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CounterPunch
February
7, 2003
Bush the Historian:
"The Past is Over"
Remembering
the "War in the Gulf" on TV
by BEN FEINBERG
Now that a new George Bush has placed himself
on the road to military action against an old Asian enemy, perhaps
it is a good time to revisit the last time that "WAR"
was screamed continuously across our television screens. Back
in 1991, the media and the last President Bush rallied the nation
to support Operation Desert Storm by carefully framing the action
in terms of powerful cultural categories, and in the process
they took steps towards reworking the meaning of another key
American conflict-the Vietnam war-and forced critical voices
to operate from impossibly weak positions. Now, as an even more
omnipresent television news machine creates the frameworks to
support the destruction of "evil" people and "terrorist"
states in distant lands, this time under the catch phrases "Countdown:
Iraq" and "Target: Iraq" rather than the now nostalgic
"War in the Gulf," those of us who try to disseminate
alternatives to mass violence may be able to learn from the devices
that were effectively used to immobilize us the last time around.
Sometimes the political slants of news
providers are as obvious as the smirks on the faces of Fox News
"reporters" or "analysts" as they hector
a Palestinian spokesman or liberal fall guy. One approach to
understanding these biases traces the corporate interests-Disney,
General Electric, etc.-that control media outlets. Another looks
at fabricated stories, such as the great Kuwait Incubator hoax,
and direct military censorship.
But sometimes media biases are more subtle,
and may operate independently from the intentions of individual
reporters. News stories always deploy framing devices (such
as the concept of a news "story") that limit possible
interpretations of what happened, privileging some while making
others seem contrary to common sense. In the case of the first
"War in the Gulf," three subtle strategic moves the
produced the Bush administration's view of the first Iraqi war
as common sense: 1) the compartmentalization of various aspects
of the war, 2) the precision/randomness opposition, and 3) intertextuality
and the uses of the story of Vietnam.
political,
military, and nationalistic frames
The Bush regime's preferred interpretation
of "The War in the Gulf" contained the elements laid
out directly and indirectly by President Bush and other government
spokesmen: the war was a noble and justified assault by the forces
of "good" and "light" (democracy, freedom,
capitalism, progress, the flag, yellow ribbons, America, Christianity)
against the minions of "evil" and "darkness"
(aggression, tyranny, the 'Other', Islam, irrationality). Dominant
voices emanating from outside the media industry made a concerted
attempt to control the interpretation of the story, both by limiting
(as "gatekeepers") the flow of information to the media,
and by imposing coherent categorizations on that information.
Media representations of the lead up to the war attacked potentially
oppositional interpretations by consistently separating out political,
military, and nationalistic spheres of control
and information. By labeling an event as pertaining to one of
these categories, these producers of news limited the degree
of acceptable debate.
"Politics," in contemporary
American culture, implies an argument between two points of view-pro/con,
Republican/Democrat, Liberal/Conservative, etc. Everyone is
theoretically entitled to an opinion within this frame, and the
media typically construct political stories around two antagonistic
voices, although of course even in this realm "experts"
are employed to frame the debate around permissible issues.
The political phase of the Gulf War, in which politicians and
other experts were permitted to question the wisdom of an attack
on Iraq, was declared over after a much-celebrated congressional
debate ended in an endorsement of military action.
Once the "military" phase began,
the issues became more technical, enabling "experts"
to usurp a greater degree of authority. The destruction of Iraq
and the deaths of thousands became more palatable when the debate
was framed within the military idiom. Against the onslaught
of uniformed military experts conjured up by CNN and the other
networks to spew meaningless nonsense in an authoritative jargon
(from inside the studio, the presumed source of truth), the voices
of dissent sounded like those of ignorant outsiders who were
hopelessly illiterate in the language of power and prestige.
Within the military frame, the makers of news became generals,
and many news broadcasts began with the image of an elderly,
confident white male in a uniform standing in front of a podium
and using every linguistic device at his disposal to enhance
the power of the institution he represented. All other actors
were marginalized.
The media accommodated to the military
frame in several ways. Newspapers and television presented summaries
of the war in the form of sports box scores (casualties, POWs,
missions flown, first downs). The merging of the genres of sports
and news has rhetorical implications in both the military and,
as I shall discuss below, the nationalistic frames. When discussing
a sports event, one typically asks, "Which team will win?
Why? What strategies will give my team a better chance? "
And one expects answers from insiders-coaches and ex-players.
