maintain itself under United Nations sanctions, I made several personal decisions, just to remain sane. One was to start speaking openly about pacifism. The other was to develop a new undergraduate seminar at the University of Michigan called Non-

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______________________________________________________________ violence in Action, that would get students thinking about more reasonable ways to solve problems between people and nations. After teaching that course for several years I began a research study that would help me envision how to reach a wider audience of students, and what that audience might need to know. I also wanted to understand more clearly what students at a high-ranking, politically liberal university think about the current war in Iraq, what they think of war in general, and how they view the possibility of a non-violent future. For this project I employed three undergraduate research assistants to help draft a questionnaire and conduct many of the tape-recorded interviews, as my experience told me that students would be more voluble and honest talking with their peers than with a faculty member. The interviewers found volunteers for the study through their personal networks of acquaintances and classmates, and I asked students in my non-violence seminar to interview themselves and their friends. Our final sample contained an approximate balance of males and females, students of colour and white students, and students pursuing a variety of academic majors. My research assistants suggested, rightly, that a student interview about the heavy topics of war and peace should begin with the personal, so each section started with such questions as how respondents were affected by the events of 9-11, their feelings about the Iraq war, the images that came to mind when they thought about the current war and war in general, whether they had ever been approached by a military recruiter and how they had responded to that, and what they would do in the event of a military draft if one were to be reinstated - which was unlikely, but had been discussed in the media. We then asked respondents to think about broader questions of war, peace, and human character and potential. ‘Why do you think terrorists want to attack the United States?’ ‘In your opinion, what is the best response to terrorism or terrorist threats?’ ‘Do you see war as a reasonable way for nations to settle their differences, a necessary evil, an unacceptable way to conduct foreign relations, or something else entirely?’ ‘Do you think war could become universally rejected or condemned at some point in the future, like cannibalism, human sacrifice, and slavery?’ ‘What do you think humans would have to learn in order to solve global conflicts peacefully?’ The purpose of these kinds of questions was two-fold; we wanted to know what respondents thought and felt and where they lacked information or reasons for their beliefs, and we wanted to give them an opportunity to reflect on ideas that too often remain unquestioned, which we thought would be a valuable end in itself. The interview questions were intentionally open-ended in order to elicit as much information as possible from respondents. Interviewers asked encouraging follow-up questions, (‘Why do you feel that way?’ ‘Can you say

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______________________________________________________________ more about that?’), occasionally posed questions of their own that deviated from the interview protocol, and allowed answers to take their own paths even if they veered somewhat off-topic. While this conversational approach makes the interview data hard to quantify, we felt it gave us a more complete picture of what these respondents think, and, from the perspective of peace education, what they need to know. In this way, we completed in-depth interviews of eighty University of Michigan undergraduates, about a quarter of whom have taken my non-violence seminar. These interviews, in addition to student essays from my non-violence classes and my reflections on teaching nearly eighty additional students over a period of five years, provide the information for this paper. Most students we talked to believe that the Iraq war is ‘pointless,’ ‘ignorant,’ or ‘unnecessary.’ This makes some of the respondents angry; others are deeply cynical. A first year student says: I totally did not approve of this war. It sounded really stupid from the beginning. I’ve heard it mentioned that this will become another Vietnam, and that’s what it seems it’s going to be, a long, drawn-out war where in the end there is no benefit; there is no end result. Just nothing. Just a lot of people coming home angry and depressed. Nothing really to show for it. Another responds: I’m looking down at President Bush because I’m like, you know, ‘Why are you putting us through this? What are we getting out of this?’ I think a lot of us are looking at Bush like, ‘What the hell are you thinking? What is wrong with you?’ Unless they have family members in the military, many say they are emotionally disengaged from the war. Some don’t even follow it on the news, either because they can’t make sense of why we are in Iraq, or because they believe that the media and/or the administration deliberately downplay the war or lie about it. A first year French major who was horrified to discover that in fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, responds emotionally: Q: Do you feel that the media plays more as a mediator and deliverer of information, or as an instigator that . . . A: (interrupts) Instigator! Instigator! And they try to scare you with a lot of things that aren’t true. It used to be a good

