Utnif 2010 Just War AFF (Final)

JUST WAR AFF JOHNSON + HANTEL
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 1

JUST WAR AFF
JUST WAR AFF..........................................................................1
1AC (1/26).................................................................5
1AC (2/26).................................................................6
1AC (3/26).................................................................7
1AC (4/26)................................................................8
1AC (5/26).................................................................9
1AC (6/26)...............................................................10
1AC (7/26)................................................................11
1AC (8/26)...............................................................12
1AC (9/26)...............................................................13
1AC (10/26).............................................................14
1AC (11/26)..............................................................15
1AC (12/26).............................................................16
1AC (13/26)..............................................................17
1AC (14/26).............................................................18
1AC (15/26).............................................................18
1AC (16/26).............................................................20
1AC (17/26).............................................................21
1AC (18/26).............................................................22
1AC (19/26).............................................................23
1AC (20/26)............................................................24
1AC (21/26).............................................................25
1AC (22/26)............................................................26
1AC (23/26).............................................................27
1AC (24/26)............................................................28
1AC (25/26).............................................................29
1AC (26/26)............................................................30
***INHERENCY***........................................32
INHERENCY - AFGHANISTAN.....................................33
INHERENCY - AFGHANISTAN....................................38
INHERENCY - AFGHANISTAN....................................40
INHERENCY - IRAQ...................................................44
INHERENCY - IRAQ...................................................45
INHERENCY - IRAQ...................................................46
INHERENCY - JUST WAR..........................................47
INHERENCY - IMPERIALISM......................................52
INHERENCY - IRAQ / IMPERIALISM...........................58
BROUGHT TO YOU BY: THE SORTORIALIST, FEREZI, THE MACHINE, OLDSTADT, BUG-A-BU, INERTIA, TOM CRUISE, FEINEHANDLER, POLTRAGEIST FELLOW, WHITIE, SATCHMO,
SYSCALL, MAC OF NICKLES HILLS, BROOKLYN
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 2
INHERENCY - AFGHANISTAN / IMPERIALISM.............62
***ADVANTAGES***......................................64
***JUST WAR THEORY***.............................66
JWT DISCRETE ADVANTAGE....................................67
JWT DISCRETE ADVANTAGE.....................................71
JWT BAD - WAR......................................................74
JWT BAD - WAR......................................................75
JWT BAD - WAR/COLLAT DAMAGE..........................76
JWT BAD - INTERNATIONALISM...............................78
JWT BAD - EXCEPTIONALISM...................................79
JWT BAD - IRAQ.....................................................80
JWT BAD - IRAQ.....................................................82
JWT BAD - AFGHANISTAN.......................................84
JWT BAD - OCCUPATION.........................................86
JWT BAD - TERRORISM...........................................87
JWT BAD - TERRORISM...........................................88
JWT BAD - PREVENTATIVE WAR.............................89
JWT BAD - CIVILIAN DEATHS..................................90
JWT BAD - SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.................91
JWT BAD - VIRTUAL WAR.......................................92
JWT BAD - NEGATIVE PEACE...................................93
JWT BAD - PREEMPTION.........................................94
JWT BAD - PREEMPTION.........................................96
***GENDER***.............................................97
GENDER DISCRETE ADVANTAGE (1/7)......................97
GENDER DISCRETE ADVANTAGE (2/7).....................98
GENDER DISCRETE ADVANTAGE (3/7)......................99
GENDER DISCRETE ADVANTAGE (4/7)....................100
LINK - AFGHANISTAN.............................................105
LINK - SAVING WOMEN..........................................109
LINK - HIJACKING FEMINISM..................................112
LINK - HIJACKING FEMINISM..................................114
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION.............................115
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION............................116
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION............................118
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION (AFGHANISTAN)...119
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION (AFGHAN)...........120
IMPACT - WOMEN’S RIGHTS KEY.............................121
IMPACT - WOMEN’S RIGHTS KEY............................122
IMPACT - WAR........................................................123
IMPACT - VIOLENCE................................................125
IMPACT - INTERVENTION........................................126
IMPACT - OCCUPATION...........................................127
***IMPERIALISM***....................................128
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 3
IMPERIALISM DISCRETE ADV (1/5).........................129
LINK - TERROR......................................................139
LINK - AFGHAN INSTABILITY..................................142
LINK - IRAQ...........................................................143
LINK - COLONIALISM - IRAQ...................................144
LINK - JWT...........................................................145
LINK - HUMAN RIGHTS...........................................147
LINK - INSTABILITY................................................149
LINK - FEAR...........................................................150
LINK - THREAT CON................................................151
LINK - ANTHROPOLOGY..........................................153
IMPACT - CIVILIAN DEATHS....................................154
IMPACT - SOVEREIGNTY..........................................157
IMPACT - VIOLENCE (AFGHAN)...............................158
IMPACT - CIVIL WAR (IRAQ)....................................159
IMPACT - TORTURE................................................160
IMPACT - TORTURE.................................................162
IMPACT - BIOPOWER...............................................163
IMPACT - BIOPOWER...............................................164
IMPACT - BIOPOWER (!)..........................................166
***SECURITY***.........................................168
LINK - THREAT CON...............................................169
LINK - THREAT CON...............................................170
LINK - WAR ON TERROR.........................................171
LINK - FREEDOM....................................................173
LINK - FREEDOM....................................................176
LINK - FREEDOM....................................................178
LINK - BIOPOWER..................................................180
IMPACT - MILITARISM............................................182
IMPACT - INSECURITY.............................................183
***ORIENTALISM***...................................184
LINK - INTEGRATION..............................................185
LINK - CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS.............................186
LINK - TERROR.......................................................187
LINK - TERROR......................................................188
LINK - WOMEN......................................................189
LINK - WOMEN.......................................................191
LINK - WOMEN......................................................192
LINK - IDENTITY POLITICS......................................193
LINK - DICHOTOMIES.............................................194
IMPACT - INTERVENTION........................................198
IMPACT - MILITARISM............................................199
IMPACT - VIOLENT HEGEMONY...............................201
IMPACT - EXTINCTION...........................................202
***TERRORISM***.................................................204
LINK - DISCOURSE.................................................205
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 4
LINK - DISCOURSE.................................................206
LINK - DISCOURSE.................................................207
LINK - WAR ON TERROR........................................208
IMPACT - SERIAL POLICY FAILURE..........................209
IMPACT - VIOLENCE...............................................210
IMPACT - VIOLENCE................................................211
IMPACT - BIOPOLITICAL VIOLENCE..........................212
IMPACT - COLONIAL VIOLENCE...............................213
IMPACT - GENOCIDE...............................................214
IMPACT - SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY...................215
IMPACT - NUCLEAR WAR........................................216
IMPACT - EXTINCTION............................................217
***BORDERS***..........................................218
LINK - BORDERS.....................................................219
LINK - BORDERS....................................................220
LINK - BORDERS.....................................................221
LINK - NATION BUILDING......................................222
LINK - N.TER.NAT’L LAW......................................223
***SOLVENCY***........................................224
SOLVENCY - TOTAL WITHDRAWAL KEY...................225
SOLVENCY - TOTAL WITHDRAWAL KEY...................226
SOLVENCY - TOTAL WITHDRAWAL KEY..................228
SOLVENCY - PUBLIC DISCUSSION/SPILLOVER.........229
SOLVENCY - REPRESENTATIONS..............................231
SOLVENCY - REPRESENTATIONS..............................233
SOLVENCY - FRAMES OF WAR.................................234
SOLVENCY - SPILLOVER..........................................236
SOLVENCY - GRIEVING...........................................237
SOLVENCY-GRIEF/VULNERABILITY.........................239
SOLVENCY - CHALLENGE JUST WAR........................241
SOLVENCY - INDEPENDENCE..................................243
SOLVENCY - IMPERIALISM......................................244
SOLVENCY - TERRORISM........................................246
SOLVENCY - TERRORISM.........................................247
SOLVENCY - TERRORISM........................................249
SOLVENCY - BIOPOWER..........................................250
SOLVENCY - RAWA...............................................252
SOLVENCY - GENDER..............................................253
***FRAMEWORK***....................................255
JWT = UTIL..........................................................256
UTIL BAD...............................................................257
UTIL BAD..............................................................259
UTIL BAD..............................................................260
UTIL BAD..............................................................262
UTIL/PUBLIC INTEREST BAD..................................265
REALISM INSUFFICIENT.........................................266
REALISM BAD........................................................267
REALISM BAD........................................................268
REALISM BAD........................................................269
REALISM FAILS......................................................270
SOCIOBIOLOGY BAD................................................271
CALCULATION BAD.................................................273
PREDICTIONS BAD..................................................275
PREDICTIONS FAIL.................................................276
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 5
ONTOLOGY FIRST...................................................277
ETHICAL PEACE.....................................................278
ETHICAL PEACE.....................................................279
PERFORMATIVITY..................................................280
FIAT BAD...............................................................281
***ANSWERS***.........................................282
A2: T - NOT ELIMINATE........................................283
A2: T - MILITARY PRESENCE.................................284
A2: OCCIDENTALISM K..........................................285
A2 OCCIDENTALISM...............................................286
A2: GUILT K..........................................................288
A2: GUILT K..........................................................289
A2: GUILT K..........................................................292
A2: SCHMITT K......................................................293
A2: SCHMITT K......................................................294
A2: LANGUAGE K...................................................295
A2: GLOBAL/LOCAL K...........................................296
A2: GLOBAL/LOCAL K............................................297
A2: MEDIA CP.......................................................298
A2: MEDIA CP......................................................300
A2: MEDIA CP.......................................................301
A2: MEDIA CP.......................................................303
A2: HUMANITARIAN PIC.......................................304
A2: HUMANITARIAN PIC........................................310
A2: HUMANITARIAN PIC - TERMINOLOGY TURN.....311
A2: CLEANUP PIC..................................................312
A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD..........................................313
A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD..........................................314
A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD..........................................315
A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD..........................................316
A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD..........................................317
A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD..........................................318
A2: TALIBAN HURTS WOMEN.................................319
A2: DISADS...........................................................320
A2: DISADS............................................................321
A2: DISADS............................................................322
A2: DISADS............................................................323
A2: EXTINCTION....................................................325
A2: OBAMA SOLVES...............................................326
A2: TERRORISM IMPACT.........................................327
A2: HEG - UNSUSTAINABLE...................................328
A2: HEG - UNSUSTAINABLE....................................331
A2: HEG - UNSUSTAINABLE/BAD...........................335
A2: HEG - UNSUSTAINABLE/BAD...........................336
A2: HEG - DEFENSE...............................................337
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 6
A2: HEG - DEFENSE..............................................338
A2: HEG - DEFENSE...............................................339
A2: OBAMA ISN’T BUSH.........................................340
A2: UTOPIAN POLITICS BAD....................................341
A2: JWT RESTRAINS WAR.....................................342
A2: OCCUPATION SOLVES.......................................343
A2: OCCUPATION SOLVES.......................................344
A2: OCCUPATION GOOD.........................................345
A2: REALISM (WOMEN).........................................346
A2: REPS K (WOMEN)............................................347
A2: BUTLER...........................................................348
A2: MEDIA CP (WOMEN).......................................349
A2: CAP K (WOMEN)..............................................350
A2: WE SHOULD STAY-TALIBAN/WOMEN...............351
***NEG STUFFS***..................................352
HUMANITARIANISM PIC.........................................353
1NC SHELL.............................................................354
1NC SHELL..............................................................355
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS KEY TO SELF-D................356
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS KEY TO SELF-D................357
SELF-D KEY TO SOLVENCY......................................358
ETHICAL OBLIGATION FOR SELF-D..........................359
A2: AFGHANIS DON’T WANT SELF-DETERMINATION 360
NET-BENEFIT 2 SHELL: MULTILATERALISM.............361
NET-BENEFIT 2 SHELL: MULTILATERALISM............362
NET-BENEFIT 2: MULTILATERALISM GOOD.............363
NET-BENEFIT 2 UNIQUENESS: MULTILATERALISM...364
NET-BENEFIT 3: JUST WAR CRITICISM BAD.............365
A2: K OF HUMANITARIAN PRESENCE.......................366
CP SOLVES WITHOUT MILITARY PRESENCE..............367
HUMANITARIAN AID GOOD.....................................368
HUMANITARIAN AID GOOD.....................................369
A2: HUMANITARY IS MILITARY................................370
FRAMEWORK: RESPONSIBILITY TO CITIZENS............371
***REALISM***..........................................372
REALISM INEVITABLE.............................................373
REALISM GOOD......................................................375
REALISM INEVITABLE............................................380
FILL IN TURN.........................................................381
FILL IN TURN........................................................382
T - REDUCE............................................................383
***DISADVANTAGES***...............................384
POLITICS - PLAN UNPOPULAR.................................385
HEG - 1NC............................................................386
HEG -1NC..............................................................387
HEG - LINK EXTENSIONS........................................388
HEG - SOLVES COUNTER BALANCING.......................389
HEG - SUSTAINABLE...............................................390
HEG - SECURITY GOOD............................................391
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 7
***ON-CASE***.....................................................392
TIMETABLE: OBAMA COMMITTED............................393
DRONES TURN.......................................................394
COLONIZATION TURN.............................................395
PATRIARCHY TURN.................................................396
JUST WAR GOOD.....................................................397
JUST WAR GOOD....................................................398
JUST WAR GOOD.....................................................399
JUST WAR GOOD....................................................400
WITHDRAWAL CAUSES WAR.....................................401
CAPITALISM K - LINK..............................................402
***LIBERAL GUILT K***.............................405
1NC........................................................................406
2NC LINK WALL.....................................................413
A2 PERMS..............................................................414
A2 PERM DO THE ALT.............................................415
K OF THE K OF THE DA..........................................416
AGENCY MINI-K.....................................................418
A2 ORIENTALISM BAD............................................419
2NC- INTERNAL LINK TO DEMOCRACY...................420
A2 WEST IS NOT BEST............................................421
DEMOCRACY GOOD - WAR.....................................422
DEMOCRACY GOOD - ETHNIC CONFLICT.................424
DEMOCRACY GOOD - STATE FAILURE.....................425
DEMOCRACY GOOD - HUMAN RIGHTS....................426
Guilt K..................................................................428
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 8
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CONTENTION 1 IS “WHY WE FIGHT:”
THE RUSH TO WAR IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ WAS BASED ON AND JUSTIFIED BY JUST WAR THEORY. THE
TRAGEDY SUFFERED BY THE US ON 9/11 EMPOWERED A DANGEROUSLY CONSERVATIVE MORAL DISCOURSE,
WHICH IMAGINED AMERICA’S “WAR ON TERROR” AS A DUTY TO THE WORLD AND HISTORY. THIS IDEA OF
MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AUTHORIZES AMERICA’S INCREDIBLY VIOLENT ADVENTURES THE MIDDLE EAST
AND CENTRAL ASIA AND JUSTIFIES ABSOLUTE DESTRUCTION OF PERCEIVED ENEMIES.
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, 2004. [“Just War or Ethical Peace: Moral
Discourses on War After 9/11,” International Affairs, 80 (2), 329-353]
American anger in the wake of September 11 was expressed in two interwoven languages: morality and war. As
Jean Bethke Elshtain describes it, ‘from George W. Bush to the average man and woman on the street, Americans si+nce September 11 have invoked
the language of justice to characterise their collective response to the despicable deeds perpetrated against innocent men, women and children.’17
George W. Bush told Congress that on September 11 ‘enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country’ and promised
that ‘whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.’ He claimed that
the war against terror was ‘the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom’, and that ‘we are in a fight for our
principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic
background or religious faith.’18 This, unmistakably, is a language of morality allied to a declaration and promise of
war: a declaration of the immorality of the attacks and their perpetrators, of the tolerance, fairness and purity of the United States and its allies, and
of its moral duty to seek and live by principles of justice through military and other counterterrorist action. It is a language which creates
an irrevocably divided moral universe, in which all virtue lies with the US and all iniquity with ‘the terrorists’,
set out starkly in the President’s description of Al-Qaeda and the Taleban as ‘the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century …
fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism’.19 It is a language which sees force not merely as a rational response to a threat
to American national security, but as a moral response to an act of injustice—a response which it is moral to make, and
which he implies should also be made in a moral way. In short, Bush’s address to Congress imagines a martial universe and a
moral universe, and then unites them. What are the implications of doing so? How does it drive or enable
policy, and what expectations might we have of that policy once it is couched in these terms? The answers are
complex and disturbing. Elshtain’s argument is that, by invoking the language of justice, Americans ‘tap into a complex
tradition called “just war”’. In her view the war on terror is both a just cause and being fought according to just war principles: When a
wound as grievous as that of September 11 has been inflicted on a body-politic, it would be the height of irresponsibility—a dereliction of duty, a
flight from the serious vocation of politics—to fail to respond … A political ethic is an ethic of responsibility. The just war tradition gives us a way
of exercising that responsibility.20 Elshtain is firm in her belief that the war on terror—even extended to Iraq—
measures up to the standards of ‘just war’, in both its justification and its execution. Her argument is significant for the
evaluation of the just war discourse, even though it can be challenged on a number of grounds, such as the reluctance of the US to explore
alternatives to a war against Afghanistan, the conduct of US operations, and the naivety of her belief that the just war framework is the one actually
being applied by the Bush administration. As Nicholas Wheeler notes, the administration tapped into more than the just war ‘tradition’ both in
designing and in justifying its response; just war, he argues, jostled for space with ‘alternative moral theories that challenge the idea of restraint in
war’ such as the ‘realist doctrine of necessity’, and the ‘supreme emergency’ and ‘war is hell’ arguments discussed by just war theorist Michael
Walzer.21 Bush’s own rhetoric betrays this ambiguity, as when he stated in the address to Congress that ‘whether we bring our enemies to justice, or
bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.’22 ‘Bringing our enemies to justice’ implies using legal processes and
neutral/universal standards of judgement; ‘bringing justice to our enemies’ suggests the use of extralegal means
both to deal with a threat and to achieve ‘justice’. They are not the same, and the latter suggests that the use of
extralegal violence or coercion (killing at a distance on the basis of minimal evidence or suspect intelligence,
highly coercive interrogation techniques, and the long-term detention of suspects outside domestic or
international law) may be both morally necessary and morally legitimate. The US
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 9
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has put great emphasis on this approach, as shown by the indefinite detention of prisoners at Camps Delta and
X-Ray, the creation of special military tribunals to try terrorist suspects in the US (rather than either using its
own civil courts or creating an international one), the bombing of Taleban and Al-Qaeda hideouts and positions,
and the use of an unmanned Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles to assassinate six Al-Qaeda ‘leaders’ in
Yemen.23 On the other hand, as Wheeler suggests, the US did employ some restraints on its bombing and targeting during
Operation Enduring Freedom—even if, as I will shortly suggest, these failed to prevent a disturbingly high number of
civilian casualties and other potential violations of the laws of war. He argues that, ‘as in the Gulf War and Kosovo, collateral
damage concerns were an integral part of the targeting process. Lawyers in the Pentagon and at the Combined Air Operations Centre at Prince Sultan
Air Base in Saudi Arabia scrutinized targets for their legality under international humanitarian law.’24 This no doubt saved many lives, but we can
reasonably suggest that comparisons with Operation Allied Force in Kosovo are misleading. As a Project on Defense Alternatives study (discussed
below) shows, both total casualty rates and casualty rates per sortie were much higher in Afghanistan.25 The conduct of US and allied
forces in Afghanistan and Iraq is analysed in detail below. What becomes clear from this examination is that
‘bringing justice to our enemies’ was the administration’s and the Pentagon’s primary response; a response
characterized by Michael Byers as part of an evolving pattern in which the US ‘is attempting to create new, exceptional
rules for itself alone’ and by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im as an ‘institutional and procedural failure of international
legality’ that ‘promotes the cause of militant Islamic fundamentalism and undermines prospects of support for
international peace and universal human rights in Islamic societies’.26 Such a disregard for international law is
built upon a particularly claustrophobic idea of moral community; a bifurcated moral universe which casts the
US and its allies as virtuous and its enemies as ineradicably threatening and evil. As Wheeler points out, the
administration’s rhetoric equating Al-Qaeda and the Taleban with Nazism suggested that they were being
constructed as such a threat to human values, as did Vice-President Cheney’s statement that ‘We cannot deal
with terror … the struggle can only end with their complete and permanent destruction.’27
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 10
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AND, DESPITE PROJECTED TIMETABLES, THE UNITED STATES HAS NO INTENTION TO LEAVE AFGHANISTAN
OR IRAQ ANYTIME SOON. THE RISK OF TERRORISM, THE NEED FOR DEMOCRACY, AND MAINTENANCE OF
US RESOLVE ARE ALL JUST EMPTY COVERS FOR THE CONSOLIDATION OF US EMPIRE AND EXTENSION OF
GLOBAL DOMINANCE THROUGH WAR, RHETORICALLY JUSTIFIED BY REFERENCE TO GREATER GOOD.
Englehardt 2010 (Tom, the creator of the Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com, the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of the 1998 book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation Engelhardt graduated from Yale College
and took a Master's degree in Area Studies from Harvard University, where he was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian
Scholars. April 25, Middle East Online, http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=38613)
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from
Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of
our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably
painlessly. Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream
news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In
Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation
worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday
stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter . Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that
would endanger
would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan --
the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and
Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of US forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have
been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the US has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and
again, evidently, last week. Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that
country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well
the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in
their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world,
into a disaster zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix).
Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at
their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the
transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-
nation. It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N.
report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well. That’s diversification for you. It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to
expand on. We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household.
Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more
terrible place. It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the
Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite
the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become,
the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the
majority insurgency we claim to fear. It’s common wisdom in the US that, before we pull our military out,
Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy,
which consigns real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of US officials to
hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a
“reconciliation process” that will last years and only begin after the US military seizes the high ground on the battlefield. The reality that dare not
speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us -- whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions
there leaped for each other’s throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country -- the stakes
for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 11
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anyone of significance here would say such a thing. Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands
on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been
fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight. Most Americans evidently remain
convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in
which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took
place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded. In a future in which our surging armies
actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for
that matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center
towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or
had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been
relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel. Vietnam and Afghanistan Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s
always some obstacle in the path of withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th
election, hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right thing. As it happens , the
election, as many predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to
resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence on the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of
American troops to the 50,000 level by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated assurances, seems to be
proceeding slowly. And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems
curious. There’s always some reason to hesitate -- and it never has to do with us. Withdrawal would undoubtedly
be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it
stopped convincing itself that the presence of the US military in distant lands was essential to a better world
(and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth). The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded and occupied other
lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But they did it. It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the
South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of
equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were burned at the US Embassy in
Saigon; military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were
deserted in the panic of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully,
but out. Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously --
including rolling communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of “credibility” for the American
superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s
Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that
somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened
afterwards. Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no
other “dominos” fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it could have been different -- and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been. But
even when local skies darken, the world doesn't end. And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in
Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The sky won’t fall, even if the US gets
out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country. We got our troops there
remarkably quickly. We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are,
undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use
to them, but either way we could go. A Brief History of American Withdrawal Of course, there’s a small problem here. All
evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw -- not really, not from either region. It has no
interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That’s
hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control)
over the planet’s strategic oil lands. And then there’s another factor to consider: habit. Over the decades, Washington has gotten
used to staying. The US has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, 65 years
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later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have
about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically
speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again, striking numbers of
American troops still garrison South Korea. Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the US built-up the
enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its seven-mile perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I, the US either built or built up military
bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the
Indian Ocean. And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite
as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking. It’s not as if the US military were taking off for Dubuque. A history of
American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the US military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of
“people power” (and a local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries,
however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating
1983 suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the US from Manta Air
Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease. ("We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base,"
he said slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.
Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded
deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come "cut and run" charges and blame for "losing" Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration. Not
surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere. In Iraq,
while President Obama has committed himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty
of wiggle room remains. Already, the New York Times reports, General Ray Odierno, commander of US forces in that country, is
lobbying Washington to establish “an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad
to sustain the relationship after... Dec. 31, 2011.” (“We have to stay committed to this past 2011,” Odierno is quoted as saying.
“I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just
because US soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.”) If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on the
mega-bases the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of
2011, have a real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast, ill-named US base and command center abutting Baghdad International
Airport on the outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the 104-acre US embassy built along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. At
present, it’s the largest “embassy” on the planet and represents something new in “diplomacy,” being essentially a military-base-cum-command-and-
control-center for the region. It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not. In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near future “embassy”
personnel, including police trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination, spies, US advisors attached to various Iraqi
ministries, and the like, may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of 1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has
requested $1,875 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an
embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from that country. Similarly, we have a giant US embassy in
Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are
not, rest assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging, even
if in ways often not noticed here. President Obama’s surge decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra troops he’s sending
in, not in terms of the shadow army of 30,000 or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles (and dying off the books in striking
numbers); nor the extra contingent of CIA types and the escalating drone war they are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor the quiet
doubling of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the “civilian surge”;
nor, for instance, the special $10 million “pool” of funds that up to 120 US Special Operations forces, already in those borderlands training the
paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend “winning hearts and minds.” Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that
great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay. With
there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly
our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget,
in fighting two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.
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CONTENTION 2 IS “IT’S NOT A JUST WAR, IT’S JUST WAR.”
THE INADEQUACY OF JUST WAR THEORY IS MADE EVIDENT IN OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM, WHERE
TERRIBLE INCIDENTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST CIVILIANS ARE TOLERATED ON THE BASIS THAT THEY ARE
“UNINTENTIONAL.” THE THRESHOLD OF INTENTIONALITY JUSTIFIES THOUSANDS OF AVOIDABLE DEATHS
AND FURTHER ENDANGERS THE POPULATION THAT AMERICAN WARMONGERERS PROMISE TO BE
LIBERATING.
The distinction between intentional and unintentional killing is enshrined both in just war theory and in the Geneva
Conventions as the ‘proportionality’ rule. Article 51(5)(b) of Protocol 1 to the Conventions prohibits operations which ‘may be expected to cause
incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the
concrete and direct military advantage anticipated’. Nicholas Wheeler criticizes international humanitarian law for being imprecise about what
‘constitutes “excessive” civilian casualties or “concrete and direct military advantage” in specific cases’; this imprecision, he argues, leaves ‘the door
… sufficiently wide open under Protocol 1 that states can justify the killing of innocent civilians as an unintended consequence of attacks against
legitimate military targets’—a problem compounded by the fact that these provisions have rarely (if ever) been tested in a court. In this light, I can
only agree with Wheeler’s conclusion that ‘the proportionality rule is the Achilles heel of just war theory.’57 Contrary to
Elshtain’s defensive protestations about the ‘ethical restraint’ of the US military, its war-fighting strategies in
Afghanistan and Iraq have both tested the (legal) limits of the proportionality rule and exposed its utter ethical
inadequacy. The study conducted of Operation Enduring Freedom by the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA), for
example, conclusively refutes claims that the US fought with care to avoid harming civilians. Using deliberately
conservative figures, its author Carl Conetta concluded that despite the US navy and air force flying 64 per cent
fewer sorties over Afghanistan than NATO in the Kosovo war, it caused two to three times more direct civilian
deaths—the respective sortie/casualty ratios being approximately 4,700/1,000–1,300 in Afghanistan versus
13,000/500 in Yugoslavia (i.e. a civilian was killed every twenty-six sorties in Yugoslavia and every three or
four sorties in Afghanistan).58 In the first half of 2002 New York Times reporters visited eleven locations where
civilians were said to have been killed in US airstrikes, verifying the killing of nearly 400 people and the
wounding of many more. These episodes included six massacres in which 50 or more were killed—including
the death of 52 people in Niazi Qala in December 2001 after US planes bombed an ammunition dump moved
there by Taleban forces, and the killing of 65 people at a mosque in Khost in November 2001, when a bomb
aimed at a residence containing a Taleban leader went off course. Reporters who visited Niazi Qala wrote of seeing
‘bloodied children’s shoes and shirts’, ‘the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair’, and the ‘severed shoe’ of
a child. In another atrocity a US AC-130 gunship attacked four villages near Kakrak in July 2002, killing 54 and
wounding 120, during an operation aimed at hunting down and killing Al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders.
Afterwards, ‘American soldiers found villagers gathering up the limbs of their neighbours.’59 Other events which
ought to trouble both just war advocates and those concerned with US observance of international law include
the targeting of civilian infrastructure, the deliberate bombing of the Al-Jazeera bureau in Kabul, the execution
and mistreatment of prisoners in Northern Alliance hands, the enormous death and suffering attributable to the
broader impact of US military operations, and the state of instability and crisis that was allowed to develop in
Afghanistan following the fall of the Taleban. Numerous reports attest to the killing and mistreatment of as
many as 800 Taleban prisoners of war by Northern Alliance militias, including the execution of approximately
600 prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, many of them suffocated in sealed shipping containers.60 US forces destroyed
or damaged the
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main telephone exchange in Kabul, the electrical grid in Kandahar and the hydro-electric power station near the
Kajaki dam, which would have exacerbated an already difficult humanitarian situation.61 The PDA estimates that
from mid-September 2001 to mid-January 2002, between 8,000 and 18,000 Afghanis died from starvation,
injuries sustained as they fled combat zones, or exposure and associated illnesses. Of these 40 per cent (between 3,200 and
7,200) ‘are attribut[able] to the effects of the crisis and war’. At the outset of the war the UN was estimating that 1.5 million people were at extreme
risk; the military operations exacerbated this crisis by generating some 560,000 refugees, disrupting national-level
food deliveries by 40 per cent in October 2001, and completely interrupting local food and aid deliveries for
two to three months (and sometimes longer) in many places. At a time of enormously increased and desperate
humanitarian need, this ‘more than doubled the size of the gap between the supply of aid and the need for it’.62
How are these awful facts to be treated by the advocates of just war, given their concern for the proportional use
of force, and the injunction that innocent life not be taken or maimed intentionally? Both Walzer and Elshtain
have given Operation Enduring Freedom the imprimatur of a ‘just war’ and aggressively challenged its critics.
The allied forces, apparently, are guilty of no crimes—the death they caused was unintentional. Is carelessness
really a defence? Carelessness, when civilians are killed in the course of aerial assassination operations based
on poor intelligence and extra-legal principles, prosecuted in such an indiscriminate way as to leave entire
villages filled with the dead and wounded? Carelessness, when an ammunition dump is seen as such a threat to
allied troops as to justify its detonation, from the air, in the midst of a densely populated area? Carelessness,
when it was highly predictable that thousands of vulnerable people would die fleeing areas where force was
being deployed in such an indiscriminate manner and supplies of desperately needed aid disrupted? A more
genuine test for the just warriors, and international law, would be whether avoidable death and suffering are
condemned and prosecuted63—a test they refuse to accept, perhaps because it would undermine the sovereign
prerogative of states to use force; it might begin genuinely to constrain war rather than liberate it.
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THE INVASION HAS TRANSFORMED THE ENTIRE TOPOGRAPHY OF AFGHANISTAN INTO A SPACE OF
EXCEPTION. WE MUST CHALLENGE THE VIOLENCE OF IMPERIALISM, NOT BY MEANS OF A CRUDE
UTILITARIAN CALCULUS, BUT RATHER INSISTING UPON THE ABSOLUTE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DEATHS OF
AFGHANI CIVILIANS—ONLY THIS CAN DISRUPT THE IMPERIAL PROJECT AND INTERVENE INTO THE
DISCOURSES OF JUST WAR WHICH PROMOTE IT.
GREGORY, DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY SCHOLAR AND PROFESSOR OF GEOGRAPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF

BRITISH COLUMBIA IN VANCOUVER, 2004 [DEREK, THE COLONIAL PRESENT: AFGHANISTAN, PALESTINE, IRAQ,
PP. 67-72]
The war also displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians not only from their homes but also from the
protections of international law. They became the mute bearers of what Agamben calls "bare life," excluded
from both "politically qualified life" and, in many cases, from the actions of international aid agencies or even
the scrutiny of the international media.' At the very beginning of the conflict, Felicity Lawrence drew attention to the absence of images
of its victims. There were already vast numbers of refugees without food, water or medicine, she wrote, but within the space of constructed
invisibility: [We] can't see them; they have no face. They have not so far massed shock-ingly in front of the cameras, because the borders to
neighbouring coun-tries remain closed. They have fled to villages in the mountains, where aid agencies fear they will starve slowly, in pockets, away
from the fences where photographers can bear witness."' Lawrence's sense of this first phase of the attack on Afghanistan as "a war depersonalized
and a narrative detached" eventually gave way, however, as the different imaginative geographies being mobilized by America and its allies
confounded and ultimately perforated one another. The military assault could never be confined to the sanitized, surgical
procedures con-jured up by Bush's "carefully targeted actions," and most of the Afghan people were never able to appreciate
what he called "the generosity of America and [its] allies." "As we strike military targets," the president had reassured his
audience before the bombing began, "we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and
suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan."' This was a tacit admission that territorialization was
an imperfect schematic, and that "al-Qaeda" and "Afghanistan" were not coincident. Indeed, Zizek suggested
that "perhaps the ultimate image of the 'local population' as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying
above Afghanistan: one can never be sure whether it will be dropping bombs or food parcels."'s The strategy was a
cruel tokenism. The parcels were intended primarily for domestic consumption — and perhaps to rally America's allies — since the airdrops were so
pitifully inadequate to the scale of the swelling hu-manitarian crisis.' But historian Niall Ferguson none the less approvingly quoted Kipling's White
Man's Burden. America was waging a "savage war of peace," he wrote, while filling "full the mouths of Famine." And he tried to silence any
dissenters by declaring that "Kipling would certainly have grasped the rationale of simultaneously dropping cluster bombs and food parcels," which
makes one wonder if the appalling man had any idea of the sheer number of those "mouths of Famine" or what cluster bombs do." For the
record: each cluster bomb contains several hundred bomblets, and when each bomblet explodes hundreds of
steel fragments shoot out at high velocity to kill or maim anyone within a radius of 100 meters from the point of
detonation. Those that do not explode lie buried in the earth, even more dangerous than conventional land-
mines: all the more so in Afghanistan since many of them were yellow — the same color as the food parcels.'
"Territory," as Homi Bhabha once observed in a remark that Kipling would no doubt also have endorsed, derives from both terra (earth) and terrere
(to frighten), from which we derive territoriurn, "a place from which people are frightened off."' And so it proved, as the crumpled folds between al-
Qaeda and Afghanistan came undone. As the re-empowered Northern Alliance swept south, supported by massive high-level aerial bombardments,
so streams of refugees headed for the borders, terrified by the prospect of another round of death and destruction. Many of them, disaffected with the
Taliban, had suffered vicious reprisals from the retreating troops, but — as my narrative in the previous chapter has shown — they also had good
reason to fear the Northern Alliance once again ruling their lives." During the night of November 12/13 the Taliban abandoned Kabul, and the next
day the city was occupied by Alliance troops. John Lee Anderson, a reporter for the New Yorker, surveyed what he called "a Daliesque panorama of
wholesale destruction"; Kabul had been battered by so many different warlords that "all of the devastation had a name attached to it" (figure 4.5). By
December 22 a new, interim administration had been installed in the capital, but this did not end the fighting or the suffering of the civilian
population. This was in part the consequence of the sheer scale of devastation. Anderson described "a vast mud Chernobyl" stretch-ing north across
the Shamali plain from Kabul to the former front line, pockmarked by "roofless and crumbling adobe farm houses, collapsed walls and battered
fields." But the continued humanitarian crisis was also the product of the US decision to rely on the militias of the Northern Alliance for most of the
ground fighting. Millions of dollars were
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expended in whole-sale bribery to persuade them to fight the Taliban, which minimized American casualties but also ensured that the warlordism that
had dis-figured Afghanistan for decades would resurface as soon as their oppon-ents had fled. Human Rights Watch documented appalling atrocities
inflicted by these militias on Pashtun civilians in particular: extortions and looting, sexual violence, beatings, and killings." The high-level war
from the air also took a heavy toll of the popula-tion. By May 2002 it was estimated that 1,300-3,500 civilians
had died and 4,000-6,500 civilians had been injured, many of them seriously, as a direct result of American
bombs and missiles (figure 4.6). Probably another 20,000 civilians lost their lives as an indirect consequence of
the American-led intervention; this includes thousands who died when relief columns from international aid
agencies were halted or delayed, and others who died through the secondary effects of targeting civilian
infrastructure (especially electrical power facilities vital for hospitals and water-supply systems).' Most of these men, women, and
children were killed or maimed "not by design," as a horrified Noam Chomsky put it, "but because it [did not] matter":
"a deeper level of moral depravity" mined by the ghosts of homo sacer." The numbers of these nameless
victims and what Marc Herold grimly calls their "unworthy bodies" do matter. But they matter not because "deaths directly
attributable to US foreign policies are to be weighed against the deaths the US has suffered, somehow leaving
the recip-ients of its imperial and post-colonial aggression in moral credit." It is not about making cruel
comparisons, which is exactly what Arundhati Roy criticized as the algebra of infinite justice: "How many dead
Afghans for every dead American?" Insisting instead on the absolute significance of these deaths disrupts those
simultaneous equations and unsettles what Gilroy calls "the imperial topography which dictates that deaths are
prized according to where they occur and the [racial markings] of the bodies involved."' We need to record
these numbers, and to think about the destroyed lives that they represent even in excess of these numbers, the
friends and families pummeled by inconsolable loss, because no sup-posedly "sacred mission" — jihad or crusade —
can provide a warrant for this indiscriminate killing. In all of these ways, then, the imaginative geographies of a
colonial past reasserted themselves in the colonial present. What Gilroy describes, appropriately, as at once "old, modern
notions of racial difference" were activated within a differential calculus according to which "some
human bodies are more easily and appropriately humiliated, imprisoned, shack-led, starved and
destroyed than others." He continues: These fine ethnic distinctions effectively revive a colonial economy in which infrahumanity,
measured against the benchmark of healthier imperial standards, diminishes human rights and can defer human recognition. The native, the
enemy, the prisoner and all the other shadowy "third things" lodged between animal and human can
only be held accountable under special emergency rules and fierce martial laws. Their lowly status
underscores the fact that they cannot be reciprocally endowed with the same vital humanity enjoyed by
their well-heeled captors, conquerors, judges, executioners and other racial betters." The sovereign powers
and delegations that decreed that the lives and deaths of all these people were of no account — who claimed to
wage a war of "civilization" against "barbarism" within the spaces of their own excep-tion — must surely be
called to account and made to reflect on the mean-ings of the wretched colonial antinomies through which they
preach vengeance and retribution.
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SIMILARLY, THE INVASION OF IRAQ EVIDENCES THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF JUST WAR THEORY.
SHOCKINGLY HIGH CASUALTY RATES ARE TOLERATED FOR THE SAKE OF A GREATER GOOD THAT IS
IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFINE, EVEN WHILE THE US RESTS ITS JUSTIFICATIONS FOR VIOLENCE THE BENEVOLENCE
OF HUMANITARIAN RELIEF – A JUSTIFICATION WHICH IS PROVEN DISINGENUOUS BY ONE HISTORICAL
EXAMPLE AFTER ANOTHER.
The war in Iraq, begun 18 months after the September 11 attacks, raises the same problems for just war theory and
international law, but even more intensely. There are similar problems of violation of jus in bello rules and postwar instability,
compounded by a globally accepted view that the war was illegal under international law (and thus an act of aggression) and also failed
to satisfy just war’s jus ad bellum criteria.70 As such, the death of every single Iraqi combatant, not merely those of
‘innocent’ civilians, must be considered a crime. Iraqi military deaths, while hard to assess, have been estimated by
Jonathon Steele at between 3 and 10 per cent of functioning units, or between 13,500 and 45,000 individuals; completely
outmatched by US technology, Iraqi troops died under volleys of cluster rockets, fire from helicopter gunships
and carpets of bombs from B-52s.71 The civilian death toll is also extremely high, and climbing. At the time of
writing, in January 2004, the website ‘Iraq Body Count’ estimated a minimum civilian death toll attributable to the invasion and subsequent
counterinsurgency operations of 8,014 and a maximum of 9,852.72 Another casualty tracking project by the PDA has not compiled total estimates,
but cites a number of incidents and surveys which make very disturbing reading.73 A Knight-Ridder newspapers survey of 19 Baghdad hospitals
after the fall of the city estimated that at least 1,101 civilians and another 1,255 who were ‘probably civilians’ were killed after the war began on 19
March, while a Los Angeles Times survey of 27 hospitals concluded that at least 1,700 were killed and 8,000 injured, not counting ‘hundreds’ of
‘undocumented civilian deaths’ reported by ‘Islamic burial societies and humanitarian groups that are trying to trace those missing in the conflict’,
and ‘dozens of deaths that doctors indirectly attributed to the conflict … pregnant women who died of complications while giving birth at home …
and chronically ill people, such as cardiac or dialysis patients, who were unable to obtain needed care while fighting raged’. High numbers of
civilian (and some military) deaths were reported by hospitals in other cities, such as Basra (400), Hilla (250), Najaf (378) and
Nasiriyah (250). When these totals are added to the Knight-Ridder survey of hospitals in Baghdad, the death toll is approximately 3,634, the vast
majority of the dead civilians. The PDA also cites another 37 reports of mid-war incidents in which at least 650 civilians were killed, a report from
Najaf cemetery suggesting 2,000 excess burials during the fighting, and, following the liberation, 200 deaths from unexploded ordnance and 34
civilians killed by US forces during protests and civil disturbances.74 These shockingly high casualty figures were incurred
during bombing, missile strikes, artillery, mortar and small arms fire, cluster bombing, and attacks from
helicopter gunships—all in the face of claims in glossy State Department documents about the ‘strategic
imperative’ of the US air force paying close attention to the law of armed conflict using technologies such as
laser-guided bombs and collateral damage assessment software.75 In the vast majority of the incidents allied
forces used indiscriminate force against targets which were civilian in nature or were close to heavily populated
civilian areas.76 The humanitarian crisis the war provoked was compounded by airstrikes against electricity
generators and telephone exchanges, and widespread looting after the liberation (which US troops stood by and
watched, while ensuring the Iraqi Oil Ministry was secure). Some hospitals were forced to close, or could not
gain access to power or water, while patients were deterred from seeking help because of the general
insecurity.77 Some of the more notorious incidents included jittery US troops shooting child weapons collectors
and firing on vehicles approaching checkpoints, and airstrikes on the Al-Shaab and Al-Nasser marketplaces in
Baghdad which killed 76 and injured 77. Journalists were also murdered in a US airstrike on the Al-Jazeera office and
tank fire on the Palestine Hotel: clear and chilling violations of the laws of war.78 Nothing in the Iraq experience
justifies the faith that Elshtain and others have placed in the US military’s responsibility and restraint; indeed, as in
Afghanistan, that experience reveals the just warriors’ excuse that the killing was
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‘unintentional’ to be little more than a moral smokescreen for the indiscriminate application of strategic
violence. Likewise, the idea that ‘proportionality’ would suffice to balance the suffering, instability and chaos
caused by the invasion against some greater ‘social good’ drives just war theory ‘perilously close to moral
incoherence’, as Wheeler remarked of its faith in such a ‘double effect’.79 Ironic, then, that in justifying the war Elshtain wrote that ‘it is better
to put one’s own combatants in danger than stand by as the innocent are slaughtered’—this, when a US soldier at Kerbala was quoted as
saying: ‘I think they thought we wouldn’t shoot kids. But we showed them that we don’t care. We are going to
do what we have to do to stay alive and keep ourselves safe.’80 In her June 2002 Boston Globe article and the November 2002
Statement of Principles on Iraq published by the Institute for American Values (also signed by Francis Fukuyama, Robert Putnam and Theda
Skocpol), Elshtain relied on the enforcement of UN resolutions to justify war against Iraq.81 However, by May 2003, relying on the ‘double effect’,
she had shifted register to focus on the liberation of Iraqis from the brutal Hussein regime: ‘Are we just going to provide iodine and band aids or
might it be necessary, as Bonhoeffer put it, to “cut off the head of the snake”?’82 We could ask why, if it was so genuinely
concerned by the suffering of the Iraqi people, the US supported Hussein through his gassing of Kurds and
Iranian troops; why it helped cause the death of a million Iraqis through sanctions while claiming to be so
opposed to their oppressor; and why it does not support the ICC and the indictment of terrorists and torturers
everywhere. This new, humanitarian justification for the war also raises another question of the advocates who
have stolen the robes of the judge: who gets to wage just war? Does every sufferer of harm and injustice, or
merely those who have the power and the means, and who can turn their justifications into truth? Surely, if the
just warriors are right, the Palestinian people had a right to wage just war on Israel after its 1982 invasion of
Lebanon and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila which the Israel Defense Force helped to organize and enable?
83 Surely the Palestinians had the right to invade Israel, remove its government and impose one which would
create a just peace and right the historic wrong imposed on them after 1948? Surely, as Elshtain says of Iraq,
they had a ‘claim to have coercive force deployed [on their] behalf to stop the Lions before they crush and
devour all the Lambs’?84 However, such an argument would rightly disturb those who, whatever its flaws, wish
to support Israeli democracy and halt the awful cycle of violence and retribution that has driven this conflict for
decades, and who believe that the conflict must be resolved with a measure of security and justice for both
peoples. In short, the weak do not get to wage just war. Their ‘innocence’ goes undefended.
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AND, IF THE WAR IN IRAQ PROVES ANYTHING, IT IS THE POVERTY OF JUST WAR THEORY WHEN IT COMES
TO PREVENTING UNNECESSARY VIOLENCE OR LIMITING ITS SCOPE. RATHER, IT LEGITIMIZES VIOLENCE AS
A RATIONAL MEANS TO POLITICAL ENDS, WRITING OFF ALL THOSE AFFECTED AS MERE COLLATERAL
DAMAGE. ARMED WITH THE MORAL AUTORITY AFFORDED BY JUST WAR THEORY, WARPLANNERS ARE
ABSOLVED OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR KILLING AND LEFT ACCOUNTABLE TO NO ONE FOR MURDEROUS
FOREIGN POLCY.
Just war theory claims to limit and control strategic violence in two ways: by limiting the circumstances under
which one can resort to war (jus ad bellum), and by limiting the ways it can be fought (jus in bello). These roughly
correspond with similar categories in international law (as laid out in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions) but cannot be reduced to them;
furthermore, just war advocates do not require that states be accountable to international law. In her book Women and war Elshtain sets out the moral
tests of just war as follows: (1) that a war be the last resort to be used only after all other means have been exhausted; (2) that a war be clearly an act
of redress of rights actually violated or defense against unjust demands backed by the threat of force; (3) that war be openly and legally declared by
properly constituted governments; (4) that there be a reasonable prospect of victory; (5) that the means be proportionate to the ends; (6) that a war be
waged in such a way as to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants; (7) that the victorious nation not require the utter humiliation of the
vanquished.38 Just war advocates oppose force being used aggressively, for the purposes of national aggrandizement or imperialism; they oppose the
preventive use of force, but are ambiguous about pre-emptive strikes; they advocate the use of peaceful efforts to deal with threats before war is tried;
and they advocate the principles of ‘proportionality’ and ‘non-combatant immunity’ to limit the impact of war on civilians. It is these last principles
that, for me, are most controversial. Proportionality and non-combatant immunity are welcome brakes on the limitless
application of force, but they are also beset with problems. First, the demand that means be matched to ends
exposes a Clausewitzian instrumentalism hiding in the interstices of just war theory, which accepts that (under
more limited circumstances) war is a rational and controllable means to political ends. Second, the principle of non-
combatant immunity is qualified by a judgement that ‘non-combatants must not be the intended targets of
violence.’39 There is enormous scope for abuse here, compounded by an implicit assumption that decisions and
acts of war are limited in space and time—that moral judgements about particular circumstances can be
quarantined from the history preceding, or a future beyond, the cessation of high-intensity military operations.
Once we begin to question these assumptions, morally neat arguments about the justice of strategic violence
begin to unravel. We can begin to test just war theory by examining the judgements its advocates have made
about the legitimacy of armed force in the conflicts that have surrounded, preceded and followed the tragedy of
9/11: the Arab–Israeli conflict; the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan; Operation Desert Storm; the sanctions and weapons inspection regime
imposed on Iraq after 1990; and the post- 9/11 wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Focusing on two of the most influential theorists
(Walzer and Elshtain), however, it is difficult to find a just war position that is consistent either between them, across examples or through time. For
example, of Iraq Walzer argues that much of the 1991 bombing was unjust: that ‘shielding civilians would certainly have excluded the destruction of
electricity networks and water purification plants’.40 In 1995 Elshtain argued that just war principles should have governed the postwar situation in
Iraq as well, and that the imposition of sanctions that were causing enormous suffering was not ‘ethically pristine … the rush to use embargoes and
sanctions that target whole populations, harming the least powerful first, requires more justification than it has received from past and current
policymakers.’41 Yet by 2003 she was marshalling just war arguments in support of the Bush administration’s plans for war in Iraq, parroting
administration propaganda that Iraq possessed a large arsenal of threatening weapons of mass destruction and supported Al-Qaeda, and arguing that
‘when a state destroys or is prepared to destroy its own citizens and propels its violence outside its own borders, it becomes a criminal entity.’42
Elshtain’s argument came with the usual jus in bello caveats about ‘proportionality’ and ‘non-combatant immunity’, but Walzer differed from her in
arguing that there was no justification (jus ad bellum) for war with Iraq by 2003. Even though he supported immediately pre-emptive attack in the
case of Israel’s 1967 war, he suggested that ‘the [Iraq] war that is being discussed is preventive, not pre-emptive—it is designed to respond to a more
distant threat.’43 Elshtain counters that ‘imminent threat does not necessarily mean one that is just around the corner’ but refers ‘to murderous
capabilities that an outlaw regime is in the process of developing’.44 Walzer argues that the restoration of the weapons inspections is the best way to
deal with such concerns, and that it is superior to preventive war ‘because the dangers to which it alludes are not only distant but speculative, whereas
the costs of a preventive war are near, certain and usually terrible’.45 To this prospect Elshtain offers crocodile tears: ‘in any conflict noncombatants
will fall in harm’s way. But it is forbidden to knowingly and maliciously target them.’46 The arguments of both here are replete with problems,
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at both the jus in bello and jus ad bellum levels. In relation to jus ad bellum, Elshtain stands on disappearing ground: months
after the
conclusion of the fighting, no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, and no links to Al-Qaeda
proven.47 Then there is the pile of documentary and anecdotal evidence, dating back to a presidential finding
signed by George Bush senior in 1992, that successive US governments had really been driven by an overriding
policy aim to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and that influential neo-conservatives began to argue
publicly in 1998 that CIA-directed covert operations should be abandoned in favour of a military invasion.48 To
this can be added the way the regime-change policy muddied the inspection waters, given the clear views of US
officials that sanctions should remain until Saddam Hussein was removed from power, even if the UN
resolutions were complied with—a scandalous position for a veto-wielding UN Security Council member to
take.49 Larger strategic objectives for control of the Middle East dating back to 1975—the establishment of
military bases in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, removal of regimes in Iran and Syria, the strengthening of
Israel and the control of Gulf oil supplies—also rank as plausible motives for the invasion of Iraq.50 These facts
shake both Elshtain’s argument for the enforcement of UN resolutions with war in 2003, and Walzer’s view that there was a just and necessary war
waiting to be fought back in the 1990s when Saddam was playing hide-and-seek with the inspectors … an internationalist war, a war of enforcement,
and its justice would have derived, first, from the justice of the system it was enforcing and, second, from its likely outcome: the strengthening of the
UN and the global legal order.51 Not only are their analyses wilfully naive about the cynical realism of US and
European foreign policy with regard to Iraq—the double standard of states that had helped create Iraq’s WMD
capability before 1990 demanding compliance in its removal,52 while remaining unwilling to disarm
themselves—but they are silent about the crime against humanity perpetrated by the powers on the UN Security
Council as they claimed to be enforcing its resolutions. Just war talk of ‘proportionality’, ‘non-combatant
immunity’ and ‘the protection of innocents’ is worth recalling here, when against the fear of Iraq’s future use of
WMD is balanced the death of more than a million Iraqi citizens as a result of sanctions which US officials,
contrary to UN Resolutions 661 and 687, insisted should stay in place until Saddam Hussein was removed from
power.53 This was the ‘justice of the system it was enforcing’: a crime against humanity perpetrated by the UN
itself—an image of ‘justice’ angrily purloined by Osama bin Laden in his 1998 interview with ABC and then
directed, with terrifying intensity, into the heart of the United States three years later.54 The continuing spectacle
of western assumptions of moral superiority in relation to Iraq is deeply unsettling, when what would be more
appropriate is the kind of soul-searching that accompanied postwar revelations of the Nazi Holocaust . We
are not to know whether or not Elshtain and Walzer believe that the impact of the sanctions amounted to a major international crime, but they have
both used arguments that the death of civilians cannot be criminal if jus ad bellum conditions are met and the killing was unintentional. Indeed, in a
combative 2003 Public Interest article Elshtain cites Walzer’s attack on critics of the war against Afghanistan to press home this point. Against
what he describes as ‘leftist’ claims that the similarity of the death tolls on September 11 and in Afghanistan
undermines the justice of the war, Walzer counters that this ‘denies one of the most basic and best understood
moral distinctions between premeditated murder and unintentional killing’.55 Even if we were to accept this
distinction (which seems to me to be a stunning evasion of responsibility), it is not as if the US were willing to
make its armed forces accountable for their targeting decisions, having refused to place its forces under the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently the only body able to prosecute violations of the laws of war. In the absence of that
accountability we are forced to rely on the arbitrary judgements of just war intellectuals, among whom Elshtain is
convinced that ‘no group in the US pays more attention to ethical restraint on the use of force than does the US military’ and that ‘the real dissenters
in American intellectual life are likely to be those who, at least in part, defend the foreign policy of the United States’.56
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ALL OF THIS PROVES THAT, FAR FROM MODERATING REALISM’S VIOLENT EXCESSES, JUST WAR THEORY
CONFIRMS ITS ONTOLOGICAL PREMISE. ANCHORING ITSELF IN METAPHYSICAL TRUTH, JUST WAR
THEORY NORMALIZES WAR AS AN EVER PRESENT PART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION, DESTROYING THE
POSSIBILITY FOR PEACEFUL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND ENSURING CONTINUED BLOODSHED. WE
SHOULD USE THE EXPERIENCES OF AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO QUESTION JUST WAR
THEORY AND ITS STRANGLEHOLD ON THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION.
In such a context, the just war tradition is presented by its advocates as a moderating influence—one that enables
force to be used if necessary and justifiable, and can police the use of that force so that it conforms with moral
principles that do not undermine the community it is being used to defend.28 The just war tradition traces its origins to St
Augustine’s break with the long tradition of Christian pacifism to defend, ‘with regret, the possibility that war may be just if it is waged in defense of
a common good and to protect the innocent from certain destruction’.29 To the ‘pacific ontology’ of the New Testament’s Christian narrative,
Augustine contrasts an ontology based on the occasional need to employ limited violence in a search for justice rather than peace (which, in his view,
could just as well mean the preservation of an unjust status quo).30 The efforts of just war advocates to distinguish their
‘tradition’ from realism (which it charges with being amoral) and pacifism (which it charges with being unrealistic and therefore
immoral) are problematic, as are their efforts to draw partial legitimacy from each. Walzer distinguishes just war most
strongly from realism, but it is the pacifist ideal and eschatology which most consistently get short shrift from just war advocates. Johnson argues that
in circumstances where ‘the use of force, at appropriate levels and discriminatingly directed, may be the morally preferable means for the protection
and preservation of values … those who would reject such use of force are in fact choosing a less moral course’, and in the immediate wake of 9/11
Elshtain indignantly suggested that ‘it would be the height of irresponsibility … to fail to respond.’31 Walzer plausibly distinguishes just war
thinking both from the ‘limitless’ application of strategic violence Clausewitz imagined as central to ‘absolute war’, and from the ‘cool and
toughminded’ ‘modern Machiavellis’ of the 1950s and 1960s who ‘taught the [US] princes … how to get results through the calculated application of
force’.32 While just war theory does work to critique rationalist realism and inject questions of ‘justice’ into a
space where utility and prudence are moral values in themselves, it is still fixed in a realist ontological bedrock.
Realist presuppositions about the essentially anarchic and dangerous nature of world politics are echoed by just
war advocates, who see the world reflected in Augustine’s image of an ‘earthly city … never free from the dangers of bloodshed, sedition and
civil war’, one in which ‘human beings are permanently estranged’. Upon these foundations Elshtain builds an argument that just war is a
‘conditional acceptance of collective violence’ that resituated pacifism as a partly submerged doctrine … the fighter is reborn in the image of the Just
Warrior who takes up arms reluctantly and only if he must to prevent a greater wrong or protect the innocent from certain harm. His tragic task is
made necessary because the dream and hope of peace on earth has been indefinitely postponed.33 The result of this strategic ambiguity
is to generate for the just war tradition an extraordinary set of claims about its relevance and legitimacy in
relation to competing discourses. Elshtain argues that just war theory ‘draws on a set of assumptions which are neither “realist” nor
“pacifist” but partake of both’ and is ‘in its full elaboration … a theory of international and domestic politics’. Walzer similarly argues that it is only
‘the language of just war’ which, in the wake of Vietnam, could serve as a ‘common moral language’.34 In short, just war theory has
colonized the space of moral discourse in relation to war and strategy—so much so that Walzer is now warning of the dangers
of its ‘success’.35 Are we for ever to remain unconcerned that its effect has been to legitimate war, discredit peace
and align justice with violence? In the wake of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, these are
problems that cannot be wished away with some neatly argued (but dangerously abstract) political theory. This
line of thinking underpins my desire to describe just war as a ‘theory’ more than a tradition; a set of arguments that, whatever its venerable
historical roots, works now as a formal model of moral reasoning that aims to generate political and epistemological
certainty by providing a model that is universalizable across cases. The call to tradition, rather than evoking
historical complexity and contingency, is used to anchor a thoroughly modernist epistemological strategy.
(Nicholas Rengger intriguingly argues that this ‘theoretical’ impulse is an unwelcome departure from the ‘casuistical, particularist and case-based’
character of medieval and early modern just war thinking, by which just war thinking has ‘been forced into an intellectual framework ill-suited to its
intellectual style and most effective mode of being’.36) Furthermore, while just war theory aims to set its norm in a bedrock of
historical truth, the norm it
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creates, in contrast to the UN Charter and Kantian liberalism, is the norm of war. Hence this article aims to work in the spirit of R. B. J.
Walker’s recent argument that September 11 ‘draws us into some very difficult questions about the grounds on which we now make political
judgements, or have our judgements made for us’.37 The test we must set for just war advocates in the wake of 9/11 is
twofold. First, we must ask how their claims about just war and its rules stand up to the experience of
Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, within the context of the other ethical and geopolitical
questions raised by the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror; and second, we must ask whether just war’s system
of limitations and judgement, as such and in the light of this experience, is an adequate one for societies that
wish to defend and enhance the legitimacy of their moral discourses.
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JUST WAR THEORY HAS PLAINLY FAILED TO LIMIT THE SCOPE OF STRATEGIC VIOLENCE. INSTEAD, IT HAS
NORMALIZED WAR, TRVIALIZING THE MURDER OF INNOCENT HUMAN BEINGS AS NECESSARY AND
COLLATERAL AND NORMALIZED TERROR, MAKING BOTH A PERMANENT PART OF HUMAN RELATIONS. THIS
DEMANDS A NEW THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATING FOREIGN POLICY WHICH STRIVES FOR
ETHICAL PEACE RATHER THAN JUST WAR.
Death can be commuted not only through technological distancing, media spin and military jargon, but also in
theory—which works to control its ethical disturbance through the creation of abstract moral and political rules
that claim to fix truth, enable justice and provide a sure guide for policy. ‘Just war’ theory now plays this role,
especially as a way of controlling and managing the question of responsibility raised by Der Derian. The moralizing
of just war advocates has come into renewed prominence since 9/11 as a legitimizing framework for the war on
terror, in terms of providing both justifications for military action (jus ad bellum) and moral limits on its conduct (jus
in bello).12 The resurgence of just war doctrine presents a unique set of problems: its relation to both realist doctrines of ‘reason of
state’ and liberal emphases on self- defence and international law is ambivalent and shifting, and to these it adds
a potent religious/metaphysical layer of justification. On the one hand, just war arguments generally map out no
essential role for international law and have often been deployed to justify its evasion, preferring instead their
own (strikingly malleable) criteria for the waging and conduct of war. On the other hand, in the recent writings of Jean Bethke
Elshtain just war doctrine blurs into and in fact sanctifies ‘reason of state’ as she simultaneously lays claim to a ‘Christian
tradition [that] tells us government is instituted by God’ and ‘an Augustinian realism that resists sentimentalism and insists on ethical restraint’.13
This is symptomatic of a more general phenomenon: that more conventionally ‘realist’ arguments for war based on national
integrity and survival draw on and deploy moral discourses, even as we think of realists being governed more
by instrumental concerns with interests, utility and effectiveness. Michael Walzer makes a significant point in his recent
admission that ‘there are now reasons of state for fighting justly’—even if I see it as a problem and he as a potential virtue.14 In the face of this
interweaving and proliferation of moral discourses in favour of strategic violence, a number of important
questions arise. Are our moral discourses—whether they are couched in realist, ‘just war’ or liberal/legal terms — adequate to the
problem and phenomenon of war, and especially war against terror? Where they set out rules, criteria and
restraints, are those provisions observed and enforced? Are they adequate as moral standards in themselves, or
can they be criticized in these terms? Do they adequately understand either war or terror, and will war against
terror ever succeed in eliminating either from our world? Do they unfairly colonize the possible space of
discourse about morality, ethics and strategic violence—and what alternative ways of thinking might be
possible were we to shake off their constraints? I will address these questions with a particular focus on ‘just war’ rhetoric and theory
as they have been mobilized in the United States after 9/11. My exploration arises out of what I had originally thought of as a tangential project
examining the influence of instrumental reason on strategic discourse and war —until it became clear that moral discourses are closely
intertwined with instrumental/ rational processes of strategic calculation, even as their result might be forms of
violence many consider to be morally unacceptable. The no-man’s land that joins these discourses and processes is my analytical
terrain; a land where, as the phrase suggests, morally acceptable slaughter, suffering and chaos are described as
‘regrettable’, but occur because they are ‘unintentional’, ‘collateral’ or ‘necessary’. Is an international
community based on modern liberal principles really willing to treat this as morally acceptable, and leave its
theories, laws and systems of enforcement untouched? One of my conclusions is that moral discourses of strategic
violence have, in the post-Enlightenment period, internalized the instrumental (Clausewitzian) assumption that war
is both a normal and a rational pursuit of political ends. This is what unites and underpins the various moral
discourses of war—realist, liberal and neo-
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Augustinian: the conviction that has made war such a pervasive modern phenomenon, that war ‘is a mere
continuation of policy by other means’.15 Following this, another important conclusion underpins the argument of this article . If war
is seen as policy, we must do what so many just war thinkers fail to do: treat war as part of a historical and
policy continuum, rather than an isolated event limited to the conduct of high-intensity military operations
whose impact can somehow be limited in time, scope and spatial reach.16 This continuum must include mechanisms such as
diplomacy, covert operations, sanctions, coups, economic relationships, foreign aid and international law enforcement, and moral responsibility must
extend across the entire gamut of social, political and humanitarian circumstances which precede, generate, shape and follow conflict. Given the
complex array of interconnected threats, processes and conflicts tied into the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror
—among them the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the involvement of Iran and Syria there, the Mujahedin war
against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the development of radical Islamist movements in Egypt and other African and Middle Eastern states, and
Iraq’s war against Iran and its aftermath in the invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Storm, UN sanctions and CIA covert operations— we need a
moral and analytical framework which can better deal with historical and geopolitical complexity. The article
concludes by speculating that our frameworks for the moral justification (and limitation) of strategic violence have
failed us; and, moreover, that they have failed at a cost of thousands of innocent lives and at the risk of creating
a future in which we are not free of terror but condemned to its permanent presence. It shifts the normative ideal from just
war to ethical peace, an ethics that eschews abstract moral theory in favour of a context-sensitive ethical orientation
that is concerned with the outcomes of decisions and the avoidance of suffering. While strategic violence will be
difficult to eliminate, and may be necessary in strictly limited situations before the achievement of ethical peace, its
acceptance can only be conditional, and under conditions far more stringent, enforceable and morally consistent
than have so far been provided by either realism, just war theory or international law. Against the
claustrophobic and divided moral communities imagined by both realism and just war theory, ethical peace
imagines a universal moral community in which no ethical obligation can be traded away in times of
emergency, and no humans can be put in mortal danger so that others may be safe.
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THUS:
THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD COMPLETELY WITHDRAW ITS MILITARY AND POLICE
PRESENCE FROM AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ.
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CONTENTION 3 IS “PROBLEMATIZING JUSTICE:”
WE SHOULD DEMAND THAT THE UNITED STATES IMMEDIATELY AND UNCONDITIONALLY LEAVE
AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ. ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF CONTINUED US PRESENCE OR ANY KIND ONLY
STRENGHTEN US IMPERIALISM AND THE IDEOLOGIES WHICH SUPPORT IT. WE SHOULD NOT SEEK TO MAKE
THE OCCUPATION MORE HUMANE, MORE ACCOUNTABLE, OR MORE BENIGN. WE SHOULD COMPLETELY
ELIMINATE IT.
Mike Ely, founder Kasama Project, Demand Complete and Immediate Withdrawal from Afghanistan ,
2002. http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/demand-complete-and-immediate-withdrawal-from-aghanistan/
I think what is posed in Medea Benjamin’s interview is a rather simple and important question: Can U.S. imperialism and its troops play a
positive role in some circumstances? The U.S. invades the remote and impoverished Afghanistan in 2001, topples the fragile regime of Taliban
theocrats (which never consolidated countrywide power in the civil war). And now it is argued that the U.S. invaders “can’t” leave in an
“irresponsible” way because the survival of a number of people (including women’s activists) would be in danger and
because their withdrawal would most likely mean a return of the Taliban. Should we carefully evaluate U.S.
aggressions on a case-by-case basis? Is this U.S. military base good, and that one bad? Is this U.S. bombing helpful, and that
one excessive? Is this U.S. nuclear threat helpful, and that one unfair? Is this U.S. drone doing good work, and that one intruding dangerously? Is this U.S.
occupation shielding and promoting positive forces — while that U.S. occupation cultivates more negative
puppets? Do we support U.S. domination until someone better comes along (who we approve of) to take their
place? Or does the U.S. military (globally and everywhere) represent a coherent means of imposing and
enforcing a particular global order on humanity generally — an order that is rooted in horrific oppression and
exploitation (including the widespread commodification of women as both workers and sexual slaves, and the traditional domestic servitude of literally billions of
women and girls)?What we need is a clear uncompromising unapologetic position: We must demand that U.S.
imperialism leave Afghanistan immediately and unconditionally — without finding ways to prop up residual
collaborators and puppet forces, without continuing to “provide air cover” for continuing war crimes. The
Afghanistan people need to be left to resolve their political affairs (and develop their own very difficult struggle
for liberation) without U.S. domination and violence.And because this is apparently quite controversial (even on the left): We should deepen
our own understanding that these armed forces cannot and will not help the people in any part of the world. Are there
other reactionary forces in the world? Taliban? Al Qaida? Saddam Hussein? Islamic theocrats in Iran? Somali warlords? French colonial troops?
Genocidal Israeli settlers and commanders? Turkish military commandos? Russian death squads in Chechnia? Catholic priests and bishops doing their secret crimes
against humanity? And so on. Of
course. There are many other reactionary forces in the world. Some of them are U.S.
allies. Some of them have sharp contradictions with U.S. imperialism. Some of them flip back and forth. But
U.S. occupation of Afghanistan (or Iraq) is itself a means of strengthening the world’s most odious and
oppressive force. And the impact of a successful pro-U.S. pacification of Afghanistan cannot just be measured
in terms of how it impacts people or sections of the people in Afghanistan. A victory for the U.S. in Afghanistan
or stabilization of pro-U.S. arrangements in Afghanistan will be a major negative influence on the dynamics of
the world as a whole. This is true, objectively. And pointing out this truth is especially important within the U.S.
itself — where illusions about the U.S. role in the world are especially strong (even on the left). Far too many
people delude themselves that there can be a “more democratic U.S. foreign policy” that “helps” people. No, we
have a special responsibility to fight the criminal actions of “our” government — and to expose its nature. Our
goal is not to “more effectively” serve “U.S. national interests.” We do not seek to “improve the U.S. image
around the world.” We are not worried that “the wrong policies will get even more people to oppose U.S.
initiatives.” We do not want to “preserve and promote the American way of life.” We don’t want to figure out
some “people’s foreign policy” or some way for the
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fucking Marines to “play a good role.” We don’t want a “more accountable CIA.” No. We want to bring down
U.S. imperialism from without and from within. Not only must we demand that the U.S.
withdraw immediately and without delay from its many overt and covert wars — but we must put forward a
larger vision that the dismantling of all the vicious U.S. armed instruments of power is in the historic interests
of humanity. That means the systematic and unilateral destruction of its nuclear arsenals, the disbanding of its armed forces, the abolition of
its CIA, the public revelation of its crimes, the dismantling of its global military bases, listening posts and secret torture prisons, the
destruction of its schools for coups and torture like the SOA, the scuttling of its imperial fleet and more.) We should proclaim this publicly
— knowing full well that these are not demands that the U.S. government would ever agree to, but they are a
much needed program that only the people can carry out through historic actions. The U.S. government, its
military and spy forces, are a central prop of global capitalism at this stage in world history. And any confusion
about this, any daydreaming that “maybe they can do some good,” needs to be explored and engaged.
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RATHER THAN CAPITULATING TO THE SLIPPERY LOGIC OF JUST WAR, WHICH JUSTIFIES ALL MANNER OF
MILITARY VIOLENCE, YOU SHOULD EVALUATE THE PLAN THROUGH THE LENS OF ETHICAL PEACE. THE
LATTER IS NOT A SIMPLE AND SCIENTIFIC FORMULA FOR DETERMINING HOW AND WHEN WAR SHOULD BE
WAGED, BUT TREATS VIOLENCE AS AN UNEQUIVOCAL TRAGEDY WHICH MUST BE ENDLESSLY DEBATED,
INTERROGATED, AND EXAMINED. ABOVE ALL, WE SHOULD PRIORITIZE AN FRAMEWORK THAT REFUSES
AVOIDABLE SUFFERING AND THE IMPERATIVE TO RISK HARM TO SOME FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS.
The manifest failures of just war theory, of current systems of international law relating to armed conflict, of operational military
restraint, and of so much western defence and foreign policy demand the imagination of alternatives that better
reflect the near-universal view that the use of force should be subject to moral restraint. I want to outline these
alternatives tentatively here under a set of principles I term ‘ethical peace’. I do this with a respectful refusal of Nicholas Rengger’s appeal against
abandoning the just war tradition, preferring instead to pick up his challenge to ‘start afresh and think our own ideas on how to legitimate and justify
force’. I will, however, try to build upon his anxiety about the way in which the context-based ‘casuistical’ mode of practical
reasoning represented by the earlier just war tradition was reified into a modernist (scientistic) theory ‘to be used
as a kind of moral slide rule from which legitimate instances of the use of force can be read off whenever
necessary’.86 Ethical peace differs from ‘just war’ by rejecting the latter’s prima facie acceptance of the
legitimacy of strategic violence, and by making peace— however complex, difficult and delayed—its central
normative goal. Ethical peace refuses to provide legitimacy to strategic policy and strategic violence, even as it
accepts that the prevalence of such violence means that it cannot be quickly eliminated. Important questions of
national security and strategic stability necessitate a coordinated and gradual approach to the elimination of
force from international life, accompanied by sustained and imaginative efforts to promote disarmament and
resolve conflict. In this respect, the appalling double standards over weapons of mass destruction—in which it is illegal for North Korea, Iran or
Iraq to possess them but fine for the US, Israel, Russia, the UK, France and China—must be eliminated.87 Ethical peace also accepts that
humanitarian intervention may be necessary and valuable at times, but that continuous debate over the conditions, experience and practice of such
intervention is needed, given the very problematic experiences of recent years in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor, Rwanda, Kosovo
and Cambodia.88 The use of humanitarian arguments for an imperialist war against Iraq, and the subversion of
effective peacekeeping in post-Taleban Afghanistan by US priorities, have muddied these waters even further.
Ethical peace assumes that if the short- to medium-term existence of strategic violence is to be accepted, it must
only be conditional, and used only under conditions far more stringent, enforceable and morally consistent than
have so far been provided by either just war theory or international law. The first step is to ensure that the
international legal frameworks provided by the United Nations Charter, the law of armed conflict and the covenants on human rights
form the starting point for decisions about coercion and the use of armed force (while also acknowledging that
decisions of the UN Security Council are sometimes tainted by power play, and that its voting structures and membership
need reform). Embodied in international law are important liberal and humanitarian principles that forbid armed
aggression and the abuse of human rights, legitimate the resort to force only after all other alternatives have
been exhausted, and impose legal restraints on the use of that force. The UN also provides frameworks which allow for the
creation of enforcement and judicial bodies, both on a permanent basis (such as the ICC) and on an ad hoc basis (such as the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia).89 If the US had asked the Security Council to create an international criminal tribunal to try the perpetrators of
the African embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks, it might have set in motion the creation of an enduring, impartial legal framework to punish,
deter and delegitimate the very lethal forms of terrorism that have emerged in recent years. Instead, just warriors find themselves
defending violent, extralegal approaches which undermine international humanitarian
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law and create a level of global anger that cannot but manifest itself in future atrocities. Ethical peace would also
demand that action be taken to ensure that existing international law relating to human rights and armed conflict was consistently enforced—that
resources be devoted to the ICC to enable it to prosecute violations, that the UN Human Rights Commission be reformed and given the ability to
launch investigations and prosecutions, and that UN member states agree to make their policy-makers and soldiers accountable to international law.
The Geneva Conventions also need reforming—not to remove constraints on armed forces, but to tighten them.90 The principles of ‘proportionality’
and ‘unintentional’ killing, which have created loopholes that have cost thousands of civilian lives in recent conflicts, need to be abandoned in favour
of a principle that declares the illegality of avoidable harm. Provisions in the 1977 Geneva Convention Protocols which undermine enforcement and
accountability, and have led Geoffrey Robertson to describe them as ‘badly drafted exercises in cynical diplomacy’, should also be changed.91 With
the scandal of Iraq fresh in its mind, the international community also needs to define the crime of ‘aggression’ in the Rome Statute of the ICC in a
credible way, and then enforce it. The capricious attitude of just war theorists to international law—enforce it here,
ignore or undermine it there—mirrors that of the most cynical realists, and is particularly egregious given their
claim to provide a universal moral theory of force. Too often, just warriors seek to enshrine their isolated and
partisan advocacy as moral truth, to steal for themselves the ‘tragic vocation of the judge’ rather than submit the
decisions they exonerate from blame to international structures of judgement that can be debated, scrutinized
and enforced. There is a moral sleight-of-hand at work in theory which makes powerful claims to universality
based on abstract rules, but then interprets those rules capriciously and insists only on voluntary adherence to
them. With its concepts of ‘proportionality’ and the ‘double effect’, just war theory fatally undermines its own
normative integrity by creating rules which harm rather than protect the innocent. In opposition to this, ethical
peace seeks to develop a moral and ethical discourse on strategic violence that is sensitive to David Campbell and
Michael Shapiro’s ‘suspicion that those preoccupied with theories of ethics end up eliding the ethical relation … that
a striving for the rules and principles of justice … effects injustice’.92 What is so dangerous about just war
theory is not so much its ‘striving’ for justice but its absolute certainty that justice has been found, that its
‘rules’ are clear, and that war will bring it closer rather than scatter it to the winds. Instead we should seek an
ethics which can be open to the moral danger, and extreme pressures for decision, of the extraordinary
moment.93 As John D. Caputo suggests, ‘the most responsible decision of all takes place precisely at those moments
when principles are not in play and we find ourselves face to face with the singular demand of a concrete
situation. We are at our best, or ought to be, when we don’t know what to do.’94 Hannah Arendt perhaps had the best understanding of this, when
in The life of the mind she reflected that those Germans (and Jews) best able to resist collaboration with the Nazis ‘were
the only ones who were able to judge by themselves’: they were capable of doing so not because they had a
better system of values or because the old systems of values were implanted in their conscience … but because
their conscience did not function in an, as it were, automatic way—as though we had a set of learned innate
rules which we then apply to a particular case as it arises … Their criterion, I think, was a different one; they
asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves … the presupposition
for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but merely the
habit of living together explicitly with oneself, that is, of being engaged in that silent dialogue between me and
myself which since Socrates and Plato we usually call thinking.95 The formal rigidity of just war theory, which allows
it to tolerate the killing of innocents provided it is done within its rules, fetishizes procedure over complexity
and ‘intentions’ over effects. Just war theory avoids the complexity of events by quarantining its system of
moral judgement within a temporal space limited to the planning and conduct of high-intensity military
operations. It then ignores their aftermath, the larger causal consequences of conflict, and the long history of
foreign policy and geopolitical manipulation that breeds and precedes conflict. In contrast, ethical peace is not a
rule-bound normative theory but a context-sensitive ethical orientation concerned with the likely outcomes of
decisions and actions. Rules and principles—such as avoidable harm—will be important, but they must not be
fetishized to a point where the intention of the theory becomes corrupted. In this way, ethical peace
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makes no claims to be a universal political or ethical theory, but would be driven by a view that the protection of
innocent life is a universally applicable principle—unlike just war theory which, even as it asserts that it has
universal moral validity, uses concepts like ‘proportionality’ and the ‘double effect’ to remove thousands of
people from the space of moral concern. Just war theory is particularly dangerous because, even as it claims
universal moral validity, it avoids the ultimate moral test of universality: in this case, the imperative that
innocents everywhere affected by a strategic action or process be protected. In the hands of Elshtain, it makes
humanitarian arguments for war against Iraq to protect the innocent, but allows for the Iraqi innocent, military
and civilian, to be slaughtered; it rightly condemns the ‘despicable deeds’ of the 9/11 terrorists, but says nothing
about the Bush administration’s suspension of international norms at Guantanamo Bay or the long list of
Faustian pacts (for bases, cooperation and military aid) struck with abusive regimes in Russia, Algeria, Pakistan, China,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as an integral part of the ‘just war against terror’.96 Ethical peace, in contrast, holds
that such compromises are intolerable; that, as Ken Booth and Tim Dunne argue after Gandhi, ‘ends and means amount to the
same thing’; that ‘a daily victory over terror’ can be won by ‘employing the means … that are the moral
equivalent of the ends we seek’.97 Ethical peace aims to create a genuinely universal moral community, rather
than the selective and restricted one imagined by both realist and just war theorists. Just war theory colludes
with realism by basing its doctrines on the fiction of the liberal body politic, built on a ‘social contract’ which
simultaneously submerges individual identity into the state and divides people from each other through their
membership of states, creating a claustrophobic apartheid of moral obligation. The security of such a ‘body
politic’, as it was imagined by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham and Hegel, is always purchased with the insecurity of others,
and just war theory entrenches this relativistic ethic even as it claims to moderate its destructive implications.98
The social contract is an ontology of violence, of secure communities embodied and sustained by violence; and
when married to the cynical, instrumental imperatives of the modern war machine, it promises not freedom
from terror but a future lived within its bloody walls. Ethical peace refuses to channel its ethical obligations
solely through the state, or rely on it to protect us violently, because in doing so the state may well violently
endanger us and everyone whom its actions affect. Ethical peace seeks to create an ‘ethical relation’ that cannot
be limited to or controlled by the state; it channels its ethical obligations above, below and beyond the state; it
makes the ethical responsibility to the Other not a gift or indulgence of the state that can be forsaken in
emergencies, but a condition of human existence prior to any community or state.99 This is the image of justice
harboured and nurtured by ethical peace, one that is never content to seek justice with war, to fight terror with a
terror tamed and moralized, to risk a future emptied of fairness and hope. Ethical peace struggles against terror
lawfully, ethically, example by difficult example, dreaming of a future in which justice, strategy and war will be
forever strangers.
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WE SHOULD USE PROTEST AGAINST THE EXPERIENCES OF WAR IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ IN ORDER TO
IGNITE BROADER PUBLIC DEBATE ABOUT US IMPERIALISM ACROSS THE GLOBE. IDENTIFYING PARTICULAR
INSTANCES OF MILITARY VIOLENCE AND CONNECTING THEM TO UNDERLYING IDEOLOGIES SUCH AS JUST
WAR IS A STRATEGY FOR CREATING NETWORKS OF RESISTANCE THAT CAN CREATE NEW CONCEPTS OF
SECURITY BASED ON HUMAN RELATIONS RATHER THAN THE ENDLESS PRODUCTION OF WAR.
Steve Sherman, sociologist and independent intelectual, “The Empire of Bases and the American Anti-War Movement,” March10th, 2010
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/the-empire-of-bases-and-the-american-anti-war-movement/
The anti-war movement in the US is in a deep funk. To date, even news of a surge in troops to Afghanistan has not really
awakened it. The new book The Bases of Empire may help to clarify what we are trying to do. Many suggest that the problem with the anti-war
movement today is that it does not break with the Democratic Party, but this argument is somewhat ahistorical. When the movement was
stronger in the sixties (against the Vietnam war)and the eighties (against intervention in Central America) painful debates raged on about
the relationship of the movement to the Democrats. There were similar voices–sometimes the same people!–on each side. What was different was not
that the movement had a great deal of clarity about this (I’m not sure that is possible in a non-revolutionary time in a two party state) but that the
movement was larger and livelier. What was different was that a sense of purpose animated the movements then that is
lacking now. In both the sixties and the eighties, there was a core of activists who strongly identified with the Marxist Leninist aspirations of
those arrayed against the US. The goal was not simply to stop wars, but to advance socialism. This was a minority view in the movements, but it
provided an immense source of energy and conviction for some, who did a great deal to keep the movements going (it could also be an obstacle–most
labor unions in the US stood on the other side of the cold war, and, so long as opposing US intervention meant supporting communists, kept their
distance from anti-war movements). The basic narrative of advancing socialism through armed confrontation with the US
or its proxies collapsed in 1989. I think a good chunk of the problem today is that no alternative narrative has replaced it
(there has also long been a robust pacifist tradition in the US, but this often leans towards individualistic bearing
witness rather than mass organizing). Instead, we lurch from mobilization to mobilization with the intuition that
war is bad. When there is some prospect of intervening in public debates — during the drive to war with Iraq in
2003, or when the elite consensus about maintaining the occupation of Iraq started to crumble around 2005 —
the crowds at our demonstrations swell. When these moments pass, the crowds dwindle. With the exception of a handful
of honorable groups, hardly anyone seems to be doing anything besides grumbling in private. Rather than a struggle
against particular wars, the movement can, inspired by the thinking of the activists documented in Bases of
Empire, think of itself as broadly counterposed to a global empire in which the ‘war on terror’ (or the ‘war in
Iraq’, ‘war in Afghanistan’, etc) is simply a particular instance. This orientation would counter the tendency to go
into hibernation whenever debate on particular interventions recedes. Notwithstanding this tendency, the empire grinds
on, sometimes in places like the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia that are almost unknown in the US (one of the most useful aspects of the book
is a map of all known US military bases around the world–particularly heavy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan and Germany, of course, but also including
numerous bases in Italy, Spain and Portugal, and throughout the Caribbean and the Andean and Equatorial portions of Latin America, among
others). The alternative to this empire is not an armed counterpower, but a variety of movements with complex
priorities — feminist, ecological, culturally diverse. This parallels the way the struggle against dogmatic neoliberalism is no longer obsessed with
the imposition of a singular, planned economic model. Rather, when we abandon the simple minded formulation that what is best for investors is best
for the world, complex alternatives gradually emerge. “One no, many yeses”, as the saying goes. Similarly, the alternative to equating
’security’ with the US military is a complex picture of what is needed to produce a meaningful and happy co-
existence. US militarism, like neoliberalism, is a one dimensional view of the world developed from a position of
power. The world is simply a space to be controlled by the military, through the endless gobbling of land for
military bases, and the subordination of other needs — cultural, economic, political, etc. — to this project. The examples
described in The Bases of Empire clarify this dynamic and how to resist it. In places as diverse as the Philippines, Iraq, Hawaii, and Turkey, one sees
similar processes over and over. The steamrolling of the rights of those considered in the way, perhaps with the support
of some local group that has long
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had it in for them. The destruction of the environment to facilitate military ’security’. The inability to imagine
those outside of the US military complex as equals. The introduction and reinforcement of regressive gender
relations epitomized by prostitution around bases (worth pondering by those who hope that the US will improve the lot of
Afghan women through military occupation). Divide and conquer strategies that involve siding with one local
group at the expense of another to secure the former’s support. To date, changes in the party which controls the
White House or congress, and even defeat in wars, has resulted more in modest shifts in geography and strategy than in
fundamental change. Sometimes the US seeks rights over a country’s territory, or co-ordination with its military, rather than a formal base, per
se. The pressure on the US to get out of places like the Philippines or Okinawa increases the importance of other territories, like Guam. Although
the bases are gone from the Philippines, the US remains, now involved as ‘advisors’ in a war on separatists. This tendency for
the empire to mutate rather than shrink can be infuriating. Yet reading this book, it is difficult not to sense growing isolation for
this project. Compounded with the economic weakness, military failures, and diplomatic isolation of the US (not dealt with in this volume), there
are grounds for hope that a military that now strides across most of the globe may someday soon begin to
shrink, and a real discussion of the actual national security needs of the American people (and the people of the
world) might begin in earnest. The Bases of Empire is notably different from most texts about the US empire in its emphasis on non-violent
resistance to US military bases and their malign impact. Feminism, and non-Western spiritualities which assert a sacred relation to the land are
recurrent themes. As is the case with social struggles in general, even when these are not immediately successful
in
achieving their demands, their impact on individuals and societies can be quite positive. For example, the anti-war
demonstrations in Turkey helped revitalize civil-society based politics in that country. Greenham Common in England made an enduring impact as a
feminist encampment. It also becomes clear that the end of the cold war actually often strengthened the hand of those pushing to close bases, since
this position no longer placed them on the Soviet side of the cold war. They could therefore reach portions of the population who might be anti-
communist, but nonetheless aware of the malign impact of the bases on their lives. Puerto Rico is one of the most salient cases of this. To combat the
tendency to go dormant whenever political space in the US starts to close up, the US anti-war movement— at least its most determined core
— might want to consider thinking of itself as instead an anti-empire movement. This would facilitate building
links with these movements around the world. Understanding their visions would also help undermine the
reactive quality of the anti-war movement, wherein we are typically more confident about what we are against
than what we are for. Although the anti-bases movement is not a unified, singular political actor on the world stage, it does have a
coherent set of demands that provide an alternative to the idea of security for Americans (and, allegedly the world)
through a global network of military bases. These demands include the recognition of all people as equals, rather than as
subordinates of empire. An alteration in the way we interact with the planet that is inflected by spiritual traditions that see the earth as sacred,
rather than as space to be controlled. The valuing of the work of caring, rather than the servicing of the sexual needs of foreign military personnel and
the glorification of warriors. Finally, a concept of security grounded in the interrelationship between all people and
between people and the wider world, rather than the production of more and more arms and bases .
Although the anti-war movement will and should invoke a basic populism — money for health care, jobs, and schools, not war — when making its
case, it should not lose sight of this broader platform of transformation.