One does not ask whether the game should be played. The sports
metaphor allowed the routinization of the unusual events of war,
and human suffering was transferred to the more impersonal summarizing
of statistics and advantages. It is in this context that we
should observe the announcement of the first U.S. ground casualties
in the Battle of Khafji, at the end of a long list of destroyed
and damaged equipment. The manipulation of figures, of pluses
and minuses, hid the loss of human life behind the rhetoric of
victory and defeat.
But even though the military categorization
privileged the generals and other official figures, the news
also bombarded us with images of normal, everyday Americans who
encouraged us with their opinions. These stories fall under
the parallel "nationalist" frame. Under the sign of
the national, debate is limited even more severely. The politicians
signified their passage to appropriate civilian roles at the
outbreak of the war when they gathered in front of flags and
evoked the timeworn signals of nationalism: unity, rallying around
the President, patriotism, the special "American" character.
The language of nationalism requires
constant expressions of unity against dangerous internal and
external others. In the context of the nationalist frame, anti-war
voices are automatically excluded as un-American and thus illegitimate.
Instead of creating the American public in the political framework
of (limited) debate, the media overwhelmingly promoted the loaded,
nationalistic theme. This is especially apparent in the selection
of "typical" Americans interviewed and in the coverage
of pro- and anti-war demonstrations. Although over 40% of the
American soldiers in the Persian Gulf were Black or Hispanic
and over 50% of Americans now live in metropolitan areas with
a population over one million, the spokespeople presented on
television corresponded overwhelmingly to the hegemonic version
of the model American; they were white, rural, and conservative.
A reporter for CBS went on a trip to find out what America thought
of the war. Significantly, his "America" was spatially
located along Interstate 45, which runs from North Dakota south
to Texas, and reproduced the ideological notion that equates
the (not coincidentally, politically conservative) geographical
center of America with the national soul. Given this construction
of the "American," voices became un-American to the
extent that they differed from the standard. While the military
and other conventional discourses presented themselves from studios,
as experts draped with other trappings of hierarchical authority,
the authority of nationalist discourse emerges because it is
placed in the voices of "normal" Americans. Viewers
were encouraged to identify with these models and to emulate
them in voicing their own opinions, particularly when they stated
the dominant position in a more emotional lexicon, like the gruff
Idaho man who demanded that, "We kick his ass." These
selected, typical Americans presented a unified picture of acceptable
American reactions to the war as seen on TV. By presenting voices
that were selected and controlled as if they were autonomous,
the networks encouraged the penetration of a single viewpoint
that wears the mask of unfiltered public opinion.
The world of sports, always ready to
enter into a wider nationalist role, was activated to its full
extent. Athletes of all kinds wore American flags or yellow
ribbons on their uniforms-one Italian college basketball player
who refused was drummed off his team and out of the country-and
the Super Bowl, one of the nation's largest theatrical rituals,
was turned into a celebration of patriotism. ABC and the other
authors of the Super Bowl carefully orchestrated the event to
align all of the prestige and attitudes of sport with the war
effort; the half time ceremonies involved a lengthy but uninformative
news report from Peter Jennings. This news report was not necessary
to inform the public about some vital movement in the war-this
was not its function. Rather, the presence of Jennings' report
in the middle of the Super Bowl linked the war and the nation
with the values of sport, signaling that, "whatever our
differences, we are on the same team, and when the chips are
down and there is no tomorrow we do what the coach tells us and
give 110%.
It should be noted that the interpretive
categorization of an event as military or nationalist does not
necessarily imply a pro-war stance. These categories do not
carry an inherent content or ideological position but are themselves
contestable, and many of the first anti-war protestors attempted
to appropriate nationalist symbols and slogans such as the flag
and "supporting our troops" and to infuse them with
an oppositional meaning. But in the context of the Gulf war,
these categories seemed weighted, by their history and the unequal
power of those who employ them, towards a certain interpretation.
As the Kansas farm-boy interviewed on CBS affirmed, "You
can't support the troops and not support what they're doing."
Indeed, the very efforts of protestors to employ these same
categories testified to the power of the dominant construction
and the desperate condition of the opposition.
Dissenters and protesters-ordinary citizens
who try to position themselves as organized, autonomous agents
and not passive "men on the street"-fall into an anomalous
position. Protestors are not legitimate "political"
actors-these are elected officials. Their collective and independent
action separates them from the cheerleading role assigned to
the nationalist frame. And their lack of political or military
credentials exclude them from the studios where experts make
strategic and tactical pronouncements under the military frame.