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______________________________________________________________ way to get information. Now we have NBC and MSNBC and CNN and FOX News and local channels, and they’re all in competition. So they all try to come up with things that make their stories more spicy and sizzling, so that more people will listen to what they have to say. It used to be a good way of giving us information when we had about four news channels. Now that we have 24-hour news channels, most of it is like, lies, or false situations! If a military draft were to be reinstated to supply personnel for the Iraq war, the majority of respondents said - rather rashly, I thought - they would flee the country, go to prison, or somehow make themselves unqualified for military service. Many said that their families would support them in their decision to avoid the draft - or even lead the way in an escape to a neutral country. When asked, ‘If there were a draft and you were drafted, what would you do?’ a second year female student replies: A: I’m not going! I’m not going if they try to draft me! Q: What would you do if you were drafted? A: (immediately) Get pregnant. (pause) Get pregnant. Get very pregnant. Q: How do you think your friends and family would respond to your decision? A: Good job! (laughs) They all know they ain’t goin’. I’m not goin’! They’re not goin’ to let me go! A fourth year male student says: I would have great trouble killing someone, or working for someone that I knew was supporting killing people. So I would try and dodge it as best I could. I’ve heard that new agreements with Canada don’t allow draft dodgers there, and the college exemption no longer works. So I don’t know what I would do. I could become blind spontaneously or some other things . . . A majority of respondents believe that the United States brought the September 11th attacks on itself because of its tendency to bully other countries or treat them as inconsequential. A second year student replies to the question, ‘Why do you think terrorists want to attack the United States?’ Every country wants to attack America. Because America has been holding its thumb down on every other country

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______________________________________________________________ for the past 100 or so years, with all its weapons. Oh my God, did you know that there’s over 200 nuclear facilities in our country alone? And we get pissed off at South Korea or Iraq if we find one! And we bomb it all of a sudden. No wonder people want to fight back; we’re like an oppressor, we’re like the biggest superpower with the biggest military and the biggest weapons, it’s like, you know, who wouldn’t want to come in and bomb it, and destroy it? A third year student responds even more graphically: [Terrorists want to attack U.S.] because the United States thinks they’re the high shit and they can do whatever the hell they want to other countries, and then they think everybody’s supposed to be okay with it. But the terrorists are fed up, they’re like, they want to be heard, and they don’t like the United States. Like a lot of countries don’t like the United States! Which people in the United States don’t realize. People say oh, we’re such a great country, we do a lot of great things - well, we do a lot of horrible things, too. Almost all respondents said that the U.S. response to the 9-11 attacks did not make them feel safer, and that war is not an effective, fair, or rational way to deal with terrorist threats or attacks. Many suggested that the individuals behind the attacks, rather than entire countries, should be brought to justice. Some pointed out the uselessness of trying to annihilate a tactic or an idea. One respondent suggested that terrorism is in all of us, even those our government is trying to protect. She related the story of how her friends and neighbours had violently turned on the only Arab American family in her small community, attempting to torch their business and effectively running them out of town. ‘I don’t think that a war [on terror] is the best answer,’ she said, ‘because anyone could be a terrorist. What happened in my town was an act of terrorism, because the majority of the people did it. So they’re the terrorists!’ While some respondents upheld the need for war in limited circumstances after careful and repeated attempts at diplomatic solutions, many said that any war is pointless, self-defeating, or hypocritical. A fourth year student explains: War is a paradox, because it can be justified by anything. Anybody can find their own reasons to start a war. At the same time, somebody else can feel that your reason for war