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FINALLY, THE COLONIAL SECURITIZATION OF THE WAR ON TERROR AND ITS UNDERLYING JUSTIFICATION
IN JUST WAR CONSTRUCTS ALL POPULATIONS AS BARE LIFE, VULNERABLE TO MURDEROUS VIOLENCE IF
CIRCUMSTANCES DEMAND IT – THE AFFIRMATIVE’S CHALLENGE TO THESE IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHIES IS
CRUCIAL TO OPEN UP THE SPACE TO COMBAT STRUCTURES OF ENMITY.
Derek Gregory, Distinguished University Scholar And Professor Of Geography At The University Of British Columbia In Vancouver, 2004 [The
Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, pp. 261-262]
Dibdin is clearly saying that this is a choice and not, as Huntington seems to think, an irrefutable given, so that the construction of an archipelago of
inclusion and exclusion cannot be attributed solely to the threat posed by external or internal "others." In constructing multiple others as "other," and
in assenting to these constructions and impositions, we not only do this to others: we do it to ourselves. We all become the subjects and
the objects of the "securitization" of civil society. This is as ugly as it sounds - it means taking the "civil" out of
"society" - and as its partitions proliferate internally and externally, inscribed through and legitimized by the so-
called "war on terror," so colonialism is surreptitiously repatriated and rehabilitated and the camp is confirmed
as the nomo.s of a continuing colonial modernity." The choice that is offered, as Henry Giroux and Paul Street have argued, is
the false choice between being safe and being free: "War is individualized as every citizen becomes a potential
terrorist who has to prove that he or she is not a menace to society. Under the rubric of the new permanent war
against the never-ending specter of terrorist apocalypse, which feeds off government-induced media panics, war provides the
moral imperative to collapse the boundaries between innocent and guilty, between suspect and non-suspect,
between peaceful political dissent and pathological, extremist alienation."" We are all - actually or potentially -
homines sacri.
In his essay on the concept of history, Walter Benjamin wrote that "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of
emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with
this insight. "39 Benjamin was writing in 1940, but his commentary on the rise of fascism has a resonance in our own times that is as deep as it is
disturbing. His call for a critical reflection on the concept of history is immensely important, but we also need a conception of geography that is in
keeping with this same insight. If we can understand the multiple ways in which difference is folded into distance, and
the complex figurations through which time and space are threaded into these tense constellations, we might
perhaps see that what lgnatieff once called "distant strangers" are not so distant after all - and not so strange
either." For this possibility to be realized - for us to cease turning on the treadmill of the colonial present - it will
be necessary to explore other spatializations and other topologies, and to turn our imaginative geographies into
geographical imaginations that can enlarge and enhance our sense of the world and enable us to situate
ourselves within it with care, concern, and humility." This is not a call for an empty relativism; there will still be disagreements,
conflicts, and even enemies. But in order to conduct ourselves properly, decently, we need to set ourselves against the
unbridled arrogance that assumes that "We" have the monopoly of Truth and that the world is necessarily
ordered by - and around - Us. If we can do this, then we might see that the most enduring memorial to the
thousands who were murdered in the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Center and parts of the Pentagon on
September 11 and to the thousands more who have been killed in Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, and Iraq - would be
the destruction of the architectures of enmity that produced and have been sustained by those dreadful events.
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***INHERENCY***
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INHERENCY - AFGHANISTAN
WITHDRAW SOON NOT LIKELY - IT REMAINS DEPENDENT ON GROUND CONDITIONS AND THERE IS A SPILL OVER-
NATO WOULD LEAVE IF THE U.S. DID
TORONTO STAR 09 DECEMBER 4, ROSIE DIMANNO, “NO EASY OUT FROM AFGHANISTAN” NEWS; PG. A02
It's the getting out within a relatively short time frame - 18 months - that strains credibility. And the pre-emptive cover was also contained in
Obama’s blueprint, though somewhat buried:Departure, as otherwise vowed,will still depend on conditions on the ground, come
July 2011. It was this late-addition codicil to the plan that secured the support of Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, who'd been opposed to setting
any withdrawal date.Only the assurance of no set-in-stone exit time-table brought Gates into the fold.Exit strategies are
for political purposes and have no military usefulness. There is an overt threat in this one to the regime of President Hamid Karzai that
his Kabul cabal is living on borrowed time. But this information had already been imparted to the palace. A very strong argument can be made that a
withdrawal deadline - even one that's somewhat fluid - will undermine everything Obamahopes to accomplish with this "surge" that he refuses to call
a "surge," because that's George W. Bush language, and despite the fact that "surge" is precisely what turned around the mess in Iraq - along with
assorted other tactics, of course, including forging alliances with Sunni tribal leaders and bribing militants left and right with gazillions in cash.
(Statistics released by the Iraqi government on Monday show that the monthly toll for civilian deaths fell in November to its lowest level - 88 - since
2003.)So, hard lessons from Iraq are being applied to Afghanistan, although differences between the two situations are enormous and possibly too
overwhelming to be duplicated in a country so vast, inhospitable, and internally fractured. Further, there were 250,000 U.S. troops originally
deployed to Iraq, later boosted, now ratcheted down to just under 120,000.But the make-or-break agenda for American military
involvement in Afghanistan - and NATO won't stay if the U.S. departs - gives the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies much
to ponder, along with Pakistan, which remains disastrously conflicted about how fiercely to combat a threat that's spilled
backwards over its borders. As the journalist and Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid observed Wednesday: "Is it in Pakistan's interest to antagonize
the Afghan Taliban now, if they will be in power two or three years down the road?"
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OBAMA’S TIMETABLE IS UNREALISTIC. WE MAY NOT FULLY LEAVE AFGHANISTAN FOR DECADES AFTER OBAMA’S
SCHEDULED JULY 2011 DATE.
JONATHANALTERJONATHAN ALTER IS A COLUMNIST AND SENIOR EDITOR FOR “NEWSWEEK” MAGAZINE, WHERE HE HAS
WORKED SINCE 1983. HE IS ALSO A CONTRIBUTING CORRESPONDENT TO NBC NEWS (NEWSWEEK, 7/3/10 “A TIMETABLE FOR
WITHDRAWAL IN AFGHANISTAN, HTTP://WWW.NEWSWEEK.COM/2010/07/03/T-MINUS-TWO-YEARS.HTML )
The Obama-Petraeus relationship is now central to the war in Afghanistan (where last week Petraeus replaced Gen.
Stanley McChrystal). But it’s by no means a comfortable dynamic for either man. “The only way we’ll consider this
[continuing the war with more troops] is if we get the troops in and out in a shorter time frame,” Obama told Petraeus and
other advisers in the room that day.A shorter time frame. From the moment the president announced his plan to start
pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan next summer, the Pentagon and its allies (including Hillary Clinton) have tried to
fuzz up the timetable. Contingencies must always be accounted for, but to hear the chatter from military officers, you
would think that the intentions of the president and the vice president don’t mean much. It’s naive, we’re told by the wise
guys on cable TV, to believe we’ll be withdrawing from Afghanistan any time soon.
There’s only one problem with betting the smart money on a long commitment: it’s not so smart. Obama has said that we
won’t “turn out the lights” in Afghanistan in July 2011; and, INDEED, some residual forces will be there for decades. But
my reporting during the last several months suggests that a significant withdrawal will begin within, at the most, 18
months to two years.
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THE U.S WON’T WITHDRAW FROM AFGHANISTAN ANY TIME SOON - WE ARE MAKING NO PROGRESS THERE NOW AND
OBAMA FACES PRESSURE BEFORE RE-ELECTION
CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 7/11/10 (STEVE CHAPMAN, MEMBER OF THE TRIBUNE'S EDITORIAL BOARD, “STAYING STUCK IN
AFGHANISTAN” HTTP://ARTICLES.CHICAGOTRIBUNE.COM/2010-07-11/NEWS/CT-OPED-0710-CHAPMAN-
20100711_1_AFGHANISTAN-PRESIDENT-OBAMA-MAJOR-WITHDRAWAL/2 )
Harvard international relations scholar Stephen Walt notes that Obama has had three chances to begin our extrication -
"right after his election, then following his strategic review in the fall of 2009, and most recently with the (Gen. Stanley) McChrystal
firing."But he passed them up. "In each case," Walt told me, "he's chosen either to deepen U.S. involvement or he's
publicly committed to 'staying the course.'"It's possible that Obama will break that pattern next summer, just as it's possible that
Adam Sandler will go for his doctorate. But there is no reason to bet on it.He came into office opposed to the Iraq war, unlike the
Afghanistan war - and yet his schedule for withdrawal is no different from what President George W. Bush planned. Why
should anyone expect him to show more nerve in Afghanistan?The political incentives are pushing him to go along with
extending our presence because no president wants to be blamed for losing a war (see: Iraq, Vietnam). It's politically safer
to muddle along hoping for something that can be portrayed as success than to admit failure.To think Obama will take the
risk of a major withdrawal as he's running for re-election assumes him to have more backbone on national security matters
than he has yet demonstrated.Time after time, forced to choose between sticking to his commitments and appeasing
Republicans, he has opted for the latter - keeping Guantanamo open, giving up the idea of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in
New York City, abandoning his campaign pledge to leave Iraq in 16 months.The only thing that would spur Obama to start a
pullout would be major progress in Afghanistan, which is about as likely as a Hard Rock Cafe in Kandahar.June was the
most lethal month for U.S. and NATO troops in the entire war, and this may just be the beginning.A U.N. report says the
number of roadside bombings by our enemies nearly doubled in the first three months of this year. So did the number of "complex
suicide attacks."Meanwhile, our allies are failing us.Corruption has proliferated, andPresident Hamid Karzai has not captured the
hearts of his countrymen since winning a rigged election last year.The Afghan army suffers from ethnic divisions, weak
leadership and an epidemic of desertion.The national police are plagued by illiteracy as well as graft. These developments do not
spell "victory."Getting out of Afghanistan would be easy for Obama if things were to go well. But to get out when things
are going badly would let Republicans blame him and his party ever after for what happens next . Democrats learned that
lesson from Vietnam.In the end,Obama is likely to follow a well-known rule of American politics: Fighting a futile war is
excusable. Ending one is not.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 38
Obama’s arbitrary and unrealistic timetable for Afghanistan is prolonging the war and leaves no possibility for
progress
Paul KORING,Canada’s The Globe and Mail's international affairs correspondent [7/4 10 Globe and Mail, Obama’s exit
deadline unrealistic, Afghan envoy says, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/obamas-exit-deadline-unrealistic-
afghan-envoy-says/article1628135)\
Barack Obama’s self-imposed deadline to start pulling troops out of Afghanistan next July is unrealistic and emboldens
the Taliban, Kabul’s man in Washington says,adding a powerful voice to the chorus calling on the U.S. President to
pledge to defeat the Islamic insurgency, not set arbitrary exit dates.It’s a “deadline that is not realistic,” said ambassador
Said Jawad, President Hamid Karzai’s envoy to Washington. With a fixed deadline “you are making the enemy a lot more
bold. You are prolonging the war.”When Mr. Obama made the war his own and ordered tens of thousands of additional
troops to Afghanistan last December, he was careful to placate Democrats opposed to the surge by promising at least
some U.S. soldiers would come marching home by July, 2011.Ever since Mr. Obama has been under increasing fire
setting even a conditional exit date as the violence has raged, casualties soared and the Taliban have stridently proclaimed
they can easily outwait the dwindling political will of Western politicians. “What I worry about more than anything else is
the July of 2011 firm date,” said Republican Senator John McCain, the leading proponent of the earlier troop surge in
Iraq, which Mr. Obama opposed. “In wars, you declare when you’re leaving after you’ve succeeded,” said Mr. McCain, a
combat veteran.Allies with troops fighting alongside the Americans, as well as his political adversaries, want Mr. Obama
to make clear what his deadline means.“If the people in Afghanistan think we’re going to begin to leave in July, 2011, and
the people in the region think we’re going to begin to leave, we have no chance of winning a counterinsurgency,” South
Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said.Mr. Obama has tripled - to roughly 100,000 - the number of U.S.
troops in Afghanistan. Then, late last month and for the second time in just over a year, he fired the general in charge of
the war, turning to General David Petraeus, the combat commander who led the surge for former president George. W.
Bush that helped quell the insurgency in Iraq.“We are in this to win,” Gen. Petraeus said Sunday in Kabul as he took
command of the U.S. and NATO troops numbering more than 130,000 - more foreign soldiers than even the Soviet Union
sent in during its decade-long failed effort to subdue Afghanistan’s mountain-hardened fighters who have seen off every
invader for centuries.What remains unclear, and what Mr. Obama has yet to define, is what “winning” and what
benchmarks need to be met to start his promised pullout.
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OBAMA IS TRYING TO APPEASE POLITICAL FACTIONS, THERE IS NO REAL INTENTION OF LEAVING NOW IT’S A
POLITICAL RUSE
Qadar BakhshBALOCH Associate Professor, Qurtuba University of Science & IT POST 2009 NO SPECIFIED DATE“Afghanistan: A
Nightmare of Imperialism” The Dialogue Volume IV Number 1
Seeing the past performance of high tech US / NATOforces during the last eight years Afghan war it is difficult to fathom
how these forces can achieve the stated aim and objectives especially when seen in the context of a graduated pull out
beginning in July 2011. The strategy is flawed when further viewed in the backdrop of troop’s induction within six
months against the 12 -18 months time envisioned by the military. 16The policy also conflicts with the singleness of aim by
also setting impracticable and non-pragmatic diversionary objectives such as enabling the Afghan security forces through
training, to effectively handle and fight the Taliban forces in the post withdrawal period, rooting out corruption,
undertaking development works and uplifting of farmers and pocketing the second / third tiers of Taliban commanders
from the top Taliban leadership. Ironically all this in about 18 months or, more precisely, in about 12 months
consideringthe time required for induction, deployment and logistic buildup. To be over courteous to Mr. Obama, one
would only call it wishful thinking. Whom is Mr. President then trying to kid, the Democrats or the Republicans?
Apparently, it is to kid (please/appease) both; the Democrats by announcing a time frame for pull out, and Republicans
and Pentagon by sending more troops. The new policy gives strength to rumours that while he might be sincere in his
resolve for peace, he is facing stiff resistance from the hawks, media and the think tanks. If rumours are to be believed, he
is at war with the Pentagon and some hawks in the State Department. He seems to be in a quandary. However, it is in
suchsituations wherea leader’s ability is truly tested.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 40
OBAMA’S PLAN FOR AFGHANISTAN IS UNCLEAR AND CONFUSING. WITHOUT END GOALS, WE ARE EXHAUSTING OUR
RESOURCES AND PERPETUATING THE WAR
Dick LUGAR, Indiana State Senator and ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ,
[Huffington Post,“Cause for Concern in Afghanistan, 7/14/10, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-dick-lugar/cause-for-
concern-in-afgh_b_645805.html]
There is substantial concern about our course in Afghanistan,in partbecause of the recent disruption in
our military leadership, but also becausegains in governance, development, military training, and other areas
have not occurred at a pace that boosts confidence in President Obama's original timetable. Some security
improvements have been achieved and more are likely to follow, but they have been hard won. In six months, the president expects a review by his
commanders on the status of our efforts in Afghanistan. This review presumably would determine the shape of an expected transition of
responsibilities to Afghan security forces in July 2011.But absent a major realignment on the ground, it is unrealistic to
expect that a significant downsizing of U.S. forces could occur at that time without security
consequences.This conclusion is reinforced by recent GAO and Inspector General reports that have raised deep concerns over the viability and
quality of training for the Afghan National Army and police .The lack of clarity in Afghanistan does not end with the
president's timetable. Both civilian and military operations in Afghanistan are proceeding without a
clear definition of success. There has been much discussion of our counter-insurgency strategy and methods, but very little explanation of
what metrics must be achieved before the country is considered secure. At some moments it appears as if we are trying to
remake the economic, political, and security culture of Afghanistan. We should know by now that such
grand ambitions are beyond our resources and powers. At other moments, it appears we are content with a narrow, security-
driven definition of success: preventing an implacably hostile Taliban regime from taking over the government and preventing Afghanistan from
becoming a terrorist safe haven, regardless of what government is in power. But even if this narrow definition of success were embraced by the
Obama administration, it would require amplification. How much Taliban military capability and territorial control is tolerable? What are we
currently doing in Afghanistan that is not required to achieve this narrow objective? What are reasonable mileposts for judging progress towards
success? What time constraints do we perceive, given resource and alliance pressures? How do dynamics in Pakistan factor into our strategy in
Afghanistan?
I recognize that the situation in Afghanistan is fluid and not easily defined. I also understand why an administration would not want to be pinned
down to a specific definition of success.The problem is that we are expending enormous resources in Afghanistan.
Our resources are finite, and they must be focused effectively. We need to know if some missions that
currently are receiving resources are not intrinsic to our objectives. We also need to know what missions are absolutely
indispensible to success, however it is defined.We can't fall back on measuring our military and civilian activities in
Afghanistan according to relative progress. Arguably we could make progress for decades on security, employment, good
governance, women's rights and other goals - expending billions of dollars each year -- without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion. In such
circumstances, avoiding mission creep toward unattainable goals is essential.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 41
THE U.S. HAS NO INTENTIONS OF LEAVING AFGHANISTAN IN 2011 OR IN THE NEAR FUTURE - WE’RE HERE TO STAY.
Carlos J. Finlay, writer for Periodico News, December 6, 2009[“General Stresses that US Troops will not leave Afghanistan by 2011”, Periodico
News, http://www.periodico26.cu/english/news_world/december2009/us-afghanistan120609.html]
Washington, Dec 6, (RHC).- According to US National Security Advisor, General James Jones, "The United States has no intention of
leaving Afghanistan in the near future, certainly not in 2011."His response came when asked by reporters at a press conference at
the Foreign Press Center in Washington about President Obama's recent statement on withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.Jones explained
thatthe President's decision did not mean that the US will leave in 2011. It just means that that will be a transition point where
they will begin to pull out some of their forces and turn over some of the responsibilities to the Afghan themselves ."It's very important to
use the right words where this is concerned," he explained in response to an Afghan journalist, saying that the words "US troops
will leave in 2011" are inaccurate. Meanwhile, General Stanley McChrystal told Afghan ministers and parliamentarians in Kabul on
Thursday thatthe US presence in the country was long-term. McChrystal said that the focus of Obama's new strategy
was "to provide an opportunity for the Afghan people to build enough capacity to provide security themselves."
More than eight years after the initial US invasion, the US presidentTuesdayannounced his intention to deploy 33,000 more
troops to Afghanistan to end the conflict there. Moreover, NATO pledged an additional 5,000 troops to fight the militancy in the war-
ravaged country. Although nearly 110,000 foreign troops are present in Afghanistan, they have not been able to establish stability in
the country.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 42
THERE IS NO PROSPECT THAT OBAMA WILL LOOK TO WITHDRAW FROM AFGHANISTAN. THE INTELLIGENCE
COMMUNITY HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY MILITARIZED AND THE AFGHANISTAN CONFLICT WILL ONLY CONTINUE TO
DRAIN RESOURCES AND COST THE LIVES OF COUNTLESS MILITARY MEN AND WOMEN.
MELVIN A. GOODMAN IN 7-8 (SENIOR FELLOW AT THE CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL POLICY AND ADJUNCT
PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, SPENT 42 YEARS WITH THE CIA, THE NATIONAL
WAR COLLEGE, AND THE U.S. ARMY, JULY 8, 2010, “OBAMA’S BUNGLED MILITARY STRATEGIES”,
HTTP://WWW.TRUTH-OUT.ORG/OBAMAS-BUNGLED-MILITARY-STRATEGIES-PART-III61188)
The new emphasis on counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and so-called "stability operations ," which the corporate media terms
a "reform,"will create opportunities for new military deployments overseas. There is no end in sight to this spending, unless
the Obama administration finds a new toughness to freeze the defense budget, stop force expansion, and set genuine procurement priorities. Instead
of the needed firmness,President Obama has contributed to the militarization of overall national security policy by appointing
general officers to key positions that should have been in the hands of civilians. These appointments include the national security
adviser; the intelligence tsar (first a retired admiral and, more recently, a retired general); ambassadors to such key states as Afghanistan and Saudi
Arabia; and a mediator for Sudan. All of these generals and admirals have had difficulty dealing with the foreign policy bureaucracy, and there are
rumors that two of them (National Security Adviser James Jones and Ambassador to Afghanistan Kurt Eikenberry) are on the way out.
Meanwhile,therehas been no attempt to reverse the militarization of the intelligence community, which includes the
Pentagon's near total control over the intelligence budget and personnel . The State Department should be the major counter to the
Defense Department, but Foggy Bottom has not had a strong leader since James Baker was the steward for foreign policy two decades ago. The
department has been in decline ever since, particularly during the last five years under Condoleeza Rice and now Hillary Clinton. Rice had contempt
for the Foreign Service; Clinton talks a much better game but has surrounded herself with congressional and personal aides who have little
knowledge of foreign policy and little political clout in the administration. President Obama's appointment of three so-called "tsars" for such
important issues as the Middle East, Iran, and Afghanistan-Pakistan also demonstrated a lack of confidence in Clinton and her department. Further ,
the appointments created an unnecessary bureaucratic layer that has confused foreign leaders and contributed to a sclerotic
foreign policy.It is hard to recall a time when the National Security Council was weaker than it is today. The NSC hasn't
even functioned as an umpire in disputes between State and Defense or between the key intelligence agencies that have
been in turmoil since the so-called reorganization in 2004. General Jones has been a weak national security adviser, ignoring the
important public role of the position and failing to organize the bureaucracy. As a result, on key matters dealing with Afghanistan and Israel, the
administration has spoken with several voices. Defense Secretary Gates even lectured Jones in a sensitive letter about the failure to develop
sufficient strategies and policies for dealing with Iran's nuclear capabilities. Last year, North Korea invited former President Clinton to Pyongyang to
settle a major diplomatic dispute, an obvious signal of interest in bilateral diplomacy, but Jones made no attempt to engage the foreign policy
bureaucracy in a discussion about this opportunity.The intelligence community is in particular turmoil and no longer serves as a
check and balance to the primacy of the Pentagon. Jones has allowed delays in the publication of an important update to the National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program, creating a vacuum for the administration's hawks to engage in strong rhetoric about Iran's alleged
nuclear ambitions that may not be backed up by the intelligence analysis. This situation opens the door to a return to politicized
intelligence, as analysts grow fearful of contradicting the dire claims made by senior officials. Instead of intelligence analysis
informing policy, the danger isthat policymakers will stake out positions and then expect the analysts to fall into line. Insidethe
CIA, the appointment of a weak CIA director, Leon Panetta, has left in place many of the operational ideologues who were
responsible for secret prisons, abusive interrogations, torture and renditions. Obama has contributed to a continuation of
the old waysby failing to appoint a statutory Inspector General, a position that has been vacant for nearly his entire first term . President
Obama will likely lack a handle on this deteriorating national security situation until he realizes that Afghanistan is not
central to the terrorism threat against the United States and that the stability of Pakistan is far more important to U.S. security in South
and Southwest Asia.Sending more troops and resources into Afghanistan does not begin to address the threat of international
terrorism, and no amount of economic assistance to Pakistan will buy support from Islamabad. In 1987, the new Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev called Afghanistan a "bleeding wound" and began the process of withdrawal. However, in 2010,since General McChrystal called
Afghanistan a "bleeding wound," there has been no sign of a U.S. withdrawal strategy. Instead, General Petraeus is once
again brandishing the notion of victory.Until there is some indication that President Obama can stand up to the Pentagon
and the Congress (and to some extent, the corporate media)on issues such as Afghanistan, defense spending, and homeland
security, the serious domestic needs of the country will continue to go wanting and the United States will become
increasingly isolated in the world.Finally, the president must understand the wisdom of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who "strongly
believed that the United States - indeed, any nation - could only be as militarily strong as it was economically dynamic and fiscally sound."
Instead,the United States has developed a garrison mentality - and has become economically stagnant and strategically
insolvent.Until President Obama recognizes the need for military restraint, the United States will continue to blunder
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 43
unilaterally into unnecessary confrontations.He needs to learn from his presidential hero, Abraham Lincoln, who understood when conflicts
were essential for the nation's survival and when they weren't. Lincoln opposed the war with Mexico from 1846-48, but called the Civil War -- the
fight to save the Union -- an "issue which can only be tried by war and decided by victory." The war in Afghanistan is not that kind of war.
Indeed,American use of force since the end of the Cold War has served only to weaken the nation, draining resources and
costing the lives of far too many fighting men and women. One would hope that Obama has learned from the McChrystal
affair that he needs to shake up his national security team - and his own thinking.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 44
THE AFGHAN WAR SHOWS NO HINT OF SLOWING DOWN ANYTIME SOON AND THE FARFETCHED PROSPECT OF
VICTORY WOULD ONLY MEAN THAT THE US WOULD BE FORCED TO POUR HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS INTO
THE COUNTRY.
TOM ENGELHARDT IN 10 (CO-FOUNDER OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE PROJECT, RUNS THE NATION INSTITUTE'S
TOMDISPATCH.COM., JULY 12, 2010, WHY ARE WE IN AFGHANISTAN? AS PETRAEUS TAKES OVER, COULD
SUCCESS BE WORSE THAN FAILURE?, HTTP://WWW.TRUTH-OUT.ORG/TOM-ENGELHARDT-WHY-ARE-WE-
AFGHANISTAN-AS-PETRAEUS-TAKES-OVER-COULD-SUCCESS-BE-WORSE-THAN-FAILURE6126)
By all accounts,the Afghan War could hardly be going worse today.Counterinsurgency , the strategy promoted by General
McChrystal but conceived by General Petraeus,is seemingly in a ditch, while the Taliban are the ones surging. Around that reality has
arisen a chorus of criticism and complaint, left, right, and center. Failure breeds critics, you might say, the way dead bodies breed
flies.Or put another way, it’s easy enough to criticize a failing American project, but what about a successful one? What if Petraeus really turns out
to be the miracle general of twenty-first century American war-making -- which, by the way, only means that he needs to “blunt” the Taliban surge
(the modern definition of “winning,” now that victory is no longer a part of the U.S. war-making lexicon)? Today,the increasingly self-evident
failure of American policy in Afghanistan is bringing enough calls for firm drawdown or withdrawal dates (or, from the
Republicans, bitter complaints about the same)to exasperate President Obama.Under the circumstances, no one evidently wonders what
success would really mean. We’ve been down so long, it seems, that few bother to consider what being up might involve. Too bad. It’s worth a
thought. Let’s say that Petraeus does return to Washington in what, these days, passes for triumph. The question is: So what? Or rather , could
success in Afghanistan prove worse for Americans than failure? Let’s imagine that, in July 2011, the U.S. military has
tenuous control over key parts of that country,including Kandahar, its second largest city. It still has almost 100,000 troops (and at
least a similar number of private contractors) in the country, while a slow drawdown of the 30,000 surge troops the
president ordered into Afghanistan in December 2009 is underway. Similarly, the “civilian” surge, which tripled the State
Department’s personnel there, remains in place, as does the CIA surge that went with it -- and the contractor and base-building surges that went with
them. In fact, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands will undoubtedly have only escalated further by July 2011 . Experts expect the
counterinsurgency campaign to continue for years, even decades more; the NATO allies are heading for the exits; and,
againaccording to the experts, the Taliban, being thoroughly interwoven with Afghanistan’s Pashtun minority, simply
cannot in any normal sense be defeated. This, then, would be “success” 10 years into America’s Afghan war. Given the
logistics nightmare of supporting so many troops, intelligence agents, civilian officials, and private contractors in the country, the approximately
$7 billion a month now being spent there will undoubtedly be the price Americans are to pay for a long time to come (and
that’s surely a significant undercount, if you consider long-term wear-and-tear to the military as well as the price of future care for those badly
wounded in body or mind).The swollen Afghan army and police will still have to undergo continual training and, in a country
with next to no government funds and (unlike Iraq) no oil or other resource revenues on the immediate horizon, they, too,
will have to be paid for and supplied by Washington.And keep in mind that the U.S. Air Force will, for the foreseeable future, be the
Afghan Air Force. In other words, success means that, however tenuously,Afghanistan is ours for years to come.So what would
we actually have to show for all this expenditure of money, effort, and lives? We would be in minimalist possession of a fractious,
ruined land, at war for three decades, and about as alien to, and far from, the United States as it’s possible to be on this planet.We would be in
minimalist possession of the world’s fifth poorest country. We would be in minimal possession of the world’s second
most corrupt country.We would be in minimal possession of the world’s foremost narco-state, the only country that
essentially produces a drug monocrop, opium.In terms of the global war on terror, we would be in possession of a country that the director
of the CIA now believes to hold 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives (“maybe less”) -- for whom parts of the country might still be a “safe haven.” And
for this, and everything to come,we would be paying, at a minimum, $84 billion a year.On the basis of our stated war objective --
“[W]e cannot allow Al Qaeda or other transnational extremists to once again establish sanctuaries from which they can launch attacks on our
homeland or on our allies,” as General Petraeus put it in his confirmation hearing at the end of June 2010 -- success in Afghanistan means
increasingly little. For al-Qaeda, Afghanistan was never significant in itself. It was always a place of (relative) convenience. If the
U.S. were to bar access to it, there are so many other countries to choose from. After all, what’s left of the original al-Qaeda -- estimated
by U.S. intelligence experts at perhaps 300 leaders and operatives -- seems to have established itself in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands,a place that the U.S. military could hardly occupy, no matter how many CIA drone attacks were sent against it. Moreover, U.S.
intelligence experts increasingly suggest thatal-Qaedais in the process of fusing with local jihadist groups in those borderlands, Yemen, Somalia,
North Africa, and elsewhere; thatIT is increasingly an amorphous “dispersed network,” or even simply an idea or crude
ideology, existing as much online as anywhere in particular on the ground. In this sense -- andthis is the only reason now
offered for the American presence in Afghanistan -- a counterinsurgency “success” there would be meaningless unless, based
on the same strategic thinking, the U.S. then secured Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and a potential host of other places. In other words , the U.S.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 45
military would have todo one thing the Bush years definitively proved it couldn’t do:impose a Pax Americana on planet Earth.Of
course, the Bush administration might have offered other explanations for the ongoing Afghan War, including the need to garrison what it called “the
arc of instability” stretching from North Africa to the Chinese border (essentially the oil heartlands of the planet), roll back Russia from its former
Soviet “backyard” in Central Asia, and guarantee the flow of Caspian Sea oil westward. More recently, with the revelation that a trillion or more
dollars worth of natural resources lie under Afghan soil, securing that country’s raw materials for western mining companies might have been added
to that list. The Obama administration, however, offers no such explanations and, being managerial rather than visionary in nature when it comes to
U.S. foreign policy, might not even have them. In any case , our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be telling a rather different
story.The singular thing the Iraq War seems to have done politically is promote Iranian influence in that country . Economically, it’s made
Iraq a safer place for the state-owned or state-controlled oil companies of China, Russia, and a number of other non-
western nations. In Afghanistan, in terms of those future natural resources, we seem to be fighting to make that country safe for
Chinese investment(just as the recently heightened U.S. sanctions against Iran are helping make that country safe for Chinese energy
dominance).
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 46
INHERENCY - IRAQ
OBAMAS TIMELINE OF WITHDRAWING TROOPS BY 2011 IS FALSE, HE IS USING BACKDOOR METHODS TO ENSURE OUR
MILITARY PRESENCE CONTINUES
Michael SCHWARTZin 2009[ professor of sociology at Stony Brook State Universit “Colonizing Iraq: The Obama
Doctrine?,” http://www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=175093]
All of this fit with a script promisingly laid out by President Barack Obamain his 2008 presidential campaign. More recently, in his much praised
speech to the students of Egypt's Cairo University, he promisedthat theU.S. would keep no bases in Iraq, andwouldindeedwithdrawits
military forces from the countrybythe end of2011. Unfortunately, not just for the Iraqis, but for the American public, it's what's happening in
"the dark" -- beyond the glare of lights and TV cameras -- that counts. While many critics of the Iraq War have been willing to cut the Obama
administration some slack as its foreign policy team and the U.S. military gear up for that definitive withdrawal, something else -- something more
unsettling -- appears to be going on. And it wasn't justthe president's hedging over withdrawing American "combat" troops
from Iraq-- which, in any case, make up as few as one-third of the 130,000 U.S. forces still in the country-- nowextendedfrom 16
to 19 months. Nor was it the re-labeling of some of them as "advisors" so they could, in fact, stayin the vacated cities, or the
redrawing of the boundary lines of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, to exclude a couple of key bases the Americans weren't
about to give up.After all, there can be no question that the Obama administration's policy is indeed to reduce what the Pentagon might call the
U.S. military "footprint" in Iraq. To put it another way, Obama's key officials seem to be opting not for blunt-edged, Bush-style
militarism, but for what might be thought of as an administrative push in Iraq, what Vice President Joe Biden has called "a
much more aggressive program vis-à-vis the Iraqi government to push it to political reconciliation." An anonymous senior
State Department official described this new "dark of night" policy recently to Christian Science Monitor reporter Jane Arraf this way: "One of the
challenges of that new relationship is how the U.S. can continue to wield influence on key decisions without being seen to
do so." Without being seen to do so. On this General Odierno and the unnamed official are in agreement. And so, it seems, is Washington. As a
result, the crucial thing you can say about the Obama administration's military and civilian planning so far is this: ignore the headlines, the fireworks,
and the briefly cheering crowds of Iraqis on your TV screen. Put all that talk of withdrawal aside for a moment and -- if you take a closer look, letting
your eyes adjust to the darkness -- what is vaguely visible is the silhouette of a new American posture in Iraq. Think of it as the Obama Doctrine.
Andwhat it doesn't look like is the posture of an occupying power preparing to close up shop and head for home.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 47
INHERENCY - IRAQ
The inconclusive Iraqi elections jeopardize the U.S. withdrawal timetable - it won’t be able to form a
government for months
McFeatters, 6/16/10[Dale, Korea Times, “Leaving Iraq not as simple as it sounds,” Lexis]
Iraq's new parliament met for 18 minutes this week, just long enough for the members to be sworn in and postpone indefinitely their first order of
business, choosing someone for the largely ceremonial post of president. Even so, U.S. officials counted the abbreviated session as a victory of
sorts.More than three months after the elections, Iraq still does not have a government and it may be weeks,
evenmonths,before it gets one. This could greatly complicate U.S. plans for withdrawal - all combat troops out
by Aug. 31,except for 50,000 to remain as trainers of the Iraqi security forces and to conduct counterterrorism operations as needed.
Those remaining troops are to be gone by the end of 2011. But absent a government, the U.S. military might be Iraq's only guarantee against anarchy
and a resumption of sectarian fighting.The problem is that the March 7 elections did not produce a clear winner, only a narrow
plurality. The Iraqiya party of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi won 91 seats in the 325-seat parliament. The State of Law party of incumbent
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.Allawi believes he should be given time to build a majority coalition. The two major Kurdish parties, with 43 seats,
say they would be amenable to joining that coalition contingent on written guarantees about such issues as the division of oil revenues.But Iran
brokered a coalition of the two major Shiite parties. This new National Alliance has 159 seats, enough for al-Maliki and other Shiite leaders to claim
the right to form the government. The question of whether a bloc created after the election can pre-empt the party with the most votes is before the
Iraqi courts.The danger in all this is that the Sunnis, who largely backed Allawi,willonceagain be shut out of power and
once again take to the streets,in the worst case just as the U.S. military is packing up to leave.In a column for the Washington Post, Allawi
argued for the U.S. to remain "actively engaged" in Iraq. "While I have long supported the withdrawal of U.S. troops, Iraq cannot be allowed to
revert to an unstable state of sectarian strife, dominated by regional influences," he wrote.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 48
INHERENCY - IRAQ
THIS MEANS THAT THE U.S. WILL STAY IN IRAQ PAST THE AUGUST DEADLINE - ODIERNO WILL KEEP AN EXTRA
BRIGADE IF HE THINKS THE GOVERNMENT IS WEAK
Dreazan, 2/23/10
[Yochi, “ U.S. Will Slow Iraq Pullout If Violence Surges After Vote,” Wall Street Journal]
The top U.S. commander in Baghdad said some American combat forces could remain in Iraq after this
summer's planned withdrawal date if the country's feuding leaders are unable to quickly form a new government. The
commentfromArmy Gen. RayOdierno is one of the clearest indications yet of how closely senior U.S. officials will
be watching Iraq's national electionsnext month for signs of whether the country will be capable of governing itself--and maintaining its
current level of security--once American forces head for the exits.Under terms of Washington's security pact with Baghdad, U.S. troop levels in Iraq
are supposed to fall to 50,000 by the end of August as the overall American mission shifts from direct combat to supporting Iraqi security forces. The
remaining U.S. forces are supposed to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.Speaking at the Pentagon, Gen. Odierno said he expected all U.S. combat forces
to leave Iraq by Sept. 1, reducing American troop levels--already at their lowest point since the start of the war in March 2003--to 50,000. He said the
continuing withdrawal was ahead of schedule, as initial plans had estimated there would be 115,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq now instead of the current
96,000.Still, Gen. Odierno hesaid, Iraq's uncertain political future meant the next phase of the drawdown could
proceed more slowly than initially planned. The commander said he had prepared contingency plans that would
leave some combat troops in Iraq past Sept. 1if the country faced serious political unrest or widespread violence after the vote. "I have
contingency plans that I've briefed to the chain of command this week that we could execute if we run into problems," Gen. Odierno said. "We're
prepared to execute those."The commander said he would consider slowing the withdrawal "if something happens" in
Iraq over the next two to three months.He saidhe would pay particular attention to how long it took Iraq's political
leaders to assemble a new coalitiongovernment after the March 7 balloting and to whether the political maneuvering was accompanied by
any new violence. Iraq's Previous elections have been marred by significant numbers of attacks and months of political instability as the country's
leaders haggled over cabinet slots.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 49
INHERENCY - JUST WAR
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS CONVINCED IT IS FIGHTING A JUST WAR DESPITE APPEALS FROM KARZAI TO
SOLIDIFY TIME TABLES
THE HERALD 09 AFRICAN NEWS APRIL 27 “ZIMBABWE; THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE” LEXIS
WHEN FBI DIRECTOR, ROBERT MUELLER REVEALED TO SENATE EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE BOMBING THAT "INVESTIGATORS BELIEVE THE
IDEA OF THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS ... CAME FROM AL QAEDA LEADERS IN AFGHANISTAN" AND THAT "WE THINK THE MASTERMINDS OF IT
WERE IN AFGHANISTAN" THENIT BECAME CLEAR THAT THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS WERE NOT
EVEN KNOWN SINCE ALL THAT COULD BE DONE EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK WAS TO SURMISE AROUND THE
MYSTERY.THE FORMERDIRECTOR OF HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH AFRICA ADDRESSED THE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON HUMAN
RIGHTS POLICY IN GENEVA IN 2002.HE SPOKE FOR MANY OF THE "ABSOLUTE PACIFISTS" AND "ABSOLUTE LUNATICS" WHEN HESAID, "I
AM UNABLE TO APPRECIATE ANY MORAL, POLITICAL OR LEGAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS JIHAD BY THE UNITED
STATES AGAINST THOSE IT DEEMS TO BE ITS ENEMIES AND THE JIHAD BY ISLAMIC GROUPS AGAINST THOSE THEY
DEEM TO BE THEIR ENEMIES."IT IS NOT AN OVERSTATEMENT TO SAY THAT TODAY, SEVEN AND HALF YEARS AFTER GEORGE W. BUSH
COMMANDED THE UNLEASHING OF THE FIRST BOMB ON AFGHANISTAN, WORLD OPINION HAS NOT CHANGED. THE MAJORITY OF EUROPEANS,
LATIN AMERICANS, AFRICANS, ASIANS AND INDEED THE PEOPLE OF AFGHANISTAN, DO NOT WANT OR SUPPORT THIS WAR.THE US AND ITS
ALLIES STAND ALONE IN THIS WAR AND NO DOUBT THEY ARE STRUGGLING TO CONVINCE THEIR OWN POPULATIONS
THAT THEY ARE FIGHTING A JUST WAR.HAMIDKARZAIHASAPPEALED TO PRESIDENT BARACKOBAMA TO STOP THE WAR
OR TO AT LEAST GIVE A WITHDRAWAL TIME TABLE BUT OBAMA APPEARS CONVINCED HE HAS INHERITED A JUST
WAR AGAINST TERROR. POWER POLITICS RIDES ON THIS OVERRIDING PRINCIPLE THAT IS DRIVEN BY THIS OVER-
RIDING PRINCIPLE THAT CRIMES AND SINS CAN ONLY BE COMMITTED BY OTHERS WHILE THE US AND HER WESTERN
ALLIES ARE ONLY CULPABLE FOR GENUINE ERRORS AND OVERSIGHTS.FOR AS LONG AS THE US CONTINUES TO STAND IN
ISOLATION OF WORLD OPINION ON MATTERS REGARDING WASHINGTON'S FOREIGN POLICY IT WILL CONTINUE TO BE EXCEEDINGLY DIFFICULT
FOR THE US TO PROVIDE THE WORLD LEADERSHIP THEY STRIVE SO MUCH TO ESPOUSE AT EVERY GIVEN OPPORTUNITY.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 50
IN THE STATUS QUO, JUST WAR THEORY HAS ENCOUNTERED SUCCESS IN DOMINATING THE ARENA OF BOTH
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS DAND WARFARE DEBATES.
(John) Williams (Senior Lecturer in International Relations John Williams studied at the Universities of Hull and Warwick. He was a Lecturer at
the University of Aberdeen for five years before joining Durham in 2001.) June 2007
Just War theory has an enviable recordof success in shaping, if not dominating, politicalethical debates about the use of force in
international relations. As some have noted, this success brings with it certain dangers (Walzer 2002), but sharing Walzer’s general satisfaction with
the way in which Just War ideas and categories have become unavoidable inthinking about and assessing the use of violence is not difficult. Moral
skepticism of the sort portrayed by Frost (1996) or Dower (1998) may have saloon-bar appeal but Just War’s ubiquity and utility, we will come to
its intellectual sophistication shortly, seem to have corralled itwithin the realm of those whose cynicism stems from intellectual inadequacy.
For those committed to the centrality of ethics to both the study and practice of international relations the ‘triumph’ of Just War is heartening. Two particular
instancesserve to highlight how it is that Just War has been able to shape and direct debate, even as the character of violencein
international relationshas moved away from classic inter-state war driven by traditional geo-strategic logics of the control of territory and the
maximization of power in pursuit of security from attacks by other states . Throughout the 1990s the debate over humanitarian intervention, still alive
and well today (e.g. Bellamy, 2006), has referred back time and again to the idea of Just War. Whether in the form of landmark policy statements (Blair, 1999; ICISS,
2001) or in the majority of the leading academic analyses and, in particular, advocacy, of a limited right to humanitarian intervention (e.g. Téson, 2005c; Wheeler,
2000) an amended and adjusted Just War framework has been central. Augmenting the idea of self-defence as just cause to include a right, or possibly even a duty, to
defend the victims of grave humanitarian crises; debating the nature of legitimate authority in these circumstances in order to minimise the opportunity for abuse by the
powerful; wrestling with the challenge of intent in multi-faceted situations where complex actors may intend multiple outcomes and be motivated by a variety of
desires; and looking at how Just War’s rules of combat may have to be changed to deal with the absence of a ‘battlefield’, in the conventional sense, have all been
important elements of this process. The second challenge is that that , on the triumphalist account, Just War has risen to has been, of course, what
we can call for the sake of economy, the ‘war on terror,’
in the period post September 11th 2001.Despite the political rhetoric about the absence
of rules (Hurrell, 2002), or the paradigm shattering nature of trans-national, mass casualty terrorism summed up in the idea that world changed
for ever on 9/11, Just War ideas and categories have remained central to public political debate.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 51
JUST WAR THEORY IS ENTRENCHED IN STATE-CENTRALITY, AND IS UNABLE TO AVOID HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
BECAUSE IT DOES NOT RECOGNIZE THE RIGHTS OF THE NON-STATE ORGANIZATION.
The longevity, flexibilityand sophistication of the Just War tradition is imposing and its centrality to contemporary debates about
humanitarian intervention and the war on terror unsurprising as a result. However, thequestion of the political spaces
thattheJust Wartradition envisages as the location of ethical debate and behaviour and the political scale at which it operates are
potentiallyproblematic. Humanitarian crises and trans-national terrorism pose important questions in both theseregards and, so
far, Just War thinking has not picked them up. The state retains its central position in all three arenas ofcontemporary Just
War thinking and this is hampering its ability to respond, not in terms of ethical critique of human rights abuses and terrorist attacks -
these are goals into which Just War theorists have found it easy to hit balls - but in terms of accommodating, even recognising, the
potential ethical import of non-state based frames of political reference and scales of political activity. This paper has suggested this
is a problem that is rooted deeply inthe Just Wartradition and that a more dynamic approach to these topics in other parts of international
relations is not being followed through here. A comprehensive analysis of what this might mean in terms of exploiting Just War’s famed flexibility to
better meet this challenge is a long-term project a single paper cannot hope to attempt. However, I have tried to sketch some sort of agenda, or at least
a set of provisional starting points in jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum terms. If nothing else these have hopefully served to highlight the
ubiquity of the problem that a lack of open-mindedness to the problems of scale and space represent . Territory, borders and ethics have
received fairly limited consideration in the past, especially in international relations (e.g. Williams, 2006), but that position, it
is argued here, is unsustainable.Just Wartheory has made some adjustments to address the changing ethics of violence of the last fifteen years,
but nowit needs to take on the recognition,evident elsewhere, that our political spacesand scales are diversifying and, as a result,
ourpolitical ethics, including the ethics of war, are under renewed pressure and in need of renewedinnovation.The next chapter
in the long history of Just War theory needs to be about ethics, space and scale.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 52
THE COIN OPERATION IN AFGHANISTAN IS ‘JUST WAR’ THEORY IN DISGUISE. FAR FROM ITS HUMANITARIAN AND
ETHICAL JUSTIFICATIONS, COIN REPRODUCES AND MASKS NAZI DOMINATION.
MICHAEL A.COHEN(WRITES ON POLITICS AND NATIONAL SECURITY AND WAS PREVIOUSLY A SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW AT THE NEW
AMERICA FOUNDATION) SPRING2010[(THE MYTH OF A KINDER, GENTLER WAR, WORLD POLICY JOURNAL, PP. 75-86, PUBLISHED BY THE
MIT PRESS, HTTP://MUSE.JHU.EDU/JOURNALS/WPJ/SUMMARY/V027/27.1.COHEN.HTML)]
Shortly after he assumed command of all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal provided his
soldiers with operational guidance for fighting insurgent Taliban forces. McChrystal’s words directly reflectthe Pentagon’s
new model of U.S. warfare and informthe philosophy behind the current U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan: “The ongoing
insurgency must be met with a counterinsurgency campaign adapted to the unique conditions in each area that: protects
the Afghan people, allowing them to choose a future they can be proud of; provides a secure environment allowing good
government and economic development to undercut the causes and advocates of insurgency.” According to McChrystal,
the “Afghan people are at the center of our mission...in reality they are the mission.” These sentiments are reflective of
what has become the new way of American war- population centric counter-insurgency(COIN).The focus on COIN doctrine was
enshrined by Gen. David Petraeusand the 2006 publication of the Army and Marine counter-insurgency manual, FM 3-24, which calls
for a military approach that seeks to convince the population that counter-insurgents, acting on behalf of a sovereign government,
can be trusted and are worthy of popular support. With its seemingly progressive and humanistic approach, FM 3-24, and counterinsurgency in
general, offer a seductive ideal for the future of American war-fighting. But the veneration of COIN conceals a brutal reality. The history
ofcounter-insurgencyin the twentieth centuryis not a story of warm and fuzzy war, of benevolent soldiers providing essential
government services to grateful natives, of armed social work, or of the gentleman soldier’s antidote to the Shermanesque
notion of Total War. Instead, counter-insurgency is a repeated tale of coercion and violence directed largely against
unarmed civilians. And this defines both those COIN efforts that have been successful-and those that have failed. Yet
counter-insurgency is often described today in misleading terms. According to Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A
Story of Modern War,COIN “embraces distinctly liberal, humanistic values like protecting civilians, cultural sensitivity, and
rigid adherence to ethical standards and the law.”Others such as Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relationsand the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power,have argued that the focus on counter-
insurgency, in Afghanistan today, is in keeping with a grand U.S. military tradition: “Mc- Chrystal’s advice to embrace the
population and be sparing in the use of firepower has been employed by successful counterinsurgents from the American Army in the Philippines at
the turn of the twentieth century.”Even those on the left are not immune to the seductions of this new mode of American
warfare. Rachel Kleinfeld, director of the progressive-oriented Truman National Security Project, has lauded counter-insurgency for its focus
on the “importance of legitimacy and privileging civilian life in order to gain hearts and minds,” a goal we are told that “progressives have been
promoting for years.” Do as the Romans DoThough protecting the population, or cleaving them away from insurgents, has long
defined COIN operations, the more coercive elements that have accompanied these efforts receive far less mention . For
example, FM 3-24 approvingly cites the experiences of the British military in Malaya and Kenya, as well as the French in Algeria, as potential
models for how to wage a population- centric counter-insurgency. But each of these conflicts-as well as U.S. COIN operations in the Philippines
and Vietnam- were defined by significant levels of coercion and violence against civilians.Even in Iraq, which has been heralded
as COIN’s shining contemporary success story, the “triumph” ofcounter-insurgencytactics that accompanied the 2007 surge of U.S. troops
wasmatched with horrific levels of violence and population resettlement-and a higher number of civilian deaths due to
American military actions. In fact, none of the major counter-insurgent wars fought by the United States and other Western countries look
much like the humanistic approach described by COIN advocates. Still, current operations in Afghanistan are predicated on this fundamental
misreading and misunderstanding of COIN’s bloody past. Indeed, the tactics espoused by McChrystal and others are fundamentally counter to
historical precedent-and the assumption they will succeed in Afghanistan is highly suspect. Like all wars, counter-insurgency is, at its core, war-and
the idea that it can be sanitized or made less violent is deeply and dangerously misleading. John Nagl, president of the Center for A New American
Security (a locus of COIN thinking in Washington) and a co-author of FM 3-24, has argued that, “unless the counterinsurgent is willing to employ
the so-called Roman method of unrestrained violence to suppress rebellion, the only way to defeat an insurgency is to gain the loyalty of the
population, thereby depriving insurgents of the support base they require to destabilize a government.” Indeed, the Roman Empire did develop an
often-imitated counter-insurgency response-brutally destroying the cities of those who resisted Roman rule and forcing any surviving prisoners into
slavery. In the fabled words of Tacitus, “They make a wasteland and call it peace.” Throughout history, counter-insurgents have
often adopted some variation of the Roman method-from Gen.William TecumsehSherman’s March to the Sea to the far more
brutal tactics adopted by the Nazis in World War II and the Soviet Union against recalcitrant ethnic minorities . Far fewer
have taken their cues from the American way of COIN as described in FM 3-24. This is not to suggest that U.S. military leaders should take
inspiration from Imperial Rome or Nazi Germany. But the continued evangelism of humanistic COIN threatens to convince policymakers that
counterinsurgency can be done effectively, without coercion-or that there exists a simplistic choice between the Roman method and Mc- Chrystal’s
predominant focus on population protection. And while it can be problematic to draw too narrow an historical lesson from past events, on this point
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 53
the legacy of COIN is consistent. The methods for defeating an insurgency have generally been defined less by an open hand than a clenched fist.
The mistaken belief that counterinsurgencies can be waged humanely risks embroiling the United States in more conflicts and weakening national
security.When it comes to COIN, the best course of action for the United States is most certainly less, not more.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 54
INHERENCY - IMPERIALISM
OBAMA ONLY WHITEWASHES IMPERIALISM TO APPEAR LIBERAL AND HUMANITARIAN BUT THE PRESUMPTIONS OF
SUPERIORITY AND VIOLENCE ARE STILL THE SAME
The Guardian 09January 27 Obama the imperialist: Change? In foreign policy, hardly. The new president is in the classic liberal interventionist
mouldRichard Seymourauthor of The Liberal Defence of MurderGUARDIAN COMMENT AND DEBATE PAGES ; Pg. 30
The first Democratic president in the modern era to be elected on an anti-war ticket is also, to the relief
of neoconsand the liberal belligerati, a hawk. Committed to escalation in Afghanistan,his foreign policy selections also
indicate bellicosity towards Sudan and Iran. During his first week in office he sanctioned two missile
attacksin Pakistan, killing 22 people, including women and children. And his stance on Gaza is remarkably close to that of the outgoing
administration. The question now is how Obama will convince his supporters to back that stance. Bush could rely on a core constituency whose
commitment to peace and human rights is, at the very least, questionable. Obama has no such luxury. In making his case, he will need the support of
those "liberal hawks" who gave Bush such vocal support. It is tempting to dismiss the "pro-war left" as a congeries of discredited left-wing apostates
andNato liberals.Their artless euphemisms for bloody conquest seem especially redundant in light of over
a million Iraqi deaths.Yettheir arguments, ranging from a paternalistic defence of "humanitarian
intervention" to the championing of "western values",have their origins in a tradition of liberal
imperialismwhose durability advises againsthasty dismissal. In every country whose rulers have opted for empire,
there has developed among the intellectual classes a powerful pro-imperial consensus, with liberals and
leftwingers its most vociferous defenders.Liberal imperialistshave resisted explicitly racist arguments for domination,
insteadjustifyingempire as a humane venture delivering progress.Even so, implicitin such a stancewas the belief
that other peoples were inferior. Just as John Stuart Mill contended that despotism was a "legitimate mode of government in dealing
with the barbarians" provided "the end be their improvement", so the Fabians contended that self-government for "native races" was "as useless to
them as a dynamo to a Caribbean". Intellectuals of the Second International such as Eduard Bernstein regarded the colonised as incapable of self-
government. For many liberals and socialists of this era, the only disagreement was over whether the natives could attain the disciplined state
necessary to run their own affairs. Indigenous resistance, moreover, was interpreted as "native fanaticism", to be overcome with European tuition.
The current liberal imperialists are not replicas of their 19th-century antecedents. Cold war priorities, including the need to incorporate
elements of the left into an anti-communist front, transformed
the culture of empire. If the "anti-totalitarian" left
supported US expansionism, they often did so under the mantle of anti-colonialism. Decolonisation and
the civil rights struggle meant explicit racism had to be dispensed with in arguments for military
intervention. This was a slow process. Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations were terrified of "premature independence" for
colonised nations. The state department asserted that "backward societies" required authoritarianism to prepare them for modernity. Irving Kristol, a
cold war liberal who became the "godfather of neoconservatism", justified the Vietnam war in part by asserting that the country was "barely capable
of decent self-government under the very best of conditions", and thus needed its US-imposed dictatorship. Nonetheless, such arguments today tend
to be rehearsed only on the wilder shores of the neoconservative right. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, some paternalistic mainstays
of liberal imperialism have been reinvented under the impress of "humanitarian intervention". Just as Victorian humanitarians saw the empire as the
appropriate tool for saving the oppressed, so the 1990s saw demands for the US military to deliver Somalians, Bosnians and Kosovans from their
tormentors - notwithstanding the fact that US intervention played a destructive role in each case. The agency of the oppressed themselves is largely
absent from this perspective. And, as New York University's Stephen Holmes pointed out: "By denouncing the United States primarily for standing
by when atrocity abroad occurs, these well-meaning liberals have helped re-popularise the idea of America as a potentially benign imperial
power."The catastrophe in Iraq has produced a reaction against humanitarian imperialismeven from former
interventionists like David Rieff, who has warned against the "rebirth of imperialism with human rights as its moral
warrant".Even so, among liberal intellectuals there is a broad coalition favouring intervention into Darfur, though humanitarian organisations
have opposed the idea. Andthere is little resistance to the escalation in Afghanistan, where "native fanaticism" is
once more the enemy. Liberal imperialism is in rude health: it is its victims who are in mortal peril.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 55
THE AMERICAN EMPIRE STILL PERSIST UNDER THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION UNLESS WE BREAK FROM THE
DICHOTOMIZING TWO-PARTY SYSTEM FEUDALISM IS INEVITABLE, THIS CONTINUATION OF THE FIERCE ERGENCY OF
NOW WILL ONLY RE-ENTRENCH THIS CYCLE NOW IS A KEY TIME TO BREAK AWAY
HenryGiroux 09(Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, :Politics After Hope”,
http://www.counterpunch.org/giroux08142009.html)
The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama.It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under
George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end
torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant
environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless
and costly weapons systems. Hedges has responded to Obama’s retreat from the politics of hope and real change by arguing that“Our
last hope is to step
outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we
will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.” Hedges has no desire to try to
influence the power elite from within. He believes that only a mass movement unequivocally on the side of socialism will be capable of mounting the collective
struggles and change necessary to reclaim the power and the tools for a viable democracy. Peter Dreier (“We Need More Protests to Make Reform Possible”) argues
that while there is considerable anger among the American public over a number of Obama’s policies, extending from health care reform to the war in Afghanistan,
such anger is meaningless unless it is mixed with hope. And as he rightly puts it, “to be effective politically that hope has to be mobilized through collective action-in
elections, meetings with elected officials, petitions, e-mail campaigns, rallies, demonstrations and even, at times, civil disobedience.” With the election of Obama,
hope, for many progressives, seems to have exhausted itself, as if it had found its final resting place in the election of an African American president. But hope
never ends, because no society has perfected democracy or is democratic enough that the “fierce urgency of now”
becomes either outdated or irrelevant. Hope needs both a discourse and a sense of possibility, just as it demands a
concerted effort on the part of individuals and social movements to combine the pedagogical conditions for creating
an informed citizenry with a sense of urgency that demands informed action .At the heart of this struggle, though neither Hedges nor
Dreier mentions it, is the need to make the crisis of agency and the importance of education and pedagogy both central to such a politics. A democratic politics demands an
informed citizenry, especially at a time when citizenship has been reduced to consumerism while politics and agency appear largely drained of any substance. Obama defied the
onset of cynicism for a short time, and one feels compelled to ask the question, how did he successfully resurrect in his presidential campaign the issue of agency through modes of
education that helped defeat John McCain? Put more abstractly, what does his victory suggest about the role that intellectuals, unions, educators, workers, parents, youth, and
others might play in rethinking how the media, schools, Internet, newspapers, and any other sites can be utilized as important pedagogical spheres that become central sites of
struggle? Such a struggle will need to create a sense of public urgency, affirm democratic public values, and provide the conditions for the growth of ready and willing individual
and collective agents for change. Ironically, Obama himself has provided both a language for and an example of how this might be done. He used the new media to spread a
message of hope, he made clear that the Bush administration had created a nightmarish crisis of such proportions that the very nature of democracy was in peril, and he masterfully
reached out and educated a wide range of constituents to support his candidacy. His call for people to educate themselves in the spirit of citizen activism, find cracks in the system,
put pressure on politicians (including presidents), and take to the streets for the causes they believed in can be found in many of his speeches-and can be read in retrospect as both a
plea and a blueprint within the current historical moment to create new mass movements to continually challenge Obama
himself, pushing him to move
away from his centrist tendencies and the conservative pressures of corporate-driven party politics .The new era of
responsibility that Obama talks about found resonance in his own attempts, against great odds, to inspire people to take chances, take risks, and exercise civic courage in
order to deepen and expand the possibilities of a substantive democracy. But that responsibility was not meant to be either privatized or romanticized, or relegated to a
strictly individual task that depoliticized politics and furthered the myth of Obama as the iconic, solitary, heroic symbol of a new future. On the contrary, it is a
discourse of responsibilityObama
forged in the heat of politics, power, and struggle, one in which matters of agency and
politics transcended the space of the privatized individual.But once Obama assumed the office of the presidency and
surrounded himself with the captains of corporate power, his call to responsibility was fueled by a notion of hope
that downplayed its emancipatory potential. Politics after hope was sabotaged by a movement of centrists, lobbyists,
market fundamentalists, militarists, and right-wing ideologues who believed that there was no longer any need for
either hope or struggle. And it is precisely this bankrupt notion of responsibility and politics that must be challenged
by those who imagine a very different politics from both the Obama administration and from emerging social
movements.In opposition to a hope uncoupled from a viable radical democratic politics, there is a need to forge a notion of possibility motivated by the collective
responsibility of a mass movement that is capable of creating and sustaining a new kind of politics, one that does not end with Obama’s election but sees it as a starting
“the fierce urgency of now”
point for a new level of mass protest, collective struggle, and movement building. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for
suggests the need to forge mass movements that can push Obama further to the left and begin the long, difficult, but
necessary, task of developing a third political party.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 56
THE WORST FORM OF TERRORISM IS THAT DONE BY THE STATE. THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR ONLY PROVIDES A
FRAMING OF U.S. IMPERIALISM THAT WILL BE EVER CONTINUING
AchinVanaik, professor of International Relations and Global Politics at Delhi University, “Selling US Wars” pp. 13-14, 2007
Though a war on terrorism has been announced by the US on past occasions during the Cold War (when the USSR was designated the main terrorist
culprit), it is really after 9/11thatthe declaration of a global war on terror (GWOT) takes center stage. It becomes the latest and
among the most important of the ideological banners of empire. Using the metaphor of war to combat
terrorismonlymilitarizes the approach to dealing with it and paves the way for using one unacceptable form of political
violence-terrorism-to deal with another form of terrorism. Indeed, the most dangerous and damaging form of terrorism has
been that of the state, whose scale has always been enormously greater. The main reason why state terrorism has never been as strong a focus for
public recrimination and anger is because states have had much greater capacities to disguise their terrorism as something else or to justify it in the
name of some higher ideal, be it national security or some other supposedly worthy goal. This essay starts from an examination of the complexities of
the very concept of political terrorism, which has prevented any universally accepted definition of it from emerging. Yet, a working
understanding of it adequate to identifying most of its forms and its agents is easily reachable. Its agents are multiple,
from alQaeda to the US government. GWOT provides an excellent framing device for the imperial project, for in
comparison to the other five ideological banners, it possesses the greatest capacity to mobilize domestic support for the
US pursuit of empire abroad. This is not to decry its capacity to win over other governments and publics. Terrorist bombings, as in London,
Madrid, Bali, and elsewhere strengthen the claims of those who would justify GWOT, which in any case is a cover that so many governments
needing to repress their own insurgency movements (Russia, China, India), and others needing to justify their collaboration with the US assaults on
Afghanistan and Iraq, find indispensable. An inevitable corollary of the US-led GWOT has been the demonization of Islam and
Muslims.This is unfair but the temptation to resort to it has proved irresistible. At the heart of the empire project IS the requirement
that Muslim Central and West Asia permanently subordinated to American power. And for this It IS necessary to mobilize
maximum support from within the US population and from the publics and governments of the West and Japan. This
demonization must be resisted and exposed for its dishonesty and hypocrisy. Along with this, the whole issue of terrorism
must be put into proper perspective. We need to Impartially condemn both the "terrorism of the weak" (non-stat actors)
and the "terrorism of the strong" (state actors). Indeed i~ IS the latte~ that is our biggest problem. Without developing and strengthening
adequate international mechanisms such as the International Criminal .Court and addressing fairly the actual political contexts 10 which terrorism
occurs we cannot hope t diminish significantly the occurrence of such terrorism by any and all its agents. Meanwhile , it remains incumbent on
us to expose the GWOT for what It primarily is-currently the most widely and frequently waved banner to hide and justify
the US government s Imperial ambitions and practices
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 57
OBAMA MERELY GIVES A FACELIFT TO IMPERIALISM; THERE IS STILL NO END IN SIGHT FROM OPPRESSION CAUSED
BY U.S. BOURGEOIS IMPERIALISM
WORKERS VANGUARD NOVEMBER 2008 (NO. 925, “OBAMA: COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF RACIST U.S. IMPERIALISM” HTTP://WWW.CLASS-
STRUGGLE.COM/2008/12/OBAMA-COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF-OF-RACIST-US.HTML)
The election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States has aroused great expectations among working people and the oppressed around the
world. Black people and others celebrated on streets throughout the country the election of the next Commander-in-Chief of bloody U.S. imperialism. Michelle Obama,
the descendent of slaves, will be first lady in a White House whose foundations were laid by slave labor. This is something most Americans never expected to see in
their lifetime. Amid fears of a new Great Depression, as millions of working people are losing their homes and unemployment grows, hopes for “change” center on the
incoming Democratic Obama administration. These hopes will be brutally dashed.As America’s next top cop, Obama will preside over the racist
capitalist system, which is based on the exploitation of working people at home and abroad. As against the reformists, who either
explicitly or implicitly backed Obama, we Marxists fight to break working people and the oppressed from illusions in the capitalist Democratic Party of war and racism.
On principle, we do not vote for, or otherwise extend any political support to, any capitalist politician-Democrat, Republican, Green or “independent.” As the front-page
headline of WV No. 923 (24 October) emphasized: “McCain, Obama: Class Enemies of Workers, Oppressed.” We Marxists also do not run for the executive offices of
the bourgeois state, such as mayor, governor or president. This is based on our understanding that the capitalist state-which at its core consists of the cops, military,
courts and prisons-exists to defend the class rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. Holding executive office means administering the capitalist state. Our aim is the forging
of a revolutionary workers party to lead the multiracial working class, and behind it all the oppressed, in the struggle to overthrow the capitalist order through workers
revolution and establish a workers state where those who labor rule. Immediately upon winning, Obama sought to tamp down expectations for his administration. He
made his agenda of “national unity” patriotism clear when he declared on election night, before a crowd of 250,000 people in Chicago celebrating his victory, the need
for “a new spirit of sacrifice.” In this, Obama is following in the footsteps of the black Democrats who have been employed as mayors and police chiefs of major urban
areas-from L.A. to Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and elsewhere. Their job has been to keep working and black people down, to oversee rampant cop terror and
administer the slashing of social programs; their value to the racist rulers is epitomized by the statement of black former New York City mayor David Dinkins: “They’ll
take it from me.” With the U.S. entering a deep economic recession, it will be Obama’s job to contain potential social unrest and impose austerity measures upon
working people-and his current popularity may very well allow him to get away with much.With cool “post-partisan” arrogance, Obama-wielding
his own $660 million campaign, which was supported by significant sections of the bourgeoisie-blames the oppressed for
their own oppression. In his Chicago victory speech, Obama stated: “If there is anyone out there…who still questions the
power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”A similar message came from McCain in his concession speech, who bluntly stated, “Let
there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship.” As we warned in “Obama Offers Facelift for U.S. Imperialism”
(WV No. 920, 12 September): “Obama serves as a very powerful propaganda weapon for the bourgeoisie, telling black people
and the oppressed to shut up and stop complaining, because, you see, ‘the American dream’ works!” From the standpoint
of the international working class and oppressed there is nothing to celebrate in Obama’s victory and much to
fear.Enthusiasm among large sections of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is justified. After nearly eight years of one of the most
incompetent and widely despised regimes in recent U.S. history, they now have in Obama a more rational face for their
brutal, irrational system. Obama has also inspired illusions in the trappings of bourgeois democracy, the means by which
the capitalists disguise their rule with the appearance of a popular mandate.Abroad, Obama provides an invaluable facelift
for U.S. imperialism, the main enemy of the world’s working people.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 58
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS HYPOCRITICAL ABOUT IT’S AGENDA CONTINUING AN ADVANCMENT OF
IMPERIALIST GOALS.
JUSTIN RAIMONDO POLICY ANALYST AT THE CENTER FOR LIBERTARIAN STUDIES, IN BURLINGAME, CALIFORNIA, ANTIWAR.COM
COLUMNIST 6-28-10 COLONIALISM, OBAMA STYLE, HTTP://ORIGINAL.ANTIWAR.COM/JUSTIN/2010/06/27/COLONIALISM-OBAMA-STYLE/
This idea that the Obama-ites are really peaceniks in disguise, who have to hide their “true” beliefs in order to pass electoral muster, is
a mythwoven by Fox News and the neocon Right:he and his Pentagon are no such thing. Indeed, they are even more serious - albeit
not as visibly enthusiastic -about projecting American military power globally than their predecessors in the White House. If the
Bushians left behind the doctrine of preemption as their geopolitical and military legacy, then the contribution of the current crew appears
to be the “new” COIN (or counterinsurgency) doctrine developed by the Obama White House in tandem with the Center for a New
American Security (CNAS) - the semi-official Obama-ite national security think-tank, whose cadre oversee the Pentagon policy shop.The
indiscretions of Big MouthMcChrystal are only the latest and the least of the “COIN-dinistas” problems. Their neo-Maoist
“live and fight among the people” doctrine is failing big time in the field, and they are falling back on the “revolution
betrayed” explanation for the inability of their new-fangled counterinsurgency strategy to turn the tide against the
Taliban.Like their neoconservative predecessors in the Bush administration, this crew is retreating behind the alleged
lack of support coming from Congress and the civilians in charge of the war effort.Just in time for the debate in Congress over re-
funding the war.As in the Bush administration, so in the age of Obama: the “antiwar” Democrats will make a lot of noise and then cave, in the end:
bribery works every time. Their “antiwar” stance is just a bargaining chip: what they really care about is how much lard they’ll be allowed to pack
into the legislation.The outing of McChrystal as a lout and a loudmouth is not a very big deal except to those Washington insiders who like to play
the game. All this brouhaha over personalities is just a smokescreen so as to avoid the real issue: what in the name of all
that’s holy are we doing in Afghanistan, not to mention Pakistan?The administration insists they’re out to get Osama bin
Ladenand his gang, butwhen asked by Jack Tapper on ABC on Sunday if there’s any new intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts , CIA
Director Leon Panetta admitted- in an offhand, almost carefree manner -that they hadn’t been on his trail since 2001, when he
slipped away at Tora Bora.What COIN is all about is nation-building: if the Afghans can be won over to a government
that provides them with both physical and legal infrastructure, the Taliban can be bypassed and made irrelevant as the
lives of the people improve. “Clear, hold, and build,” or so the COIN-dinista aphorism goes. Yetwhat, precisely, are we building over
there? Surely not an independent state: our obstreperous client, “president” Hamid Karzai, is little more than the mayor
of Kabul- and that’s on a good day. On most days his authority barely extends outside the presidential palace.In a move that would have had the
Hollywood-Huffington left screaming bloody murder if done by the Bush administration, Team Obama is busy building the foundations
of a full-fledged US colony in Afghanistan, and Iraq as well(where a “residual” force will stay long after the official
“withdrawal.”)With the alleged discovery - or, rather, rediscovery - of untold mineral riches in the mountains of the Hindu Kush,
the Money Power and its vassals in government have added incentive to push for this wacky “nation-building” strategy.
That infrastructure Uncle Sam keeps promising the Afghan people sure will come in handy when it’s time to bring all that lithium to market.
“Government in a box” - McChrystal’s phrase just about sums up the facile banality of the COIN-dinistas, who imagine
they can build a real nation in their social engineering laboratory, and not have it resemble the Frankenstein monster, at
best. Such a “strategy” is perfectly suited to the grandiosity and self-consciousness of this administration, which does everything with one eye on
History, and the other on the main chance.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 59
OBAMA IS STILL SUPPORTIVE OF A U.S. HEGEMON AND DOESN’T OPPOSE MILITARY INTRUSION AND IMPERIALISM
THAT HAS RAPED THE WORLD FOR DECADES
Mike ELY 08 (Revolutionary, “Obama vs. the Revolution Pt 2: The Empire Obama Serves” http://kasamaproject.org/2008/10/08/obama-vs-the-
revolution-part-2-the-empire-obama-serves/
A VERY BASIC STAND WITH AN UNJUST EMPIRE AND ITS MANY HORRORSFirst of all I think we need to zoom back and look at the war as a moment
within the defense and expansion of this empire, and on a very fundamental level. Obama supports the fight for U.S. hegemonic control
of the world; he supports nuclear arms, he supports having a military , he supports having a navy in the Persian Gulf. He supports
this concept of American national interests in this place and that plac E.So on a very fundamental level he’s speaking from within a
framework, and not just speaking because he’s a man of trying to exercise power, and intends to act from a framework that accepts the Monroe
Doctrine, that accepts the Carter Doctrine on nuclear use in the Persian Gulf right down the line. In fact, he doesn’t reject all the other “doctrines” and
countless other ways that the U.S. says that dominating huge parts of the world are its “national interests.” Has Obama even publicly renounced the
outrageous Bush Doctrine that insists on the U.S. right to launch unprovoked aggression against any country in the world? No. More: Obama
doesn’t expose or oppose the U.S. rape of the world over many years - the draining of Latin America, the robbery of oil resources from
the Middle East? (No, he like McCain talks as if Arab countries have been taking advantage of the U.S.!) Obama doesn’t call for removing US
troops, ships, nukes and missiles that threaten people all over the world, and that prop up hated oppressors in country after country. He doesn’t
oppose the massively exploit the world’s poorest people in vast new sweatshop zones - or the rapid restructuring of the whole world’s economy to
better carry on that exploitation. He doesn’t oppose the tight U.S. alliance with Israel, or the continuing outrage of Israeli occupation of Palestinian
land. and so on and so on. On every key issue and aspect of empire, Obama supports U.S. imperialism - supports strengthening
its “standing in the world,” supports “restoring U.S. leadership in the world,” supports “U.S. national security” - which are
all the codewords for imperialism. So that is the overall point. No one can point out, in any way, why Obama is not firmly and
enthusiastically on the side of U.S. imperialism. This is not a matter of rhetoric. This is not a matter of “saying what you need to say to get elected.”
It is what is happening here: Barack Obama is running for the commander in chief of the world’s most aggressive and brutal empire - and his politics
and plans fully serve that. And they will serve that if he makes it into the Oval Office. And in that context, we can zero in on his critique of the
current wars
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INHERENCY - IRAQ / IMPERIALISM
U.S. PRESENCE FROM IRAQ IS GRADUALLY BEING RECEDED THROUGH COVERT OPERATIONS AT NIGHT, INVISIBLY
REDUCING THEIR MILITARY PRESENCE WHILE MAINTAINING EXPLOITATIVE, COLONIAL CONTROL OVER THE REGION
Michael Schwartzprofessor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context 7/9/09
[“Colonizing Iraq: The Obama Doctorine?”, TomDispatch.com,
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175093/michael_schwartz_twenty_first_century_colonialism_in_iraq)
Here’s how reporters Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora of the New York Times described the highly touted American withdrawal
from Iraq’s citieslast week:“Much ofthe complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat
outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night. Gen. Ray Odierno, the overall American commander in Iraq, has ordered that an
increasing number of basic operations- transport and re-supply convoys, for example - take place at night, when fewer Iraqis are
likely to see that the American withdrawal is not total.”Acting in the dark of night, in fact, seems to catch the nature of
American plans for Iraq in a particularly striking way. Last week, despite the death of Michael Jackson, Iraq made it back into the TV
news asIraqis celebrated a highly publicized American military withdrawal from their cities. Fireworks went off; some Iraqis
gathered to dance and cheer; the first military parade since Saddam Hussein’s day took place (in the fortified Green Zone, the country’s ordinary
streets still being too dangerous for such things); the U.S. handed back many small bases and outposts; andPrime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
proclaimed a national holiday - “sovereignty day,” he called it.All of this fit with a script promisingly laid out byPresident
Barack Obamain his 2008 presidential campaign. More recently, in his much praised speech to the students of Egypt’s Cairo University,
hepromised that the U.S. would keep no bases in Iraq, and would indeed withdraw its military forces from the country by the
end of 2011.Unfortunately, not just for the Iraqis, but for the American public, it’s what’s happening in “the dark” - beyond the glare of lights and TV
cameras - that counts. While many critics of the Iraq War have been willing to cut the Obama administration some slack as its foreign policy team and the
U.S. military gear up for that definitive withdrawal, something else - something more unsettling - appears to be going on.And it wasn’t
just the president’s hedging over withdrawing American “combat” troops from Iraq - which, in any case, make up as few as one-
third of the 130,000 U.S. forces still in the country - now extended from 16 to 19 months. Nor was it the re-labeling of some of them as
“advisors” so they could, in fact, stay in the vacated cities, or the redrawing of the boundary lines of the Iraqi capital,
Baghdad, to exclude a couple of key bases the Americans weren’t about to give up.After all, there can be no question that
the Obama administration’s policy is indeed to reduce what the Pentagon might callthe U.S. military “footprint” in Iraq.To put it
another way, Obama’s key officials seem to be opting not for blunt-edged, Bush-style militarism, but for what might be thought of as an
administrative push in Iraq, what Vice President Joe Biden has called “a much more aggressive program vis-à-vis the Iraqi government
to push it to political reconciliation.”An anonymous senior State Department official described this new “dark of night” policy recently to Christian
Science Monitor reporter Jane Arraf this way: “One of the challenges of that new relationship is how the U.S. can continue to wield influence on
key decisions without being seen to do so.”Without being seen to do so. On this General Odierno and the unnamed official are in agreement. And
so, it seems, is Washington. As a result, the crucial thing you can say about the Obama administration’s military and civilian planning so far is this: ignore the
headlines, the fireworks, and the briefly cheering crowds of Iraqis on your TV screen. Put all that talk of withdrawal aside for a moment and - if you take a
closer look, letting your eyes adjust to the darkness - what is vaguely visible is the silhouette of a new American posture in Iraq. Think of it as the Obama
Doctrine. And what it doesn’t look like is the posture of an occupying power preparing to close up shop and head for home .As your eyes grow
accustomed to the darkness, you begin to identify a deepening effort to ensure that Iraq remains a U.S. client state, or, as
General Odierno described it to the press on June 30th, “a long-term partner with the United States in the Middle East.” Whether Obama’s national security
team can succeed in this is certainly an open question, but,on a first hard look, what seems to be coming into focus shouldn’t be too unfamiliar
to students of history. Once upon a time, itused to have a name:colonialism.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 61
THE BUREAUCRACY OF THE U.S. EMBASSY IS UNCOMPROMISINGLY COLONIALIST - THE ABUNDANCE OF AMERICAN
ADMINISTRATORS IS A TOOL TO CONTROL IRAQ’S POLITICS, MILITARY, AND ECONOMY.
Michael SCHWARTZ professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context 7/9/09
Traditional colonialism was characterized by three features: ultimate decision-making rested with the occupying power
instead of the indigenous client government; the personnel of the colonial administration were governed by different laws
and institutions than the colonial population; and the local political economy was shaped to serve the interests of the
occupying power. All the features of classic colonialismtook shape in the Bush years in Iraq andare now, as far as we can tell,being
continued, insome cases even strengthened, in the early months ofthe Obama era.The U.S. embassy in Iraq, built by the Bush
administration to the tune of $740 million, is by far the largest in the world. It is now populated by more than 1,000 administrators,
technicians, and professionals - diplomatic, military, intelligence, and otherwise - though all are regularly, if euphemistically, referred to as
“diplomats” in official statements and in the media . This level of staffing - 1,000 administrators for a country of perhaps 30 million
- is well above the classic norm for imperial control. Back in the early twentieth century, for instance,Great Britain utilized fewer
officials to rule a population of 300 million in its Indian Raj.Such a concentration of foreign officialdom in such a gigantic
regional command center- and no downsizing or withdrawals are yet apparent there - certainly signals Washington’s larger imperial
design: to have sufficient administrative labor power on hand to ensure that American advisors remain significantly
embedded in Iraqi political decision-making, in itsmilitary, andin the key ministries ofits (oil-dominated) economy.From the first
moments of the occupation of Iraq, U.S. officials have been sitting in the offices of Iraqi politicians and bureaucrats, providing
guidelines, training decision-makers, and brokering domestic disputes. As a consequence, Americans have been involved, directly or
indirectly, in virtually all significant government decision-making.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 62
U.S. OCCUPATION OF IRAQ IS IMPERIALISTIC, ANY CLAIM OTHERWISE IS A RUSE AND CAN IN NO FORM CAN
LIBERATE THE COUNTRY
JohnNICHOLS, Writer for The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Author, “Sorry, Mr. President, it
is Imperialism,” http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0416-04.htm, April 16, 2004
Here is a tip for President Bush:Next time you endeavor to justify the violent occupation of Iraq, you might want to
avoid using phrases like, "We're not an imperial power. We're a liberating power." That was the line the president adopted
in the prime time press conference that was organized this week as part of the latest of his administration's uninspired attempts to calm concerns
about the killings, kidnappings and related crises in Iraq.Unfortunately, the old rule applies: When you have to say you aren't
an imperialist, you almost certainly are one. And when you have to say that you are a liberating power, you almost
certainly are not in the liberation business.Perhaps the president really believes that invading another country,
forcing a regime change and then picking pliantbureaucratsto serve as the friendly faces of that occupation is not
imperialism. And perhaps the president really believes that the people of Iraq find it liberating to have the army of
a foreign land shuttering their newspapers, controlling their resources, policing their streets, arresting their friends
and relatives, and killing and maiming their neighbors.But, even if the president does entertain such fantasies, his aides have a
responsibility to keep him from making statements that sound absurd on their face.And claiming that the occupation of Iraq is not an
act of imperialism is as absurd as referring to that occupation as an act of liberation.The president's aides might want to
offer their boss a quick history lesson. When the American revolutionaries were struggling to throw off the shackles of British colonialism, they
received vital assistance from the French government. The French did not start the fight, however, and once it was finished, they quickly exited the
scene. As a result, the French were revered during the early years of this country's history as America's truest friends .Had the Iraqi people
mounted a mass revolt against Saddam Hussein's dictatorial rule, had the Bush administration then provided
assistance to that struggle, and had the U.S. troops quickly left the Iraqis to settle their own affairs when the struggle was done,
Americans mightwellbe viewed as true friends of Iraq.But that's not what happened. A little over a year ago, theBush
administration ordered the invasion and occupation of a country that posed no threat to the United States. The
administration is now cobbling together an unelected "government" to pretend to take charge of Iraq on June 30. The stage-managed handoff
of Iraq to a U.S.-designed "governing council" will not end the occupation because it will not put the Iraqi people
in a position to control their fate - let alone their oil. It will simply put a local face on the occupation
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 63
THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ IS ONE OF THE GREATEST IMPERIALIST OFFENSES KILLING HUNDREDS OF THOUSAND AND
U.S. HEGEMONIC CONTROL CONTINUES TO KEEP OTHER STATES UNDER ITS THUMB
AshleySmith (Organizer of International Socialist Organization and Burlington Anti-War Coalition, Anatomy of an Imperial War Crime - the
invasion and occupation of Iraq, International Socialist Review September/October 2007
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Imperialism_Neocolonialism/Anatomy_ImperialCrime_Iraq.html) 2007
The invasion and occupation of Iraq is one of the greatest crimes in the history of imperialism. According to a study published
in the British medical journal, the Lancet, there were 665,000 excess deaths between 2003 and 2006 attributable to the
occupation. The United Nations reports that the United States has created the biggest refugee crisis in Middle East since
the Israeli expulsion of Palestiniansin 1948. Iraq, which once had the living standards of Greece in the 1970s, now falls below Burundi as one
of the poorest countries on the planet. And it is coming apart under the stress of a civil war that the U.S. orchestrated by pitting
Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds against one another. In the 2007 Failed States Index, issued by the Fund for Peace and Foreign
Policy magazine ranks Iraq as the second-most unstable country in the world, behind Sudan and ahead of the ravaged
Sub-Saharan states and even Haiti. One of the birthplaces of civilization now lies in burning ruins.The Bush
administration had aimed to use the political capital it obtained in the wake of the September 11 attacks to pursue a more
preemptive, aggressive foreign policy designed to cement the U.S. as the world's unchallengeable superpower. After first
dismantling Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the Bush administration hoped to install a sympathetic government in Iraq, conduct
regime changes of a similar nature in Syria and Iran, and settle other conflicts in the region like those in Lebanon and Palestine on U.S. terms. With
the region and its strategic oil reserves under its control, the U.S. hoped to hold all potential challengers that are dependent
on Mideast oil, such as China, under its thumb
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 64
INHERENCY - AFGHANISTAN / IMPERIALISM
THE END OF THE WAR IS FARTHER AND FARTHER AWAY AS THE U.S. CONTINUES ITS MURDER OF
CIVILIANS, TORTURE, AND PUSHING THE AFGHANI POPULATION INTO POVERTY
MAOIST PARTY OF AFGHANISTAN 2009
(HTTP://WWW.SHOLAJAWID.ORG/ENGLISH/WHATSNEW/AFGHANISTAN_OCCUPATION080909.HTML) AUGUST 9, 2009
Within two months after they invaded Afghanistan, the U.S.-led coalition forces ousted the Taleban from power and
declared victory. But the war wasn't over. In fact, now even American military authorities admit that the war's end is
receding further and further from sight. After seven years of occupation, themilitary and political situation inAfghanistanhas
become critical. The occupiers are making every effort to ease the situation and reverse the tide that has been running against them.
Theirmethodsincludebuilding up their troop strength, obliging their occupation partners to join the fighting in the war zones, and murdering
civilians (including many children) in aerial attacks on an unprecedented scale . On the other side, the Taleban and other
fundamentalists are taking advantage of the chaos and misery created by the occupiers and the puppet regime. They are advancing their war and
imposing their medieval theocratic dictates over more of the country and its people, although they do not have stable areas of political power. What
the invasion brought Afghanistan This war launched with the pretexts of a "war on terror" and "freeing the people of
Afghanistan"was in fact a war of aggression aimed at serving the interests of the U.S. and the other imperialists,regional
interests given greater importance by their global context . But the achievement of the war's aims has run up against obstacles arising
from its unjust and reactionary nature. This is something that the arrogant imperialists could not and did not want to
foresee. All the various imperialist countries, whether ruled by open right-wing regimes or social democratic governments, obeyed only
one logic: the interests of monopoly capital and imperialist power relations. They took advantage of 9/11 and the anti-woman
brutality of the Talebanregime to legitimise their invasion of Afghanistan. They never doubted that victory would come
quickly and easily. However, "Operation Enduring Freedom", asthe invasion was labelled, brought the people of Afghanistan no
freedom at all. Instead, the result has been all kinds of misery imposed on the people in various forms by both the
occupiersand the fundamentalists.In addition to frequent bombardments of villages in the contested areas of the south and east , the invaders
carry out torture at Bagram(the former Soviet base near Kabul now run by the U.S.) and other military facilities. They harass the people
and worse on the streets and in their homes. Instead of the promised economic reconstruction, the country's economy has
become dependent on the drug trade. Some 40 percent of the people suffer absolute poverty, and 20 million - more than
70 percent of the population - live under the poverty line. The invaders have entrusted the government and parliament to
the most corrupt and brutal criminals,reactionaries whom the people have known and hated for the last 30 years. Further, the occupation of
Afghanistan has drawn Pakistan deeply into this war, risking a wider and more complex conflict that could pull in other countries in the region, such
as Iran and even conceivably India.When the occupation of Afghanistan started many people were astonished by the military
superiority of theimperialists and in particular the U.S. imperialists, especially by the video game-like clips of their high-tech military
apparatus played over and over again on global TV screens. Yet today the military situationfor the occupationhas deteriorated so much
that nowhigh-ranking Western government and military officials are using terms like "stalemate" to describe conditions in some
parts of the country.A recent, still secret Washington intelligence report calls the overall situation a "downward spiral". (International Herald
Tribune, 31 October 2008) We no longer hear claims that the U.S. is winning the war. All authoritative sources agree that the occupation faces, at
best, many more years of fighting. Even if we compare the present military situation with that of 18 months ago, when occupation officials were still
optimistic about victory, we can see that the war has become much more intense. Causalities have risen on both sides. The war has spread to new
regions, and areas the occupiers formerly considered under control are now considered dangerous - some of the northern part of the country and even
the capital. Maybe the occupiers' only military achievement in the last two years has been the killing of a number of important Taleban commanders.