Some stories may treat them sympathetically-as a valued, albeit
quirky and confused, sign of our "democratic freedoms"-but
dissenters are never part of "us" who are represented
by "ordinary (not political) Americans" or the experts
who provide models of reasonable opinion from the studio. Cable
News' coverage of this year's massive January 18 protests demonstrates
the continuing marginalization of the roles of protesters. Fox
News morning panel of experts mentioned the protests in a joking
tone, acknowledging their impressive size only to laugh at the
"incoherence" of their message, as demonstrated through
placards like "US out of Iraq and San Fransisco."
The smiles on the "experts" faces immediately faded
as they turned to serious, real news made by congressmen, the
UN inspectors, and members of the administration. MSNBC opened
a discussion of the protests by asking this question: "Protesters:
Unamerican or a good example of the freedoms our soldiers are
getting ready to go to war to defend?" In other words,
should we deal with dissenters as dangerous transgressors of
the hegemonic categories for understanding the war, or should
we incorporate them into these categories as harmless "examples"
of American freedoms? In either case, the protestors remain
a "they"; we are not invited to identify with their
critical position, and they are not invited to join the talk
radio hosts and other pundits whose answers reflect "real
American" opinion.
precision and
chaos, pristine and grotesque, culture and nature
Television news produced the story of
the war in terms of an opposition between precision and chaos,
encouraging the interpretation of this narrative through the
mechanism of already circulating cultural categories. Both the
military and the media consistently described the American war
effort through the poetic language of precision. All the networks
ran effusive special reports on the high tech weapons in the
U.S. arsenal. All spokesmen emphasized the accuracy of these
weapons, which were said to strike their military targets unerringly.
The military briefers showed videos, which the networks aired
and reaired, purporting to show American weapons going through
doors and down chimneys. But despite the extensive media coverage
of these high tech weapons systems, the so-called smart bombs
comprised a small percentage of the explosives dropped on Iraq
and Kuwait.
At the same time that the American war
was shrouded in high-tech precision, the Iraqi war effort was
represented as containing all of the dangerous and unpredictable
traits of the "other." The SCUD missiles came randomly;
nobody knew when or where they would hit or whether they would
carry conventional or chemical warheads. The Iraqis transgressed
the boundaries of what was defined as "proper" military
action, an attribute which referred back to their violation of
international borders which was the ostensible cause of the United
States intervention. The comments made by "experts"
after the oil spills initially attributed to Iraq were typical
of this construction of Iraq as transgressing boundaries. The
oil not only violated international borders; it also crossed
over the line between the military and environmental spheres
of influence. The confrontation between the U.S. Patriot missiles
and the Iraqi SCUDs was promoted as a symbol for the conflict
as a whole. The Patriot, with its nationalist name, represented
high-tech precision and the defense of innocents; the ominously
titled, vaguely obscene SCUDs represented random destruction
that violates national boundaries and the military/non-military
distinction. This weapon was denied a place inside the legitimate
arsenal. Unlike the U.S. missiles and bombs that struck "targets,"
the SCUD, according to Dan Rather, was a "terrorist"
weapon with no intelligible military value. This construction
of the war encountered its toughest test when a U.S. bomb entered
an Iraqi shelter and killed 500 civilians. Here, it appeared,
the Americans were responsible for violating their own boundary
between military and civilian spheres. But the generals' explanation
for the atrocity still enabled the event to be categorized according
to the successful scheme; the shelter was a military target,
General Kelly insisted, and the Iraqis were blamed for, in effect,
violating our pristine high-tech military space with their grotesque
dead bodies.
The emphasis on this dichotomy between
precision and chaos served several functions. First of all,
at the corporate level, the powers that control the networks
are motivated towards promoting their other business interests.
General Electric, the owner of NBC, also is involved in the
manufacture of weapons, and members of the boards of directors
of CBS and ABC are also members of the boards of directors of
many other corporations. One of the motivations for the war
could have been the need to garner support for continuing the
high level of military spending after the close of the Cold War.
The glorification of precision weapons by the media contributes
to the network executives' own financial interests and helps
to combat the perceptions that military spending is wasteful
and the weapons are inefficient or do not work.
On a wider level, this construction of
the war contributes to the scheme of classifying, ordering, and
incorporating possible conceptions of reality into distinct,
bounded units. An oppositional representation of the war, on
the other hand, would most likely stress the grotesque aspects
which contradict the pure and bounded high tech images that poetically
invoke the ideal of precision; particularly, it would present
images of dead and wounded bodies vividly transgressing their
own limits and contradicting the abstract language of the machines
with the inescapable concrete reality of flesh. The military
demonstrated its awareness of the power of these images by taking
steps to keep cameramen away from the casualties; during a previous
(practice) war, the Panama invasion of 1989, American soldiers
reportedly shot and killed a Spanish photographer who would not
stop taking pictures of the corpses produced by U.S. bombing.