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______________________________________________________________ is totally not justified. So war is just - there’s really no reason. It’s just ridiculous. It’s not even a paradox, because a paradox makes sense. It’s an inherent contradiction. It’s a self-defeating philosophy of humanity. A first year student says categorically: I don’t think anybody has the right to kill anyone regardless of anything. So, just the simple fact that we’re sort of saying, ‘Hey, it’s sorta your time to die now’ - boom! - I’m not ready for that. So that’s how the [Iraq] war affects me. I’m not down with the killing. Yet despite their abhorrence of war and violence, the overwhelming majority of interview respondents said that wars will continue eternally, and that the dream of a non-violent future is unrealistic. The reasons for this pessimistic view are many. Some students confidently assert that humans are inherently violent, self-centred, or irrational: A third year political science student answers: Q: Is the thought or dream of a non-violent society realistic? A: No! It’s just not realistic. Because human beings are, we’re not reasonable. We don’t think about what’s in everybody’s best interest. We just think about our own. You know, we’re selfish, we’re jealous, there’s a whole list of all the negative things that human beings are. A computer science student explains that people just aren’t logical: Q: So what would you suggest as an alternative to war? A: You know, people always say, ‘Talk it out.’ So that’s what I want to say. That’s the right thing to do. But we don’t just live in a perfect society where you can just like, talk out problems, so everyone can go their separate ways, cause human beings aren’t rational people. We don’t think logically . . . People don’t think about the other side, or if they have a valid point. They only think about themselves. We’re selfish people, I guess.

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______________________________________________________________ A third year student who believes that the president’s response to the 9-11attacks ‘unveiled our government’s true nature,’ suggests that humans can’t give up the will to power: No, I can’t imagine a world without war. And that’s unfortunate, but that’s reality. As long as there’s a world, there will be wars. Because humanity will have its people who want more power, they want more control over others; they want to continue to rule the world. And as long as there’s a mentality that ‘I need to rule,’ that ‘I need to control,’ that ‘I need money,’ that ‘I need material things,’ that ‘I need to satisfy myself at the expense of others,’ and as long as there’s fear there will always be war. Some students even suggested that because of human nature, almost any dispute is hard to resolve without violence. A third year student remarks: [War and violence are] just part of who we are. It’s pretty difficult to solve problems with just peace. Such as like who owns land, who controls resources . . . these are issues you can’t solve peacefully because of the way that people are. Or the difference in cultures. Or something as simple as a language barrier or whatnot. So I guess it’s whoever can take it, it’s theirs. I mean, that’s just something that’s part of being human. Those who didn’t go as far as attributing war to inherent human flaws sometimes pointed out that violence is by far the easiest way to settle differences. A first year student who told us he ‘totally did a 180’ conservative Republican to liberal Democrat - when he discovered that the administration had lied about the reasons we had gone to war in Iraq says: Why are people so ready to use violence and war to solve problems? Because you can get it over with, you can just kill someone. You don’t have to sit down and actually make a compromise. Because in war, whoever is the most powerful will like, come out on top, but when you have to actually sit down, go over your flaws, fix the things that are going wrong, listen to another party’s views, to actually sit down and try to come up with a plan, people don’t want to do that.

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______________________________________________________________ Others suggested that weapons technology promotes war, or that powerful people gain from violence and chaos. A third year psychology major says: Will war ever become obsolete? I don’t think so. Not in this day and age, because we’re getting more technologically advanced, developing more strategies and weapons and all that stuff, so you know, (sarcastically) you gotta use them, why try anything else, why try to listen when we have weapons? Ha, ha, we’ve got the big gun! A first year chemical engineering student says: I don’t know about other countries, but America has this big industry manufacturing guns and weapons. And the only way we can justify how much money we’re putting into building and making all these weapons of mass destruction and whatever, is using them every so often. So we can have the companies that make these guns make profit for people and make more money. And then we have to go and use them and sell them to other countries. Some see cultural norms as getting in the way of the elimination of war. A second year student with three family members stationed in Iraq says: I think [war] is just a very traditional idea. A lot of people think it’s just what they’re called to do: the men have to defend their country, the women go up there as nurses to take care of the men that are getting hurt. It’s just like socially built-in things that we always have in our culture. Like a chip in your brain, where guys are like, ‘Okay, I’ll go.’ You don’t have to think about it very much. Some see mere differences in personality or lifestyle as barriers to getting along without war and violence. A first year student who lost two extended family members in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks responds: Q: Is the thought or dream of a non-violent society realistic? A: (blithely) No, it’s impossible. Q: Why do you think that? A: Everyone’s too different. I mean, there are those of us who are really aggressive and those of us who are not.