However, the lasting impact of those killings is debatable. The changes in the situation have given rise to contradictions among the imperialists and
between the occupiers and the puppet regime. These conflicts are not such that they can split or seriously weaken the imperialist coalition at present,
but they have hurt morale. The tone has become sharper. Several governments are no longer enthusiastic about sending troops to Afghanistan.
Furthermore, they are blaming the U.S. for this deteriorating state of affairs, due, they say, to strategic errors and a heavy-handed approach. A Nato
meeting held in Bucharest last April included an expanded conference on the military situation in Afghanistan attended by heads of state and
government. At this summit the U.S., UK, Netherlands and Canada vigorously demanded that Germany, France and Italy send more troops to
Afghanistan and lift the restrictions now keeping their forces already stationed there out of combat. The Bucharest summit and the period prior to it
revealed significant disagreements among the occupiers. Despite resistance from some countries, those attending agreed to send more soldiers. But
the summit was unable to settle the differences. Despite a fake show of unity at the end, it brought to the surface the fragility of the unity between
them, reflecting political disagreements and contradictory interests. At present 40 countries have troops in Afghanistan. Until recently 26 of these
contingents were under Nato command in the framework of the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the rest under U.S.-lead
coalition forces. At the beginning of the occupation ISAF had 5,000 troops mainly concentrated in Kabul, and the number of "international coalition"
troops went up to 20,000 before dropping down to 15,000 when Nato assumed command of ISAF and began taking part in the war zones. Thus the
occupation troops numbered about 20,000 in total. In the years since then, with the intensification of the war, the presence of foreign forces in
Afghanistan has increased. There are now about 60,000 troops under Nato command. The total number of American soldiers in Afghanistan at
present is said to be about 36,000. These troop numbers only refer to those assigned to combat roles. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT)
and armed private security company employees should also be counted as part of the occupation forces. "Despite the word ‘reconstruction' in their
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 65
name, these PRT teams working throughout the country are military, not civilian. Each is led by a particular Nato country. Although their members
do not wear uniforms, they are all soldiers. They are accompanied by uniformed soldiers to protect their security. Economic, social and cultural
programmes are only one aspect of their multiple tasks. They also take part in what's called military reconstruction, organizing the police forces and
training recruits. In fact, they control the provincial security commands. They also intervene in all administration affairs, appointing and dismissing
foreign experts in government offices in the provinces. These teams have the real administration and security of the provinces under their control and
can even appoint or dismiss provincial governors." (From Sholeh Jawid, no. 18, organ of the Communist [Maoist] Party of Afghanistan.) There are
about PRT members in Afghanistan.Thousands of private security company employees have been sent along with the occupation
forces.Although they come and go, their number is estimated to be about 5,000 at any given time. These groups are usually tasked with
patrolling the main roads,escorting logistic caravans,and protecting governmental locations and leading officials. Most of the
higher-ranking employees of these private armies are ex-U.S. armed forces officers , but they also employ non-American foreign
personnel. They have also been trying recruiting some Afghanis, especially from among criminal jihadi groups. Thus the total
number of occupation forces is now approximately 71,000 - about three and a half times more than at the start. Following the Bucharest summit, U.S.
President George W. Bush approved the deployment of 8,000 more troops in early 2009. Gordon Brown, the UK Prime Minister, indicated that
alliance members would allocate at least 18 new advanced helicopters to Afghan operations. France announced it would dispatch 700 soldiers to the
war zones in eastern Afghanistan, bringing the total number of French troops to about 3,000. Canada announced it would keep its 2,500-strong
contingent in the country. Their troops are stationed in contested Kandahar province, a Taleban stronghold. Earlier Canada had warned that they
would withdraw their contingent if other countries didn't send more help. Under pressure from Nato, the German government pledged 1,000 more
soldiers, and the Bundestag (parliament) approved it in October. This means that Germany will eventually have 4,500 troops in the country, the third-
largest contingent after the United States and Britain. Finally, General David McKiernan, the commander of American and Nato forces in
Afghanistan, recently said that he needs as many as 15,000 more combat and support troops, in addition to the 8,000 troops the U.S. already has
scheduled to be sent early next year. Another significant change since the beginning of the occupation is the increased role for Nato in commanding
occupation forces. This happened several years ago, at a time when the U.S. was preoccupied with the war in Iraq. As the situation in Afghanistan
grew more intense, the U.S. tried to bring in more European forces and soldiers under Nato command from other parts of the world (such as Turkey).
Now leadership of Nato and American forces has been combined in one man, the U.S. General McKiernan. This move to re-establish full American
control of all occupation troops in Afghanistan and at the same time unify them under a single command reflects the widely-shared belief in
Washington that the war is going badly, and that it must be shifted more to the centre of the U.S.'s strategic concerns, in terms of troop levels and
especially command, which involves political as well as military components. David Petreus, the general credited with the U.S.'s recent successes in
splitting and at least temporarily neutralising some of the forces fighting the occupiers in Iraq, has been put in charge of the whole region. He is
expected to pay close attention to strategic issues in Afghanistan. Multiplying their troop strength did not help the imperialists stabilize
their occupation. Instead, it resulted in an escalation of the war on both sides,as the following quotes show. For the first time, in
May 2008 the number of coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan was more than those killed in Iraq. "Pentagon officials said that in May, 16 coalition
troops were killed in Iraq, 14 of them American, and that 18 coalition troops were killed in Afghanistan, 13 of them American." (Guardian, 13 June
2008) "Overall, McKiernan offered a sober view of Afghanistan, saying the violence is more intense than he had anticipated, particularly in the east
and south. The U.S. military death toll has risen to more than 130 this year, exceeding the 117 killed last year and reaching a new annual high since
the war began in 2001."(Washington Post, 2 October 2000) Yetthere is no prospect that the imperialists will abandon their war in
Afghanistan. The troop escalation, command changes and other moves are an indication of even more involvement and determination on the part
of all the major powers. Within the U.S., from start to finish in the presidential campaign, all the major candidates argued for stepped-up war there.
One contradiction the imperialists face is this: on the one they are not willing to end the occupation, and on the other, the
Afghan people's hatred for that occupation is the main source of strength for the fundamentalists fighting it. Right now
there is now much discussion within imperialist circles about how to deal with this and make a breakthrough , not only in
reversing the unfavourable tide of war buteventually in achieving their political goals. It is an indication of the seriousness of their
intentions to persist that while they recognise the risk of extending the war more widely in the region, they are not letting
even that danger stop them.Consequently, once again Afghanistan is at the centre of discussions and differences among the
imperialists.Even the future of the puppet regime and in particular Karzai himself is under serious consideration .There is no doubt that the
imperialists are striving to come up with a "more realistic" strategy. And it's obvious their "more realistic" strategy is not
going to mean getting their hands off Afghanistan. What seems "more realistic" to them is either to hugely increase the number of their
forces in Afghanistan, or to try to cut a deal with the Taleban in some way and draw them into the puppet regime, or a combination of both. This
would not solve the problem, although it could achieve some temporary results. The basic contradiction - imperialist intervention and domination -
would remain unresolved and continue to assert itself, as has been the case in Afghanistan for the last 30 years.
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***ADVANTAGES***
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***JUST WAR THEORY***
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JWT DISCRETE ADVANTAGE
MORAL DISCOURSES LIKE JUST WAR THEORY ACT NOT TO ETHICALLY INHIBIT THE USE OF MILITARY
POWER IN THE WAR ON TERROR, BUT RATHER PROVIDE JUSTIFICATION FOR UNCHECKED VIOLENCE.
ANTHONY BURKE, SENIOR LECTURER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, 2004. [“JUST WAR OR
ETHICAL PEACE: MORAL DISCOURSES ON WAR AFTER 9/11,” INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, 80 (2), 329-353]
For those who assume that the application of morality to foreign policy or war-making implies a radical critique
of strategic violence—one that seeks to abolish it or at least to control its use—it may be surprising that moral
convictions can be placed in its service. Yet in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the development of
the cybernetically controlled, mediated and ‘limited’ forms of violence James Der Derian has termed ‘virtuous war’, we are faced with a
prospect of morality being deployed, imagined and evaded in the process of planning and waging the war on
terror.5 In however bizarre and unsatisfactory a fashion, moral discourses and judgements permeate the war on terror, many
of them in its justification. In the light of this experience we may be forced to conclude that ‘amorality’ does embody powerful moral
assumptions; that in the view of many, strategic violence is and can be ‘moral’; that we must see a moral position implicit in George Kennan’s self-
consciously amoral view that ‘the interests of the national society for which government has to concern itself are basically those of its military
security, the integrity of its political life, and the well-being of its people.’6 Moral discourses and justifications permeated the
sense of outrage and violation felt by Americans after 9/11, soaked its media coverage and public debate, and
were smoothly deployed to justify military action against Afghanistan. Rhetorics of justice and injustice,
humanity and inhumanity, civilization and barbarism, were repeatedly invoked by US officials in the tragedy’s
wake. Moral discourses have been used to brush aside concerns about the disproportionately high level of
civilian casualties incurred during US and Northern Alliance operations against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda, as
they were similarly used to play down the casualties of the war against Iraq. Moral arguments—including, incredibly, ‘just
war’ arguments—have even been used to support waging war against Iraq.7 In their wake, we face the sobering
realization that moral discourses are part of the warrior’s political armoury; they are part of war’s machinery,
not a rod in its wheels. As Vivienne Jabri has written, ‘strategic and normative (just war) discourses … constitute
together the structuring language of war … [they] share that element of destruction which is the defining
characteristic of war.’8 In short, moral rules about war’s justification, process and restraint may function not so
much as limitations on war as tools for its liberation.
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JUST WAR THEORY HAS PLAINLY FAILED TO LIMIT THE SCOPE OF STRATEGIC VIOLENCE. INSTEAD, IT HAS
SANCTIFIED THE STATE’S WAR, TRIVIALIZING THE MURDER OF INNOCENT HUMAN BEINGS AS NECESSARY
OR COLLATERAL AND HAS NORMALIZED TERROR, MAKING BOTH A PERMANENT PART OF HUMAN
RELATIONS.
Death can be commuted not only through technological distancing, media spin and military jargon, but also in
theory—which works to control its ethical disturbance through the creation of abstract moral and political rules
that claim to fix truth, enable justice and provide a sure guide for policy. ‘Just war’ theory now plays this role,
especially as a way of controlling and managing the question of responsibility raised by Der Derian. The moralizing
of just war advocates has come into renewed prominence since 9/11 as a legitimizing framework for the war on
terror, in terms of providing both justifications for military action (jus ad bellum) and moral limits on its conduct (jus
in bello).12 The resurgence of just war doctrine presents a unique set of problems: its relation to both realist doctrines of ‘reason of
state’ and liberal emphases on self- defence and international law is ambivalent and shifting, and to these it adds
a potent religious/metaphysical layer of justification. On the one hand, just war arguments generally map out no
essential role for international law and have often been deployed to justify its evasion, preferring instead their
own (strikingly malleable) criteria for the waging and conduct of war. On the other hand, in the recent writings of Jean Bethke
Elshtain just war doctrine blurs into and in fact sanctifies ‘reason of state’ as she simultaneously lays claim to a ‘Christian
tradition [that] tells us government is instituted by God’ and ‘an Augustinian realism that resists sentimentalism and insists on ethical restraint’.13
This is symptomatic of a more general phenomenon: that more conventionally ‘realist’ arguments for war based on national
integrity and survival draw on and deploy moral discourses, even as we think of realists being governed more
by instrumental concerns with interests, utility and effectiveness. Michael Walzer makes a significant point in his recent
admission that ‘there are now reasons of state for fighting justly’—even if I see it as a problem and he as a potential virtue.14 In the face of this
interweaving and proliferation of moral discourses in favour of strategic violence, a number of important
questions arise. Are our moral discourses—whether they are couched in realist, ‘just war’ or liberal/legal terms — adequate to the
problem and phenomenon of war, and especially war against terror?Where they set out rules, criteria and
restraints, are those provisions observed and enforced? Are they adequate as moral standards in themselves, or
can they be criticized in these terms? Do they adequately understand either war or terror, and will war against
terror ever succeed in eliminating either from our world? Do they unfairly colonize the possible space of
discourse about morality, ethics and strategic violence—and what alternative ways of thinking might be
possible were we to shake off their constraints? I will address these questions with a particular focus on ‘just war’ rhetoric and theory
as they have been mobilized in the United States after 9/11. My exploration arises out of what I had originally thought of as a tangential project
examining the influence of instrumental reason on strategic discourse and war —until it became clear that moral discourses are closely
intertwined with instrumental/ rational processes of strategic calculation, even as their result might be forms of
violence many consider to be morally unacceptable. The no-man’s land that joins these discourses and processes is my analytical
terrain; a land where, as the phrase suggests, morally acceptable slaughter, suffering and chaos are described as
‘regrettable’, but occur because they are ‘unintentional’, ‘collateral’ or ‘necessary’. Is an international
community based on modern liberal principles really willing to treat this as morally acceptable, and leave its
theories, laws and systems of enforcement untouched? One of my conclusions is that moral discourses of strategic
violence have, in the post-Enlightenment period, internalized the instrumental (Clausewitzian) assumption that war
is both a normal and a rational pursuit of political ends. This is what unites and underpins the various moral
discourses of war—realist, liberal and neo-Augustinian: the conviction that has made war such a pervasive
modern phenomenon, that war ‘is a mere continuation of policy by other means’.15 Following this, another important
conclusion underpins the argument of this article. If war is seen as policy, we must do what so many just war thinkers fail to
do: treat war as part of a historical and policy continuum, rather than an isolated event limited to the conduct of
high-intensity military operations whose impact can somehow be limited in time, scope and spatial reach.16
[CONTINUED]
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[CONTINUED]
This continuum must include mechanisms such as diplomacy, covert operations, sanctions, coups, economic relationships, foreign aid and
international law enforcement, and moral responsibility must extend across the entire gamut of social, political and humanitarian circumstances
which precede, generate, shape and follow conflict. Given the complex array of interconnected threats, processes and
conflicts tied into the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror—among them the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the 1982 Israeli invasion of
Lebanon and the involvement of Iran and Syria there, the Mujahedin war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the development of radical Islamist
movements in Egypt and other African and Middle Eastern states, and Iraq’s war against Iran and its aftermath in the invasion of Kuwait, Operation
Desert Storm, UN sanctions and CIA covert operations—we need a moral and analytical framework which can better deal
with historical and geopolitical complexity. The article concludes by speculating that our frameworks for the moral
justification (and limitation) of strategic violence have failed us; and, moreover, that they have failed at a cost of
thousands of innocent lives and at the risk of creating a future in which we are not free of terror but condemned
to its permanent presence. It shifts the normative ideal from just war to ethical peace, an ethics that eschews abstract moral
theory in favour of a context-sensitive ethical orientation that is concerned with the outcomes of decisions and
the avoidance of suffering. While strategic violence will be difficult to eliminate, and may be necessary in
strictly limited situations before the achievement of ethical peace, its acceptance can only be conditional, and under
conditions far more stringent, enforceable and morally consistent than have so far been provided by either
realism, just war theory or international law. Against the claustrophobic and divided moral communities
imagined by both realism and just war theory, ethical peace imagines a universal moral community in which no
ethical obligation can be traded away in times of emergency, and no humans can be put in mortal danger so that
others may be safe.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 71

JUST WAR THEORY ENABLES THE CONSTRUCTION OF IMPACTS THAT MUST BE COUNTERED – THIS MAKES
ACTS OF AGGRESSIVE STRATEGIC VIOLENCE AND PREEMPTIVE STRIKES INEVITABLE.
BURKE, ANTHONY 2005 [“AGAINST THE NEW INTERNATIONALISM”, ETHICS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 19,
NO.2 PG 77-78]
Furthermore, Elshtain’s gesture at deconstruction (“war’s historic opponents ...are inside a frame with war”) dissolves into
normative incoherence. Peace is not the Janus face of war, but its normative other. Certainly peace and war are
linked as systems of meaning—the horrors of war provide peace with its normative force—but as norms there is
a vast distance between them. They are like planets separated by the vacuum of space, their overlapping gravitational
forces drawing every action, every policy, and every ethic in one direction or another. There is no ontological
middle ground, no viable normative place of war/peace where the two can mesh together in a mutually
enhancing exchange. I argue this because it is just such an imagined
normative harmony of war and peace that underpins the new internationalism and hides there as a new ontological claim. The practical
force to my argument is supplied by the fact that just as every normative argument made in this field will reinforce
either war or peace, policy actions will also do so, ineluctably affecting the future possibilities for global
security and conflict. Such a practical understanding is implicit in the international system of arms control set
out by the NPT, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the now moribund Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which is structured by
the need to manage and gradually eliminate the security dilemma. In this sense, the new internationalists who argue for
selective/preventive counter-proliferation, while remaining silent about the U.S. administration’s plans for
missile defense and space, are literally playing with nuclear fire. As Neta Crawford argues, a preventive security
doctrine “is likely to create more of both fearful and aggressive states ...instability is likely to grow as a
preventive war doctrine creates the mutual fear of surprise attack.”VI of the NPT, with its in junction for , embodies an
insight that WMD proliferation is also driven by a desire to counter conventional military threats cheaply. This is
the widely understood basis for Israeli nuclear doctrine, and it seems reasonable to see it as at least part of the
rationale for the Iranian and North Korean programs. A desire for a symmetric as much as mutual deterrence
drives WMD proliferation, and hence the proliferation of conventional and mass destruction weapons cannot be
disentangled.
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IF THE WAR IN IRAQ PROVES ANYTHING, IT IS THE POVERTY OF JUST WAR THEORY WHEN IT COMES TO
PREVENTING UNNECESSARY VIOLENCE. RATHER, IT LEGITIMIZES VIOLENCE AS A RATIONAL MEANS TO
POLITICAL ENDS, WRITING OFF ALL THOSE AFFECTED AS MERE COLLATERAL DAMAGE. ARMED WITH THE
MORAL AUTHORITY AFFORDED BY JUST WAR THEORY, WARPLANNERS ARE ABSOLVED OF RESPONSIBILITY
FOR KILLING AND LEFT ACCOUNTABLE TO NO ONE FOR MURDEROUS FOREIGN POLCY.
Just war theory claims to limit and control strategic violence in two ways: by limiting the circumstances under
which one can resort to war (jus ad bellum), and by limiting the ways it can be fought (jus in bello). These roughly
correspond with similar categories in international law (as laid out in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions) but cannot be reduced to them;
furthermore, just war advocates do not require that states be accountable to international law. In her book Women and war Elshtain sets out the moral
tests of just war as follows: (1) that a war be the last resort to be used only after all other means have been exhausted; (2) that a war be clearly an act
of redress of rights actually violated or defense against unjust demands backed by the threat of force; (3) that war be openly and legally declared by
properly constituted governments; (4) that there be a reasonable prospect of victory; (5) that the means be proportionate to the ends; (6) that a war be
waged in such a way as to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants; (7) that the victorious nation not require the utter humiliation of the
vanquished.38 Just war advocates oppose force being used aggressively, for the purposes of national aggrandizement or imperialism; they oppose the
preventive use of force, but are ambiguous about pre-emptive strikes; they advocate the use of peaceful efforts to deal with threats before war is tried;
and they advocate the principles of ‘proportionality’ and ‘non-combatant immunity’ to limit the impact of war on civilians. It is these last principles
that, for me, are most controversial. Proportionality and non-combatant immunity are welcome brakes on the limitless
application of force, but they are also beset with problems. First, the demand that means be matched to ends
exposes a Clausewitzian instrumentalism hiding in the interstices of just war theory, which accepts that (under
more limited circumstances) war is a rational and controllable means to political ends. Second, the principle of non-
combatant immunity is qualified by a judgement that ‘non-combatants must not be the intended targets of
violence.’39 There is enormous scope for abuse here, compounded by an implicit assumption that decisions and
acts of war are limited in space and time—that moral judgements about particular circumstances can be
quarantined from the history preceding, or a future beyond, the cessation of high-intensity military operations.
Once we begin to question these assumptions, morally neat arguments about the justice of strategic violence
begin to unravel. We can begin to test just war theory by examining the judgements its advocates have made
about the legitimacy of armed force in the conflicts that have surrounded, preceded and followed the tragedy of
9/11: the Arab–Israeli conflict; the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan; Operation Desert Storm; the sanctions and weapons inspection regime
imposed on Iraq after 1990; and the post- 9/11 wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Focusing on two of the most influential theorists
case of Israel’s 1967 war, he suggested that ‘the [Iraq] war that is being discussed is preventive, not pre-emptive—it is designed to respond to a more
will fall in harm’s way. But it is forbidden to knowingly and maliciously target them.’46 The arguments of both here are replete with problems, at
both the jus in bello and jus ad bellum levels. In relation to jus ad bellum, Elshtain stands on disappearing ground: months after the
conclusion of the fighting, no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, and no links to Al-Qaeda
proven.47 Then there is the pile of documentary and anecdotal evidence, dating back to a presidential finding
signed by George Bush senior in 1992, that successive US governments had really been driven by an overriding
policy aim to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and that influential neo-conservatives began to argue
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 73
publicly in 1998 that CIA-directed covert operations should be abandoned in favour of a military invasion.48 To
this can be added the way the regime-change policy muddied the inspection waters, given the clear views of US
officials that sanctions should remain until Saddam Hussein was removed from power, even if the UN
resolutions were complied with—a scandalous position for a veto-wielding UN Security Council member to
take.49 Larger strategic objectives for control of the Middle East dating back to 1975—the establishment of
military bases in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, removal of regimes in Iran and Syria, the strengthening of
Israel and the control of Gulf oil supplies—also rank as plausible motives for the invasion of Iraq.50 These facts
shake both Elshtain’s argument for the enforcement of UN resolutions with war in 2003, and Walzer’s view that there was a just and necessary war
waiting to be fought back in the 1990s when Saddam was playing hide-and-seek with the inspectors … an internationalist war, a war of enforcement,
and its justice would have derived, first, from the justice of the system it was enforcing and, second, from its likely outcome: the strengthening of the
UN and the global legal order.51 Not only are their analyses wilfully naive about the cynical realism of US and
European foreign policy with regard to Iraq—the double standard of states that had helped create Iraq’s WMD
capability before 1990 demanding compliance in its removal,52 while remaining unwilling to disarm
themselves—but they are silent about the crime against humanity perpetrated by the powers on the UN Security
Council as they claimed to be enforcing its resolutions. Just war talk of ‘proportionality’, ‘non-combatant
immunity’ and ‘the protection of innocents’ is worth recalling here, when against the fear of Iraq’s future use of
WMD is balanced the death of more than a million Iraqi citizens as a result of sanctions which US officials,
contrary to UN Resolutions 661 and 687, insisted should stay in place until Saddam Hussein was removed from
power.53 This was the ‘justice of the system it was enforcing’: a crime against humanity perpetrated by the UN
itself—an image of ‘justice’ angrily purloined by Osama bin Laden in his 1998 interview with ABC and then
directed, with terrifying intensity, into the heart of the United States three years later.54 The continuing spectacle
of western assumptions of moral superiority in relation to Iraq is deeply unsettling, when what would be more
appropriate is the kind of soul-searching that accompanied postwar revelations of the Nazi Holocaust. We are not to
know whether or not Elshtain and Walzer believe that the impact of the sanctions amounted to a major international crime, but they have both used
arguments that the death of civilians cannot be criminal if jus ad bellum conditions are met and the killing was unintentional. Indeed, in a combative
2003 Public Interest article Elshtain cites Walzer’s attack on critics of the war against Afghanistan to press home this point. Against what he
describes as ‘leftist’ claims that the similarity of the death tolls on September 11 and in Afghanistan undermines
the justice of the war, Walzer counters that this ‘denies one of the most basic and best understood moral
distinctions between premeditated murder and unintentional killing’.55 Even if we were to accept this distinction
(which seems to me to be a stunning evasion of responsibility), it is not as if the US were willing to make its
armed forces accountable for their targeting decisions, having refused to place its forces under the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently the only body able to prosecute violations of the laws of war. In the absence of that
accountability we are forced to rely on the arbitrary judgements of just war intellectuals, among whom Elshtain is
convinced that ‘no group in the US pays more attention to ethical restraint on the use of force than does the US military’ and that ‘the real dissenters
in American intellectual life are likely to be those who, at least in part, defend the foreign policy of the United States’.56
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 74
THREATS OF IMPROBABLE EXTINCTION IMPACTS ARE USED TO MAKE USE IGNORE BROADER AND MORE
HORRIFIC STATE SPONSORED VIOLENCE
CUOMO, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, 1996 (CHRIS CUOMO IS A THEORIST, ACTIVIST, AND ARTIST, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AND
WOMEN’S STUDIES, AND DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE FOR WOMEN’S STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA. CHRIS HOLDS A PH.D. IN
PHILOSOPHY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON. SHE HAS BEEN AWARDED GRANTS FROM THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION, THE
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION, AND THE CHARLES PHELPS TAFT CENTER, THE SARTORIALIST WAS HERE “WAR IS NOT JUST AN EVENT:
REFLECTIONS ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EVERYDAY VIOLENCE,” HYPATIA, VOL. 11, NO. 4, WOMEN AND VIOLENCE (AUTUMN, 1996), PP. 30-45
PUBLISHED BY: BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, P. JSTOR//DN)
Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and
specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on members of
military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and
institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman
entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in
an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism,
declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current
ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and
military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based
politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and
politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed,
omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives . Neglecting the
omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace , the polar opposite of war.
It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false
belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to
militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control . Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally
occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that
make resisters drop all other political priorities . Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters
complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in
constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over,
all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state . Moving away
from crisis-driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of relationships among
seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For
example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the
events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the
pervasive presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of
state-sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate interests ;
the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for
considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war." Given current American obsessions with
nationalism, guns, and militias, and growing hunger for the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate the need for
philosophical and political attention to connections among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded militaristic campaigns. I
propose that the constancy of militarism and its effects on social reality be reintroduced as a crucial locus of contemporary feminist attentions, and that feminists
emphasize how wars are eruptions and manifestations of omnipresent militarism that is a product and tool of multiply oppressive, corporate, technocratic states.2
Feminists should be particularly interested in making this shift because it better allows consideration of the effects of war and militarism on women, subjugated
peoples, and environments. While giving attention to the constancy of militarism in contemporary life we need not neglect the importance of addressing the specific
qualities of direct, large-scale, declared military conflicts. But the dramatic nature of declared, large-scale conflicts should not obfuscate
the ways in which military violence pervades most societies in increasingly technologically sophisticated ways and the
significance of military institutions and everyday practices in shaping reality. Philosophical discussions that focus only on the ethics of declaring
and fighting wars miss these connections, and also miss the ways in which even declared military conflicts are often
experienced as omnipresent horrors. These approaches also leave unquestioned tendencies to suspend or distort moral judgement in the face of what
appears to be the inevitability of war and militarism .
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Far from acting as an ethical restraint on war, moral discourses like Just War Theory unleash its violence.
Anthony Burke,Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, 2004. [“Just War or Ethical Peace: Moral
For those who assume that the application of morality to foreign policy or war-making implies a radical critique of
strategic violence-one that seeks to abolish it or at least to control its use-it may be surprising that moral convictions can
be placed in its service. Yet in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the development of the cybernetically controlled,
mediated and ‘limited’ forms of violence James Der Derian has termed ‘virtuous war’, we are faced with a prospect of morality being
deployed, imagined and evaded in the process of planning and waging the war on terror .5 In however bizarre and unsatisfactory a
fashion, moral discourses and judgements permeate the war on terror, many of them in its justification . In the light of this
experience we may be forced to conclude that ‘amorality’ does embody powerful moral assumptions; that in the view of many, strategic violence is
and can be ‘moral’; that we must see a moral position implicit in George Kennan’s self-consciously amoral view that ‘the interests of the national
society for which government has to concern itself are basically those of its military security, the integrity of its political life, and the well-being of its
people.’6 Moral discourses and justifications permeated the sense of outrage and violation felt by Americans after 9/11,
soaked its media coverage and public debate, and were smoothly deployed to justify military action against Afghanistan.
Rhetorics of justice and injustice, humanity and inhumanity, civilization and barbarism, were repeatedly invoked by US
officials in the tragedy’s wake. Moral discourses have been used to brush aside concerns about the disproportionately high
level of civilian casualties incurred during US and Northern Alliance operations against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda, as
they were similarly used to play down the casualties of the war against Iraq. Moral arguments-including, incredibly, ‘just war’
arguments-have even been used to support waging war against Iraq.7 In their wake, we face the sobering realization that
moral discourses are part of the warrior’s political armoury; they are part of war’s machinery, not a rod in its wheels . As
Vivienne Jabri has written, ‘strategic and normative (just war) discourses … constitute together the structuring language of war
… [they] share that element of destruction which is the defining characteristic of war. ’8 In short, moral rules about war’s
justification, process and restraint may function not so much as limitations on war as tools for its liberation.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 76
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JUST WAR THEORY FAILS TO CONSIDER THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON BOTH SIDES OF THE CONFLICT. WE MUST
BE CONSCIOUS OF THE WAY WE FIGHTS THAT WAR AND MAKE SURE THE WRONG THAT IT IS TRYING TO
RIGHT IS NOT BETTER THAN THE EFFECTS OF THE WAR IT HAS STARTED.
ROBERT E.WILLIAMS, JR. AND DAN CALDWELL in 2006 (Associate Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University,
Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University, 2006, Jus Post Bellum: Just War Theory and the Principles of Just Peace, Published in:
International Studies Perspectives 7, 309-320)
The just war tradition is based on the paradox that killing may be necessary to save lives, that the devastation of war may
be required to prevent the destruction of deeply held values. Pacifists think the paradox is in reality a contradiction. Their position is
understandable when we think of the consequences of modern warfare. How could the deaths of millions-some estimates put the number of people
killed in the wars of the twentieth century alone at 90 million-possibly be justified in the name of saving lives? In fact, there are enormous
numbers of war-related deaths that cannot be justified even in terms of the just war idea of waging war in order to save
lives.There have been, after all, unjust wars and, within those wars that were just, unjustifiable killings. But the principle, and
the paradox it engenders, is well illustrated by those cases in which a military response almost certainly did save lives (as in Kosovo) or would have
if it had been forthcoming (as in Rwanda). Over time, philosophers have divided just war thinking into two parts, jus ad bellum and
jus in bello- the before and after considerations separated by the point of entry into war.The first has to do with the moral
reasoning that justifies the resort to war-proper authority, just cause, last resort, right intention, and perhaps other concerns-while the
second has to do with the legitimacy of the means used to wage war. These considerations relate to why and how a war is fought. But
this conventional division sometimes obscures the fundamental inseparability of motive and means.If war can only be
justified by a concern for the lives and dignity-in essence, the human rights-of those we seek to defend (whether our own citizens or the
victims of attack or oppression elsewhere), then how we wage that war will matter a great deal.It is inconsistent to go to war for
the defense of human rights if such a war is likely to result in the deaths of extraordinary numbers of the civilians we seek
to save or, on balance, increase their misery. Likewise, it is inconsistent to claim to be waging a war for the defense of lives
from future terrorist attacks if such a war is likely to increase those attacks or result, on balance, in less security. Of course,
such consequentialist judgments are difficult to make, but a concern for justice requires that we make them to the best of our ability. More to the
point, however, is the understanding that how a war is fought is integrally related to its rationale.Reconciling means and ends is,
indeed, a matter of integrity. A just war is one that seeks to right a wrong , and, not incidentally, at a cost that will not leave us
wondering whether or not the wrong that has been righted might have been preferable to the wrongs we have left
behind.War is never a good thing, but we consider it justified if a persuasive case has been made that it is the lesser of two (or
ten or a hundred) evils. It must be expected to produce less evil than a reliance on diplomacy, less evil than economic sanctions, less evil than passive
resistance, less evil than doing nothing-less evil, that is, than anything we can plausibly offer as an alternative. Thus we must, to be moral,
concern ourselves with the evils that war produces and that raises questions about how we fight and what we do after we
have fought. Likewise, it means that how we intend to fight and what we intend to do after we have fought must be part of the
moral calculus in determining whether or not we may justly go to war. We begin to see, then, why retrospection is so important
to moral judgment in the sense of evaluation and why intention is so important to moral judgment in the sense of
discernment. World War II is called ‘‘the good war’’ not just because of the defeat of fascism and the liberation of captive peoples. Perhaps it was
‘‘the good war’’ not even primarily for these reasons. After all, the liberation brought by Allied armies came too late for many, including two-thirds
of Europe’s pre-war Jewish population. World War II is judged favorably by so many in large measure because of the postwar
order it established. Notwithstanding the Cold War and scores of civil wars and ethnic conflicts that followed, World War II led, in many
parts of the world, to decolonization, democratization, and development. It produced, in other words, significant improvements in
human rights. Of course, here we must recognize that the postwar order may have been judged quite differently by, for example, the Poles and the
French. It may be only a slight exaggeration to say that World War II was fully justified only when the United States began
to reconstruct Western Europe and to rehabilitate and reform Germany and Japan. Would it even be controversial to suggest that
the Soviets’ war of self-defense against German aggression was morally tainted by Stalin’s postwar policy of carting off to Russia economic assets
from the parts of Europe occupied by the Red Army or to claim that the Soviet Union fought a just war up to the point at which the Nazis were
expelled from Soviet territory, but that its ‘‘liberation’’ of Eastern Europe proved to be unjust because it merely replaced one alien dictatorship with
another? What happens after the shooting stops and the surrender is signed is important to the moral justification of warfare,
just as the means employed is. And yet there has always been inadequate attention paid to considerations of jus post
bellum in the just war tradition.
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Just War Theory has plainly failed to limit the scope of strategic violence. Instead, it has normalized war,
trivializing the murder of innocent human beings as necessary and collateral and normalized terror, making both a
permanent part of human relations. This demands a new theoretical framework for evaluating foreign policy
which strives for ethical peace rather than just war.
Death can be commuted not only through technological distancing, media spin and military jargon, but also in theory-
which works to control its ethical disturbance through the creation of abstract moral and political rules that claim to fix
truth, enable justice and provide a sure guide for policy . ‘Just war’ theory now plays this role, especially as a way of
controlling and managing the question of responsibilityraised by Der Derian. The moralizing of just war advocates has come
into renewed prominence since 9/11 as a legitimizing framework for the war on terror, in terms of providing both
justifications for military action (jus ad bellum) and moral limits on its conduct (jus in bello).12 The resurgence of just war doctrine
presents a unique set of problems: its relation to both realist doctrines of ‘reason of state’ and liberal emphases on self- defence
and international law is ambivalent and shifting, and to these it adds a potent religious/metaphysical layer of justification .
On the one hand, just war arguments generally map out no essential role for international law and have often been deployed
to justify its evasion, preferring instead their own (strikingly malleable) criteria for the waging and conduct of war . On the
other hand, in the recent writings of Jean Bethke Elshtain just war doctrine blurs into and in fact sanctifies ‘reason of state’ as she
simultaneously lays claim to a ‘Christian tradition [that] tells us government is instituted by God’ and ‘an Augustinian realism that resists
sentimentalism and insists on ethical restraint’.13 This is symptomatic of a more general phenomenon: that more conventionally ‘realist’
arguments for war based on national integrity and survival draw on and deploy moral discourses, even as we think of
realists being governed more by instrumental concerns with interests, utility and effectiveness . Michael Walzer makes a
significant point in his recent admission that ‘there are now reasons of state for fighting justly’-even if I see it as a problem and he as a potential
virtue.14 In the face of this interweaving and proliferation of moral discourses in favour of strategic violence, a number of
important questions arise. Are our moral discourses -whether they are couched in realist, ‘just war’ or liberal/legal terms - adequate to
the problem and phenomenon of war, and especially war against terror?Where they set out rules, criteria and restraints, are
those provisions observed and enforced? Are they adequate as moral standards in themselves, or can they be criticized in
these terms? Do they adequately understand either war or terror, and will war against terror ever succeed in eliminating
either from our world? Do they unfairly colonize the possible space of discourse about morality, ethics and strategic
violence-and what alternative ways of thinking might be possible were we to shake off their constraints? I will address these
questions with a particular focus on ‘just war’ rhetoric and theory as they have been mobilized in the United States after 9/11. My exploration arises
out of what I had originally thought of as a tangential project examining the influence of instrumental reason on strategic discourse and war -until it
became clear that moral discourses are closely intertwined with instrumental/ rational processes of strategic calculation, even
as their result might be forms of violence many consider to be morally unacceptable . The no-man’s land that joins these discourses
and processes is my analytical terrain; a land where, as the phrase suggests, morally acceptable slaughter, suffering and chaos are
described as ‘regrettable’, but occur because they are ‘unintentional’, ‘collateral’ or ‘necessary’. Is an international
community based on modern liberal principles really willing to treat this as morally acceptable, and leave its theories,
laws and systems of enforcement untouched? One of my conclusions is that moral discourses of strategic violence have, in the
post-Enlightenment period, internalized the instrumental (Clausewitzian) assumption that war is both a normal and a rational
pursuit of political ends. This is what unites and underpins the various moral discourses of war-realist, liberal and neo-
Augustinian: the conviction that has made war such a pervasive modern phenomenon, that war ‘is a mere continuation of
policy by other means’.15 Following this, another important conclusion underpins the argument of this article . If war is seen as policy, we
must do what so many just war thinkers fail to do: treat war as part of a historical and policy continuum, rather than an
isolated event limited to the conduct of high-intensity military operations whose impact can somehow be limited in time,
scope and spatial reach.16 This continuum must include mechanisms such as diplomacy, covert operations, sanctions, coups, economic
relationships, foreign aid and international law enforcement, and moral responsibility must extend across the entire gamut of social, political and
humanitarian circumstances which precede, generate, shape and follow conflict. Given the complex array of interconnected threats,
processes and conflicts tied into the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror -among them the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 1982 Israeli
invasion of Lebanon and the involvement of Iran and Syria there, the Mujahedin war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the development of radical
Islamist movements in Egypt and other African and Middle Eastern states, and Iraq’s war against Iran and its aftermath in the invasion of Kuwait,
Operation Desert Storm, UN sanctions and CIA covert operations- we need a moral and analytical framework which can better deal
with historical and geopolitical complexity. The article concludes by speculating that our frameworks for the moral justification
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 78
(and limitation) of strategic violence have failed us; and, moreover, that they have failed at a cost of thousands of innocent
lives and at the risk of creating a future in which we are not free of terror but condemned to its permanent presence . It shifts
the normative ideal from just war to ethical peace, an ethics that eschews abstract moral theory in favour of a context-sensitive
ethical orientation that is concerned with the outcomes of decisions and the avoidance of suffering. While strategic
violence will be difficult to eliminate, and may be necessary in strictly limited situations before the achievement of ethical peace,
its acceptance can only be conditional, and under conditions far more stringent, enforceable and morally consistent than
have so far been provided by either realism, just war theory or international law. Against the claustrophobic and divided
moral communities imagined by both realism and just war theory, ethical peace imagines a universal moral community in
which no ethical obligation can be traded away in times of emergency, and no humans can be put in mortal danger so that
others may be safe.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 79
JWT BAD - INTERNATIONALISM
Internationalism was used to invade Iraq with almost no intelligence and largely predicated on the fear-mongering
Anthony Burke 2005 [“Against the New Internationalism”, Ethics & International Affairs 19, no.2 pg 75-76]
Blair revived the “doctrine of the international community” in March 2004,this timein relation to Iraq. This time the revolutionary
normative ambitions visible there werefully developed-a new vision of liberal universalism melded with the preemptive
wardoctrineofthe U.S.neoconservatives.Hejustified invading Iraq even in the face ofweak intelligence with an argument
that“the risk of this new global terrorism and itsinteraction with states or organizations orindividuals proliferating WMD is
one I amsimply not prepared to run ...this is not thetime to err on the side of caution; not a timeto weigh the risks to an infinite balance; nota
time for the cynicism ofthe worldly wisewho favor playing it long.” 10This urgent,fear-soaked rhetoric was matched with asweeping
argument that “nations that arefree,democratic and benefitingfrom economic progress tend to be stable and solidpartners
in the advance of humankind”:We cannot advance these values except withina framework that recognises their universality.Ifit is a global
threat,it needs a global re-sponse, based on global rules....Britain’s roleis to find a way through this:to construct aconsensus behind a broad agenda
ofjusticeand security and means of enforcing it.11Far from being on the back foot over the failure to find WMD in Iraq or the controversy over the
legality of Britain’s participaion in the war, Blair was already redirecting British foreign policy toward the task of revolutionizing global
institutions andrules-in ways that would make regimechange and preemption into the basis for anew normative
framework:It means reforming the United Nations so itsSecurity Council represents 21st century reality;and giving the UN the capability to
acteffectively as well as debate.It means gettingthe UN to understand that faced with thethreats we have,we should do all we can tospread the values
offreedom,democracy,therule oflaw,religious tolerance and justice forthe oppressed,however painful for somenations that may be.12
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 80
JWT BAD - EXCEPTIONALISM
just war theorist are flawed holding a false presumption of equality that in the end is couched in U.S. superiority
There are two further problems with herargument.The first is theoverreliance onjust war theory as a guide both to jus ad
bellum conditions for decisions about forceand jus in bello protection of civilians. Elshtain rightly makes the caveat that
interventions should avoid, “to the extent that this ishumanly possible,either deepening theinjustice already present or creating newinstances
ofinjustice,” but in my viewjustwar principles ofproportionality and un-intentional harm fail to address adequatelysuch
dangers.32The second problem flowsfrom what is a major flaw in just war theory:the refusal to place the UN Charter
andSecurity Council at the center of normativedecisions about the use of force, or international criminal tribunals at the
center ofprosecutions for violations ofthe laws ofwar. 33While the problems with the UNSecurity Council are certainly well
known,Elshtain devotes a single paragraph to dismissing it in favor of an argument that thereis “a presumptive case in favor of the use
ofarmed force by a powerful state or allianceofstates who have the means to intervene,tointerdict,and to punish in
behalfofthosewho are under assault.”34Who is to be this state,and who its allies?Here Elshtain conducts an ethical sleight
ofhand:while she bases her normative claimfor equal regard not merely in just war doctrine and Christianity but in
“principles thatare part ofthe universal armamentarium ofstates ...ifthey are members ofthe UnitedNations and signatories ofvarious
international conventions,”she immediatelybrushes that body and its capacity for globaldebate and transparency aside.Instead
sheoffers the “Spider-Man” ethic:“The morepowerful have greater responsibilities.” Thesuperpower,the United States,is recast
assuperhero,with all the absence ofmoralambiguity such a metaphor implies: The United States is itselfpremised on a set ofuniversal
propositions concerning humandignity and equality.There is no conflict inprinciple between our national identity anduniversal claims and
commitments.The conflict lies elsewhere-between what we affirmand aspire to,what we can effectively do,andwhat we can responsibly do.35
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 81
JWT BAD - IRAQ
If the war in Iraq proves anything, it is the poverty of Just War Theory when it comes to preventing unnecessary
violence or limiting its scope. Rather, it legitimizes violence as a rational means to political ends, writing off all
those affected as mere collateral damage. Armed with the moral authority afforded by just war theory,
warplanners are absolved of responsibility for killing and left accountable to no one for murderous foreign polcy.
Just war theory claims to limit and control strategic violence in two ways: by limiting the circumstances under which one
can resort to war (jus ad bellum), and by limiting the ways it can be fought (jus in bello). These roughly correspond with similar
categories in international law (as laid out in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions) but cannot be reduced to them; furthermore, just war
advocates do not require that states be accountable to international law. In her book Women and war Elshtain sets out the moral tests of just war as
follows: (1) that a war be the last resort to be used only after all other means have been exhausted; (2) that a war be clearly an act of redress of rights
actually violated or defense against unjust demands backed by the threat of force; (3) that war be openly and legally declared by properly constituted
governments; (4) that there be a reasonable prospect of victory; (5) that the means be proportionate to the ends; (6) that a war be waged in such a way
as to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants; (7) that the victorious nation not require the utter humiliation of the vanquished.38 Just
war advocates oppose force being used aggressively, for the purposes of national aggrandizement or imperialism; they oppose the preventive use of
force, but are ambiguous about pre-emptive strikes; they advocate the use of peaceful efforts to deal with threats before war is tried; and they
advocate the principles of ‘proportionality’ and ‘non-combatant immunity’ to limit the impact of war on civilians. It is these last principles that, for
me, are most controversial. Proportionality and non-combatant immunity are welcome brakes on the limitless application of
force, but they are also beset with problems. First, the demand that means be matched to ends exposes a Clausewitzian
instrumentalism hiding in the interstices of just war theory, which accepts that (under more limited circumstances) war is a
rational and controllable means to political ends. Second,the principle of non-combatant immunity is qualified by a
judgement that ‘non-combatants must not be the intended targets of violence.’39 There is enormous scope for abuse here,
compounded by an implicit assumption that decisions and acts of war are limited in space and time-that moral judgements
about particular circumstances can be quarantined from the history preceding, or a future beyond, the cessation of high-
intensity military operations.Once we begin to question these assumptions, morally neat arguments about the justice of
strategic violence begin to unravel. We can begin to test just war theory by examining the judgements its advocates have
made about the legitimacy of armed force in the conflicts that have surrounded, preceded and followed the tragedy of
9/11: the Arab-Israeli conflict; the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan; Operation Desert Storm; the sanctions and weapons inspection regime
imposed on Iraq after 1990; and the post- 9/11 wars against Afghanistan and Iraq . Focusing on two of the most influential theorists
case of Israel’s 1967 war, he suggested that ‘the [Iraq] war that is being discussed is preventive, not pre-emptive-it is designed to respond to a more
will fall in harm’s way. But it is forbidden to knowingly and maliciously target them.’46 The arguments of both here are replete with problems, at
both the jus in bello and jus ad bellum levels. In relation to jus ad bellum, Elshtain stands on disappearing ground: months after the conclusion
of the fighting, no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, and no links to Al-Qaeda proven .47 Then there is the
pile of documentary and anecdotal evidence, dating back to a presidential finding signed by George Bush senior in 1992,
that successive US governments had really been driven by an overriding policy aim to remove Saddam Hussein from
power, and that influential neo-conservatives began to argue publicly in 1998 that CIA-directed covert operations should
be abandoned in favour of a military invasion.48 To this can be added the way the regime-change policy muddied the
inspection waters, given the clear views of US officials that sanctions should remain until Saddam Hussein was removed
from power, even if the UN resolutions were complied with-a scandalous position for a veto-wielding UN Security
Council member to take.49 Larger strategic objectives for control of the Middle East dating back to 1975-the
establishment of military bases in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, removal of regimes in Iran and Syria, the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 82
strengthening of Israel and the control of Gulf oil supplies-also rank as plausible motives for the invasion of Iraq .50 These
facts shake both Elshtain’s argument for the enforcement of UN resolutions with war in 2003, and Walzer’s view that there was a just and necessary
war waiting to be fought back in the 1990s when Saddam was playing hide-and-seek with the inspectors … an internationalist war, a war of
enforcement, and its justice would have derived, first, from the justice of the system it was enforcing and, second, from its likely outcome: the
strengthening of the UN and the global legal order.51 Not only are their analyses wilfully naive about the cynical realism of US and
European foreign policy with regard to Iraq-the double standard of states that had helped create Iraq’s WMD capability
before 1990 demanding compliance in its removal,52 while remaining unwilling to disarm themselves-but they are silent
about the crime against humanity perpetrated by the powers on the UN Security Council as they claimed to be enforcing
its resolutions. Just war talk of ‘proportionality’, ‘non-combatant immunity’ and ‘the protection of innocents’ is worth
recalling here, when against the fear of Iraq’s future use of WMD is balanced the death of more than a million Iraqi
citizens as a result of sanctions which US officials, contrary to UN Resolutions 661 and 687, insisted should stay in place
until Saddam Hussein was removed from power.53 This was the ‘justice of the system it was enforcing’: a crime against
humanity perpetrated by the UN itself-an image of ‘justice’ angrily purloined by Osama bin Laden in his 1998 interview
with ABC and then directed, with terrifying intensity, into the heart of the United States three years later. 54 The
continuing spectacle of western assumptions of moral superiority in relation to Iraq is deeply unsettling, when what would
be more appropriate is the kind of soul-searching that accompanied postwar revelations of the Nazi Holocaust . We are not to
know whether or not Elshtain and Walzer believe that the impact of the sanctions amounted to a major international crime, but they have both used
arguments that the death of civilians cannot be criminal if jus ad bellum conditions are met and the killing was unintentional. Indeed, in a combative
2003 Public Interest article Elshtain cites Walzer’s attack on critics of the war against Afghanistan to press home this point. Against what he
describes as ‘leftist’ claims that the similarity of the death tolls on September 11 and in Afghanistan undermines the
justice of the war, Walzer counters that this ‘denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions between
premeditated murder and unintentional killing’.55 Even if we were to accept this distinction (which seems to me to be a
stunning evasion of responsibility), it is not as if the US were willing to make its armed forces accountable for their
targeting decisions, having refused to place its forces under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently the only
body able to prosecute violations of the laws of war. In the absence of that accountability we are forced to rely on the arbitrary
judgements of just war intellectuals, among whom Elshtain is convinced that ‘no group in the US pays more attention to ethical restraint on
the use of force than does the US military’ and that ‘the real dissenters in American intellectual life are likely to be those who, at least in part, defend
the foreign policy of the United States’.56
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 83
JWT BAD - IRAQ
The invasion of iraq also evidences the moral bankruptcy of just war theory. Shockingly high casualty rates are
tolerated for the sake of a greater good that is impossible to define, even while the US rests its justifications for
violence the benevolence of humanitarian relief - a justification which is proven disingenuine by one historical
example after another.
The war in Iraq, begun 18 months after the September 11 attacks, raises the same problems for just war theory and international
law, but even more intensely. There are similar problems of violation of jus in bello rules and postwar instability, compounded by a globally
accepted view that the war was illegal under international law (and thus an act of aggression) and also failed to satisfy just war’s jus ad
bellum criteria.70 As such, the death of every single Iraqi combatant, not merely those of ‘innocent’ civilians, must be
considered a crime. Iraqi military deaths, while hard to assess, have been estimated by Jonathon Steele at between 3 and 10 per cent of
functioning units, or between 13,500 and 45,000 individuals; completely outmatched by US technology, Iraqi troops died
under volleys of cluster rockets, fire from helicopter gunships and carpets of bombs from B-52s. 71 The civilian death toll
is also extremely high, and climbing. At the time of writing, in January 2004, the website ‘Iraq Body Count’ estimated a minimum civilian
death toll attributable to the invasion and subsequent counterinsurgency operations of 8,014 and a maximum of 9,852.72 Another casualty tracking
project by the PDA has not compiled total estimates, but cites a number of incidents and surveys which make very disturbing reading.73 A Knight-
Ridder newspapers survey of 19 Baghdad hospitals after the fall of the city estimated that at least 1,101 civilians and another 1,255 who were
‘probably civilians’ were killed after the war began on 19 March, while a LosAngeles Times survey of 27 hospitals concluded that at least 1,700
were killed and 8,000 injured, not counting ‘hundreds’ of ‘undocumented civilian deaths’ reported by ‘Islamic burial societies and humanitarian
groups that are trying to trace those missing in the conflict’, and ‘dozens of deaths that doctors indirectly attributed to the conflict … pregnant women
who died of complications while giving birth at home … and chronically ill people, such as cardiac or dialysis patients, who were unable to obtain
needed care while fighting raged’. High numbers of civilian (and some military) deaths were reported by hospitals in other cities,
such as Basra (400), Hilla (250), Najaf (378) and Nasiriyah (250). When these totals are added to the Knight-Ridder survey of hospitals in
Baghdad, the death toll is approximately 3,634, the vast majority of the dead civilians. The PDA also cites another 37 reports of mid-war incidents in
which at least 650 civilians were killed, a report from Najaf cemetery suggesting 2,000 excess burials during the fighting, and, following the
liberation, 200 deaths from unexploded ordnance and 34 civilians killed by US forces during protests and civil disturbances.74 These shockingly
high casualty figures were incurred during bombing, missile strikes, artillery, mortar and small arms fire, cluster bombing,
and attacks from helicopter gunships-all in the face of claims in glossy State Department documents about the ‘strategic
imperative’ of the US air force paying close attention to the law of armed conflict using technologies such as laser-guided
bombs and collateral damage assessment software. 75 In the vast majority of the incidents allied forces used indiscriminate
force against targets which were civilian in nature or were close to heavily populated civilian areas .76 The humanitarian
crisis the war provoked was compounded by airstrikes against electricity generators and telephone exchanges, and
widespread looting after the liberation (which US troops stood by and watched, while ensuring the Iraqi Oil Ministry was
secure). Some hospitals were forced to close, or could not gain access to power or water, while patients were deterred
from seeking help because of the general insecurity. 77 Some of the more notorious incidents included jittery US troops
shooting child weapons collectors and firing on vehicles approaching checkpoints, and airstrikes on the Al-Shaab and Al-
Nasser marketplaces in Baghdad which killed 76 and injured 77. Journalists were also murdered in a US airstrike on the Al-
Jazeera office and tank fire on the Palestine Hotel: clear and chilling violations of the laws of war. 78 Nothing in the Iraq
experience justifies the faith that Elshtain and others have placed in the US military’s responsibility and restraint ; indeed, as in
Afghanistan, that experience reveals the just warriors’ excuse that the killing was ‘unintentional’ to be little more than a
moral smokescreen for the indiscriminate application of strategic violence. Likewise, the idea that ‘proportionality’ would
suffice to balance the suffering, instability and chaos caused by the invasion against some greater ‘social good’ drives just
war theory ‘perilously close to moral incoherence’ , as Wheeler remarked of its faith in such a ‘double effect’.79 Ironic, then, that in
justifying the war Elshtain wrote that ‘it is better to put one’s own combatants in danger than stand by as the innocent are slaughtered’-this, when a
US soldier at Kerbala was quoted as saying: ‘I think they thought we wouldn’t shoot kids. But we showed them that we
don’t care. We are going to do what we have to do to stay alive and keep ourselves safe .’80 In her June 2002 Boston Globe
article and the November 2002 Statement ofPrinciples on Iraq published by the Institute for American Values (also signed by Francis
Fukuyama, Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol), Elshtain relied on the enforcement of UN resolutions to justify war against Iraq.81 However, by
May 2003, relying on the ‘double effect’, she had shifted register to focus on the liberation of Iraqis from the brutal Hussein regime: ‘Are we just
going to provide iodine and band aids or might it be necessary, as Bonhoeffer put it, to “cut off the head of the snake”?’82 We could ask why,
if
it was so genuinely concerned by the suffering of the Iraqi people, the US supported Hussein through his gassing of Kurds
and Iranian troops; why it helped cause the death of a million Iraqis through sanctions while claiming to be so opposed to
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 84
their oppressor; and why it does not support the ICC and the indictment of terrorists and torturers everywhere . This new,
humanitarian justification for the war also raises another question of the advocates who have stolen the robes of the judge:
who gets to wage just war? Does every sufferer of harm and injustice, or merely those who have the power and the means,
and who can turn their justifications into truth? Surely, if the just warriors are right, the Palestinian people had a right to
wage just war on Israel after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila which the Israel
Defense Force helped to organize and enable? 83 Surely the Palestinians had the right to invade Israel, remove its
government and impose one which would create a just peace and right the historic wrong imposed on them after 1948 ?
Surely, as Elshtain says of Iraq, they had a ‘claim to have coercive force deployed [on their] behalf to stop the Lions
before they crush and devour all the Lambs’?84 However, such an argument would rightly disturb those who, whatever its
flaws, wish to support Israeli democracy and halt the awful cycle of violence and retribution that has driven this conflict
for decades, and who believe that the conflict must be resolved with a measure of security and justice for both peoples. In
short, the weak do not get to wage just war. Their ‘innocence’ goes undefended.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 85
JWT BAD - AFGHANISTAN
The inadequacy of just war theory was made evident in Operation Enduring Freedom, where terrible incidents of
violence against civilians are tolerated on the basis that they are “unintentional.” The threshold of intentionality
justifies thousands of avoidable deaths and further endangers the population that American warmongerers
promise to be liberating.
The distinction between intentional and unintentional killing is enshrined both in just war theory and in the Geneva Conventions
as the ‘proportionality’ rule. Article 51(5)(b) of Protocol 1 to the Conventions prohibits operations which ‘may be expected to cause incidental loss of
civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct
military advantage anticipated’. Nicholas Wheeler criticizes international humanitarian law for being imprecise about what ‘constitutes “excessive”
civilian casualties or “concrete and direct military advantage” in specific cases’; this imprecision, he argues, leaves ‘the door … sufficiently wide
open under Protocol 1 that states can justify the killing of innocent civilians as an unintended consequence of attacks against legitimate military
targets’-a problem compounded by the fact that these provisions have rarely (if ever) been tested in a court. In this light, I can only agree with
Wheeler’s conclusion that ‘the proportionality rule is the Achilles heel of just war theory .’57 Contrary to Elshtain’s defensive
protestations about the ‘ethical restraint’ of the US military, its war-fighting strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq have both
tested the (legal) limits of the proportionality rule and exposed its utter ethical inadequacy. The study conducted of
Operation Enduring Freedom by the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA), for example, conclusively refutes claims that the US
fought with care to avoid harming civilians. Using deliberately conservative figures, its author Carl Conetta concluded
that despite the US navy and air force flying 64 per cent fewer sorties over Afghanistan than NATO in the Kosovo war, it
caused two to three times more direct civilian deaths-the respective sortie/casualty ratios being approximately
4,700/1,000-1,300 in Afghanistan versus 13,000/500 in Yugoslavia (i.e. a civilian was killed every twenty-six sorties in
Yugoslavia and every three or four sorties in Afghanistan) .58 In the first half of 2002 New York Times reporters visited
eleven locations where civilians were said to have been killed in US airstrikes, verifying the killing of nearly 400 people
and the wounding of many more. These episodes included six massacres in which 50 or more were killed-including the
death of 52 people in Niazi Qala in December 2001 after US planes bombed an ammunition dump moved there by
Taleban forces, and the killing of 65 people at a mosque in Khost in November 2001, when a bomb aimed at a residence
containing a Taleban leader went off course.Reporters who visited Niazi Qala wrote of seeing ‘bloodied children’s shoes and
shirts’, ‘the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair’, and the ‘severed shoe’ of a child . In another atrocity a US AC-130
gunship attacked four villages near Kakrak in July 2002, killing 54 and wounding 120, during an operation aimed at
hunting down and killing Al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders. Afterwards, ‘American soldiers found villagers gathering up the
limbs of their neighbours.’59 Other events which ought to trouble both just war advocates and those concerned with US
observance of international law include the targeting of civilian infrastructure, the deliberate bombing of the Al-Jazeera
bureau in Kabul, the execution and mistreatment of prisoners in Northern Alliance hands, the enormous death and
suffering attributable to the broader impact of US military operations, and the state of instability and crisis that was
allowed to develop in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taleban . Numerous reports attest to the killing and
mistreatment of as many as 800 Taleban prisoners of war by Northern Alliance militias, including the execution of
approximately 600 prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, many of them suffocated in sealed shipping containers. 60 US forces
destroyed or damaged the main telephone exchange in Kabul, the electrical grid in Kandahar and the hydro-electric power
station near the Kajaki dam, which would have exacerbated an already difficult humanitarian situation .61 The PDA estimates
that from mid-September 2001 to mid-January 2002, between 8,000 and 18,000 Afghanis died from starvation, injuries
sustained as they fled combat zones, or exposure and associated illnesses . Of these 40 per cent (between 3,200 and 7,200) ‘are
attribut[able] to the effects of the crisis and war’. At the outset of the war the UN was estimating that 1.5 million people were at extreme risk; the
military operations exacerbated this crisis by generating some 560,000 refugees, disrupting national-level food deliveries
by 40 per cent in October 2001, and completely interrupting local food and aid deliveries for two to three months (and
sometimes longer) in many places. At a time of enormously increased and desperate humanitarian need, this ‘more than
doubled the size of the gap between the supply of aid and the need for it ’.62 How are these awful facts to be treated by the
advocates of just war, given their concern for the proportional use of force, and the injunction that innocent life not be
taken or maimed intentionally? Both Walzer and Elshtain have given Operation Enduring Freedom the imprimatur of a
‘just war’and aggressively challenged its critics. The allied forces, apparently, are guilty of no crimes-the death they
caused was unintentional. Is carelessness really a defence? Carelessness, when civilians are killed in the course of aerial
assassination operations based on poor intelligence and extra-legal principles, prosecuted in such an indiscriminate way as
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 86
to leave entire villages filled with the dead and wounded? Carelessness, when an ammunition dump is seen as such a
threat to allied troops as to justify its detonation, from the air, in the midst of a densely populated area? Carelessness,
when it was highly predictable that thousands of vulnerable people would die fleeing areas where force was being
deployed in such an indiscriminate manner and supplies of desperately needed aid disrupted? A more genuine test for the
just warriors, and international law, would be whether avoidable death and suffering are condemned and prosecuted63-a
test they refuse to accept, perhaps because it would undermine the sovereign prerogative of states to use force; it might
begin genuinely to constrain war rather than liberate it.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 87
JWT BAD - OCCUPATION
In addition to the traditional jus ad bellum (the right to wage war) and jus in bello (the rules of waging war), post
9-11 just war theorists have created a third category: jus post bellum (the duty to set up a liberalist institutions)
which further strips the rights of Afghanis and Iraqis alike.
This final example of the sophistication of the debate that I wish to highlight is the development of a new category within Just War
thinking, adding the idea of jus post bellum to the traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Johnson (1999: 191-218) is amongst those
developing this category, although he doesn’t use the label, reiterating the fact that even those who stick most closely to the classical resources of the tradition are able
to innovate and respond to contemporary challenges. Evans (2005: 19-20), Rigby (2005) and Hayden (2005) develop an explicit discussion of the jus post bellum,
and earlier discussions of humanitarian intervention, such as Wheeler (2000), implicitly require such a category because of their
emphasis on the need for long-term commitment to prevent the recurrence of humanitarian disasters necessitating intervention to ‘save
strangers’. In policy circles, the ICISS (2001) also deploy such a notion, via a ‘responsibility to rebuild’ as an inherent component of the ‘responsibility to protect’.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought home the necessity of jus post bellum in the ‘war on terror’, too . They have
also demonstrated the enormously difficult task that this can represent when establishing such justice is inextricably entangled with a
concept that is deeply indebted to liberalism , yet local circumstances are not necessarily hospitable to that political doctrine. In some ways, this, too, is
recapturing the richness of the Just War tradition. Restoration of the status quo ante bellum as being about all that needed to be said on this subject, and thus covered by
the right intention principle of the jus ad bellum, stands in contrast to the idea of punishment that was prominent in the classic, Christian texts on Just War. It is notable,
though, that some analysts, such as Gilbert (2003: 100-1) argue that the war on terror has much of the character of punitive punishment that the medieval tradition
included. Certainly some contemporary jus post bellum ideas recapture some of that spirit, for example in seeing arraigning those responsible for gross human rights
abuses before appropriate, often international, courts as essential. I have no intention of getting involved in the restorative versus retributive justice debate (e.g. Gilbert,
2003: 103-51; Rigby, 2005; Schaap, 2005) in post-conflict societies, but, again, the sophistication of this discussion highlights the significance of the move to a serious
consideration of the nature and content of jus post bellum. More pertinent to this paper is the way in which jus post bellum has been linked to
political transformation in post conflict societies towards the embedding of liberaldemocratic values, concepts, institutions
and practices.This applies whether we are dealing with the aftermath of humanitarian intervention or action pursuant to the war on
terror. In some its strongest statements (e.g. Elshtain, 2003; 2004; Téson, 2005a) jus post bellum is almost defined by the creation of the
institutions of liberal democracy. Those who oppose or reject liberal ideas, values and principles are guilty of a criminal act and
thus lose any standing within the idea of Just War. As criminals ‘… their opposition to intervention does not count’ (Téson, 2005a: 16) it
is illegal to act with the intention of preventing the creation of a liberal state or from illiberal or anti-liberal motives, and criminals
lose any defensive rights that Just War accords. Téson’s characterisation of this argument may verge on the caricature. Nardin (2005), in a critique of Téson,
describes his view as ‘humanitarian imperialism’, a label Téson accepts (2005b: 30), arguing that this represents a revolution in the understanding of the nature of the
Just War tradition, established understandings of humanitarian intervention and the character of the international system of sovereign states. Whilst I am generally
sympathetic to most of Nardin’s points, both he and Téson, and Elshtain (2003), share a statist approach that has been the source of criticism of the Just War tradition in
the past, at present and, in a hopefully somewhat distinctive way, is a source of criticism for this paper as well. However, having sketched the ways Just War has
responded to the challenges of humanitarian intervention and the ‘war on terror’, largely successfully in the eyes of those canvassed above, it is time to look at the
nature of some of the critiques, especially those that connect to and contextualise the specific argument I wish to make in response to the triumph of Just War theory.
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Just War theory is incompatible with recognizing that trans-nationalist terrorist organizations, are in fact
TRANSNATIONAL, and the US has targeted the states of Iraq and Afghanistan and stripped them of their
sovereignty for giving a home to terror organizations.
It would seem uncontroversial to argue that thestate has been at the centre of Just War thinkingfor the last two hundred years at least. The
current intellectual developments by leading JustWar theorists serve , if anything, to further embed this centrality. What is striking about
this is that the move is a self-consciously ethical one - the state, so long the subject of ethical suspicion and critique - is being portrayed as
at the heart of an ethical response to humanitarian abuse and terrorist violence. More specifically, the state is being portrayed as
thevehicle for the just war against these ills and the basis for a lasting solution to them, especiallywhen, as is increasingly argued, they
meld into one. Perhaps most striking here is Elshtain’s (2003, 2004, 2005) deployment of Just War argumentsin defence of military
intervention that connect these to the creation, or re-creation, of an‘ordinary civic peace’ (Elshtain, 2004: 46) as the sine qua non for ethical
life. This civic peacerequires a set of effective state institutions, but also requires that these take certain forms, are limited in power and held accountable
in certain ways and are animated by a particular ethos of service to those over whom they exercise their limited authority. Elshtain sees just wars against those who
preside over, whether through intention or neglect, humanitarian catastrophes or terrorist activity as being about a just war to bring the victims of such abuse within the
embrace of a liberal democratic state. Utilising the contingency of sovereignty that humanitarian intervention placed on the agenda, [Just War Theorists]
extends this contingency to taking effective measures against trans-national terrorist organisations , principally al Qaeda and similar groups.
The threat they represent to the creation of civic peace in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and their potential to disrupt the
civic peace of the US and other established Western democracies, generates just cause, and also compromises, if not removes, the
sovereignty of those states that harbour or aid and abet them. The role and nature of the state as a political institution thus becomes an object of
debate about just cause and also about legitimate authority and right intention within the jus ad bellum side of the Just War tradition. The authority of those
states that maintainordinary civic peace is superior to those that do not.The legitimate state is one that protects and promotes the
rights and interests of itscitizens, starting with their entitlement to live securely within a territorially bounded zone of ordinary civic
peace. Where states fail to or are unwilling to deliver this, or are involved with organisations committed to the destruction of civic peace then, as with
those murderous regimes who oversee humanitarian catastrophe, they lose any serious claim to legitimacy. They lack legitimate authority
and their intention in resisting Western power is ethically reprehensible because it is about denying humans their right to live within a zone of
ordinary civic peace. For Téson (2005a: 17), this leads to a clear statement of the ethical superiority of the intentions and authority of liberal democratic states: ‘the fact
that the West has disproportionate influence on the [United Nations] Security Council is one of its good features. … It is unacceptable that the decision whether to free
people from tyranny, or to veto any such decision, be left to illegitimate regimes.’ This ordinary civic peace is necessarily territorialized and connected to the sovereign
state.
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The lines between terrorism and counter-terrorism have faded. Just war equally, if not more, signifies the
terrorism of our ‘enemies’ through the systemic annihilation of civilians. Obviously, without withdrawal, war is
inevitable
(James) Der Derian, (Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University,) 05 (Imaging terror:
logos, pathos andethos, p 24-27)
Two framed artefacts of the second Cold War hang on either side of my desk.The first is a simple black and white poster made in 1985, most probablyinspired by
President Reagan’s description of the Afghanmujahideenasfreedom fighters. Next to a photograph of Reagan is one of a New York Cityfirefighter. The caption
underneath says: ‘A firefighter fights fires. Afreedomfighter fights ___________’ The second image comes from a 1985issue ofThe Manipulator, a short-lived, large-
format art magazine. On thecover is a Nancy Burston photograph entitled ‘Warhead 1’, a digitisedcomposite of world leaders proportioned according to their country’s
nuclearweapons, in which the facial features of Reagan (55% of the world’s throw-weight) and Brezhnev (45%) dominate the fuzzier visages of Thatcher,Mitterand,
and Deng (less than 1% each) (see Figures 1 and 2).1These two images speak volumes, revealing the grammatical logos thatunderwrites the pathos and ethos of
terror.As verb, code and historicalmethod, terrorism has consistently been understood as an act of symbolicallyintimidating
and, if deemed necessary, violently eradicating a personal,political, social, ethnic, religious, ideological or otherwise
radically differentiated foe. Yet, as noun, message and catch-all political signifier, the meaningof terrorism has proven
more elusive. From Robespierre’s endorsement toBurke’s condemnation during the French Revolution, from the Jewish Irgunblowing up the King David Hotel to
the Palestinian Black September massacreat the Munich Olympics, from Bin Laden the Good fighting the Sovietoccupiers of Afghanistan to Bin Laden the Bad toppling
the Twin Towers ofNew York, terrorism, terrorists and terror itself have become the politicalpornography of modernity: one knows terrorism with certainty only
when,literally, one sees it. But, in the blink of an eye, the terrorist can become thefreedom fighter, and vice versa, for at one time or another nearly everyone,from
righteous statesmen who terror-bomb cities to virtuousjihadistswhosuicide-bomb women and children, seems to have a taste for terror.Without engaging in nostalgia,
one can recognise that the most powerfulform of terror mutated at the end of the Cold War.With the decline (if notthe total demise) of a logic of
deterrence based on a nuclear balance of terror,so too eroded the willingness and capacity to inflict mutually
unacceptableharm that had provided a modicum of order, if not peace or justice, to thebipolar system. In its place a
newimbalance of terrorhas emerged, based on amimetic fear and hatred coupled with an asymmetrical willingness
andcapacity to destroy the other without the formalities of war.2This cannot bereduced, as much as leaders on both sides of the conflict have
tried, to a post-9/ll phenomenon. It can be traced back doctrinally to the 1990’s, when aseries of US defense policy guidances (subsequently formalized in the
1997Quadrennial Defense) shifted US strategy from collectivelydeterringanddominatingto unilaterally and preemptivelydestroyingthe enemy, and whenBin Laden
issued his pseudo-fatwas which decreed Christian and Jewishcivilians legitimate targets of the jihad.As in the older, tidier balance of terror, the doctrine of taking
civilianshostage and if necessary killing them still held for both sides, but it nowoperated as a contingent factor of an asymmetrical relationship. Regardless
ofnomenclature-‘terror’ or ‘counter-terror’-high numbers of civilians would(and continue to) be killed in the process. It
might be small solace to thevictims to know they were primary targets as opposed to ‘accidental’ or‘collateral’ victims,
especially since casualty rates have been terribly skewed inboth cases. When one takes into account how war-related
fatalities have beenreversed in modern times, from 100 years ago when one civilian was killed pereight soldiers, to the
current ratio of eight civilians per soldier killed, thencompares the similarly-skewed combatant-to-non-combatant casualty
figuresof 9/11, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War, the terror/counter-terrordistinction begins to fade even further. Perhaps
it is time for a new Bursoncomposite, using the leaders of the three conflicts to proportionally representthe number of
civilian casualties from the three conflicts.With weapons systems, war-fighting doctrine and war games oftenwagging the
dog of civilian policy, the narratives as well as the paladins ofthe Cold War seem destined to an eternal return in US
foreign policy.
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Preventative war is a sanctified as duty used against suspected states who can’t be trusted with WMDs justifying
cohesive actions, sanctions, and war
A slightly less ambitious,but no less disturbing, argument in this vein has been putby Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughterin the January
2004issue of Foreign Affairs.13There they assert a new principle:a “collective ‘duty to prevent’nations run byrulerswithout
internal checks on their power fromacquiring or using WMD.”As with Blair’sarguments in 2003,they areseekingtoembedanew
internationalist norm withpotentially revolutionary consequences,based on the “premise that the rules nowgoverning the use
offorce,devised in 1945and embedded in the UN Charter,are inadequate.”14It is not enough,they argue,thatthe UN already possesses the
power to identify a state’s WMD programs as a “threat tointernational peace and security” and takemeasures , as it did with
Iraq after 1990:But articulating and acknowledging a specificduty to prevent such governments from evenacquiring WMD
will shift the burden of prooffrom suspicious nations to suspected nationsand create the presumption of a need for
earlyand, therefore, more effective action .15They see sucha “duty to prevent”as asmooth development of the emerging
normofhumanitarian intervention,even (some-what scandalously) mimicking the title ofthe International Commission on Intervention and
State Sovereignty’s report TheResponsibility to Protect,chaired by GarethEvans and Mohamed Sahnoun.16Feinsteinand Slaughter assert that the
commission’s“efforts to redefine basic concepts ofsovereignty and international community arehighly relevant to international security,”17despite
Evans’s and Sahnoun’s clear statement in 2002 that the report’s concerns andrecommendations should not be related tothe post-September 11debates
over securityagainst terrorism and “hot pre-emption” ofWMD threats- the issues were “conceptually and practically
distinct.”18LikeBushand Blair, Feinstein and Slaughterare drivenby a conviction that certain states cannot betrusted with
weapons ofmassdestructionand that deterrence will not suffice to dealwith the threat they might one day pose, andlike Blairthey
argue that national interestand humanitarianism have converged in thepost-September 11 environment: “The linksbetween
the two sets of issues, especially theneed to tackle them with proactive strategies,are becoming more evident.” Suchstrategies
rangefrom “diplomatic pressureor incentives,”“economic measures,”to“coercive actions” along a scale from sanctions,
inspections, and blockades, to the useof armed force in the last instance. The “utility of force in dealing with the most
seriousproliferation dangers,”theyincrediblysuggest,“is not a controversial proposition,” and while they do not overtly endorseregime
change actions such as in Iraq,theirproposal leaves the door open to suchactions since it seeks to control not onlyWMD
proliferation “but also the peoplewho possess them.” We can perhaps begrateful that they still affirm the centrality ofthe UN Security
Council in the “duty to pre-vent”(and ifit is paralyzed,a regionalorganization,such as NATO,“with sufficiently broad membership to permit
seriousdeliberation over the exercise of collectiveduty”).However, they still ultimatelyendorse unilateral action or “coalitions ofthe
willing” after “these options are tried ingood faith.” 19MichaelIgnatieffmakes a similar move,linking WMD proliferation to
humanitarian intervention and folding it into a newuniversalist framework based on the powerand moral authority ofthe
UnitedStates.Indoing so,he strongly endorses the principleofpreventive war,and the U.S.invasion ofIraq,although not without
some moralanguish and genuine angerat many U.S.actions.20In a long New York Timesarticle inSeptember 2003,he argues, “Ifthe
UnitedStatesfails in Iraq,so will the UnitedNations.”In order to save the UnitedNations from what he sees as a deeply flawed(ifprincipled)
U.S.policy,based too muchin unilateralism,corporate self-interest,andsanguine assumptions about the ease oftransforming the country into a stable
free-market democracy,he argues that the UN’snorms need to change:“It will have torewrite its own rules for authorizing the
useofforce.”Here,like Blair,Feinstein,andSlaughter,he equates “defend[ing] humanrights”with long-term threats from WMD,and
adds to the now widely acceptedgrounds for intervention (such as ethniccleansing and mass killing) cases
“wheredemocracy is overthrown and people insidea state call for help,” where “states fail to stopterrorists on their soil
from launchingattacks,” and where “as in Iraq, North Koreaand possibly Iran,a state violates the non-proliferation protocols
regarding the acquisition ofchemical,nuclear or biologicalweapons.”These, he says,“would be thecases when intervention by
force could beauthorized by majority vote on the SecurityCouncil.” To his credit, Ignatieffdoes arguethat the membership of the
Security Council should be expanded, that the veto powerof the Permanent Five should be abolished,and that the U.S.should “commit to useforce
only with the approval of the Council.” This is undermined,however,by the vastly This is undermined,however,by the vastly advocates for the UN.21
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Just War legitimates human rights violations and civilian death through “risk transfer war” or when the military
engages in mainly preventative missions to put all the risk on civilians and take none of the risks on themselves.
One of the oldest challenges to Just War stems from the idea, most commonly associated with Kant, that its advocates are the ‘sorry
comforters’ of war. Just War theory has offered spurious ethical weight to a realm of human activity that, at best, can be seen
as an occasionally necessary evil in the face of even worse evils, but not one that can ever claim any sort of ethical virtue.Pacifism,
whether religiously motivated - and, of course, overcoming Christian pacifism was one of the reasons behind the development of Just War thinking - or inspired by a
secular philosophical commitment (e.g. Reader, 2000) continues to challenge Just War. However, pacifism’s challenge is one which we have to either accept, and thus reject Just
War, or reject, in which case Just War becomes the default position for those who nevertheless wish to recognise the ethical dimension to warfare and avoid some kind of moral scepticism. More interesting to this paper is the
way in which the idea of human rights is being used to critique Just War theory, leading to a debate over whether or not human rights are compatible with, and even enhanced by, a commitment to maintaining classic Just War
principles and practices. We have seen how some (Buchanan and Keohane, 2004; Téson, 2005) have seen little difficulty with this. Others have debated whether human rights serve as a useful analogy for Just War principles,
for example is the state’s right to self defence analogous to that of individuals, or is it instead the cumulative result of the individual rights of the state’s citizens (e.g. Gilbert, 2003: 24-46; McMahan, 2004; Rodin, 2004; Ryan,
Martin Shaw (2005) has used human rights as a central part of his critique of what he labels ‘risk transfer war’, which
2004)? Alternatively,
characterises, he argues, the ways in which the leading Western military powers, most importantly the US, have pursued military
operationsin the last decade.This stands as the latest incarnation of what he (2003) labels ‘degeneratewar’ - the process by
which, throughoutthe twentieth century, war became increasinglyfocused on the killing of civilians and the destruction of
societies. That this process has been driven by the leading powers throughout this time, means that it is impossible to see this as being a consequence of ‘degenerate’
regimes, such as Nazi Germany. Neither is it limited tothe increasingly significant phenomena of ‘new wars’ (Kaldor, 1999), in which
the collapseof legitimate political authority helps bring about brutal internecine conflicts driven byideological, religious or
nationalist prejudice, economic enrichment or some combination of the two. For Shaw, the wars fought in Kosovo,
Afghanistan and Iraq are from the same stableas those in Democratic Republic of Congo, Chechnya or Liberia. What characterises
this commonality is the abuse of human rights. In the latter conflicts thisis perhaps more obvious, because of the way in which
pillage, rape, mutilation, massacre andtorture are routinely deployed by those ostensibly part of armed organisations. In the case of
Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the degeneracy is less immediately apparent. Although abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib, Camp Breadbasket, CIA ‘black
prisons’ and Guantanomo Bay are widespread enough to call into question the ‘bad apple’ explanations routinely offered by the US and UK political and military
establishments, Shaw’s argument is somewhat different. His claim is that contemporary Western warfare abuses human rightsbecause of the way that
it transfers risk from Western combatants to the non-combatants ofthe state where the conflict is taking place, even when
the state apparatus may not be thetarget of military action. Thus, even though, precision guided munitions have enabled Western
militaries to avoid some of the most blatant instances of degeneracy, such as the area bombing of cities with the express intent of killing civilians, the
pattern of transferring risk to civilians has in fact accelerated.Within casualty figures that may be lower overall, the
proportion of enemy noncombatantsbeing killed or injured has risen, and risen dramatically. In the war over Kosovo, famously, NATO forces
suffered no combat deaths. In the war to overthrow the Taliban, theonly US combat death was of a CIA agent caught up in a
riotof prisoners of war. The prison was subsequently leveled and the vast majority of the prisoners killed, despitetheir
noncombatant status in Just War terms (Shaw, 2003: 126-7, 238-40; Gilbert, 2003: 101). Shaw’s critique is powerful and thought-
provoking. His challenging of arguments commonly offered that precision guided munitions offer a welcome opportunity to restore a
degree ofdiscrimination between combatant and non-combatant (e.g. Elshtain, 2003: 69 n. 6) that [in fact] theindustrialised
warfare of the twentieth century had seeminglydestroyed turns on the balanceof risk and the relationship to human rights. Shaw argues
that the rights of Westerncombatants are now almost automatically placed ahead of those of enemy non-combatants. Saving
soldiers lives at the cost of civilians is a part of the degeneracy of warfare, and even ifthe scale of civilian losses may be lower in terms of outright numbers
they now make up alarger and larger proportion of those killed and injured, with Western combatants becomingless and less
likely to be killed or injured (Shaw, 2003: 238-40; 2005). Insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan may have done something to restore the vulnerability of
Western troops, but even here the number of civilians being killed dwarfs the number of troops. Shaw thus argues that, from the perspective of human
rights, the Just War tradition has comprehensively failedto rein in the degenerate tendencies of warfare. Just War thinking has lost
touch with the human rights tradition that alone can ground an ethical framework for thinking about the systematic and organised use of violence.
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Policy continually follows a dichotomy between war and peace that is imagined, instead the doctrine of prevention
spurs new fears and aggressions because the possibility of attack
Furthermore,Elshtain’s gesture atdeconstruction (“war’s historic opponents ...are inside a frame with war”) dissolves into
normative incoherence.Peaceis not the Janus face ofwar,but its normative other.Certainly peace and war arelinked as
systems ofmeaning-the horrors of war provide peace with its normative force-but as norms there is a vastdistance between
them.They are likeplanets separated by the vacuum of space,their overlapping gravitational forcesdrawing every
action,every policy,andevery ethic in one direction or another.There is no ontological middle ground,no viable normative
place ofwar/peacewhere the two can mesh together in amutually enhancing exchange.I arguethis because it is just such an
imagined
normative harmony of war and peace thatunderpins the new internationalism andhides there as a new ontological
claim.The practical force to my argument issupplied by the fact that just as every normative argument made in this field
willreinforce either war or peace, policy actionswill also do so,ineluctably affecting thefuture possibilities for global
security andconflict.Such a practical understanding isimplicit in the international system of armscontrol set out by the
NPT,the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,and the now mori-bund Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,which isstructured by the
need to manage andgradually eliminate the security dilemma.In this sense,the new internationalists whoargue for
selective/preventive counter-proliferation,while remaining silent aboutthe U.S.administration’s plans for missiledefense
and space,are literally playing withnuclear fire.As Neta Crawford argues,apreventive security doctrine “is likely tocreate
more of both fearful and aggressivestates ...instability is likely to grow as apreventive war doctrine creates themutual fear
of surprise attack.”49LikewiseArticle VI ofthe NPT,with its injunctionfor general as well as nuclear
disarmament,embodies an insight that WMDproliferation is also driven by a desire tocounter conventional military
threatscheaply.This is the widely understoodbasis for Israeli nuclear doctrine,and itseems reasonable to see it as at least
part ofthe rationale for the Iranian and NorthKorean programs. 50A desire for asymmetricas much as mutual deterrence
drivesWMD proliferation,and hence the proliferation ofconventional and mass destruction weapons cannot be
disentangled.
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Bombing and other form of virtual war never lead to concessive victories only a continuation self-righteousness
and totalizing morals
In his book Virtual War, Ignatieffmakesthe revealing statement that “virtual war”produces merely “virtual
victory”:“Sincethe means employed are limited,the endsachieved are equally constrained:notunconditional
surrender,regime change ordestruction ofthe war-making capacity ofthe other side,only an ambiguous ‘end-state.’”Posing
a question that now reads likea prophecy,he asks,“Why do virtual warsend so ambiguously?”and then answers:“Liberal
democracies that are unwilling torepair collapsed states,to create democracywhere none existed,and to remain on
guarduntil the institutions are self-sustaining andself-reproducing,must inevitably discoverthat virtual victory is a poor
substitute forthe real thing.”64These then,are the passions that droveliberals to support the invasion of Iraq, andwhich
drive them,in its wake,to refashionliberal internationalism in a new guise,as aconvergence ofuniversal and American
values backed by “decisive force.”Yet Ignatieffalso cautioned that we may never “ask our-selves clearly enough whether
our moralemotions are real ...we need to reflect onthe potential for self-righteous irrationalitywhich lies hidden in
abstractions likehuman rights.”65The destructive trap hid-den in the appeal ofinternational moralism was identified long
before by HansMorgenthau,who felt that the historicweakness ofcosmopolitan morality leavesthe statesman with a
“perpetually uneasyconscience”that is soothed by pouring “thecontents ofhis national morality into thenow almost empty
bottle ofuniversalethics.”Nations “oppose each other now asthe standard-bearers ofethical systems ...the moral code ofone
nation flings thechallenge ofits universal claim with mes-sianic fervor into the face ofanother,which reciprocates in
kind.Compromise,the virtue ofthe old diplomacy,becomesthe treason ofthe new.” 66This Morgenthaurightly saw as
particularly dangerous,because it leaves little room for plural claims:The world has room for only one,and theother must
yield or be destroyed.Thus,carry-ing their idols before them,the nationalisticmasses ofour time meet in the
internationalarena,each group convinced that it executesthe mandate ofhistory,that it does forhumanity what it seems to do
for itself,andthat it fulfils a sacred mission ordained byProvidence,however defined.Little do theyknow that they meet
under an empty sky fromwhich the Gods have departed.67We do not have to subscribe to Morgenthau’s realist pessimism
to acknowledge theprofundity ofhis appeal for caution,a cau-tion that must temper any idealism we maystill want to
harbor in a chastened,post-modern search for perpetual peace.TheUnited Nations has long been fissured by atragic and
intractable struggle between theprerogatives ofsovereignty and the cosmo-politan vision ofthe “universal commu-nity”-
but it should be resolved not byradically transforming its structures andprinciples,but by transforming sovereigntyand its
violent conceptual formin ways wehave only begun to explore.A revived lib-eral internationalism must be tempered bythe
fear that our ideals may be suspect,ourmeans dangerous,and our ends tarnished;and ifit is to be a guide to action,it
mustresist the perennial seductions ofan agethat strives for a day when thinking canstop,and action can be pure.
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The idea that a war can be justified rests from the assumption’s that war starts from a decleration and ignores the
beginning of war in pre-existing militaristic institutions. The only hope to isolate when we should fight is by
analyzing existing militarism.
Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy, ‘96
(Chris Cuomo is a theorist, activist, and artist, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at
the University of Georgia. Chris holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been awarded grants from the
Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Center, “War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the
Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), pp. 30-45 Published by: Blackwell Publishing,
P. JSTOR//DN)
Just-war theory is a prominent example of a philosophical approach that rests on the assumption that wars are isolated
from everyday life and ethics. Such theory, as developed by St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius, and as
articulated in contemporary dialogues by many philosophers, including Michael Walzer (1977), Thomas Nagel (1974),
and Sheldon Cohen (1989), take the primary question concerning the ethics of warfare to be about when to enter into
military conflicts against other states. They therefore take as a given the notion that war is an isolated, definable event
with clear boundaries. These boundaries are significant because they distinguish the circumstances in which standard
moral rules and constraints, such as rules against murder and unprovoked violence, no longer apply. Just-war theory
assumes that war is a separate sphere of human activity having its own ethical constraints and criteria and in doing so it
begs the question of whether or not war is a special kind of event, or part of a pervasive presence in nearly all
contemporary life.Because the application of just-war principles is a matter of proper decision- making on the part of
agents of the state, before wars occur, and before military strikes are made, they assume that military initiatives are
distinct events. In fact, declarations of war are generally overdetermined escalations of preexisting conditions. Just-war
criteria cannot help evaluate military and related institutions, including their peacetime practices and how these relate to
wartime activities, so they cannot address the ways in which armed conflicts between and among states emerge from
omnipresent, often violent, state militarism. The remarkable resemblances in some sectors between states of peace and
states of war remain completely untouched by theories that are only able to discuss the ethics of starting and ending direct
military conflicts between and among states. Applications of just-war criteria actually help create the illusion that the
"problem of war" is being addressed when the only considerations are the ethics of declaring wars and of military violence
within the boundaries of declarations of war and peace. Though just-war considerations might theoretically help decision-
makers avoid specific gross eruptions of military violence, the aspects of war which require the underlying presence of
militarism and the direct effects of the omnipresence of militarism remain untouched. There may be important decisions
to be made about when and how to fight war, but these must be considered in terms of the many other aspects of
contemporary war and militarism that are significant to nonmilitary personnel, including women and nonhumans.
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Just war theory fails to prevent war in the modern world because it justifies retaliation and has become a theory -
contextualizing violence is key to solve
Nicholas Rengger, Prof of IR @ University of Saint Andrews, April 2002 [On the Just War Tradition in the Twenty-First
Century, International Affairs 78.2 p. 353-63, Jstor]
It is perhaps an especially rich irony that the events that spurred the rebirth of arguments in the just war tradition
are, in many ways, the same events that have carried liberal ideas in international relations into a still more
dominant, though hardly unchallenged, position in contemporary world politics. The founding of the United Nations,
the entry into force of the UN Charter, the genocide con-vention and the UN convention on human rights, the Nuremberg
tribunals and theirJapanese cousins, and the growth and gradual spread of the 'human rights revolution', as many of its
advocates would call it-all these things challenged the traditional understandings of the sovereignty of states as never
before. If, therefore, states could no longer assume a simple right of going to war, as they largely had during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then the question 'Under what circumstances might states [or, indeed, other actors]
use force?' regained its resonance. However, this return to the jus ad bellum, if one can call it that, took place, as we
have seen, against the background of, first, a more general hostility to war under any circumstances in liberal publc
cultures; second, a concept of jus in bello largely transformed by both legal instantiation and military habituation; and
third, the effective secularization of the societies in question. Given these features, it is hardly surprising that the
'renaissance of the just war', both in scholarship and in practice, disclosed a character very different from that which
the just war tradition had traditionally displayed.I9 II Of course, the differing characters of traditional just war
assumptions and their moder equivalents has not escaped some of the more sharp-eyed among the tradition's
contemporary defenders. James Turner Johnson, for example, has recently point to the fact that over time the jus ad
bellum had coalesced around a set of seven principles: in rough order of priority, just cause, right authority, right
intention, proportionality of ends, last resort, reasonable hope of success and the aim of peace. The jus in bello,
meanwhile, had come to revolve around two central principles: proportionality of means and non-combatant
immunity. In the modern context, however, as he rightly points out, many of these assum-ptions have either
narrowed markedly from their original sense or disappeared altogether, while those that remain have become
legal, rather than principally ethical, in their force. Thus, for example, 'just cause' in the traditional just war
setting ranged from the defence of the innocent against armed attack, through the retaking of persons, property or
values unjustly taken, to the punishment of evil. In the modern context, it has shrunk to national self-defence
against armed attack or, perhaps, retaliation for armed attack.20 It might be that the debate over so-called 'humani-
tarian intervention' during the I990s is, at least in some respects, a pale echo of the old emphasis of the tradition on the
protection of the innocent;2' but it is also clear that the entrenched assumptions of what we might call 'Westphalian'
international law, for all that it might be fraying at the edges, still militate against this emphasis. This bias, moreover, is
reinforced by many writers working self-consciously within the just war tradition. Perhaps most notoriously, Walzer
concedes only an extremely limited right of intervention inJust and unjust wars (admitting only three grounds: secession,
civil war or genocide); and even though he relaxes this somewhat in a later essay,22 he has never changed his
fundamental view that 'interventions' should be very infrequent affairs. As we have seen, part of the reason for this
rather more constrained under-standing of the character of the just war has to do with its embedding in law; but
equally clearly, another part of the reason has to do with the norms of the states-system that evolved after the just
war tradition reached maturity. States were presumed from roughly the eighteenth century onwards to have a
right of war in defence of their interests, which therefore made the traditional questions of the jus ad bellum
largely irrelevant. The rebirth of interest in the just war tradition has come about in part because, at least since the
Second World War, that presumed right has come under increasing challenge (from the international human rights regime,
from globalization and so on). Nonetheless, it is still a powerful force. Even many of those who decline to accept it, like
Wheeler in Saving strangers,a dmit its power by emphasizing the centrality of the role of states in shaping international
norms and arguing that states should adopt what Wheeler calls a 'solidarist' conception of international society, which
would allow, even encourage, interventions in cases of humanitarian emergency.23 As Wheeler says, 'Where else can we
turn? At present it is only states that have the capabilities to fly thousands of troops halfway around the world to prevent
or stop genocide or mass murder'.24 But, as long as states retain this central role, then it is unlikely that the broader
conception of the just war tradition will be given as much room as its advocates would like. There is, however, a
final reason for the different character of the just war tradition in the modern world. For, while earlier examples of the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 96
tradition were content to use specific legal, political and institutional means, the central fact about the tradition was
that it was a tradition of moral and political reflection rooted in practice, and the practice concerned not merely
the business of war and the use of force but its role in statecraft and, indeed, its involvement with people's
everyday lives. As Johnson notes, the purposes of the just war tradition were not limited to specific wars (or occasions of
the use of military force) but extended to the purposes of political community as such and the character of individual
actions.25
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JWT BAD - PREEMPTION
Justifying pre-emptive war leads to endless wars which can never be stopped because states will construct threats
as an excuse for aggression
Andrew Gordon Fiala, director of the Ethics Center @ CSU Fresno, 2008 [The Just War Myth: Moral Illusions of War,
Google Books]
‘There is, of course, something right about RP lt seems easy enough to justify on consequentialist grounds: if the
suffering caused by the pre- emptive attack were less than the suffering that would occur if the threat of aggression were
not preempted, then an act of preemption would be justified. We may be suspicious of this because it risks an
escalation of war as nations try to preempt one another. One way around this is to consider the possibility that RP
may be justified for the United States but not for everyone else.” This double standard is linked to claims about U.S.
hegemony and moral superiority. 11ie basic idea is that the United States should have the prerogative to act as a global
hegemon because it has both the power and the moral legitimacy to preempt developing threats. The difficulty for
citizens is what to make of both the consequentialist argument and the claims about U.S. moral hegemony. My thesis is
that citizens should reject both of these arguments. The consequentialist argument is dilicult to implement in
practice because it is based on speculation about risk. This difficulty is noted, for example, by Walzer, who
acknowledges that what he calls “preventive” war may be justilied on consequentialist grounds: lighting early might lead
to less suffering in the long run. However, Walzer recognizes the practical/epistemological problem: “Given the
radical uncertainties of power politics. there probably is no practical way of making out that position-deciding
when to light and when not-on utilitarian principles.”27 'l'he traditional basis for restricting anticipatory self-defense
was that, without such restriction. we would suffer worse long-term consequences. In Webster’s words. a permissive idea
about preemption would lead to “bloody and exasperated war."” This is so because any country could use
speculative threats as a pretext for aggression, thus creating a genuine risk of escalation. Thus, on rule-
consequentialist grounds, one could argue that it is better not to accept RPBoth sorts of consequentialist arguments-in
favor and against RP-are based on speculative assessment of the long-tenn consequences of RR In most cases it is
impossible to say one way or another whether a policy of RP will produce better or worse consequences. If we are
skeptical. I main~ tain we should err on the side of conservatism and thus reject RR Now one way we could hope to shore
up the consequential argument in favor of RP is to adopt the double standard and claim that RP is only for the United
States, the de facto moral hegemon. But we have good l l The Preemprive War Doctrine 93 reason to be skeptical of tl\is
claim as well. It is quite difficult to establish the long-term consequences of adopting the double standard. Such a
unilateral approach may in fact stimulate further hostility toward the United States and thus inspire more anti-
United States terrorism. In the absence of proof that the double standard will produce better long-term consequences, we
should be conservative and stay within the more global framework that is found in TP, which admits that all states have an
equal right to preempt traditionally understood imminent threats.
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***GENDER***
GENDER DISCRETE ADVANTAGE (1/7)
US military policies have hijacked the notion of progressive feminism but have fallen back to sexist and
gendered policies and ignored the needs of women co-opted micropolitical humanitarian movements for
women’s rights.
Drucilla Cornell (professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women's Studies at Rutgers
University) 2002 [(The Sacrilege of Feminism, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture,
http://www.identities.org.mk/files/Drucilla%20Cornell_The%20Sacrilege%20of%20FeminismENG.pdf)]
On April 20, 2002, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) assailed the feminist majority of The
United States, represented as it was by an article in Ms. Magazine called “A Coalition of Hopes” for ignoring the horrible atrocities committed
by the Northern Alliance and for erasing RAWA.s historical role twenty five years of relentless struggle against the
Taliban’s inhumanity toward women. Most of the members of RAWA, at least those who have not been executed or forcibly exiled remain in
Afghanistan, seeking support for their own program of secular democracy, women’s rights, and the re-establishment of a working infrastructure, which is utterly
necessary for anything resembling a democratic society to thrive. In its response to the Ms. Magazine article, RAWA posed a set of penetrating questions to US
feminists: Are they merely smearing the US government and Western press who find it easier to present the Taliban as evil and the forces that the US supported against
them as good? Or have they joined with our government in a concerted effort to ignore these crimes and once again forfeit the lives and rights of women for our current
national self-interest? Perhaps the feminist majority, in their push for US economic and political power, are being careful not to
anger the political powers in the US who still deny and make apologies for the human rights abuses done by the likes of
Massoud, Rabinni, Dostum, Hekmatyar, and others who were trained, armed, and supported by the US during the Cold
War years in Afghanistan, and then left in a power vacuum to destroy their people and their country.2 RAWA does not here cite
the innovative philosophical work of Giorgio Agamben, someone who has tried to show the contemporary political relevance of the ancient
Roman category of homo sacer by claiming that .[w]hen their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when human
beings are truly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in Roman law of the archaic period: doomed to death.. 3 But
for the members of RAWA, their erasure is inseparable from our so-called .war which was not a war. against the Afghan people,
in which the innumerable deaths of Afghan citizens did not count, could not be counted, either in a moral or a
mathematical sense. For we still do not know how many people have died as a result of our militaristic effrontery, people
who were killed with impunity as homines sacri, people who looked up at our planes not knowing whether packages of aid
or bombs were about to fall on their heads. As I deliver these words to you today, it appears that Iraqis will be the next ones doomed to death in
Agamben’s sense as we move headlong into a war against Iraq, in an effort to oust its leader, Saddam Hussein. To be sure, this will be an unprecedented war in
American constitutional history since we plan to engage in extreme military aggression against a government that has been shown by Scott Ritter, UN weapon’s
inspector in Iraq for over seven years now, not to pose any serious threat to US national security. Yet the imminent war against Iraq will not be an exception to the rule
that political discourse created to shore up flagrantly illegitimate military campaigns typically points to the fact that our action is necessary in order to right wrongs.
After all, in the case of Afghanistan, the justification for the bombing and for the overthrow of the Taliban regime was that
we were righting wrongs against women. In much of her Marxist feminist work over the years, Gayatri Spivak has shown that the long and brutal
history of Western imperialism was able to survive, ideologically and otherwise, because the liberation of the poorest of the poor among women also helped promote a
program of systematic economic domination. But recently, in an essay called “Righting Wrongs” she has shifted her theoretical focus, arguing that we
must revisit the classical liberal distinction between natural and civil rights if we are understand how it is that unjustified
conceptions of natural right are used to encroach upon the civil rights recognized by nation-states in the global south and
by delegitimated social institutions and structures that grassroots activists are trying to re-legitimate. Her point is that only
once these institutions and structures receive new legitimacy can the nation-states in which they function overcome the
human rights dependency that endlessly reproduces the figure of .wronged victim..a dependency that , according to Spivak, .can
be particularly vicious in its neo-colonial consequences , if it is the state that is the agency of terror and [Europe and the
United States] that is the savior..4 This self-permission for continuing to right wrongs is, for Spivak, premised on the idea
that .wronged victims. will never be able to help themselves, and indeed will always need to be politically buttressed from
the outside, due to their necessarily inferior political status, which renders them at once unwilling and unable to
participate in what the likes of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington would call the modern civilized culture of democracy.Spivak goes on to
suggest that the notoriously shaky philosophical foundation of natural rights, the idea that our rights as men. are, ipso facto, anterior to our
civil rights as citizens, often goes unnoticed in human rights discourse . The reason for this, she claims, is that a decidedly
Darwinian assumptionunderwrites much of that discourse, namely that those who are naturally the most human must
shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs of those less-than-human peoples who do not fit into our modern as well as
classical liberal conception of the rights bearing individual protected under the law . Interestingly enough, she nevertheless fully
endorses what I would like to call, following Immanuel Kant, the ideal of humanity. But she does so by admonishing those of us who are
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 99
[CONTINUED]
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 100
[CONTINUED]
citizens of the US and of Europe to unlearn our cultural absolutism which is in fact our own cultural relativism, and which
includes our hegemonic conception of modernity, our conception of ourselves as the natural saviors of the world, as the
ones who are the most truly human and who are thus in a position to name what counts, and especially what does not
count, as human. It is important to note that Spivak is not against human rights, that, believe it or not, she thinks such rights are necessary and sufficient, in
particular historical contexts, for achieving the ethical goal of righting wrongs. But it is perhaps more important to note that central to her recent thinking no less than to
her political activism in India and elsewhere is the idea that human rights activists must be constantly cognizant of the fundamental
inequality that allows them to right the wrongs perpetrated against so many others in this world, particularly women . With
her conception of worlding, she forces those of us residing in .the first world. to accept that we inhabit an imaginary world that is only too real, a world in which doing
the right thing is horribly bound up with Social Darwinist assumptions about the natural power to name the human, the inhuman, what may even be otherwise than
human or inhuman. Spivak’s sincerest hope is that we can salvage human rights discourse by suturing it to .an epic as openness toward the imagined agency of the other
for and to. even compromised and de-legitimated cultures and societies and, most specifically, the almost buried social institutions and rituals of the subaltern..5
Anything less than this suturing would merely return us time and again to justifications of natural rights founded upon some avatar or another of Social Darwinism. In
view of Spivak’s critique of Darwinian liberalism, consider Martha Nussbaum’s attempt to name basic human capabilities6.a forthright attempt to solve the dilemma of
how natural rights conceived precisely as human rights could manage to trump civil rights and indeed justify overriding the sovereignty of nation-states. Although
Nussbaum wishes to leave space for cultural interpretation of the basic capabilities, she believes it is possible to describe in normative terms the proper contents and
functions of these capabilities, and therefore how exactly one who is not yet human ought to become human. Amartya Sen, in both implicit and explicit critiques of
Nussbaum, expresses his disagreement with this kind of hierarchical value system of natural human rights over and against civil rights by insisting that the goal of
development (a teleological project that, with Spivak, I do not think can be extricated from its indisputably imperialist origins) is freedom .freedom to protect not only
civil rights, but what the Marxist Spivak would call the social production and circulation of capital and value. At his most radical, Sen contemplates articulating Marxist
economic claims from a politically liberal standpoint. But that is as far as he goes: he backs down from Spivak.s far more daring project of raising questions about how
we might suture a new ethics of responsibility to the figure of the other, to its imagined agency in a world that cannot count the other, in all its sacred forms and
incarnations.among its sovereign agents.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 101
US intervention in Afghanistan has made the women’s right situation worse – new doctrines grossly
compromise women’s rights and activist women’s movements are being specifically targeted by military
personell.
Kolhatkar, Sonali. (Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission and the host and producer ofUprising
Radio. A Call for Clarity on The War in Afghanistan. http://www.zcommunications.org/a-call-for-clarity-on-
the-afghanistan-war-by-sonali-kolhatkar) November 03, 2009
One of the original justifications for the war in 2001 that seemed to resonate most with liberal Americans was
the liberation of Afghan women from a misogynist regime. This is now being resurrected as the following: If
the U.S. forces withdraw, any gains made by Afghan women will be reversed and they'll be at the mercy of
fundamentalist forces. In fact, the fear of abandoning Afghan women seems to have caused the greatest
confusion and paralysis in the antiwar movement. What this logic misses is that the United States chose right
from the start to sell out Afghan women to its misogynist fundamentalist allies on the ground. The U.S. armed
the Mujahadeen leaders in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation, opening the door to successive
fundamentalist governments including the Taliban. In 2001, the United States then armed the same men, now
called the Northern Alliance, to fight the Taliban and then welcomed them into the newly formed government
as a reward. The American puppet president Hamid Karzai, in concert with a cabinet and parliament of thugs
and criminals, passed one misogynist law after another, appointed one fundamentalist zealot after another to the
judiciary, and literally enabled the downfall of Afghan women's rights over eight long years. Any token gains
have been countered by setbacks. For example, while women are considered equal to men in Afghanistan's
constitution, there have been vicious and deadly attacks against women's rights activists, the legalization of
rape within marriage in the Shia community, and a shockingly high rate of women's imprisonment for
so-called honor crimes — all under the watch of the U.S. occupation and the government we are
protecting against the Taliban. Add to this the unacceptably high number of innocent women and children
killed in U.S. bombing raids, which has also increased the Taliban's numbers and clout, and it makes the case
that for eight years the United States has enabled the oppression of Afghan women and only added to their
miseries. This is why grassroots political and feminist activists have called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal
from their country.After eight years of American-enabled oppression, they would rather fight for their liberation
without our help. The anti-fundamentalist progressive organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women
of Afghanistan (RAWA), has called for an immediate end to the war. Echoing their call is independent dissident
member of Parliament Malalai Joya, who tells her story in her new political memoir, A Woman Among
Warlords.The members of RAWA and women like Joya are openly targeted by the U.S.-backed Afghan
government for their feminism and political activism. RAWA and Joya have worked on the ground, risking
their lives for political change and echo the vast majority of poor and ordinary Afghan women. It's they whom
we ought to listen to and express solidarity with. If American progressives think they know better than
Afghanistan's brave feminist activists on how liberation can be achieved, we're just as guilty as the U.S.
government for subjecting them to the mercy of women-hating criminals.
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The U.S. constructs a progressive feminism but falls back to misogynistic suggestions of women as naïve
of the necessary pragmatics, neo-conservatism needed to win a war – all humanitarian efforts are a
disguise for geostrategic interests.
David Holloway 2009 The War on Terror Espionage Thriller, and the Imperialism of Human Rights Comparative Literature Studies, Volume
46, Number 1, 2009, pp. 20-44 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/cls.0.0062 Muse
If the genre’s willingness to ironize notionally “masculine” perspectives suggests a genuine sensitivity to the current climate in mainstream Euro-
American culture wars, the thriller’sdeeper-lying misogyny suggests that itsconstruction of the West as a progressive
“feminist” culture may serve largely pragmatic generic ends. In this respect,the pragmatism of the war on terror
thriller’s regard for Western women’s agency and rights again mirrors that of the 2002 National Security Strategy , where, despite repeated
appeals to human rights for women in major foreign policy speeches after 9/11, theBush administration’s actual
commitments to women remained fl imsy and vague. (In the whole of the 2002 NSS there was just one mention of women—in
Section II, on how to “Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity,” where “respect for women” was listed among the things that America must “stand
fi rmly for,” alongside “respect for private property” and “limits on the absolute power of the state” [ NSS , 3]). In the war on terror espionage
thriller, wherea generic “male gaze” ensures that women are sexualized body parts before they are anything else,
where their presence in military and espionage circles is fraught with bad outcomes for men, and where truly
liberated women look to male authority not liberal “political correctness” for guidance, the commitment to
women’s rights often appears equally flimsy. Appropriately, perhaps, given their pragmatic appropriation of women’s
rights as tools for the legitimation of torture and war, generic treatments of women tend to ape the traditional
alignments of US foreign policy towards the rest of the world, alternately fl eeing female entanglements by retreating into
essentially women- less fi ctional worlds or seeking vigorously to “educate” female protagonists in ostensibly masculine wisdom or ideology. In
either casethe generic effect is to render abject the agency of Western women, even while that agency is
celebrated as a token of the West’s superior civilizational stature as the bringer of rights. The scenario recurs
often in the war on terror thriller: a sexually desirable, high-flying but naïve young woman enters an all male world and is
“educated,” and in the process is brought to moral or professional maturity, usually through some form of confl ict with the men who know what is
best for her (see particularly Empire State , Memorial Day , and Pandora’s Legion ). Where it is aired at all in these novels, explicit and overt
opposition to human and civil rights abuses tends to come from women who eventually learn the error of their ways (see particularly Isis Herrick and
Peggy Stealey). In the war on terrorespionage thriller, feminine opposition to human and civil rights abuses by Americans and their proxies is
indicative of woolly idealism and weak moral fi ber, the very antithesis of the pragmatic, square-jawed, neocon misogynists who stride resolutely
through the genre as heroes.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 103
Gender has constructed a necessity of militarism through power relations on an international sphere – we
must problamitizes the justifications behind our interventionist policies to disrupt the masculinity behind
unethical militarism.
J. Ann Tickner, Professor of IR @ USC, 2002 [“Feminist Perspectives on 9/11” International Studies
Perspectives p. 333-350]
In this article I first examine the gendering of war and peace; I then situatethe events of post-9/11 in this context, showing how gendered discourses are used
on both sides to reinforce mutual hostilities and their consequences for both women and men . I discuss the much-publicized
representation of Afghan women as victims as well as the less familiar ways —at least to us—in which they have been fighting
back. Through this case, I suggest how feminist analysisexposes and questions these stereotypical gender representations and demonstratestheir negative consequences. I conclude with four generalized lessons thatI take
from this feminist analysis. I begin by defining what I mean by gender.Defining Gender A dictionary definition of gender refers to the social classifications “masculine” and “feminine” as opposed to sex, the physiological
Those, such as
distinction between males and females. In this article, I build and expand on this definition. I definegender as a set of variable, but socially and culturally constructed relationalcharacteristics.
power, autonomy, rationality, activity, and public are stereotypically associated with masculinity; their opposites,
weakness, dependence, emotionality, passivity, and private are associated with femininity . Thereis evidence to suggest that both
women and men assign a more positive value tothe masculine characteristics which denote a culturally dominant ideal type, or“hegemonic” masculinity, to which few
men actually conform; nevertheless, theydo define what men ought to be.16 It is important to note that gendered social relationships are
relationships of power; it is through these hierarchical relationships that male power and female subordination are
sustained, albeit in variousdegrees across time and place. Most feminists consider gendered relationships associal constructions because the specific content of
these contrasted characteristicschange over time and place; this allows for the possibility of femaleemancipation. Gender distinctions can also be used to
reinforce the power of dominant groups: minorities, and “outsiders,” are frequently characterized by dominant groups as
lacking in these hegemonic masculine characteristics. Gender is not , asis so often claimed, synonymous with women and feminine
identities; it is alsoabout men and masculine identities and, more important, about relations between men and women. Gender serves to
legitimate certain activities and ways of thinking over others; it privileges certain societal tasks over others and assignscertain people, depending
on their sex, to undertake them. The consequencesfor women ~and for men! and for society more generally are significant. Nowhere are these
gender lines more firmly drawn than in how societies view and conduct war .Gendering War and PeaceGeorge Patton’s claim—that war
gives purpose to life, evident in post-9011 politicaldiscourse—is one that has been widely shared by both women and men.Whereas wars frequently
energize societies and foster a communal and selfsacrificial spirit among women and men alike, war-fighting is an activity
that has been undertaken almost exclusively by men.In his book War and Gender, Joshua Goldstein questions why we have not beenmore curious
about this fact. In an exhaustive cross-cultural investigation of warsthroughout history, Goldstein finds no biological evidence for why men arealmost always the
fighters; instead, he attributes it to cultural socialization. “Cultures mold males into warriors by attaching to ‘manhood’ those qualities
that make good warriors” ~Goldstein, 2001:252!.17 The toughening up of boys isfound across cultures and many cultures use gender to motivate participation
incombat ~Goldstein, 2001:406!. Warriors require intense socialization in order tofight effectively ~Goldstein, 2001:252!.While Goldstein finds it remarkable that this
association between masculinity and war has received so little attention from scholars who write about war, war as a
masculine activity has been central to feminist investigatio ns ~Stiehm,1983; Elshtain, 1987; Enloe, 1993, 2000!. Generally supporting Goldstein’s
claimsabout militarized masculinity, feminists have suggested that “military manhood,” or a type of heroic masculinity that goes back to
ancient Greece, attracts recruits and maintains self-esteem in institutions where obedience is the norm. The term “patriot” is
frequently associated with service in military combat. The National Organization for Women’s ~NOW! support for women entering theU.S.
military was based on the argument that, if women were barred fromparticipation in the armed forces on an equal footing with men, they wouldremain second-class
citizens denied the unique political responsibility of riskingone’s life for the state ~ Jones, 1990!. The lack of ability to serve in combat hasalso acted as a handicap for
women running for political office in the UnitedStates.The notion that ~young! males fight wars to protect vulnerable people, such aswomen and children who cannot
be expected to protect themselves, has alsobeen an important motivator for the recruitment of military forces. “Protection” has been an important myth
that has sustained support for war by both men and women.18 I use the term “myth” because the large number of civilian
casualties in recent wars severely strains the credibility of female protection. If war is a phenomenon we associate with
men and “hegemonic” masculinity, peace is a term we stereotypically associate with women and some of the devalued
feminine characteristics I outlined earlier. As Jean Elshtain ~1987:230! hassuggested, we are afraid to let go of war because we fear even more the
prospectsof a sterile peace. Peace is frequently seen as an ideal, and even uninteresting, state with little chance of success in the
“real” world. Women have been linked to anti-war sentiment throughout history and most peace movements have beendisproportionately populated by women.
Indeed, many of these movements havedrawn inspiration from maternal imagery to craft their strategies. Yet I believethat the association of women with
peace renders both women and peace as idealistic, utopian, and unrealistic; it is profoundly disempowering for both . Andas
long as peace remains associated with women, this may reinforce militarizedmasculinity ~Goldstein, 2001:413!.The association of men with the “realities” of war and
women with an “idealistic”notion of peace reinforces the gender hierarchies I outlined earlier. Theconsequences of this gender hierarchy are real in that it reinforces
men’s legitimacyand helps sustain their continued dominance in world politics; it alsoserves to perpetuate the barriers that women face in gaining legitimacy in
foreignand military policymaking, particularly in times of conflict. In most societies, women’s under-representation in international security
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 104
matters and the military cannot be explained by legal barriers alone. I shall now suggest someconsequences of these gender stereotypes for our
post-9011 world.

THE RHETORIC OF MIDDLE EASTER WOMAN AS A SEXUAL OBJECT IN NEED OF RESCUE FROM A
BARBARIC EASTERN MALE JUSTIFIED INTERVENTIONISM. ISLAM IS PORTRAYED IN THE MEDIA
AS MISOGYNISTIC AND OPPRESSIVE AND CREATES LINES OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WESTERN
AND ISLAMIC CULTURES.
JIWANI, YASMIN, 2007 [ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, “GENDERING TERROR: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE
ORIENTALIZED BODY IN QUEBEC’S POST-SEPTEMBER 11 ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PRESS” MIDDLE EAST CRITIQUE 13.3 P 265-91]
Much has been written about the ways in which the binaries inherent in colonial discourses have feminized representations
of subject nations, as well as their inhabitants .8 The leakage of such representations into common sense thought through
popular culture also has been documented in numerous instances .9 The continuity between past representations and
contemporary portrayals also has been the subject of considerable research. Said argued that the Orient has been conceptualized as
feminized terrain, weak yet dangerous and ready to be subjugated/domesticated by the civilizing forces of the
'progressive' West. Within this context, women are seen in terms of their role as signifiers of culture: the boundary markers
between the 'us' and 'them' that underlie and structure the relationship of the dominant colonizers to the
subordinated colonized.11 Thus, women's bodies have been used to solidify national boundaries and/or to differentiate
out-groups.12 The body of women as gendered beings then carries particular connotations and is located at multiple sites
of discursive manipulation.13 On the one hand, women are represented as the keepers of culture and the maintainers of tradition. On the
other hand, they are represented as exchange commodities to be used to cement alliances, or to be used as sexual
objects by bothoccupying forces and indigenouspatriarchal institutions.The gendered discourse of power
underpinning colonialism and subsequently neo/post colonial relations is also evident in the ways in whichthe news
media coverstories about 'other' nations and 'other' peoples. Extent studies point out the numerous ways in which 'developing'
nations are portrayed as backward, barbaric, traditional, and 'primitive.'14 In keeping with the Manichean allegories of
colonial thought,15 the 'natives' of these countries are seen to be innocent, childlike and pure relics of a distant
past.16 In the case of women, dominant representations tend to exoticize them, highlighting their perceived
hypersexuality, but at the same time representing them as dangerous and engulfing.17 A critical feature of many of
these representations is their inherent ambivalence.18 As Stuart Hall has pointed out, if the representation of black women,
for example, has centered on the magnetism of their perceived sexuality, this very sexuality also is seen as being
threatening because of its 'otherness' and because of its perceived potentiality to overcome and invade the male
psyche. Lalvani and others have traced the many ways in which the exotic 'other' historically was rendered into a consumable
fetish.20 Through the process of commodification and through the reification of the commodity, the fetish is conquered, its threat
contained, and its use value replaced by its exchange value which is articulated in the currency of desire.21 This is most clearly
apparent in Hollywood depictions of the gendered, Orientalized body—from the geisha tothe slave girl , from the
dragon lady to the oppressed and victimized princess. Although women from different areas with different histories have
experienced colonization and imperialism in specific ways, their representations within the Western media—and most
notably the American media—have tended to collapse such differences , except when highlighting those cultural elements that
serve as the key signifiers of difference and that accentuate particular attributes, such as docility, sexuality, or fecundity, over others. For
instance, women from the 'East' have tended to be portrayed in Hollywood films, imperial literature, and travelogues as
mysterious, exotic, erotic, and dangerous. Said argued, Just as the various colonial possessions—apart from their
economic benefit to metropolitan Europe—were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of delinquents,
poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience
unobtainable in Europe. In a more recent analysis, Sherene Razack argues that the sexual exploitation of women and
children in the countries of the South is underpinned by the Orientalist framing of these countries and their populations.23 She notes
that traveling East to secure exotic and forbidden sexual pleasures is part of the social construction of the region as an
area of 'moral degeneracy.'24 By corollary, the West is constructed as a zone of morality. Drawing on historical
examples, Razack illustrates how the sojourns of Victorian bourgeois men into areas of moral degeneracy helped to rejuvenate and restore within
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 105
prostitution andsexual
them their own sense of masculinity and cumulatively reinforce hegemonic values. She further argues that
exploitationare forms of violence, predicated on and intersecting with the violence of the colonial and post-colonial
[CONTINUED]
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 106
[CONTINUED]
encounter. The theme of the sexualized other is an important focal point in colonial literature about women in
the East. Much of this literature highlights a preoccupation with the veil and the veiling of women. As Yeenolu states: The
veil attracts the eye, and forces one to think, to speculate about what is behind it.It is often represented as some
kind of a mask, hiding the woman. With the help of this opaque veil, the Oriental woman is considered as not yielding herself to the
Western gaze and therefore imagined as hiding something behind the veil. It is through the inscription of the veil as a mask that the Oriental woman
is turned into an enigma. Such a discursive construction incites the presumption that the real nature of these women is concealed, their truth is
disguised and they appear in a false deceptive manner. They are therefore other than what they appear to be.25If, as Frantz Fanon suggested, this
leads to an overpowering desire to rend the veil and unmask the woman (a desire which, in part, can be understood as
motivating Western media's fascination and obsession with the veil), the veil as a cover is also enticingly mysterious.26 A recent
United Colors of Benetton advertisement featuring Afghani women in the burqa captures this sense of mystery, inviting the Western gaze to unveil
the woman.27 Interestingly, the woman is unveiled in the very next ad, suggesting that Benetton is able to undo in an instant what centuries of
colonization only could attempt. In contemporary Western media, the veil remains a symbol of Muslim women and their
oppression by tribal, primitive, and conservative upholders of Islam.28 As Anouar Majid remarks, 'For the Western media, the picture of the
veiled woman visually defines both the mystery of Islamic culture and its backwardness.'29 However, as she goes on to explain: Despite its
close association with Islam, the veil is in fact an old eastern Mediterranean practice that was assimilated to Islam
in its early stages of expansion. In the two suras (verses) in the Qur'an that refer to the veil, not only is there no specific mention of veiling the face
but certain parts of the body in fact are assumed to be visible.30 Nonetheless, the association of Muslim women with the veil
persists in Western popular imagination. Moreover, it feeds and fuels yet another prevailing feature in the discourse
surrounding Orientalized women—that of their oppressed and tradition-bound existence. Within Western popular
media, this feature often serves to underpin the 'rescue' motif . In this motif, the white male explorer seeks to rescue
the imperiled woman of color and save her from the brutality of her cultural traditions.31 Miriam Cooke maintains that 'the
burqa recalls suttee and the four-stage gendered logic of empire: (1) women have inalienable rights within universal
civilization; (2) civilized men recognize and respect these rights; (3) uncivilized men systematically abrogate these
rights; and (4) such men (the Taliban) thus belong to an alien (Islamic) system.'32 Cooke adds that: Imperial logic
gendersand separates subjectpeoples so that the men are the Other and the women are civilizable. To defend our
universal civilization we must rescue the women . To rescue these women we must attack these men . These women will
be rescued not because they are more 'ours' than 'theirs' but rather because they will have become more 'ours' through the rescue mission … In the
Islamic context,the negative stereotyping ofthe religion as inherently misogynist provides ammunition for the
attack on the uncivilized brown men.33Interestingly, Western imperial feminism alsohas been taken to task by feminists
of color for embracing this same rescue motif . As Antoinette Burton notes, 'Many middle-class British feminists viewed the women of the
East not as equals but as unfortunates in need of saving by their British feminist 'sisters.'34 By imagining the women of India as helpless colonial
subjects, British feminists constructed 'the Indian woman' as a foil against which to gauge their own progress.'35 The rescue motif is also
apparent in the ways in which many Western feminists reacted to the plight of Afghan women as victims of
oppressive, barbaric men, needing to be saved by their sisters .36 The focus on the veil from all these various quarters thus
allows for the enactment of the rescue motif. It legitimizes intervention in the name of liberation and progress. Indeed,
many within Islamic nations have sought to mark progress in terms of normative or prescriptive dictates that forbid or sanction the wearing of the
veil.37
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 107
OUR CONSTRUCTION OF THE ORIENT AS ONTOLOGICALLY BACKWARDS IN RELATION TO US LEGITIMIZES
WESTERN SUPERIORITY AS WORTH DEFENDING AT ANY COST – WAR, GENOCIDE, AND VIOLENT HEGEMONY
Meghana V.Nayak, Pace University, andChristopherMalone, Pace University, 2009 [American Orientalism
and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony]
Edward Said (1979)shattersthe taken-for-granted status of colonial and postcolonial knowledge about the developing world
with his analysis of Orientalism. As he notes, European intellectual, artistic, archeological, and literary examinations o f—and
claims about—the bodies and borders conquered and mapped, justified the necessity and endurance of colonial European
empires. Further, there is an internal consistency of the Orientalist discourse, despite any lack of correspondence with a
"real" Orient, in order to confer an objective and innocent status to the knowledge production that both prompted and
rationalized the brutality of imperialism(Said 1979:5–7). However, this does not mean that Orientalism is just a play of meanings and ideas, for, as
constructivist IR scholars argue, the more we act toward an entity as if it has a particular representation or meaning, the more that entity can take on that representation
(Wendt 1992; Doty 1996). For example, the more European colonialists perceived colonized territories as incapable of self-governing, the more Europeans treated the
territories as in need of governing. Indeed, Orientalism is a "Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over
the Orient" (Said 1979:3), acting "dynamically along with brute political, economic, and military rationales" (Said 1979:12). Said
(1979:12) also claims that Orientalism has much less to do with the "Orient" and much more to do with the making of "our"
world. Knowledge claims about the Other (the Orient/the East) actually cement the way the Self (Europe/the West) sees
and constructs itself.The "Orient"—a mysterious, erotic, dark, dangerous mass of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Arab, South
Asian, East Asian natives—is a deep and recurring image in Western identity-making. The impact of Said's work , particularly
Orientalism, on critical IR is threefold. First, it creates space for critical IR scholars to examine representational practices and international hierarchy in
international politics, in dialogue with scholars in other fields, such as literary criticism, anthropology, postcolonial thought, feminist studies, political geography, and
others. Said's contrapuntal analyses of culture, colonial discourses, nationalism, power, and representational practices in his body of work opens the way to explore the
nuances, contradictions, and shifting and hybrid contexts of Othering (Chowdhry 2007). The Other is that through which the subject is represented as privileged and
superior, with the Other being devalued, feared, reviled, even desired, in some way. The Other stands as a potential disruption of the Self, but at
the same time, as critical IR theorist Campbell (1998b)points out, the Self cannot fully contain or "resolve" the anxiety over the
difference from or the encounter with the Other; without the production of this anxiety, insecurity, and danger, statecraft
and nation-making would have nothing against which to assert themselves . Indeed, for the West, the encounters of slavery,
colonialism, and genocide have to be represented as trysts with danger, backwardness, and ever-threatening barbarism—
anything but illegitimate violence—in order to naturalize Western superiority. Second, the various debates about Said's work have
inspired and fortified critiques of rationalist methodology of mainstream IR scholars and of how their ontological
presumptions about and methodological studies of the "West" and the "rest" obscure more than they explain (Allain 2004;
Chowdhry 2007). Third, the American variant of Orientalism allows for an analysis of the discursive deployments in which (1)
the United States assumes and relies upon an ontological distinction between the United States and Others (Weldes et al. 1999;
Richter-Montpetit 2007); (2) the United States employs authoritative epistemological claims and representations about Others'
bodies, habits, beliefs, feelings, and political sensibilities, thereby justifying interventions, sanctions, and other actions
within, across, and outside of its borders (Persaud 2002); and (3) US foreign policy relies on a rationalist methodology
consisting of finding "evidence," such as reports and fact-finding missions, of foregone conclusions about the Other and
the United States need to assert its position (Tetreault 2006).Research in this vein, both within and in conversation with critical IR, has examined both
the US relationship with the Middle East since the 1940s7 as well as American aggressions since the nineteenth century (Sadowski 1993; Ngai 2000; Little 2002;
Mamdani 2004; Khalidi 2005). Orientalism, or at least the controversies over its conclusions, has featured prominently in the debates since 9/11
over whether Huntington was right about Islam (Fox 2001; Abrahamian 2002; Elshtain 2004; Lewis 2004), and in claims that the United
States is Othering Islam/Arabs with disastrous results (Little 2002; Khalidi 2005; Alam 2007). Further, many find that an understanding
of Orientalism "within" the United States, particularly toward Arab Muslim and South Asian Americans, after 9/11, is crucial (Hagopian 2004).
Agathangelou and Ling's (2005) stinging critique of the 9/11 Commission Report's treatment of the Muslim Other demonstrates the overwhelming reasons why we
should understand the reasons for and consequences of constructing the quintessential Muslim/Arab/Middle Eastern Other
both within the United States and "elsewhere."
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 108
LINK - AFGHANISTAN
Occupation of Afghanistan only exacerbates the suffering of women in Afghanistan and portrays them subalterns
that cannot speak for or defend themselves.
Blake, Sarah (Masters degree in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the London School of Economics and gender
theory author, November 09, The War on Terrorism as State of Exception: A Challenge for Transnational Gender Theory,
published in: the Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 11 #3)
Abu-Lughod’s discomfort with the public discourse on gender and, crucially, ‘culture,’ raises important questions for both
academics and activists, which lend urgency and specificity to questions that have concerned Spivak and other gender
theorists for decades. Considering the degree to which gender theorists have, as a community, struggled to deal with
‘culture,’ her criticism of the popular discourse around the invasion of Afghanistan retains a particular salience: The
question is why knowing about the ‘culture’ of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women,
was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S.’s role in
this history. Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human
suffering in this part of the world.Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give religio-
cultural ones. Instead of questions that might lead to the exploration of global interconnections, we were offered ones that
work to artificially divide the world into separate spheres-recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us
versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in
burqas. 23 The ‘imaginary geography’ that Abu-Lughod describes here is familiar to gender theorists working on
transnational issues, which relate to how power is justified and exercised through actual and imagined space. Achille
Mbembe further explores the circular logic of imaginary and physical geography that traps individual bodies in its
exception in his discussion of the circumstances of colonial occupation. Mbembe asserts: Colonial occupation itself was a
matter of seizing, delimiting and asserting control over a physical geographical area-of writing on the grounds a new set
of social and spatial relations.The writing of new spatial relations (territorialization) was, ultimately, tantamount of the
production of boundaries and hierarchies; zones and enclaves . . . and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of
cultural imaginaries.24 Abu-Lughod maps the imaginary geography deployed in discourses about Afghan women in a
way that reveals their historical precedence in the uses of ‘colonial feminism,’25 by the English and French in the Middle
East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The contrast that she highlights between that administration’s use of images
of women’s rights in the territories it sought to dominate and the low status it granted to women at home26 points to a
precedent for challenging the American government’s moral authority in this case. This rings particularly true in
hindsight, and knowledge of the United States military’s abuses at Abu Ghraib, which Judith Butler called “the actions of
a misogynist institution against a population in which women are cast in roles bound by codes of honor and shame, and so
not ‘equal’ in the way that women ostensibly are in the West.”27 Abu-Lughod’s final criticism already touches on some
of the instrumentalization already at work in 2002: Even RAWA, the now celebrated Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan, which was so instrumental in bringing to U.S. women’s attention to the excesses of the Taliban,
has opposed the U.S. bombing from the beginning. . . They consistently remind audiences to take a close look at the ways
policies are being organized around oil interests, the arms industry, and the international drug trade. They are not obsessed
with the veil, even though they are the most radical feminists working for a secular democratic Afghanistan.28 This
creates a sense that, from the beginning, the gender justice argument was almost entirely a symbolic one. This divergence
in stated priorities - between the oppressed, yet activist RAWA, and the liberating government, raises questions about the
degree to which Muslim-particularly Afghan-women were and are seen as muted subalterns. Indeed, their subaltern status
is assured by the fact that even when actively campaigning for their own political priorities, their alleged liberators
continue to speak for them. Indeed, the treatment of RAWA provides an illustration of Spivak’s argument that
subalterneity, rather than defined as mere disenfranchisement or disadvantage, but a reduction to an identity defined only
as difference.29 To return to a crucial element of Agamben’s idea of what structures states of exception: …in the modern
era, misery and exclusion are not only economic or social concepts, but eminently political categories ...In this sense, our
age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt to overcome the division dividing the people, to eliminate,
radically the people that is excluded.30 It is possible, then, to read the instrumentalization of particular Afghan women’s
advocacy as a consequence of the American public’s desire to accept any intervention that would eliminate this marked
difference. This complicates the discussion of the politics that encourage the use of the ‘liberation of Afghan women’ to
justify violence that inevitably leads to the suffering of many such Afghan women. If symbolic deployments of women’s
images is shorthand for the existence of the ‘people’ that suffers and that must be eliminated through ‘development’ in
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 109
some cases, and overt violence in others, then investigating the discursive construction of certain categories of women
becomes an even more urgent task.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 110
LINK - AFGHANISTAN
US military presence ensures masculinized domination of women in Afghanistan-reducing women to objects
without agency.
Cynthia Enloe(Ph.D. in political science @ the University of California Berkley) 2007 [(Updating the Gendered Empire: Where are
the Women of occupied Afghanistan and Iraq?, Exceptional State, pp.134-158)]
Which men foreign elite expansionist men choose to become their trusted local allies will almost certainly have repercussions for local
women. Moreover, which men an invading force selects as its local allies will either enhance or, more commonly, undermine the
viability of those foreign expansionists' use of women's emancipation as a moral justification for their expansionist enterprise. When
US policy makers in Washington selected Ismail Khan and his fellow Northern Alliance antimodernist regional
commanders as their most promising allies, they did not employ the empowerment of Afghan women as their chief
criterion. Instead, the Washington strategists chose ground-level military capability and previous experience of
cooperation with the United States as their principal criteria for choosing their Afghan allies . The criteria that any
expansionist government uses when it chooses its local allies are a much better predictor of the expansionists'
postinvasion commitment to women's advancement than is any post hoc discourse of moral justifi cation. Furthermore,
which men the invading force chooses as its primary local allies will also privilege certain forms of local masculinity over
others. This was true in earlier imperial enterprises, and it is true in any putative imperial enterprises today. Internationally ambitious
governments have typically sought local allies as they expanded the reach of their power and authority. Stories of the Spanish
expansion into Mexico, the Dutch expansion into what is now Indonesia, the British expansions into Malaya, India, and Egypt, the US
expansion into the Philippines, and the French expansion into Vietnam - each testify to this common expansionist strategy of forging
unequal local alliances of convenience. Empires, that is, are crafted out of unequal alliances between the ambitious imperialists and
those local actors who calculate, often mistakenly, that they will be able to extract strategic gains for themselves even out of a clearly
imbalanced alliance. Bedfellows are not all equal. All masculinities are not equal. Virtually every one of the imperializing
alliances mentioned above were between men. This fact is not trivial. Today in Afghanistan, the likelihood of : the young
Herat woman experiencing meaningful liberation of the sort wishfully imagined by so many Americans who lent, their moral
support to the US invasion of Afghanistan has been made dependent on a deeply masculinized local provincial regime
whose power is ensured by its deeply masculinized foreign institution, the US military. Several independent human
rights researchers have investigated what hap pened to Afghan girls and women between 2001 and 2003. What these re-
searchers discovered - not only in Khan's Herat but in many other provinces outside of Kabul where Northern Alliance
commanders have used their militias and their intimate ties with American soldiers on the ground to consoli date their
grasp on the levers of local power (and money) - was that the military strategy the Bush administration officials adopted to conduct
the invasion constituted a strategy that hobbled, rather than facilitated, the genuine liberation of most of Afghanistan's women
and girls. These observers noted the apparently easy rapport that had developed between the American Special Forces
male soldiers - the Special Forces being perhaps the most masculinized of all US military units - and the local governor's
militiamen, perhaps due to their shared identity as combat-tested men. The investigators also noted that despite their opposition
to the Taliban regime, Khan and Northern Al liance commanders were committed to a very patriarchal form of post-
Taliban social order. Khan thus shared with the Taliban's and al-Qaeda's male leaders a belief that controlling women's
marital and sexual relations was important for sustaining their hold on power . The Northern Alliance and its
relationships with the US military each warrant feminist-informed investigations for several reasons. First, we need to know in
precisely which ways shared masculinity has facilitated the sustaining of this alliance between Herat's warlord Ismail Khan and the US
field commanders. Second, we need to know in exactly which ways, other differences notwithstanding, shared masculinities created
an easy rapport between the American and Afghan Northern Alliance commanders' rank-and-file men, assisting each to consolidate
their authority in their respective daily operations. Third, we need to explore the ways in which this two-layered masculinization
served to entrench the Northern Alliance regional commanders' own notions of subordinate femininity. Fourth, in our investigation of
contemporary American expansionism, we need to pay serious attention to the rivalry between the Northern Alliance commanders'
model of masculinity and the models of masculinity projected by the Kabul-based senior civilian officials in Hamid Karzai's cabinet.
Some Afghans have declared this to be a contest between the warlords and "the neckties." Men such as Khan can claim that the
neckties sitting in Kabul have become the lackeys of the United States and other foreign donors (the UN, the European Union, and
Japan). Khan and the other warlords, despite their intense ethnicized mutual distrust of each other, on the other hand, can claim to be
combat-tested veterans, commanders of men, men who have wielded manly violence and risked their lives to defend the nation. The
warlords thus can drape over their patriarchal shoulders the mantel of masculinized nationalism. Their ability to control the women in
their provinces and to act as the guardians of "true" Afghan femininity constitutes a crucial component of their ability to mobilize their
own armies and collect their own tax revenues.On the other hand, the neckties - represented especially by Dr. Ashraf Ghani, Karzai's
minister of finance - can claim to be men of reason. Reason and combat - both have been used repeatedly by men of myriad cultures to
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 111
compete with other men for the political brass ring; being recognized as the man liest of public men. The neckties see themselves as
builders of a new centralized constitutional state, a political order based on laws and budgets, not on artillery and armed roadblocks.
The neckties can portray themselves as being able to represent the nation's interests where it counts, not on some desolate battlefield,
but in the corridors of the most important masculinized international arenas, the United Nations Security Council, the US State
Department, the World Bank, and the European Commission. 8One might think that any form of dominant masculinity might be
better for most women than is the warlord variety. In practice, however, women hoping for the education, public voice,
and economic opportunities that US officials promised for them commonly find that there is little space left for
autonomous women in such a masculinized contest. In such a contest, women are deemed crucial by the rivals, but merely as
symbols, subordinates, admirers, or specta tors. Men rivaling each other in the arena of politicized masculinity have
always needed to ensure that "their" women will play those politically salient feminized roles. That is not liberation. That
is not authentic citizenship.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 112
LINK - SAVING WOMEN
The US’s representations of Afghani women as in need of saving - epitomized in the symbol of the burqa - does
epistemological violence to cultural traditions. This justified the material violence of US military intervention
Kevin Ayotte, Associate Professor of Communication @ CSU Fresno, and Mary Husain, Lecturer of Communication @
CSU Fresno, 2005 (Securing Afghan Women, Feminist Formations 17.3, Project MUSE, p. 115-23)
There seems to be considerable agreement that the burqa, the heavy garment that covers the entirety of a woman’s body
with only a narrow mesh screen for vision, has become the universal symbol of women’s oppression in Afghanistan
(Kensinger 2003, 2; Abu-Lughod 2002, 785). In the context of the Taliban’s harsh imposition of the mandatory burqa for
all Afghan women, where the smallest deviation in dress was often met with public violence, such symbolism is easy to
understand. It has been well documented that women in Afghanistan have been beaten simply for accidentally letting an
inch of skin show (United Nations 2000, 7; Amnesty International 1999; Physicians for Human Rights 1998, 52). Of
course, the Taliban’s overwhelming misogyny neither began nor ended with the imposition of the burqa, and the
wide range of oppressive policies that the Taliban infl icted upon women has certainly been discussed in the U.S.
news media. Yet in many cases, representations of the burqa have come to stand in for all of the other violence
done to Afghan women by an either visual or linguistic synecdoche. It is not only the rhetoric of “the veil” that is
signifi cant in U.S. discourses about Afghan women but also the position of the speaking subject.3 Especially
problematic is the ventriloquism of Afghan women by discourses speaking for (both “on behalf of” and “in place of”)
them. For example, Vicki Mabrey reported on CBS’s 60 Minutes II that, “for the women of Afghanistan, the veil, the
burqa, has become the symbol of the Taliban’s power” (“Unveiled” 2001). Of course, in one sense this may very well
be perfectly accurate, and the point of identifying this moment is not to suggest that U.S. women (or men) should not
speak of other peoples’ oppression. The key is to maintain a constantly refl exive skepticism toward the adequacy of
our own (U.S.) representations of the “plight” of third-world women. Although Mabrey does interview women from
Afghanistan, we must recall that “Huma,” “Sonia,” and the others interviewed in the news program are always already
ventriloquized by the media narrative. Even if their accounts could be unproblematically interpreted as immediate
and generalizable reflections of reality, that discourse has already been edited, prompted by certain lines of
questioning, i.e., mediated. This is not to suggest that the women’s stories are false, but rather that even their indigenous
narratives are inflected by their representation in an inevitably Western discourse (Spivak 1999, 49).
Postcolonial feminists have long recognized that paternalistic Western representations of third world women in
need of saving by white Europeans are not benign (Mohanty 1991b, 72). Although the West’s appropriation and
construction of the third-world Muslim woman is not a new phenomenon, in the aftermath of 9/11 the circulation of
images of veiled females reached epic proportions. U.S. media quickly capitalized on the veil as a visual and
linguistic signifi er of Afghan women’s oppression. Burqa-clad fi gures, potent political symbols of the “evil” of the
Taliban, were suddenly everywhere. Our intent is neither to support nor repudiate Islamic covering practices. Rather, we
argue that U.S. discourses homogenize an extraordinarily diverse population of Muslim women. Noticeably rare in
the U.S. construction of the Afghan woman is an explication of the origins, variety, and underlying meanings of these
practices that have shifted across historically specifi c cultural contexts (Mohanty 1991b, 67; Mojab 1998, 21). Although
an exhaustive description of covering practices would be impossible, a brief foray into their variety will help to highlight
the false homogeneity of U.S. representations. Contrary to popular misconceptions, these cultural practices
originated prior to the rise of Islam (Ahmed 1992, 5).4 The monolithic image of the Taliban-imposed burqa is also just
one among many covering “styles,” a phrase that seems oxymoronic in light of the often homogenous portrayal of Islam
in Western media (Abu-Lughod 2002, 786). Meanings of oppression are certainly not intrinsic to Islamic covering
practices but are socially constructed through discourse. Covering has functioned in a multiplicity of ways throughout
time. For example, its use as an expression of agency (e.g., in the resistance movements against secular governments in
Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Iran) has been elided by Western media (Mojab 1998, 20). In some Middle Eastern
countries, covering signifi es the initiation of women into fundamentalist resistance movements (Franks 2000, 919).
During the 1979 revolution, middle-class Iranian women “veiled themselves” as a symbol of protest against the
Shah and “Western cultural colonization,” or as a means of expressing their solidarity with working-class women
(Mohanty 1991b, 67). Post-9/11 archetypal representations of oppressed burqa-clad women often ignore its utilization by
Afghan feminists. The burqa provided an effective cover for smuggling books and supplies to a network of underground
schools, cameras for documenting Taliban abuses, and women fl eeing persecution (Kensinger 2003, 7).5 Some feminists
have vehemently challenged the idea that these practices can be “empowering” (e.g., Moghissi 1999, 42-7). However, as
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 113
Mohanty remarks, “[t]o assume that the mere practice of veiling women in a number of Muslim countries indicates
the universal oppression of women through sexual segregation not only is analytically reductive, but also proves
quite useless when it comes to the elaboration of oppositional political strategy” (1991b, 67). The consequences of
such analytical reductionism are not merely theoretical; homogenization of Muslim covering practices partakes in
exactly the paternalistic logic that underlies the neocolonial politics of U.S. efforts to “liberate” Afghan women
according to an explicitly Western model of liberal feminism. The U.S. appropriation of the burqa after 9/11 is
reminiscent of depictions of women in colonial territories, and colonial discourses provide helpful analogues for the
present analysis.For example, Spivak provides a rigorous critique of the paternalistic feminism that informed the British colonial ban on sati in India (1999, 285-7). In British accounts of this practice, in which
a widow would immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, the voice of women who practiced sati was always absent (287). As Spivak remarks, “[t]he agency was always male; the woman was always the victim” (298).
In other cases, Western discourses displayed a sexualized Orientalism without any explicit interest in alleviating women’s oppression (see Said 1979). French colonial postcards of Algerian women during the early 1900s, for
instance, systematically distorted Muslim women, producing rather than refl ecting reality in a bizarre amalgam of “eroticism and exoticism” for their European audience (Schick 1990, 350). French and British colonists
focused on veiling in particular as the overarching symbol of the “degradation of women” and “the backwardness of Islam” (Ahmed 1992, 152). It was against this historical context that Ahmed coined the term “colonial
feminism” to describe feminism “used against other cultures in the service of colonialism” (151). For example, in Egypt, Lord Cromer championed the cause of unveiling women, claiming the veil was constraining their
“mental and moral development” (153). The colonial impulse behind Cromer’s concern for Egyptian women becomes more obvious when his “feminist” sentiments are juxtaposed to the hypocrisy of his position as a
founding member and president of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. In Algeria, French generals bused village women into Algiers for a carefully choreographed unveiling by French women as evidence of
indigenous support for the French occupation (Lazreg 1994, 135). Whether in the context of covering or uncovering, collapsing differences among Muslim women through the use of the burqa as a generalized symbol of
. Under such assignment, women’s status as objects remains fi xed since they are denied
female oppression performs a colonizing function
the power to speak of differences, their placement in the existing fi rst/third-world imperialistic order secured
(Mohanty 1991b, 73). In contemporary U.S., as in European colonial, discourses, “[t]he domesticated, subjugated,
unenlightened Other as opposed to the liberated, independent and enlightened Western self was used as a moral
prop to legitimize colonial power relations” (Moghissi 1999, 15; see also Mohanty 1991b, 74). According to Mavis
Leno, chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation campaign for women in Afghanistan, before the rise of the Taliban,
women “lived an Islamic version of a contemporary American woman’s life” and “[t]hey dressed as they wished” (“Mavis
Leno” 2001). The U.S. woman was thus cast as an ideal to which Afghan women could aspire as a result of their
“liberation.” Although the variations in the plethora of news reports fl ooding print, broadcast, and internet media make an
exhaustive catalogue impossible, three rhetorical patterns can be discerned in the following examples that are
illustrative of the epistemic violence infl icted by certain U.S. discourses about Islam, Afghan women, and the
burqa. These rhetorical patterns include the demonization of the burqa, the homogenization of Islam, and the
fetishization of “unveiling.”
First, many U.S. discourses demonize or deride the burqa itself, rather than the garment’s imposition by the Taliban,
and in so doing unwittingly obliterate vital aspects of feminist agency for Afghan women. For example, a Time
magazine article entitled “About Face” featured photographs of nameless women wearing the ubiquitous burqa, “to
Western eyes a kind of body bag for the living” (Lacayo 2001, 36). In an exposé on refugee camps in Pakistan sponsored
by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), Barbara Walters contrasted the freedom in the
camp with the “dehumanizing veil” mandated by the Taliban (“Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association Explains”
2001). While the Taliban’s enforcement of the burqa and the punishments for noncompliance were clearly destructive of
Afghan women’s agency, the phrasing of the above excerpts makes clear that it is the burqa itself that is to be considered
sub-human. By vilifying the burqa, such representations offer no possibility for women to choose to wear it out of
personal preference or cultural tradition. In some cases, the dehumanization of Afghan women was quite explicit
as journalists referred to burqa-clad women as “ghosts” (Ozernoy 2001, 30; Roane and Ozernoy 2001, 22). Signifi cantly, the term “ghost” defi nes Afghan
women wearing the burqa, not the Taliban’s abuses. To the extent that this representation is accepted as valid by reading audiences, Afghan women could never exercise agency in the form of a choice to adopt the burqa and
remain human. Another article in Time, laudably providing brief descriptions of the diversity of Muslim covering practices (e.g., chador, niqab, hijab, burqa), carried the title “Headgear 101” (Song 2001, 31). The problem
lies in the derisive simplifi cation of the complex cultural dynamics of covering practices as “headgear.” The neocolonial assumptions underlying this seemingly innocuous language choice in the title become more obvious
when one compares the apparent acceptability of the title when applied to Muslim covering practices to the unlikelihood that widows’ veils or the Papal miter would be dubbed “headgear” by U.S. journalists. A similar tone
of derision can be discerned in the description of the burqa, worn by choice by a woman in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, as a “costume” (Gibbs 2001, 39). In all of the examples above, the overt vilifi cation or subtle
.S. discourses infl ict epistemic violence on Afghan women by denying the very
mockery of the burqa becomes a rhetorical technique whereby U
possibility for agency through the choice of dress, ostensibly the cause at issue with these representations in the fi
rst place. Second, the distinction between “liberated” U.S. women and “unenlightened” Afghan women is often
amplifi ed by ethnocentric criticisms of a homogenized Islam. For example, one Time article entitled “The Women of
Islam” implied that the oppressions it described in some countries are intrinsic to Islam, a notion emphasized by the subtitle “nowhere in the Muslim world are women treated as equals” (Beyer 2001, 50). Here, despite the
article’s overt attempt to describe the diversity of Islamic practices among Malaysia, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kashmir, there is still a discursive commitment to the religious and geographic homogeneity of
Islam in the language of a “Muslim world.” The infinite differences among these countries melt away as they become fixed in the space of a separate Islamic “world” to which they are assigned. At the same time, the religious
diversity within each of the countries named in the article vanishes as the label of Islam comes to exhaust the meaning of religion under those signifiers.6 The ethnocentrism inherent in the idea of a “Muslim world” can be
discerned when one contemplates the likely outcry that would follow the identifi cation of Euro-America as a “Christian world.” The neocolonial notion of Islam as a marginal Other to the West is particularly evident in the
fact that “the women of Islam” are all portrayed as Middle Eastern or Asian, despite the enormous and growing Muslim population in North America and Europe. Once again, the signifi er “Islam” undergoes an Orientalist
transformation into one pole of a binary opposition, the signifi ed “non-Western.” Third, the fetishization of “unveiling” so pervades many U.S. accounts of Afghan women’s oppression that it has come to serve as its own
complex rhetorical trope. Loretta Kensinger notes how a wide range of news media in the United States not only used the image of the burqa when representing Afghanistan, but also “celebrated the veil’s lifting as the U.S.
bombs fell” (2003, 15). The cover of the 3 December 2001 issue of Time featured the picture of a woman wearing a simple headscarf; the headline reads, “Lifting the Veil.” An article in Newsweek acknowledged that many
Afghan women were still wearing the burqa after the fall of the Taliban but suggested they were “waiting [to unveil]” to see whether victorious Northern Alliance forces were “serious about women’s liberation” (Liu 2001,
46). While freedom from imposed covering is obviously an imperative right for Afghan women, these representations once again vilify the burqa itself and thereby elide the agency of women who might choose various forms
of covering practices. Worse, the Newsweek article attributes the agency for liberation solely to the (male) Northern Alliance fi ghters while Afghan women await their approval. Other accounts of “unveiling” objectify
Afghan women with less than subtle sexual fi gurations. In a story on women living under the Taliban regime, Tom Brokaw enticed viewers by explaining that this story would provide “a rare look behind the veil” (“Life of
Women” 2001). The 60 Minutes II segment entitled “Unveiled” promised that the viewer would meet young Afghan women who “unveil more than just their faces” (“Unveiled” 2001). This last instance is particularly
noteworthy as an example of how many of these seeming celebrations of the liberation of Afghan women from the burqa implicitly rely on the voyeuristic Orientalism of a promise to uncover women’s bodies. The common
To erase the diverse and
theme running throughout this trope of “unveiling” is the reduction of Afghan women’s agency to their conformity to popular U.S. notions of feminist liberation.
contextually specific experience of Afghan women regarding covering practices infl icts epistemic violence by
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 114
devaluing them as subjects (Spivak 1999, 291; Mohanty 1991b, 71). U.S. representations of Afghan women only or
primarily as objects victimized by (even the Taliban’s) male agency ineluctably reduce knowledge of these women
to their status as victims. This discursive elision of varied indigenous practices and the knowledge regarding their
contextual values can only be described as a “violent” imposition on Afghan women’s subjectivity. As demonstrated
above, the subjectivity of Afghan women-and third-world women in general-is not exhausted by their victimization in
patriarchal and misogynist contexts. Some discourses about the burqa, however, ironically parallel the violence of sati
by performing a metaphorical burning of the subaltern subject in neocolonialist expressions of U.S. feminism. The
violence wrought by the rhetoric of the veil is not, however, limited to epistemological registers. Physical Violence The infliction of
violence against women’s bodies, in the form of assault, rape, and murder, is clearly the most visible manifestation of misogyny. To the extent that physical brutality ultimately threatens the very existence of the subjects on
which it is imposed, we might plausibly say that physical violence against women is the most signifi cant concern out of the various types of violence discussed in this article. Yet the obviousness of physical violence should
not lead us to think that violence against women is a theoretically or historically simplistic phenomenon. Women in Afghanistan were most certainly the victims of terrible physical violence at the hands of the Taliban. At the
which governments and the military use, and alter,
same time, we must take seriously the call from feminist international relations scholars to examine “the ways in
prevailing discourses about gender to their own ends” (Whitworth 1994, 26). While U.S. expressions of concern for
the well-being of Afghan women were indeed valuable for raising the profile of efforts to address the conditions for
women in Afghanistan, we must turn a critical eye toward the appropriation of feminism to justify U.S. military
intervention. Tickner has observed that military violence between nation-states is always legitimized by some
instantiation of“[t]he concept of the ‘protected’ ” (2001, 57). In other words, the military pursuit of geopolitical
security necessarily involves a specifi cation and defi nition of the object, persons, or ideas that are being secured.
Following the incredible devastation caused by the attacks on 9/11, one might logically expect that the physical safety
of U.S. bodies would be the primary security concern in U.S. public discourse, and in fact it was. The sudden
upsurge in public discourse about the gendered oppression of Afghan women after 9/11, however, reveals that an
enormous amount of governmental and media effort was expended in reframing U.S. military intervention as the
securing of Afghan women from the ravages of the Taliban. It is not enough to argue that these representations of
Afghan women were simply part of a propaganda campaign to justify U.S. military action, as the oppression of and
violence against Afghan women was a demonstrable material fact. The more important question to ask is: how does one
trace the ideological and material consequences of such representations? The oppression of women in foreign lands has
often been a discursive tool of statecraft seeking to justify military intervention. As Moghissi notes, issues of women’s rights have
long been “used ideologically to isolate and contain adversaries of great powers” (1999, 4). Representations of women’s oppression have fi t particularly well into patriarchal social mythologies whose own devaluation of
women has been cloaked in terms of a need to “protect” women from the harshness of certain jobs or political responsibilities. In such social myths, women are characterized primarily as victims in need of saving by the
paternalistic masculinity of patriarchal social or governmental institutions. This formula extends to the realm of international relations, where “the heroic, just warrior is sometimes contrasted with a malignant, often
racialized, masculinity attributed to the enemy” (Tickner 2001, 57). Following 9/11, it was not only the Taliban as supporters of terrorism, but also the Taliban as oppressors of women, that defi ned our enemy in the “war on
, U.S. military action became “just” in part as the agency of
terrorism.” In the U.S. government’s appropriation of the feminist concern with women’s oppression
Afghan women’s liberation. The U.S. government and media made substantial use of “the maltreatment of women and their exotic attire” to represent the “moral, cultural and political defi ciencies
of the Islamic world” as part of the warrant behind the 1991 Gulf War (Moghissi 1999, 37). More recently, gender oppression under the Taliban became a justifi cation for U.S. military intervention to topple the oppressive
regime. In a televised address to Congress on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush identifi ed the Taliban prohibition on education for women as part of the background for his demand that the Taliban give up the al Qaeda
members hiding in Afghanistan (G. Bush 2001). Signifi cantly, the succor of Afghan women was not going to be achieved in any way by the fulfi llment of Bush’s demands; at that moment of history, the Taliban’s
The representation of women’s
compliance would have left gendered oppression in Afghanistan intact because surrendering bin Laden would have kept the same regime in power.
oppression was employed partly to demonize the Taliban and to prepare the U.S. public (and the world) for the air
strikes that began on 7 October 2001. It is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate comprehensively the justifi cation
for air strikes against Taliban targets, and it cannot be claimed that representations of burqa-clad Afghan women were
responsible for the U.S. decision to attack the Taliban, since the air strikes began before the majority of discourse about
the burqa appeared in U.S. media. However, the epistemic violence done by eliding the agency of Afghan women in
their representation only as passive victims played a crucial role in justifying the particular forms of military
action taken, even after the fact. Because U.S. discourses about Afghan women suggested that they could not “save”
themselves, “liberation” had to come from the outside. While the sheer number of these portrayals makes an
exhaustive analysis impractical, one particularly well-publicized event provides an explicit illustration of the
appropriation of feminist struggles against gender oppression in the service of the war on terrorism.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 115
LINK - HIJACKING FEMINISM
Only when we unlearn our cultural superiority can we acknowledge the inequities between ourselves and the
subaltern, can they become lifted from homo sacre status. Attempts outside this frame de-legitimate victim’s
agency and re-entrench their dependence.
Drucilla Cornell (professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women's Studies at Rutgers University)
2002 [(The Sacrilege of Feminism, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, http://www.identities.org.mk/files/Drucilla
%20Cornell_The%20Sacrilege%20of%20FeminismENG.pdf)]
On April 20, 2002, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) assailed the feminist majority
of The United States, represented as it was by an article in Ms. Magazine called “A Coalition of Hopes” for ignoring the
horrible atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance and for erasing RAWA.s historical role twenty five years of
relentless struggle against the Taliban’s inhumanity toward women. Most of the members of RAWA, at least those who
have not been executed or forcibly exiled remain in Afghanistan, seeking support for their own program of secular
democracy, women’s rights, and the re-establishment of a working infrastructure, which is utterly necessary for anything
resembling a democratic society to thrive. In its response to the Ms. Magazine article, RAWA posed a set of penetrating
questions to US feminists: Are they merely smearing the US government and Western press who find it easier to present
the Taliban as evil and the forces that the US supported against them as good? Or have they joined with our government
in a concerted effort to ignore these crimes and once again forfeit the lives and rights of women for our current national
self-interest? Perhaps the feminist majority, in their push for US economic and political power, are being careful not to
anger the political powers in the US who still deny and make apologies for the human rights abuses done by the likes of
Massoud, Rabinni, Dostum, Hekmatyar, and others who were trained, armed, and supported by the US during the Cold
War years in Afghanistan, and then left in a power vacuum to destroy their people and their country.2 RAWA does not
here cite the innovative philosophical work of Giorgio Agamben, someone who has tried to show the contemporary
political relevance of the ancient Roman category of homo sacer by claiming that .[w]hen their rights are no longer the
rights of the citizen, that is when human beings are truly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in Roman law of
the archaic period: doomed to death..3 But for the members of RAWA, their erasure is inseparable from our so-called .war
which was not a war. against the Afghan people, in which the innumerable deaths of Afghan citizens did not count, could
not be counted, either in a moral or a mathematical sense. For we still do not know how many people have died as a result
of our militaristic effrontery, people who were killed with impunity as homines sacri, people who looked up at our planes
not knowing whether packages of aid or bombs were about to fall on their heads. As I deliver these words to you today, it
appears that Iraqis will be the next ones doomed to death in Agamben’s sense as we move headlong into a war against
Iraq, in an effort to oust its leader, Saddam Hussein. To be sure, this will be an unprecedented war in American
constitutional history since we plan to engage in extreme military aggression against a government that has been shown
by Scott Ritter, UN weapon’s inspector in Iraq for over seven years now, not to pose any serious threat to US national
security. Yet the imminent war against Iraq will not be an exception to the rule that political discourse created to shore up
flagrantly illegitimate military campaigns typically points to the fact that our action is necessary in order to right wrongs.
After all, in the case of Afghanistan, the justification for the bombing and for the overthrow of the Taliban regime was
that we were righting wrongs against women. In much of her Marxist feminist work over the years, Gayatri Spivak has
shown that the long and brutal history of Western imperialism was able to survive, ideologically and otherwise, because
the liberation of the poorest of the poor among women also helped promote a program of systematic economic
domination. But recently, in an essay called “Righting Wrongs” she has shifted her theoretical focus, arguing that we must
revisit the classical liberal distinction between natural and civil rights if we are understand how it is that unjustified
conceptions of natural right are used to encroach upon the civil rights recognized by nation-states in the global south and
by delegitimated social institutions and structures that grassroots activists are trying to re-legitimate. Her point is that only
once these institutions and structures receive new legitimacy can the nation-states in which they function overcome the
human rights dependency that endlessly reproduces the figure of .wronged victim..a dependency that, according to
Spivak, .can be particularly vicious in its neo-colonial consequences, if it is the state that is the agency of terror and
[Europe and the United States] that is the savior..4 This self-permission for continuing to right wrongs is, for Spivak,
premised on the idea that .wronged victims. will never be able to help themselves, and indeed will always need to be
politically buttressed from the outside, due to their necessarily inferior political status, which renders them at once
unwilling and unable to participate in what the likes of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington would call the modern
civilized culture of democracy.Spivak goes on to suggest that the notoriously shaky philosophical foundation of natural
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 116
rights, the idea that our rights as men. are, ipso facto, anterior to our civil rights as citizens, often goes unnoticed in human
rights discourse. The reason for this, she claims, is that a decidedly Darwinian assumptionunderwrites much of that
discourse, namely that those who are naturally the most human must shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs of those
less-than-human peoples who do not fit into our modern as well as classical liberal conception of the rights bearing
individual protected under the law. Interestingly enough, she nevertheless fully endorses what I would like to call,
following Immanuel Kant, the ideal of humanity. But she does so by admonishing those of us who are citizens of the US
and of Europe to unlearn our cultural absolutism which is in fact our own cultural relativism, and which includes our
hegemonic conception of modernity, our conception of ourselves as the natural saviors of the world, as the ones who are
the most truly human and who are thus in a position to name what counts, and especially what does not count, as human.
It is important to note that Spivak is not against human rights, that, believe it or not, she thinks such rights are necessary
and sufficient, in particular historical contexts, for achieving the ethical goal of righting wrongs. But it is perhaps more
important to note that central to her recent thinking no less than to her political activism in India and elsewhere is the idea
that human rights activists must be constantly cognizant of the fundamental inequality that allows them to right the
wrongs perpetrated against so many others in this world, particularly women. With her conception of worlding, she forces
those of us residing in .the first world. to accept that we inhabit an imaginary world that is only too real, a world in which
doing the right thing is horribly bound up with Social Darwinist assumptions about the natural power to name the human,
the inhuman, what may even be otherwise than human or inhuman. Spivak’s sincerest hope is that we can salvage human
rights discourse by suturing it to .an epic as openness toward the imagined agency of the other for and to. even
compromised and de-legitimated cultures and societies and, most specifically, the almost buried social institutions and
rituals of the subaltern..5 Anything less than this suturing would merely return us time and again to justifications of
natural rights founded upon some avatar or another of Social Darwinism. In view of Spivak’s critique of Darwinian
liberalism, consider Martha Nussbaum’s attempt to name basic human capabilities6.a forthright attempt to solve the
dilemma of how natural rights conceived precisely as human rights could manage to trump civil rights and indeed justify
overriding the sovereignty of nation-states. Although Nussbaum wishes to leave space for cultural interpretation of the
basic capabilities, she believes it is possible to describe in normative terms the proper contents and functions of these
capabilities, and therefore how exactly one who is not yet human ought to become human. Amartya Sen, in both implicit
and explicit critiques of Nussbaum, expresses his disagreement with this kind of hierarchical value system of natural
human rights over and against civil rights by insisting that the goal of development (a teleological project that, with
Spivak, I do not think can be extricated from its indisputably imperialist origins) is freedom .freedom to protect not only
civil rights, but what the Marxist Spivak would call the social production and circulation of capital and value. At his most
radical, Sen contemplates articulating Marxist economic claims from a politically liberal standpoint. But that is as far as
he goes: he backs down from Spivak.s far more daring project of raising questions about how we might suture a new
ethics of responsibility to the figure of the other, to its imagined agency in a world that cannot count the other, in all its
sacred forms and incarnations.among its sovereign agents.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 117
LINK - HIJACKING FEMINISM
The U.S. constructs a progressive feminism but falls back to misogynistic suggestions of women as naïve of the
necessary pragmatics, neo-conservatism needed to win a war
If the genre’s willingness to ironize notionally “masculine” perspectives suggests a genuine sensitivity to the current climate in mainstream Euro-
American culture wars, the thriller’sdeeper-lying misogyny suggests that itsconstruction of the West as a progressive
“feminist” culture may serve largely pragmatic generic ends. In this respect,the pragmatism of the war on terror
thriller’s regard for Western women’s agency and rights again mirrors that of the 2002 National Security Strategy , where, despite repeated
appeals to human rights for women in major foreign policy speeches after 9/11, theBush administration’s actual
commitments to women remained fl imsy and vague. (In the whole of the 2002 NSS there was just one mention of women-in Section
II, on how to “Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity,” where “respect for women” was listed among the things that America must “stand fi rmly
for,” alongside “respect for private property” and “limits on the absolute power of the state” [ NSS , 3]). In the war on terror espionage thriller,
wherea generic “male gaze” ensures that women are sexualized body parts before they are anything else, where
their presence in military and espionage circles is fraught with bad outcomes for men, and where truly liberated
women look to male authority not liberal “political correctness” for guidance, the commitment to women’s rights
often appears equally flimsy. Appropriately, perhaps, given their pragmatic appropriation of women’s rights as tools for
the legitimation of torture and war, generic treatments of women tend to ape the traditional alignments of US
foreign policy towards the rest of the world, alternately fl eeing female entanglements by retreating into essentially women- less fi
ctional worlds or seeking vigorously to “educate” female protagonists in ostensibly masculine wisdom or ideology. In either case the generic
effect is to render abject the agency of Western women, even while that agency is celebrated as a token of the
West’s superior civilizational stature as the bringer of rights. The scenario recurs often in the war on terror
thriller: a sexually desirable, high-flying but naïve young woman enters an all male world and is “educated,” and in the process is brought to
moral or professional maturity, usually through some form of confl ict with the men who know what is best for her (see particularly Empire State ,
Memorial Day , and Pandora’s Legion ). Where it is aired at all in these novels, explicit and overt opposition to human and civil rights abuses tends
to come from women who eventually learn the error of their ways (see particularly Isis Herrick and Peggy Stealey). In the war on terrorespionage
thriller, feminine opposition to human and civil rights abuses by Americans and their proxies is indicative of woolly idealism and weak moral fi ber,
the very antithesis of the pragmatic, square-jawed, neocon misogynists who stride resolutely through the genre as heroes.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 118
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION
The US Army’s attempts to “save” the women of Iraq and Afghanistan only hampered feminists efforts and led to
more violence against females
Susan Faludi 2007[“The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” p. 293]
ON THE LARGER stage of national and international politics, as in NewYork, the need to pursue concrete concerns
would be bartered for ceremonialscrip. In Afghanistan, our fantasies of female rescue actually gotin the way of female
security. Not only did White House vows to safeguardthe rights of Afghan women prove hollow, our woefully
inadequateattempts at "reconstruction" only served to make their conditions worse.By 2006, the news was bleak: honor
killings were dramatically on the rise(with 185 women and girls killed in the first nine months of the year),about 40
percent of women reported that they had been forced into marriage,about 50 percent had been beaten by their husbands,
three hundredgirls' schools had been set on fire in the last year and several teacherskilled, as little as 3 percent of girls
were enrolled in schools in some regionsand many had retreated to secret home classes, no women were appointedto the
new Afghan cabinet, and the director of the women's affairsministry in Kandahar had been gunned down in her own front
yard.8The pattern would repeat in Iraq, a nation that had made significantprogress in advancing women's rights from the
sixties to the eighties.Once more, the United States promised heightened security andfreedom for Iraqi women, and once
more our policies helped accomplishthe opposite.By 2005, human rights organizations were reportinga sharp rise in rapes,
abductions, and sexual slavery; severe restrictionson women's ability to travel, go to school, and work; and the return
ofSharia law in a U.S.-brokered constitution that also restricted women's reproductive,employment, marital, and
inheritance rights. "Misery gangs"roamed the streets, tormenting and beating women who did not dress orbehave
"properly." In Basra, it became a capital crime for a woman to wearpants or appear in public. By 2005, several women's
rights activists and femalepolitical leaders, along with one of the three female members of theIraqi Governing Council,
had been murdered, and even Bush's former femalesupporters in Iraq were in despair. "I want the American people
toknow that our dreams are gone, our work was in vain," wrote Raja Kuzai,an obstetrician and former member of the Iraqi
assembly's constitutiondraftingcommittee, who once hailed Bush as "My Liberator." "There willbe no future for our
children and our grandchildren in the new Iraq," shesaid. "The future is for the clerics."
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 119
Military intervention in women’s rights gives us a sense of hollow hope with fluffy media coverage of the US
success - leaving out the fact that the US is responsible for the woman’s rights crisis - absent criticism of this
imperialist means to an end, women’s rights violations will inevitable.
CarolStabile, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and DeepaKumar,Rutgers University, 2005 (“Unveiling imperialism: media, gender and the war on
Afghanistan” Media, Culture and Society, Sage Publications, http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/27/5/765.short)
These realities have not prevented journalists from glorifying the US invasion of Afghanistan. ‘What a difference regime change
makes,’ enthused CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (explicitly endorsing the invasion of Iraq) on a segment of 60 Minutes broadcast over a year after the
bombing of Afghanistan commenced. Entitled ‘The Women of Afghanistan’, the segment proposed to look at ‘how women have fared’ one year later
(CBS, 2002) Not surprisingly, the program dealt mainly with girls’ education and women’s liberation from the burqa. There
was no mention of outbreaks of diseases like polio and measles, of chronic hunger or dreadful poverty. Over the past two
years, coverage of Afghanistan in the mainstream media has all but vanished; few stories have covered the in-fighting among various
warlords and the shambles that the country is now in. In retrospect, the coverage of Afghan women that followed from 11 September
2001 can only be understood as a cynical and opportunistic use of women. Few journalists and reporters could have believed that the
sudden interest in Afghan women was anything other than a cover for the Bush administration’s dreams of empire,
particularly given the absence of coverage of issues involving women and violence in the US media in general. Additionally,
had journalists had some memory of the 1980s media coverage of the Afghan-Soviet war and the mujahideen, out of which the Taliban emerged,
they would have remembered that it was 776 Media, Culture & Society 27(5) positively glowing. As David Gibbs observes, there was ‘near
unanimous agreement that the [mujahideen] guerillas were “heroic,” “courageous” and above all “freedom fighters”’ (2002). As we have seen,
however, references to history were largely absent from the story of Afghanistan . Indeed, the figure of the veiled Afghan
woman, who could be set in opposition to the bearded, unsmiling face of the Islamic patriarch, was a perfect pawn in this
game of dehistoricization. Unmarked by time or any recognizable economic context, Afghan women’s oppression was represented
largely in ahistorical religious and cultural terms. And their oppression commenced, as numerous reports suggested, with the rise of the
Taliban. For instance, one report stated: Since taking Afghanistan’s capital Kabul in 1996, the Taliban has prohibited schooling for girls over age 8,
shut down the women’s university, and forced women to quit their jobs, the report said. The Taliban restricted access to medical care for women and
limited the ability of women to move about freely. (USA Today, 2001). 7 While it is true that the Taliban did curtail women’s rights, this did
not result from some peculiarly Afghan historical inevitability . Rather, what Afghan history reveals is that the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism and consequent attacks on women is due , in no small part, to US policy - a history and legacy that the media
went to some lengths to obscure. When US politicians and news media suddenly take notice of women, particularly women in war-torn
nations, advocates of women’s rights need to be cautious. We need to recall the fact that US media have never been
particularly good on domestic women’s issues, much less international women’s issues, for a host of reasons. Since the early days of
television, news producers have avoided topics that might prove ‘controversial’ , a word that was and remains a euphemism for
arguments that might indict capitalism as an economic system. Thus, when issues relating to women do make it onto the news agenda,
we can expect that these issues will support the status quo by diligently avoiding questions about class or economic issues in
general.8 Importantly, ‘controversy’ is bad for advertisers, media owners and politicians - the very elites whose special
interests dominate the mass media’s agenda. Broadcasting controversial information about a corporation or corporate wrongdoing is bad for
business. Offering rationales for war that foreground US economic interests in regions like Afghanistan and Iraq is bad for business; additionally, it
exposes the base materialistic interests of the class that benefits from these wars. Afghan women, in contrast, work well, especially when they are not
allowed to speak for themselves. US women are also useful pawns in this construction. The ‘rescue’ of Private Jessica Lynch, one of the crowning
moments of the war on Iraq, was a US military fabrication. As Kumar (2004) argues, Lynch’s story served as way 777 Stabile & Kumar, Unveiling
imperialism to galvanize patriotism in the US and to demonize the Iraqi people, despite the fact that it was Iraqi doctors and nurses who saved her
life. Rhetorically, it served the US well. As The Guardian noted: . . . [h]er rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news
management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon’s media managers, and
has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars. (The Guardian, 2003) Even after the BBC and The Guardian exposed
the inaccuracies and the willful manipulation of the Lynch story by the military and the media, this did not stop various media conglomerates from
trying to outbid each other to secure lucrative book deals and movie contracts. Time will tell which version of the story we will get to see and read.
Most likely, it will be the version that does not expose the military’s lies - that would be simply too ‘controversial’. At the same time, however, these
discourses of protection do provide some traction for critics of the War on Terror, largely because they so obviously ring false in light of the US’s
overall lack of concern for the condition of women, men, and children throughout the world. Consider, for example, that the US is, as Rosalind
Petchesky (2001) has pointed out, one of only two countries (along with Afghanistan) that have failed to ratify the Women’s Convention and the only
country that hasn’t ratified the Children’s Convention. Domestically, the far right that President Bush has consistently placated (perhaps most notably
in his appointment of John Ashcroft as Attorney General) has offered the most active and militant opposition to feminist politics (not to mention their
position on lesbian and gay issues - a position not that far removed from that of Islamic fundamentalists). As long as women are not
permitted to speak for themselves, they provide the perfect grounds for an elaborate ventriloquist act, in which they serve
as the passive vehicle for the representation of US interests. In the case of Afghan women, despite calls by the Afghan
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 120
Women’s Mission and RAWA to halt the bombing, both organizations received little or no press in the US. The
representations of Afghan women in the days following 11 September 2001, and their cynical usage by US politicians, were
solely aimed at supporting the US case for intervention. They were meant to supply the US with the ideological (if not
ethical) justification for bombing a country whose infrastructure had been destroyed decades before . Today, the news media have
finally ‘discovered’ that the Bush administration was lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Now that the US war is a fait accompli
and the occupation of Iraq, which is not going as well as planned, promises to continue for months and even years, 778 Media, Culture & Society
27(5) the mass media can turn its attention to the factual lapses in the case for war. 9 Amidst this flurry of finger pointing, waffling and dissembling,
we should point out an earlier lie and a half-hearted promise made to the women of Afghanistan. We should assert that the
rhetoric of women’s liberation was a lie as monumental as the claims about WMD . But in a society as deeply sexist as the
US, and a media system more engrossed with weapons than with women’s issues, we can expect that this lie will go
unchallenged.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 121
The War on Terror is a distraction from a neoliberalist restructuring at home - it furthers violence against women
and power over civil life
Sunera Thobani, women’s studies professor @ University of British Columbia, 2007 (White wars: Western feminisms and
the `War on Terror', Feminist Theory 8: 169, Sage Pub)
Eisenstein’s aim in Against Empire is ‘to uncover the relations and histories of power . . .’ (2004: xv). She argues
that the US has a long history of violence and exploitation, from the conquest of indigenous peoples to slavery
through to the present. Cautioning against the uncritical adoption of the language of ‘terror’ propagated by the
Bush Administration, she points out that a ‘class war is being waged in the U.S. while all eyes look abroad’ (p. xix):
the government is engaged in a neo-liberal/neoconservative assault on the gains of the civil rights and women’s
rights movements at home, as well as a dangerous remilitarization. This ‘downsizing and corporate restructuring
of the U.S. economy through the 1980sand 1990s has now been accompanied by a restructuring of the CIA, FBI, and
Pentagon . . . This new security-state monitors and conducts surveillance in the name of democracy’ (p. xix).Eisenstein
notes that the earlier Gulf War and the policies of several USAdministrations are the context for the War on Terror.
