Perpetual War within the state of exception.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Cooper, Simon
• Date: 01 January 2003

The implications of the Iraq war extend well beyond its borders. The construction of a new geopolitical framework resulting in the occupation of Iraq has legitimized certain forms of behaviour and patterns of understanding, and created a set of conditions that work to collapse any distinction between war and peace. The notion of perpetual war seems difficult to imagine for many people (though much less so for those in the underdeveloped world). However, a combination of political, economic and technological factors are leading us towards a state where civilian populations are permanently militarized, where the gap between war and peace collapses, and where peace as a mode of being distinct in its own right seems impossible to constitute. Undoubtedly the actions of the current US administration and its allies directly contribute to this situation. The aggressive uni-lateralism of the United States--not just in the pre-emptive war on Iraq and the threats of similar actions in Iran and Syria--but in relation to the Kyoto treaty on the environment and the International Criminal Court, amounts to a wholesale rejection of global governance. This in itself creates the possibility for continual war because the structural causes of the war in Iraq--and of global terrorism itself--have not been addressed. Future wars will be fought over declining natural resources, exacerbated by rising levels of unsustainable consumption. The break-up of the Soviet bloc has allowed for the possible dissemination of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The talking up of a new missile defence shield severs any agreement to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons. While human rights abuses under dictatorships have not gone away with the war on terror. (1)

It is a mistake, however, to simply claim that this heightened militarization is a result of neo-conservative zeal. Instead, a wider cultural shift is taking place, a shift inimical to any notion of sustainable peace. Essential to this shift is the structural impact of the global neo-liberal economy. As John Hinkson has observed, the postmodern economy marks a broad shift in values, culture and the social realm as much as any transformation in the market. (2) The social transformation enabled through the postmodern economy creates the conditions whereby citizens come to accept the idea of a perpetual war conducted in order to secure their freedom--a freedom increasingly defined in terms of the market. In the words of Christian Marazzi, 'War is the continuation of the new economy by other means'. (3)

The Outsourcing of Responsibility

Combined with the illegal nature of the invasion in the first place, the fabrication of Iraq's capability as an international threat ought to be a major scandal. Yet while there has been criticism, the level of outrage has not been as high as one might expect. No parliamentarian anywhere within the 'coalition' has been forced to resign. There is the promise of government inquiries, but in the future. By and large what appears to have been a war conducted via deception or gross incompetence has been successfully managed. Indeed, the war in Iraq seems to have acquired a kind of legitimation despite the facts indicating beyond all doubt that Iraq posed no threat. One can only conclude pessimistically that the facts themselves do not seem adequate to base an anti-war position on. Slavoj Zizek takes up this point in a critique of the anti theoretical approach underpinning Noam Chomsky's work. Zizek notes that for all his admiration for Chomsky's writing: 'it's an underlying premise of his work that you don't have to do any theory--just tell the facts to the people. The way ideology works today is much more mysterious ... there's an active refusal to know'. (4) Indeed, in many ways 'the message behind the US attack was not primarily addressed to the Iraqi people but to all of us witnessing the war--we were the true ideological and political targets'. (5)

This disavowal of knowledge is a key to the kind of exceptionalism that has driven US policy in its most spectacular form in the last two years. Since September 11, the prevailing mood within much of the West has been to abandon any analytic framework and replace it with a militarized one. The rejection of social analysis represents another version of Zizek's 'refusal to know'. Even normally sophisticated thinkers such as Michael Ignatieff now argue that historical or cultural analysis is largely unnecessary in the war on terror:

What we are up against is apocalyptic nihilism. The nihilism of their means--the indifference to human costs--takes their actions not only out of the realm of politics, but even out of the realm of war itself. The apocalyptic nature of their goals makes it absurd to believe they are making political demands at all. They are seeking the violent transformation of an irremediably sinful and unjust world. Terror does not express a politics, but a metaphysics, a desire to give ultimate meaning to time and history through ever-escalating acts of violence which culminate in a final battle between good and evil. (6) What are the consequences of such a refusal to know as expressed by the de-politicization of the war on terror? For Alain Joxe it represents a 'sort of militarist lobotomy because it means replacing the identification of political and social interests with armed groups ... [made possible through] the negation of the social sciences as a search for causes ...' (7) With the denial of causation comes an unwillingness to engage with the histories which produced different cultures. Instead, the non-West simply waits for the spread of the 'capitalist revolution' to manifest itself. In the words of leading US neo-conservatives Kristol and Kaplan, 'we stand at the cusp of a new historical era ... it is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the US is to play in the twenty-first century'. (8)

While many writers have concerned themselves with the future of war through the framework of international relations, this article is equally concerned with the culture shift occurring within the West. What does it mean for populations within the West to wage a seemingly infinite war on terror (of which Iraq forms only a part)? While President Bush has regularly described the war on terror as 'World War III' and Dick Cheney has said it could go on for a 'long, long time, perhaps indefinitely', the majority of citizens are asked to play no part in this war. One only need recall President Bush's call to US citizens to 'shop, fly and spend' as he announced the war on terror. (9) Unlike previous calls for civic or individual sacrifice in the time of war or crisis, the war on terror merely requires its citizens to maintain regular patterns of consumption.

Bush's remarks are more significant than they might first appear. It reveals the dominance of neo-liberal rationality: the displacement of all other spheres of life by the market. It can perhaps explain the fact that support for many of the leaders of the coalition (with the partial exception of Tony Blair) has not plummeted despite the abandonment of many of the tenets of liberal democracy (the abuse of intelligence reports and agencies, misleading statements, suppression of civil liberties and so on). (10) The support of much of the media for the deception of their citizens on the grounds of pragmatism reveals the extent to which a neo-liberal framework has taken hold and has been able to rid itself of any vestiges of morality generated from sources outside the market. Indeed, the real question with respect to the contemporary political framework is how much legitimacy neo-liberal governance requires from a democratic vocabulary, that is, how much does neo-liberalism have to cloak itself in liberal democratic discourse and work with liberal democratic institutions. The fact that the answer seems at present to be 'not much' should not lead us to simply reject these institutions. However, neither should we simply long for them to be restored. Such a simple dichotomy leads to a deadlock on the part of the anti-war movement. How this deadlock might be resolved will be considered below.

We are faced with a strange and seemingly contradictory situation when the experience of war, of being part of a country involved in war, is becoming an increasingly tangential one for the majority of Western populations at the same time as these civilian populations are being militarized--legally, politically, aesthetically--to an unprecedented extent. Whereas traditional war was all encompassing for a society, an intense but distinguishable experience, contemporary war appears not to be intrinsic to the values of a society. Christopher Coker argues that wars are now tools of foreign policy and they are 'instrumental, rather than existential'. The attempt to couch the Iraq war within traditional grand narratives remains unconvincing for large sections of the population. If Hegel was able to see the World Spirit manifested in Napoleon's troops as they passed through Jena, can we say the same about today's high-tech warfare, often abstracted from any human relation, employed for shifting and self-contradictory rationales? (11) As Adorno predicted, since World War II it has become impossible for civilians to experience war as a social phenomenon. For Adorno, the technological mediation of war created a 'vacuum between men and their fate in which their real fate lies'. (12) Their real fate, as we shall see, lies in a peculiar transformation whereby civilian populations are alienated from the spirit of war, but are militarized themselves as the warring state declares a permanent state of emergency. If war 'no longer [tells] a story of how progress was made, tyranny defeated, and freedom dearly bought', (13) it does reconstruct our horizons so that other ways of engaging...