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______________________________________________________________ There will always be that imbalance. And because of that there will always be fighting, always some kind of conflict. And a third year student contends that people are so ornery that they would find a way around any attempt to solve problems peacefully: The only way to [eliminate war and violence] would be to establish rules, and of course by establishing rules, people would just break them anyway. And this would just lead to anarchy. People are gonna - it’s just the way people are. Q: How do you think we’ll get to a non-violent society, if ever? A: I guess the only way I see it happening is by finding some way to enforce the rules around the clock. But basically you’d have to remove a lot of people’s freedoms. I found these responses somewhat puzzling, because they seem to ignore the ways disputes between people and groups are solved non-violently every day, through the judicial system, through laws that promote fairness, through civil and religious education, through systems of family values and practices, and so on. Interestingly, informants tended to think of large-scale national or international violence in the same terms as interpersonal disagreement. People will always get angry at each other, they said, or use violent language to put each other down, or even just assert their will, and that means that in order to avoid violence, we would have to agree about everything, and that would mean we would need some kind of thought police to avoid divisions between people. Humans would have to be perfect to outgrow the need for war, they said, and that will never come to pass. A first year student says: No matter what, there’s always going to be violence, there’s always going to be that one guy on the block who abuses his wife, there’s always going to be that one woman on the block who abuses her children, there’s always going to be that one country around the corner that disagrees with our policy, there’s always going to be that one president who’s out of his mind that would bring us back to war. These reasons for the inevitability of war were almost always given in a tone of cynicism and even despair. Yet when asked how humans could learn to avoid war, almost all students gave answers that reflected their optimism about human nature or human capabilities, saying that tolerance, respect, and communication are key, or that we just need to sit down with the

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______________________________________________________________ other side and work on problem solving together, or that more cultural understanding will help, as will alleviating world poverty. A second year student who describes the reasons the U.S. went to war in Iraq as ‘immature’ says: In regards to warfare, just negotiate instead of jumping the gun and starting a war. Just negotiate with the other heads of the countries. And I’m sure people could be civil and figure things out. If the U.S. poses ideas to the other country, and tries to handle the situation in a calm, rational kind of way, then it could work towards, first of all, making countries hate us less, and second of all, making us less violent, then the violence against us would decrease too. A student who says she reacted to the 9-11 terrorist attacks by intentionally travelling to as many countries as possible ‘because I feel that’s the best way I can show what a real American is like,’ says: To solve global conflicts peacefully? This is really cliché, but we need to remember that everyone’s just a human trying to live their life, have their family, everyone’s got things in common. So there’s no reason to blow each other up (laughs). To oversimplify. But it’s like Palestinian and Jewish families; they have the same Semitic values, the same structure. If you have a room full of Palestinians and Jews together, they look the same, basically. It’s like if people would just realize how much they were alike and came together, it’d be better. And a first year student who says that watching graphic war movies made her give up the idea that war is a reasonable last resort says: On Star Trek they have gone beyond war now, and I think that’s kinda cool. If we decided we’re going to get rid of this war, I think it’d be about a year before we could get it done. Same thing as if we decided to give electricity to all countries - six months. If we decided to make a way where everyone could have fresh water to drink - nine months. If we decide to put our energy, time, effort from fighting each other into uniting as one to make the world even better? Hot damn, we can’t be stopped! (sigh)