Discussing theviolence that shaped the historical development of capitalism in the US,she ties this development to a
history of racism and patriarchy. Eisensteindefines American masculinity as imperialist and the Taliban as
misogynistas she argues that ‘gender apartheid and sexual terrorism are crucialaspects of these political times’ (2004:
152). Challenging the Bush Administration’s claim that the War will ‘free’ Afghan women, she takes the
Administration and its ‘women helpmates’ to task for ‘appropriat[ing] the language of women’s rights for a right-
wing and neo-liberal imperial agenda’ (p. 148). She points to the violence against women that exists in the US and
argues that the ‘choice between sexual exploitation (commodification) and sexual repression (denial) is no
democratic choice at all’ (p. 155). This text relies on its theorization of a relationship between capitalismand patriarchy
which gives rise to a shared experience of violenceamong women: white women are subjected to sexual terrorism by
whitemen, and Muslim women are subjected to gender apartheid by Muslimmen.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 122
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION (AFGHANISTAN)
US troop presence hurts feminism in Afghanistan - it supports a misogynistic government manifested in Karzai
laws
Kolhatkar, Sonali. (Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission and the host and producer ofUprising Radio. A Call for
Clarity on The War in Afghanistan. http://www.zcommunications.org/a-call-for-clarity-on-the-afghanistan-war-by-sonali-
kolhatkar) November 03, 2009

One of the original justifications for the war in 2001 that seemed to resonate most with liberal Americans was the
liberation of Afghan women from a misogynist regime. This is now being resurrected as the following: If the U.S. forces
withdraw, any gains made by Afghan women will be reversed and they'll be at the mercy of fundamentalist forces. In fact,
the fear of abandoning Afghan women seems to have caused the greatest confusion and paralysis in the antiwar
movement.
What this logic misses is that the United States chose right from the start to sell out Afghan women to its misogynist
fundamentalist allies on the ground. The U.S. armed the Mujahadeen leaders in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation,
opening the door to successive fundamentalist governments including the Taliban. In 2001, the United States then armed
the same men, now called the Northern Alliance, to fight the Taliban and then welcomed them into the newly formed
government as a reward. The American puppet president Hamid Karzai, in concert with a cabinet and parliament of thugs
and criminals, passed one misogynist law after another, appointed one fundamentalist zealot after another to the judiciary,
and literally enabled the downfall of Afghan women's rights over eight long years.
Any token gains have been countered by setbacks. For example, while women are considered equal to men in
Afghanistan's constitution, there have been vicious and deadly attacks against women's rights activists, the legalization of
rape within marriage in the Shia community, and a shockingly high rate of women's imprisonment for so-called
honor crimes - all under the watch of the U.S. occupation and the government we are protecting against the
Taliban. Add to this the unacceptably high number of innocent women and children killed in U.S. bombing raids, which
has also increased the Taliban's numbers and clout, and it makes the case that for eight years the United States has enabled
the oppression of Afghan women and only added to their miseries.
This is why grassroots political and feminist activists have called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from their
country.After eight years of American-enabled oppression, they would rather fight for their liberation without our
help. The anti-fundamentalist progressive organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
(RAWA), has called for an immediate end to the war. Echoing their call is independent dissident member of
Parliament Malalai Joya, who tells her story in her new political memoir, A Woman Among Warlords.The members of
RAWA and women like Joya are openly targeted by the U.S.-backed Afghan government for their feminism and political
activism. RAWA and Joya have worked on the ground, risking their lives for political change and echo the vast majority
of poor and ordinary Afghan women. It's they whom we ought to listen to and express solidarity with. If American
progressives think they know better than Afghanistan's brave feminist activists on how liberation can be achieved, we're
just as guilty as the U.S. government for subjecting them to the mercy of women-hating criminals.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 123
IMPACT - WOMEN’S OPPRESSION (AFGHAN)
Conditions in Afghanistan perpetuate the poor treatment of women - the US’s transitional government simply
feeds empty rhetoric
Gianna Giorgi, Graduate of Rhode Island College, andDavid Thomas, Professor of History @ RIC, Spring 2009 (The Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan: Lifting the Veil of Feminism in Afghanistan, http://www.km-
awards.umb.edu/essays2009/documents/Giorgi.pdf, p. 18-9)
After the Taliban were removed from power, conditions for women and girls were supposed to improve but have
not; it is suggested that ‘the removal of the Taliban has not achieved the liberation of Afghan women...women could be
more insecure at present than before September 11.” 88 In a recent article for The National, it was said, “despite doing
extensive social work, RAWA describes itself as a political organization, not a nongovernmental organization.” 89 It is
important to understand that RAWA often disagrees with both the Islamic fundamentalists as well as the
Westernsupported officials; Sands said “[RAWA] members now believe USbacked warlords and officials are among
those who want them dead.” 90 Even though Hamid Karzai (the then Prime Minister) signed the 2002 Declaration of
the Essential Rights of Afghan Women, which was drafted by both Afghan women as well as eminent Western
feminists such as Gloris Steinem, Betty Friedan and Catherine Deneuve the status quo has remained unchanged. 91
Suspiciously, the declaration was signed by Karzai at a reception honoring the then Senator Joseph Biden. The document, if enforced, would grant full equality between men and women, including equal protection under the
law, open education, freedoms of movement, speech, political participation and would reject the model of mandatory veiling. It is impossible to discount the effect of the Taliban upon the female population of Afghanistan
when it is considered that among the regime’s first actions after taking power of Kabul in 1996 was to institute a strict Islamic code which banned women from employment outside of their homes and mandated women
adhere a stringent dress code; they now had to wear the traditional, fulllength chaudri whenever they were out in public. 92 Emadi said that “the perception of women’s roles in society is largely determined by a combination
of tribal cultural mores and religious precepts as understood by men”. 93 These tribal cultural mores Emadi mentions play a major part in keeping women acquiescent. Additionally, “women [were] brought up to believe in
94 The oppression of women in the area was used as a justification by the Bush administration to
their own natural inferiority”.
invade Afghanistan in 2001. 95 However, two years after the invasion, an Amnesty International report held that
the “Afghan Transitional Administration, led by President Hamid Karzai, have proved unable to protect women”
96 . The report expounds upon the dangers women faced every day despite First Lady Laura Bush’s jubilant
declaration that “women are no longer imprisoned in their homes” 97 . In an interview for ZMagazine, RAWA
member known as Mariam told reporter Jason Podur: When the US invaded…many Afghans appreciated their presence
and were happy to get rid of the Taliban's oppressive rule. They thought the Taliban had been eliminated, the
international community worked, they were promised a better life, democracy and freedom and an end to the
fundamentalist groups. Within months, it was clear that the US government still continues its wrong policy of
supporting the fundamentalists in Afghanistan. We saw that the US rely on the fundamentalists of the Northern
Alliance to fight another fundamentalist band the Taliban.
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IMPACT - WOMEN’S RIGHTS KEY
Strong women are key to corruption-free and lasting democracies - empirics
Melanne VerveerAmbassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issue, Testimony before the subcommittee on International Organizations, Human
Rights and Oversight of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs June 9, 2010, “Women as agents of change: Advancing the role of Women in
Politics and Civil Society” http://www.state.gov/s/gwi/rls/rem/2010/142953.htm
Around the world, women are entering the field of politics and government in growing numbers, yet their gains have been uneven and
their leadership often goes unrecognized. According to the Inter- Parliamentary Union, women hold almost 20 percent of seats in
parliaments worldwide, and serve as heads of government in over 20 countries, including in Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Liberia, and
Lithuania. While these are positive developments, women are still vastly underrepresented globally. Women are half the population
yet they hold less than one-fifth of positions in national governments. They are still significantly outnumbered in the chambers of
parliaments, in provincial councils, and they are often missing from negotiating tables where conflicts are to be resolved. All too often,
important decisions that affect women, their families, and their societies are made without their having a voice. When women are
discriminated against in the political arena, their experiences, talents, and perspectives are shut out of the policy decisions of our
democracies, and prospects for a better world are shortchanged. Moreover, according to the World Bank, at the country level, higher
rates of female participation in government are associated with lower levels of corruption. I have been fortunate to see firsthand how
women are making a difference in the political process at the local level.Women in Kuwait struggled for many years to get the right to
vote and to stand for office. Several years ago, a Kuwaiti activist told me, “We don’t want a skim milk democracy; we want a full
cream democracy.” The women of Kuwait finally achieved their goal in 2005, but it wasn’t until last year that they finally took their
place in parliament when four women were elected. Already, they are making their voices heard for the betterment of their country. In
India, approximately 40 percent of all elected representatives in villages and municipal councils are women. More than a million
women across the subcontinent have been elected at the local or panchayat level, the highest such female representation for any
democracy. The success of India’s panchayats has often been referred to as a silent revolution within the democratic decentralization
process. According to many studies, women-led panchayats have provided more public services, from building wells to roads, and
they acquired more public funding for local projects. These panchayats have improved attention to service delivery such as the water
supply, sanitation, and other issues including education. The large presence of women in local governments has brought women
considerable gains- both social as well psychological- including enhanced self-esteem and self-confidence, which has led to a greater
role for women in their households and in the community. In Afghanistan and Iraq, women who have been committed to building their
nascent democracies, exercising their right to vote and to run for office, often do so at great personal peril. Last year, I traveled to a
remote province in Afghanistan prior to the elections there. More women were running for the provincial council than the quota
allocated. They told me that, despite the threats to their security, they were willing to make the sacrifice to run for office because it is
their hope that they can help make life better in their communities. Women are a vibrant force in civil society, from Iran to Kenya to
Chile-and every place else, as they work to advance social, economic, and democratic progress, safeguard human rights, and promote
peace. Women in these countries, and the world over, are strengthening democracies and creating more equitable societies.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 125
IMPACT - WOMEN’S RIGHTS KEY
Full participation of women in politics will promote peace - Afghanistan, Liberia, Guatemala, and Northern
Ireland
Melanne VerveerAmbassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issue, Testimony before the subcommittee on International Organizations, Human
Rights and Oversight of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs June 9, 2010, “Women as agents of change: Advancing the role of Women in
Politics and Civil Society” http://www.state.gov/s/gwi/rls/rem/2010/142953.htm
Women’s political participation, role in civil society, and government decision-making are key ingredients to building democracy.
Democracy without the full participation of women is a contradiction in terms. It is a simple fact that no country can progress or
prosper if half its citizens are left behind. Progress for women and progress for democracy go hand in hand. Today, investing in
women is at the very heart of U.S. foreign policy. We know that women’s participation is essential to addressing virtually every
challenge we face as nations and as a community of nations. We are implementing policies and programs to grow women’s leadership
capacity in all areas of political participation and decision-making. Women are also at the center of the U.S. Government’s
development work, including the Food Security Initiative and the Global Health Initiative. Women are also integral to our national
security. The 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy Report that the Obama Administration just released notes that “experience shows
that countries are more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunity.” We are investing in
policies and programs to grow women’s leadership capacity in all areas of political participation, decision-making, and civil society.
Women must not only be more engaged in governance, they must also be at the table in peacemaking, peace negotiations, and work on
post-conflict reconstruction. We know that without the voices of women contributing to the delicate process of conflict resolution,
peace is less likely to take root.We have seen, from Guatemala to Northern Ireland to Liberia to Afghanistan, that women can be
powerful peacemakers, willing to reach across deep divides to find common ground.
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IMPACT - WAR
Gender constructs encouraged militarism after 9/11 - without problematizing the power relations that justified our
interventionism, war is inevitable
J. Ann Tickner, Professor of IR @ USC, 2002 [“Feminist Perspectives on 9/11” International Studies Perspectives p. 333-
350]
In this article I first examine the gendering of war and peace; I then situatethe events of post-9/11 in this context, showing
how gendered discourses are used on both sides to reinforce mutual hostilities and their consequences for both
women and men. I discuss the much-publicized representation of Afghan women as victims as well as the less
familiar ways-at least to us-in which they have been fighting back. Through this case, I suggest how feminist
analysisexposes and questions these stereotypical gender representations and demonstratestheir negative consequences. I
conclude with four generalized lessons thatI take from this feminist analysis. I begin by defining what I mean by
gender.Defining Gender A dictionary definition of gender refers to the social classifications “masculine” and “feminine”
as opposed to sex, the physiological distinction between males and females. In this article, I build and expand on this
definition. I definegender as a set of variable, but socially and culturally constructed relationalcharacteristics. Those, such
as power, autonomy, rationality, activity, and public are stereotypically associated with masculinity; their
opposites, weakness, dependence, emotionality, passivity, and private are associated with femininity. Thereis
evidence to suggest that both women and men assign a more positive value tothe masculine characteristics which denote a
culturally dominant ideal type, or“hegemonic” masculinity, to which few men actually conform; nevertheless, theydo
define what men ought to be.16 It is important to note that gendered social relationships are relationships of power;
it is through these hierarchical relationships that male power and female subordination are sustained, albeit in
variousdegrees across time and place. Most feminists consider gendered relationships associal constructions because the
specific content of these contrasted characteristicschange over time and place; this allows for the possibility of
femaleemancipation.Gender distinctions can also be used to reinforce the power of dominant groups: minorities,
and “outsiders,” are frequently characterized by dominant groups as lacking in these hegemonic masculine
characteristics. Gender is not, asis so often claimed, synonymous with women and feminine identities; it is alsoabout
men and masculine identities and, more important, about relations between men and women. Gender serves to
legitimate certain activities and ways of thinking over others; it privileges certain societal tasks over others and
assignscertain people, depending on their sex, to undertake them. The consequencesfor women ~and for men! and for
society more generally are significant. Nowhere are these gender lines more firmly drawn than in how societies view
and conduct war.Gendering War and PeaceGeorge Patton’s claim-that war gives purpose to life, evident in post-9011
politicaldiscourse-is one that has been widely shared by both women and men.Whereas wars frequently energize
societies and foster a communal and selfsacrificial spirit among women and men alike, war-fighting is an activity
that has been undertaken almost exclusively by men.In his book War and Gender, Joshua Goldstein questions why we
have not beenmore curious about this fact. In an exhaustive cross-cultural investigation of warsthroughout history,
Goldstein finds no biological evidence for why men arealmost always the fighters; instead, he attributes it to cultural
socialization. “Cultures mold males into warriors by attaching to ‘manhood’ those qualities that make good
warriors” ~Goldstein, 2001:252!.17 The toughening up of boys isfound across cultures and many cultures use gender to
motivate participation incombat ~Goldstein, 2001:406!. Warriors require intense socialization in order tofight effectively
~Goldstein, 2001:252!.While Goldstein finds it remarkable that this association between masculinity and war has
received so little attention from scholars who write about war, war as a masculine activity has been central to
feminist investigations ~Stiehm,1983; Elshtain, 1987; Enloe, 1993, 2000!. Generally supporting Goldstein’s claimsabout
militarized masculinity, feminists have suggested that “military manhood,” or a type of heroic masculinity that goes
back to ancient Greece, attracts recruits and maintains self-esteem in institutions where obedience is the norm. The
term “patriot” is frequently associated with service in military combat. The National Organization for Women’s
~NOW! support for women entering theU.S. military was based on the argument that, if women were barred
fromparticipation in the armed forces on an equal footing with men, they wouldremain second-class citizens denied the
unique political responsibility of riskingone’s life for the state ~ Jones, 1990!. The lack of ability to serve in combat
hasalso acted as a handicap for women running for political office in the UnitedStates.The notion that ~young! males fight
wars to protect vulnerable people, such aswomen and children who cannot be expected to protect themselves, has
alsobeen an important motivator for the recruitment of military forces. “Protection” has been an important myth that
has sustained support for war by both men and women.18 I use the term “myth” because the large number of
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 127
civilian casualties in recent wars severely strains the credibility of female protection. If war is a phenomenon we
associate with men and “hegemonic” masculinity, peace is a term we stereotypically associate with women and
some of the devalued feminine characteristics I outlined earlier. As Jean Elshtain ~1987:230! hassuggested, we are
afraid to let go of war because we fear even more the prospectsof a sterile peace. Peace is frequently seen as an ideal,
and even uninteresting, state with little chance of success in the “real” world. Women have been linked to anti-war
sentiment throughout history and most peace movements have beendisproportionately populated by women. Indeed, many
of these movements havedrawn inspiration from maternal imagery to craft their strategies. Yet I believethat the
association of women with peace renders both women and peace as idealistic, utopian, and unrealistic; it is
profoundly disempowering for both. Andas long as peace remains associated with women, this may reinforce
militarizedmasculinity ~Goldstein, 2001:413!.The association of men with the “realities” of war and women with an
“idealistic”notion of peace reinforces the gender hierarchies I outlined earlier. Theconsequences of this gender hierarchy
are real in that it reinforces men’s legitimacyand helps sustain their continued dominance in world politics; it alsoserves to
perpetuate the barriers that women face in gaining legitimacy in foreignand military policymaking, particularly in times of
conflict. In most societies, women’s under-representation in international security matters and the military cannot
be explained by legal barriers alone. I shall now suggest someconsequences of these gender stereotypes for our post-
9011 world.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 128
IMPACT - VIOLENCE
Epistemic violence justifying US military intervention caused massive amounts of innocent deaths which realism
excludes from analysis
CSU Fresno, 2005 (Securing Afghan Women, Feminist Formations 17.3, Project MUSE, p. 125)
The failure of military intervention to bring about security for Afghan women will likely come as little surprise to
feminist international relations scholars. The lack of public debate regarding civilian casualties following the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan offers a telling example of the material consequences that follow from the realist emphasis
on state security in contrast to feminist notions of individual security from physical, structural, and epistemic
violence. Some 1,300 Afghan civilians may have been killed directly by U.S. bombs and missiles. Even more signifi -
cantly, estimates of “indirect victims” of U.S. military action who died as a consequence of the rigors of forced
migration from their homes, the interruption of drought relief, and the upsurge in fi ghting between the Taliban and the
Northern Alliance range from 3,000 to 7,000 (Conetta 2002). Of course, various media outlets and the U.S. government
dispute these numbers. The U.S. government does not even track civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military
action, ostensibly for reasons ranging from practicality to concerns about public opposition to “collateral damage.” In
fact, the disinterest regarding civilian casualties refl ects the philosophical framework of realpolitik under which
U.S. foreign policy is conducted. Within political realism, civilian casualties do not need to be counted because they do
not fi gure as variables in a geopolitical equation that privileges the security of the nation-state over individual security
from violence. In stark contrast to Laura Bush’s sanguine confi dence in the liberatory success of U.S. military
intervention, a damning report by Human Rights Watch concluded that “[t]he situation today-widespread
insecurity and human rights abuse-was not inevitable, nor was it the result of natural or unstoppable social or
political forces in Afghanistan. It is, in large part, the result of decisions, acts, and omissions of the . . . [U.S.]
government, the governments of other coalition members, and parts of the transitional Afghan government” (2003, 11).
To the extent that Western representations of the burqa and oppressed Afghan women were successful in persuading
public audiences to support uncritically U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, the epistemic violence of such discourse
wreaked physical violence on the bodies of Afghan women as well.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 129
IMPACT - INTERVENTION
US interventionism hijacked the feminist movement in Afghanistan - it excluded their perspectives while
paternalizing them under Western justifications for war
Zillah Eisenstein, Professor of Politics @ Ithaca College, Spring 2004 (What’s In A Name?: Seeing Feminism, Universalism, and
Modernity, http://appweb.cortland.edu/ojs/index.php/Wagadu/article/viewFile/376/715)
Little of this complexity comes through in the anti-terrorist war rhetoric of post-Sept. 11th between modernity and
the west; and religious fundamentalism and the east.[62] Women’s rights becomes the rallying cry as women are once again made
the pawns of war. The civilized world will protect the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban even though there
are religious fanatics in the west; and secularists and mainstream believers in the east. This use of women’s
condition is hardly new to the women of afghanistan. The soviets de-veiled women and insisted they wear skirts as
part of their modernization program. Then the Taliban passed lawsenforcing the burqa and disallowing women to work or go to school, effecting up
to 150, 000working women and about 100,000 girls at school as part of their anti-soviet policy.[63]The Feminist Majority, a western liberal
feminist activist group was crucial in first bringing the plight of Afghan women to the attention to the world . The
work they did was utterly crucialand yet problematic in that their exposure of women’s condition did not criticize u.s. policies forpast support of Taliban rule. This
explains in part the Bush administration’s early waffling onwomen’s rights. At first Bush officials said that they did not want to appear too pushy aboutwomen’s rights
and needed to be culturally sensitive in their condemnation. Shortly after, the State Department released a report the “Taliban’s War
Against Women”, which states that “Islam is a religion that respects women and humanity”, while the “Taliban
respects neither”. The report then advocated a role for women in a post-Taliban afghan government.[64] Little was
ever said about women activists in afghanistan or in exile; nor was their recognition of the wide swath of feminisms
that exist within Islam. Instead the feminist rhetoric used by the Bush administration dominated the airwaves . This
has very much to do with the way that theu.s. dominates globalized media in the first place. But it also has to do with the fact that much of the feminism in
islam is also anti-colonial, and anti-western. Most muslim feminists who speak against the Taliban also speak
against u.s. foreign policy. Fawzia Afzal-Khan states quiteclearly that muslim feminist voices speak simultaneously against
“Islamic extremism” and the “unjust foreign policies of the United States that have contributed and continue to
contribute to the `hijacking’ of Islam for terrorist ends”. Most muslim feminists argue that the u.s. must rethink its
foreign policy as a whole, particularly in the middle east.[65] The feminism that is publicized in and by the west
silences these voices.Fifty-seven men and five women-all of whom had been exiled activists-- attended the peace talksin Bonn. [66] The Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) who were at first excluded from the proceedings, were quite critical that the
women chosen as negotiators were compromised by their husbands and/or fathers allegiances to the Northern
Alliance, which is also misogynist fundamentalist.[67] This simply shows the factionalism that is endemic topolitical struggle within the afghan
women’s movement.An Afghan Women’s Summit for Democracy was held in Brussels and Senator Hillary RodhamClinton hosted a Forum on the Future of Women in
Afghanistan along with the FeministMajority on the importance of women in the reconstruction of their country.[68] At the hearingsmany of the afghan
women spoke about the importance of support from u.s. women’s groupsand yet their fear of a cultural imperialism that does not fully
understand afghan women’s particular situations.It is also instructive to note that Hillary Clinton, especially as first lady, was very active
inspeaking on behalf of women’s rights for women in other countries, while not here at home.Although she traveled the world to speak on behalf of women in india and
Africa, she remainsmute on issues like abortion, welfare rights, and day care needs, for u.s. women. She appears to equate women’s rights with
modernization by the west.When Dr. Sima Samar, the physician and exile who now heads the Ministry of Women’s Affairsin the new afghan government
was asked whether a liberated afghanistan is a western one sheanswered: Why should everything be Westernized? Liberation is not just a
Western idea. Everyone wants it.” The liberated afghan woman will have access to education, the right to vote, the
right to work, the right to choose a spouse. But these are rights of all human beings, not just western ones.[ 69] Yohra
Yusuf Daoud, a former Ms. Afghan who is a radio talk show host inMalibu, California speaks of her mixed views of women’s liberation. “If a woman has to wear
aburqa head to toe but can go to school, then that is something I approve of”. [70]
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 130
IMPACT - OCCUPATION
The justification of gender for the occupation of Afghanistan constitutes a new form of invasion - the West
distinguishes itself from the Other and opens it up for occupation by Western feminism
the `War on Terror', Feminist Theory 8: 169, Sage Pub)
The power of the United States was shaken as surely by the 9/11 attacksas was the ground upon which stood the Twin Towers. The attacks demonstratedthat the US
was not unassailable, and the transformation of the attack into a global media spectacle reiterated this message in no uncertainterms. As the Bush
Administration (with the support of its allies, includingCanada) launched the War on Terror to reassert its dominance, the battle to
control the meaning of the attacks was no less intense than the one waged on the bodies of the Muslims named as the
enemy. Defining the attacks as an epochal assault on the West and its civilizational values, the Bush Administration
sought to extend its imperial reach (which reliesin no small measure on its access to, and potential control of, the vast oiland natural gas reserves of the
Middle East and Central Asia) (Rashid,2001) even as it popularly presented its actions as a defence of Western values and their
extension into the Islamic world. The War on Terror marks a significant shift in postcolonial articulations of whiteness.
The Bush Administration has described Western societies as gravely threatened by the murderous violence of the
Islamists, and in effect, whiteness has been recast as vulnerable, endangered innocent and the subject of the irrational hatred of
this fanatic non-Western Other. Despite the unprecedentedmilitary power of the US, most Western elites have given credence to thisdiscourse of
vulnerability through their own deployments of it facilitatingits extension beyond the borders of the US. Among the most salient of the values said to
distinguish the West from those of Islam is that of gender equality. The Bush Administration’s identification of the
‘liberation’ of Afghan women as a key objective in its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan brought gender to the
forefront of global politics. Feminists have historically had a complex relationshipwith the colonial and imperial projects that have furthered white
racialsupremacy internationally, and this tension has remained no less palpablein the postcolonial era (Amos and Parmar, 1984; Mohanty, 1991; Lewis andMills, 2003).
Aboriginal, third world, and postcolonial feminists have produced a substantive body of work addressing the relationships
among race, gender, colonialism and imperialism . They have argued that the integration of white women into the institution of
white supremacy was critical to the reproduction of colonial relations . Western feminists havecontested their gendered inequalities with
considerable success. Somehave even sought to transform their relationship to ‘whiteness’ and thedeep divisions this precipitates among women. The US-led War
on Terror is giving rise to new forms of invasions and occupations, and it is of great consequence to examine how
feminists are theorizing the War on Terror.In what ways are feminists applying the lessons learnt from prior suchhistories of conquest? How are they
defining the relationships among race,gender and the War on Terror? What, if any, is the correlation betweenfeminist theorizations and the ‘new’ imperial imaginary?
What doesfeminist theory have to offer in terms of resistance to the contemporaryreconfigurations of imperial relations?
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***IMPERIALISM***
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IMPERIALISM DISCRETE ADV (1/5)
OUR INTERVENTIONIST MILITARY RESPONSE IN AFGHANISTAN IS AN EXAMPLE OF WESTERN
EXCEPTIONALISM WHICH LIES AT THE HEART OF IMPERIALISM.
Gregory, Derek [geographer and professor of geography at the University of British Columbia], “The Colonial
Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq”, 2004
Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar is understandably more skeptical about this post-imperial world, and his argument has a radically different ring. Yet
he reaches a similar conclusion. Cooper hesitates over the place of the United States in his geographical imaginary - the rupture between America and
"old Europe" over the war in Iraq makes his reluctance all the more revealing - but Sanbar makes no bones about saying that
"globalization is in the process of transforming everywhere into a domestic American space." In consequence, he claims
that: [T]he notions of interior and exterior, of domestic and foreign policy, will be called upon to disappear in favour of Washington's supremacy,
which is gradually becoming the enthroned capital of the world .... It is not a question of a new occupation of foreign territories
but of an integration - an annexation, I should say - of all humanity within the borders of the United States. 33
This is the ideology of American Empire, to be sure, of the New American Century in which America is cast not only as the
global superpower but also as the universal (Hollywood) actor. But unless one understands "humanity" in Sanbar's last sentence in the always
conditional sense produced by the excision - the ex-ception - of homo sacer, it is not the practice of American Empire. For over 200 years, as Veena
Das cogently reminded us, "the distinction between an 'inside' in which values of democracy and freedom were
propagated and an 'outside' which was not ready for such values and hence had to be subjugated by violence in
order to be reformed has marked the rhetoric and practice of colonialism and its deep connections with Western
democracies."" Das had good reason to say this in the aftermath of September 11, and the subsequent unfolding of "the war on
terror" in Afghanistan and its violent extensions into Palestine and Iraq (and beyond) have demonstrated not the slackening but the
tightening of this colonial spacing. For colonialism's promise of modernity has always been deferred - always
skewed by the boundary between "us" and "them" - and although that partition is routinely crossed, even transgressed, the dismal fact is
that no colonial anxiety, no colonial guilt has ever erased it altogether. If this is still the primary meridian of imaginative
geography, however, it is no simple geometry. It is, as I have repeatedly insisted, a topology that also marks the threshold, the space of the
exception, whose seams are folded, stretched, and torn into new, ever more wrenching constellations. Borders are not only lines on maps
but spacings dispersed across multiple sites embassies, airports, detention centers that radically contort
conventional mappings of territory. Even hybrid "borderlands" bear the scar tissue of those boundaries. Through these twists and turns the
divide may be annulled in some registers (in these ways, you may be modern: like "us") while it is simultaneously reaffirmed in others (in these ways
you will never be modern: always irredeemably "other"). Our "six degrees of separation" mean that the modern world is
marked by spacings of connection, which are worked by transnational capital circuits and commodity chains, by global flows of
information and images, and by geopolitical alignments and military dispositions. These have their own uneven geographies - they do not
produce a single, smooth surface and they are made intelligible through their own imaginative geographies. But the modern world is also
marked by spacings of disjuncture between the same and the other that are installed through the same or parallel economic, cultural, and
political networks but articulated by countervailing imaginative geographies that give them different force and sanction. Imaginative geographies are
thus doubled spaces of articulation. Their inconstant topologies are mappings of connective dissonance in which connections are elaborated in some
registers even as they are disavowed in others. These are all "gravity's rainbows." In his novel of (almost) that name, Thomas Pynchon
described the arc of the V-2 rockets launched against Britain from occupied Europe in the dying days of the Second World War as a "screaming
coming across the sky." Several writers have used the same image to describe the events of September 11. Hijacked aircraft crashing into the Twin
Towers, cruise missiles and "daisy-cutters" raining down on Afghanistan: so many "screamings across the sky" whose
terrifying arcs at once marked and made viscerally physical connections." But they also made disconnections,
marked by an unwillingness to see an altogether more solid geometry and to hear an altogether different sound : the misshapen
bodies of the dead and the screamings of the injured as they lay among the rubble. Imaginative geographies are like
gravity's rainbows. They map the twists and turns of engagement and estrangement. Mappings of engagement and estrangement articulate
contemporary cultures of travel. Bauman's tourists probably know this without being told; at least those accustomed to move from one exotic
site/sight to another, gazing upon the other but always able to withdraw to the security of the familiar, know this. As the young British protagonist in
Will Rhode's Paperback Raita puts it, "Half the attraction of coming to India is the ability to leave it." Tourists move in the folds between
compression and expansion, and, cultures of travel are some of the most commonplace means through which colonialism is abroad in our own
present. as.Urry once remarked, it is now the case that in the first world "people are much of the time tourists, whether they like it or not," it is also
the case that they ~- we - are implicated in the performance of the colonial present." Ironically one of the immediate consequences of September 11
was to contract the space of American tourism as flights were cancelled and aircraft flew half-empty. Two weeks later Bush told enthusiastic airline
employees at Chicago's O'Hare airport that "one of the great goals of this war is to tell the traveling public: Get on board.""
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[CONTINUED]
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[CONTINUED]
This must count as one of the most bizarre reasons for waging war in human history, and yet it also speaks a powerful truth. Modern metropolitan
cultures privilege their own mobility.
"Privilege" has to be understood literally; there are other cultures of travel within which movement is a burden, an imposition, even a tragedy." What,
then, of Bauman's vagabonds? Three weeks after September 11 the metropolis reasserted its customary powers and
privileges as military action was launched against Afghanistan, and thousands of refugees were displaced by
these time-space compressions. Many of them were trapped at borders - not only at Afghanistan's borders but at other borders around the
world. Here is Gary Younge on their experience almost in Britain: [S]hould those whom we seek to protect [by our international military actions]
arrive on our shores, all apparent concern evaporates in a haze of xenophobic bellicosity. Whatever compassion may have' been
expressed previously is confiscated at the border. As soon as they touch foot on British soil they go from being
a cause to be championed to a problem to be dealt with. We may flout international law abroad, but God forbid
any one should breach immigration law here .... We love them so we bomb them; we loathe them so we deport them.'9
Thousands of displaced people, refugees, and asylum-seekers found that, in the very eye of these wrenching time-space compressions, time and space
had dramatically expanded for them. Then in April 2003 the British government began the forcible repatriation of Afghan refugees. According to the
Home Office, "the deportation was aimed partly at testing the situation in Afghanistan." The refugees were the creatures of a cruel experiment: "We
need to ensure that the process is sustainable and that there is adequate infrastructure and security on the ground to receive them." There are, of
course, other - less violent - ways of investigating conditions on the ground than sending desperate human beings back to the danger zone. In fact,
there is credible, compelling evidence that Afghanistan is not safe, and the British government continues to advise its own citizens against travelling
there.2í But refugees are allowed few rights. "The globe shrinks for those who own it," Homi Bhabha once remarked, but "for the displaced or the
dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers. ,2' The figure of the refugee - as both
wanderer and prisoner - throws into crisis what Agamben calls "the originary fiction of sovereignty" because it calls into question the connective
imperative that makes nativity the foundation of nationality and hence of the sovereign space of the nation-state. The refugee is, figuratively
and physically, a border figure who, if not excluded or confined, threatens to perforate the territorial integrity of
the state."
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THE WAR ON TERROR IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF THE US DRIVE FOR IMPERIALISM – IT JUSTIFIES THE
NEW FORM OF HEGEMONIC GLOBAL CONTROL
Julian Reid,Lecturer in International Relations, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, 2005 [“'The Biopolitics of the
War on Terror: a critique of the 'return of imperialism' thesis in international relations”, Third World Quarterly, ]
http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/265145_731199548_713720198.pdf
ABSTRACT The ‘war on terror’ is widely regarded as instigating a major regression within the development of the
international system. Processes of globalisation are being challenged, it is argued, by a reassertion of the sovereign power
of nation-states, most especially the USA. In more overt terms this regression is represented as a ‘return’ of a traditional form of
imperialism. This ‘return of imperialism’ thesis challenges the claims of theories developed during the 1990s which
concentrate on the roles of deterritorialisation and the development of biopolitics in accounting for the constitution of the
contemporary international order. In contrast this paper seeks to detail the important respects in which biopolitical forces of
deterritorialisation continue to play an integral role within the strategies of power that make the war on terror possible.
Rather than understanding the war on terror as a form of ‘regression’ it is necessary to pay heed to the complex
intertwinings that continue to bind sovereign and biopolitical forms of power in the 21st century. Such an understanding is
urgent in that it provides for different grounds from which to reflect on the processes by which international order is
currently being reconstituted and to help think about how to engage in reshaping them.
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IMPERIALISM CREATES THE STATE OF EXCEPTION EVERYWHERE – THE RHETORIC OF THE WAR ON TERROR
IS INVOKED TO LEGITIMATE STATE BIOPOWER. THE IMPACT IS INDIVUDALIZED WAR – HOMO SACRI. A
REPENTANCE AND GUILT IS NECESSARY TO RECOGNIZE HOW BORDERS HAVE CREATED THE STATE OF
EXCEPTION
Gregory, Derek [geographer and professor of geography at the University of British Columbia], “The Colonial
Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq”, 2004
It should, then, come as no surprise to find close parallels between the extra-territoriality of Camp X-Ray at
Guantçnamo Bay, where the United States detains hundreds of "unlawful combatants" captured during its military
operations in Afghanistan, and Woomera Detention Centre in the Australian outback, where hundreds of asylum-seekers were detained in "a place
that is, and yet is not, Australia." "Razor wire and metal fencing mark out the camp as a space of exception," Suvendri Perera writes. "Five layers of
wire protect the threshold between Australia and its other, not-Australia." Australia's Pacific Solution works to the same end: asylumseekers who are
intercepted by Australian forces are transferred to camps on the tiny island nation of Nauru, on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, or on Australia's
Christmas Island." Or again, in early 2003 the British government drew up plans to deport asylum-seekers to "Regional Processing Areas" in the zone
of origin or to "Transit Processing Centres" on the borders of the European Union, institutionalizing yet another space of the exception. 14 We need
to remind ourselves that camps like these have their origins in the European colonial wars of the late nineteenth
century. In such conditions, now as then, the "external" and the "internal" are articulated not to erase the
"outside" but to produce it as the serial spacing of the exception, for ever inscribing exclusion through inclusion.
Pandora's Spaces As these zones of indistinction multiply around the world, so it becomes clear that "third spaces" or
"paradoxical spaces" are not always and everywhere the emancipatory formations that some writers have taken
them to be." Before September 11 Agamben had warned that "the camp is the space that opens up when the state of the exception starts to
become the rule." After September 11 he worried that the "war on terror" would be invoked so routinely that the exception
would indeed become the rule, that the law would be forever suspending itself.26 His fears were well founded.
Less than a year later the American director of Human Rights Watch reported that " the US government has failed to uphold the very
values that President Bush declared were under attack on September ii." The Bush administration attempted to curtail
democratic freedoms in at least three arenas: by circumventing federal and international law; by suppressing public information; and by
discriminating against visible minorities. Even the conservative Cato Institute objected to the proliferation of "secretive
subpoenas, secretive arrests, secretive trials, and secretive deportations . 1, 17 Much of this was authorized by the USA
PATRIOT Act - "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" - which was
passed less than two months after September 11 to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies unprecedented powers of surveillance and
investigation. This series of exceptions was perfectly consistent with the imaginative geographies of civilization
and barbarism that were mobilized by the White House to wage its war on terror. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean describe
"a constant and mutual production of the civilized and the savage throughout the social circuitry." -The homeland
had to be defended not only against the enemy without but also against the enemy within." On September 11, 2002, for example, the US Immigration
and Naturalization Service introduced a new registration system for designated "non-immigrant aliens." Visitors from specified countries were not
only to be interviewed but also photographed and fingerprinted at the port of entry, and later required to report to an INS office to provide additional
documentation and information. Compliance with this National Security Entry and Exit Registration System was made retroactive for all visitors 16
years of age and older already resident in the United States who came from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia,
Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab
Emirates, and Yemen. The only country on the call-in list with no substantial Muslim population is North Korea. This is a strategy familiar from the
Cold War, whose geography of containment was double-headed: The first conception speaks to a threat outside of the social
body, a threat that therefore has to be excluded, o, isolated in quarantine, and kept at bay from the domestic
body. The second meaning of containment, which speaks to the domestic contents of the social body, concerns a threat internal to the host which
must then he neutralized by being fully absorbed and thereby neutralized."Although the Bush administration abandoned containment for preemption ,
its national security strategy was also given an interior as well as an exterior focus: "Profiling and pre-emption
work together to define the human targets of the 'war on terror.""' This is more than the rehabilitation of the
Cold War and its paranoid silencing of difference and dissent, however, because the permanent state of
emergency institutionalized through these imaginative geographies of the alien "other" also reactivates the
dispositions of a colonial imaginary. Its spacings are mirror images of the "wild zones" of the colonial imagination. " The national
security state," Susan Buck-Morss points out,
[CONTINUED]
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[CONTINUED]
"is called into existence with the sovereign pronouncement of a 'state of emergency' and generates a wild zone
of power, barbaric and violent, operating without democratic oversight, in order to combat an
'enemy' that threatens the existence not merely and not mainly of its citizens, but of its sovereignty ." The process of surveillance and
screening, profiling and purification, has not been confined to the United States. When Kanishka Jasuriya warned against
the creeping internationalization of the state of exception already in train before September 11 - he drew special attention to the
application of strategies of risk management and profiling to "target populations" around the world."
Throughout the non-Islamic world Arabs and Muslims have been made desperately vulnerable by these
identifications. In Israel their status has been made ever more precarious as one-fifth of Israel's own population has increasingly been excluded
from politically qualified life; Israeli Arabs have been demonized not only as a fifth column but as a "cancerous growth," and in the occupied
territories - for which Israel takes no civil responsibility - Sharon's chief of staff has chillingly promised the Palestinians "chemotherapy" as his
armed forces set about excluding them from bare life too ." Irnmigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers have been the victims of
paranoia and hysteria in Europe too. At the beginning of The Clash of Civilizations Samuel Hunting-ton cites a passage from novelist
Michael Dibdin's Dead Lagoon that speaks directly to these issues: "There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are
not, we cannot love what we are." Huntington described this as "an unfortunate truth," as though it were somehow inscribed in the nature of things.
But in the novel these sentences come from a speech given by Ferdinando Del Maschio - hardly the hero of the story - to drive home the cause of
selfdetermination for Venice and the need to preserve and purify its Venetian culture. At the end of the novel Del Maschio rounds on Dibdin's
detective, Aurelio Zen, and tells him: Sooner or later you're going to have to choose .... The new Europe will be no place for rootless
drifters and cosmopolitans with no sense of belonging. It will be full of frontiers, both physical and ideological,
and they will be rigorously patrolled. You will have to be able to produce your papers or suffer the consequences. Dibdin is clearly
saying that this is a choice and not, as Huntington seems to think, an irrefutable given, so that the construction of an archipelago of
inclusion and exclusion cannot be attributed solely to the threat posed by external or internal "others." In
constructing multiple others as "other," and in assenting to these constructions and impositions, we not only do this to others: we do it to ourselves.
We all become the subjects and the objects of the "securitization" of civil society. This is as ugly as it sounds - it
means taking the "civil" out of "society" - and as its partitions proliferate internally and externally, inscribed
through and legitimized by the so-called "war on terror," so colonialism is surreptitiously repatriated and
rehabilitated and the camp is confirmed as the nomo.s of a continuing colonial modernity." The choice that is offered,
as Henry Giroux and Paul Street have argued, is the false choice between being safe and being free: " War is individualized as every
citizen becomes a potential terrorist who has to prove that he or she is not a menace to society. Under the rubric
of the new permanent war against the never-ending specter of terrorist apocalypse, which feeds off government-induced
media panics, war provides the moral imperative to collapse the boundaries between innocent and guilty, between
suspect and non-suspect, between peaceful political dissent and pathological, extremist alienation."" We are all -
actually or potentially - homines sacri. In his essay on the concept of history, Walter Benjamin wrote that "the tradition of the
oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain
to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. "39 Benjamin was writing in 1940, but his commentary on the rise of fascism has a
resonance in our own times that is as deep as it is disturbing. His call for a critical reflection on the concept of history is immensely important, but
we also need a conception of geography that is in keeping with this same insight. If we can understand the multiple ways in
which difference is folded into distance, and the complex figurations through which time and space are threaded into these tense
constellations, we might perhaps see that what lgnatieff once called "distant strangers" are not so distant after all - and not so strange either." For this
possibility to be realized - for us to cease turning on the treadmill of the colonial present - it will be necessary to
explore other spatializations and other topologies, and to turn our imaginative geographies into geographical
imaginations that can enlarge and enhance our sense of the world and enable us to situate ourselves within it
with care, concern, and humility." This is not a call for an empty relativism; there will still he disagreements, conflicts, and even enemies.
But in order to conduct ourselves properly, decently, we need to set ourselves against the unbridled arrogance that assumes that "We" have the
monopoly of Truth and that the world is necessarily ordered by - and around - Us. If we can do this, then we might see that the most
enduring memorial to the thousands who were murdered in the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade
Center and parts of the Pentagon on September 11 and to the thousands more who have been killed in
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 138
Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, and Iraq - would be the destruction of the architectures of enmity that produced
and have been sustained by those dreadful events.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 139
LINK - AFGHANISTAN
US imperialism has prevented stabilization of Afghanistan - the strategic violence employed increased resentment
and caused countless deaths through indiscriminate searches and bombings
Revolutionary Communist Party 2009 (http://revcom.us/a/176online/AWTWNS-Afghanistan-en.html)
The U.S. commander of the more than 100,000 American and European occupation troops has studied the lessons of other
occupations and reactionary wars. General Stanley McChrystal recently announced new rules of engagement that he said would reduce the number of
civilian deaths. But even if he would like to win Afghan "hearts and minds" to isolate the Taliban, this is impeded by two factors. One is
the reactionary goal of the war: to reassert U.S. supremacy in the region and beat back anti-U.S. Islamic fundamentalism, not
to free the people but to enslave them to Western imperialist capital. To that end, the occupation preserves major
features of the country's oppressive economic and social system and subjugation, and ideological backwardness.
The other factor is the way the imperialist armies fight and indeed must fight. U.S. authorities blamed their allies, as
though the Germans had dropped the bombs, as though the U.S. hadn't already bombed countless villages and wedding parties in
Afghanistan, and as though the U.S. had not insisted on the presence of German troops in the first place. But the sharpest criticism aimed at the German commanders was their
failure to send troops to the scene to "prevent the Taliban from coming out with their own version of events" (BBC, 7 September). In other words, they should have done more to cover up the
civilian deaths. German military authorities rebutted that the attack was necessary because the hijacked tankers could have been used for an attack on a nearby German base. As for their lack of
timely action afterward, even General McChrystal, with all his supporting firepower, didn't dare go to the site itself. But there was a major political factor in why the German military was so
worried about protecting its soldiers. Several commentators have pointed out that any further German casualties might endanger the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing elections
in late September. Although Germany's major parties support the war, including the supposedly anti-war Greens, most Germans do not. When soldiers are killed, this raises a question about
what they are doing there. The government has repeatedly declared that this isn’t a war at all but a "stabilization effort". The Bundeswehr is portrayed as if it were an NGO carrying out
humanitarian missions, not an army. "In Afghanistan, it is like a war, but for us it is not a war," explained a German Social Democratic parliamentarian. "It is an important distinction."
Following this incident, other members of Parliament reacted angrily as if the Defence Minister had been concealing the fact that this is a war from them. (Washington Post, 8 September) In
response to the American criticism, German military authorities claimed that the U.S. was endangering German lives by publicly admitting that civilians might have been killed, which the
German authorities denied as long as they could. Again, there was a subtext - that if the U.S. wants Germany to wage a war in Afghanistan, it has to help the German authorities hide what is
going on from the German people. And there is probably genuine resentment among German ruling circles. They had sent troops to Kunduz on the understanding that it was not a combat zone,
specifically because they were afraid of public opinion. Now the north has become hotly contested. By extending the war to Pakistan, the U.S. has found its supply routes in the south under
pressure, and is now resorting to bringing in the huge amount of supplies on which its war depends through Central Asia. That’s why the fuel tankers were on the Kanduz-Tajikistan
road in the first place. The fact is that "death from above" is the preferred warfighting method of all the
occupiers because it allows them to bring to bear their greatest strengths - the airpower and other technology they have produced thanks to riches
amassed through the exploitation of people all over the world. They also prefer it because they do want to limit the number of
casualties on their side, not because they value any human life but of how they are able to get the people at home to
go along. In the case of Germany, it is to pretend that this isn’t really a war at all. In the case of the U.S. and the UK, the first and second
biggest suppliers of cannon fodder, it is by arguing that this is a war to save American and British lives ("the war on terror") and that
Western lives are worth everything and those of oppressed peoples nothing. As if anything more were needed to
expose the nature of this war, three days after the bombing U.S. soldiers provided another example of why
occupiers have trouble winning the hearts and minds of their victims. Soldiers from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division in
Wardak province southwest of Kabul stormed into a Swiss charity-run hospital late at night. They kicked in doors, tied up four hospital
employees and two family members of patients, and forced people out of their beds as they ransacked the facility for
two hours, allegedly looking for "insurgents".(How were they going to identify them? Were they just planning to
grab and torture everyone with an apparent bullet wound or any young men they could find?) The troops warned
the medical staff not to treat "insurgents" and to ask the permission of American officers before admitting patients. The
hospital staff said they would refuse to comply, because this would violate their ethics, the rules of war and the agreements
with the U.S.-led occupation forces under which they were operating - and turn the hospital and its staff into a target for the Taleban as well. This
follows an August attack on a hospital in the eastern province of Paktika by U.S. helicopter gunships.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 140
LINK - AFGHANISTAN
The US’s strategic violence in Afghanistan is based on patriotic, hypocritical rhetoric that justified its invasion -
the impact to the imperialist “benevolent” reconstruction is mass violence and terrorism
Arundhati Roy, 1997 Booker Prize winner, 2001 [War Is Peace,
http://peace.concordia.ca/pdf/war.is.peace.arundhati.roy.pdf , 10/18]
The UN, reduced now to an ineffective abbreviation, wasn't even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright
once said, "The US acts multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it must.") The 'evidence' against the
terrorists was shared amongst friends in the 'Coalition'. After conferring, they announced that it didn't matter whether
or not the 'evidence' would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly
trashed. Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists,
private militia, people's resistance movements-or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised
government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror
against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly
toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington. People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them.
People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They first use flags to shrink-wrap peoples'
minds and suffocate real thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to cloak the mangled corpses of the willing dead.
On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments.
Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond-they have to live with the phenomenon of
blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding
escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts. There is no easy way
out of the spiraling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human
race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11
changed the world forever. Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war-these words have taken on new meaning.
Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty
and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the
International Coalition. Or the Taliban. When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, "We're a
peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the
UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people." So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace. Speaking
at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United
States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject
violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire." Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war
with-and bombed-since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69);
Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964- 73); Vietnam (1961-73);
Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua (1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-
99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan. Certainly it does not tire-this, the Most Free
nation in the world. What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of
artistic statement, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things.
Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate-usually in the service of America's real
religion, the 'free market'. So when the US government christens a war 'Operation Infinite Justice', or 'Operation
Enduring Freedom', we in the Third World feel more than a tremor of fear. Because we know that Infinite Justice
for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.
The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them,
they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass
destruction-chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide,
subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed, and
financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of
violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league. The Taliban was compounded in
the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin, and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in
their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a
society scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45 billion worth
of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 141
upon a thoroughly medireview society. Young boys-many of them orphans-who grew up in those times, had guns for toys,
never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers,
the Taliban beat, stone, rape, and brutalise women; they don't seem to know what else to do with them. Years of war
have stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. They dance to the percussive
rhythms of bombs raining down around them. Now they've turned their monstrosity on their own people. With all due
respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All
the beauty of human civilization-our art, our music, our literature-lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles.
There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they'll all
embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is
about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony-every kind of
hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious, and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a
monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of
dictatorship. It's like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn
open. One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war.
Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the
air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot
put it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich environment". At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, US
defense secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets. "First we're going to re-hit targets," he said, "and second,
we're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is..." This was greeted with gales of laughter in the Briefing Room. By the
third day of the strikes, the US defense department boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan". (Did
they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan's planes?) On the ground in Afghanistan, the
Northern Alliance-the Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the International Coalition's newest friend-is making
headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track record is not very
different from the Taliban's. But for now, because it's inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The
visible, moderate, "acceptable" leader of the Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in
September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists, and unbending
clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.
Until Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5 per cent of the geographical area of Afghanistan.
Now, with the Coalition's help and 'air cover', it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing
imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the Alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing
uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all. Love is hate, north is south,
peace is war. Among the global powers, there is talk of 'putting in a representative government'. Or, on the other
hand, of 'restoring' the Kingdom to Afghanistan's 89-year-old former king, Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome
since 1973. That's the way the game goes-support Saddam Hussein, then 'take him out'; finance the mujahideen,
then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to 'put in' a
representative government? Can you place an order for Democracy-with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?) Reports
have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders
which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of
working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5
million according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say
that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not
both. As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations
into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 5,000,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for
half-a-million people out of the several million in dire need of food. Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical,
dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile. First, because the
food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk
being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race. Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves.
Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we're told, as per Muslim Dietary Law(!) Each
yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers,
raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user
instructions. After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of
cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean,
the US government's attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description. Reverse the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 142
scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real
target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a
few thousand packets containing nan and kababs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York ever
find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if
they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York City,
returned a gift of $10 million from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American
policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury only the rich are entitled to? Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of
rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don't go back into the box once you've let them out. For every
'terrorist' or his 'supporter' that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent
people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 143
LINK - TERROR
The US’s strategic violence in Afghanistan is based on patriotic, hypocritical rhetoric that justified its invasion -
the impact to the imperialist “benevolent” reconstruction is mass violence and terrorism
The UN, reduced now to an ineffective abbreviation, wasn't even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright
once said, "The US acts multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it must.") The 'evidence' against the
terrorists was shared amongst friends in the 'Coalition'. After conferring, they announced that it didn't matter whether
or not the 'evidence' would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly
trashed. Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists,
private militia, people's resistance movements-or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised
government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror
against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly
toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington. People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them.
People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They first use flags to shrink-wrap peoples'
minds and suffocate real thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to cloak the mangled corpses of the willing dead.
On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments.
Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond-they have to live with the phenomenon of
blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding
escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts. There is no easy way
out of the spiraling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human
race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11
changed the world forever. Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war-these words have taken on new meaning.
Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty
and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the
International Coalition. Or the Taliban. When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, "We're a
peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the
UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people." So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace. Speaking
at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United
States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject
violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire." Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war
with-and bombed-since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69);
Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964- 73); Vietnam (1961-73);
Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua (1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-
99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan. Certainly it does not tire-this, the Most Free
nation in the world. What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of
artistic statement, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things.
Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate-usually in the service of America's real
religion, the 'free market'. So when the US government christens a war 'Operation Infinite Justice', or 'Operation
Enduring Freedom', we in the Third World feel more than a tremor of fear. Because we know that Infinite Justice
for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.
The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them,
they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass
destruction-chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide,
subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed, and
financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of
violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league. The Taliban was compounded in
the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin, and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in
their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a
society scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45 billion worth
of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 144
upon a thoroughly medireview society. Young boys-many of them orphans-who grew up in those times, had guns for toys,
never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers,
the Taliban beat, stone, rape, and brutalise women; they don't seem to know what else to do with them. Years of war
have stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. They dance to the percussive
rhythms of bombs raining down around them. Now they've turned their monstrosity on their own people. With all due
respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All
the beauty of human civilization-our art, our music, our literature-lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles.
There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they'll all
embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is
about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony-every kind of
hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious, and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a
monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of
dictatorship. It's like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn
open. One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war.
Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the
air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot
put it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich environment". At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, US
defense secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets. "First we're going to re-hit targets," he said, "and second,
we're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is..." This was greeted with gales of laughter in the Briefing Room. By the
third day of the strikes, the US defense department boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan". (Did
they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan's planes?) On the ground in Afghanistan, the
Northern Alliance-the Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the International Coalition's newest friend-is making
headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track record is not very
different from the Taliban's. But for now, because it's inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The
visible, moderate, "acceptable" leader of the Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in
September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists, and unbending
clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.
Until Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5 per cent of the geographical area of Afghanistan.
Now, with the Coalition's help and 'air cover', it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing
imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the Alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing
uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all. Love is hate, north is south,
peace is war. Among the global powers, there is talk of 'putting in a representative government'. Or, on the other
hand, of 'restoring' the Kingdom to Afghanistan's 89-year-old former king, Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome
since 1973. That's the way the game goes-support Saddam Hussein, then 'take him out'; finance the mujahideen,
then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to 'put in' a
representative government? Can you place an order for Democracy-with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?) Reports
have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders
which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of
working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5
million according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say
that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not
both. As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations
into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 5,000,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for
half-a-million people out of the several million in dire need of food. Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical,
dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile. First, because the
food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk
being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race. Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves.
Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we're told, as per Muslim Dietary Law(!) Each
yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers,
raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user
instructions. After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of
cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean,
the US government's attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description. Reverse the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 145
scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real
target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a
few thousand packets containing nan and kababs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York ever
find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if
they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York City,
returned a gift of $10 million from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American
policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury only the rich are entitled to? Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of
rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don't go back into the box once you've let them out. For every
'terrorist' or his 'supporter' that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent
people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 146
LINK - AFGHAN INSTABILITY
Portrayals of Afghanistan instability legitimize our “imperial obligation” to bring “order in a world of chaos.”
Neil Cooper (Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, UK ) 2005 [(Economies and the Implications for
Policy Picking out the Pieces of the Liberal Peaces: Representations of Conflict, International Peace Research Institute,
http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/36/4/463)]
One strand of such analysesconstructed states such as Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afghanistanand even Bosnia (at least for a time) as
beyond repair and strategically unimportant, while projects of external interventionwere portrayedas futile attempts to
save perpetually recidivist societies that merely wasted Western lives and funds (Luttwak, 1999). Alternatively, such
representations have also been used to justify arguments for a new ‘voluntary imperialism’ underpinned by the interest and
obligation of ‘postmodern states’ to ‘bring order and organisation’ to a pre-modern world in which ‘chaos is the norm’
(Cooper, Robert, 2002). Moreover, while ostensibly polar opposites, we often find these two discourses fused in discussions of policy towards
specific conflicts. Thus discussion of policy on the Democratic Republic of Congo or Sudan today is both motivated by the call for the imposition of
imperial order and simultaneously delimited by concern over the dangers of being sucked into the horror at the ‘heart of darkness’.From the mid-
1990s onwards, academics and policymakers began to focus far more explicitly on the political economy of civil conflicts. One school of analysis,
associated with the work of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (Collier, 2000a,b; Collier & Hoeffler, 2001; Collier et al., 2003), incorporated an IFI
emphasis on the role of rebel greed in instigating and perpetuating civil conflict, and specifically rejected the idea that economic inequality, ethnic
divisions or repressive government were at the root of conflict and instability. Instead, the emphasis was placed on the role played by rebel greed and
the opportunities for funding insurgency. This approach was significant in a number of respects. First, it moved away from understanding economic
activity in conflict as a secondary issue that either did not need explaining or could simply be contextualized as part of a broader set of horrors
unleashed by war. Second, the fact that this work had the imprimatur of the World Bank meant that it was particularly influential, spurring a host of
conferences on the topic, diplomatic activity and further research. Third, the emphasis on a rational motivation for the activity of even vicious
warlords was, ironically, an optimistic one, suggesting that using international intervention and regulation to change the
opportunity costs of conflict might well facilitate a shift from war to peace . Fourth, this work produced a number of significant
policy lessons that have had varying influence: most notably, the need to diversify economies, address diaspora funding for rebel groups and improve
good governance (Collier, 2000a,b).
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 147
LINK - IRAQ
The U.S. has always been imperialist the invasion in Iraq was a race to control oil supplies and project power over
Eurasia
Bryan Mabee, “Discourses of Empire: The US 'Empire', Globalisation and International Relations”, Third World
Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 8 (2004), pp. 1359-1378, JSTOR, 2004
The Marxist critics take on the radical critique of old, that the US was always an imperialist power, but a specifically
capitalist one: its aim was always to further US economic interests through expansion abroad.'7 While the geopolitics of
empire is also crucial,'8 the role of contemporary capitalism is always at the core. The analysis of the Bush strategy,
overall, is that it sees a militarization of former US imperial polices, with the express intention of protecting US
hegemony through preventing the rise of possible competitors. The route to this is mainly through control of Middle East
oil, which is seen as a major driver of the global economy. As Harvey summarizes: Not only does [the US invasion of
Iraq] constitute an attempt to control the global spigot and hence the global economy through domination over the Middle
East. It also constitutes a powerful US military bridgehead on the Eurasian land mass which, when taken together with its gathering
alliances from Poland to down through the Balkans, yields it a powerful geostrategic position in Eurasia with at least the potentiality to disrupt any consolidation of a
Eurasian power that could indeed be the next step in that endless accumulation of political power that must always accompany the equally endless accumulation of
capital.'9 The sceptics are less critical of American policy as capitalist imperialist and more concerned with the detrimental effects of the current US foreign policy.
That is not to say that many do not see the US as an empire before the present Bush administration, it is just that the previous imperial strategy was either
justified, or was on a more consensual and less dangerous basis.20 Overall, such critics aresquarely focused on the use and abuse of
American power, which tends to focus on the unsustainably of empire in the long term. As Mann sums up: 'the result is a disturbed, misshapen
monster stumbling clumsily across the world. It means well. It intends to spread order and benevolence, but instead it creates more disorder
and violence'. 21 Most, if not all, the sceptics point to the problem of coercion versus consent. The sceptics (and some Marxists) view the
American-led international order post-World War II as a consensual international order, either as a hegemonic order, or consensual empire.22T he
broad contours of the international order were created by the US, for its benefit, but other states also found value in it. As Maier
states, 'it was an empire with a difference-a coordination of economic exchange and security guarantees welcomed by its less powerful member
states, who preserved their autonomy and played a role in collective policymaking'. 23 Along these lines, Ikenberry has done much to point to the
special qualities of America's post-World War II hegemony. While Ikenberry is overly sceptical that the US should be considered an empire,
precisely because of its 'special' qualities-its provision of global public goods, its exercise of power through rules and institutions, and the allowance
for weaker states to have 'voice opportunities'24-he does agree with the other sceptics that the Bush doctrine is an imperial policy that does
away with the effective combination of realism and liberalism that constituted the post-World War II international order.
As he summarises, 'the new imperial grand strategy presents the United States very differently: a revisionist state seeking
to parlay its momentary power advantages into a world order in which it runs the show'. 25 The sceptics all agree that the
strategy is unsustainable, because America's power is overstated (overwhelmingly dominant military, but economic power distributed more
evenly) due to the costs of maintaining such a strategy and to the inevitable opposition from other states.26 A point of emphasis along these lines is the over-reliance on
military power as one of the pre-eminent problems of the imperial strategyo f the Bush administration.27 While the potential failures of such an approach are
emphasised in the context of coercion versus consent, it has also been noted that the Bush strategy misses the importance of 'soft 28 power' in maintaining
predominance. All of the camps involved have similar ideas about the American empire, if different emphases, and different ideas about
its viability or desirability. All share the idea that the empire is based on the superiority of American power (especially
military) and its overall place in the structure of the international system, about the broad power and appeal of American
values, about what amounts to an ideological mission in foreign policy, and about how America as empire curtails other
states' right to sovereignty when such states violate broader principles of justice and order
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 148
LINK - COLONIALISM - IRAQ
The bureaucracy of the U.S. embassy is uncompromisingly colonialist - the abundance of American administrators
is a tool to control Iraq’s politics, military, and economy.
Michael Schwartz professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in
Context 7/9/09 [“Colonizing Iraq: The Obama Doctorine?”, TomDispatch.com,
Traditional colonialism was characterized by three features: ultimate decision-making rested with the occupying power
instead of the indigenous client government; the personnel of the colonial administration were governed by different laws
and institutions than the colonial population; and the local political economy was shaped to serve the interests of the
occupying power. All the features of classic colonialism took shape in the Bush years in Iraq and are now, as far as we can
tell, being continued, in some cases even strengthened, in the early months of the Obama era.
The U.S. embassy in Iraq, built by the Bush administration to the tune of $740 million, is by far the largest in the world. It
is now populated by more than 1,000 administrators, technicians, and professionals - diplomatic, military, intelligence,
and otherwise - though all are regularly, if euphemistically, referred to as “diplomats” in official statements and in the
media. This level of staffing - 1,000 administrators for a country of perhaps 30 million - is well above the classic norm for
imperial control. Back in the early twentieth century, for instance, Great Britain utilized fewer officials to rule a
population of 300 million in its Indian Raj.
Such a concentration of foreign officialdom in such a gigantic regional command center - and no downsizing or
withdrawals are yet apparent there - certainly signals Washington’s larger imperial design: to have sufficient
administrative labor power on hand to ensure that American advisors remain significantly embedded in Iraqi political
decision-making, in its military, and in the key ministries of its (oil-dominated) economy.
From the first moments of the occupation of Iraq, U.S. officials have been sitting in the offices of Iraqi politicians and
bureaucrats, providing guidelines, training decision-makers, and brokering domestic disputes. As a consequence,
Americans have been involved, directly or indirectly, in virtually all significant government decision-making.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 149
LINK - JWT
The incorporation of morality into just war discourse masks imperialist and hegemonic motives for the invasion of
the Middle East
Colin Flint, Department of Geography @ Penn State, and Ghazi-Walid Falah, Department of Geography @ U Ohio
Akron, 2004 [How the US Justified Its War on Terrorism: Prime Morality and the Construction of a Just War, Third
World Quarterly 25.8, Jstor]
The classic text on the definition of just and unjust wars is Michael Walzer's Justand Unjust Wars, originally published in
1977.30 Its continued applicability withthe changing natureo f war has been discussed,31w ith the general conclusion that
states have adapted just war theory to discuss the moral conduct of war,32b ut theconcepts and values of Walzer's just war
theory remain applicable.33A just waris one that is constructed as either a war of self-defense after being attacked, awar in
the face of an imminent threat of attack, or a war in aid of a victim ofsomeone else's attack.34I n addition, a just war must
not only have a just causebut be committed by a just authority, with the right intent, in a mannerproportionalt o the threat
and as a last resort.35T he role of this paper is to gobeyond the assumptions of previous analyses of just war to show how
they are disrupted in the instance when the hegemonic power is initiating the war.36Walzer takes great pains to
show the horror of war and, hence, the gravityof-in his words-the crime of aggression.37But despite his moral
strength and deeply critical approach, he stays within the axioms of social science.38 Mostnotably, two of his
assumptions are challenged by the recognition of the role ofa hegemonic power. First, assuming the nation-state to be
the only unit of analysis precludes discussion of the role of extra-territorialityin causing and justifying wars.
Second, concentration upon nation-states results in an understanding of balance of power as the combination of
states equal in power, rather than the construction of global consensus by the hegemonic power. Both of
theseassumptions have implications for constructing a war as just or unjust.The notions of a just war assume the
authority of territorial sovereignty. Aggression is a military invasion of another's sovereign territory and a just
defense is the removal of that foreign presence. But what if we understand statesovereignty as something that is
continually violated? Moreover, what if thatviolation is constructed as something that is both necessary and beneficial?
Hegemonic economic, political and cultural extra-territoriality results in a world in which state sovereignty is
continually violated in order to ensure hegemonic integrative power. Hence, the hegemonic power must construct
just wars in a way that identifies particular violations of territorial sovereignty as aggressions that justify war
while maintaining an international context that facilitates its everyday extra-territoriarl each.With regard to the
second assumption, an understanding of balance of powerthat is the aggregation of relatively equal states points to the
definition of justauthority as rule of sovereign territory. On the other hand, identification of a 1384 THE
CONSTRUCTION OF A 'JUST WAR' hegemonic power draws attention to geopolitical world orders built by the
hegemonic power rather than alliances initiated by states of equal power. Theimplication is that just authority to
initiate war is defined by the hegemonicpower with regard to its global project, rather than at the scale of separate
states.The challenge for the hegemonic power is the universality of its authority. Asevident during the challenge of the
Vietnam War: Secretary of Defense RobertMcNamara stated 'South Vietnam is vital to the United States in the
significancethat a demonstrable defeat would have on the future effectiveness of the UnitedStates on the world scene-
especially in areas where people are depending uponour guarantee of their independence. It is a vital US concern to
maintain ourhonor as an ally and or formidabilitya s an opponent.'3 Power for the hegemonicstate is not a concert of
independent states to balance an alternative alliance ofstates, but a pax of global authority.Reference to a moral mission
becomes one of the tools by which the hegemonic power can justify its extra-territoriaml ission in a world of
sovereign states. The hegemonic power's moral claims are simultaneously universal andaddressed at the scale of the
individual. By speaking for 'all', the hegemonic power attains a global reach while appearing to avoid the language
of inter-state politics. As a brief example, the assumed and unstated moral authority of thehegemonic project of the US,
with specific reference to its declared War on Terrorism, is evident in Elshtain's40 identification of the US's just
cause. Al-Qaeda's motives are identified as cultural and moral: 'They loath us because of who we are and what our
society represents.'4 In response, Elshtainadvocates a hegemonic mission, to alleviate global injustice. A mission that
justifies violence in the diffusion of a prime modernity: 'we must and will fight-not in order to conquer any countries
or to destroy peoples or religions,but to defend who we are and what we, at our best, represent'.42 But there is nomention
of why the US has developed this responsibility, or why intervention insovereign spaces is obviously desirable. Instead,
'we do bear an obligation todefend the ideal of free citizens in a polity whose ordering principles make civicfreedom and
the free existence of religion available to all'.4Two points are crucial-the use of we refers not to 'who' but 'what'-the weis a
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collective mission to diffuse particular values across the globe. Second, thescale of analysis is one we will see reflected
later in the geopolitical strategy ofthe Bush Administration-it is the dignity of the individual, manifested in freechoice,
which needs to be saved by geopolitical intervention
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LINK - HUMAN RIGHTS
The discourse of securitizing the American public and human rights against a culture masked the neoliberalist
motivations for engaging in wars of hegemonic expansion
Colin Flint, Department of Geography @ Penn State, and Ghazi-Walid Falah, Department of Geography @ U Ohio
Akron, 2004 [How the US Justified Its War on Terrorism: Prime Morality and the Construction of a Just War, Third
World Quarterly 25.8, Jstor]
The National Security Strategy of the United States is an annual publication that, normally, does not attract a great deal of
attention. The 2002 version was different. Published in the wake of the attacks of September 11 it was seen as the
defining document of the 'War on Terrorism,' the defining trope of the emergent Bush foreign policy. The main
response to the document focused upon the new doctrine of 'preemption'-the intention to attack before 'our
enemies strike first' to 'exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptivelya gainst such terrorists'.78 Negative
reaction to this strategy was based, implicitly mostly, on the realization that wars of anticipation are hard to classify as
just.79 However, the Strategy engaged these difficulties by stating that the 'struggle against global terrorismi s
different from any other war in history'. 80 Hence, the axioms of just war could, as the basis of this strategy, be
ignored or rewritten. Militarily, a global war on terrorism and the-sometimes separated at others connected-concern
over weapons of mass destruction, were used to justify a new doctrine of preemption, or anticipation. But, because
of the emphasis upon extra-territoriality in the Strategyna further ingredient in the creation of a just war was
necessary. This second ingredient, human rights, will be the focus of our analysis.81 Human rights were used in the
Strategy as a way of defining the USA's responsibility and right to act extra-territorially:to be able to exert its power
across the globe for reasons of economic and 'national' self-interest, but under a beacon of being able to define and deliver
a better life for all. In this way, the swampy strategy of preemption was skirted, to a certain degree, and replaced by
what was presented as a de-politicised defense of a 'common sense' understand-ing of human dignity. Such human
dignity was embedded within a particular understanding of society: Prime modernity was used to construct a
prime morality. Defense of the latter was promoted as the basis for creating extra-ter-ritorial anticipations as just. In
addition, orientalist constructions dehumanised Arab societies in a way that not only made the killing of
individuals by US military might less morally problematic for Americans, but also, and most crucially, justified the
imposition of a US-defined morality. Such cultural constructions managed 'to say that it [the US military] could go
ahead and kill, bomb and destroy, since what would be being attacked was really negligible, brittle, with no
relationship to books, ideas, cultures and no relation either, it gently suggests, to real people'. 82 Consequently, the
message was that Arabs would gain a human dignity they never had through the imposition of US prime morality.
Particular themes in the Strategy are readily identified that promoted the extra-territorialityo f the United States, its
disseminationo f a prime modernity, and the usage of a prime morality to create a 'just cause' and, hence, a just
war. These themes will be outlined in this section. The War on Terrorism was deemed a 'global enterprise of
uncertain duration' that required a global policing operation as 'accountability must be expected and required'83v
ia a commitment to 'lasting institutions';8 4 extra-territorialitya nd hegemonic institutions were fused. Thus, a national
security document un-abashedly opened with the extra-territorial statement that 'Our Nation's cause has always been
larger than our Nation' s defense' .85 The contemporary justification for such a global presence was a war against
'terrorists of a global reach'86a threat that was explicitly non- and extra-territorial:th e 'enemy is not a single
political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism'.87 This focus upon terrorism was linked
to a universal economic project, as would be expected from the hegemonic framework, whereby recent economic
changes in the former Soviet Union and China 'have encouraged our hope that a truly global consensus about basic
principles is slowly taking shape'. 88 The use of the word 'basic' here depoliticised the diffusion of a particular economic
model into 'common sense.' Nonetheless, 'these are the practices that will sustain the supremacy of our common principles
and keep open the path of progress'.89 But promises of economic development may not be enough to ensure the universal
acceptance of the USA's global role. Indeed, now 'is the time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength'
as 'The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the US commitment to allies and
friends'. 90 The stated purpose of this military presence brings us back to Walzer's interpretationo f just wars. The
universalp resence of the US militaryr epresented 'the resolve to maintain a balance of power that favors freedom'.91
Balance of power was not a concert of states preventing the rise of a dominant power. Instead, the Strategy recognized a
hegemonic (im)balance of power that was to be maintained by military might, if necessary, or, if possible, by the global
emulation of a prime modernity, under-girded by a neo-liberal economic project.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 152
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LINK - INSTABILITY
Countries portrayed as instable and the threat to global security-intervention is inevitable such a discourse.
Neil Cooper(Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, UK ) 2005 [(Economies and the Implications for Policy Picking out the
Pieces of the Liberal Peaces: Representations of Conflict, International Peace Research Institute, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/36/4/463)]
In the aftermath of 9/11, weak and failed states have become the object of a heightened discourse of threat that represents
them as actual or potential nodal points in global terrorist networks. In this conception, the absence of state authority and
the persistence of disorder creates local societies relatively immune to technologies of surveillance, making them ideal
breeding grounds for terrorist recruitment, training, money-laundering and arms trafficking, as well as organized crime
more generally. As Collier et al. (2003: 41) note, civil war generates territories outside the control of governments that have become ‘epicentres
of crime and disease’ and that export ‘global evils’ such as drugs, AIDS and terrorism. This has produced an element of synthesis between new-right
critiques of the current aid paradigm and at least some critics from the liberal left. In particular, the idea that the neoliberal project has been taken too
far and has had the counterproductive effect of eroding state capacity and legitimacy - a traditional refrain of the left - has now been taken up by
realists. Thus, Fukuyama’s State Building signs up to earlier analyses that have emphasized the way in which neopatrimonial regimes used external
conditionality as an excuse for cutting back on modern state sectors while expanding the scope of the neopatrimonial state (Fukuyama, 2004: 22).
Fukuyama has also become a belated convert to the idea that, under the Washington Consensus, the state-building agenda was given insufficient
emphasis (Fukuyama, 2004: 7). Thus, the new-right analysis is one that emphasizes strong states and local empowerment. Even
(especially) the Bush administration concluded in its National Security Strategy of 2002 that ‘America is now threatened less
by conquering states than we are by failing states’ (White House, 2002: 1). However, this apparent consensus between the new-right
analysis and the liberal critique raises a number of concerns. First, the new-right analysis is situated as a response to the apparently new global
dangers unleashed by 9/11. As Fukuyama (2004: 126) notes, ‘the failed state problem . . . was seen previously as largely a humanitarian or human
rights issue’, whereas now it has been constructed as a problem of Western security. This dichotomy between the situation preceding and that after
9/11 is most certainly an exaggeration. Underdevelopment has always been securitized, just in different ways; and even its post-Cold War
manifestation was firmly in place well before 9/11. Indeed, this historical amnesia can be understood as an intrinsic element of a securitizing
discourse that justifies regulatory interventions as a response to a specific global emergency rather than as part of longer-term trends.
Nevertheless, it is also the case that the securitization of underdevelopmenthighlighted by Duffield has become acutely
heightened post-9/11, and it is in this context that current debates about the need to eradicate debt, increase aid and reform
trading structures are taking place. Thus, the cosmopolitan emphasis on responding to the plight of other global citizens
has been merged with the security imperatives of the war on terror to create something of a monolithic discourse across
left and right that justifies intervention, regulation and monitoring as about securing both the poor and the developed
world.Consequently, what structures the debate about addressing abuse or underdevelopment in this perspective is not the abuse or
underdevelopment per se but its links with multiple threats posed to the developed world. A continuum is thus created for external intervention,
entailing not merely the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq but also structuring debate about Somalia or the need to address shadow trade.
Moreover, this discourse is by no means unique to new-right perspectives. Thus, the recent Barcelona Report on a Human Security Doctrine for
Europe deploys much the same kind of language, despite being situated in an explicitly cosmopolitanist analysis that emphasizes the
importance of human security. For the authors, regional conflicts and failed states are ‘the source of new global threats
including terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and organised crime’ and consequently ‘no citizens of the world are any
longer safely ensconced behind their national border’ (Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities, 2004: 6-7). Interventionary
strategies, whether designed to address weapons of mass destruction, AIDS or the shadow trade emanating from civil
conflict, are thus explicitly framed as prophylactic strategies designed to protect the West from terror, disease, refugees,
crime and disorder. In the words of an IISS (2002: 2) report on Somalia, the concern is with ‘inoculating failed or failing states against
occupation by al-Qaeda’. This is not to suggest there is now complete synthesis between new-right analyses and liberal critiques. As already noted,
analyses such as the Barcelona Report are located in a cosmopolitanist perspective that still emphasizes the importance of providing human security
to the citizens of weak states and stresses the need for a bottom-up approach that empowers locals. In contrast, for Fukuyama (2004: 115), state-
building and local ownership somehow manage to encompass approval for the idea that, on key areas such as central banking, ‘ten bright technocrats
can be air-dropped into a developing country and bring about massive changes for the better in public policy’. The emphasis is also on state capacity
for enforcement, ‘the ability to send someone with a uniform and a gun to force people to comply with the state’s laws’ (Fukuyama, 2004: 8) and to
maintain the integrity of borders too easily traversed by networked crime and terror.
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LINK - FEAR
U.S. power works on fear projection bringing mines, famine and disease kill to a large portion of Afghanis. The
U.S. positions itself as such to further project its power in Europe and against Russia
Jonathon Neale (writer and anti-capitalist activist, Afghanistan, Anti-imperialism: a guide for the movement, Pages 138-139)
March 2003
alleged training camp for Al Qaida in southern Afghanistan, and demanded that the Taliban turn Bin Laden over to them. The Taliban government replied that they
would do so, but first the US would have to provide evidence to an Afghan court to justify extradition. The US government refused to do so, probably because it ~didn’t
have any evidence. Then came 11 September 2001. Here I will deal only with the consequences for Afghanistan. 11 September was a major challenge to
US power in the world. In the Middle East, in particular, US influence and power depended more on fear than consent.
Fear, and US power, had to be restored. Someone was going to pay. There was debate in the Bush administration about
where to strike first. Iraq and Saudi Arabia were possibilities. But both might provoke internal resistance and
demonstrations or uprisings across the Middle East. The Taliban, however, were widely -despised in the Middle East for their right
wing attitudes to women, and many in the Arab world looked on Afghans as backward anyway. Moreover, the Taliban had little support inside the country. Millions
of Afghans had fought for Communism and Islam. Now there was widespread cynicism about both. With a million dead
by now, after 23 years of war, few Afghans were likely to resist the US. The economy was also shattered. Much of the
agricultural land was still full of mines. Most of the refugees in Pakistan, Iran and the cities decided not to return. There had been a drought
for three years, many nomadic pastoralists had been forced to kill their herds for lack of water, and famine threatened
much of the country. Without regular shipments of food aid, many would starve.Farmers in many areas had survived by growing opium.
But then the Taliban had prevented poppy farming in the hope that this would appease the Americans. Precisely because Afghans had suffered so
much, and were so helpless, they would now suffer more. The US government also saw possible gains if it invaded
Afghanistan. First and foremost there was the Central Asian oil. A victory in Afghanistan could not only guarantee a
pipeline but tip the balance of power away from Russia across Central Asia. There was a broader reason too. In economic terms
the US was increasingly competing with the European Union, a roughly equivalent power. In military terms US
superiority was overwhelming. Washington had learned from the war against Iraq in l99l that a military victory could be
translated into superpower domination of the world economy. And so the invasion began. The justification was that they
would ‘regime change' the Taliban, free Afghan women and capture or kill Bin Laden, thereby getting justice for 11
September. There were problems, however. The US did not dare invade with ground troops in force, for two reasons. The first was that ever since the Vietnam War
there had been strong resistance inside the US by ordinary working class people to letting their children die abroad for American foreign policy. This was usually called
the ‘Vietnam syndrome', as if it were a sickness, when in fact it was a healthy reaction. The American elite hoped that after 11 September they could get round this, but
they were still wary of committing troops in force. The other reason was that US tanks and infantry would recall still bleeding memories of the Russian war inside
Afghanistan. So the US sent special forces, paratroops and CIA agents, but not infantry or tanks. Kandahar was heavily bombed, and so were many rural
areas. Roughly 3,000 civilians were killed, and perhaps as many Taliban troops. Many more people died of hunger and
disease as they fled, and because relief supplies could not get through. We have no idea how many. But there were limits to the
American war. The sort of saturation bombing of Kabul necessary to destroy the Taliban regime would quickly lead to an outcry across the world. The US government
was particularly worried about the effects of bombing in Pakistan.
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LINK - THREAT CON
Threat construction masked US imperialist objectives in Iraq - the end result was massive amounts of material
ruin
Harold Pinter (was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, political activist and poet. He was among
the most influential British playwrights of modern times. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Nobel
Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics,http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html) 2005
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the
evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that
power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own
lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. As every single person here knows,
the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of
mass destruction, some of which could be fired sin 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured
that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility
for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true . We were
told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is
something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it
chooses to embody it. But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean
United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this
period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here. Everyone knows what
happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the
widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone
documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the
truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence
of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte
blanche to do what it liked. Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the
main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of
people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the
country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued
- or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in
power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in
the years to which I refer. The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent
example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now. I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in
London in the late 1980s. The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in
their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the
most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz
(then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the
north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few
months ago a Contra force attacked the parish.They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural
centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like
savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist
activity.' Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was
greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell
you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer. Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a
gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further
atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of
murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?' Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as
presented support your assertions,' he said. As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays.
I did not reply. I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the
moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.' The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 156
over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular
revolution. The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy
contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a
stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants
were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A
quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was
established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated. The United States
denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example
was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise
the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries
would ask the same questions and do the same things
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 157
LINK - ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropologists in the Middle East have become the foot soldiers on the front lines of the spread of the
US empire by contributing information to expedite the oppression of “enemy” cultures.
Alboro, ’07 - (Robert, member of the AAA Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence
Communities and chair of the AAA Committee for Human Rights, January 2007, “Anthropology’s Terms of Engagement with Security,”
Anthropology News, http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:ZSWtg4H03UcJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=20000)
Other panelists in the double session contributed by providing a historical context to help enable the present disciplinary discussion.
Discussant Leslie Gill recalled anthropology’s long term relationship to state power, and warned against our
becoming new kinds of expert “foot soldiers in the War on Terror” when engaging national security. Based on
his three decades of work in Afghanistan, David Edwards in turn emphasized that provisioning governments
with information gleaned from ethnographic counterparts is a piecemeal choice. Edwards allowed that
anthropologists can work with governments, but only if for any given case we can distinguish between
desirable sociocultural “insight” of a general sort and specific “information” about particular people and their
circumstances that could be used against them. Ultimately, there are no guarantees that information will be used
appropriately, he argued, but anthropological expertise should be employed in public interventions to change unconstructive policies
and perceptions. Laura Nader compared contemporary Iraq to the history of the anthropology of Native
Americans so as to highlight colonial and neocolonial practices of anthropology “in the service of empire”
and to ask if a “culturally intelligent military” should be a goal of anthropology. Nader thus distinguished
“empire” from “republic,” in differentiating the two distinct modalities of US behavior in the world, and
called anthropology to resist complicity with “the empire in us.”As a discussant and a panelist, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
used a detour through Brazil to remind us that this is a dialogue on the relation between scholarship and citizenship. It is
impossible, he noted, to separate power and politics from the production of anthropological knowledge. This,
Lins Ribeiro pointed out, includes the ways that anthropology overlaps with elite projects and is conducted in
state institutions like universities, where “nation-building” is easily mixed up with “empire-building.”
Contributing to empire is harder to avoid than we typically recognize.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 158
IMPACT - CIVILIAN DEATHS
The US has used the Iraqi people as a tool of its foreign policy designs for decades. In the Gulf War we bombed
not only troops but critical civilian infrastructure, water plants and power stations, breaking down hospitals and
power stations. Because of American interests in removing Saddam Hussein from power, the CIA itself murdered
over 100 civilians in Baghdad to incite a coup. Then between the two Gulf Wars we instituted sanctions so harsh
and cruel that 600,000 children died from malnutrition and disease. Every day we stay in Iraq, the legacy of US
imperialism leaving behind 1,000,000 dead Iraqis and thousands more each year is sustained.