But besides limiting the possibilities
for the production of this subversive grotesque version, the
media reduced its strength by incorporating it at the low end
of an established hierarchy. Disorder and its associated critique
of the war were associated with Iraq and the practices of the
enemy. The chaotic blurring of boundaries and hierarchies was
given a firmly bounded location in a scheme of fixed hierarchy
and the American forces remained clean and unbloodied while the
Iraqis became associated with the oil splattered birds and burned
children that dampen the enthusiasm of all but the most virulent
advocates of war.
The strategically constructed opposition
between the precise and clearly bounded American weaponry and
the chaotic and grotesque Iraqis was also made to correspond
to another frequently deployed device; the opposition between
nature and culture. There are no inherent values that can be
attached to this trope; at any given moment nature can be made
to signify "good" and culture "bad" and vice
versa. In an article published in 1988, Robert Karl Manoff analyzed
an ABC story that associated SDI with nature in its positive
aspect in the form of a "bucolic campus" and "the
promise of a new Eden, free of technological sin, in which SDI
will supersede the Satanic engines of modern war." The
alignment of high-tech military innovations with nature
against a destructive slightly more primitive "technology"
corresponds, as Manoff demonstrates, to the master narrative
of the Reagan presidency, which revolved around a moral, nontechnical
discourse.
To some extent, this alignment was continued
in the Persian Gulf narrative, as the realm of the "super
high-tech" emerges as the protector of nature against the
destructive, uncontrolled pollution spilling out of the smoky
Iraqi machinery. But the media is not limited in any way in
its use of this opposition. In some stories the United States
was portrayed as the defenders of purity and nature pitted against
a sinful technology, but in other stories the Americans represented
an advanced culture at war with the chaotic forces of nature.
This second construction was mobilized, for example, in the
stories that described Saddam Hussein as "crafty" or
decried the "animalistic atrocities" allegedly committed
by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait. George Bush and his spokespeople
were not interested primarily in establishing a coherent ideological
position, but in continually deploying images that resonate with
powerful cultural categories-a task that necessarily involves
the construction of contradictory statements.
remaking Vietnam
News stories always refer to other stories,
including fiction and non-fiction. The Persian Gulf story constantly
evoked other narratives and codes with origins at various distances
from the current event; the portrayal of the celebrations of
the happy little Kuwaiti people after the destruction of the
evil witch by American air power seems to refer as much to The
Wizard of Oz as anything else. But there is one story in
particular that remained in the background of every statement
or image to come out of the Gulf War. That story, of course,
was Vietnam.
America's last great war had become a
great national story, like the Wild West or the Alamo. Great
national stories serve as shorthand tools to encapuslate dominant
ideologies, but they are also too big to be the property of a
single group or ideology, and they are always open to competing,
subversive versions. Vietnam had emerged in the 70's and 80's
as the one of the culture's most conflicted terrains for contesting
interpretations. The war was universally represented through
the images of chaos and tragedy and the idea that the war signified
a great national mistake, but these images and ideas themselves
still allowed for debate; as Rambo took on Apocalypse
Now and Reagan incorporated Rambo. The Persian Gulf
War provided an opportunity for the dominant forces to launch
an all out effort to fix the meaning of Vietnam in an authoritative
manner.
This was accomplished (though not completely)
through the same categorizations that I discussed earlier; the
war was transferred from the political frame to the realm of
the military and the nationalist. "No More Vietnams"
had been mobilized in the 70's and 80's by the liberal opposition
as a tool against military intervention, particularly in El Salvador
and Nicaragua. In this context, the slogan referred to an essentially
mistaken foreign policy and indexed an anti-military political
position. The same slogan was appropriated, in context of the
War in the Gulf, by the government and military-Bush, Quayle,
Schwarzkopf, and the rest of the posse brought out the sign of
Vietnam in many speeches and briefings-but its meaning was drastically
altered to resonate with the aims of the war against Iraq.