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______________________________________________________________ Trite as these responses may sound, they were offered to the interviewers seriously, even passionately, as if these alternatives to violence had never really been considered before. Many respondents also claimed that wars of liberation or armed humanitarian intervention in cases of extreme oppression or genocide are quite different from the greed or fear-inspired wars like Iraq or Vietnam that they so deplore. Like many Quakers, these students see World War II as a ‘good war,’ saying (erroneously) that the U.S. entered into it to liberate the Jews from Nazi oppression. Some also cited the U.S. Civil War as morally necessary, saying (again erroneously) that it was fought primarily to free the slaves. This strong impulse to justify armed intervention to protect the weak and vulnerable is echoed by the majority of students who enrol in my nonviolence class. ‘Just war,’ to these students, is not about their own national or even personal security. It’s about stopping rape and pillage in Darfur, it’s about caring enough to send in armed peacekeepers to stop the Rwandan genocide; it’s about supporting an armed revolutionary struggle in Chiapas that fights for an impoverished indigenous population considered so inconsequential that, as one student wrote, ‘nobody cared whether they protested non-violently.’ If students like these are to move us toward a world where global conflicts are worked out fairly and without bloodshed, what do they need to know? First, I found it striking that when students were asked to name strategies other than war that had been used to solve disputes in the past, they give very vague, general answers: ‘Diplomacy, I guess. Negotiation.’ While several mentioned the most famous exemplars of non-violent resistance (Gandhi, Martin Luther King), virtually no one mentioned any other nonviolent movement, nor did they bring up any specifics of regional or international conflict resolution, or any other non-violent tactics such as those that have long been used in the labour movement, the peace movement, or other political protests. These omissions shouldn’t surprise us, given that non-violent practices are rarely celebrated in history textbooks and are often downplayed, even ridiculed, in media reports. Likewise, negative judgments about human nature abound in our culture, leaving the distinct impression that despite countless examples to the contrary, humans are incapable of controlling themselves or their institutions. And while many respondents spoke of the horror of war: the vast toll in human lives, the physical and mental cost to survivors, the deceit, the profiteering, the promotion of racism and sexual violence, the acceptance of torture, the deliberate targeting of civilians, the suspension of civil liberties, and so on, they mentioned these only in regards to wars they disapprove of; few pointed out that these evils pervade ‘good wars’ as well. Indeed, educators, curriculum developers, textbook writers, and administrators have much work to do.

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______________________________________________________________ Peace education is not entirely absent in U.S. classrooms. Wonderful models and lesson plans exist for all age levels, and dedicated teachers work such courses and units into the standard curriculum when they can. But clearly, the basics of non-violence are not reaching enough students; even those who attend the elite schools that feed top universities like Michigan. And while some universities have excellent peace studies programs, one wonders if their scholarship reaches students who do not choose such a course of study, but instead, elect the standard history and political science classes that send them on the road to law school and from there to political office. Anyway. Let me tell you about my non-violence seminar, and give you a bit of the flavour of my students. My classes are small because they are writing and discussion-intensive. I never lecture; students are expected to come to class prepared with questions for discussion and debate. I tell them I don’t expect them to adopt my pacifism, since I know it’s a rather extreme position, but that they do need to listen to the arguments that support it, and that I welcome their challenges and questions. Some students enrol in the course because they are looking for ways to convince their friends, or their parents, or indeed, themselves, that their impulse toward non-violence is valid. Others take the course simply to satisfy the university’s upper level writing requirement, so they come with a great variety of viewpoints. One of my best students did most of her schooling in India where she had become frustrated by the prevailing ‘Mahatma craze,’ as she put it, the glorification of ‘Gandhi’s bloodless war’ that defeated British control. She had come to the University of Michigan to study war, actually, since she had wondered all her life if the terrible violence between Muslims and Hindus at the partition of India and Pakistan could have been avoided by armed intervention. She was taking my class ‘to get the other point of view.’ Some young men arrive in my class full of masculine bravado, believing, as one put it, ‘that pacifists are worthless cowards, and that walking away from a fight is cowardly as well.’ The most common view is that non-violence is irrelevant. ‘When I came into this course,’ one student wrote at the end of the semester, ‘I had a rather odd misconception that being non-violent meant having a lot of crappy bumper stickers on your car. Not much to it besides participating in a few peace marches that are largely ignored.’ We start the course by attempting to define ‘violence’ and ‘nonviolence.’ My students inevitably want to define violence extremely broadly, including emotional and spiritual violence and even the violence of ideas. (‘It seemed that by the time we finished that list even breathing could be considered a violent act,’ one student recalled). Nevertheless, allowing students to define their terms, even if they have to reconsider them later, seems to set the tone for the intellectual and personal engagement I expect of them throughout the semester. We look at what anthropologists say about