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer at School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, 200 5 (“Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering,” Global
Change, Peace & Security, Volume 17, Number 2, June 2005, P. 191 -213//DN)
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, US policy towards Saddam’s regime was to do an abrupt about-face-
over an utterly unchanged bedrock of enframing strategic reason.United Statesstrategic interests in oilmeant that
Iraq’s potential control of two-thirds of global reserves was a threat, along with the vast military forces Saddam
had built up over the past few years with the help of the West. A desire to destroy much of this military power
may have motivated the Bush administration’s desire to rush to war, despite indications diplomacy might work
and despite significant misgivings on Capitol Hill.79 Iraqi deaths during the Gulf War are estimated at about
60,000 (including approximately 32,000 from the bombing campaign and 25,000 as US air force, army and marines slaughtered
retreating Iraqis on the road from Kuwait), but the most devastating impact was to come later. In the course of over
110,000sortiesallied air forces used between 100,000 and 140,000 tons of explosives, killingthousands of
civiliansand strikingcrucial infrastructuresuch as power stations, with flow-on effects such as breakdowns in
hospitals, health care and sewage treatment. Combined with the effects of thedraconian sanctionsimposed by the
UN Security Council in August 1990, the war had, in the words of Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, ‘thrust Baghdad and its 3.5
million inhabitantsabruptly back into the third world’. Dilip Hiro described the impact as ‘reducing Iraq to a pre-
industrial state’.80 The Cockburns relate how, just six months after the end of the war, a US Catholic Relief Services worker ‘cast a
professional eye over the breakdown in the health system, food supplies, and the overall effect of sanctions on the economy and
soberly forecast to us that, as a result, no less than 175,000 Iraqi children would inevitably die’.81 UN Security Council
Resolution 687 specified that the sanctions should remain in force until Iraq had dismantled its weapons of mass destruction and was
cooperating with ongoing monitoring and verification (as set out in paragraphs 8-13 of the resolution).82 However, the US and its
allies had other ideas: three months after the war ended President Bush signed a secret ‘finding’ authorising the CIA to
mount a covert operation to ‘create the conditions for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power’.83 Speaking
after the vote that authorised Resolution 687, the UK permanent representative David Hannay calmly stated that ‘my government
believes that it will in fact prove impossible for Iraq to rejoin the community of civilised nations while Saddam Hussein remains in
power’. The US Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates put the US position most clearly in May 1991, when he
said that Saddam’s ‘leadership will never be accepted by the world community and, therefore, Iraqis will pay the
price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained while he is gone. Any easing of
sanctions will be considered only when there is a new Government.’84 This policy was later restated by
Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (March and November 1997) and by
George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell (February 2002).85 United States Gulf policy after the end of the Gulf
War took the form of ‘dual containment’ of Iraq and Iran, which Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake
described as being based on the ‘strategic principle . . . to establish a favorable balance of power, one that
willprotect critical American interestsin the security of our friends and in the free flow of oil at stable prices’. In this 1994
Foreign Affairs article, Lake criticised as ‘disastrous’ the previous US policies of supporting the Iranian Shah and building up Iraq’s
military capability, only to then replay the same cruel and unthinking hubris. He described Iran and Iraq as ‘a complex strategic puzzle
that has confounded the policies of three previous American administrations’, and wrote that, ‘as the sole superpower, the United
States has a special responsibility for developing a strategy to neutralize, contain and, through selective pressure, perhaps eventually
transform these backlash states into constructive members of the international community’.86 United States foreign policy in
this way hijacked both the UN Security Council and the people of Iraq, grossly distorting international law
enforcement and causingenormous human suffering. The people of Iraq were not seen as people, but as
pieces in a ‘strategic puzzle’, and they were to realise that, as Lake wrote, ‘there is a price to pay for their
[regime’s] recalcitrant commitment to remain on the wrong side of history’.87 All elements of US policy, even
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 159
humanitarian elements, were to be subordinated to the goal of removing Saddam.The Kurdish ‘safe haven’
established in Iraq’s north (after a global outcry at the refugee crisis following the 1991 uprising) was used as a base for
Iraqi exile groups and CIA covert operations, while the ‘no fly zone’ in the south did nothing to prevent Iraqi
ground forces repressing Shia Muslims but was, as Hiro suggests, ‘strategically valuableto Washington. The
Pentagon perceived it as a means of denying Baghdad the opportunity to train its pilots in the Southern Iraqi airspace
and as a source of intelligence input in its early warning system.’88 The zones also gave the US and UK an excuse to strike Iraqi
targets without reference to the UN: in just eight months in 1999 the US fired 1100 missiles at 359 targets, more than three times the
number during 1998’s Operation Desert Fox.89 United States coup-making efforts were also a dismal failure: in 1994-
1995the CIA backed Iraqi National Accord (INA) killed as many as 100 civilians in a series of terrorist bombings in
Baghdad (with little political effect), and coup attempts in March 1995 and June 1996 were decisively crushed by the regime.90
The 1996 attempt-thwarted after Iraqi intelligence secretly seized CIA-supplied communications equipment from Iraqi exiles and
proceeded to eavesdrop on the coup planning-saw the arrest and execution of over 800 people from the army, Republican Guard and
security services, and was described by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn as ‘one of the most colossal failures in the history of the CIA,
deserving comparison with the far more famous Bay of Pigs Operation in 1961’.91 Not only did the US-UK regime-change policy fly
directly in the face of Resolution 687, but the US sabotaged the operations of the UN Special Commission in Iraq (UNSCOM) by
placing its own agents in the organisation, who led inspections of highly sensitive sites such as Republican Guard headquarters,
security services offices and military academies.92 While Iraq had certainly been attempting to conceal the extent of its programs
from UNSCOM, the US regime-change policy gravely muddied the waters and gave Iraq every motive not to comply. This was a key
element in both Iraq’s demand for US inspectors to leave Iraq in 1997 and the total breakdown in cooperation with UNSCOM by
1998, which precipitated Operation Desert Fox and ensured that sanctions would remain in force for years to come.93 Meanwhile
the sanctions continued, reducing Iraq to appalling levels ofpovertyand undermining itseconomy and its
education, healthandcultural systems-at the same time as they strengthened the regime. The rationing system established by the
regime made Iraqis more rather than less dependent on the regime, and the undiscriminating harshness of the sanctions led Iraqis to
blame the West more than the folly and venality of their President. This underlines both theimmoralityandstupidityof US
strategy. The blockade slashed Iraqi oil exports by US$13 billion, forced a 2000 per cent increase in food prices in a single year,
caused enormous unemployment and gutted real incomes (by 90 per cent in the first year of sanctions and a further 40 per cent over
the next five years). War damage to infrastructure, and bans on ‘dual-use’ imports such as chlorine, meant that
water and sewage treatment plants could not be repaired. The end result was malnutrition and disease-especially
gastroenteritis and cholera-which saw infant mortality rates rise from one-in-thirty toone-in-eight in 1997. With a lack
of clean water, reduced power supplies and an inability to import medicines and equipment, Iraq’s hospital
system crumbled at a time of greatest ever need.94 United States policymakers sometimes cite the ‘oil-for-food’
program (which Saddam rejected until 1996) as evidence that Iraq’s suffering was the regime’s fault. In the context of
the US use of the UN as a vehicle for regime change, this is a serious misrepresentation- not only did the UN
sanctions committee refuse approval for the import of items such as tyres, spare parts for ambulances, and lead
pencils, but the amount offered Iraq (US$4 billion a year, minus 28 per cent for UN costs and reparations to Kuwait) failed to
cover its annual food import needs and did nothing to assist Iraq to rebuild its shattered health, power, water and
education systems.95 Even when the Security Council further raised the ceiling to US$10 billion a year in 1998, the run-down
state of the Iraqi oil infrastructure meant that it could not pump enough oil to generate that much income (which was still miniscule
compared with the import levels of comparably sized countries).96 By 1995, the human impact of the sanctions regime had
taken on the proportions of amajor international crime: the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated that as many
as 576,000 children had died as a direct result, and the World Health Organisation estimated that 90,000
Iraqisannuallywere dying in Iraq’s public hospitals‘above and beyond the number who would have expired in a
“normal” situation’. In August 1999 the Executive Director of UNICEF said that had the reduced child mortality rates recorded
before 1990 continued into the sanctions period, ‘there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the
country as a whole during the period 1991 to 1998’. The sanctions continued until 2003, and the Cockburns point out that ‘the
number of Iraqis of all ages who have died because of sanctions is probably closer toone million’.97 What was
the purpose of all this suffering? How does it have meaning within the enframing deployment of strategic
reason that governs Iraq’s fate? A former CIA official associated with the Iraq operation has said that senior US
policymakers ‘really believed that the sanctions policy might encourage a coup’, and in 2002 Colin Powell was still
saying that ‘sanctions and the pressure of sanctions are part of a strategy of regime change, support for the opposition, and reviewing
additional options that might be available of a unilateral or multilateral nature’.98 The function, the utility of theIraqi peoplein
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 160
this‘strategy’was of course crystal clear back in 1991, when Robert Gates warned that ‘Iraqis will pay the price
while Saddam Hussein remains in power’.A million humans who might have lived, but do not; mass, slow-motion
slaughter in the service of ‘life’; in Heidegger’s terms, the people of Iraq were made into ‘standing reserve’, their suffering
was a resource.
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IMPACT - SOVEREIGNTY
U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan prevents any uprising of state sovereignty - oppresses state autonomy
through dominance in the context of state obsession with violence.
Anthony Burke,Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, 2002 [“The Perverse Perseverance
of Sovereignty”, Borderlands E-Journal, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/burke_perverse.html]
10. As I write, more than six months after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the US continues to fight in
Afghanistan and rattles the sabre against Iraq, Israel pulls back its forces from the vicious destruction of "Operation
defensive shield", having killed as many as 500 Palestinians in two weeks, and the Indonesian military pursues a vicious
war of counterinsurgency in the oil rich province of Aceh (where Exxon-Mobil is a major investor). The Venezuelan
military has staged a coup, with tacit US backing, only to reinstate the elected left-wing President after the Organisation of
American States condemned their actions and local support evaporated. Dominant public obsessions are with security and
its violent, exclusivist, ontologising technologies: counter-terror, border protection, deterrence, 'homeland security', the
'necessary' erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law. 11. In such contexts we see perverse connections of tactics and
ideology. A free market US administration demonising its enemies in the starkest terms of self and other, freedom and
terror; linking such representations with a global military and diplomatic campaign; yet also accelerating the very forces
of globalising capital which are interpreted as hastening the dissolution of the territorial state. There is something more
complex at work, which can't be reduced to a new Zeitgeist, to a new, seductive and totalising narrative of historical
inevitability. Alongside (and in counterpoint to) an analysis of "Empire" we need to understand something less heartening:
the perverse perseverance of sovereignty. 12. By citing a range of contemporary examples - the Asian financial crisis and
post-Soeharto Indonesia, Israel's war against the Palestinian Intifada, the post-9/11 'war on terror', and the new
xenophobia directed against migrants and refugees in the developed West - this essay argues that we need to consider the
complex coexistence of imperial sovereignty with modern sovereignty. This generates a political task which must be at
once deconstructive and re-productive: turned towards a critique of the exclusionary repression of sovereignty and
towards the creation of an ethical cross-border solidarity of the multitude.
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IMPACT - VIOLENCE (AFGHAN)
The invasion of Afghanistan has incited some of the most brutal of imperial actions
Shola, Jawid (Voice of the Communist Party of Afghanistan, Afghanistan After Seven Years Of The
Invasion, http://www.sholajawid.org/english/main_english/afg_after7years041108.html) 2008
This war launched with the pretexts of a "war on terror" and "freeing the people of Afghanistan" was in fact a war of
aggression aimed at serving the interests of the U.S. and the other imperialists, regional interests given greater importance
by their global context. But the achievement of the war's aims has run up against obstacles arising from its unjust and
reactionary nature. This is something that the arrogant imperialists could not and did not want to foresee. All the various
imperialist countries, whether ruled by open right-wing regimes or social democratic governments, obeyed only one
logic: the interests of monopoly capital and imperialist power relations. They took advantage of 9/11 and the anti-woman
brutality of the Taleban regime to legitimise their invasion of Afghanistan. They never doubted that victory would come
quickly and easily. However, "Operation Enduring Freedom", as the invasion was labelled, brought the people of
Afghanistan no freedom at all. Instead, the result has been all kinds of misery imposed on the people in various forms by
both the occupiers and the fundamentalists. In addition to frequent bombardments of villages in the contested areas of the
south and east, the invaders carry out torture at Bagram (the former Soviet base near Kabul now run by the U.S.) and other
military facilities. They harass the people and worse on the streets and in their homes. Instead of the promised economic
reconstruction, the country's economy has become dependent on the drug trade. Some 40 percent of the people suffer
absolute poverty, and 20 million - more than 70 percent of the population - live under the poverty line. The invaders have
entrusted the government and parliament to the most corrupt and brutal criminals, reactionaries whom the people have
known and hated for the last 30 years. Further, the occupation of Afghanistan has drawn Pakistan deeply into this war,
risking a wider and more complex conflict that could pull in other countries in the region, such as Iran and even
conceivably India.
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IMPACT - CIVIL WAR (IRAQ)
US imperialism in Iraq has created the conditions for conflict by pitting sects against each other - the threat of civil
war only serves as a cover for hiding US interests
Patrick Martin (Jerusalem based Middle East Bureau chief, Blaming the Iraqis: A new cover-up for American militarism,
World Socialist Web Site) 10 February 2007
A new ideological justification for more US violence in Iraq has been sounded in recent weeks from Bush administration
officials, congressional Democrats and media pundits alike: all of them now maintain that the blame for the descent of
Iraqi society into chaos and civil war should be placed, not on the American invaders, but on the Iraqi people
themselves. It was the Iraq Study Group report, released two months ago, that first gave voice to this theme, which has now been taken up more
generally throughout official Washington, from Republicans like Senator John McCain, who has proposed rigid benchmarks for the Maliki
government in Baghdad, to Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who have suggested that funds might be cut off for the Iraqi military-but
not, of course, to the American war machine that still dominates the conquered country. For fervid supporters of the war, criticism of Iraqi
failures becomes a means of explaining away the catastrophic results of the US invasion and occupation, particularly for
the neo-conservatives who played a critical role in presenting the war as an exercise in spreading democracy and freedom
in the Middle East. A particularly brazen expression of this type of argumentation comes from Charles Krauthammer, the conservative pundit
who is among the most unrestrained in portraying the American conquest of Iraq as an exercise in “democratization.” In a column published February
2 in the Washington Post, Krauthammer bemoaned the “bewildering” array of religious, ethnic and subgroup conflicts now
raging in Iraq, writing that it “can lead only to further discouragement of Americans, who are already deeply dismayed at
the notion of being caught in the middle of endless civil strife .” The column was headlined, “Who’s to Blame for the
Killing.” Krauthammer answers the question by placing the responsibility squarely on the Iraqis themselves. “America
comes and liberates them from the tyrant who kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient animosities and more recent
resentments begin to play themselves out to deadly effect,” he writes. “Iraqis were given their freedom, and yet many
have chosen civil war.” The columnist is at pains to denounce anyone who might suggest that the US invasion itself
caused the disintegration of Iraqi society. He wrote: “Of all the accounts of the current situation, this is by far the most stupid. And the most
pernicious. Did Britain ‘give’ India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12
million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?” While Krauthammer apparently
thinks this question self-evidently absurd, any serious student of history would respond: “Yes, yes and yes!” Britain’s policy of
“divide-and-rule” deliberately exacerbated and inflamed ethnic and religious tensions in all these colonies, which
exploded into violence as the old colonial regimes were dismantled. And one can add many more examples: Belgian
colonialism, followed by French and American neo-colonial manipulation and exploitation, fueled the Hutu-Tutsi
conflicts that erupted into the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The American bombing of Cambodia for nearly a decade
created the conditions for the coming to power of the genocidal Pol Pot regime. (“Bombing them back to the Stone Age”
was not just a turn of phrase.) German and American rivalry for influence in post-Soviet Yugoslavia produced the
secession, first of Slovenia and Croatia, then of Bosnia. These secessions triggered a struggle among peoples who had
lived together peacefully for more than 40 years, but now found themselves persecuted minorities in their newly “independent” states (Serbs in
Croatia; Moslems, Croats and Serbs in various parts of Bosnia; Croats, Moslems, Hungarians and Albanians in Serbia), igniting an explosion of
civil war and ethnic cleansing. What underlies every one of these mass slaughters is the pernicious and destructive role of
imperialism, and especially of American imperialism, the most dangerous and aggressive in today’s world. Krauthammer,
ever the apostle for the “good intentions” of the American ruling class, claims that in Iraq, “at the political level, we’ve been doing everything we can
to bring reconciliation. We got the Sunnis to participate in elections and then in parliament. Who is pushing the Shiite-Kurdish coalition for a law that
would distribute oil revenue to the Sunnis? Who is pushing for a more broadly based government to exclude Moqtada al-Sadr and his sectarian
Mahdi Army?”The truth is that the United States has encouraged the centrifugal tendencies in Iraq for more than 30
years. The Nixon and Ford administrations gave significant backing to Kurdish separatism in the 1970s, directed against the secular Baathist regime
in Baghdad that was loosely aligned with Moscow during the Cold War. The first Bush administration incited a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian
Gulf War, then reversed course, fearing that a Shiite-ruled Iraq would line up with Iran. In the initial stages of the current war, Sunnis were the
principal target, culminating in the leveling of Fallujah, the center of Sunni resistance to the US occupation. The ongoing anti-Sunni war in Anbar
province is now being combined with an offensive against the Shiite radicals of al-Sadr. At every stage, the US policy has been to pit one
sectarian group against another. As for the supposedly altruistic support for a Sunni share in oil revenue, the major
concern of Washington is not fairness for the Sunnis, but the adoption of a legal framework, on whatever terms can be
devised, that can provide the vehicle for privatizing the oil industry and opening up Iraq’s vast oil wealth to American
corporations-one of the principal aims of the war.
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IMPACT - TORTURE
The initial imperialist colonization of Iraq was akin to a torture facility - we dropped tens of thousands of bombs to
strike fear into the Iraqi people
Naomi Klein 2007 [London School of Economics/Exposer of truth, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism,” p. 330-335
330 THE SHOCK DOCTRINE "the difference between Atari and PlayStation," as one commentator put it, Iraq's military capacity had been hurtling backward, eroded
by sanctions and virtually disassembled by the United Nations-administered weapons inspection program.9 That meant that, compared with Iran or Syria, Iraq seemed
the site for the most winnable war. Thomas Friedman was forthright about what it meant for Iraq to be selected as the model. "We are not doing nation-building in Iraq.
We are doing nation-creating," he wrote-as if shopping around for a large, oil-rich Arab nation to create from scratch was a natural, even "noble" thing to do in the
twenty-first century.10 Friedman is among many of the onetime war advocates who has since claimed that he did not foresee the carnage that would follow from the
invasion. It's hard to see how he could have missed that detail. Iraq was not an empty space on a map; it was and remains a culture as old as civilization, with fierce
anti-imperialist pride, strong Arab nationalism, deeply held faiths and a majority of the adult male population with military training. If "nation creating" was
going to happen in Iraq, what exactly was supposed to become of the nation that was already there? The unspoken
assumption from the beginning was that much of it would have to disappear, to clear the ground for the grand experiment-
an idea that contained, at its core, the certainty of extraordinary colonialist violence . Thirty years earlier, when the Chicago School
counterrevolution took its first leap from the textbook to the real world, it also sought to erase nations and create new ones in their place. Like Iraq in 2003, Chile in
1973 was meant to serve as a model for the entire rebellious continent, and for many years it did. The brutal regimes that implemented Chicago School ideas in the
seventies understood that, for their idealized new nations to be born in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, whole categories of people and their cultures would need
to be pulled up "from the root." In the countries that suffered the political cleansings, there have been collective efforts to come to terms with this violent history-truth
commissions, excavations of unmarked graves and the beginnings of war crimes trials for the perpetrators. But the Latin American juntas did not act alone: they were
propped up before and after their coups by Washington, as has been amply documented. For instance, in 1976, the year of Argentina's coup, when thousands of young
activists were snatched from their homes, the junta had full financial support from Washington. ("If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,"
Kissinger had said.)11 That year, Gerald Ford was president, Dick Cheney was his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld was his ERASING IRAQ 331 secretary of defense,
and Kissinger's executive assistant was an ambitious young man named Paul Bremer. These men faced no truth-and-justice process for their roles in supporting the
juntas and went on to enjoy long and prosperous careers. So long, in fact, that they would be around three decades later to implement a strikingly similar-if far more
violent-experiment in Iraq. In his 2005 inaugural address, George W. Bush described the era between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror as
"years of repose, years of sabbatical-and then there came a day of fire."12The Iraq invasion marked the ferocious return to the early
techniques of the free-market crusade-the use of ultimate shock to forcibly wipe out and erase all obstacles to the
construction of model corporatist states free from all interference. Ewen Cameron, the CIA-funded psychiatrist who had tried to "depattern" his
patients by regressing them to infantile states, had believed that if a little shock was good for this purpose, more was better. He blasted brains with everything he could
think of-electricity, hallucinogens, sensory deprivation, sensory overload-anything that would wipe out what was and give him a blank slate on which to imprint new
thoughts, new patterns. With a far larger canvas, that was the invasion and occupation strategy for Iraq. The architects of the war surveyed the global arsenal of shock
tactics and decided to go with all of them-blitzkrieg military bombardment supplemented with elaborate psychological operations, followed up with the fastest and most
sweeping political and economic shock therapy program attempted anywhere, backed up, if there was any resistance, by rounding up those who resisted and subjecting
them to "gloves-off" abuse. Often, in the analyses of the war in Iraq, the conclusion is that the invasion was a "success" but the occupation was a failure. What this
assessment overlooks is that the invasion and occupation were two parts of a unified stategy-the initial bombardment was designed to erase the canvas on which the
model nation could be built. War as Mass Torture For the strategists of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the answer to the question of "where to stick the needles" appears to
have been: everywhere. During the 1991 Gulf War, roughly three hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired over the course of five weeks. In 2003, more
than three hundred and eighty were launched in a single day. Between March 20 and May 2, the weeks of "major combat,"
the U.S military dropped more than thirty thousand bombs332 THE SHOCK DOCTRINE on Iraq, as well as twenty
thousand precision-guided cruise missiles -67 percent of the total number ever made.13 "I am so scared," Yasmine Musa,
a Baghdad mother of three said during the bombings. "Not a single minute passes by without hearing and feeling a drop of
a bomb somewhere. I don't think that a single meter in the whole of Iraq is safe."14 That meant Shock and Awe was doing its job. In
open defiance of the laws of war barring collective punishment, Shock and Awe is a military doctrine that prides itself on not merely targeting the enemy's military
forces but, as its authors stress, the "society writ large"-mass fear is a key part of the strategy. Another element that distinguishes Shock and Awe is its acute
consciousness of war as a cable news spectacle, one playing to several audiences at once: the enemy, Americans at home and anyone else thinking of making trouble.
"When the video results of these attacks are broadcast in real time worldwide on CNN, the positive impact on coalition support and negative impact on potential threat
support can be decisive," the Shock and Awe manual states.* From the start, the invasion was conceived as a message from Washington to
the world, one spoken in the language of fireballs, deafening explosions and city-shattering quakes. In The One Percent Doctrine,
Ron Suskind explains that for Rumsfeld and Cheney, "the primary impetus for invading Iraq" was the desire "to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of
anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States." Less than a war strategy, it was a "global experiment
in behaviorism."15 Warfare is always partly a performance, always a form of mass communication, but Rumsfeld's marshaling of his tech and media know-how from
the business world put the marketing of fear at the center of U.S. military doctrine. During the Cold War, the fear of a nuclear attack was the core of the deterrence
strategy, but the idea was for the nuclear missiles to stay in their silos. This attack was different: Rumsfeld's war would use everything short of a nuclear bomb to put on
a show designed to bombard the senses, pull and play on emotion, and convey lasting messages, with targets carefully chosen for their symbolic value and their made-
for-TV impact. In this way, Rumsfeld's theory of war, part of his project of "transformation," had far less in common with the "force-on-force" battlefield strategies of
the generals, who *The 1991 Gulf War was the first CNN battle, but since the idea of twenty-four-hour live coverage was still young, the military had not by then fully
incorporated it into its war planning. ERASING IRAQ 333 were always slowing him down, and far more in common with the terrorists against whom Rumsfeld had
declared permanent war. Terrorists don't try to win through direct confrontation; they attempt to break public morale with spectacular, televisual displays that at once
expose their enemy's vulnerability and their own capacity for cruelty. That was the theory behind the 9/11 attacks, just as it was the theory behind the invasion of Iraq.
Shock and Awe is often presented as merely a strategy of overwhelming firepower, but the authors of the doctrine see it as much more than that:
it is, they claim, a sophisticated psychological blueprint aimed "directly at the public will of the adversary to resist ." The
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 165
tools are ones familiar from another arm of the U.S. military complex:sensory
deprivation and sensory overload, designed to induce
disorientation and regression. With clear echoes of the CIA's interrogation manuals, "Shock and Awe" states, "In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize
control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events." The goal is "rendering the adversary completely
impotent." This includes such strategies as "real-time manipulation of senses and inputs. . . literally 'turning on and off' the 'lights' that enable any potential aggressor to
see or appreciate the conditions and events concerning his forces and ultimately, his society" as well as "depriving the enemy, in specific areas, of the ability to
communicate, observe."16 The country of Iraq was subjected to this experiment in mass torture for months, with the process
beginning well before the bombs started falling. Fear Up When the Canadian citizen Maher Arar was grabbed by U.S. agents at JFK airport in 2002
and taken to Syria, a victim of extraordinary rendition, his interrogators engaged in a tried-and-tested torture technique. "They put me on a chair, and one of the men
started asking me questions. . . . If I did not answer quickly enough, he would point to a metal chair in the corner and ask, 'Do you want me to use t h i s ? ' . . . I was
terrified, and I did not want to be tortured. I would say anything to avoid torture."17 The technique Arar was being subjected to is known as "the showing of the
instruments," or, in U.S. military lingo, "fear up." Torturers know that one of their most potent weapons is the prisoner's own imagination -often just showing fearsome
instruments is more effective than using them. As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, U.S. news media outlets were
conscripted by the Pentagon to "fear up" Iraq. "They're calling it 'A-Day,' " 334 THE SHOCK DOCTRINE began a report on CBS News that aired two
months before the war began. " 'A' as in airstrikes so devastating they would leave Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to fight ." Viewers were introduced
to Harlan Ullman, a Shock and Awe author, who explained that "you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear
weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes." The anchor, Dan Rather, ended the telecast with a disclaimer: "We assure you
this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military."18 He could have gone further: the report, like so many others in
this period, was an integral part of the Department of Defense's strategy-fear up. Iraqis, who picked up the terrifying reports on contraband
satellites or in phone calls from relatives abroad spent months imagining the horrorsof Shock and Awe. The phrase itself became
a potent psychological weapon. Would it be worse than 1991? If the Americans really thought Saddam had WMDs, would they launch a nuclear attack? One answer
was provided a week before the invasion. The Pentagon invited Washington's military press corps on a special field trip to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to witness
the testing of the MOAB, which officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast but which everyone in the military calls the "Mother of All Bombs." At twenty-one
thousand pounds, it is the largest nonnuclear explosive ever built, able to create, in the words of CNN's Jamie Mclntyre, "a ten-thousand-foot-high mushroom-like cloud
that looks and feels like a nuclear weapon."19 In his report, Mclntyre said that even if it was never used, the bomb's very existence "could still pack a psychological
wallop"-a tacit acknowledgment of the role he himself was playing in delivering that wallop. Like prisoners in interrogation cells, Iraqis were being shown the
instruments. "The goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition so clear and so obvious that there's an enormous disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight," Rumsfeld
explained on the same program.20 When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensorydeprivation on a mass
scale. One by one, the city's sensory inputs were cut off; the ears were the first to go. On the night of March 28, 2003, as
U.S. troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four Baghdad
telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phones across the city. The targeting of the
phone exchanges ERASING IRAQ
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IMPACT - TORTURE
Torture is not an exceptional act committed by sadistic individuals but instead is inherent within the colonialist
configuration. This complicates the classically heroic portrayal of the anti-colonialist figure.
Stephen Morton in ’08 (senior lecturer in anglophone literatures at the University of Southampton, 2008, “Torture,
Terrorism, and Colonial Sovereignty” from Foucault in an age of terror)
Implicit in these questions is the suggestion that the brutal acts of torture and killing carried out in many of the detention
camps in Kenya during the emergency in the 1950s were not exceptional acts of violence carried out by sadistic
individuals. Moreover, by appealing to the discourse of human rights in his claim that the ‘security forces’ committed
crimes against humanity, Kariuki highlights the false universality of human rights discourse from the colonial space of the
detention camp. In posing these questions, Kariuki identifies the limitations of the argument that the deaths of eleven
detainees in the Hola detention camp during the Emergency period were exceptional and illegal. Such a questioning of the
violence of colonialism is more explicitly addressed by Frantz Fanon in a polemical essay titled ‘Algeria Face to Face
with the French Torturers’. In Fanon’s account, ‘Torture in Algeria is not an accident, or an error or a fault’; rather, he
insists that ‘Colonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing, of violating or of massacring’. Fanon’s
essay was written in response to the use of torture by the French military to counter the Algerian national liberation
struggle in Algeria during the 1950s. The essay was first published in the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid in 1957, the same
year that the revelations about the atrocities and use of torture perpetrated by the French military started to become public.
Fanon’s purpose in “Face to Face with the Algerian Torturers’ was not simply to expose the practice of torture as a
scandalous or exceptional practice; rather, he sought to emphasize that torture is consistent with the political logic of
colonial sovereignty and terror. It was for this reason that Fanon argued that torture is ‘inherent in the whole colonialist
configuration’. In contrast to the moral opposition to the military’s use of torture in Algeria from the French left, which
opposed torture on the grounds that it undermined the democratic foundations of the modern French body politic, Fanon
held that torture was part of the French colonial state.Such a view is echoed by Rita Maran’s observation that the French
mission civilisatrice was invoked by the leaders of the French colonial military in Algeria to justify the use of torture
during the Algerian liberation war. Significantly, Maran notes that many writers on the French Left criticized the use of
torture in Algeria, but did not examine how the idea of colonialism as a civilizing mission underpinned the rationalization
and justification of torture. It is precisely this connection between torture and the civilizing mission that Fanon gesture
towards in ‘Face to Face with the Algerian Torturers’. What both Fanon and Kariuki identify is the way in which torture is
a symptom of the colonial formation of violence in Algeria and Kenya rather than an exceptional instance of counter-
insurgency method carried out by the military during anti-colonial resistance. As I will Argue, the embodied experience of
torture in colonial Kenya also gives the lie to the rhetoric of colonialism’s civilizing mission. Focusing on Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s novel A Grain of Wheat and Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End, this chapter considers how the
retroactive articulation of torture constructs a traumatic structure through which to track the political foundation of the
European colony. In doing so, it will suggest that this traumatic structure complicated the heroic narrative of the anti-
colonial subject and raises questions about what a revolutionary subject could be under such conditions.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 167
IMPACT - BIOPOWER
The War on Terror promotes biopolitical power - US imperialism dominates other societies through the
manifestation of globalization.
Julian Reid,LECTURER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF WAR STUDIES, KING’S COLLEGE LONDON, 2005 [“'The
Biopolitics of the War on Terror: a critique of the 'return of imperialism' thesis in international relations”, Third World
Quarterly, ]
ABSTRACT The ‘war on terror’ is widely regarded as instigating a major regression within the development of the
international system. Processes of globalisation are being challenged, it is argued, by a reassertion of the sovereign power
of nation-states, most especially the USA. In more overt terms this regression is represented as a ‘return’ of a traditional
form of imperialism. This ‘return of imperialism’ thesis challenges the claims of theories developed during the 1990s
which concentrate on the roles of deterritorialisation and the development of biopolitics in accounting for the constitution
of the contemporary international order. In contrast this paper seeks to detail the important respects in which biopolitical
forces of deterritorialisation continue to play an integral role within the strategies of power that make the war on terror
possible. Rather than understanding the war on terror as a form of ‘regression’ it is necessary to pay heed to the complex
intertwinings that continue to bind sovereign and biopolitical forms of power in the 21st century. Such an understanding is
urgent in that it provides for different grounds from which to reflect on the processes by which international order is
currently being reconstituted and to help think about how to engage in reshaping them.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 168
IMPACT - BIOPOWER
U.S. involvement in the War on Terror has transformed the government into an imperialist, biopower hungry
monster - initial plans in the war have been thwarted in the greed for power - U.S. driven conflict in the
international community has led to an uprising of biopolitical control of the American state.
Quarterly, ]
Deleuze and Guattari’s theorisation of the necessary intertwinement of processes of deterritorialisation with those of
reterritorialisation provides a more helpful framework for comprehending the apparent reassertion of the sovereign power
of nation-states in the context of what was an increasingly decentred global order. There is no predestined certainty
committing the international system to a decentred and deterritorialized form of rule, as argued throughout Empire by
Hardt and Negri. Rather we can understand the contemporary moment in the development of the organisation of power
internationally as the articulation of this fundamental oscillation in the balance between deterritorialising and
reterritorialising forces. This act of reterritorialisation, by which the nation-state reinstates its sovereignty, redrawing its
boundaries in constitution of a milieu of interiority, necessarily draws upon and requires the existence of deterritorialising
flows. Indeed we can only understand the global scope with which the reterritorialising force of sovereign power is being
asserted today in the context of the global flows through which the deterritorialisation of power was rendered during the
1990s. The global assertion of state sovereign power that is occurring in the context of the war on terror assumes as its
condition of possibility the existence of spaces, practices and discourses created by the very bodies that deterritorialised
sovereignty during the 1990s. This is an important element of the war on terror that tends to be ignored in those accounts
of it as a return to a traditional form of imperialism.In spite of the discursive commitments to an imperialism that revokes
reliance on allies, champions the national interest, neglects the importance of norms, and eschews moral and ethical
underpinnings, the JULIAN REID 244 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 18:25 16 July 2010 war on
terror is conditioned by flows, agencies and practices of biopolitical form. We can start to think about this problem
concretely in the context of the war in Iraq. One of the major features of the immediately post-cold war era was the
expansion in the aims and ambitions of the UN. There was a new optimism about the potential of the organisation to fulfil
the humanitarian tasks of its Charter.23 There was a widespread belief that the UN’s burgeoning strength and scope
represented a shift away from an international system predicated on the sovereignty of nation-states to a supranational and
decentred global system that would enfranchise a deterritorialised humanity against the sovereign power of nation-
states.24 The most immediate and major initiative of the UN at the end of the Cold War was the imposition of a
comprehensive sanctions regime upon the state of Iraq on humanitarian grounds.25 The Iraqi state was targeted on
account of ‘the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq’, most especially Kurdish people.26
Perversely, the maintenance of the sanctions regime throughout the 1990s itself created a more general humanitarian crisis
throughout the Iraqi population. This led ultimately to the creation of the oil-for-food programme that mediated the sale of
Iraqi oil in return for economic assistance to Iraq up until the war in 2003. The oil-for-food programme developed from
the provision of economic and basic humanitarian assistance to the involvement of the UN in the wholesale
redevelopment of the infrastructure of the Iraqi state. From its inception in 1995 it expanded gradually beyond an initial
emphasis on aiding the provision of food and medicine to incorporate, by 2002, infrastructure redevelopment in a vast
range of different sectors: food, food handling, health, nutrition, electricity, agriculture and irrigation, education, transport
and telecommunications, water and sanitation, housing, settlement rehabilitation, de-mining, assistance for vulnerable
groups, oil industry spare parts and equipment, construction, industry, labour and social affairs, youth and sports,
information, culture, religious affairs, justice, finance, and banking.27 The programme was regarded as effective in so far
as it disciplined the Iraqi state to dedicate funds deriving from the sale of oil to its population rather than to military
investment.28 In important senses it appeared to represent a biopolitically defined programme in so far as it aimed at an
increase of the welfare of the Iraqi people at the expense of the sovereign will of the Iraqi state. The US-led war in Iraq
was widely held to represent a direct challenge to the agency, practice and normative framework underlying UN
involvement there. The humanitarian elements of UN policy, always hotly contested, were swept away, it was said, by the
flagrant pursuit of US security and economic interests. Consequently we witnessed in the run up to the war a new and
significant split between the USA and the UN, as well as the broader community of ngos dedicated to biopolitical ends.29
Yet the development of the UN oil-for-food programme ultimately played a fundamental role in the organisation of the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 169
war in Iraq. The USA’s conduct of the war was predicated logistically on the existence of the dense BIOPOLITICS OF
THE WAR ON TERROR 245 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 18:25 16 July 2010 infrastructures
created by the UN in Iraq through the oil-for-food programme for humanitarian ends.30 The adoption of resolution 1483
led to the official establishment of relations between the UN and the occupying forces in Iraq and the transfer of
responsibilities for oil-for-food activities to the provisional authorities representing the occupying powers.31 Indeed, the
broader framework of the war in Iraq was fairly consistent with the development of so-called ‘liberal’ or ‘humanitarian’
warfare during the 1990s, in which the UN often played a major role. The Bush administration went to inordinate lengths
to secure the support of a range of different nongovernmental and humanitarian actors in advance of the actual conduct of
the war. Having established an inter-agency group for the planning of postwar relief and reconstruction in Iraq, it then
held multilateral and bilateral meetings with ngos in order to pre-plan the reconstruction effort. Financial aid was provided
to enable the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and humanitarian agencies to pre-position humanitarian
aid. Warehouse spaces were paid for in neighbouring Gulf states in which to store humanitarian supplies.32 The practices
of social reconstruction were integrated as fully as possible within the military operation of intervention in ways
continuous with guidelines as to ‘best-practice’ developed in recent years by the UN itself.33 The war in Iraq was, in
important senses, a conflict fought along biopolitical lines. In this sense we can see that the conduct of the war was not
defined in simple terms by the naked expression of the sovereign power of the USA that has frequently been attributed to
it in critical responses. The verbalisation of disputes between the USA and the international community draws a thin veil
over a thick set of logistical relations that continues to combine the sovereign power of the United States with a range of
biopolitical bodies and forces. In spite of the ways in which the US use of force circumvents traditional UN norms, in
logistical terms relations between the USA, the UN and the broader realm of global civil society remain very strong.
Contrary to popular perceptions of a USA that is ‘operating in the world on its own terms’,34 US strategy remains
predicated in important respects on the securing of logistical support from a range of biopolitical bodies and agencies,
among which the UN is central. The claims that, in pursuing a ‘neo-imperial agenda’, the USA was neglecting the need to
build coalitions of states and multilateral agencies to orchestrate aid and assist in rebuilding states are wide of the mark.35
The invasion that took Iraq by storm in the spring of 2003 was a complex amalgam of forces combining the sovereign
power of the USA with the biopower of a range of deterritorialised actors.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 170
IMPACT - BIOPOWER (!)
The War on Terror perpetuates biopolitical regimes on a never ending quest for power - our involvement in such a
war justifies the determination for global control - star this card - it’s amazing.
Quarterly, ]
Currently within IR theory this debate is being articulated in terms of competing conceptions of the possibilities for a
biopolitical global order in which a universalised humanity is enfranchised against the sovereign power of nation-states.
The reassertion of the sovereign power of particular Western states amid the war on terror is being variously interpreted as
either: a) an attempt to defend an already existing, biopolitically grounded system, in exceptional circumstances that
demand a suspension of the biopolitical principles which define the system itself; or b) confirmation that commitments to
the development of a global biopolitics that challenges state sovereignty are doomed to fail. Either sovereignty is seen to
be tragically BIOPOLITICS OF THE WAR ON TERROR 247 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 18:25
16 July 2010 suborning the biopolitical or it is seen to be enacting a transgression of the development of biopolitics in
paradoxical defence of it. Either way, Hardt and Negri’s claims that biopolitical forces are prevailing over the sovereign
agencies of the nation-state in the constitution of the contemporary order look to be challenged. It is in this context that it
makes more sense to turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s more contingent theorisation of the strategy of power in order to
comprehend what is occurring within the current international order. Deleuze and Guattari pitch the relations of
biopolitical and sovereign bodies, what he calls the forces of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, in terms of a
permanent and agonistic tension that renders it facile to imagine an assertion of one without a re-assertion of the other.
Deterritorialisation is, by necessity, inseparable from correlative processes of reterritorialisation.39 Yet he also compels us
to think about this set of relations between forces of de- and reterritorialisation, the sovereign and biopolitical, in terms of
strategy. That is to say, in terms of relations that are organised in the name, development and sustenance of the
constitution of political sovereignty.40 Forces of deterritorialisation are continually being set in movement by a form of
sovereignty that operates strategically by recombining and entering into new relations with these forces in the constitution
of novel assemblages.41 Indeed, it is important in this context to draw a distinction between processes of
deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation on the one hand, and the constitution of the sovereign and the biopolitical on the
other. We can say that it is only through a consequent process of reterritorialisation that forces of deterritorialisation are
rendered biopolitical. The constitution of biopolitics is what defines the strategy of sovereignty. Its reterritorialisations are
the tactical effects by which deterritorialising forces are brought back within the realm of sovereign control. The
biopolitical is never a naı¨ve representation of a deterritorialising movement but is defined primarily by the imprint of a
reterritorialising manoeuvre. In this sense, the distinction that Hardt and Negri draw between movements of
deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the biopolitical and the sovereign, the immanent and the transcendent, or
constituent and constituted power, does insufficient justice to Deleuze and Guattari’s original theorisation of the strategy
of power. The movement of immanence always functions within a Deleuzean framework not of simple opposition to the
transcendent powers of political sovereignty but in reconstitution of it. Immanence is haunted by the forms of
transcendence that it attempts to ward off.42 The biopolitical functions as the figuration of that haunting. When we speak
of biopolitics, therefore, we are speaking of political agencies and practices that reconstitute the problem of political
sovereignty. The key institutions and actors that comprise Hardt and Negri’s account of the biopolitics of Empire-the UN,
the NGO community and global civil society-are to be understood in this context.43 They are agencies that do not simply
enact a deterritorialisation of sovereignty, but rather which figurate the reterritorialisation of deterritorialising flows of
immanence in the name of political sovereignty. Yet in this context it remains essential to poseJULIAN REID 248
Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 18:25 16 July 2010 the question of how these strategic relations
between immanence, biopolitics and sovereignty are affected.What is it that is being deterritorialised and how is the
reterritorialisation of these agencies enabled? The defining feature of the modern international system has been the
ongoing conflict between the sovereign powers of its constituent nation-states and the development of biopolitical organs
generated in pursuit of an ethical commitment to the enfranchisement of a universalised humanity. Yet the account of
humanity rendered in the institutionalisation of biopolitical practices and through the creation of agencies for the defence
of the rights of humanity in universal terms is itself a statically imperial one. Defining humanity in accordance with
internationalised laws, reducing it to another imperial injunction, biopolitical modernity plays into the hands of modern
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 171
sovereignty. Co-ordinating its global deterritorialisations of humanity via a concomitant universalisation realises the
conditions for the imposition of a new form of transcendent sovereign power, also on a global scale. Global
deterritorialisations beget global reterritorialisations. The idea and pursuit of a universally coded and legally enfranchised
humanity necessarily invokes the idea and pursuit of a universal state. It is for these reasons that we cannot account for the
global way in which the sovereign power of the USA is asserted today other than in the context of a global biopolitics.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 172
***SECURITY***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 173
LINK - THREAT CON
Traditional policy making always analyses the way the world currently is which only entrenches a reproduction of
the same world, an enemy is always characterized as the axis of evil to fill the Soviet void
LuizaBialasiewicz et al 7 “David Campbell, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey, Alison Williams @ Durham University, Performing
security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy”
Political Geography 26 page 405-422 ]
Again, it is essential that we conceptualize these strategies as both containing and makingimaginative geographies;
specifying the ways ‘‘the world is’’ and, in so doing, actively (re)-making that same world. This goes beyond merely the
military action or aid programmesthat governments follow, but indicates a wider concern with the production of ways of
seeingthe world, which percolate through media, popular imaginations as well as political strategy. These performative
imaginative geographies are at the heart of this paper and will re-occurthroughout it. Our concern lies specifically with the ways
in which the US portrayseandover the past decade has portrayedecertain parts of the world as requiring involvement,
asthreats, as zones of instability, as rogue states, ‘‘states of concern’’, as ‘‘global hotspots’’, aswell as the associated
suggestion that by bringing these within the ‘‘integrated’’ zones of dem-ocratic peace, US securityeboth economically and
militarilyecan be preserved. Of course,the translation of such imaginations into actual practice (and certainly results) is never as
sim-ple as some might like to suggest. Nonetheless, what we wish to highlight here is how thesestrategies, in essence, produce the
effect they name. This, again, is nothing new: the UnitedStates has long constituted its identity at least in part through
discourses of danger that mate-rialize others as a threat (seeCampbell, 1992). Equally, much has been written about the newset of
threats and enemies that emerged to fill the post-Soviet voidefrom radical Islamthrough the war on drugs to ‘‘rogue states’ ’
(for a critical analyses see, among others,Benjamin& Simon, 2003; Stokes, 2005; on the genealogies of the idea of ‘‘rogue states’’
seeBlum,2002; Litwak, 2000).What is crucial in the rendering of these strategies, rather, is how those perceived threats areto
be dealt with. PNAC, for instance, urged Clinton to take a more hawkish line on Iraq in a 1998 letter (signed by many who
would later populate the Bush administration), which con-cluded with an exhortation: ‘‘We urge you to act decisively. If you act now
to end the threat ofweapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fun-damental national
security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift,we put our interests and our future at risk’’ (PNAC,
1998).
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 174
LINK - THREAT CON
The construction of the threat of the terrorists invokes emotions to mobilize the American public into supporting
strategic violence - the impact is biopolitical surveillance and increased anti-Americanism, proving the self-
fulfilling prophecy
Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of
what 'terrorism' is. One country's terrorist is too often another's freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies
the world's deep-seated ambivalence towards violence. Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political
instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes
contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed, and sheltered plenty of rebels and
insurgents around the world. The CIA and Pakistan's ISI trained and armed the mujahideen who, in the 1980s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied
Afghanistan. While President Reagan posed with them for a group portrait and called them the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers. Today, Pakistan-America's ally in this new war-sponsors insurgents who cross
the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as 'freedom fighters', India calls them 'terrorists'. India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained
separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lanka-the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism. (Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its
) It is important for governments
back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide-bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
and politicians to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow purposes
may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious
sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any people-including their own. People who
live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text-from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita-can be mined and misinterpreted to justify
anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation . This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage
on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be. But is war the best way to track
them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a
living hell for all of us? At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you
freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many e-mails can you intercept, how many letters can
you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information
than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder intelligence-small wonder the
US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India's nuclear tests in 1998.) The sheer scale of the
surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And
freedom-that precious, precious thing-will be the first casualty. It's already hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously.
Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of
unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People's Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war and anti-
US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested. The right-wing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists groups like the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Students' Islamic Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti-terrorist act which had been withdrawn
after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by
alienating them? Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The
international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, has more
or less rolled over, allowing itself to be tickled on the stomach with press hand-outs from militarymen and government officials. Afghan radio stations have been
destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the Press.In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of
how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable
information, wild rumours spread. Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of
burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough.
They're blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 175
LINK - WAR ON TERROR
The war on terror has been constructed as a war for freedom used to rally populations for the neoconservative
agenda in Afghanistan -actively engaging in constant critique of our understanding of what we imagine as
freedom and the way in which we construct the process of defending it can differentiate between free will and
the democratic guise used to justify acting unethically in the name of freedom
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, 2005 (“Freedom’s Freedom: American
Enlightenment and Permanent War ” Social Identities)
This is what the Bush phenomenon demands we think: ‘freedom unhindered’. Not freedom suppressed or
threatened, but freedom unbound, unleashed and unac countable, even if also paradoxically driven by fear of one day
encountering its own limits and foundering there. While the September 11 attacks were certainly an awful tragedy,
necessitating some kind of defensive and even armed response from the United States, it is widely acknowledged that the
response mobilised by the Bush administration was self-serving,disproportionate, corrosive of democracy
and international norms, and tainted by the neo-conservative agenda for which ‘freedom’ now stands as a
potent signifier. 5It is important to understand that here we are not primarily concerned with familiar liberal-
humanist accounts of freedom as a series of freedoms (speech, labour, property ownership, suffrage) possessed by individuals that
a democracy naturally embodies and seeks to preserve. While such freedoms are certainly valuable, and the US constitution is notable in
generally preserving them, in Bush’s rhetoric they are often mere figures of ideology and are being structurally
undermined by the response to 9/11 (See Arato, 2002, pp. 457-76; Perera, 2002; Nasser-Eddine, 2002; McCulloch,
2002). Rather we are considering the freedom possessed and wielded by sovereigntyboth conceptual and
material, as realised in and through the modern national security state and its partner, capital; the freedom
unleashed by modern science, technology and organisational rationality and then transformed into enormous
structures of security, government, surveillance and military force.We are concerned with the freedom ,
channelled and enabled in such ways, to do and to make ... to imagine, alter, preserve or to destroy potentially everything
that lives and exists. A freedom that ultimately disavows its own power and agency in favour of a historicist
inevitability, the unfurling of necessity: to fight terror, remove rogue regimes, bring democracy and peace . As
Bush said on 29 January 2002, in a speech that prefigured all the themes of his policy and exposed its underlying ontology, ‘ History has
called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight ’
(State of the Union Address). Jacques Derrida briefly hints at such an ‘unlicensed’ image of freedom in his 2005 book Rogues: Two Essays
on Reason, where he writes of Plato’s and Aristotle’s concerns about the consequences of a demo-cracy that is founded
upon both liberty and license (eleutheria and exousia), that unites people and power (demos and kratos) in a practice
of freedom that is ‘the faculty or power to do as one pleases, to decide, to choose, to determine one-self be master’. He writes:
‘It has always been hard to distinguish, with regard to free will, between the good of democratic freedom
or liberty and the evil of democratic license . They are hardly different.’ (Derrida, 2005, pp. 21 -22) As perceptive as this is,
ancient texts cannot quite do the problem justice: we are now dealing with a demo-kratic freedom made greatly more powerful through the
vastly expanded capacities of sovereignty, imperialism and modernity, powers made operative in the figure of the democratic-national
Leviathan who nonetheless claims to embody a universal desire and will. In short, we are dealing with a freedom that is at once
liberty, license and instrumental power. What can we say or think in the face of this - in the face of this central aporia of
democracy and this unlicensed, instrumental and sovereign figure of freedom? For his part, Levinas wanted to put into question the ‘good
conscience’ with which freedom operates (Levinas, 1999, p. 78). In the wake of 9/11, our critical task is not to help power
seek out and destroy the ‘enemies of freedom’ (as Bush put it in his address to Congress of 20 September 2001) but
to question how they were constructed as enemies of ‘freedom’; to put into question the very categories
‘enemies’ and ‘freedom’, so that we can ask about their meaning and effect. It is to wonder if we, the free,
might already be enemies of freedom in the very process of imagining and defending it. Our task, then, is to
question both freedom and its good conscience: to question Freedom’s freedom. Founding Fathers, Ambiguous
Freedom Freedom is certainly never far from the lips of an American President, but it has rarely been so invoked so often and
with such intensity. It is a central motif in virtually every speech that Bush makes, and its appearance at the locus of key events
and discourses*/the national crisis following the 9/11 attacks, the naming and rationale of wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the 2002 National Security Strategy, and the 2003 announcement of ‘a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle-East’ */ suggests
that something is certainly afoot.I say this in the face of a contrasting feeling that the incessant repetition of freedom has a
numbing effect, leading us to wonder if Bush’s freedom is little more than empty political rhetoric, an
overdetermined, empty sign, desperately everywhere; all affect, no depth or reality. Alternatively, it may be tempting to think that the
problem is directly related to the post-9/11 crisis and the emergence of a radically hawkish and unilateral neo-conservatism in
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 176
US policy making, and that this should be the limit of our concerns. As salient as these factors are (and without wishing to play down the
serious problems created by the Administration’s militant unilateralism), the problem of freedom that is now so visible runs much deeper,
drawing on influential political and philosophical strands in western modernity (Clausewitzian strategy, Hegelian teleology, post-
Renaissance secularism) and importantly, in powerful metanarratives of US ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘destiny’.Despite its thematic
intensity for the Bush Presidency, the rhetoric and ontology of freedom is deep-seated in the American polity
and consciousness. The unique American calling to freedom is something that twentieth century presidents */from Franklin
Roosevelt on */have used to narrate their purpose: in his 1941 inaugural address Roosevelt recalled ‘the multitudes of those who
came ... to find freedom more freely’; in 1949 Truman promised that ‘what we have achieved in liberty, we will surpass
in greater liberty’; in 1961 Kennedy spoke of the need to ‘defend freedom in its hour of maximum danger’; in 1985 Reagan promised an era
when ‘American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life’; and in 1993 Clinton said that we rededicate ourselves to the
very idea of America ... an idea born in revolution and renewed through two centuries of challenge ... an idea infused with the
conviction that America’s long, heroic journey must go forever upward. 6
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 177
LINK - FREEDOM
Using freedom as a theme for war necessitates the existence of a threat to that freedom - Bush administration
deployed rhetoric framing terrorism as the direct assault upon freedom and we have a duty as a nation built on
freedom to defend it - this is the primary justification for US exceptionalism which causes us to respond to
threats in an overly preemptive manner and perpetuates the same insecurities that military intervention seeks to
prevent.
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, 2005 (“Freedom’s Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War ” Social
Identities)
Freedom rhetoric deployed by the Bush administration took advantage of uncertainty following 9/11 and framed it as a violation of freedom that
can only be stopped through war.
Clear from the outset is the stark ontological division repeated often by Bush after 9/ 11: that between freedom
and terror. As he said in the address to Congress of 20 September, ‘ enemies of freedom committed an act of war
against our country’. He told Americans , and through them the world, thatfreedom and fear are at war . The
advance of human freedom- / the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time- /now depends on us.Indeed he told
the world that ‘what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight.’ It is
a division, an ontological border, summed up in his curt answer to the question, ‘Why do they hate us?’: ‘they hate our
freedoms’.Given the occasions of these texts-/a declaration of war on terrorism, and a statement of the
national security policies of the United States which laid the ground for the invasion of a Middle-Eastern nation never implicated in
the 9/11 attacks- /we must identify the invocation of freedom with security, with war, and with power , at least power
conceived in its most arid, instrumental terms. This is made clear in Bush’s preface to the National Security Strategy:Today, the United
States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles ,
we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions
in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.Freedom
creates a balance of power that frees itself: a threat and a promise. What anxiety underpins this promise ? While
one factor in the emergence of the Bush doctrine at this time was the severe sense of uncertainty and insecurity
occasioned by the 9/11 strikes , its roots in fact lie further in the Administration’s past and, beyond that, in some of the fundamental
desires of European modernity. The sinister promise to create a ‘balance of power that favours freedom’ first appeared
in George W. Bush’s inaugural address (20 January 2001), followed by declarations that the US will ‘defend our allies
and our interests’, ‘show purpose without arrogance’, ‘meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, [to] speak
to the values that gave our nation birth’. ‘Freedom’, ‘security’, ‘resolve’, and the ‘values that gave our nation birth’: all
potent signifiers of national natality, survival and power ; windows onto an intense mythical landscape, the metanarratives of
American historical innocence, exceptionalism anddestiny. These, fittingly, frame the Presidential inauguration, when Bush speaks of the place
of Americans ‘in a long story’: ... a story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-
holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not to
possess, to defend but not to conquer. It is the American story* /a story of a flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by
grand and enduring ideals. Spoken like this, at the birth of the Bush presidency, freedom is invoked as a foundation,
a foundation that grounds the nation and its ‘long story’ of mythic birth and maturity. Bush evokes this story to ground his presidency
and his politics, to ground it in a potent, but imaginary, system of cultural truth. The speech also sought to rewrite this
‘truth’, turning it to future use: the past made to serve the future, the future the past. Freedom is thus a project, and a foundation.
Freedom is a project that founds itself through myth. At this point Heller offers a salutory warning. ‘Freedom became the
foundation of the modern world’, she writes in A Theory of Modernity, but ‘it is the foundation that grounds
nothing’: Freedom is the foundation of the moderns, which means that every demonstration needs to have recourse to
freedom, which on its part warrants the truth and goodness of the demonstrandum. Freedom is then taken for granted and
constantly repeated as all traditions are, the arche at which all arguments stop, the limit that sets order and warrants
certainty ... the problem is however, that Freedom as the ultimate principle , as the arche of modernity, cannot perform one
single task that an arche is supposed to perform ... that freedom grounds means that everything is ungrounded ... grounding starts anew
every time. Every political act grounds itself; every life grounds itself... (Heller, 1999, p. 14) Consider how after September 11 Bush
repeatedly invoked and promised certainty as a promise (‘the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain’)
when nothing could have been more corrosive of the certainty promised in the Inauguration’s declaration that ‘we will
build our defenses beyond challenge, less weakness invite challenge’ (20 September 2001). Even the most cursory readings ofBin
Laden’s writings and interviews would underline the fact that it was America’svery strength that invited
challenge, a challenge that would dramatically expose theAchilles heel of the vast military system upon which the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 178
US bases its ‘security’ . At the heart of the new ‘asymmetric’ war is a profound and corrosive paradox: the stronger we are, the more
vulnerable we may become. The paradox set out by Heller and Fromm is given a sharper edge after 9/11 by the fact that America’s version of
enlightenment, exceptionalism, was premised on being able to escape and abolish the ambiguity of European freedom. Daniel Bell argued this in
1975, after the fall of Vietnam to communism, when he described American exceptionalism as: the idea that, having been ‘born free’,
America would, in the trials of history, get off ‘scott fre e’. Having common political faith from the start, it would escape the ideological
vicissitudes and divisive passions of the European polity, and being an entirely middle class society, without aristocracy or boheme, it would not
become ‘decadent’, as had every other society in history. As a liberal society providing individual opportunity,
safeguarding liberties, and expanding the standard of living, it would escape the disaffections of the intelligentsia, the
resentment of the poor, the frustrations of the young*/which historically had been the signs of disintegration, if not the
beginnings of revolution, in other societies. In this view too, the United States, in becoming a world power, a paramount power, a
hegemonic power, would, because it was democratic , be different in the exercise of that power than previous world empires. (Bell, 1975,
p. 197) According to Bell, exceptionalism was the idea which grouped all the most powerful American concepts and myths
together: manifest destiny, manifest mission and the American century . Central figures in the construction of these metanarratives
included idealist philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley (whose 1726 poem proclaimed ‘Westward the course of empire’); Hegel, who
named America ‘the land of the future’ in his 1822 Philosophy of History; John O’Sullivan, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
espoused the United States’ ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying
millions’*/a doctrine used to justify the Louisiana Purchase, the acquisition of Florida and California, and the dispossession of Indian tribes; and
Time-Life Publisher Henry Luce, whose February 1941 Life editorial outlined his vision of a post-war ‘American century’*/ a vision of America
as a world power which is authentically American ... America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as
the training center of the skillful servants of mankind ... America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice ... (Bell, 1975, pp. 195-203)
It is certainly no accident that much of the neo-conservative ideology driving the Bush Administration’s policy (regime
changes in ‘rogue states’, massive increases in military spending, and the abrogation of the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court (ICC)
and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty) was sourced from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a broad front
organisation of intellectuals and former policymakers (Barry & Lobe, 2002) who wanted the United States to seize the potential of the
‘unipolar moment’ following the collapse of the Soviet Union*/for the US to develop a ‘Reaganite policy of military strength and
moral clarity’ that ‘is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure [its]
security and [its] greatness in the next’. Its 1997 Statement of Principles set out four demands seen as crucial to developing ‘a strategic
vision of America’s role in the world’: to modernize the US armed forces; to ‘strengthen ties to democratic allies’ and to ‘challenge regimes hostile to
our interests and values’; to ‘promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad’; and to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in
preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles. The statement was signed by twenty-four
men and one woman, including The End of History author Francis Fukuyama, tycoon Steve Forbes, former Reagan administration figures Dan
Quayle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and international relations professor Aaron Friedberg. They argued that as the 20th
century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s most preeminent power ... If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges
to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge,
and to meet threats before they become dire. (PNAC, 3 June 1997) The echoes of Henry Luce’s famous Life essay in the statement are uncanny. In
1941 Luce had attacked the isolationism of previous administrations by saying that whereas their nation became in the 20th century the most
powerful and the most vital nation in the world, nevertheless Americans were unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that
fact ... Hence they have failed to play their part as a world power*/a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all
mankind. And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the
world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purpose as we see fit and by
such means as we see fit. (Luce, 1941, p. 63) The New American Century It is significant is that Luce was not a neo-conservative, but a
Rooseveltean internationalist, albeit one with an extremely pragmatic, realist edge who would in the 1950s and 60s become an unyielding cold war
hawk (Halberstam, 1992, pp. 18- 19). This shows that whatever the important departures the ‘Neocons’ represent, they also draw on
a longer US foreign policy tradition (dating at least to the 1890s (Hietala, 1985), and felt most strongly after 1945) and beneath that, upon a
nineteenth century philosophical tradition which sought to read western History as the reason-driven story of modernisation and ‘dialectical’
historical progress. Luce-/ a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, which had already initiated planning for a global post-war
strategic and capitalist order dominated by the United States-/mixed a rhetoric reminiscent of the German idealist philosophers with a hard-nosed
pragmatism. Arguing that ‘the abundant life is predicated on Freedom ... a vision of Freedom under Law’, he went on to say: It is for America and
for America alone to determine whether a system of free economic enterprise -/an economic order compatible with freedom and
progress-/shall or shall not prevail in this century. (Luce, 1941) The Idea of Freedom set out by Luce (and Bush after him) is strongly Hegelian,
and could be said to have found its contemporary philosophical justification in the work of Francis Fukuyama (who was, not accidentally, a signatory
to the 1997 PNAC statement of principles). Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man argued that liberal democracy and
global free market capitalism had triumphed over their ideological competitors (fascism and communism) and were
therefore ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution ... the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992, p xi). Fukuyama drew this argument
from Hegel (via Alexandre Koje`ve), citing his argument that History effectively ended after the Battle of Jena in 1806, because the principles on
which liberalism was based could not be surpassed (p. 64). This image-/refracted through Luce’s ‘American century’ essay-/is repeated in the
National Security Strategy, which begins by saying that the twentieth century’s ‘great struggle of ideas: destructive totalitarian visions versus
freedom and equality ... is over’: The militant visions of class, nation and race which promised utopia and delivered misery have
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 179
been defeated and discredited ... we will work to translate this moment of influence into decades of peace, prosperity and
liberty. The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union
of our values and our national interests. (National Security Strategy, part 1; emphasis added, this phrase being Luce’s) The source for
Fukuyama’s arguments is Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, which declared that History ‘travels from East To West, for Europe is
absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning’. Europe stood at the apex of civilisation and development, ahead of Asia (which was at the
‘childhood of History’) and Africa (which is merely at the ‘threshold of the World’s History ... still involved in the conditions of mere nature’ (Hegel,
1990, pp. 91-99, 104, 443). There are two crucial elements of this argument for the development of American exceptionalism. One is the special role
of America in Hegel’s system, and the related image of the North American continent’s indigenous peoples; the second is the image of freedom and
the state (the political ontology of freedom) that he develops and is later entrenched into the core of the US political imagination. Presaging and
buttressing the later accounts of American exceptionalism, Hegel assigned America the most privileged and exalted space in History:
‘the land of the future’, a ‘land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber room of old Europe’, where the original nation having
vanished, or nearly so ... we witness a prosperous state of things, an increase of industry and population, civil order and firm freedom, and where
‘the outlet of colonisation’ remains ‘constantly and widely open , and the multitudes are continually streaming into the plains of the
Mississippi’. Here, in 1822, was a prophecy of the doctrine that would become manifest destiny, where Hegel’s praise for the ‘subjective unity’ of
the republican constitution, the ‘universal protection for property’ and the ‘endea vour of the individual after acquisition, commercial profit, and gain’ mingled with
descriptions of the ‘passionless disposition’, ‘want of spirit’, ‘crouching submissiveness’, and ‘inferiority in all respects’ of the ‘native Americans’ (Hegel, 1990, pp. 80-87). A more accurate
account of what this meant, in human and historical terms, can be found in a letter written by Civil War General William Tecumsah Sherman to another hero of the American west, Buffalo
Bill: In my estimation there were around nine and a half million buffalo on the plains between the Missouri and the Rocky mountains in 1862. They have all disappeared, killed for their meat,
hides and bones ... At that time there were about 165,000 Pawnees, Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Apaches, who annually depended upon these buffalo for food. They’re also gone and have
been replaced by two to three times that number of men and women of the white race, who have turned this land into a garden and who can be counted, taxed and governed according to the
laws of nature and of civilization. This change has been beneficial and will be carried to the very end. (cited in Clastres, 1998, p. 58) Bush’s Inauguration address, while briefly acknowledging
the shameful history of slavery, said nothing about this massively enabling history of murder, dispossession and genocide without which Bush and the PNAC could not speak of American
‘greatness’ and ‘success’ (PNAC, Statement of Principles). Even Fukuyama, in the conclusion to his book, resorted to a naı¨vely chilling use of the western settler- conquest metaphor, saying
that ‘mankind will come to seem like a long wagon train strung out along a road’: some wagons will be ‘pulling into town sharply and crisply’, others ‘stuck in ruts in the final pass over the
mountains’, and still others, ‘attacked by Indians, will have been set aflame and abandoned along the way’. But despite these travails, all the wagons will eventually pull into town, and ‘history
is the recycling of a
will vindicate its own rationality’ (Fukuyama, 1992, p. 339). What makes Bush’s politics possible, and the neo-Hegelian triumphalism that is its intimate cousin,
birth myth based on forgetting ... not merely of this history, but of more recent US moral and geopolitical failures such as
the use of nuclear weapons against Japan or the Vietnam war . Vietnam in particular was a conflict that occasioned a massive bout of
national introspection. The overwhelming sense that the war had punctured American myths of innocence and exceptionalism
was the dominant trope in major histories of the war: Stanley Karnow wrote that ‘with the young men who died in Vietnam died the
dream of an “American century”’, and Daniel Bell, in his 1975 Public Interest essay ‘The End of American Exceptionalism’, wrote that ‘there is no
longer a manifest destiny or mission. We have not been immune to the corruption of power ... Our mortality now lies before us’ (Karnow, 1983, p. 9;
Bell, 1975 p. 205; see also Burke, 1999). Yet after 9/11 it was as if nothing had happened. Rather, for Bush, ‘it was as if our entire country looked
into a mirror and saw our better selves’ (State of the Union Address, 29 January 2002). This is certainly true of the heroism shown by
Americans after the attacks, but was it right to imagine the entire nation and its history in such a way, and what kind of knowledge does it close
off? Why could Osama bin Laden, in a 1998 ABC interview, attempt to justify his criminal targeting of Americans and Jews by saying: ‘ American
history does not distinguish between civilians and military, and not even women and children’? Citing the bombing of
Nagasaki, the massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon, and the deaths of a million children in Iraq , he argued that we believe
that the biggest thieves in the world and the terrorists are the Americans. The only way for us to fend off these assaults is
to use similar means. (Miller, 1998) As wrong as this is, it must be acknowledged that someone put this logic into the world. It did not spring
fully formed from Bin Laden’s head; it is, sad to say, not a new historical possibility. However if there is to be a new American century, America
must be innocent. And nothing is so dangerous as wounded innocence.
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LINK - FREEDOM
Protection of freedom requires constant challenges to its security - freedom can only be deployed as a tactic by the
state in its absence - this logic necessitates constant and endless violence and threats to the soveirgn - and coupled
with US exceptionalism causes us to constantly engage in militaristic response to constructed security images.
Identities)
Hannah Arendt recognised this instrumental, utilitarian form of action in the modern dream of historical progress, particularly in
the modern transformation of the ‘unknown and unknowable “higher aims”’ of history (which Kant, after Vico, had merely read backward into
events) into future-directed, purposive action: ‘planned and willed intentions ’. The result was that ‘meaning and meaningfulness were
transformed into ends’: this is what happened when Marx took the Hegelian meaning of all history-/ the progressive unfolding and
actualisation of the idea of freedom-/to be an end of human action, and when he furthermore, in accordance with tradition, viewed this
ultimate ‘end’ as the end-product of a manufacturing process ... In this version of deriving politics from history, or rather, political conscience from
historical consciousness-/by no means restricted to Marx in particular, or even pragmatism in general-/ we can easily detect the age-old
attempt to escape from the frustrations and fragility of human action by construing it in the image of making ... he alone
realised that if one takes history to be the object of a process of fabrication or making , there must be a moment when this object is
completed, and that if one imagines that one can make history, one cannot escape the consequence that there will be an end to history. Whenever
we hear of grandiose aims in politics, such as establishing a new society in which justice will be guaranteed forever, or fighting a
war to end all wars or to make the whole world safe for democracy, we are moving in the realm of this kind of thinking .
(Arendt, 1961, pp. 78-79) With hindsight, we can see that Marx was not the only thinker to understand or posit an end to history (Hegel and Koje`ve
did, and Fukuyama after them) and the irony and tragedy is that this end should have been proclaimed in the defeat of socialism and the triumph of
‘liberal-democratic’ civilisation based on US example and leadership (Fukuyama, 1992). This is the meaning of Fukuyama’s signature on the PNAC
Statement of Principles, a document utterly infused with the ‘grandiose aims’ of an enframing technological reason masquerading as historical
inevitability. Thus we can understand how George W. Bush could follow the invasion of Iraq with the announcement of a ‘forward strategy of
freedom in the Middle-East’, a strategy apparently in the tradition of Wilson’s fourteen points and Roosevelt’s four freedoms that requires the same
persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the
world, the advance of freedom leads to peace. (Bush, Remarks at the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 November 2003) This links with a
further crucial feature of freedom in the American enlightenment: its Eurocentric and Orientalist nature. Freedom is
something the East lacks, and it will be achieved not by the agency of its own people, or the upwelling of some genuinely
universal human aspiration, but by the particular application of American pressure and force. The seeds of this view can be glimpsed in
Aristotle’s distinction between Greece’s ‘love of freedom’ and Asia’s despotism, but it was given a distinctively racist and dialectical cast in Hegel’s
system which declared that Africa was at the ‘mere threshold’ of history, and China at its ‘childhood’, while Europe was at its end (Hegel, 1990, pp.
104-05). Now America, history’s ‘future’ according to Hegel, is to bring the Middle-East into history, into the freedom that is ‘the direction of
history’ and ‘the design of nature’. Yet the first act in America’s ‘forward strategy of freedom’ was to invade and subjugate Iraq,
suggesting that if ‘peace’ is its object its means is war : the engine of History is violence, on a massive and tragic scale, and
violence is ultimately its only meaning. This we can glimpse in ‘Toward a Pacific union’, a deeply disingenuous chapter of Fukuyama’s The
End of History and the Last Man. This text divides the earth between a ‘post-historical’ world of affluent developed democracies where ‘the old rules
of power-politics have decreasing relevance’, and a world still ‘stuck in history’ and ‘riven with a variety of religious, national and ideological
conflicts’. The two worlds will maintain ‘parallel but separate existences’ and interact only along axes of threat, disturbance and crucial strategic
interest: oil, immigration, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Because ‘ the relationship between democracies
and non-democracies will still be characterised by mutual distrust and fear’ , writes Fukuyama, the ‘post-historical half must
still make use of realist methods when dealing with the part still in history ... force will still be the ultima ratio in their relations’. For
all the book’s Kantian pretensions, Fukuyama naturalises war and coercion as the dominant mode of dealing with billions of people defined only
through their lack of ‘development’ and ‘freedom’. Furthermore, in his advocacy of the ‘traditional moralism of American foreign policy ’
and his dismissal of the United Nations in favour of a NATO-style league of truly free states ... capable of much more forceful action to
protect its collective security against threats arising from the non-democratic part of the world we can see an early
premonition of the historicist unilateralism of the Bush Administration .10 In this light, we can see the invasion of Iraq as
continuing a long process of ‘world-historical’ violence that stretches back to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas , and the
subsequent politics of genocide, warfare and dispossession through which the modern United States was created and then
expanded*/initially with the colonisation of the Philippines and coercive trade relationships with China and Japan, and eventually to the self-
declared role Luce had argued so forcefully for: guarantor of global economic and strategic order after 1945. That this role involved the
hideous destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia, ‘interventions’ in Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan (or an ever more
destructive ‘strategic’ involvement in the Persian Gulf that saw the US first building up Iraq as a formidable regional military power, and then
punishing its people with a fourteen-year sanctions regime that caused the deaths of at least two-hundred thousand people) we are meant to accept as
proof of America’s benign intentions, of America putting its ‘power at the service of principle’. They are merely History working itself out, the
‘design of nature’ writing its bliss on the world (quotes from Bush, Remarks at the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 November 2003). But
this freedom offers us the bliss of the graveyard, stretching endlessly into a world marked not by historical perfection or
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 181
democratic peace but by the eternal recurrence of tragedy, as ends endlessly disappear in the means of permanent war and
permanent terror.This is how we must understand both the awesome horror visited on the people of Iraq since 1990, and the
inflammatory impact the US invasion will have on the new phenomenon of global anti-western terrorism.American
exceptionalism has deluded US policymakers into believing they are the only actors who write history, who know where it is
heading, how it will play out, and that in its service it is they (and no-one else) who assume an unlimited freedom to act. Osama bin Laden
and his many supporters do not accept the American narrative of power in the service of principle; they see merely power in the service of power, and
derive from it a lesson that it is both necessary and legitimate to respond with a commensurate violence. As Bin Laden said in his chilling 1998
interview with John Miller, who asked him if his ‘fatwa’ calling on all Muslims to kill Americans extended to all Americans: We are surprised this
question is coming from Americans. Each action will solicit a similar reaction. We must use such punishment to keep your evil away from
Muslims ... America does not have a religion that prevents it from destroying all people. ... The prophet said: ‘A woman entered hell because of a
cat’. She did not feed it and blocked it from finding food on its own. She is going to hell for blocking a cat to death, but [what do you] say to those
who agreed and gave reason for the hundreds of thousands of troops to blockade millions of Muslims in Iraq? (Miller, 1998b) Furthermore the
rhetoric of freedom and the ‘way of life’, at both a philosophical and practical level, cannot but inflame the fundamentalist community that serves as
a social and cultural basis for al-Qaeda and its associated organisations. It will do so because it is read as a confirmation of the critique*/found in the
philosophy of thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb*/of the moral and ethical bankruptcy of western rationalism and its imperialist agenda to dominate and
destroy Islam, to perpetuate a state of modern jahiliyya, the ‘conscious usurpation of God’s authority ... [the] foundational transgression of human
hubris’ (Euben, 2000). The narrative of freedom that Bush speaks (and the US armed forces enact) has already been written and
interpreted in fundamentalist thought, with a starkly different meaning from that Bush seeks to convey, one further transformed by
every American action in Iraq and throughout the Middle-East. The Bush Administration’s April 2004 endorsement*/in pointed defiance of
countless UN resolutions on the issue*/of the Israeli government’s unilateral plan under the guise of ‘disengagement’ to impose a grossly unjust
‘final settlement’ on the Palestinians, one that will undermine any possibility of meaningful self-determination, is just such an example of arrogance
and hubris that will deepen Islamic hatred of the West and rebound upon it in new acts of terror (MacAskill, 2004, p. 1). This US gesture,
portrayed throughout the Arab world as a new ‘Balfour declaration’ , is yet another example of the callous, ‘strategic’ use of
instrumental reason that treats the Palestinian people as so much human cattle who can be contained and corralled, and
whose destiny can be decided by a handful of men in Jerusalem and Washington (Howeidy, 2004; see also Katib, 2004; Alpher,
2004; Beilin, 2004). The arguments of Bin Laden and Bush have one important thing in common: they betray the same
deluded, claustrophobic commitment to the easy translation of means into ends , as if either of their policies could protect Muslims, ensure
the security of Americans, or bring about the utterly irreconcilable ‘ends’ of history they seek (‘Freedom’ fights the ‘Caliphate’, like Punch and Judy dolls squabbling
on the arms of History). Nothing has been more detrimental to the livelihood and future of Muslims than Al-Qaeda’s campaign of terror, and nothing has been more
detrimental to future global security than the invasion of Iraq, yet we are locked in a terrible hall of mirrors where each discourse makes the other meaningful, and each
act precipitates the next (as the latter-day Isaac Newton says, ‘each action will solicit a similar reaction’) (Miller, 1998b) . As we count the enormous toll of
dead and wounded in Iraq, and ponder the abyss of violence, frustration and insecurity into which it has slipped since the
fall of Saddam Hussein, the times more than ever call for the insight of a Hannah Arendt. Violence is not power, she warns us,
and the very substance of violence is the means-end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, is that
the end is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and are needed to reach it. ‘disastrous
reduction of human affairs to the business of dominion’ so that they can ‘appear, or rather reappear, in their full diversity’ (Arendt, 2002, pp. 19-34).
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 182
LINK - FREEDOM
We must liberate ourselves from the notion that freedom is a utility of the soveirgn and can be deployed and justify
US exceptionalism to make a distinction between true freedom that operates in the context of our ontological
relations to the Other instead of domination deployed by the soveirgn as a tactic to constantly engage in violent
intervention
Identities)
Can freedom ever reappear in its full diversity, in a way that jettisons the urge to dominate and control, that respects the
plurality of human communities and projects, that can be representative of something we might one day call justice ? While
it is impossible, by way of conclusion, to enter into the now global debate about how United States foreign policy and identity should change-/a
debate that has addressed global security, counter-terrorism, civil and human rights, international society and law, the global environment, poverty
and the world economy, among others (see Go¨kay & Walker, 2004; Kaldor, 2003; Bhuta, 2003; Booth & Dunne, 2004; Johnson, 2001; Scraton,
2002)-/I can address the issue of freedom. Might it be possible to salvage an idea of freedom from the moral and political
wreckage of American exceptionalism? It may first be important to remind ourselves what freedom ought not to be. A new image of
freedom needs to be disentangled from the projects of national, imperial, civilisational and capitalist aggrandisement
which have rendered it so meaningless and sinister ; from the anonymous movement of a History in which no one acts and no one is
responsible; and from the instrumental, utilitarian images of technological mastery which the powerful use to make tools and resources of the weak.
Above all, even as it retains a critical faith with something of the enlightenment, freedom must be disentangled from an ontological correspondence
with ‘Europe’, ‘America’, ‘the West’. It must no longer be ‘autobiography’ written on the self, but dialogue written with the
Other.11 If we are to grapple with the horror that is the new terrorism, and the profound challenge of the Islamist philosophy which (partially)
supplies it with meaning, such a dialogue is crucial-/within and between ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’, ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’, ‘Europe’ and ‘America’, ‘North’
and ‘South’-/a dialogue which interrogates the past as it opens the future to what the future is: new possibility. We must get beyond the idea that
freedom is a secure tradition, fully realised, that can be mapped onto ever greater areas of the world at the whim of any passing visionary or
statesman. Surely the world has had enough of a history of freedom that obsessively maps the past onto the future, especially
when the mapmaker’s preferred tools are the US Cavalry, the B52 and the armoured corps.Mapping the past onto the
future does not bring the future closer; it annihilates it. Freedom can no longer be thought of as a thing, a possession, an infinite capacity
to will, make, use, decide. It must be a freedom that is aware of ethical, social, and physical limits, because without them it is not
freedom but domination. These limits cannot, as in the classical social contract theory, be supplied by the new physical and ontological power
of the state, as an exchange of freedom for security-/that gesture is precisely what simultaneously subordinated men to the state and generated reason
of state’s belief in its unbounded freedom to act. We thus need to preserve and radicalise Kant’s insight that Right is ‘the restriction of
each individual’s freedom so that it harmonises with the freedom of everyone else’ (Kant, 1988, p. 73), while expanding its
community of ‘hospitality’ and detaching it from nationalist ontology and sovereign authority .12 To get beyond its atomistic
liberal formulation, Kant’s principle of balance and limitation here must be extended to the operation of institutions, technologies and social
formations. In the spirit of Levinas and Arendt*/but perhaps also beyond them*/I would argue that the limits to freedom must come from
nature, the world, the Other; from the infinite plurality of human society and aspiration within the natural structures that
contain them and interact with their social and technological processes so unpredictably. If freedom is to exist, if it is to have any
kind of positive value, and if it is to be a measure of being, it must be rethought as relationship and responsibility. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The
Experience of Freedom: Freedom cannot be presented as the autonomy of a subjectivity in charge of itself and its decisions, evolving freely and in
permanent independence from every obstacle. What would such an independence mean, if not the impossibility of entering into the slightest
relation*/and therefore of exercising the slightest freedom? (Nancy, 1993, p. 66) In short, freedom arises only in relationships of
interconnection, mutual dependence and responsibility, not in separation, control or mastery. Freedom, at its most naked and
unborn, is a wish sent into a space of existence; a simplistic, childlike hunger growing in a space of complexity and life. It is this ‘space’ that is most
important. Who lives there? What do we all want, in our tension and complexity? How do we adjudicate, mediate, and meet our diverse and so often
conflicting claims? How is justice also to live there, in tension, in dialogue, in partnership with freedom? Here we encounter some difficult dilemmas.
Firstly, how do we promote human emancipation, and sustainable relationships with others and the environment, when human and/or natural claims
and aspirations clash?13 Should freedom be plural and differentiated at the same time as it is universal? How is conflict to be mediated and
resolved to work for freedom, a plural freedom, without being thought as a ‘contradiction’ that can be ‘dialectically’
resolved into a higher end or suffocating unity that contains the seeds of new conflict ? Secondly, how can we think a limited
freedom to act when modern action is, as Arendt (1998, p. 230) argued, perpetually dangerous and unpredictable yet remains one of the
‘most decisive human experiences’ without which freedom cannot be possible ? In short, we must ask who and what lives and hopes
in the space of freedom, how we interact, and how our actions affect how we might interact. Who lives there are other people, other animals, other
forms of matter and life: the societies and ecosystems that sustain and limit us. Complexity and contingency, plural and contested meanings, inhabit
and fissure this space, and freedom must learn to accept the uncertainty that comes with it. Arendt argues that modernity reduced action to
‘making’ in order to reduce its uncertainty and ‘save human affairs from their frailty’, yet cautioned that ‘action has no end’. We
are not able to ‘undo or even control reliably any of the process we start through action’-/uncertainty is its product. She suggests that the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 183
traditional attempt to evade this ‘burden of irreversibility and unpredictability’ by identifying sovereignty with freedom is
no answer, because ‘the result would not so much be sovereign domination of oneself as arbitrary domination of all
others’. The result would be both unjust and meaningless: ‘no man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth’. Conversely,
any ‘aspiration toward omnipotence always implies-/apart from utopian hubris-/the destruction of plurality’ (Arendt, 1998, pp. 230-34, 202). In a
profound meditation on power in The Human Condition, Arendt argues that plurality-/‘the living together of people’-/is the very condition of
freedom, of ‘human power’. Plurality is its condition and ‘its only limitation’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 201). Such a recognition of plurality-/a plurality
which I would expand from Arendt’s more limited definition to take in different people, genders, races, religions, nations, sexualities and
cultures-/points us towards profound ways of thinking freedom ethically. A plurality that must be further radicalised, in ways that Arendt could not
quite conceive, beyond the human so that it takes in animals, plants, ecosystems, so that our terrible ability to act into nature, to turn humans into
nature, product and resource simultaneously, is matched by responsibility for that action and possibility (Arendt, 1998, pp. 200-50; Wadiwel, 2002).
It is in this sense that the Bush Administration’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, its doctrine of preventive force and fundamentalist belief in the
transformative power of war, and its stunning disregard for the daily suffering of millions, are so paradigmatic of an irresponsible exercise of
freedom thrown in the very face of creative efforts to recognise and limit the destructive character of modern action and global processes. It is not as
if we do not possess the resources and ability to develop such understandings of responsible freedom and contingent action-/in the spheres of the
global environment, political economy and security, among others, existing discussions and efforts to organise show valuable evidence of the
sensibility I am arguing for here. They need to be cultivated, refined and, most importantly, mobilised at the highest and most potentially destructive
levels of politics and organisational power. What this essay has sought to suggest, above all, is that the problem for us does not merely lie
with one group of men, one government, or one state. In this sense the peril we face -/while most potent and urgent with the Bush
administration-/goes well beyond his government and time. It lies with a particularly widespread and dangerous potential of our
modernity-/what Heller calls the ‘unholy matrimony of the historical and technological imagination’-/which other critical potentials in our modernity
thankfully contain the power to mitigate (Heller, 1999, p 160). The disasters American exceptionalism may bring us are only those
inherent in the larger hubris by which modern man has combined ever more powerful and unpredictable forms of freedom
with a discourse of historical inevitability that effaces all trace of its political authorship , its unequal beneficiaries, and its truly
terrible human and natural costs. But perhaps this freedom’s authors have their doubts, too: when George W. Bush was asked by Bob
Woodward how history would judge the invasion of Iraq, he replied, with unwitting irony, ‘History. We won’t know. We’ll all be dead’ (Hamilton,
2004, p. 30). To this the voiceless might say: History. We’re all dying.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 184
LINK - BIOPOWER
The striving for development of countries to maintain their security has deviated from its Cold War past- the
securitization has become not one of states so much as one of the populations of states, as Biopower. This in turn
shapes and creates state level securitization.
Mark Duffield, Professor of Development, Democratization and Conflict at the University of Leeds, 200 5 (BA(Sheff), PhD(Birm) “Getting
savages to fight barbarians: development, security and the colonialPresent,” Conflict, Security & Development,Volume 5, Issue 2 August 2005 ,
pages 141 - 159//DN)
The claim that development requires security, while security is impossible without development is repeated to
the point of monotony in countless government reports, political statements, UN documents, NGO briefs, academic
works, and so on. Indeed, it now qualifies as anaccepted truthof the post-Cold War era. Moreover, when we are
told that “…[w]ar retards development, but conversely, development retards war” (Collier et al. 2003: 1), this
interdependence is usually implied as something new; a fresh policy departure arising from pressing
international threats posed by entrenched poverty, fragile states and the changing nature of conflict. The
interdependence between development and security suggests a radicalisation of the former. Since the mid 1990s,
there has been a growing call to harness developmental resources to change the balance of power between
social groups, include the excluded and rebuild crisis-ridden societies anew in the interests of global stability
(Stiglitz 1998). This radicalisation of development ranges from coalition attempts to remake Afghanistan and Iraq
into regional sites of democracy to the present policy drive to develop fragile states (Torres and Anderson 2004).
However, while development appears to have taken a radical turn, the identity between development and security
is not new. Evenduring the recent past of the Cold War, for example, development and security were interconnected.
Foreign aid was frequently scandalised as little more than a reward for political allegiance. In a world of competing
geopolitical spheres of influence, it was a means of cementing alliances with erstwhile Third World states.
However, while there are some similarities with today’s war on terrorism, there are also important differences. The “…floating
coalitions of countries” (Rumsfeld 2001) that have emerged with American encouragement to fight this war are
once again being favourably treated in terms of foreign aid, weapons sales, trade concessions and political
patronage (BOND 2003). For some aid agencies this is a retrograde step. It is argued that a more universalistic commitment to
poverty reduction and human rights that gained ground during the 1990s has now stalled. However, before rushing to declare a “…
new Cold War” (Christian Aid 2004), it is important to consider the differences in the nature of the international alliances of the Cold
War and post-Cold War periods. The West’s Third World alliances during the Cold War functioned to contain the world’s largest and
most centralised, state-based war economy: the Soviet Union and its allies. Today’s floating coalitions, however, are
directed to a threat that, in terms of its character and dynamics, is very different, indeed, almost the opposite:
decentralised shadow economies, transborder migratory flows, and non-state global insurgent networks that, in
an interdependent world, are able to threaten international stability. Rather than being geopolitical, such
alliances are primarilybiopoliticalin terms of their focus and concerns. Instead of arming erstwhile Third World
states per se, the main concern is securing the peoples living within them. International danger now equates with the
unsecured circulatory flows and networked interconnections associated with the social, economic and political life of global
population. Geopolitics, the security of states, and biopolitics, the security of population, are not mutually
exclusive; they are complementary, interdependent and work together to lesser or greater degrees (Dillon 2004). Today
the geopolitics of effective states rests upon the deployment of biopolitical tools that, to a degree unseen since
the colonial period, operate directly at the level of population within ineffective ones. Compared to the Cold War, when
state security predominated, development and security now readily interconnect on the circulatory terrain of human
population. Before the nature of biopolitics is examined in more detail, however, it should be emphasised that this interconnection
only appears new if one takes the recent past of the Cold War as a starting point. The three decades spanning the 1950s and 1970s saw
the fantastic birth of the ‘world of states’ each enjoying a de jure equality on the international stage. It was a heroic age of national
independence movements and decolonisation. Rather than the world assuming its natural and ordained condition, however,
increasingly this historical juncture has been seen as a transient, even aberrant, phenomenon (Derlugian 1996). The state-led plans
for modernisation and industrialisation, for example, through which the new states hoped to carve their own
paths to effective independence have, for many, proven to be little more than a dream. During the 1980s, the world
of states moved into a deepening crisis as the ‘failed state’ came to define the world’s emerging conflict zones.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 185
The brave but short-lived world of independent states has given way to what is perhaps the real heir of
decolonisation: an innovative, unstable and circulatory ‘world of peoples’. Given the uncertainties and dangers
this has created, it is unsurprising that the sentiments of liberal imperialism, including the policing role of
effective states, have been rehabilitated (Ferguson 2003). Much present day instability is attributed to the fading
of the old imperialism and its ability to order the world. What is required, from this perspective, is a new kind of
imperialism authored by effective states, attuned to cosmopolitan values and based upon “…the voluntary
principle” (Cooper 2002: 17-18).
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IMPACT - MILITARISM
Security is genealogically linked to the root of sovereignty - causes a drive towards gain in a community and
justifies militarism as a response - destroys the very foundation of civil society through the unending quest for
power.
