War and the future: Iraq one year on.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 2004
• Author: Cooper, Simon

When the US administration first declared the possibility of a preemptive war in Iraq, ostensibly as a response to September 11, the pronouncement seemed both unbelievable and utterly consistent with a certain way of thinking. This dual response has remained as the war and occupation has unfolded. In a year we have moved from the triumphalism of a high-tech induced regime change and the spectacle of shock and awe, to the reality of a protracted conflict after 'the end of major hostilities'. The public case for the Iraq invasion, accepted by an overwhelming majority of the mainstream press at the time, has been revealed as illegitimate. The post-hoc humanitarian reasons for invasion and occupation have foundered after the Abu Ghraib revelations. And we now know that the United States has simply bought off and redeployed many sectors of the former Ba'athist regime. The handover of sovereignty has now installed a US-approved administration that changes little in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, many of whom simply wish the United States to leave. The possibility that Iraq might break up--that an independent Kurdistan, allied with Israel, might be declared by seizing Kirkuk and its surrounding oilfields--must also be entertained. Turkey, Syria and Iran would be drawn into this conflict, with devastating consequences for the entire region. (1)

If one had to find an overall theme that governed the war in Iraq, it would be the evasion of responsibility. We have high-tech weapons that distance aggressors from their actions; and we have the outsourcing and privatization of armies and gaolers able to avoid the Geneva convention. A war is being conducted in our name, yet our leaders deny any responsibility for the atrocities that have occurred. Even the ban on publicly displaying the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers suggests that the Coalition is unwilling to accept responsibility for their war. (2) Given that this orientation mirrors the distinctive way in which our sense of ethics is now constituted--via an intensive relation with image culture that both distances us and at times spectacularly involves us in the world--shouldn't we be asking just what it is that we are opposing?

Given that the Iraq venture has resulted in a protracted disaster it is easier for the anti-war movement to feel vindicated, but one has to be careful here. Have the wider assumptions behind the war been undermined, or is it simply that while the dysfunctional occupation represents a setback for US legitimacy, the assumptions that led to war remain intact?

We need only to reflect upon what has been made possible through the Iraq invasion: aggressive unilateralism; the weakening of international co-operation; a narrow conception of security based on order through military dominance; serious talk of the use of nuclear weapons; a lack of commitment to international human rights laws; while domestically, faith in the pronouncements of our leaders is at an all time low. The conditions are set in place for a kind of quasi-fascism. There is a disconnection between leaders who wield power and the populace, and a disturbing growth in cynicism and an alienated citizenry. There is also the cultivation of the worst kind of defensive patriotism based on the exclusion of others, the manufacture of fear, and a corresponding increase in the surveillance of populations.

The failure of the occupation in Iraq has not altered these conditions. Indeed the Iraq venture might be said to mark a transition from the neo-liberal globalization that dominated the 1990s to a geo-political and directly aggressive form of power, the imprint of US empire in the twenty-first century. (3) While the former period, however contradictorily, projected optimism and sense of renewal--renewal of international co-operation via institutions of the global market, or a renewal of society via 'Third Way' forms of association, shareholder capitalism and the like--the new empire brutally strips away illusions of renewal and begins to embed a new culture, defined by fear and insecurity.

The Abu Ghraib photographs reveal the ethical...