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______________________________________________________________ aggression and cooperation in human nature, the difficulties many soldiers have in killing other human beings, and the ways that people can be trained and psychologically manipulated to cause each other harm. We look at the reasons people become suicide bombers, and question the common assumption that this form of violence is unique to Islam. We debate ‘just war’ theory and try to apply it to current military actions. Students choose among books about first person experiences of war, like Nuha Al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries, or historical accounts of genocide, like Philip Gourevitch’s book about Rwanda, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, or exposes of war crimes, like The Bridge At No Gun Ri, by Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza about the Korean war, or ruminations on violence in the aftermath of war like Akira Yoshimura’s One Man’s Justice. To encourage reflection on the books they read, I have them write an imaginary letter to the author or one of the characters, telling them what they learned from them and what questions they are left with. The idea of the letter format is to encourage students to connect with the people in the book at a deeper, more personal level than they would if they were asked to analyse the text in the abstract, distanced language of academia. They read their drafts of these letters to small groups of their classmates, soliciting their feedback on the depth and thoughtfulness of their questions and comments, and rewriting their drafts before they hand them in to me. This helps all students become better critical thinkers and editors of their own work, while sharing the substance of a variety of books about war, peace, and ‘human nature.’ Once we have an understanding of how violence can be defined, understood, regulated, promoted, and justified, we turn our attention to alternatives. We look at teachings of non-violence in various religious traditions: not just Christianity, although that tradition has the most extensive and striking literature, but also Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and some Native American spiritual traditions. Discovering commonalities and differences among faiths can get students talking in ways they rarely do in other classes. One semester I had two fundamentalist Christians, one Sufi Muslim convert, five Jews ranging from Orthodox to Reform to secular, and one Russian Orthodox, with the remaining students defining themselves by their politics and secular ethics rather than any particular faith. Since I want students to speak from their own experience and knowledge as well as from their understanding of the texts I assign, it was not unusual for one of the fundamentalists to whip out his pocket Bible to explain why the world would be more harmonious if we all accepted Christ as our personal saviour, or for a conservative Jewish student to invoke Zionist principles to justify Israeli settlements in Palestine, or a Muslim student to argue that men and women are treated as equals in Islam. Although these

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______________________________________________________________ discussions can be charged and difficult at times, I encourage them, first because they expose students to points of view they never have considered before, and second, because there are so few venues on campus where such opinions can be aired without disintegrating into loud, angry denunciations of the opposition. Having a relatively safe space to listen and be heard can give students the courage to confront their own unacknowledged tendencies to dismiss, devalue, or fear particular groups. A reflective Jewish student writes at the end of the semester that she was barely aware of how her ‘us and them’ thinking began: Perhaps it was my education in Hebrew school, learning that Israel was surrounded by Arab neighbours who disliked Israel’s existence. Maybe it was the fear in my parents’ voices when they discussed the suicide bombings by Islamic extremists in Israel and their concern for our family living there. Perhaps this image was perpetuated by the events of 9-11 and the anti- Arab sentiment of the U.S. When we began our unit on religion, I didn’t know anything about Islam. I didn’t care to understand a religion that preached that becoming a suicide bomber would guarantee you a spot in heaven surrounded by virgins. I was shocked to discover that jihad is not a reference to holy war; rather, it means struggle or effort. Jihad, I learned, is divided into two struggles, the Greater Struggle to improve yourself and the Lesser Struggle to improve the world around you. What I knew of Islam was just a small extremist faction that has received much media attention. Ironically, the moment I came to understand the meaning of jihad, I was partaking in the Greater Struggle. I was actively breaking down perceived lines of separation, developing my internal non-violence. This was the first time my beliefs were shaken and I was forced to question the values that I grew up with. To help students develop effective communication strategies I introduce a model of dialogue called the LARA Method near the beginning of the course. This technique, originally developed in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and adapted by the Portland, Oregon community group, ‘Love Makes a Family,’ models a series of steps: Listen, Affirm, Respond, and Add. The idea is to listen deeply until you hear the moral principle your opponent is speaking from or a feeling or experience you share. Then affirm by expressing the connection you found when you listened, letting the person