Anthony Burke,Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, 2002 [“The Perverse Perseverance
of Sovereignty”, Borderlands E-Journal, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/burke_perverse.html]
20. There is a further way of exposing the paradoxical and violent constitution of sovereignty: through genealogy.
Genealogy aims to understand the 'conditions of possibility' of modern sovereignty: the political, cultural and discursive
space in which it could emerge, and the space it would in turn enable and continue to transform. It also aims to understand
how, out of and against its limits, we can imagine a new form of politics. 21. Hardt and Negri pursue such a genealogy of
sovereignty in two stunning chapters of Empire, where they develop their concept of "modern sovereignty"; we can also
see the contours of such a genealogy emerging in Foucault's Discipline and Punish and his lectures on security,
population and governmentality. (1991a, 1991b, 1983, 1988) This is to pursue a genealogy of modern sovereignty via the
promise that has always been linked umbilically to it: security. (Burke 2002, 2001a) 22. In Hobbes' Leviathan and Locke's
Second Treatise on Governmentthe figure of the sovereign was imagined via a founding exchange of freedom for security:
one that fused the individual and sovereign subjects (state and citizen) into a single existential figure that now seems
impossible to break apart. This secure modern subject was further imagined as endangered, as primally estranged from the
Otherof the Criminal, the Socialist, the Aboriginal or the ethnic minority. This entrenched a powerful image of sovereign
identity as perpetually under threat, and as intolerant and repressive of difference; thus in pursuit of its own survival, that
sovereign subject is always entitled to deploy violence. As Hobbes wrote, the Soveraignty (sic) has right 'to do whatsoever
he think necessary to be done…for the preserving of Peace and Security'. (Burke 2002: 7-11; Hobbes 1985: 233) 23.
Furthermore sovereignty was not just a juridical figure. It was a political technology which simultaneously reached into
the heart of the citizen and most obscure reaches of the social world, and enabled new forms of governmental power that
underpinned and accelerated new forms of technological and economic modernity. This Foucault saw as the 'political
double-bind…the simultaneous individualisation and totalisation of modern power structures'. (Burke 2001a: 274;
Foucault 1983: 216) 24. In this way, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham saw security as essential to the
progressive imagination of liberal modernity. Security would safeguard an 'expectation' of the future in which economic
gain can be pursued without interruption either by social disorder or socialist redistribution; a security which rested not
merely on totalising deployments of police or military violence but on desire, discipline and self government - what
Foucault termed "governmentality". Hegel, concerned with similar threats, developed a powerful narrative of economic
and social progress in which state and civil society would be fused via an antagonism to the Other, which is to be either
expelled or effaced within the higher unity of the One. Such images of progressive western subjectivity would in turn
justify an imperialism to which 'the civil society is driven' in its search for new markets, the 'passion for gain which
involves risk…the element of danger, flux and destruction'. (Burke 2001a: 278-98, 2002: 16-17)
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 187
IMPACT - INSECURITY
The drive to ontological security causes the US to adopt policies that are inherently violent, and decrease
its physical security
Epstein in 2k7
[Noa, Master’s Candidate in the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, MIT International
Review, explaining the war on terror from an ontological-security perspective, http://web.mit.edu/mitir/2007/spring/perspective.html]
The U.S.’s policy towards al-Qa’ida in response to 9/11 is difficult to understand if the U.S.’s only objective was to retaliate against al-Qa’ida and make the U.S.
more physically secure in the face of further terrorist threats. The explanation from the perspective of ontological security is proposed not to replace but to complement the array of existing
explanations. The collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 astonished millions throughout the world. But with it, less visual, but no less daunting, came a severe challenge to the U.S.’s identity
and sense of certainty. In order
to restore its ontological security, the U.S. chose to respond in a way that reinforced its identity and
alleviated uncertainty. Because states constantly seek ontological security, they tend to become attached to the routines
that safeguard a stable identity and provide a sense of certainty . While an attachment to dangerous routines might enhance
a state’s ontological security, it may hinder its physical security. Indeed, the U.S.’s response to 9/11 may be regarded as an
attachment to dangerous routines (namely, declaring “War on ______”), which possibly generates a self-fulfilling prophecy that in turn
poses a threat to the U.S.’s physical security. It seems that the U.S. is beginning to understand that applying the Westphalian
perspective to fight its “war on terror” might not be prudent after all, evident by the fact that it is reforming its military
into one that is adept at fighting small guerilla forces . It remains to be seen how the U.S. will manage to ensure both its ontological and physical security, without
having one satisfied at the expense of the other.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 188
***ORIENTALISM***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 189
LINK - INTEGRATION
Those not integrated are characterized as barbarians and are constantly guarded against in order to protect the
homeland from what is foreign. The media covers hyper-real images not the Iraqis and Afghanis that are killed as
mere collateral damage.
As we have tried to argue, suchelaborations of security rely upon the affirmation of certain understandings of the world
within the context of which the strategies and understandings advancedby them are rendered believable. What is
more, we have tried to highlight howsuch performancesinvoke earlier articulations, even as their reiteration changes them .
More broadly, we stressed howsuch articulations provide the conditions of possibility for current eand futureeaction.
Integration thus marks a new performative articulation in US security strategy, but it reworks rather thanreplaces
earlier formulations.One of the ways in which this operates is that the ideal of integration,as we have seen, necessarily invokes the idea of
exclusion. The imagined divide between the US‘homeland’ and the threatening ‘frontier’ lands within the circle of
Barnett’s ‘Non-IntegratingGap’ thus recalls earlier iterations of ‘barbarism’ even if their identity and spatiality are producedby
more than a simple self/other binary. In the final section of this essay, we will make some briefremarks regarding the disjuncture between the theory
and the practice of the enactment of suchimaginations. First, however, we would like to highlight some other ways in which these deploy-ments of
categories of inclusion and incorporation, on the one hand, and exclusion and targeting,on the other, are also performed in the popular geopolitical
work done by a wide range of textual,visual, filmic and electronic media supportive of the ‘war on terror’ at home and abroad. These cultural
practices resonate with the idea of fundamentally terrorist territories, whilst, at thesame time rendering the
‘homeland’ zone of the continental US as a homogenous and virtuous‘domestic’ community. Such wide-ranging and
diffuse practices that are nonetheless imbricatedwith each other are further indications that we are dealing with performativity rather than con-
struction in the production of imaginative geographies.The first exampleethat of media cartographyeconcerns the consumption by Western pub-
licsof the US urban bombing campaigns that have been such a dominant feature of the ‘war onterror’. These
involve representations in which the regions and metropolitan areas that werebombed have been constructed as
receiving points for the dropping of murderous ordnance.Verticalized web and newspaper maps, for example, have routinely
displayed cities like Bagh-dad as little more than impact points where GPS-targeted munitions are envisaged as landingalong flat, cartographic
surfaces (Graham, 2006; Gregory, 2004). Meanwhile, the weapons’ actual impact on the everyday life for the ordinary Iraqis
or Afghanis who are ‘collateral damage’has been both marginalized and repressed by the US military through the
denial of media accessand a refusal to record civilian casualties (seeGregory, 3 May 2004).The spatialization of good and
evil that resultsfrom these reinscribed binariesis in starkcontrast to the imaginative geographies of other US global
discourses, especially that of theaccelerating flows of globalization, which inevitably undermine such simplistic
moral cartographies.The challenge of this tension is to be found both ‘home’ and ‘away’. The September11th 2001 attacks themselves
provided a perverse reminder of the stark geopolitical tensionsbetween the diasporic formation of contemporary US cities and efforts to construct
simpleimaginative geographies of national communities who are purportedly under threat fromexternalised, terroristic people and places (seeWatson,
2003).
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 190
LINK - CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
THE IDEA OF A CLASH BETWEEN WESTERN SOCIETY AND THE OTHER WAS USED AS A RHETORICAL JUSTIFICATION
FOR THE INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN AFTER 9/11. BY PORTRAYING THE MIDDLE EAST AS A
SAVAGE, INFERIOR SOCIETY, PATERNALISTIC AND AGGRESSIVE FEELINGS OF THE NEED TO SAVE AND POLICE THE
OTHER WERE STIRRED UP IN THE AMERICAN POPULACE.
Dana L. Cloud in ’04(Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas, 2004, To Veil the Threat of Terror: Afghan
Women and the Clash of Civilizations in the Imagery of the US war on terrorism, Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 90, No. 3, August 2004, pp. 285-
306)
The phrase “clash of civilizations,” popularized in the 1990s by Samuel Huntington, 3refers to the idea that the United States and
its people face an incontrovertible conflict with Others, particularly Islamic Others, whose civilizations are inferior and
hostile to Western capitalism.This rhetoric of the clash of societies destined by nature to be enemies is not a recent invention, however. David
Spurr has argued thatthe idea of immutable clash between allegedly superior and inferior civilizations has been part of the
rhetoric of U.S. imperialism since at least the end of the 19th century.4 He writes, “The colonizer’s traditional insistence
on difference from the colonized… establishes a notion of the savage as Other, the antithesis of civilized values.”5
Likewise, rhetorical scholar Robert Ivie has noted that justifications for war often involve representations of the “enemy” as savage
and barbaric: “The usual strategy is to construct the image indirectly through contrasting references to the adversary’s coercive, irrational, and
aggressive attempts to subjugate a freedom-loving, rational, and pacific victim.”6 The discourse of enmity between “civilized” people and “savages”
is not the only dimension of the rhetoric of civilization clash, however. Images of the oppressed in an “inferior” civilization can prompt
a paternalistic response alongside an aggressive one.Descriptions of the people of an enemy society as ignorant, abject
victims of an enemy regime warrant intervention on the allegedly humanitarian grounds of saving people from
themselves. Thus, the idea of the “white man’s burden” is a core element in the belief in a clash between white, Western
societies and inferior Others requiring policing and rescue.7 This article is an attempt to answer the question, “What does the clash of
civilizations look like?” This question is significant because the imagery of civilization clash has long been as important as verbal
political rhetoric in warranting U.S. policies of war and occupation.8 Although the strategy of contrasting images of
Othersis not new to political discourse, it was prominent and influential in the political and cultural discourses justifying the
2001-2002 war with Afghanistan that began after terrorist attacks on U.S. targets on September 11, 2001. This article explores
the role of widely circulated images of Afghans, with emphasis on those of Afghan women, in national news magazines and their web sites during
this war, arguing thatimages of Afghan women and men establish a binary opposition between a white, Western, modern
subject and an abject foreign object of surveillance and military action. These images construct the viewer as a
paternalistic savior of women and posit images of modern civilization against depictions of Afghanistan as backward and
pre-modern. Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance
toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in justifications
for the war that belie the actual motives for the war. This contradiction has a number of implications for democratic deliberation and
public life during wartime. The main purpose of this article is to document the ways thatthe imagery of the war on terrorism justifies the
imperial thrust of U.S. foreign policy. In addition, however, this studyhas implications for theory, criticism, and practical
politics.For rhetorical theory, this article extends the idea of the visual ideograph introduced by Janis Edwards and Carol Winkler.9 I argue below that visual ideographs are more than
recurring iconic images that shift in meaning depending on context; they also index verbal ideographic slogans, making abstractions such as clash of civilizations concrete. For criticism, the
essay defends what John Thompson calls “depth hermeneutics,” seeking underlying truths veiled by a misleading ideological common sense.10 Finally, for politics, the article exhorts readers
the verbal
to answer the real (rather than only the image of) clash of war with protest and solidarity across national borders. This article proceeds as follows: First, it describes
rhetoric of civilization clash, arguing that this phrase and its accompanying imagery operate in an ideographic way,
summing up and exhorting conformity to a sense of American-ness established through negation of the self-governing
humanity of the Other.The role of images of Afghan women in this discourse is to establish the barbarity of a society in
which women are profoundly oppressed. After a brief survey of relevant concepts from the literature on visual rhetoric, the essay proceeds
to an analysis of photographs from the website Time.com to demonstrate the way that these images have warranted the use of force in
Afghanistan on allegedly humanitarian grounds.In Kipling’s terms, U.S. forces are there to “serve their captives’ needs.” After analyzing
these aspects of the images of Afghan women, I argue that the humanitarian justifications encapsulated in the rhetoric of civilization
clash are contradicted by evidence suggesting that other economic and geopolitical motives for U.S. intervention were
primary among makers of foreign policy.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 191
LINK - TERROR
The war on terror was produced by the name of terror, the U.S. constantly re-plays the same mode of violent
assimilation, capture and integration as the Spanish conquistadores
This paper has traced the emergence of integration as the basis for the imaginative geography of the ‘war on terror’. It has done
soby maintaining that the production of this imaginativegeography should be understood in terms of performance
rather than construction. That is be-cause we are dealing with an assemblage of practicesestate policy, ‘non-state scribes’
andtherepresentational technologies of popular geopolitic sewhichtogether produce the effect theyname, stabilizing
over time to produce a series of spatial formations through the performance ofsecurity. Given the manner in which
this emergent imaginative geography has materialized inthe invasion and occupation of Iraqewhich was carried
out in the name of terror and has cre-ated the very terror it named eit is clearwhen we speak of performance we are
dealing withmuch more than just thinking, writing or speaking differently. Yetin practice the materialization of
such strategies and imaginations has rarely beenstraightforward . In fact, in many instances the opposite ofthe intention has
been created.Wecould point, for example, to the ways in which‘territorial integrity’ was repeatedly mobilizedas a war-aim in
the invasion of Iraq and yet the consequence has been the creation of a statewhich is unable to protect its borders,
cannot project its power effectively within them andis in danger of fragmentation into ethnically or religiously
created regions(Elden, 2007).The self-serving apologetics of many of those integrally involved in the framing of such pol-icieseBarnett
(2005)andFukuyama (2006), for twoeindeed indicate the resilience of theimaginaries we describe, clear and present failures notwithstanding; it is not that they
got thingswrong, for the basic analysis still holdseit only needs to be enacted more effectively.In the latest incarnations of these understandingseboth in
Barnett’s newBlueprint forActionand within the pages of the 2006 National Security Strategye we find a re-playingof the basic chain of claims being
made. Countriesintegrated into the global economy playingby American rules are less dangerous than those that do
not;US security therefore depends onintegrating those countries into that rule set; US policy should be directed
towards that goal.This, it is claimed, has benefits beyond merely military security and forms the foundation
ofeconomic security.Indeed, the first is often mobilized as the rationale when the second ismore clearly the aim. Seemingly unconsciously, the 2006
National Security Strategy proclaimsthis as a key goal: ‘‘Ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and freetrade’’ (The White House,
2006: 1, 25). Thatthe strategies in practice have often produceda process of disintegration, of a falling apart and a
rending of connections previously madeis beside the point in the pure idealism of this new realism . While Bush claims
that ‘‘likethe policies of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, our approach is idealistic about our nationalgoals, and realistic about the means to achieve them’’
(Bush, 2006; see National SecurityStrategy, 2006: 49), it may well be that it is unrealistic about the first precisely because it isidealistic about the
second.Yet,as much as this emergent imaginative geography is new and specific to its time andplace, so too does it
recall a much earlier formulation, as we would expect of a performativegeopolitics produced by recitation,
reiteration and resignification. When the Spanish conquis-tadores landed in the New World they were tasked with reading outThe
Requirementeach timethey encountered indigenous people. Although based on the ideal belief that the Amerindianswere people descended from God like the
Spanish, this proclamation nonetheless threatenedwar, forcible conversion and enslavement against the indigenous should they decide againstthe Holy
Catholic Faith once they had been informed of it.Voluntary integration and violentexclusion were thus two modes of the same
disposition towards the other, lodged within thesame hierarchy of identity/difference (Campbell, 1992: 112e118).Nearly
five centuries on,the challenge remains very much the sameecan the security performances of the major powerof
the day relate to others in ways less violent and more ethical?
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 192
LINK - TERROR
The war on terror is inherently Orientalist, it makes the “East” out as the mysterious, exotic, and dangerous other.
This justifies excessive use of violence.
JIWANI, YASMIN, 2007 [ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY]
In the immediate aftermath of the horrific destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, the public was overwhelmed with
images of Osama bin Laden as the quintessential 'evil' warlord of the East versus George W. Bush as the righteous sheriff
of the West.While the latter was intent on establishing order, the formerwas portrayed as engaging in ceaseless violence
bent on destroying the 'free' world as we know it and unleashing the forces of chaos reminiscent of a tribal past. The binaries
of 'us' versus 'them' were encoded explicitly in the representations of opposing forces: Bush versus Osama bin Laden, West
versus East, modernity versus primitive tribalism, freedom versus oppression, democracy versus totalitarianism, Christianity versus Islam,
and the list continues. Between these binary oppositions were several mediating agents that permitted the oppositional
structures to retain their polarity. The status of women was one such mediating factor. The other was the whole gendered
nature of the discourse of terrorism. This article interrogates the notion of terror and its gendering in the press coverage following the events
of 11 September 2001. It begins by outlining the discursive structures of Orientalism and goes on to examine their resonance and continuity in stories
covered by The Gazette. This newspaper's peculiar location and status as the major English daily newspaper in a Francophone environment with a
large Muslim population makes it a valuable object of analysis. It provides an avenue by which to understand the various ways in which the media
rework and refract dominant discourses of race and racism.Edward Said's significant contribution in defining the organizational features of
Orientalism and examining it as a discursive regime has been critiqued by feminists on the grounds that it does not address the issue of sexuality
adequately, and that it tends to be a totalizing discourse devoid of any spaces of resistance or counter discourses. Nevertheless, I still find Said's
definition of Orientalism to be a useful point of departure for the present inquiry. Orientalism, according to Said, is ageneric term … to
describe the Western approach to the Orient; Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a
topic of learning, discovery and practice. But in addition … the word [Orientalism can be used] to designate the collection of
dreams, images and vocabulariesavailable to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies East of the dividing line. In this
sense, Orientalism describes a mlange of diverse approaches and perspectives that are unified bya Western gaze and sedimented
through historical references to other works that assume a coherence of sorts. Or, as Foucault would suggest, Orientalism constitutes a
regime of truth based on an authoritative corpus of knowledge . For Said, then, the Orient is: less a place than a topos, a set of
references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the
Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions
presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort.5 The discursive regime of
Orientalism overlaps with and is derived from discourses of colonialism and imperialism. Hence, commonalities with these
discursive traditions lie in the binary oppositions that form and inform the power coordinates of these 'regimes of truth.'These
include a perception of cultural practices as indicative of inherent and innate traits, a collapsing of differences between subject
peoples so that they appear as monoliths, and taxonomies of knowledge that situate subject peoples in particular relations of
inferiority that then are naturalized. In terms of the tradition of Orientalism, then, the Orient is a place of mystery and danger with
the Orientalized body discursively situated within this landscape, serving to legitimize and naturalize unequal power relations. The
Orientalized body becomes a projection of all that the West finds strange, alien and abhorrent, but simultaneously exotic,
inviting and alluring. In short, the Orientalized body essentializes otherness. In examining how the discourse of Orientalism
permeates, shapes and informs The Gazette's coverage of stories immediately following 11 September 2001, the representation of the gendered body
becomes central to my inquiry. I pay particular attention to the ways in which the news media, ideologically and discursively, construct an
Orientalized gendered interpretation, but also how, through the cumulative body of authoritative knowledge.
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LINK - WOMEN
The United States justifies the slaughter of the “eastern barbaric male” by subordinating eastern women to “sexual
objects that need rescue”. The western media re-entrenches this by portraying Islam as misogynistic and
oppressive.
Much has been written about the ways in which the binaries inherent in colonial discourses have feminized representations of
subject nations, as well as their inhabitants .8 The leakage of such representations into common sense thought through popular
culture also has been documented in numerous instances .9 The continuity between past representations and contemporary portrayals also
has been the subject of considerable research. Said argued that the Orient has been conceptualized as feminized terrain, weak yet
dangerous and ready to be subjugated/domesticated by the civilizing forces of the 'progressive' West. Within this context,
women are seen in terms of their role as signifiers of culture: the boundary markers between the 'us' and 'them' that underlie and
structure the relationship of the dominant colonizers to the subordinated colonized. 11 Thus, women's bodies have been
used to solidify national boundaries and/or to differentiate out-groups.12 The body of women as gendered beings then carries
particular connotations and is located at multiple sites of discursive manipulation .13 On the one hand, women are represented as the
keepers of culture and the maintainers of tradition. On the other hand, they are represented as exchange commodities to be used to
cement alliances, or to be used as sexual objects by bothoccupying forces and indigenouspatriarchal institutions.The
gendered discourse of power underpinning colonialism and subsequently neo/post colonial relations is also evident in the
ways in whichthe news media coverstories about 'other' nations and 'other' peoples. Extent studies point out the numerous ways in
which 'developing' nations are portrayed as backward, barbaric, traditional, and 'primitive.'14 In keeping with the Manichean
allegories of colonial thought,15 the 'natives' of these countries are seen to be innocent, childlike and pure relics of a distant
past.16 In the case of women, dominant representations tend to exoticize them, highlighting their perceived
hypersexuality, but at the same time representing them as dangerous and engulfing.17 A critical feature of many of these
representations is their inherent ambivalence.18 As Stuart Hall has pointed out, if the representation of black women, for example,
has centered on the magnetism of their perceived sexuality, this very sexuality also is seen as being threatening because of its
'otherness' and because of its perceived potentiality to overcome and invade the male psyche. Lalvani and others have traced the
many ways in which the exotic 'other' historically was rendered into a consumable fetish.20 Through the process of
commodification and through the reification of the commodity, the fetish is conquered, its threat contained, and its use value
replaced by its exchange value which is articulated in the currency of desire.21 This is most clearly apparent in Hollywood depictions
of the gendered, Orientalized body-from the geisha tothe slave girl , from the dragon lady to the oppressed and victimized princess.
Although women from different areas with different histories have experienced colonization and imperialism in specific
ways, their representations within the West ern media-and most notably the American media-have tended to collapse such
differences, except when highlighting those cultural elements that serve as the key signifiers of difference and that accentuate particular attributes,
such as docility, sexuality, or fecundity, over others. For instance, women from the 'East' have tended to be portrayed in Hollywood
films, imperial literature, and travelogues as mysterious, exotic, erotic, and dangerous. Said argued, Just as the various colonial
possessions-apart from their economic benefit to metropolitan Europe-were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous
populations of delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual
experience unobtainable in Europe. In a more recent analysis, Sherene Razack argues that the sexual exploitation of women and
children in the countries of the South is underpinned by the Orientalist framing of these countries and their populations.23 She notes that
traveling East to secure exotic and forbidden sexual pleasures is part of the social construction of the region as an area of
'moral degeneracy.'24 By corollary, the West is constructed as a zone of morality. Drawing on historical examples, Razack
illustrates how the sojourns of Victorian bourgeois men into areas of moral degeneracy helped to rejuvenate and restore within them their own sense
of masculinity and cumulatively reinforce hegemonic values. She further argues that prostitution andsexual exploitationare forms of
violence, predicated on and intersecting with the violence of the colonial and post-colonial encounter. The theme of the
sexualized other is an important focal point in colonial literature about women in the East . Much of this literature highlights
a preoccupation with the veil and the veiling of women. As Yeenolu states: The veil attracts the eye, and forces one to think, to
speculate about what is behind it.It is often represented as some kind of a mask, hiding the woman . With the help of this opaque
veil, the Oriental woman is considered as not yielding herself to the Western gaze and therefore imagined as hiding something behind the veil. It is
through the inscription of the veil as a mask that the Oriental woman is turned into an enigma. Such a discursive construction incites the presumption
that the real nature of these women is concealed, their truth is disguised and they appear in a false deceptive manner. They are therefore other than
what they appear to be.25If, as Frantz Fanon suggested, this leads to an overpowering desire to rend the veil and unmask the woman (a
desire which, in part, can be understood as motivating Western media's fascination and obsession with the veil), the veil as a cover
is also enticingly mysterious.26 A recent United Colors of Benetton advertisement featuring Afghani women in the burqa captures this sense of
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 194
mystery, inviting the Western gaze to unveil the woman.27 Interestingly, the woman is unveiled in the very next ad, suggesting that Benetton is able
to undo in an instant what centuries of colonization only could attempt. In contemporary Western media, the veil remains a symbol of
Muslim women and their oppression by tribal, primitive, and conservative upholders of Islam.28 As Anouar Majid remarks, 'For the
Western media, the picture of the veiled woman visually defines both the mystery of Islamic culture and its backwardness.'29 However, as she goes
on to explain: Despite its close association with Islam, the veil is in fact an old eastern Mediterranean practice that was
assimilated to Islam in its early stages of expansion. In the two suras (verses) in the Qur'an that refer to the veil, not only is there no specific
mention of veiling the face but certain parts of the body in fact are assumed to be visible.30 Nonetheless, the association of Muslim women
with the veil persists in Western popular imagination. Moreover, it feeds and fuels yet another prevailing feature in the discourse
surrounding Orientalized women-that of their oppressed and tradition-bound existence. Within Western popular media, this
feature often serves to underpin the 'rescue' motif . In this motif, the white male explorer seeks to rescue the imperiled woman
of color and save her from the brutality of her cultural traditions.31 Miriam Cooke maintains that 'the burqa recalls suttee and the
four-stage gendered logic of empire: (1) women have inalienable rights within universal civilization; (2) civilized men
recognize and respect these rights; (3) uncivilized men systematically abrogate these rights; and (4) such men (the Taliban)
thus belong to an alien (Islamic) system.'32 Cooke adds that: Imperial logic gendersand separates subjectpeoples so that the
men are the Other and the women are civilizable. To defend our universal civilization we must rescue the women . To rescue
these women we must attack these men. These women will be rescued not because they are more 'ours' than 'theirs' but rather because they
will have become more 'ours' through the rescue mission … In the Islamic context,the negative stereotyping ofthe religion as inherently
misogynist provides ammunition for the attack on the uncivilized brown men. 33Interestingly, Western imperial feminism
alsohas been taken to task by feminists of color for embracing this same rescue motif. As Antoinette Burton notes, 'Many middle-class
British feminists viewed the women of the East not as equals but as unfortunates in need of saving by their British feminist 'sisters.'34 By imagining
the women of India as helpless colonial subjects, British feminists constructed 'the Indian woman' as a foil against which to gauge their own
progress.'35 The rescue motif is also apparent in the ways in which many Western feminists reacted to the plight of Afghan
women as victims of oppressive, barbaric men, needing to be saved by their sisters .36 The focus on the veil from all these
various quarters thus allows for the enactment of the rescue motif. It legitimizes intervention in the name of liberation and progress .
Indeed, many within Islamic nations have sought to mark progress in terms of normative or prescriptive dictates that forbid or sanction the wearing of
the veil.37
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 195
LINK - WOMEN
Western human rights for women rely on the framing of Islamic men as rapist and is a legitimization of U.S.
imperialism
Another narrative often used in the war on terror espionage thriller to depict pragmaticWestern power projection
(including Western torture) as a virtuous and progressive force on the world stage is the absence of human rights for Muslim
women. In Western culture this narrative has been particularly associated with discussions of Afghanistan under
the Taliban (1996-2001). Human rights abuses against Afghan girls and women were a regular theme in major public statements about national
security and foreign policy by President Bush after 9/11. As early as his “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies” speech to Congress on
September 20, 2001, Bush was preparing Americans for war by referring to the brutalizing of women in Afghanistan. (Despite the rhetoric, Amnesty
International’s 2005 report, “Afghanistan: Women Still Under Attack-A Systematic Failure to Protect,” was diffi cult to differentiate in outline from
“Women in Afghanistan: A Human Rights Catastrophe,” a 1995 Amnesty report which described “gross human rights
violations” against unarmed civilian women “committed with total impunity.” 20 ) This political appropriation of
gendered human rights discourse, and its redeployment for the legitimation of torture, empire, and war, has been
vigorously recycled in the war on terror espionage thriller, where Muslim women, when they appear at all, tend to
be visibly oppressed by their political and religious culture, in sharp contrast to the liberated, high-achieving
women who conventionally populate the genre’s default version of “the West.” This gendered discourse about the
absence of human rights for Muslim women forms part of the generic background noise to which readers who
explore the contemporary thriller will quickly become accustomed . In Empire State Karim Khan is accused by one of his
American interrogators of supporting the execution of women for reading school books (Porter, 136). In Pandora’s Legion we meet an Afghan
Muslim and al Qaeda associate who forbids “his woman” to take part in male discussions (Coyle and Tillman, 203). In Fullerton’s A Hostile Place
Afghan women are described as “servants or childbearers,” “an underclass, living-if it could be called living-at the
whim of others”(Fullerton, 71, 232). Such references are routine in the war on terror thriller, sometimes moving explicitly
to the narrative foreground in the fi gure of the Islamist rapist, an emerging stock-fi gure in Anglo-American war
on terror iconography who appears in A Hostile Place in the form of a group of Pakistani intelligence operatives who attempt to rape
Amarayn, a female associate of the hero (Fullerton, 184-85). As an emerging cultural archetype of the war on terror, the Islamist
rapist derives from quite traditional “orientalist” confi gurings of “the East” as a site of deviant or transgressive
sexuality-an idea that fi gures elsewhere in A Hostile Place in the description of an Afghan market selling children into sex-slavery. Fullerton,
though, gives the traditional idiom a distinctive war on terror twist by linking thefi gure of the Islamist rapist to the contemporary
idea of the Muslim “failed state,” describing the attempted rape ofAmarayn as a symptom of “general lawlessness” in
Afghanistan, a“twenty- three-year-long lapse in social order” (Fullerton, 205). During the Bush years
the most poignant and unsettling presentation of the Islamist rapist as a metonym for the failed Muslim state was the Siddiq Barmak-directed fi lm
Osama (2003), the fi rst movie made in Afghanistan by an Afghan cast and crew after the fall of the Taliban. The fi lm told the story of an
adolescent girl discovered masquerading as a boy, who is sentencedfor this “crime” by a sharia court to a lifetime of rapein the harem
of an elderly mullah. Barmak’s fi lm was endorsed by political elites in the West, where President Bush andSecretary of State Colin Powell both
spoke publicly about it,and where private screenings were organizedin Washington during May 2004 for members of the
US Senate.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 196
LINK - WOMEN
Western human rights for women rely on the framing of Islamic men as rapist and is a legitimization of U.S.
imperialism
Another narrative often used in the war on terror espionage thriller to depict pragmaticWestern power projection
(including Western torture) as a virtuous and progressive force on the world stage is the absence of human rights for Muslim
women. In Western culture this narrative has been particularly associated with discussions of Afghanistan under
the Taliban (1996-2001). Human rights abuses against Afghan girls and women were a regular theme in major public statements about national
security and foreign policy by President Bush after 9/11. As early as his “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies” speech to Congress on
September 20, 2001, Bush was preparing Americans for war by referring to the brutalizing of women in Afghanistan. (Despite the rhetoric, Amnesty
International’s 2005 report, “Afghanistan: Women Still Under Attack-A Systematic Failure to Protect,” was diffi cult to differentiate in outline from
“Women in Afghanistan: A Human Rights Catastrophe,” a 1995 Amnesty report which described “gross human rights
violations” against unarmed civilian women “committed with total impunity.” 20 ) This political appropriation of
gendered human rights discourse, and its redeployment for the legitimation of torture, empire, and war, has been
vigorously recycled in the war on terror espionage thriller, where Muslim women, when they appear at all, tend to
be visibly oppressed by their political and religious culture, in sharp contrast to the liberated, high-achieving
women who conventionally populate the genre’s default version of “the West.” This gendered discourse about the
absence of human rights for Muslim women forms part of the generic background noise to which readers who
explore the contemporary thriller will quickly become accustomed . In Empire State Karim Khan is accused by one of his
American interrogators of supporting the execution of women for reading school books (Porter, 136). In Pandora’s Legion we meet an Afghan
Muslim and al Qaeda associate who forbids “his woman” to take part in male discussions (Coyle and Tillman, 203). In Fullerton’s A Hostile Place
Afghan women are described as “servants or childbearers,” “an underclass, living-if it could be called living-at the
whim of others”(Fullerton, 71, 232). Such references are routine in the war on terror thriller, sometimes moving explicitly
to the narrative foreground in the fi gure of the Islamist rapist, an emerging stock-fi gure in Anglo-American war
on terror iconography who appears in A Hostile Place in the form of a group of Pakistani intelligence operatives who attempt to rape
Amarayn, a female associate of the hero (Fullerton, 184-85). As an emerging cultural archetype of the war on terror, the Islamist
rapist derives from quite traditional “orientalist” confi gurings of “the East” as a site of deviant or transgressive
sexuality-an idea that fi gures elsewhere in A Hostile Place in the description of an Afghan market selling children into sex-slavery. Fullerton,
though, gives the traditional idiom a distinctive war on terror twist by linking thefi gure of the Islamist rapist to the contemporary
idea of the Muslim “failed state,” describing the attempted rape ofAmarayn as a symptom of “general lawlessness” in
Afghanistan, a“twenty- three-year-long lapse in social order” (Fullerton, 205). During the Bush years
the most poignant and unsettling presentation of the Islamist rapist as a metonym for the failed Muslim state was the Siddiq Barmak-directed fi lm
Osama (2003), the fi rst movie made in Afghanistan by an Afghan cast and crew after the fall of the Taliban. The fi lm told the story of an
adolescent girl discovered masquerading as a boy, who is sentencedfor this “crime” by a sharia court to a lifetime of rapein the harem
of an elderly mullah. Barmak’s fi lm was endorsed by political elites in the West, where President Bush andSecretary of State Colin Powell both
spoke publicly about it,and where private screenings were organizedin Washington during May 2004 for members of the
US Senate.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 197
LINK - IDENTITY POLITICS
Manichean identity politics ensure the inevitability of terrorism
(James) Der Derian, (Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University,) 05 (Imaging terror:
logos, pathos andethos, p 24-27)
Havingmapped this phenomenon before 9/11, I wish to focus on what (if anything)has changed since then, and to
understand the celerity and alacrity by whichour age has now been defined by terrorism.3Although the
fundamentalistreligious and political beliefs of the major combatants have attracted themost attention, I think we need to
pay more attention to the multiple media,which transmit powerful images as well as help to trigger highly
emotionalresponses to the terrorist event.Thanks to the immediacy of television, theinternet and other networked
information technology, weseeterrorismeverywhere in real time, all the time. In turn, terrorism has taken on aniconic,
fetishised and, most significantly, a highlyopticalcharacter. Afterwitnessing the televised images of kamikaze planes
hitting the World TradeCenter, the home videos of Bin Laden, the internet beheading of NicholasBerg, we were all too
ready to agree with President Bush: ‘Evil now has aface’.However, somewhere between the Pyrrhic victory of Tora Bora
and thedisastrous post-war of Iraq, the face of terror began to morph into a newPost-Bursonian composite. The ‘terrorist’
can now easily do double-duty asan airport security profile, featuring the checkeredkeffiyehof Arafat, theaquiline nose of
Osama Bin Laden, the hollowed face of John Walker Lindh,the maniacal grin of Saddam Hussein, the piercing eyes of
Abu MusabZarqawi (‘He could direct his men simply by moving his eyes’, said Basil AbuSabha, his Jordanian prison
doctor). The historicity, specificity and even thecomprehensibility of terrorism have been transmogrified by the new holy
andmedia wars into a single physiognomy of global terror.Of course, our image of terror did not arrive by itself or on its
own.Justas every image comes with an explicit or implicit caption-what RolandBarthes, the gifted semiotician, referred to
as the ‘anchorage’ which seeks tofix the ‘polysemy’ of the sign 4-so too is the war on terror freighted withthe narratives of
the Cold War. Moreover, the legacy of the Cold War liveson through popular culture, a ‘fact’ ably noted by a Hollywood
actor whoknows a thing or two about the morbidity of comebacks. Playing a ‘C-fuckin’-I-A agent’ doubling as a Gulf war
arms dealer, up againstFBIstraight man (another constant in national security culture) Willem Dafoe,Mickey Rourke
colourfully notes how the dead continue to weigh on theliving:
This isn’t about sides. This is about confusion. This is about creating enemieswhen there aren’t any. And, man, the whole
Goddamn world’s falling apart.Peace reigns, freedom reigns, democracy rules. How are we gonna keep themilitary -
industrial complex chugging forward without clear-cut, pit-faced,scum-sucking evil breathing down our neck? Hmmm?
Threatening our veryshores. Now my job is to make sure the other side keeps fighting; whateverside-I mean whatever side
we’re officially not on this year.5
Seen in this light, the war on terror is not new but part of a permanent stateof war by which the sovereignty of the most
powerful state is reconstitutedthrough the naming of terrorist foe and anti-terrorist friend.There are lessons to be learned
from an earlier inter-war-one that isbeginning to look too much like our own-in which two media critics,avantla lettre,first
confronted this new matrix of art, politics and terror. WalterBenjamin took his first measure of film production in his
celebrated essay,‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, taking note ofhow mechanically reproduced
art, especially film, could be especially usefulto, if not generative of, fascism. Rendering politics into aesthetics had the
advantage of mobilising the masses for war without endangering traditionalproperty relations. He quotes the futurist
Marinetti to chilling effect:
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 198
LINK - DICHOTOMIES
U.S. foreign policy frames states that are disconnected from its control as problematic and generally “bad” the U.S.
either attempts to assimilate or destroy them
‘‘Non-Integrating’’ areas are those which are, in the words ofBarnett (2004: 8), ‘‘disconnected from the global economy and
the rule sets that define its stability’’. But disconnectionis not only a ‘‘problem’’ for these societies alone: ‘‘In this century, it
is disconnectedness thatdefines danger. Disconnectedness allows bad actors to flourish by keeping entire societies
detached from the global community and under their control. Eradicating disconnectedness, there-fore, becomes the
defining security task of our age’’ (Barnett, 2004: 8).Disconnection from the global communityeor, asRoberts et al.
(2003)argue, the globaleconomyealso brings with it disconnection from the ‘‘rule sets’’ governing ‘‘proper’’ inter-national
behaviour: ‘‘enunciating that rule set is the most immediate task in this global waron terrorism, and promoting the global
spread of that security rule set through our use ofmilitary force overseas (e.g. pre-emptive war against regimes that openly
transgress the ruleset) is our most important long-term goal in this struggle’’ (Barnett, 2004: 25). As noted above, the American role
in the enunciation of a new ‘‘global rule set’’ has been the guiding preoccu-pation of the Project for the New American
Century since its inception: a preoccupation whichhas been materialized within a number of the National Security Strategies
(including the mostrecent iteration issued in March 2006).It is far from a selfish task, however; Barnett argues that it is America’s
‘‘moral responsibil-ity’’ to ‘‘share’’ the rule set: ‘‘[as] America seeks to export this new security rule set called pre-emptive
war, we are very careful in making sure this strategic concept is correctly understood. In short, pre-emptive war is not a tool
for reordering the Core’s security structure as some fear.Rather, it is an instrument by which the Core should collectively
seek to extend its stablesecurity rule set into the essentially lawless Gap’ ’ (Barnett, 2004: 7, 40).As for Robert Kagan, for
Barnett the United States’ role is predicated upon, above all, a privileged knowledge of the rule sets (the ability to define
‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ states), a privilegedunderstanding of ‘‘the ways the world works’’, but also the willingness to enforce
those rulesets.America is the Gap’s Leviathan: ‘‘if other Core powers want a greater say in how weexercise that power, they simply need to
dedicate enough defense spending to develop similarcapabilities. Absent that, America earns a certain right for unilateralism in the Gap’’
(Barnett,2004: 173, 174). Similarly echoing Robert Kagan’s dismissal of Europeans’ ‘‘Kantian illusions’’, Barnett is even more resolute in affirming
that such ‘‘illusions’’ have no place in today’schaotic and dangerous world. In justifying the United States resistance to the InternationalCriminal
Court, Barnett suggests that it is not a question of American ‘‘exceptionalism’’ butrather the fact ‘‘that America needs special consideration for the
security roles it undertakesinside the Gap. In effect, we don’t want fellow Core members applying their Kantian rulesets to our behavior inside the
Hobbesian Gap’’ (Barnett, 2004: 174). Barnett suggests thatthe stakes are highe ‘‘One of us must die. Either the Core assimilates the
Gap, or the Gapdivides the Core’’eand that the only response is to exterminate the ‘‘cancer’’; shrink thegap and thus face up to the reality of
the new world situation (Barnett, 2004: 249, 250). AsRoberts et al. (2003: 888)suggest, this geopolitics of absolutes is at play beneath the
talk ofglobal integration and ‘‘neoliberal world vision’’. Conflict is therefore inevitable: it is a foundational truth
confirmed by the severed map.Barnett’s cartography thus serves as both a description of today’s world and a prescriptionfor its proper
ordering. AsRoberts et al. (2003: 890)argue, ‘‘the map is both that which isto be explained and the explanation itself, descriptive
of the recent past and predictive of futureaction’’. Insecurity comes not from a specific threatening other but from all those
unwilling tointegrate; all those refusing their (prescribed) place on the map . As Monmonier puts it, themap’s ‘‘lines and labels not
only rationalize the current [Iraqi] occupation.but also arguefor future interventions throughout the Gap’’ (Monmonier, 2005: 222). This
understandingwas clearly articulated in Barnett’s first book (Barnett, 2004), but is even more explicit inthe follow-up volume, revealingly
entitledBlueprint for Action(Barnett, 2005). US interventions are thus presented as inevitable, until the messiness of the world is made to match
thegeometries of the Pentagon’s New Map.National security strategiesThe concept of integration, invoked in different ways and in different measures
by bothKagan and Barnett, is similarly at the heart of the current administration’s foreign and domesticpolicies. The former Director of Policy at the
US State Department, Richard Haass, articulatedthe central tenets of the concept when he wondered:Is there a successor idea to containment? I think
there is. It is the idea of integration. Thegoal of US foreign policy should be to persuade the other major powers to sign on to cer-tain key ideas as to
how the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons ofmass destruction, support for free trade, democracy, markets.Integrationis
about lockingthem into these policies and then building institutions that lock them in even more (HaassinLemann, 1 April 2002, emphasis
added).That the US is no longer prepared to tolerate regimes that do not mirror its own democraticvalues and practices, and
that it will seek to persuade such major powers to change theirpolicies and behaviours to fit the Americanmodus operandi, is not
without historical precedent(Ambrosius, 2006). Nor does the differently imagined geography of integration replace completely previous Manichean
conceptions of the world so familiar to Cold War politics. Rather, the proliferation of new terms of antipathy such as ‘axis of evil’,
‘rogue states’, and ‘terrorcities’ demonstrate how integration goes hand in hand witheand is mutually constitutiveofenew
forms of division. Barnett’s divide between the globalised world and the non-integrating gap is reflected and complemented by Kagan’s divide in
ways of dealing with this state ofaffairs. Much of this imagined geography pivots on the idea of ‘the homeland’ . Indeed, in
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 199
theimaginations of the security analysts we highlight here, there
is a direct relationship and tensionbetween securing the homeland’s
borders and challenging the sanctity of borders elsewhere (seeKaplan, 2003: 87).
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U.S. national security creates an us versus them dichotomy framing foreign nations as the axis of evil, valorizing
once simple binaries to push U.S. values
What we find in this isthe kernel of the policies implemented in the administration of George W. Bush, reworked through the Clinton period
by such organizations as PNAC (discussed above). The assemblage of individuals and organizationse both inside and outsidethe formal state
structureserunning from the DPG, through PNAC to the plethora of Bushadministration security texts cited above (all of which draw upon well-
established US securitydispositions in the post-World War II era) demonstrates the performative infrastructure
throughwhich certain ontological effects are established, and through which certain performances aremade possible and
can be understood.As we argue throughout this paper,the distinctive thing about recent National Security Strategies is their
deployment ofintegrationas the principal foreign policy and security strategy . Itis telling thatBush’s claim of‘‘either you are with
us, or you are with the terrorists’’ (Bush,2001) relies not on astraightforward binary, as is sometimes suggested, butaprocess of incorporation.It is
not simply us versus them, butwithus, a mode of operating alongside, or, in thewords of one of Bush’s most enthusiastic supporters, ‘‘shoulder to shoulder’’
(Blair, 2001; seeWhite & Wintour, 2001). This works more widely through a combination of threats and promises, as in this statement about the Palestinians:
‘‘If Palestinians embrace democracy and therule of law, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American supportfor the creation of a
Palestinian state’’ (The White House, 2002b: 9). Likewise, it can be foundin some of remarks of the British Prime MinisterBlair (2004)about the significance
of democracy in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq. Equally Bush’s notorious ‘axis of evil’ speech did not simply name North Korea, Iran
and Iraq as its members, but suggested that ‘‘stateslikethese, andtheir terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to
threaten the peace of the world’’ (Bush,2002a, emphasis added). A comparison of thelike, alongside the ‘‘withthe terrorists’’
is actually a more complicated approach to the choosing of sides and the drawing of lines than is generally credited.
Simple binary oppositions are less useful to an understanding here than theprocess of incorporation and the policy of
integration.These examples indicate the policy of integration or exclusion being adopted by the US andfollowed by certain
allies. It warns those failing to adopt US values (principally liberal ‘representative’ democracy and market capitalism), that they
will be excluded from an American-centric world. The place of US allies in these representations is not unimportant.
Indeed, thestrength of the US discourse relies also on its reflection and reiteration by other key allies,especially in Europe. Above
and beyond the dismissive pronouncements of Rumsfeld aboutEurope’s ‘‘Old’’ and ‘‘New’’ea conception that was inchoately articulated as early as the
1992DPGethe dissent of (even some) Europeans is a problem for the US in its world-making endeavours(seeBialasiewicz & Minca, 2005). It is not surprising,
then, that following his re-election, George W. Bushand Condoleeza Rice embarked almost immediately on a ‘‘bridge-building’’ tour
acrossEurope, noting not trans-Atlantic differences but ‘‘the great alliance of freedom’’ that unites theUnited States and Europe (Bush,
2005).Foralthough the United States may construct itself as the undisputed leader in the newglobal scenario, its ‘‘right’’eand the
right of its moral-political ‘‘mission’’ of spreading ‘‘free-dom and justice’’ erelies on its amplification and support by
allies.The construction of theUnited States’ world role relies also on the selective placement and representation of other international actors who are
‘‘hailed’’ into specific subject positions (seeWeldes, Laffey, Gusterson, & Duvall, 1999). Of course, different actors are granted different roles and
differentdegrees of agency in the global script: the place of key European allies is different from thatbestowed upon the peripheral and semi-peripheral states
that make part of the ‘‘coalition ofthe willing’’. Both, however, are vital in sustaining the representation of the US as the leaderof asharedworld of values and
ideals. Indeed, the ‘lone superpower’ has little influence inthe absence of support.
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LINK - DICHOTOMIES
The line between domestic and foreign security has blurred this is a crucial move in a strategy of violent
assimilation of non-integrated states
Another important dimension ofintegration as the key strategic concept is its dissolution ofthe inside/outside spatialization of
security policy. The concluding lines of the ‘‘Strategy forHomeland Defense and Civil Support’’ are particularly telling. It contends that the
DepartmentofDefensecan ‘‘no longer think in terms of the ‘home’ gameandthe ‘away’ game. There isonly one game’’
(Department of Defense, 2005b: 40). In part this is directed at the previousfailure to anticipate an attack from within: indeed, the Strategy remarks
thatthe September11th2001attacks ‘‘originated in US airspace and highlighted weaknesses in domestic radarcoverage and
interagency air defense coordination’’ (2005b: 22). In other words, the US needsto ensure the security of its homeland from
within as much as without, to treat home as away . Inpart, however, such rhetoric also reflects a continuity with and reiteration of broader
under-standings with a much longer history, promoted by a range of US ‘‘intellectuals of statecraft’’since the end of the Cold War: understandings
that specifiedincreasingly hard territorialisationsof security and identity both at homeandabroad to counter the ‘‘geopolitical
vertigo’’(seeO´Tuathail, 1996) of the post-bipolar era.It is important to note here, moreover, that the 2002 National Security Strategy’s
affirmationthat ‘‘today,the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is diminishing’’ (The WhiteHouse, 2002b: 30) also
involves the US treating away as a home, or at least, as a concern.From this we can see how the pursuit of integration enables the territorial
integrity of other sovereign states to be violated in its name, as specific places are targeted to either ensure or overcome
their exclusion(seeElden, 2005). As an example, consider this statement, which recallsthe late 1970s enunciation of an ‘arc of crisis’ stretching
from the Horn of Africa through theMiddle East to Afghanistan: ‘‘There exists an ‘arc of instability’ stretching from the WesternHemisphere,
through Africa and the Middle East and extending to Asia. There are areas inthis arc that serve as breeding grounds for threats to our
interests.Within these areas roguestates provide sanctuary to terrorists, protecting them from surveillance and attack’’
(JointChiefs of Staff, 2004: 5).In his foreword to the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush declared that ‘‘We will defendthe peace by fighting
terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free
and open societieson every continent’’ (Bush, 2002b: i). This notion of extension is crucial in understanding theexplicitly spatial
overtones of this strategy of integration: more than merely about values,democracy and capitalism, it is about
aperformative geopolitics. Put crudely, it is about specifying the geographies of world politics; it is about specifying ‘‘the
ways the world (now)is’’ea presumably descriptive ‘‘geopolitical exercise’’but that, as all such exercises, alsoimplicitly
contains the prescription for putting the world ‘‘right’’.
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IMPACT - INTERVENTION
Discursive securitization of the middle east pre-ordains military intervention inevitable - we deal with the middle
east only as a problem for great power interests
BILGIN, PROF IR BIKENT UNIVERSITY, 05 [REGIONAL SECURITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST A CRITICAL
PERSPECTIVE, PAGE 67-69]
One of the central arguments put forward in this study is that when rethinking regional security from a critical perspective,
both concepts - 'region' and 'security' - should be opened up to investigate the relationship between (inventing) regions and
(conceptions and practices of) security. Part I is devoted to investigating the workings of this relationship during the Cold
War. Chapter 2 opens the discussion by tracing the trajectory of the Middle East from its origins in Britain's security
policies during the late nineteenth century into the Cold War era when reference to this part of the world as the Middle
East became 'common sense'. This is intended as a further illustration of the point (also reinforced in Chapter 4) that
regions are geopolitical inventions that have their roots in the security discourses of their inventors. The Middle East
was invented to help British and later US policy-makers to think about and organise action in this part of the world. It
is sometimes argued that researching into the invention and/or inventors of regions is a futile exercise in that once a region
is 'invented' it becomes an object of security. Yet, such arguments underestimate the role geopolitical discourse and spatial
representations play in shaping 'how we see the world and how we decide to act' (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992:190). To
quote Gearóid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew,
It is only through discourse that the building up of a navy or the decision to invade a foreign country is made
meaningful and justified. It is through discourse that leaders act, through the mobilisation of certain simple
geographical understandings that foreign-policy actions are explained and through ready-made geographically-infused
reasoning that wars are rendered meaningful.(1992:191)
Choosing to represent a part of the world as the 'Middle East' is by no means an innocent act; it involves the 'construction
of a special kind of geographical “Other”' (Sidaway 1994:366). This, in turn, 'reflects and supports the kind of Western
military intervention (such as the raids on Libya and the Gulf War) that ultimately does very little to deal with the
persistent and underlying causes of conflict in the region' (Sidaway 1994:366). This is not to suggest that regions as
spatial representations are fixed and unchanging. On the contrary, defining and redefining regions are political processes
that are continually being resisted and contested (as with Arab actors' representations of this part of the world as the 'Arab
Regional System'). What is more, prevailing representations are continually being redefined in line with the changing
security interests and concerns of the major actors (as with Britain and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth
century). Viewed as such, researching into the processes through which regions are (re)defined becomes central to
studying regional security, for such (re)definitions give away the changing security concerns of various actors as well
as the conceptions of security they are rooted in.
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IMPACT - MILITARISM
The US’s militaristic response to Islam is a product of discourses which consider the US to be superior and distinct
from the Other - without problematization, the ideological motives for violence are reentrenched, making it
inevitable
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, 2008 (‘The end of terrorism
studies,’ Critical Studies on Terrorism 1.1, p. 44-7)
This is to argue that any enterprise of normative innovation and travel must be aboutmore than General Assembly
resolutions and reports of eminent persons; it must be sensitive to both the local contexts and struggles in which it must
become embedded, and themediated (global) space of abstraction that forms a horizon of events against which it willbe
compared and judged, a horizon where its legitimacy will prosper or founder. In thecase of the war on terror, which is
predominately focused on the threat posed by the al- Qaeda network, such a space of abstraction is structured by a
profound normative and existential division between ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’, one continually reproduced in both Western
discourses of purpose and identity, and in Islamic fundamentalist thought. The use of violence can be detached from them
in the cause of normative progress or even moral philosophy, but it is much harder to achieve in the immediate flow of
events and lived experience. This is because such grand abstractions are intimately connected with violence - strategic and
terrorist - as systems of justification, motivation, purpose, andpropaganda. This provides critical terrorism studies with a
two-sided agenda that includesboth challenge and opportunity.On one side is a mode of self-reflexive critique directed at
the West. This workcritiques the strategic languages used to justify and argue for policy, the ‘culture wars’ and ‘security
politics’ pursued by neo-conservatives, the normative disaster of the resort totorture, ‘extraordinary renditions’ and secret
interrogations, the exceptional politics of executive orders and detention camps, the racist and Islamophobic attacks on
multiculturalism and traditions of secular tolerance, and the efforts to transform the affective space of Western societies
via the normalization of fear and warfare as ways of being (Jackson 2005, Burke 2007c, Borderlands e-journal various years). Deeper
lines of critique then put some of the foundational images of politics, security and existence that underpin such politics into question (Agamben 1998,
Butler 2004, Burke 2007a). On the other side (the side of the Other) is a challenge that must see critical terrorism studies widened to take in other,
comparative forms of scholarship, along with scholarship from the Middle East and Islamic world. Critical terrorism studies cannot be a Western
dialogue with itself. It must expand its space of dialogue and concern to take in, engage and contest the highly developed forms of thinking that - if
not coextensive with terrorist violence - provide it with legitimizing foundations and a world view of some profundity. In the case of al-Qaeda and
other movements inspired by Sunni fundamentalism, this world view is provided by a particular version of Islamist ideology represented by Sayyid
Qutb and Abu al-Ala Mawdudi. This, as Roxanne Euben (1999) has demonstrated, offers simultaneously a sharp critique (and perverse mirror) of
Western rationalism and modernism. (My argument here is not meant to stereotype Islamism, which, as a group of philosophies that link Islam with
politics, is a diverse body of thought that includes more moderate and pluralist streams.) Here the war on terror is revealed not as a simple
instrumental struggle between ‘forces’ but an ideational one with deep philosophical contours. The normative challenge, in this light, is more
complex than choices about targets or modes of violence; it is a challenge posed by the linkage of terrorism and violence with clashing visions of
secularism, faith, political community, nationhood and modernity. This linkage, from the side of the Other, can be seen in bin Laden’s ‘sermon’ of
February 2003, where familiar denunciations of Western imperialism and US foreign policy were accompanied by arguments that, after the 9/11
attacks: the spirit of brotherhood in faith among Muslims was strengthened, which can be considered a great step in the unification of the Muslims
under the word of God and establishing the rightly guided caliphate with the permission of God. He also praised the hijackers for ‘taking the path of
jihad’ to ‘defend their religion and promote the causes of their umma more than the governments and peoples of fifty countries in the Islamic world
have done’. We can easily condemn the moral sensibility that could see the 9/11 atrocity as a legitimate form of (even
violent) struggle or jihad, alongwith the political naiveté which believes that in this way it is possible to ‘target the
foundations’of US power such that ‘the whole edifice will totter and sway, and relinquish itsunjust leadership of the
world’ (Lawrence 2005, pp. 194-195). Yet underpinning the argument is a philosophy that offers a profound challenge to
Western forms of liberalism, government and thought. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian author of Ma’alim fi al-Tariq
(Signpostson the Road, or Milestones, 1964), condemns an undifferentiated ‘West’, and the modernsystems of thought
that underpin it, not merely for its imperialism and support for oppressiveMiddle Eastern regimes, but for its moral
corruption, its consumerism, and its separationof Church and State; for its assumption that men not God are sovereign, for
its‘rejection of Allah’s sovereignty in favor of a philosophy and epistemology that claims forhumans the right to create
values and to legislate rules for collective behaviour’ (Euben1999, p. 57). In Euben’s words:[Qutb’s philosophy] entails a
rejection of the Western-inspired measurement of civilization interms of material, scientific, and technological progress.
The only civilised community, toQutb, is the moral one; real freedom is moral freedom, and true justice is Islamic justice .
. .the authority of science produced by the Enlightenment worldview has proven incapable ofpromoting real progress, that
is, moral progress (p. 58).As Euben shows, Qutb’s vision of a society ruled by Sharia and Islam is deeply essentialistand
repressive: a vision of an Islam that is not subject to ‘multiple interpretations’ andis allied with an injunction upon
Muslims to wage an ideological and violent jihad (a holywar) ‘to remove the political, social, and economic obstacles to
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 204
the establishment of theIslamic community’. Qutb’s critique of the West is sometimes well observed and convergeswith
elements of critical theory, but is grossly overdetermined, morphing into adenunciation of all forms of Western thought
and non-Islamic state constitution as jahiliyya,a darker and more unjust form of the ignorance and hubris of early Islam
(Euben1999, pp. 75, 57).This effaces the great diversity in modern political, social and religious thought and the
dynamically contested (rather than unitary) nature of political being and power inmany societies. It creates a vast and
dangerous gulf between the Islamic world and its Other, the West, mirroring on a much larger scale the Schmittian
ontology of the nationstatein terms of the distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt 1996, p. 26). Likewisethe idea
that true freedom comes with absolute submission of the individual to thesovereignty of God (in the form of Sharia law)
echoes what Isaiah Berlin found mostrepressive in Western visions of the social contract, where individuals lose
themselves inthe state (Berlin 1998, p. 234, Euben 1999). Qutb fails his own critique, exchanging oneform of hubris for
another with similarly repressive potential. No accident, then, thatEuben (1999) comments that ‘aspects of his thought can
be compared with fascist thinkers’(p. 126).Yet this is not to endorse the critiques of US conservatives such as Daniel
Pipes and Francis Fukuyama who, while rightly warning of the danger and intolerance inherent in radical Islam, use the
term ‘Islamofascism’ in a highly politicized and selfregarding way to play down the immediate geopolitical context for al-
Qaeda’s campaign and construct Islamism as the demonic Other to a liberal-democratic West with superior values and
civilisation. Worse, the construct has been used to legitimize repressive and excessively militaristic policies in the war on
terror, which has onlyconfirmed in a stark and destructive way the basic premises of the Islamist critique.(Exhibiting a
profound normative deafness, in 2002 Fukuyama defended the warsagainst Afghanistan and Iraq by saying: ‘Much as
people would like to believe thatideas live or die as a result inner moral rectitude, power matters a great deal’;
Fukuyama2002, p. 34.).The policies of the USA, Britain, and other allies towards Iraq and Israel have notonly inflamed
Islamic communities and directly led to new terrorist attacks, but also undermined the public moral critique of Islamist
terrorism and, more deeply, affirmed an image of the West as a jahili civilisation and a threat to Islam. We may
complainthat the moral and strategic picture is far more complex than they portray it, but thiswill be virtually impossible
to convey given the binary prism through which Westernacts will be viewed. And self-regarding talk of the superior
values of secularism, representative democracy and free markets (especially when they are accompanied by attacks on
multiculturalism and basic civil rights) will only make the situation worse.Euben perceptively points out that Qutb’s work
demonstrates that there is ‘a transculturalproblematic of modernity’ which needs careful analysis, but Fukuyama is a
paradigmcase of a thinker who cannot accept that modernity might be criticizable. His owntheory of the inexorable
advance of liberal American modernity and its dissolution of local cultural differences beneath a single capitalist horizon
is exactly the target of Qutb’s critique of the ‘Crusader spirit’ that ‘lives on in the seemingly inexorable march of Western
colonization and the cultural hostility it embodies and expresses’ (Euben1999, pp. 18, 124).I can only touch on the depth
of the challenge here, but the normative challenge cannot be dissociated from a series of deeper failures in the liberal
West: a failure to dissociate itself from power-politics and imperialism (realist critiques such as those ofMearsheimer and
Walt (2007) and Walt (2005) are of limited value here, given theircontinued investment in the former); a failure to define
and enact a secularism thatgenuinely respects and entrenches faith pluralism, and cultivates a dialogue thatmight create an
enduring architecture of basic shared values; and a failure to build ajust and sustainable vision of cosmopolitan modernity
amid conflict, agonism anddiversity
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IMPACT - VIOLENT HEGEMONY
American orientalism is to motivating force for imperial violence - it rationalizes warfare, institutionalizes
genocide, and produces an ontological distinction between self and other which naturalizes hegemony
Meghana V.Nayak, Pace University, andChristopherMalone, Pace University, 09 [American Orientalism and American
Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony]
Edward Said (1979)shatters the taken-for-granted status of colonial and postcolonial knowledge about the developing world
with his analysis of Orientalism. As he notes, European intellectual, artistic, archeological, and literary examinations o f-and
claims about-the bodies and borders conquered and mapped, justified the necessity and endurance of colonial
European empires. Further, there is an internal consistency of the Orientalist discourse, despite any lack of
correspondence with a "real" Orient, in order to confer an objective and innocent status to the knowledge production that
both prompted and rationalized the brutality of imperialism(Said 1979:5-7). However, this does not mean that Orientalism is
just a play of meanings and ideas, for, as constructivist IR scholars argue, the more we act toward an entity as if it has a particular
representation or meaning, the more that entity can take on that representation (Wendt 1992; Doty 1996). For example, the more
European colonialists perceived colonized territories as incapable of self-governing, the more Europeans treated the territories as in
need of governing. Indeed, Orientalism is a "Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the
Orient" (Said 1979:3), acting "dynamically along with brute political, economic, and military rationales" (Said 1979:12). Said
(1979:12) also claims that Orientalism has much less to do with the "Orient" and much more to do with the making of
"our" world. Knowledge claims about the Other (the Orient/the East) actually cement the way the Self (Europe/the
West) sees and constructs itself.The "Orient"-a mysterious, erotic, dark, dangerous mass of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish,
Arab, South Asian, East Asian natives-is a deep and recurring image in Western identity-making.
The impact of Said's work, particularly Orientalism, on critical IR is threefold. First, it creates space for critical IR scholars to
examine representational practices and international hierarchy in international politics, in dialogue with scholars in other fields, such
as literary criticism, anthropology, postcolonial thought, feminist studies, political geography, and others. Said's contrapuntal analyses
of culture, colonial discourses, nationalism, power, and representational practices in his body of work opens the way to explore the
nuances, contradictions, and shifting and hybrid contexts of Othering (Chowdhry 2007). The Other is that through which the subject is
represented as privileged and superior, with the Other being devalued, feared, reviled, even desired, in some way. The Other stands
as a potential disruption of the Self, but at the same time , as critical IR theorist Campbell (1998b)points out, the Self cannot
fully contain or "resolve" the anxiety over the difference from or the encounter with the Other; without the production of
this anxiety, insecurity, and danger, statecraft and nation-making would have nothing against which to assert themselves .
Indeed, for the West, the encounters of slavery, colonialism, and genocide have to be represented as trysts with
danger, backwardness, and ever-threatening barbarism-anything but illegitimate violence-in order to naturalize
Western superiority. Second, the various debates about Said's work have inspired and fortified critiques of rationalist
methodology of mainstream IR scholars and of how their ontological presumptions about and methodological studies of
the "West" and the "rest" obscure more than they explain (Allain 2004; Chowdhry 2007). Third, the American variant of
Orientalism allows for an analysis of the discursive deployments in which (1) the United States assumes and relies
upon an ontological distinction between the United States and Others (Weldes et al. 1999; Richter-Montpetit 2007); (2)
the United States employs authoritative epistemological claims and representations about Others' bodies, habits, beliefs,
feelings, and political sensibilities, thereby justifying interventions, sanctions, and other actions within, across, and
outside of its borders (Persaud 2002); and (3) US foreign policy relies on a rationalist methodology consisting of finding
"evidence," such as reports and fact-finding missions, of foregone conclusions about the Other and the United States need
to assert its position (Tetreault 2006).
Research in this vein, both within and in conversation with critical IR, has examined both the US relationship with the Middle East
since the 1940s7 as well as American aggressions since the nineteenth century (Sadowski 1993; Ngai 2000; Little 2002; Mamdani
2004; Khalidi 2005). Orientalism, or at least the controversies over its conclusions, has featured prominently in the debates since
9/11 over whether Huntington was right about Islam (Fox 2001; Abrahamian 2002; Elshtain 2004; Lewis 2004), and in claims
that the United States is Othering Islam/Arabs with disastrous results (Little 2002; Khalidi 2005; Alam 2007). Further, many
find that an understanding of Orientalism "within" the United States, particularly toward Arab Muslim and South Asian
Americans, after 9/11, is crucial (Hagopian 2004). Agathangelou and Ling's (2005) stinging critique of the 9/11 Commission
Report's treatment of the Muslim Other demonstrates the overwhelming reasons why we should understand the reasons for and
consequences of constructing the quintessential Muslim/Arab/Middle Eastern Other both within the United States and
"elsewhere."
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 206
IMPACT - EXTINCTION
The end result of this Orientalist way of thinking is total annihilation on a global scale - the frames through which
we organize our relationship to the middle east and the rest of the world pre-ordain violence and are the root cause
a multiplicity of wars in the region.
NaderSadeghi, MD Campaign Iran (CASMII), 07 [US Policy in the Middle East Taking a Turn for Worse; The
Catastrophic Human Consequences]
The US foreign policy in the Middle East in the last quarter century has resulted in untold suffering for the people of the
region. These policies in one hand are extremely short sighted for the US strategic interests . On the other handthey have
resulted in massive destruction of countries in the region such as Afghanistan and Iraq . Today few would argue
against the established fact that the creation of Jihadist fundamentalist fighters in Afghanistan during the Soviet
occupation was largely formulated and supported by the United States and its allies in the region. The result over 25 years
later is a failed state and Afghanistan today is not faring any better than it did before the latest US and coalition invasion
of that country.Yet the scope of US plan for the submission, to its misguided will,of the Middle East and lack of tolerance for
any independent state in the Middle East is so entrenched in its foreign policy that destruction of one country and failure
in one must soon follow with another failed policy. It seems thatthe Unites States can only see the Middle East region and
the Moslem world at large through the spectacles that the late Edward Said called “Orientalism” . This is the same
spectacle that was invented by “Oxidant” since centuries and became the core of colonialist expansion to the Middle East
and the rest of the “Orient” through 18th and 19th century, latest intellectual champions of this movements having been
Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz, and score of others with US neoconservatives at their political front,
bringing new cycle of violence and neocolonial wars to the Middle East .
The old colonial strategy of divide and conquer has never lost its appeal to the practitioners. Support for Iraqi government of Saddam
Hussain during his invasion of Iran in 1980’s to the point of arming him with chemical weapons and turning a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against civilians
in Iran (1) as well as in Iraq’s Halabja (2) shows clearly the lack of empathy for human life in this “orientalist” view of the Middle East by the US and its western
allies. All this is then sold to the mass population of the west in the name of “war on terror”, expansion of “democracy” and
other words to conceal the real intent.
The massive campaign of dehumanizing the Middle East and its people in order to facilitate the support for
neocolonialist wars in the region is yet another chapter in this “Orientalist” vision of the Middle East . This
dehumanizing campaign is the metamorphosis and another face of “subspeciation” strategy borrowed from the social
Darwinists of the 19th century (and this has nothing to do with Darwin and his biological work) and used by racists who
drove the policy of segregation in the US until recently ( the effects of which is still persistent in US society today), the
apartheid policy of South Africa until they could sustain it no more, and the regime in Israel whose “apartheid policies”
are “worse than South Africa” in the words of Jimmy Carter in his recent book titled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”. Lets look at Iraq to see a small
glimpse of human tragedy the country has suffered since 1991 with first invasion of that country by US and subsequent sanctions for 12 years followed by another
massive attack in 2003 which still continues. A look at the infant and child mortality rates in Iraq, as reported by UNICEF (3) in the last 40 years is very telling of the
story. Compared to Iran and Turkey, Iraq had the lowest child mortality rate until 1990. The reduction in child mortality in Iran and Iraq despite the 8 year Iran Iraq war
is impressive. However following the sanctions against Iraq instituted in 1991 there was almost a 2.5 fold increase in child mortality that has sustained since then. (4)
The infant mortality follows the similar outcome. (Figure 2)
How many children and infants in Iraq are perished as a consequence of sanctions and ongoing wars seem inconsequential to the US foreign policy makers. The
massive human fall out of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by US and its allies has already put over 650000 Iraqis to death according to the study by the Bloomberg School of
Public Health at John Hopkins University (5). This casualty on human life has resulted directly from the violence as well as indirectly as a result of massive destruction
of the infrastructure in Iraq. This is only the beginning of the story and Iraq has yet decades to pay. The deterioration of public health with escalation of all
communicable diseases, tuberculosis, diarrhea, measles, rubella, polio, maternal death, and reduced life expectancy among many other core health indicators in Iraq are
just one dimension of the tragedy. Collapse of the infrastructure of the economy, education, universities, and basic human needs will make ever harder for Iraqi people
to have any quality of life for years to come. Americans have also paid a heavy price for these ongoing conflicts both in material and human life. Yet, neoconservatives
who have hold of the power in US administration turn a blind eye and deaf ears to the need of its own population, 40 million of which lack any form of health access,
while $500 billion has already been spent in the destruction of Iraq.The Irony is that neoconservatives are determined to expand a failed war to Iran. Every effort for
diplomacy is promptly blocked by the neoconservative agenda of the US administration, including the recent Iraq Study Group report calling for engaging Iran
diplomatically to help stabilize Iraq. (6) There are many more concrete steps that US has actively taken to pave the way for military confrontation with Iran. The threat
of nuclear attack on Iran by both US and Israel in an attempt to prepare the public mind for such eventual nuclear holocaust on Iranians, accusing Iran of possession of
WMD’s, repeated accusation of Iran’s intention to develop nuclear weapons despite IAEA reports showing no evidence of military diversion of Iranian nuclear activity,
allocation of funds for “regime change” in Iran, covert incursions to Iranian soil, movement of US warships to the Persian Gulf, calling for additional 22000 troops in
Iraq, and attacking on Iranian consulate within Iraqi Kurdistan and taking Iranians working there as hostage despite forceful objections of the regional Kurdish
authorities are all signs that US is determined to expand the war in the region.
The catastrophic consequences of a military attack on Iran andwide spread destruction of human life will devastate Iran and the
entire region as well as causing unpredictable economic fall out not only for the Middle East, but through the rest of the
world. This madness must be stopped. The world must stand up against the war mongers and for peace. A peaceful
multilateral engagement of the Middle East and unconditional negotiations with Iran and allowing the region to speak for
itself and letting go of the “orientalist” spectacles in viewing the Middle East is the only way for US to achieve peace and
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 207
security in the region. The problem of the Middle East is not a sectarian divide. Rallying the Arab Sunni governments by trying to sell
them a fabricated “Shia threat” posed by Iran will not work. The people on the ground across the Muslim world do not buy such
propaganda anymore. It is also time for the decent citizens in the US and across the western hemisphere to stand up
against the escalation of US imposed doctrinal pre-emptive wars . The next war must be stopped before it starts.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 208
***TERRORISM***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 209
LINK - DISCOURSE
Questioning the term terrorism as necessary - versus crime - is imperative to prevent endless sequences of violence
and dichotomies
Alain Badiou, French philosopher, professor @ European Graduate School, 2003, [Infinite Thought, p. 142-3]
As such, a second kind of evidence is proposed to philosophical labour; this time not that of an affect, but of a name, the
name 'terrorism'. This nominal evidence (that the mass crime of New York - signalled by the affect of the disaster - is a
terrorist action) has since played a decisive role. By fixing a designated enemy, it has cemented a world coalition,
authorized the UN to declare that the US is in a state of'legitimate defence', and initiated the programming of the
targets of vengeance. At a deeper level, the word 'terrorism' has a triple function:
It determines a subject - this is the subject who is targeted by theterrorist act, who is struck, who is plunged into
mourning and who must lead the vengeful riposte. This subject is named either 'Our Societies', or 'The West', or
'The Democracies' or, even, 'America'
but the latter at the price, swiftly paid by the editors, that 'we' are 'all American'.
It supports predicates - on this occasion terrorism is 'Islamic'.
It determines a sequence - the entire current sequence is from now on considered as 'the war against terrorism'.
We are warned that it will be a long war, an entire epoch. In short, the 'war against Islamic terrorism' takes over from
the Cold (and Hot: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba .. .) War against communism.
There, once again, philosophy has a duty: if it is to register the widespread evidence of the word 'terrorism' as an
important symptom, then it must examine the latter's origin and application.
In short, there are two rules to the method. First, philosophy is never transitive to affect no matter how widespread the
latter might be. A crime is a crime, agreed. But the consequences of a crime - even one that, formally, is fascistic -
cannot mechanically be other crimes. And this designation, 'crime', should also be applied to State crimes, including
those - innumerable - committed by 'democratic' States. As we well know - in fact, at the least since Aeschylus'
Oresteia and thus for a long time - the question is always to know how to reinstate justice in the place of vengeance.
Second, however commonly held the dominant nominations may be, philosophy cannot accept them without
critical examination. Philosophy knows that in general such nominations are under the control of the powers that be and
their propaganda.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 210
LINK - DISCOURSE
The concept of terrorism de-legitimizes violence committed by non-state actors - such hypocrisy falls prey to
propaganda which recreates subject-object binaries and enables violence to be justified
It is remarkable that the word 'terrorism', which clearly qualified a particular figure of the exercise of State power,
has come, little by little, to signify exactly the contrary. Indeed, for a long time now the word 'terrorist' has been
used by the State to designate all violent and/or armed political adversaries, precisely in view of their non-State
character. As examples we can list the Russian terrorists of Narodnaia Volia at the end of the last century; all those of the
anarchist tradition, including the Bande a Bonnot in France; and the character of Chen, in Man's Fate, who, already,
incarnated the decision of the suicide attack and to which Malraux gave - without justifying it politically - a terrible
grandeur. But the word has finally come to designate - and it is here that it takes on a negative connotation - from
the position of the dominant, all those who engage in a combat, using whatever means at hand, against a given
order which is judged to be unacceptable. 'Terrorists', the anti-Nazi resistors for Petain and his militia; 'terrorists', the
Algerian patriots of the NLF for every French government without exception between 1954 and 1962; as are also the
Palestinian lighters for the State of Israel, and the Chechens for Putin ancl his clique. 'Terrorists' lastly, for Bush and
his servile patriotic opinion, the nebulous, or at least extremely- opaque, group of those who attack and incriminate
Americans' goods and lives.
It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandist term.
It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and
consequences.
In fact, it is a term that has become essentially formal. 'Terrorist' no longer designates a political orientation or the
possibilities of such and such a situation, but rather, and exclusively, the form of action. And it does so according to
three criteria. It is first and foremost - for public opinion and those who attempt to shape it - a spectacular, non-State
action, which emerges - reality or myth - from clandestine networks. Second, it is a violent action aiming to kill or
destroy. Lastly, it is an action which makes no distinction between civilians and non-civilians.
This formalism approaches Kant's moral formalism. This is why a 'moral philosophy' specialist like Monique Canto
believed she could declare that the absolute condemnation of 'terrorist' actions and the symmetrical approval of
reprisals, including those of Sharon in Palestine, could and should precede any examination of the situation, and be
abstracted from any concrete political considerations. When it is a matter of 'terrorism', according to this Iron lacly of a
new breed, to explain is already to justify. It is thus appropriate to punish without delay and without further examination.
Henceforth, 'terrorism' qualifies an action as the formal figure of Evil. Moreover, this is exactly how Bush from the
very beginning conceived of the deployment of vengeance: Good (in concrete, State terrorism directed against peasant
villages and the ancient cities of Central Asia) against Evil (non-State terrorism directed at 'Western' buildings).
It is at this point, where rationality risks collapsing beneath the immensity of the propagandistic evidence, that one
must be careful with the details. In particular, one must examine the effects of the nominal chain induced by the
passage from the adjective 'terrorist' - as the formal qualification of an action to the substantive 'terrorism'.
Indeed, such is the moment when, insidiously, form becomes substance. Three kinds of effect are thereby rendered
possible: a subject-effect (facing 'terrorism' is a 'we' avenging itself); an alterity-effect (this 'terrorism' is the other
of Civilization, the 'Islamic' barbarian) ; and finally, a periodization-effect (now commences the long 'war against
terrorism').
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 211
LINK - DISCOURSE
The term ‘terrorism’ constructs a threat against which ‘Americans’ or ‘democracies’ must coalesce - this justifies
indiscriminate retaliatory violence
It is obvious that 'terrorism' is a non-existent substance, an empty name. But this void is precious because it can be
filled. And, first of all, as always, it is filled (as it was for 'the Boche' or 'the Jew') by that which is supposed to be
opposed to it (the 'Frenchman' or the 'Aryan'). On this occasion, facing 'terrorism' there is a 'we' defending itself.
Now, outside America - a name sufficient for American imperi¬alist patriotism but hardly so for the anti-terrorist
coalition, except if 'we are all American', which even the committed anti-terrorists balk at declaring - three names have
been found for this 'we' facing the beast: a perilous but weighty name, 'the West'; a neutral name, 'our societies'; and
a legitimating name, 'the democracies'.
In relation to the first of these names, it is regrettable to have to note that philosophy compromised itself there long ago;
what with The Decline of the West - Spengler's best-seller - at the end of the nineteenth century, and with what continues
nowadays in the phrase 'the end of Western metaphysics'. The 'Western' appropriation of thought - which is nothing
but the intellectual trace of four centuries of imperialism -resounds right up to and including the opposition of the
West (Christian? Jewish?'; to 'Islamic terrorism'. Apart from anything else, let us recall for the younger generations that
for decades the political use of the term 'the Occident' was confined to the racist extreme right, to the point of
being the name of one of its most violent groupuscules.2 Moreover, it seems to us that the litany of colonial atrocities
committed throughout the entire world, the savagery of the world-scale slaughters, the wars of national liberation
in Asia, the Middle-East and Africa, the armed revolts in Latin America, the universal value of the Chinese revolution,
and the febrile sterility of the world in which we live, is sufficient for those who see an opposition being drawn up
between 'Western values' and 'Terrorism' to conclude that 'terrorism' is a hollow word.
When 'our societies' are spoken of and it is declared that 'terrorism' wanted to 'strike them in their very heart' or
'destabilize' them, let us agree that what is being referred to is either still 'the West' but in a more demure fashion,
or it is a material paradigm; a certain state of objective wealth which, in itself, has no kind of value for the
philosopher and furthermore which would not be able to ground any kind of consistent solidarity. If this is not the case,
then why does the crime of New York affect 'our societies', while neither the millions of AIDS deaths in Africa nor
the genocidal disast ers in Rwanda affect them in any way? 'our societies', designating in a faintly obscene manner
the completely relative well-being of some of the wealthiest human groups (minorities) on the planet, hardly make for
a presentable face-off against the supposed substance of terrorism. Even if Monique Canto - her again - judges that it is
philosophi¬cally superior and indispensable in the situation to remind us that being very rich is not a moral fault. Yet, to
go against the grain of her formalist zeal, we would only grant her such a point after a meticulous and concrete
examina¬tion of the origins of the wealth in question. For it could well be that all genuinely considerable wealth today is
entirely, and by way of necessity, implicated in certain indubitable crimes.
Of the three names for 'us' only the third, fundamentally propagandistic, remains: what 'terrorism' targets is the
'Democracies', and in their heart, that exemplary democ¬racy which we all know as the United States of America.
As any old patriot from over there will tell you, 'it's a free country', and those Saudi fanatics, that's what they wanted to
mutilate. 'Terrorism against democracy'; such is the formula for consensus. I mean, for the overwhelming majority of
our contemporaries: here, in this jaded 'democratic' country, France, the sole space for a political inscription of the
mass crime of New York is the one outlined by that formula. It is this formula which has neutralized reactions and
generated general support, albeit a little plaintive, for the American war. Finally, it has been conceded that, in any
case, if the democracies are attacked by terrorism then, in view of their excellence, they have the right to avenge
themselves. What remains to be known is against whom these legitimate reprisals are to be carried out.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 212
LINK - WAR ON TERROR
America’s bloody attempt to rewrite the global narrative through the “war on terror” is a practice
constructed by an intersection of both geopolitical economic interests and otherizing cultural
representations
Derek Gregory in 2004 [“The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq,” p. 16]
For the war on terror is an attempt to establish a new global narrative in which the power to narrate is vested in a
particular constellation of power and knowledge within the United States of America. I want to show how ordinary people
have been caught up in its violence: the thousands murdered in New York City and Washington on September 11, but also
the thousands more killed and maimed in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq under its bloody banners. The colonial present
is not produced through geopolitics and geoeconomics alone, through foreign and economic policy set in motion by
presidents, prime ministers and chief executives, the state, the military apparatus and transnational corporations. It is also
set in motion through mundane cultural forms and cultural practices that mark other people as irredeemably "Other" and
that license the unleashing of exemplary violence against them. This does not exempt the actions of presidents, prime
minister, and chief executives from scrutiny (and, I hope, censure); but these imaginative geographies lodge many more of
us in the same architectures of enmity. It is important not to allow the spectacular violence of September 11, or the wars in
Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, to blind us to the banality of the colonial present and to our complicity in its horrors.
Representative geopolitical distinctions engender wars because they create self-other binaries referred to
as architectures of enmity
These extensions have been made possible through the connective imperative between colonial modernity and its
architecture of enmity. I borrow this phrase from political scientist Michael Shapiro, and it flows through much of my
discussion in different forms and from different sources. 'Geography is inextricably linked to the architecture of enmity,"
Shapiro writes, because it is centrally implicated "in how territorially elaborated collectivities locate themselves in the
world and thus how they practice the meanings of Self and Other that provide the conditions of possibility for regarding
others as threats or antagonists."" Architectures of enmity are not halls of mirrors reflecting the world - they enter into its
very constitution - and while the imaginaries to which they give shape and substance are animated by fears and desires
they are not mere phantasms. They inhabit dispositions and practices, investing them with meaniKg IiT legitimation, and
so sharpen the spurs of action. As the American response to September 11 unfolded, and preparations were made for an
armed assault on Afghanistan, James Der Derian cautioned that "more than a rational calculation of interests takes us to
war. People go to war becauseof-how they-see, perceive, picture, imagine and speak of others: that is, how they I
construct the difference of others as well as the sameness of themselves
through re presentation."1
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 213
IMPACT - SERIAL POLICY FAILURE
The strategic violence implemented by the War on Terror is subject to serial policy failure in which terrorism can
only be furthered and never contained - the condemnation of the violence of the affirmative is key to solve
In this way, strategic and terrorist violence can take on a similar character. What is so dangerous is that, historically, they
can form into a never-ending chain of mutually enabling supposition. Consider 9/11, and then work back. In 1998, bin
Laden was interviewed by an American ABC network journalist who asked him to whom his ‘fatwa’ directing Muslims to
kill Jews and American applied. Bin Laden replied: American history does not distinguish between civilians and military,
and not even women and children. They are the ones who used the bombs against Nagasaki. Can these bombs distinguish
between infants and military? . . . The only way for us to fend off these assaults is to use similar means. (Miller 1998)
Three years later we found that he certainly was not joking. The normative chain established here is built on a view that
our crimes legitimate and necessitate theirs, and vice versa; so long as injustice prevails, such moral distinctions cannot
hold. It is also vested in a crude form of instrumental/strategic reason that sees civilian populations as objects of effective
coercion. This has long been an element of the doctrine of strategic bombing - as expressed by Guilio Douhet (1972),
updated in more recent years by Buzan (2002), and put into action in Israel’s 2006 war against Lebanon - but was also
there at the beginnings of the nuclear age. In his Danger and Survival, Bundy (1988) recounts how, when a committee
established by President Harry S. Truman considered the most effective use of the atomic bombs produced by the
Manhattan Project, ‘every target recommended, and every one approved by Truman, was a city’ (p. 67). Secretary of War
Stimson argued that while ‘we could not concentrate on a civilian area . . . we should seek to make a profound
psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible’ (p. 70). The Cold War analyst Thomas Schelling put
the strategy in even starker terms: ‘the political target of the bomb was not the dead of Hiroshima or the factories they
worked in, but the survivors in Tokyo’ (Schelling 1966, p. 17). Such strategies are, in my view and that of the Secretary-
General’s High Level Panel, inherently terrorist in nature. Surely, as the panel defines terrorism, they are acts: intended to
cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context,
is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing
any act. (United Nations 2004, p. 26) On this definition, the strategic intent behind the US bombing of North Vietnam and
Cambodia, Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, or the sanctions against Iraq is also terrorist. My point is not to remind us that
states practise terror, but to show how mainstream strategic doctrines are terrorist in these terms and undermine any
prospect of achieving the normative consensus required if such terrorism is to be reduced and eventually eliminated. My
argument is echoed by the High Level Panel, which puts the view that: the strong, clear normative framework of the
United Nations surrounding State use of force must be complemented by a normative framework of equal authority
surrounding non-State use of force. Attacks that specifically target innocent civilians and non-combatants must be
condemned clearly and unequivocally by all. (United Nations 2004, §161 52)
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 214
IMPACT - VIOLENCE
Sans a critique of strategic violence, populations are reduced to death in the present - necropolitics and a never
ending cycle of violence
To succeed, such a cosmopolitanism must be joined with a critique of violence as a perverse form of instrumental action
that so often fails to link means and ends into an enduring and stable reality. Contra Clausewitz, Schelling, or bin Laden,
hurt is not a strategic or political tool, and human beings will not tolerate being subjects of violence and playthings of
power.4 All hurt produces is an ever widening system of disaster. I remainhaunted by Achille Mbembe’s disturbing
analysis of modern biopolitics and sovereignty as a form of necropolitics, citing occupied Palestine as one example where
the space ofexistence has been transformed into a ‘death-world’, a ‘new and unique form of social existence in which vast
populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’. It is easy then to imagine
individuals choosing to become suicide bombers (and ironically transforming themselves into instruments of
instrumentalityin politics) when ‘death in the present . . . is but a moment of vision - vision of the freedom not yet come’
(Mbembe 2003, pp. 39-40).5 Normative progress is supremelydifficult to advance under such conditions, and
cosmopolitan visions of justice and coexistencemust seem like cruel and indulgent dreams. Yet by now it must be clear
that neither strategic nor terrorist violence will provide security or liberation. Hence, whether or not we can agree on a
larger normative vision, perhaps we can agree on violence. That is, that the desire to eliminate specifically terrorist forms
ofviolence ought to be the core normative end of critical terrorism studies. This in turnbrings about the prospect of a
further ‘end’: that of critical terrorism studies itself, as itsobject of critique recedes from the practice of politics, relegating
the field to a branch ofthe historical sciences. Better that than a terror industry invested in the continuation of thevery
horrors that provide it with funding, prestige and rationality. An honourable ‘end’ for critical terrorism studies: to
conceive and enable a normative transformation that mightone day see its own abolition.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 215
IMPACT - VIOLENCE
The rhetoric of terrorism prevents finding solutions to the problem of violence and allows us to be
complicit in atrocities.
Bleiker, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, in ‘3

[Roland, Aestheticising terrorism: alternative approaches to 11 September, The Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 49]
Most commentators--including the author of this essay--would readily agree that defending democratic principles against terrorist threats is a worthwhile endeavour. It is, indeed, essential.