The problems of Vietnam, according to
the authoritative version, were threefold. The first set of
problems were military; the strategy of the Vietnam War was flawed
because "the troops were forced to fight with one hand tied
behind their back." This new war, the corollary of this
suggestion asserts, avoided that error by committing a massive
immediate attack. The second set of problems involved the lack
of support given to the war effort by the American public. The
new war could contrast with the failure of Vietnam if the nation
united under the great banner of patriotism. The third aspect
of this dominant memory blamed the lack of public support, in
part, on the media, which was remembered as having overly reported
the negative and grotesque aspects of the war and thus turned
public support against it. This construction of the past justified
the tight controls placed on the press; it also placed the media
in the position of needing to correct its past "errors"
by constructing its practice in the Persian Gulf in contrast
to this perception of Vietnam-and do everything possible to bolster
popular support for the war and avoid grotesque images.
The one critique of Vietnam that is missing
from this construction, of course, is political. The leaders
of that era were absolved from all blame except in the technical
field of military strategy. Dissenters were blamed for the war's
failure; the new authoritative meaning assigned to Vietnam by
the government and most elements of the media demands that the
new war be approached through demonstrations of unity and loyalty,
that so-called political issues be downplayed and that all decisions
be left to the appropriate "experts" in military uniforms.
The image of Vietnam aided the establishment of a hegemonic interpretation
of the new war, and the Gulf conflict, in turn, provided the
opportunity to seize upon the "great national story"
of Vietnam. This interpretation, powerful though it may be,
still faces opposition, and new challenges will arise in the
future. But for now, the ideological mobilization of the Gulf
War on TV has restored the moral integrity of Vietnam-a recent
Mel Gibson version of Vietnam called "We were Soldiers"
reproduces the war as a forum for WWII movie style individual
heroism and male bonding, without a hint of moral ambiguity-and
even given a new positive meaning for the signs of "war"
and of an expansionist, militaristic state; images that had lost
some of their luster in the 60s.
conclusions
As the date for the next war rapidly
approaches, apparently determined more by the details of military
deployment and strategy than the activities of the UN inspectors
or the proof of Bush's odd claims about Iraq's menace to the
United States, those of us who hold critical viewpoints about
American military power may seek lessons from the way our position
was effectively neutralized the last time around. How can our
message escape the categories and histories erected to make military
aggression seem like common sense?
First of all, we must not give any legitimacy
to the qualifications of military "experts" or calls
to nationalist "unity." The outbreak of war should
not be seen as a signal to put aside our differences and "support
our troops." The prosecution of the war is itself a political
process-and real politics does not only include two manufactured
positions represented by comfortable leaders. Seemingly apolitical
calls to commend our troops made by sports announcers or others
outside the circumscribed spheres of debate are not innocent-they
are subtle ways to get us to endorse military action-and should
be consistently rejected.
Secondly, our message should challenge
the sweeping stereotypes that represent the "enemy"
as a single, malevolent individual who manifests the out-of-control,
irrational, and boundary-crossing characteristics of negative
Nature. Instead, we should focus on the humanity we share with
the victims of US military aggression, and the grotesque impact
of bombs on human flesh. The war, when it starts, is not a clean
game of high-tech football played on a video screen-wherever
we can, we need to publicize photographs that demonstrate the
true, dirty nature of these assaults. Pilots are not heroes
risking their lives to protect our freedoms. They are men who
awake from comfortable beds, fly hundreds of miles to destroy
the homes, bodies, and lives of people (and whatever cats, dogs,
or cows live with them) they will never know or see, and then
return home in time for supper.
Finally, we need to challenge the wholesale
rewriting of history that accompanies each new war. Noted historian
G.W. Bush (who once stated perceptively that "the past is
over") claims that opponents of the war "have not learned
the lessons of history." Instead of returning to trite
homilies about the "greatest generation" of World War
II or remaking Vietnam as a noble cause undermined by weak public
support, we need to describe the war in terms of other, post-WWII
US-led regime changes, and to educate Americans about what happened
next. What happened after the 1954 regime change in Guatemala
that deposed a left-leaning democratic government described by
the Eisenhower administration as a communist threat to America?
What about the 1953 regime change in Iran? The attempted overthrow
of the Cuban government in 1961? The infamous coup of September
11, 1973 that murdered Chilean president Salvadore Allende and
imposed General Pinochet? And what about the militarization
of the "War on Drugs" or the invasion of Panama?
Have these mostly unilateral regime changes,
justified by claims later shown to be false, led to greater democracy
and opportunity for the people in the affected nations? Have
they made the United States safer and created regional stability?
The shocking history of American military aggression and its
aftermath is almost completely absent from reporting on Iraq.
It shouldn't be.
Ben Feinberg
is a Professor of Anthropology at Warren Wilson College in Asheville
NC. He can be reached at: feinberg@warren-wilson.edu
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February
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