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______________________________________________________________ know that you agree or empathize on a deep level. Third, respond fully and honestly to the issue the person raised, and finally, add new information that will correct mistaken ideas and give a more factual basis for discussion. The point is not to win the argument but to reach a deeper understanding and connect on a human level, despite differences. After they practice these conversations in class (generally using topics unrelated to the course) students can be reminded to use the method later if their discussions begin to escalate. Although the LARA method is more difficult to put into practice than it might sound, the mere fact of having tried it seems to make productive discussion more likely. A student who had been sceptical of pacifism and critical of what she saw as easy, liberal solutions to complex problems writes at the end of the course: What made the class for me was my fellow classmates. We had such a dynamic group of people who learned to listen, to trust, and to cross barriers in order to communicate with one another on a deeper level of understanding and discussion. Hearing the comments of a variety of people coming from different backgrounds and experiences was incredibly refreshing and challenging. I was interested to hear people talk so passionately about philosophies I completely disagreed with. Right now, it’s hard to let everything I’ve experienced and felt in this class fall into place. I’ve always felt like the hippie liberal among my friends, and suddenly in this class I’ve found myself feeling more like a Republican. Experiencing such an extremely liberal perspective on politics actually gave me a much clearer understanding of some conservative viewpoints. At this point - about a third of the way through the semester students are getting the idea that the world they want to see will not be achieved through violence. Yet, non-violence is still very abstract to them. Like the interview respondents, my students are quick to point out the obvious, that skill in dialogue, diversity education, and just distribution of the earth’s resources all could lay the foundation for a non-violent future. But these are long-term goals, they say, and violence is happening now. They envision a crisis: machete-wielding mobs attacking their neighbours; horsemen bearing down on defenceless villagers or their own country’s military gearing up for a shock and awe campaign that will inevitably destroy thousands of civilians. What can possibly deter these madmen from violence but more violence, they wonder. Even when they see the circular nature of that position, it is not enough for them to say that the world should simply

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______________________________________________________________ quell the violence by creative, non-violent means. Because they don’t yet know well enough what those means might be. Their education, both formal and informal, has so neglected the range of diplomatic and political tactics that have been or could be employed to deter violence that they see no clear path to follow. This deficit cannot be addressed in a single semester. But providing them with some examples of successful non-violent movements and an opportunity to analyse their methods and tactics gives them a start on what they’re looking for. For this section of the course I rely on a wonderful video series, A Force More Powerful, with its accompanying text by the same name, which shows, through news footage, interviews, and commentary, non-violent movements in Poland, Chile, South Africa, India, the Philippines, and many other countries. I also use videos from Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years Series, and from Chicano!, a series that documents Mexican American activism in the 1960s and 70s, particularly the grape boycott. Students meet in small groups for the three or four weeks that we devote to these case studies and look carefully at the goals, leadership, tactics, and cultural and historical context of each movement, reporting on what they found and comparing them to others they have studied. Next, I introduce them to a few of the personalities of the peace and justice community including Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Jane Addams, A. J. Muste, and Thich Nhat Hanh. We read the moving testimonies of Israeli conscientious objectors in Breaking Ranks by Ronit Chacham, and stories from the international accompaniment movement in Latin America in Unarmed Bodyguards, by Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren. We hear from local community activists who attend the yearly protest at the School of the Americas (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Georgia, whose graduates have participated in acts of extreme violence and repression in Latin America. And if we’re lucky, a former student might come back to talk to us about what it’s like to work with an international peace team in Iraq or Palestine. I include a community action component in the course, both to give students the opportunity to put their ideas into practice, and to spread the non-violence message a bit further. A few weeks into the course, students form small groups to plan projects that can be carried out on or off campus. Some of the most successful of these have included a day of teaching some of the themes of our course to students in a local secondary school; arranging a peace art show on campus that included paintings, sculpture, visual media, and spoken word performance; tape recording reminiscences from Holocaust survivors in a elder care facility; and interviewing local community peace activists for a website of the students’ own design. By the end of the course, most students are confident and ready to put their new learning into practice. They are energized by news footage of

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______________________________________________________________ successful non-violent action; they are moved by testimonies of peacekeepers without arms; they ask themselves under what conditions they too would be brave enough to enter into a violent situation without the means to defend themselves. They completely give up their view of non-violence as passive or somehow unmanly. And students who had trouble defending their idealism from the jibes of their friends and family find that their deepest beliefs and hopes for a non-violent world have been given substance and dignity. A future teacher writes: I have always been a non-violent person; I and am highly sensitive and have a deep sense of compassion towards others. I had no idea there was a way to embody my values on a worldwide scale . . . I had always been taught to believe that man was violent by nature, and therefore the idea that violence could be eradicated was preposterous. This course has taught me otherwise. I have no doubt that humans are intelligent and courageous enough to address their differences without resorting to war. But to get there, we must convince the young that peace is possible. High schools and even elementary schools need required courses in peace education that would teach non-violent solutions to conflicts, both interpersonal and international. University students in political science courses should learn effective ways to address some of the major causes of war: global inequalities, religious extremism, and arguments over dwindling energy resources, with special attention given to points of view of countries and individuals most affected by these problems. History courses should give central consideration to the extensive history and theory of non-violent activism, and challenge students to come up with their own ideas about how international conflicts could have been addressed without violence. All these courses must be grounded in the personal: the stories, testimony, and deeply introspective accounts of the people we call friends and enemies. This is what touches students and gives them pause. At the end of my course, many of my students report that their new understanding of non-violence has come as a meaningful, personal revelation. As one student wrote in her final reflection: I do not identify as a pacifist. But I do identify as part of the human race. And as such, I feel obligated to protect the rights of other humans. I am striving to see every person as human. I am striving to attain non-violence within myself, for then I will be able to separate people from their actions and love my enemy. I have come to understand that nonviolence is not the absence of violence or even the

Helen Fox

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______________________________________________________________ opposition to violence, but something much deeper. It is actively refraining from violence; it is a way to bring about change; it is a conscious decision about my own actions; it is an attitude toward other human beings; it is an internal commitment to better myself. . In my pursuit of knowledge, I can begin to think non-violently. Because I believe that once peace is achieved internally, outwardly acting towards peace is inevitable.

Notes on Contributors Gary Baines is Associate Professor in the History department at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He is co-editor of Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa's late Cold War Conflicts (Unisa Press, 2008). Julia Boll is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches and researches English Literature and directs the Scottish Universities' International Summer School. David Boulting is an independent scholar whose research interests focus on war and representation and deputy editor at Cathedral Communications Limited, UK. Bob Brecher is Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton, UK. He is author of Torture and The Ticking Bomb (Wiley 2007), Getting What You Want? (Routledge 1997), editor of several volumes and has published numerous articles in moral and applied philosophy, liberalism and higher education. Helen Fox teaches undergraduate seminars on nonviolence, human rights, race and racism, and grassroots development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA. Tarik Kochi is a Lecturer in Law and International Security at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. He research focuses upon critical approaches to international security, global violence and legal and political theory. Jason T. McEntee is Associate Professor of English at South Dakota State University, USA. His research/teaching interests are in war literature and film (specifically the Vietnam War). Avery Plaw is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, USA. Elke Rosochaki is a doctoral student in the English Department of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, working on ethics in contemporary literature. Kiran Sarma teaches on the Clinical Doctorate Programme in the School of Psychology at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

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______________________________________________________________ Seth B. Scott is an independent scholar living and working in New York City. He is currently writing a book about the future conduct of warfare in a historical and cross-cultural context. Janicke Stramer teaches government, economics, history and languages at a private institution in California. She is an independent researcher. Arjen Vermeer is a legal advisor for the Netherlands Red Cross, researcher at the T.M.C. Asser Institute and assistant to the Special Rapporteur of the UN International Law Commission on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters. He is founder of the Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies. Stephenie Young is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Salem State College in Massachusetts.