Whether or not a rhetoric of good versus evil is helpful to this task is an entirely different question. Various analysts strongly challenge this assumption. Douglas Klusmeyer, Astri Suhrke and
Roxanne Euben, for instance, argue that a rhetoric of evil prevents both serious investigation into the phenomenon of terrorism and,
perhaps more importantly, innovative solutions to addressing it. (34) Several convincing reasons can be found to support such a position. Much like
Rumsfeld's metaphorical portrayal of the burglar as an "evil guy", the rhetoric of "evil states" removes the phenomenon of terrorism into the realm
of irrationality. Evil, then, is a term of condemnation for a phenomenon that can neither be fully comprehended nor
addressed, except through militaristic forms of dissuasion and retaliation. This is why Klusmeyer and Suhrke see the
rhetoric of "evil" as an "analytical cul de sac" that prevents, rather than encourages understanding. (35) It certainly leaves
far too many questions unanswered. This is particularly fateful in the domain of terrorism, where even the meaning of the
term is of an intensely political nature. The killing of innocent civilians, for instance, is not enough to define an act of
violence as terrorism.If that were the case, then a variety of US interventions, from Iraq to Afghanistan, would need to be
classified as terrorist acts. The issue, rather, revolves around who can legitimately employ violence to further certain
political goals. "What is described as terrorism by one group may be variously regarded as heroism, foreign policy, or
justice by others", stresses Grant Wardlaw in a classical study on the subject. (36) The key to understanding terrorism,
then, does not lie with violence as such, but with the differences between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force. And this
division, in turn, is directly linked to issues of statehood and sovereignty. Max Weber famously described the state as a human community "that
claims the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". (37) But the question of violence and
legitimacy clearly goes beyond the territorial bounds of the sovereign state. At an international level too, the state claims
to have a certain right to the legitimate use of force. And it is from this claim that emerges the moral distinction between
war (a legitimate act of violence perpetuated by a state) and terrorism (an illegitimate use of violence perpetuated by a
non-state actor.) Whether or not innocent civilians are killed is a rather secondary question if viewed from such a vantage-point. This of course
does not mean that one cannot justify the use of force for certain purposes. A military response in the spirit of jus ad bellum, or a
humanitarianintervention designed to stop a genocide, may be justifiable according to international law, even if innocent
civilians are killed in the process. But such a justification becomes far more difficult--both legally and ethically--if a
simplistic rhetoric of evil obscures the political content of the struggle over the legitimate use of force . More difficult as well becomes
the task of criticising authoritarian regimes that use the rhetoric of "evildoing terrorists" to suppress domestic political dissent. (38) Some go as far as arguing that a rhetoric of evil
entails an "evasion of accountability", for the normative connotations of the term inevitably leads to policy positions that "deny negotiations
and compromise". (39) How is it, indeed, possible to negotiate with "evil" without being implicated in it, without getting sucked into its problematic
vortex? The difficulties are evident. This is why theAmerican government could not and did not negotiate with the Taliban leaders
of Afghanistan. Even though none of the terrorists involved or implicated in the 11 September attack was of Afghan
origin, a link to the Taliban regime was clear enough. The only policy option, then, was an ultimatum and, once it expired,
military action. "The opposition between good and evil is not negotiable", Allan Bloom already noted at the time of Reagan. It is a question of principles, and thus a "cause of war".
(40) Bloom is right in noting this inevitable consequence, but he is mistaken in pointing out that criticising the logic of "good versus evil" leads into a "value relativism" that portrays the
struggle over meaning simply as "insubstantial stuff, existing primarily in the imagination". (41) The struggle over values is an essential element of politics
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 216
IMPACT - BIOPOLITICAL VIOLENCE
The flipside of America’s supposed benevolence is power to disqualify threatening life - intervention itself
seeks to impose order open chaotic space. This biopolitical practice has causes mass violence and
military intervention in the name of civilizing missions.
Cairo in 2k6 (Heriberto, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Alternatives, “The
Duty of the Benevolent Master: From Sovereignty to Suzerainty and the Biopolitics of Intervention,” vol 31, ebsco)
In these narratives, “thefacts are structured in such a way that they become components in a particular story ,” which creates an
order of meaning in the narrated events.5 In the “micronarratives” of the political actors,6 geopolitical explanations were important in the past, and they
are important now in order to make intelligible the so-called “foreign policy.”7 Western leaders have used the argument about the
“danger to neighbor countries” from Iraq and other “rogue states” extensively since the First Gulf War. Even a new “domino theory” has been
formally formulated: Historians may argue about whether the domino theory really applied to Communism, but I have no doubt that it does apply to the chaos of failed states. In the
1990s the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo sucked in countries throughout the Great Lakes region of Africa. One of the biggest obstacles to peace in Sierra Leone was continuing
violence in neighbouring Liberia. Even now any slide back into ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia could affect the whole region. An Afghanistan in chaos remains a threat to its
neighbours in Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia, whose stability is already undermined by the drugs trade and the refugee crisis.8 The formulation of these simplistic
statements about the metaphysical consequences of territorial position is amplified by the mass media. Their reception is facilitated by the way
they reaffirm the certainties of the Cold War . However from a critical perspective the relation between spatial structures and discourse
cannot be interpreted in a teleological way. As Henri Lefebvre points out: “Space was produced before being read; nor was it produced in order to be read and grasped,
but rather in order to be lived by people with bodies and lives. . . . In short, ‘reading’ follows production.”9 That is to say, spatial structures are produced historically with
the aim of providing people with a guide to orient their bodies in their dwelling space. It is therefore irrelevant whether this guide responds to an objective
necessity in the economic or political field. What is important is to understand that the spatial structure is a structure of domination - in Anthony Giddens’s sense10-
both economic and political. In the process of production of these structures it is necessary to establish their legitimization,
and then they become meaningful in the system of communication. They are not produced with the system of communication in mind, although the symbolic
element is an integral and essential part that we cannot forget if we intend to explain the whole system. <CONTINUES 1 PARAGRAPH
LATER>Representations of space,13 like that implicit in the new domino theory formulated by Jack Straw above, more than being the result of economic or political pressures to
dominate places that are described as black holes,are instrumental for arranging new uses for institutions, like the huge armies built during
the Cold War, or to regulate the economics of the military-industrial complex. Biopolitical considerations are also a
driving force of current interventions, and biopolitical accounts are also easily understandable: after all, people , bodies and
their conduct, are the immediate object of action. Following one after another,the armed and violent Western interventions are
legitimized in function by the necessity to eliminate some dangerous bodies, which would allow the reform of the conduct
of the population through its rebuilding into a “civilized,” “developed,”or “democratic” polity. The model was well constructed in World War II:
Hitler and the SS or the militarist officials of the Japanese army were the main obstacles to be overthrown, but the re-education of population was the main objective of the postwar policy. For
example, a US Army propaganda documentary entitled Our Job in Japan illustrates the character of the Japanese re-education program: From time to time in the documentary there are shots of
a brain and a voiceover claiming that Japanese brains had been “washed” thereby making difficulties for the US forces of occupation. The job of re-education dealt not exclusively with the
brain, but as well other parts of the body: The students at the schools had to ink out by hand all the phrases and words about the emperor and the army in their textbooks.14 Since the end
of the Cold War, the elimination of the dangerous bodies is effected through “clean” strikes, with only “co-lateral”
damage, and it has perhaps allowed an even stronger use of biopolitical arguments in the micronarratives of relevant
political actors. For instance, in the previous Iraq war, the oil wells seemed just to be accidentally there, it was the tyrant (his life in palaces with gold taps in the bathrooms), his
supporters (“loyalists” of the Republican Guard or “fanatics” of the Saddam’s Fedajin) and their fellow citizens who constitute the heart of the narrative of a new just war. Of course there is oil
in Iraq and a new gas pipeline is going to be built in Afghanistan, but thesovereign power is being applied to eliminate what Giorgio Agamben denominates as “bare
life” orthe “life that is unworthy of life.”15
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 217
IMPACT - COLONIAL VIOLENCE
The impact is part of a representational and aesthetic process of isolating spaces of instability and
disorder to achieve coherence of US identity. These representations are not benign-they motivated ways
of thinking that manifest materially as colonial violence toward the ‘uncivilized’ world.
Rajaram in 2k6
[Prem Kumar, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Alternatives 31, Dystopic
Geographies of Empire]
Though varying in its specific form across space, Europeancolonial power of the eighteenth and nineteenth centurieswas, broadly speaking, structured by two related
strategies of power. One was the structuring or ordering of space through epistemic appropriation and ontological
hierarchization, where the colony became a known and delimited space through techniques of mapping, archiving in museums, and census taking.The end result of this
imaginative and generative processeswas a “totalizingclassificatory grid,”1 a flexible semantic structure that not onlyprovided the stable base against
which identity, phenomena, and experience in the colonycould be understood but also signified the static temporality of the colony (which was perhaps the defining
element of colonialism). The force of the classificatorygrid lay in its capacity to orient the future , through active (and contested)processes of
maintaining and justifying the present in reference to (often codified) memories of the past and of custom or tradition.2These temporalizing processes ran
hand in glovewith spacing processes, where the boundaries and limits of the colonial space were drawn and redrawn at a variety of scales . A
number of scholars show that Europeancolonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesmay be read in terms of a heterogeneousdiscourse of
normalization, where an unruly space is transformed or isalways undergoing a process oftransformation into an orderly
dominion populated by more or less knowable identities.3The discourses of normalization whereby normal forms of living within the gridded colony are identified and
policed are representational practices . Such representational practices evoke complexstructures of affect and aesthetics: The
known dominion is essentiallyan imagined one. The discipline of organization is in a relation to the spectacle of
representation. The organization of lives and living in the colony signify a greater and enveloping abstraction: that of a more or less metaphysical “framework.”4 The
representation of bodies andidentities on an orderly grid harks to an absent conceptual frame-in the colony,perhaps notions of
“progress, reason, law, discipline, history, colonial authorityand order.”5 This order is the form of the colony, taken now as an
aesthetic creation or landscape-a formthat orders and enables the content. It is the framework that instantiates a way of thinking
about the self and its relation to the past, the present, and the future (and to how each of these concepts is articulated); in short,it is the framework-of order, reason,
progress, or what have you-that provides an arena of secure predictability . The power of the colonial order is notto be studiedsolely in its
effects (docile and knowable bodies) butin what the sum of organized bodies represent (a particular European or Western mode of thinking about the self, its relation
to external reality, and the extent to which the principles of order can be discerned in an external reality). This is thus the hierarchy and the dystopia. The
systematic completeness of the Western Cartesian mind , able to grasp and desirous of grasping the ordering structures of external realities, presumes andis
founded on its opposite-the irregular anddisorderly non-European mind: “When we pass from works of imagination to works
in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely
immeasurable.”6 The organization of the colony and the colonized body should not, I argue, be understood solely as a decentered force to be studied in its effects: It should be
associated also with a series of enabling frameworks whose specific form changes over space and time. These point then to fluid hegemonic processes and ideologies. Such hegemonic
processes and ideologies give hierarchy; they denote the premodern or the primitive (essentially, they enable the translation of recognized “cultural” differences between peoples into a series of
value judgments on the relative worth of other, non- Western, lives). It is important to note that such hegemonic
processes are neither purely discursive , in a limited
sense, nor unrelated to a material base -a material base, of relations of production, of the production and promulgation of
military force, that enacted and was fed by systematic processes of colonial exploitation based on the conceptualization of
land and people as economic goods. Such hegemonic processes and/or ideologies are founded upon and cyclically enable the continual
identification of dystopia and dystopic space. It is inherent in the identification of spaces of order that spaces of dystopia are
presumed. It is inherent in the promise of the modern utopia of progress that some are confined to the imaginary waiting
room of history.7 Dystopia enables and vindicates the gridding of colonial space . Dystopic imaginations are fundamentally
aesthetic forms of knowing. The aesthetic process of knowing, following the Frankfurt school and particularly Theodor Adorno, is imbued with
affect: with a volatile and perhaps sensuous investment of the self with and against its other .8 A dystopic imagination of
the colony, where the native and his space is understood in terms of lack, imagines a relation of power centered on extremes . Colonization may
be read as a process that reduces the colonized to a subhumanity , thus setting up a teleology or vision of progress and change
through a civilizing mission. It is important to read and trace the contours of colonial power from those disciplinary
processes that create the colonial state down to “the intimacies of human bodies.”9 If the process of colonization as
disciplinary procedure may be understood as a gradual process of creating a governable space, and if that process hinges
on a dystopic imagination of the space as lack and its inhabitants as occupying a lower niche on an evolutionary scale of
humanity, then the point at which the brutality underpinning representations of a civil order of colonialism becomes
evident is in bodies.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 218
IMPACT - GENOCIDE
Their ethnocentrist disad impacts turn a blind eye to the systemic genocide against Iraq and Afghanistan
because the lives of’ us’ are more important than the lives of ‘them’
There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the city of Baghdad to fall
down - hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with mothers 2nd soldiers inside - and here in the place I want to love best, I had to watch people cheering about it. In
Baghdad, survivors shook their fists at the sky and said the word "evil." When many lives are lost all at once, people gather together and say words like "heinous" and
"honor" and "revenge," presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from the ways people die a little each day from sickness or hunger. They raise up
their compatriots' lives to a sacred place - we do this, all of us who are human thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less willingly risked than lives
on other soil."In one sense, Kingsolver is surely right. There is something distasteful about cherry-picking among such extremes of horror. And yet in another sense, as I
think she recognizes in her last sentence, each one of the dreadful events she describes - and those she doesn't, including the genocides in Nazi occupied Europe,
Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, and Bosnia that preoccupy Power - was understood in different ways and produced different responses in different places. This is why
an analysis of the production of imaginative geographies is so vitally important. As Stephen Holmes puts it in his review
of Power's indictment of indifference (at best inattention) to so many of these contemporary genocides, the distinction
between "us" and "them" has consistently overshadowed any distinction between "just" and "unjust." Gilbert Achcar
describes this more generally as a "narcissistic compassion," rooted in a humanism that masks a naked ethnocentrism:
a form of empathy "evoked much more by calamities striking 'people like us,' much less by calamities affecting people
unlike us.""
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IMPACT - SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
Terrorism predictions inevitably fail-they’re assumptive of world of the status quo, not plan. And they justify the
violence they try to avoid.
Jasbir K. Puar, Amit Rai (Dept. of Women's Studies and Geography, Rutgers University /Associate Professor, PhD, 1996 from the Program in
Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University)2004 (The Remaking of a Model Minority: Perverse Projectiles under the Specter of
(Counter)Terrorism, Social Text, 80 (Volume 22, Number 3), pp. 75-104, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/soc/summary/v022/22.3puar.html)]
In that sense its immediate precursor and ally is the technology of insurance. In insurance, the term risk designates neither “an event nor a general
kind of event occurring in reality (the unfortunate kind) but a specific mode of treatment of certain events capable of happening to a
group of individuals-or, more exactly, to values or capitals possessed or represented by a collectivity of individuals: that is to say, a population.
Nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyzes
the danger, considers the event.” 39 In the counterterrorism imaginary, risk names a procedure of assessment,
counterintelligence, containment, and projection into the future. Its analysis is predicated on the fixity of implacably
opposed political forces whose only resolution resides in the murderous destiny of the United States to manage democracy
for the world (it is our “calling,” as President Bush says). Moreover, the sliding between structure and network returns here in the form of a sort of
insurance value. The sliding between the securely fixed and the terrifyingly unmoored that names the essential dynamic of
counterterrorism technologies generates specific kinds of selflegitimating exchange values that have innumerable
trajectories and their own surplus: cultural (counterterrorism revalues Western civilization), political (it gives the security state the aura of a
need), economic (the economics of fear drives the billions of dollars spent on everything from spy planes to home security systems), and affective
(fear itself has been given a new value after 9/11). Risk is at once the technology of the future that calls forth all the arts of
prediction that science can conjure in its mission to master the future and the abstract machine that diagrams our present.
But these terms-present, future-are no longer actually operative in community formations of terrorist risk. They interpenetrate
at each moment, determining each other in a dance of pure repetition. Thus when Randy Martin states that risk “is a rhetoric of the future that
is really about the present; it is a means of price setting on the promise that a future is attainable,” one must see that, first,
risk (financial or terroristic) is not merely a rhetoric-it is an abstract machine whose shiny surfaces do not reflect or signify
something as much as they form assemblages with other machines, like panopticism, biopolitics, or necropolitics; and
second, the future is now: the ambivalence of the present has given way to the anxieties of the present-future, this
anxiety is itself a temporality, an impossible becoming-totalitarian.40 Terrorist risk engenders a nation or, better, civilizational
burden unequally shared between members of a risk community. Members of that community would include the capitalist elite from all countries, but
not all could exercise equally the right to articulate a position in a “collectively binding” process of “decision making,”41 which demonstrates the
discursive kinship to ecological risk. Terrorist risk is both an acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge and a kind of abstract
but very real spur forever driving into the bodies of these men and women, driving them to produce absolute knowledge
of the other, to connect bodies to security machines, to detain, harass, and always surveil citizens and immigrants and
thereby multiply the borders to be policed (and, of course, as Homi K. Bhabha so brilliantly points out, it is the enunciation of the stereotype
that is crucial to this paradox).42 In that sense, the terrorist threat draws its enemies (the civilized subjects of modern risk
communities) to a future that has already excluded it. In the future, when it will come, and it will certainly come, there will be no
terrorism; meanwhile, in the present, its seemingly infinite proliferation only means that all we are saying is beside the
point: we must exterminate the brutes.43 In any case, what becomes possible through this preliminary diagram of terrorist
risk is the return of the early modern practice of a “good risk,” which is affirmative and designed to be “embraced for self-
betterment.”44 Because terrorist risk is both a burden of civilization for the transnational risk community against the axis
of evil and a mission for the truth, the good, and humanity, danger is revalued as a civilizational value. That is why the
civilized are waging an unending war. With every new body bag and suicide bomber the value of “danger” goes up.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 220
IMPACT - NUCLEAR WAR
Expansion of the system of security results in the deployment of nuclear weapons and unending violence.
Der Derian 1998

[James, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst, On Security, Columbia University Press,
Chapter 2: “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard,” Columbia International Affairs Online,
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz.html]
The rapidity of change in the international system, as well as the inability of international theory to make sense of that
change, raises this question:Of what value is security? More specifically,just how secure is this preeminent concept of
international relations? This evaluation of security invokes interpretive strategies to ask epistemological, ontological, and
political questions--questions that all too often are ignored, subordinated, or displaced by the technically biased, narrowly
framed question of what it takes to achieve security. The goal, then, of this inquiry is to make philosophically problematic
that which has been practically axiomatic in international relations. The first step is to ask whether the paramount value of security lies in its abnegation of
the insecurity of all values.No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary
power of "security."In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most
recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods, emperors,
and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national
interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact . And, less often noted in international relations, in its name billions
have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted. We have
inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be a widespread,
metaphysical belief in it. Indeed,within the concept of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics , which was best described by Derrida
"as a series of substitutions of center for center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." 1 From God to Rational Man, from Empire to Republic, from King to the People--and
on occasion in the reverse direction as well, for history is never so linear, never so neat as we would write it--the
security of the center has been the shifting site
from which the forces of authority, order, and identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos,
and difference. Yet the center, as modern poets and postmodern critics tell us, no longer holds. The demise of a bipolar system, the diffusion of power into new political, national, and
economic constellations, the decline of civil society and the rise of the shopping mall, the acceleration of everything --transportation, capital and information flows, change itself--have induced
a new anxiety. As George Bush repeatedly said--that is, until the 1992 Presidential election went into full swing --"The enemy is unpredictability. The enemy is
instability.”
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 221
IMPACT - EXTINCTION
The danger of the new security system puts all life at risk - the very same strategies which optimize life
generate new threats and dangers which must be met with violence. The result is a new hypersecurity
state that produces a permanent state of emergency
Dillon, Department of Politics and International Relations University of Lancaster, in 07

[Michael “Governing Terror”: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence”]
I want to return by way of conclusion to the relation of biopolitics to spatiality and temporality as well as to power. Whereas under sovereign juridical regimes of power, monopolizing the
taking of life helped demarcate the territorial integrity of the sovereign whose power was infinite, under biopolitics the very evental taking place of life now
becomes the locus of a power for which infinite flux of immanent contingent change is central. (Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair
insists on calling this modernization.) I am not arguing that all this is a matter of sheer luck or pure chance. Once more, it has to be emphasized that contingency has a history, and that the
history of modern liberal biopolitical contingency is thereby characterized by its own reason as well. Paradigmatically, that matrix of reason includes capitalism, but it also exceeds as it
reinforms capitalism’s pure economic calculus of circulation the advent and exponential growth of the future markets is a case in point. Here what Marx after Aristotle called the
perpetuum mobile of circulation(Marx 1976:226), which defines capitalism, is also embedded within a wider perpetuum mobile of
biopolitical reproduction, where the innermost principle of life itself is survival as adaptive contingency . In respect
ofspatialization, one might also say, iconically, that Mercator projection cedes political priority,if not of course all political and economic
significance, to the new life-spatializing sciences such as those for example of genetic mapping, virtual cartography, and
epidemiology (Rogers 1996, 2000, 2002, 2004; McNally 2005). (Our biological imagination is governed by the metaphors of mapping as
much as it is by the metaphors of information and code ; Gaudillie`re and Rheinberger 2004.) New tabulations of life,as contingent
adaptation whose very circulation amplifies and intensifies all the systemic hazards, risks, dangers, pathologies, and
epidemics to which it is subject, engender a new space and time of biopolitical existence for the twenty-first century .
Hence: the widespread medicalization of security discourse and practices from asymptomatically ill beings and
preventative medicine to asymptomatically dangerous beings and preventative war.Hence also: the securitization of
medicine as an integral part of the strategy of national resilience for dealing with catastrophic event and terroristic attack .
When at the end of the Order of Things Foucault imagined that one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand
at the edge of the sea (387), wemight also observe how thequasi-transcendentals of Labour, Life, and Language that he
identified as demarcating Man have been mutating into Information, Animation, and Code . In the process, Circulation, Connectivity, and
Complexity offer replacements. The new sciences of Circulation specifying a new terrain of value across which life as such, and not
simply Man as a living being, is now ordered offer different accounts of dissemination, proliferation, propagation
especially of how new threats and dangers are constituted and very rapidly amplified by the very same systems that
circulate life. The new sciences of Connectivity give novel accounts of the global-local propinquity, adhesion, adherences, proximities, associations, alliances, virtualities, realities, and
belonging that constitute life. The new Complexity sciences study the lifelike properties of complex adaptive systems and offer
novel accounts of the spontaneous non-linear phase changes that are now said to constitute the vital signs of such life’s
very animation.What lends unity to the field of new knowledge demarcated by this over triangulation of
quasitranscendentals is no longer Man, but Contingency.Thus has the modern been morphing into a new, hypersecuring
liberal biopolitical positivity in which the cult of Man erasing itself biopolitically the odds on species extinction continue
in lethal paradox to shorten remorselessly.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 222
***BORDERS***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 223
LINK - BORDERS
Modern international law re-entrenches colonialism by enforcing and legitimizing the cartography of the time
period this makes political reconciliation, and enduring peace impossible. Disparate people with different political
goals, different histories and different cultures are forced together into one polity.
TayyabMahmud professor of law at Seattle University school of law director of the center for global justice 2010 [colonial cartographies and
postcolonial borders: the unending war in and around Afghanistan Brooklyn journal of international law vol 20:1http://ssrn.com/abstract=1596835 ]
Many of today’s pervasive and intractable security and nation-building dilemmas issue from the dissonance between the
prescribed model of territorially bounded nation-states and the imprisonment of postcolonial polities in territorial
straitjackets bequeathed by colonial cartographies. With a focus on the Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and
Pakistan and the epicenter of the prolonged war in the region, this article explores the enduring ramifications of the
mutually constitutive role of colonialism and modern law. The global reach of colonial rule reordered subjects and
reconfigured space. Fixed territorial demarcations of colonial possessions played a pivotal role in this process. Nineteenth
century constructs of international law, geography, geopolitics, and the frontier, fashioned in the age of empire, were
interwoven in the enabling frame that made the drawing of colonial borders like the Durand Line possible. Imperatives of
colonial rule and compulsions of imperial rivalries positioned these demarcations that often cut across age-old cultural and
historical social units. Postcolonial states inherited these demarcations and, with them, a host of endemic political and
security afflictions. Modern international law, which in its incipient stage lent license to colonial rule, today legitimates
colonial cartographies, thereby accentuating postcolonial dilemmas of nation-building and territorial integrity. By freeze-
framing inherited colonial borders, international law forces disparate people to circumscribe their political aspirations
within predetermined territorial bounds, precluding political and territorial arrangements in tune with their aspirations. To
silence the questions that rise from colonial territorial demarcations, international law raises the specter of disorder. It
seeks to preserve order, even an unjust and dysfunctional one. In the process, international law betrays a deeper affliction
that plagues it - its refusal to squarely face its complicity in colonial domination accentuates its inability to resolve today’s
international disputes procreated by colonial cartographies.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 224
LINK - BORDERS
Modern International law legitimizes colonialism by enforcing and assigning value to the borders drawn by the
colonial powers this makes it part of the problem. we must re-imagine political communities beyond the
straitjackets or territorial states.
Modern colonialism was nothing if not an exercise in audacity. The global reach of colonial rule reordered subjects and
reconfigured space. Fixed territorial demarcations of colonial possessions played a pivotal role in this process. Issuing
from imperatives of colonial rule and compulsions of rivalries between colonial powers, these demarcations often cut
across age-old cultural and historical social units. Postcolonial states inherited these demarcations and, with them, a host
of endemic political and security afflictions. The unmistakable spatiality of the so-called Great Games, both old and new,
brings into relief the continuing salience of space and territory in an age when supposedly the forces and processes of
globalization had rendered them irrelevant. Modern international law, which in its incipient stage lent license to colonial
rule, today legitimates colonial cartographies, thereby accentuating postcolonial dilemmas and conflicts. This accords
with the larger affliction that plagues international law: its refusal to squarely face its complicity in the process of empire
building combines with its inability to break free of the shadow of a sordid past. The career of the Durant Line highlights
that when addressing many of today’s intractable conflicts, the law as it exists is more of a problem than a solution. As
humanity struggles to imagine political communities beyond the straitjackets of territorial states, a primary challenge is to
clear the conceptual and doctrinal hurdles that remain in the way. This necessitates breaking free of imperial geographies
and economies of knowledge that undergird modern legal constructs and international regimes. Albert Einstein cautioned
us that “it is theory which decides what can be observed.” The first step in that direction is to align our inquiries and sights
with the other side of the lines drawn by international law.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 225
LINK - BORDERS
Uti Possidetis, the principle that post-colonialist states will keep the border it had when it was a colony, is a
political tool used to pacify the global south, stunt self-determination and hide modern colonialist intervention.
The doctrine of uti possidetis, far from being grounded in any sound legal principle, is thus more a political instrument to
legitimate existing state boundaries. The precarious status of the norm was underscored by the Beagle Channel
Arbitration’s observation that it is “possibly,at least at first, a political tenet rather than a true rule of law.” 365
Koskenniemi sees in the recognition of uti possidetis an acknowledgment that the ethical conception of international law
cannot override the sociological. 366 Demarcation of boundaries is essentially a political act. However, when reified by
international law, these boundaries appear to have an identity separate from politics of the international system. The
primary rationale for the adoption of the principle has been to avoid territorial conflict among post-colonial states,
particularly in the light of international law’s primary role - preservation of order. While peace and order remain elusive
in the global system, uti possidetis furnishes a cloak of legitimacy over colonial disposition of territories of the global
South by eliding the questions of the origins of these dispositions. By forcing disparate people to circumscribe their
political aspirations within predetermined territorial bounds, uti possidetis reverses the vision of self-determination that
seeks to protect vulnerable populations by allowing them political and territorial arrangements of their own. 367 Ian
Brownlie is unequivocal in stating that “it is uti possidetis which creates the ambit of the pertinent unit of self-
determination, and which in that sense has logical priority over self- determination.” 368 The problem is that this logical
priority furnishes the grounds for actual priority of territory over people.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 226
LINK - NATION BUILDING
Efforts at nation building problematize ethnic communities. small disparate ethnic communities become
“problem” allowing the nation to become the “solution”. this rhetoric of security allows the nation to destroy the
ethnic communities and unify a region around the colonialist borders and an inherited geo-piety
Building of state-nations procreates the problem of minorities, ethnicities, ethno- nationalism, separatism, and sub-state
nationalism. “[T]he nation dreads dissent” 280 and “the nation-state’s limits implicate its geographic peripheries as central
to its self-fashioning.” 281 In the process a co-constitutive role of “nation” and ethnicity develops as a “productive and
dialectical dyad.” 282 It is by the construction of ethnicity as a “problem” that the “nation” becomes the resolution and the
state incarnates itself as the authoritative problem solver. In this way often “the very micropolitics of producing the nation
are responsible for its unmaking or unraveling.” 283 Incessant rhetoric of endangerment and discursive production of
threats to the nation render “nation-building” a coercive enterprise and facilitate the overdevelopment of the coercive
apparatuses of the state. 284 While inherited boundaries represent the postcolonial state- nation’s “geo-body,” 285 cultural
and ethnic heterogeneity within induces “geo-piety.” 286 It is surprise, then, that most postcolonial states have as their
raison d’etre the production, maintenance, and reproduction of the discourses and apparatuses of national security. 287
The career of Pakistan as a postcolonial state circumscribed within an inherited territorial frame substantiates this political
grammar.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 227
LINK - N.TER.NAT’L LAW
International law fails its commitment to territorial integrity inevitably reproduces colonialism
The ICJ has acknowledged that by giving fixity and legitimacy to colonial boundaries, the principle uti possidetis “at first
sight … conflicts outright with another one, the right of peoples to self-determination.” 344 In the face of this dilemma,
the ICJ fell back on pragmatism to claim that “maintenance of the territorial status quo” is essential to “preserve what has
been achieved by people who have struggled for their independence.” 345 The Court sought support for this claim with a
gesture toward the practice of post-colonial states: “[t]he essential requirement of stability in order to survive, to develop
and gradually to consolidate their independence in all fields, has induced African states judiciously to consent to the
respecting of colonial frontiers, and to take account of it in the interpretation of the principle of self-determination.” 346
HereNesiahrightly sees a “double bind” infecting the Court as it is committed to decolonization but “[t]erritorial integrity
emerges here as a statist spatial representation intelligible to international law, and posited as indispensible to the self-
determination of the postcolony.” 347
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 228
***SOLVENCY***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 229
SOLVENCY - TOTAL WITHDRAWAL KEY
The United States must immediately and unconditionally leave Afghanistan and Iraq. Reasons why some
presence is good while some is bad props up US imperialism and perpetuates the global hegemonic order
the United States military imposes on the world. No other country is as important. We should not seek
to make the military better, or more accountable, or more benign. We must completely and totally
destroy it. We recognize that our demand would never immediately be complied with by the government,
but only a calling out of imperialism can mobilize people against the institution of the United States.
Mike Ely, founder Kasama Project, Demand Complete and Immediate Withdrawal from
Afghanistan, 2002. http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/demand-complete-and-immediate-withdrawal-from-aghanistan/
I think what is posed in Medea Benjamin’s interview is a rather simple and important question: Can U.S. imperialism and its troops play a
positive role in some circumstances? The U.S. invades the remote and impoverished Afghanistan in 2001, topples the fragile regime of
Taliban theocrats (which never consolidated countrywide power in the civil war). And now it is argued that the U.S. invaders “can’t” leave
in an “irresponsible” way because the survival of a number of people (including women’s activists) would be in danger and
because their withdrawal would most likely mean a return of the Taliban. Should we carefully evaluate U.S. aggressions
on a case-by-case basis? Is this U.S. military base good, and that one bad? Is this U.S. bombing helpful, and that one excessive? Is
this U.S. nuclear threat helpful, and that one unfair? Is this U.S. drone doing good work, and that one intruding dangerously? Is this U.S.
occupation shielding and promoting positive forces - while that U.S. occupation cultivates more negative puppets? Do we
support U.S. domination until someone better comes along (who we approve of) to take their place? Or does the U.S.
military (globally and everywhere) represent a coherent means of imposing and enforcing a particular global order on
humanity generally - an order that is rooted in horrific oppression and exploitation (including the widespread commodification of
women as both workers and sexual slaves, and the traditional domestic servitude of literally billions of women and girls)?WHAT WE NEED IS A
CLEAR UNCOMPROMISING UNAPOLOGETIC POSITION: We must demand that U.S. imperialism leave Afghanistan
immediately and unconditionally - without finding ways to prop up residual collaborators and puppet forces, without
continuing to “provide air cover” for continuing war crimes. The Afghanistan people need to be left to resolve their
political affairs (and develop their own very difficult struggle for liberation) without U.S. domination and violence .And
because this is apparently quite controversial (even on the left): We should deepen our own understanding that these armed forces cannot and
will not help the people in any part of the world. Are there other reactionary forces in the world? Taliban? Al Qaida? Saddam
Hussein? Islamic theocrats in Iran? Somali warlords? French colonial troops? Genocidal Israeli settlers and commanders? Turkish military
commandos? Russian death squads in Chechnia? Catholic priests and bishops doing their secret crimes against humanity? And so on. Of
course. There are manyother reactionary forces in the world. Some of them are U.S. allies. Some of them have sharp
contradictions with U.S. imperialism. Some of them flip back and forth. But U.S. occupation of Afghanistan (or Iraq) is
itself a means of strengthening the world’s most odious and oppressive force. And the impact of a successful pro-U.S.
pacification of Afghanistan cannot just be measured in terms of how it impacts people or sections of the people in
Afghanistan. A victory for the U.S. in Afghanistan or stabilization of pro-U.S. arrangements in Afghanistan will be a
major negative influence on the dynamics of the world as a whole. This is true, objectively. And pointing out this truth
is especially important within the U.S. itself - where illusions about the U.S. role in the world are especially strong (even
on the left). Far too many people delude themselves that there can be a “more democratic U.S. foreign policy” that “helps”
people. No, we have a special responsibility to fight the criminal actions of “our” government - and to expose its nature.
Our goal is not to “more effectively” serve “U.S. national interests.” We do not seek to “improve the U.S. image around
the world.” We are not worried that “the wrong policies will get even more people to oppose U.S. initiatives.” We do not
want to “preserve and promote the American way of life.” We don’t want to figure out some “people’s foreign policy” or
some way for the fucking Marines to “play a good role.” We don’t want a “more accountable CIA.” No. We want to bring
down U.S. imperialism from without and from within. Not only must we demand that the U.S. withdraw immediately and
without delay from its many overt and covert wars - but we must put forward a larger vision that the dismantling of all the
vicious U.S. armed instruments of power is in the historic interests of humanity. That means the systematic and unilateral
destruction of its nuclear arsenals, the disbanding of its armed forces, the abolition of its CIA, the public revelation of its crimes, the dismantling
of its global military bases, listening posts and secret torture prisons, the destruction of its schools for coups and torture like the SOA, the
scuttling of its imperial fleet and more.) We should proclaim this publicly - knowing full well that these are not demands that the
U.S. government would ever agree to, but they are a much needed program that only the people can carry out through
historic actions. The U.S. government, its military and spy forces, are a central prop of global capitalism at this stage in
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 230
world history. And any confusion about this, any daydreaming that “maybe they can do some good,” needs to be explored
and engaged.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 231
US presence can only possibly have negative influence. Even as the strategy unravels, the calculative
strategic framework dictates that every part of the Iraqi people and the army be put to use. This
ontological bedrock of hegemony and utilitarianism must be immediately stopped to allow an ethical
prevention of unfathomable human suffering
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer at School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, 200 5 (“Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering,” Global
Change, Peace & Security, Volume 17, Number 2, June 2005, P. 191 - 213//DN)
The sanctions were finally lifted by the United Nations on 22 May 2003, following the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq with its toll of more
than 7000 Iraqi civilian (and 14,000 thousand military) dead, and more than 19,000 civilian wounded. By the time of writing, in February 2005, more
than 1460 American soldiers had been killed and over 10,000 wounded in a complex drawn-out guerrilla war that the US appears to be losing.
Estimates of overall Iraqi dead range up to 100,000, with more conservative estimates of civilian deaths ranging from 15,000 to 18,000.99
The first phase of the war cost the US and Iraq some US$45 billion, further damaged crucial infrastructure such as oil and electricity, saw the
widespread looting of schools, universities, museums, government buildings and hospitals, and general lawlessness and insecurity.100 It created
enormous anger and bitterness across the Arab world, leading Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to warn that ‘if there is one bin Laden now, there
will be one hundred bin Ladens afterward’.101 The war has weakened the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and hastened
the convergence of (formerly hostile) secular and fundamentalist radicals, potentially providing them with new sanctuaries, new
operational linkages and strengthened capabilities. 102 Beyond Iraq, the war is likely to provoke global increases in military
spending, lower the threshold for the use of force, damage the credibility of international arms control and verification
efforts, encourage the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and undermine global security .103 Two years of
occupation have cost the United States upwards of US$150 billion and deeply polarised the US electorate.104 United States occupation policy
(characterised by a chaotic mix of goodwill, viciousness and ham-fisted efforts to quickly impose US favourites, enrich US
corporations, secure long-term strategic objectives and restructure the economy along neoliberal lines ) is deeply resented
by Iraqis.105 Much of it also now lies in ruins. The Bush administration’s failure to plan for the occupation and reconstruction is by now well
known, but its management of the occupation has also been disastrous.106 Decisions to deliberately exclude the United Nations, to detain thousands
of people in prisons such as Abu Ghraib, to disband the Iraqi armed forces and sack thousands of bureaucrats and teachers, and to privatise Iraqi state
corporations and give the bulk of the reconstruction work to American companies are all blamed for the alienation of Sunni Sheikhs and poor Shia,
who have supported (or become involved in) armed resistance against the US and its allies.107 Counter-insurgency operations, such as those
in Fallujah, Baghdad and Najaf, have been ineffective, caused enormous civilian death and displacement (some 200,000 people
left Falluja during the November 2004 operation) and further alienated Iraqis.108 The war has given al Qaeda a new theatre in
which to fight the US and a powerful series of propaganda images -not the least of which are those from Abu Ghraib. The brutal
hostage-taking and executions of officials, journalists and aid workers by anti-coalition militants have also evoked images
of the chaos in Lebanon following Israel’s 1982 invasion, and further hampered reconstruction. Even the welcome image of Iraqis
voting in free elections was marred by widespread violence, which rapidly resumed its intensity once extra security measures were relaxed.109
Furthermore even if US planning and occupation policy had been much better, it is likely that substantial armed resistance and the damage to
infrastructure would have hampered the restoration of stability, given what is now known of the Hussein regime’s elaborate plans for a guerrilla
struggle prior to the war.110 In the wake of this failure, it is intriguing to observe how US analysts are seeking to
grapple with the situation and salvage some kind of strategic benefit from it. In a recent study an influential
strategistat Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, hopes that ‘the United States may still be
able to achieve some sort of victory in Iraq if it persists, commits the necessary resources, and accepts the real-world
limits on what it can do’. While he recommends that the US should ‘stay the military course’ and ‘develop Iraqi security
forces as quickly as possible’, with ‘at least a five year period of continued US engagement after full Iraqi sovereignty’ -
approaches broadly in line with administration policy-his analysis concludes that central US strategic goals have either been
mistaken or will not be achievable. In particular, future Iraqi governments may not be sympathetic to the US and plans to reconstruct the
economy along neoliberal lines and control its oil industry should cease.111 Yet however radical, his analysis is silent on scandals such
as Abu Ghraib and the impact of counter-insurgency operations on civilians (along with their perverse political results),
and underestimates the enormous challenge of involving the international community and bringing genuine stability to
Iraq. In contrast, progressive think-tanks like the Institute for Policy Studies are advocating a total withdrawal of all US troops by
July 2005, as a crucial step in restoring Iraq’s sovereignty, bringing greater legitimacy to an elected Iraqi government and
removing a major focus for attacks.112 While credibly suggesting that this will see a reduction in insurgent violence, their analysis may
likewise underestimate the dangers of civil war, human rights abuses by Iraqi security forces, or more general state breakdown after a withdrawal.
Journalist Paul McGeough gloomily suggests that ‘the prospect is that Iraq will become Beirut writ large’.113 From the perspective of early 2005,
Iraq’s future seems to be little more than a long series of Sophie’s choices . After the September 11 attacks, George W.
Bush told Americans that even though ‘this conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others’ it ‘will end in a way,
and at an hour, of our choosing’. He told them that ‘the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain’ .114
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Like a latter-day Francis Bacon, Bush voiced his
conviction that the use of force against terror would provide America with
‘fitting certainty’.115 While the US strategy in Iraq has been unravelling, on its own terms, the enframing
machinery of strategic reason grinds on in all its unreflective, calculating arrogance, endlessly demanding
that power have no limits, that everything be made useful, that no ethical framework be permitted to
slow its progress. Theendlessness of itis what is most frightening, bound so deeply into theontological bedrockof
modern industrial civilisation as to appear likea second law of nature and a new meaning of being. (This perhaps is why the Bush
Doctrine’s eloquent opponents remain trapped in its underlying assumptions, unwittingly providing it with oxygen and fuel.) Calculation,
hegemony, utility: this, for strategic man, is meaning. Yet Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, had already sounded a warning-
pointing to the emptiness of a utilitarianism that gets caught in an ‘unending chain of means and ends’ in which ‘ all ends are bound to be of
short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends’ .116 This perfectly describes the rolling disaster of
the United States’ policy towards Iraq, from the time the Reagan administration decided to make of Saddam a ‘strategic
asset’, then sought his removal through a decade of failed and ever more destructive policy, until only the invasion and
occupation of the country could seemingly achieve US goals . It perfectly describes the geopolitical panic and ambition of
the Bush neoconservatives, who have sought to build one illusory strategic ‘victory’ on another (Afghanistan, Iraq, then . . .)
without consideration of what counts as victory, its manifest failures and its unbearable human, economic and political costs.
Strategy, seeking one proliferating end after another, becomes an end in itself and the ultimate, narcissistic source of
meaning. To use Arendt’s words, it ‘defies questioning about its own use . . . utility established as meaning generates
meaninglessness’.117 When will it stop?When will Oppenheimer’s ethical plea -made only a year before John F. Kennedy warned
that the ‘fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth’118-ever be heard and acted upon? Heidegger warned that within modern
instrumental reason lay a double tragedy: that as man turned himself into a resource , into ‘standing reserve’, he would
simultaneously ‘exalt himself to the posture of lord of the earth’ . This, he warned, ‘in turn gives rise to one final delusion: It
seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. ’119 Bacon did say that scientific man would recover ‘his
empire over creation’ which was lost at the Fall, affirming his ‘power over nature’ with ‘new creations and imitations of divine works’ until ‘man
may be said to be a god unto man’.120 So what of Iraq, the land where, with the words of Isaiah, George W. Bush triumphantly
informed the world on 1 May 2003 that ‘the United States and its allies have prevailed’? 121 Man the vengeful god: Iraq is
this god’s plaything, strategic man’s burnt offering to himself . . . this ever useful death, ashes in the President’s mouth .
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The US cannot possibly help with any sort of positive processes abroad. The kind of troops we train, the
kind of reconciliation we promote, is the problem. We have to walk away.
Mike Ely, founder Kasama Project, Demand Complete and Immediate Withdrawal from
Afghanistan,2002. http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/demand-complete-and-immediate-withdrawal-from-aghanistan/
Medea said: “…we also heard a lot of people say they didn’t want more troops to be sent in and they wanted the U.S. to have a
responsible exit strategy that included the training of Afghan troops, included being part of promoting a real reconciliation process and
included economic development; that the United States shouldn’t be allowed to just walk away from the problem. So that’s
really our position.” No. We must DEMAND that the U.S. “walk away” - and we must be clear that the U.S.
imperialism is a huge part of “the problem” and is NOT part of the solution. What kind of troops is the U.S.
training? What kind of “reconciliation” process would the imperialists “promote”? At the risk of being harsh, such
views are not new. In the time of Kipling and the global British empire, it was called “White Man’s Burden.” In
the late 19th century, socialists (of a particularly patriotic kind) imagined that French or British or German or American
colonialism would bring “progress” to the “savages” of the Third World - and that the arrival of capitalism
would be an “advance” over their existing state. And the logic of this led straight into supporting “their”
particular imperialists into the horrific trenches of World War 1. 4) People say “well if the U.S. doesn’t confront
these awful forces, who will?” (Or “if the U.S. doesn’t promote “real reconciliation” who will?”) And the answer is that in the
absence of revolutionary forces there will often be NO ONE confronting awful forces or solving the horrific
suffering of the people. There will not BE “reconciliation” in Afghanistan - and if one happened under U.S.
promotion it would be to establish a terrible new order.Here is a difficult truth of our time: Many many
desperate problems of the people will notbe solved under capitalism…. that is (in fact) one of the reasons that
radical change is urgently needed
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SOLVENCY - PUBLIC DISCUSSION/SPILLOVER
The anti-war movement needs to become an anti-imperialism movement. Instead of people getting up in
arms occasionally based on intervention, we spark a shift, actively moving toward the breakdown of US
imperialism toward the linking of global movements in the struggle toward a new concept of security
based upon the connections between people, not the production of war.
Steve Sherman, sociologist and independent intelectual, “The Empire of Bases and the American Anti-War Movement,” March10th,
2010 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/the-empire-of-bases-and-the-american-anti-war-movement/
The anti-war movement in the US is in a deep funk. To date, even news of a surge in troops to Afghanistan has not really
awakened it. The new book The Bases of Empire may help to clarify what we are trying to do. Many suggest that the problem with the anti-war
movement today is that it does not break with the Democratic Party, but this argument is somewhat ahistorical. When the movement was
stronger in the sixties (against the Vietnam war)and the eighties (against intervention in Central America) painful debates raged on about the
relationship of the movement to the Democrats. There were similar voices-sometimes the same people!-on each side. What was different was not that
the movement had a great deal of clarity about this (I’m not sure that is possible in a non-revolutionary time in a two party state) but that the
movement was larger and livelier. What was different was that a sense of purpose animated the movements then that is lacking
now. In both the sixties and the eighties, there was a core of activists who strongly identified with the Marxist Leninist aspirations of those arrayed
against the US. The goal was not simply to stop wars, but to advance socialism. This was a minority view in the movements, but it provided an
immense source of energy and conviction for some, who did a great deal to keep the movements going (it could also be an obstacle-most labor unions
in the US stood on the other side of the cold war, and, so long as opposing US intervention meant supporting communists, kept their distance from
anti-war movements). The basic narrative of advancing socialism through armed confrontation with the US or its proxies
collapsed in 1989. I think a good chunk of the problem today is that no alternative narrative has replaced it (there has also
long been a robust pacifist tradition in the US, but this often leans towards individualistic bearing witness rather than mass
organizing). Instead, we lurch from mobilization to mobilization with the intuition that war is bad . When there is some
prospect of intervening in public debates - during the drive to war with Iraq in 2003, or when the elite consensus about
maintaining the occupation of Iraq started to crumble around 2005 - the crowds at our demonstrations swell. When these
moments pass, the crowds dwindle. With the exception of a handful of honorable groups, hardly anyone seems to be doing
anything besidesgrumbling in private. Rather than a struggle against particular wars, the movement can, inspired by the
thinking of the activists documented in Bases of Empire, think of itself asbroadly counterposed to a global empire in
which the ‘war on terror’ (or the ‘war in Iraq’, ‘war in Afghanistan’, etc) is simply a particular instance. This orientation
would counter the tendency togo into hibernation whenever debateonparticular interventions recedes. Notwithstanding this
tendency, the empire grinds on, sometimes in places like the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia that are almost unknown in the US (one of
the most useful aspects of the book is a map of all known US military bases around the world-particularly heavy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan and
Germany, of course, but also including numerous bases in Italy, Spain and Portugal, and throughout the Caribbean and the Andean and Equatorial
portions of Latin America, among others). The alternative to this empire is not an armed counterpower, but a variety of
movements with complex priorities - feminist, ecological, culturally diverse. This parallels the way the struggle against dogmatic
neoliberalism is no longer obsessed with the imposition of a singular, planned economic model. Rather, when we abandon the simple minded
formulation that what is best for investors is best for the world, complex alternatives gradually emerge. “One no, many yeses”, as the saying goes.
Similarly, the alternative to equating ’security’ with the US military is a complex picture of what is needed to produce a
meaningful and happy co-existence. US militarism, like neoliberalism, is a one dimensional view of the world developed from
a position of power. The world is simply a space to be controlled by the military, through the endless gobbling of land for
military bases, and the subordination of other needs - cultural, economic, political, etc. - to this project. The examples described in The
Bases of Empire clarify this dynamic and how to resist it. In places as diverse as the Philippines, Iraq, Hawaii, and Turkey, one sees similar processes
over and over. The steamrolling of the rights of those considered in the way, perhaps with the support of some local group
that has long had it in for them. The destruction of the environment to facilitate military ’security’. The inability to
imagine those outside of the US military complex as equals. The introduction and reinforcement of regressive gender
relations epitomized by prostitution around bases (worth pondering by those who hope that the US will improve the lot of
Afghan women through military occupation). Divide and conquer strategies that involve siding with one local group at
the expense of another to secure the former’s support . To date, changes in the party which controls the White House or
congress, and even defeat in wars, has resulted more in modest shifts in geography and strategy than in fundamental
change. Sometimes the US seeks rights over a country’s territory, or co-ordination with its military, rather than a formal base, per se. The pressure
on the US to get out of places like the Philippines or Okinawa increases the importance of other territories, like Guam. Although the bases are
gone from the Philippines, the US remains, now involved as ‘advisors’ in a war on separatists. This tendency for the empire to
mutate rather than shrink can be infuriating. Yet reading this book, it is difficult not to sense growing isolation for this project.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 235
there are grounds
Compounded with the economic weakness, military failures, and diplomatic isolation of the US (not dealt with in this volume),
for hope that a military that now strides across most of the globe may someday soon begin to shrink, and a real discussion
of the actual national security needs of the American people (and the people of the world) might begin in earnest. The Bases of
Empire is notably different from most texts about the US empire in its emphasis on non-violent resistance to US military bases and their malign
impact. Feminism, and non-Western spiritualities which assert a sacred relation to the land are recurrent themes. As is the case with social
struggles in general, even when these are not immediately successful in achieving their demands, their impact
on individuals and societies can be quite positive. For example, the anti-war demonstrations in Turkey helped revitalize civil-society
based politics in that country. Greenham Common in England made an enduring impact as a feminist encampment. It also becomes clear that the end
of the cold war actually often strengthened the hand of those pushing to close bases, since this position no longer placed them on the Soviet side of
the cold war. They could therefore reach portions of the population who might be anti-communist, but nonetheless aware of the malign impact of the
bases on their lives. Puerto Rico is one of the most salient cases of this. To combat the tendency to go dormant whenever political space in the US
starts to close up, the US anti-war movement- at least its most determined core - might want to consider thinking of itself as instead
an anti-empire movement. This would facilitate building links with these movements around the
world. Understanding their visions would also help undermine the reactive quality of the anti-war movement, wherein we
are typically more confident about what we are against than what we are for . Although the anti-bases movement is not a
unified, singular political actor on the world stage, it does have a coherent set of demands that provide an alternative to the idea of
security for Americans (and, allegedly the world) through a global network of military bases. These demands include the recognition of
all people as equals, rather than as subordinates of empire. An alteration in the way we interact with the planet that is inflected by
spiritual traditions that see the earth as sacred, rather than as space to be controlled. The valuing of the work of caring, rather than the servicing of the
sexual needs of foreign military personnel and the glorification of warriors. Finally, a concept of security grounded in the
interrelationship between all people and between people and the wider world, rather than the production of more
and more arms and bases. Although the anti-war movement will and should invoke a basic populism - money for health care, jobs, and
schools, not war - when making its case, it should not lose sight of this broader platform of transformation.
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SOLVENCY - REPRESENTATIONS
The selection of who we grieve and what lives we consider important is not neutral. Representations of
the war have been placed in a cycle of hegemonic images. The faces of the people are employed either to
justify further violence against them, or to show how they are perpetually and always dead. The 1AC,
just like the images of murdered children during Vietnam, is a deliberate disruption in this hegemonic
field of representation, allowing reinvigorated relation to the faces of the Other and systems of public
discourse where oppositional voices and criticism can be fostered.
Judith Butler, Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkely, 200 4 (PhD Yale, The Precarious Life, July, The
Precarious Life, P. 146-151 //DN)
The media's evacuation of the human through the image has to be understood , though, in terms of the broader problem that
normative schemes of intelligibility establish what will and will not be human, what will be a livable life, what will be a
grievable death. These normative schemes operate not only by producing ideals of the human that differentiate among
those who are more and less human. Sometimes they produce images of the less than human, in the guise of the human, to show how the less
than human disguises itself, and threatens to deceive those of us who might think we recognize another human there, in that face. But sometimes
these normative schemes work precisely throughproviding no image, no name, no narrative, so that there never
was a life, and there never was a death. These are two distinct forms of normative power: one operates through producing a symbolic
identification of the face with the inhuman, foreclosing Our apprehension of the human in the scene' the other works through radical effacement, so
that there never was a human, there never was a life, and no murder has, therefore, ever taken place. In the first instance, something that has already
emerged into the realm of appearance needs to be disputed as recognizably human; in the second instance, the public realm of appearance is itself
constituted on the basis of the exclusion of that image. The task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might
well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance, a sphere in which the trace of the cry has
becomehyperbolically inflated to rationalize a gluttonous nationalism,or fully obliterated, where both alternatives
turn out to be the same. We might consider this as one of the philosophical and representational implications of war,
because politics-and power-work in pan through regulating what can appear, what can be heard . Of course, these schemas of
intelligibility are tacitly and forcefully mandated by those corporations that monopolize control over the mainstream
media with strong interests in maintaining US military power . The war coverage has brought into relief the need for a broad de-
monopolizing of media interests, legislation for which has been, predictably, highly contested on Capitol Hill. We think of these interests as
controlling rights of ownership, but they are also, simultaneously, deciding what will and will not be publicly
recognizable as reality. They do not show violence, but there is a violence in the frame in what is shown. That latter violence is the
mechanism through which certain lives and deaths either remain unrepresentable or become represented in ways that
effects their capture (once again) by the war effort. The first is an effacement through occlusion; the second is an effacement through
representation itself. What is the relation between the violence by which these ungrievable lives were lost and the prohibition on their public
grievability? Is my prohibition on grieving the continuation of the violence itself? And does the prohibition on grieving demand a light control on the
reproduction of images and words? How does the prohibition on grieving emerge as a circumscription of representability, so that
our national melancholia becomes tightly fitted into me frame for what can be said what can be shown ? Is this not the site
where we can read if we still read, the way that melancholia becomes inscribed as the limits of what can be thought? The derealization of loss--
the insensitivity to human suffering and death-becomes ,the mechanism through which dehumanization is
accomplished. This derealization takes place neither inside nor outside the image, but through the very framing by which
the image is contained. In the initial campaign of the war against Iraq, the us government advertised its military feats as an
overwhelming visual phenomenon. That the US government and military called this a "shock and awe" strategy suggests
that they were producing a visual spectacle that numbs the senses and , like the sublime itself, puts out of play the very capacity
to think. This production takes place not only for the Iraqi population on the ground, whose senses are supposed to be
done in by this spectacle, butalso for the consumers of warwho rely on CNN or Fox, the network that regularly
interspersed its war coverage on television with the claim that it is the "most trustworthy" news source on the war. The
"shock and awe" strategy seeks not only to produce an aesthetic dimension to war, but to exploit and instrumentalize the
visual aesthetics as part of a war strategy itself . CNN has provided much of these visual aesthetics, and although the New York
Times belatedly came out against the war, it also adorned its front pages on a daily basis with romantic images of military
ordnance against the setting sun in Iraq or "bombs bursting in air" above the streets and homes of Baghdad (which are not
surprisingly occluded from view). Of course, it was the spectacular destruction of the World Trade Center that first made a claim upon the "shock and
awe" effect, and the US recently displayed for all the world to see that it can and will be equally destructive. The media becomes entranced
by the sublimity of destruction, and voices of dissent and opposition must find a way to intervene upon this
desensitizing dream machine in which the massive destruction of lives and homes, sources of water, electricity,
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 237
and heat, are produced as a delirious sign of a resuscitated US military power. Indeed, the graphic photos of US
soldiers dead and decapitated in Iraq,and then the photos of children maimed and killed by US bombs,were
both refused by the mainstream media, supplanted with footage that always took the aerial view, an aerial view whose
perspective is established and maintained by state power.And yet, the moment the bodies executed by the Hussein
regime were uncovered, they made it to the front page of the New York Times, since those bodies must be grieved . The
outrage over their deaths motivates the war effort, as it moves on to its managerial phase, which differs very little from
what is commonly called "an occupation." Tragically, it seems that the US seeks to preempt violence against itself by waging
violence first, but the violence it fears is the violence it engenders . I do not mean to suggest by this that the US is responsible in some
causal way for the attacks on its citizens. And I do not exonerate Palestinian suicide bombers, regardless of the terrible conditions that animate their
murderous acts. There is, however, some distance to be traveled between living in terrible conditions, suffering serious, even
unbearable injuries, and resolving on murderous acts . President Bush traveled that distance quickly, calling for "an end
to grief" after a mere ten days of flamboyant mourning. Suffering can yield an experience of humility, of
vulnerability, of impressionability and dependence, and these can become resources, if we do not "resolve"
them too quickly; they can move us beyond and against the vocation of the paranoid victim who regenerates
infinitely the justifications for war. It is as much a matter of wrestling ethically with one's own murderous impulses,
impulses that seek to quell an overwhelming fear, as it is a matter of apprehending the suffering of others and taking stock
of the suffering one has inflicted.In the Vietnam War, it was the pictures of the children burning and dying from napalm that
brought the us public to a sense of shock, outrage, remorse, and grief. These were precisely pictures we were not supposed to
see,and they disrupted the visual field and the entire sense of public identity that was built upon that field .
The images furnished a reality, but they also showed a reality that disrupted the hegemonic field of
representation itself. Despite their graphic effectivity, the images pointed somewhere else, beyond themselves, to a life and to a
precariousness that they could not show. It
was from that apprehension of the precariousness of those lives we destroyed that many
us citizens came to develop an important and vital consensus against the war . But if we continue to discount the words
that deliver that message to us, and if the media will not run those pictures, and if those lives remain
unnameable and ungrievable, if they do not appear in their precariousness and their destruction, we will not be
moved. We will not return to a sense of ethical outrage that is, distinctively, for an Other, in the name of an Other. We cannot, under
contemporary conditions of representation, hear the agonized cry or be compelled or commanded by the face.
We have been turned away from the face, sometimes through the very image of the face, one that is meant to convey the inhuman, the already dead,
that which is not precariousness and cannot, therefore, be killed; this is the face that we are nevertheless asked to kill, as if ridding the world of this
face would return us to the human rather than consummate our own inhumanity. One would need to hear the face as it speaks in something other than
language to know the precariousness of life that is at stake. But what media will let us know and feel that frailty, know and feel at the
limits of representation as it is currently cultivated and maintained? If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural
criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human wherewe’d expect to find it, in its
frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense.We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing
of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear what we can see, what we can sense. This
might prompt us, affective1y, to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning, of coming to understand
the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional
voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 238
SOLVENCY - REPRESENTATIONS
The image of the middle east portrayed by mass media and the government is an imperialist and racist
product of war that is used to rally support for war and to veil the actual nature of the threat of
terrorism. It is the true driving force behind the war in Afghanistan. The only way to combat these racist
images is through pragmatic social action aimed at deconstructing them.
Dana L. Cloud in ’04 (Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas, 2004, To Veil the Threat of Terror: Afghan
Women and the Clash of Civilizations in the Imagery of the US war on terrorism, Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 90, No. 3, August 2004, pp. 285-
306)
Scholars should understand the workings of ideographic images during the war and occupation in the context of
the actual economic and geopolitical aims of the United States . The visual manifestations of the clash of
civilizationsduring the U.S. war against Afghanistan in 2001-2002 veiled the threat of terrorism with explanations of
irrational hatred between superior and inferior civilizations. Metonymic, emotionally charged, and widely
circulated images of terrorists and abject women established binary oppositions between self and Other, located
U.S. viewers in positions of paternalistic gazing, and offered images of a shining modernity that justified U.S.
intervention there. Veiling not only the reasons for terrorism, this discourse also rendered opaque the actual
motives for the war and, thus, disabled real public deliberation over its course. As in any qualitative cultural study, only
indirect evidence can be adduced to suggest that such images created identification and solidified public support for war and
occupation. President George W. Bush’s approval ratings with regard to policy in Afghanistan were high through the end of active hostilities in
2002. In March 2002, a CNN/USA Today poll reported that 79 percent of Americans thought the president was doing a good job, with a majority
saying they thought the U.S. was winning the war on terrorism.77 The Associated Press reported in June, 2003, “Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
and through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush has enjoyed approval ratings of 60 percent or higher in most polls, indicative of the historical
trend of the nation rallying around the commander in chief when the nation’s security is threatened.”78 The cultivation of attitudes toward
enemy Others in mass media is central to the rallying of public support for war . Most imagery about war is
produced, mass mediated, and controlled by a mere handful of multinational media corporations beholden to state
power.79 In this context, the clash of civilizationsimagery in national newsmagazines and on their web sites has been a
powerful inducement to the public’s consent. In the interest of fuller deliberation, it is imperative to cut through the pseudo-
cultural, pseudo-humanitarian coding of what is, at the end of the day, a racist and imperialist project of war and
occupation for the control of oil. In the case of the U.S. war with Afghanistan, the ideograph encouraged consent to
repressive violence in the domestic arena (the policing of Arabs, Muslims, and dissenters under the Patriot Act) as
well as abroad in acts of outright brutality that resulted in the deaths of many thousands of innocents. 80 Images in
mass media compose a slippery and not always tenable terrain upon which the struggle against the brutality of imperialism is waged. As Kevin
DeLuca has argued, the increasing saturation of public discourse with mediated images compels the Left to engage and employ the strategies of
visual rhetoric.81 In Image Politics, DeLuca argues that social movement “image events” can “deconstruct and articulate
identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures in our modern industrial civilization. ”82
He and others are right that media and politics are intertwined and that the “public screen” has overshadowed more
traditional deliberative public forum in which contending groups make arguments and engage in instrumental
action toward concrete political outcomes.83 But is “imagefare”84 all there is? Is it enough for movements seeking actual social change
(increased standards of living for those struggling, an end to discrimination, the rights of full citizenship, and so on to more radical aims) rather than
fleeting moments of shocking representation? This discussion of the possibilities and limits of the public screen raises several other questions for
future inquiry-namely how, for which audiences, in what contexts, and under what circumstances oppositional images may seriously interrupt the
flow of mass-mediated common sense. The social, economic, and political contexts of that engagement (including the presence or absence of a
broader movement) will condition the extent of the Left’s influence on an imagistic terrain. A rhetorical situation of pro-imperialist hegemony, I
would argue, needs a movement with sufficient strength and visibility to enable public reframing and questioning of images that appear as slices of
reality within a taken-for-granted, nationalist system of ideas.85 To a lesser extent, critical readings of images may enable
oppositional interpretation, and we should avail ourselves of opportunities to unpack the workings of hegemonic
imagery in broadly accessible venues and language. At the end of the day, the clash of civilizations is not just an image or an
ideograph. Thus, the real clash of war requires more than scholarly criticism. Ultimately, the most significant aspect of this discourse is
its role in justifying the deadly imperialist adventures of the United States . In this context, activists must continue to
challenge not only the rhetoric of civilization clash, but also its actuality, motives, and consequences.Enabling fully
informed deliberation of war and occupation in the U.S. public requires critical unpacking of images and engaging
the real necessity of speaking in public alongside others in international solidarity. To this end, we mustemulate the
hundreds of thousands of participants, whose numbers spanned nations, races, religions, ages, genders, sexualities, and political beliefs , in
the anti-war demonstrations of 2002 and 2003. In image and indeed, these activists have begun the work of deconstructing the clash of
civilizationsin favor of shared humanity, solidarity, and peace
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 239
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 240
SOLVENCY - FRAMES OF WAR
Our plan is the expression of the immense anger and rage contained within us against the devestation
caused by the United States in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even in its artificial claims of
withdrawal, still we fail to stop and grieve the lives of the hundreds of thousands dead at our hands.
What we need is not more action, but final and complete withdrawal, a “nonact,” to paralyze the
infrastructure that allows military interventions and atrocities. “Resolving” our position in Asia is not
the answer. Only our nonact opens up the possibility to finally grieve and offer resistance to the system.
Judith Butler, Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkely, 200 9 (PhD Yale, Frames of War, The Claim of
Nonviolence, P. 146-151 //DN)
If non-violence has the opportunity to emerge here, it would take its departure not from a recognition of the injurability of
all peoples (however true that might be), but from an understanding of the possibilities of one's own violent actions in relation to
those lives to which one is bound, including those whom one never chose and never knew, and so those whose relation to
me precedes the stipulations of contract. Those others make a claim upon me, but what are the conditions under which I can hear or respond
to their claims? It is not enough to say, in Levinasian vein, that the claim is made upon me prior to my knowing and as an inaugurating instance of
my coming into being. That may be formally true, but its truth is of no use to me if I lack the conditions for responsiveness that allow me to
apprehend it in the midst of this social and political life. Those "conditions" include not just my private resources, but the various mediating forms
and frames that make responsiveness possible. In other words, the claim upon me takes place, when it takes place, through the
senses, which are crafted in part through various forms of media: the social organization of sound and voice, of image and
text, of tactility and smell. If the claim of the other upon me is to reach me, it must be mediated in some way, which
means that our very capacity to respond with non-violence (to act against a certain violent act, or to defer to the "nonact" in
the face of violent provocation) depends upon the frames by which the world is given and by which the domain of
appearance is circumscribed. The claim to non-violence does not merely interpellate me as an individual person who must decide one way
or another. If the claim is registered, it reveals me less as an "ego" than as a being bound up with others in inextricable and irreversible ways, existing
in a generalized condition of precariousness and interdependency, affectively driven and crafted by those whose effects on me I never chose. The
injunction to non-violence always presupposes that there is some field of beings in relation to whom nonviolence ought to
be the appropriate bearing. Because that field is invariably circumscribed, non-violence can only make its appeal by
differentiating between those against whom violence ought not to be waged and those who are simply "not
covered" by the injunction itself. For the injunction to non-violence to make sense, it is first necessary to
overcome the presumption of this very differential-a schematic and non-theorized inegalitarianism-that operates
throughout perceptual life.If the injunction to non-violence is to avoid becoming meaningless, it must be allied
with a critical intervention apropos the norms that differentiate between those lives that count as livable and
grievable and those that do not. Only on the condition that lives are grievable (construed within the future anterior) does the
call to non-violence avoid complicity with forms of epistemic inegalitarianism . The desire to commit violence is thus
always attended by the anxiety of having violence returned, since all the potential actors in the scene are equally
vulnerable. Even when such an insight follows from a calculation of the consequences of a violent act, it testifies to an
ontological interrelation that is prior to any calculation. Precariousness is not the effect of a certain strategy, but the generalized condition
for any strategy whatsoever. A certain apprehension of equality thus follows from this invariably shared condition, one that is most difficult to hold
fast in thought: non-violence is derived from the apprehension of equality in the midst of precariousness. For this purpose, we do not need to know in
advance what "a life" will be, but only to find and support those modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to be made and
heard (in this way, media and survival are linked). Ethics is less a calculation than something that follows from being addressed and addressable in
sustainable ways, which means, at a global level, there can be no ethics without a sustained practice of translation-between languages, but also
between forms of media.13 The ethical question of whether or not to do violence emerges only in relation to the "you" who figures as the potential
object of my injury. But if there is no "you," or the "you" cannot be heard or seen, then there is no ethical relation. One can lose the "you" through the
exclusive postures of sovereignty and persecution alike, especially when neither admits to being implicated in the position of the other. Indeed, one
effect of such modes of sovereignty is precisely to "lose the you." Non-violence thus would seem to require a struggle over the
domain of appearance and the senses, asking how best to organize media in order to overcome the differential ways
through which grievability is allocated and a life is regarded as a life worth living or, indeed, as a living life. It is also to
struggle against those notions of the political subject that assume that permeability and injurability can be monopolized at
one site and fully refused at another. No subject has a monopoly on "being persecuted" or "being persecuting," even when thickly sedimented
histories (densely compounded forms of iteration) have produced that ontological effect. If no claim to radical impermeability is finally acceptable as
true, then no claim to radical persecutability is finally acceptable either. To call into question this frame by which injurability
is falsely and unequally distributed is precisely to call into question one of the dominant frames
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 241
sustaining the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the Middle East . The claim of non-violence
not only requires that the conditions are in place for the claim to be heard and registered (there can be no "claim" without its mode of presentation),
but that anger and rage also find a way of articulating that claim in a way that might be registered by others. In this sense,
non-violence is not a peaceful state, but a social and political struggle to make rage articulate and effective-the carefully
crafted "fuck you." In effect, one has to come up against violence to practice non-violence (they are bound together, and tensely so); but, it
bears repeating, the violence one is up against does not issue exclusively from the outside. What we call aggression and rage can move in the
direction of nullifying the other; but if who we "are" is precisely a shared precariousness, then we risk our own nullification. This happens not
because we are discrete subjects calculating in relation to one another, but because, prior to any calculation, we are
already constituted through ties that bind and unbind in specific and consequential ways. Ontologically, the forming and
un-forming of such bonds is prior to any question of the subject and is, in fact, the social and affective condition of
subjectivity. It is also a condition that installs a dynamic ambivalence at the heart of psychic life. To say that we have "needs" is thus to say that
who we "are" involves an invariable and reiterated struggle of dependency and separation, and does not merely designate a stage of childhood to be
surmounted. It is not just "one's own" struggle or the apparent struggle of "another" but precisely the dehiscence at the basis
of the "we," the condition under which we are passionately bound together: ragefully, desirously, murderously, lovingly .
To walk the line is, yes, to live the line, the impasse of rage and fear, and to find a mode of conduct that does not seek
to resolve the anxiety of that position too quickly through a decision. It is, of course, fine to decide on nonviolence, but decision cannot
finally be the ground for the struggle for non-violence. Decision fortifies the deciding "I," sometimes at the expense of relationality itself. So the
problem is not really about how the subject should act, but about what a refusal to act might look like when it
issues from the apprehension of a generalized condition of precariousness or, in other words, of the radically
egalitarian character of grievability. Even the "refusal to act" does not quite capture the forms of stalled action or
stoppage that can, for instance, constitute the nonviolent operation of the strike. There are other ways of conceiving the
blocking of those reiterated actions that reproduce the taken-for-granted effects of war in daily life. To paralyze the
infrastructure that allows armies to reproduce themselves is a matter of dismantling military machinery
as well as resisting conscription. When the norms of violence are reiterated without end and without interruption, non-violence
seeks to stop the iteration or to redirect it in ways that counter its driving aims .When that iteration continues in the name
of "progress," civilizational or otherwise, it makes sense to heed Walter Benjamin's trenchant remark that "Perhaps revolutions are
nothing other than human beings on the train of progress reaching for the emergency brake ."14 To reach for the brake is an
"act," but it is one that seeks to forestall the apparent inexorability of a reiterated set of acts that postures as the motor of
history itself. Maybe the "act" in its singularity and heroism is overrated: it loses sight of the iterable process in which a
critical intervention is needed, and it can become the very means by which the "subject" is produced at the expense of a
relational social ontology. Of course, relationality is no utopian term, but a framework (the work of a new frame) for the consideration
of those affects invariably articulated within the political field: fear and rage, desire and loss, love and hatred, to name a
few. All this is just another way of saying that it is most difficult when in a state of pain to stay responsive to the equal claim of
the other for shelter, for conditions of livability and grievability. And yet, this vexed domain is the site of a necessary
struggle, a struggle to stay responsive to a vicissitude of equality that is enormously difficult to affirm, that has yet to be
theorized by the defenders of egalitarianism, and that figures in a fugitive way in the affective and perceptual dimensions
of theory. Under such circumstances, when acting reproduces the subject at the expense of another, not to act is , after all, a way of
comporting oneself so as to break with the closed circle of reflexivity, a way of ceding to the ties that bind and unbind, a way of registering and
demanding equality affectively. It is even a mode of resistance, especially when it refuses andbreaks the frames by which war
is wrought time and again.
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SOLVENCY - SPILLOVER
The war on terror is the site of the struggle against US hegemony. To have any kind of relevance we
must use intellectual spaces to inform national opinion and public debate toward a new system of politics.
Buck-Morss ‘01[Susan, Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in the Department of Government @ Cornell, Radical
Philosophy November 7, 2001]
September 11 has transformed irrevocably the context in which we as intellectuals speak . The acts of terror on that day were no
invasion from the outside by a barbaric evil “other” but, rather, produced fully within a coeval and common world . We are witnessing the
mutation of a new, global body-politic, and if we intellectuals are to have any potency as part of its thinking organ, it will
be in discourses that refuse to separate academic life from political life, and that inform not just national opinion, but a
global public debate. To think and write for a global public sphere is not an easy task. I do not have great confidence that these essays will
succeed. I have no political choice but to try, nonetheless, as the commitment to a diverse, multi-centered human society is what my work, and what
much of critical, theoretical work has been about for the past several decades, in universities that are now becoming decisively, and quite hopefully,
global communities of scholars. The global public sphere in a broader sense, however, is not yet a “community,” or even a
coherently navigable discursive terrain. To address it is thus a performative act. It aims to bring about that which it
presumes. The notion of the “global” itself circulates globally today, describing and generating discourses of social
change. Many, including myself, have questioned its newness, pointing to the five hundred years of European expansion that produced a
world economy and world political domination. But the global terrain that is emerging out of the ruins of September 11
and its aftermath is, arguably, of a different order. And this difference has fundamentally to do with intellectual vision - what we see, and
how we see it. Historical rupture is a jagged process. There has not been a clean break with the past, there never is. The end of the Cold War, the
restructuring of transnational capital, the electronic media revolution - these transition markers have been with us for decades. We have
charted their development with concepts like post-modernism, post-colonialism, postsocialism, post-Marxism. But recent
events bring the realization that in using these terms, our academic “global community” has not gone far enough. The
hegemonic signifiers of Western capitalism, Enlightenment modernity and national sovereignty were kept in place.
Radical criticism attacked their Eurocentricity without denying it . It appears now that events have outrun us, captured in a videotaped
image of destructive fury that left us speechless, devastating our imagined political landscape. What disappeared on September 11 was the apparent
invulnerability, not only of U.S. territory, but of U.S., and, indeed, Western hegemony. A new, global struggle for hegemony has begun.
But let us not be content just to describe this process, as if the only actors who counted were military men, terrorists and
counter-terrorist forces. In fact their use of force indicates their lack of hegemony, not its guarantee. It is, ultimately, the
global public that will determine hegemonic power - a public newly forming, for whom the old economic and
political narratives - even critical ones - are inadequate interpretive tools . The staging of violence as a global spectacle separates
September 11 from previous acts of terror. The dialectic of power, the fact that power produces its own vulnerability, was itself
the message. This distinguishes it decisively from radical social movements that aim to accomplish specific social and political goals. The
Chiapas resistance movement, which was violent but minimally so, used global channels in order to garner wide support
from a public inside and outside of Mexico, in order to bring pressure to bear on the Mexican state to change specific
policies. It was and continues to be a radical, cosmopolitan articulation that translates indigenous cultural experience into
hegemonic discourses of criticism as the precondition for the intelligibility of its demands. The goal is to communicate
within the existing codes of oppositional struggle. A poet, Commandante Marcos, speaks in its name in inclusive, human terms against
diverse manifestations of oppression; solidarity for this local struggle is imagined in global terms
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 243
SOLVENCY - GRIEVING
The 1AC is finally the act of grief for the adults and children of Iraq and Afghanistan. The exclusion of
those lives as public and real creates a disjoint between those lives as real and not. They are not
recognized, they are not alive even while they are animated, and this allows their lives to be negated
through violence again and again. The Affirmative is the obituary for those people, an insurrection at the
level of ontology as to whose lives are real and how we picture some lives as important, some as
disposable, and some we don’t picture at all.
Judith Butler, Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkely, 200 4 (PhD Yale, The Precarious Life, July,
Violence, Mourning, Politics, P. 32-35 //DN)
A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated. We have seen it already, in the genre of the obituary, where lives are
quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. But this
is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians
who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults. Do they have
names and faces, personal histories, family, favorite hobbies, slogans by which they live?What defense against the
apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with
self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness?To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam,
fallenoutside the "human" as it has been naturalized in its "Western" mold by the contemporary workings of humanism?
What are the cultural contours of the human al work here? How do our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds
of losses we can avow as loss?After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, thenwhat and where is the loss ,
and how does mourning lake place? This last is surely a question that lesbian, gay, and bi-studies have asked in relation to violence against
sexual minorities; that transgendered people have asked as they are singled out for harassment and sometimes murder; that intersexed people have
asked, whose formative years are so often marked by unwanted violence against their bodies in the name of a normative notion of the human, a
normative notion of what the body of a human must be. This question is no doubt, as well, the basis of a profound affinity between movements
centering on gender and sexuality and efforts to counter the normative human morphologies and capacities that condemn or efface those who are
physically challenged. It must also be part of the affinity with anti-racist struggles, given the racial differential that undergirds the
culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the
present time. I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon
is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the
their exclusion. It
level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?
Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives
considered as "unreal"? Does violence effect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality? If violence is done
against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives
are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again ). They
cannot be mourned because they are alwaysalready lost or, rather, never "were," and they must be killed, since they seem
to live on, stubbornly, in this Slate of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object, The
derealization of the "Other" means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that imagines the war
against terrorism as a war without endwill be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its
enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established groundsto suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with
violent aims. How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first, on the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered
lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that
this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. It is
another thing to say that discourse itself effects violence through omission. If 200,000 Iraqi children were killed during
the Gulf War and its aftermath/ do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, Singly or
collectively?Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attachedto those children?
There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts , and there cannot be. If there were to be an
obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that
qualifies for recognition. Although we might argue that it would be impractical to write obituaries for all those people, or for
all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is
publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become,a publicly grievable life , an icon for
national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy . As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an
act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 244
worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable. It
is not simply, then, that there is a "discourse" of dehumanization that
produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility. It is
not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse , but in
the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. The queer lives that vanished on September 11 were not publicly welcomed into the idea
of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the marital norm holding sway once
again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable
losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 245
SOLVENCY-GRIEF/VULNERABILITY
Our articulation of grief through the protests of US deployments of Just War and the hijacking of
feminism is key. Leftist capitulation to these notions inevitably cause a masculine, “moral,” rush to
action, trapping us in cycles of imperialism and war.
Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, 200 6 (University of London, studied as a postgraduate at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, “Vulnerability, violence and (cosmopolitan) ethics: Butler’s Precarious Life,” The
British Journal of Sociology 2006 Volume 57 Issue 1, 69-86//DN)
How do we respond to injury and violence and how can these experiences be reflected upon so as to avert further spirals of violence?
What kind of vocabulary can intercede so as to counter calls for vengeance and for pre-emptive violence in the name of national
security? Butler proposes that processes of grieving and mourning are capable of making more apparent interdependency and
vulnerability. In mourning we are dispossessed, we lose something which is part of ourselves, but which is also another, and this in
turn makes us mysterious or enigmatic to ourselves. I am not the same person after such a loss, who am I, and who might I now
become? I must always have been also someone else. Our proclamations of loss comprise a mode of address to others wherein we
reveal our vulnerability. We initiate, in enduring such loss, a new circuit of communication with others. Mourning need not mean, as it
is often understood to mean, withdrawal and solitude. Recognition of this dependency on others can be the basis for new forms of
political community. Vulnerability reminds us of our dependency on others. Callousness to one who is dying or to the already dead
calls into question the basis of ‘our’ humanity.Thus our vulnerability, the fact that we can be so easily injured or harmed, gives rise to
recognition of dependency, which in turn can be productive of new forms of sociability. Recognition from the other is what enables us
to have a subjectivity, to have an ‘I’. It is also what makes us social, we are ‘constituted in cultural norms’(Butler 2004a: 45).
Vulnerability and mourning both might then be understood as conducive to developing wider modes of commonality and co-
operation. Communities which have suffered violence, for example women, black people, and sexual minorities, have indeed
developed forms and organizations which have countered aggression by non-aggressive means. Grief can be acutely mobilizingas has
been evident in the lobbying and campaigning by parents in both the USA and Britain, whose sons or daughters have been killed in
these recent wars.2 First World safety and relative protection from incessant risk and danger might now be revealed to be one of its
most precious privileges, when indeed that security is threatened. How might that moment of recognition of vulnerability become an
opportunity to consider those others for whom such palpable and routine vulnerability is a normative condition of existence? Butler’s
point is that others are part also of who we are, our initial vulnerability as infants, means we are enthralled to another, without whom
we cannot survive. This dependency can either be understood as a constant condition of our humanity, the need to be cared for, or else
can be carelessly cast aside, disavowed in favour of the masculinist requirement of wholeness and autonomy. This is not to say that
Islamic fundamentalists pose little or no real danger, nor is it to suggest that there ought to be no response whatsoever to terrorist
aggression. Instead it is to insist upon the re-opening of that space of vulnerability and inter-dependency, against the cowboy mentality
of the American republican imaginary. In a voice which draws on a feminist legacy with its emphasis on intimacy, domesticity and
maternity, Butler reflects on the immediacy with which she herself can mourn for the loss of the journalist Daniel Pearl, who was
taken hostage and subsequently killed. She writes that he shares with her a Hebrew name. We almost invariably seek comfort in what
is familiar and under circumstances such as these mourn the death of someone who reminds us of someone we might know, and with
whom we share a bond of kinship. But this very reflex, Butler argues, is exactly what needs to be critically examined. Whose death is
mournable and whose is not? And, in more sociological terms, what can we learn from governmental mobilizations of grief, and acts
of national mourning, and the practices of boundary marking in death which are invoked in and through these rituals? In effect she is
asking how can my propensity to grieve for someone who is familiar to me, and who I am also invited to grieve for on the basis of
shared national identity, perhaps also shared religious faith, become a vehicle for the construction of a new ethics of grief extended to
those for whom grief is for whatever reason disallowed? The very urgency of the violent situation which has arisen, and which has
caused such grievous outpourings, calls for an immediate response. However such responsiveness also requirestime for reflection and
open debate, so as to avoid the dangers of vengeance and ‘rapid rebuttal’. Butler is I think asking that we wait, that we are patient with
our grief. In the USA, following the events of 9/11, public reflection on for example those conditions of living in the impoverished
world, which have given rise to animosity towards the USA, including fundamentalist anger and rage, was quickly foreclosed. This
foreclosure was hastened Butler suggests by the premature capitulation of the left and liberals to the idea of a just war in
Afghanistan. This made it easier for those in the peace movement to be mocked and marginalized as out-of-date and anachronistic. It
helped to give legitimacy to the unapologetic masculinist and anti-intellectual voice of Donald Rumsfeld. It further facilitated the
deployment by Bush of a rhetoric of being either a friend or foe of the USA which in turn paved the way for the shrinking of media
space for dissent and debate. This too-rapid capitulation to a just-war vocabulary also, doubtless, facilitated the mandate to the
invasion of Iraq where the grounds for military action were also highly questionable.And when the Bush government was then able
to deploy elements drawn from feminism to further justify the intervention to remove the Taliban, the difficult questions this
raised were rarely confronted. Here Butler shows herself willing to query those aspects of invasionist mentality at that point where
‘we’ Western feminists might be most tempted to concede ground. Butler provides a warning against the desire for international
political agency on the part of First World feminism. Which is to say that ‘we’ feminists also, like other left-liberal onlookers, perhaps
even just momentarily, needed those images of girls seemingly gladly removing their burkhas, as though to reap something from a war
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 246
which as Butler argues was waged on the basis of (masculinist) outrage and wounded US pride. And as we know from the work of
Spivak (1999), this instrumentalization of feminism in the service of invasion and occupation demonstrates a not entirely
unprecedented dynamic within a neo-imperialist mission.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 247
SOLVENCY - CHALLENGE JUST WAR
Our challenge of Just War includes a challenge of all three of its components questioning its state-centric view, its
legitimation of gratuitous collateral damage, and its responsibility to impose liberal state-centric institutions on the
surviving victims.
Thus Just War thinking arguably faces the need to address a lack of geographical imagination in its response to these key
contemporary debates about the ethics of violence in international relations. This has implications for all three of the divisions of the
just war tradition - jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum. This paper lacks the space to explore these in full, but hopefully
certain instances may illustrate the potentially significant challenges that could arise. For the jus ad bellum the state as the site of legitimate
authority and therefore the key declarer and prosecutor of war has been challenged, especially indiscussions of humanitarian
intervention, by the idea of the UN Security Council as a superior authority (in both senses of the word). This, however, retains
the statist basis of the legitimate authority principle and also limits the perspective of just cause to those instances where the
Security Council can agree to utilise the elasticity in the idea of threats to international peace and security. Recognising the moral authority of
non-state actors in this regard and the justice of causes which areinherently ill-suited to a statist framing or mediation becomes
very difficult and Just War becomes allied to a conservative interpretation of international relations. The alternative scales and differently
territorialized conceptions of space in these programmes are ill-served by the established Just War discourse, and the
developments in the theory over the last decade have done little to address this effectively. This is despite the inherent notions of space and scale
within jus adbellum principles, such as proportionality, which asks us to consider the balance between the harm of the originating act of violence
against the harm of the putative violent response. The geographical extent of that violence is part of this - a global war on terror, for instance,
suggests a violent response could occur anywhere. However, the reality has been the corralling of an ostensibly ‘global’ scale within a state-based
framework. Equally, the spaces of violence have also remained largely conventional in terms of the ethical debate - the
‘battlespace’ has remained, conceptually, the ‘battlefield’ - a discrete and specific geographical location where those who are
permissibly subject to violence congregate. Securing spaces where either political authority is complicit with terrorist networks or where
authority is so weak as to be unable to prevent their operations is a commonplace in political debates about the war on terror (e.g. Williams with
Roach, 2006). A distinction is still drawn, though, between this and a ‘battlefield’ - the ethical location of legitimate large-scale violence. Talk of the
‘battlefield’ raises the issue of the implications of this argument for the jus in bello. Here the categories of combatant and non-combatant
have been challenged anew. Some (e.g. Buzan, 2002) have risked advocating a re-opening of the debate within Just War whereby the
innocence of non-combatants is connected to their not presenting a real or imminent threat of violence, as opposed to being innocent of any political
commitment to support an unjust political project. When that political project lies outside of the established, state-focused
frameworks Just War is used to dealing with, then the problem is exacerbated.Can one be a combatant in the name of a
trans-national political project that cannot be accommodated within the dominant contemporary geographical framework, and
can one claim the authority of acting in the name of the leaders of such a project?Whilst this helps to highlight the long-
standing problem in relation to terrorists as either combatants or non-combatants , and leaving aside the US government’s
designation of ‘illegal combatants’ in order to open some room for manoeuvre on this issue, the question of proportionality is at stake here,
as well. Whilst the combatant/non-combatant distinction has grabbed most of the attention in the war on terror, and also in humanitarian
intervention debates where the status of irregular paramilitary forces has been important, the issue of proportionality is also potentially controversial.
The global war on terror, for example, places at the centre of the challenge the idea of transnational terrorist networks ,
loosely affiliated to one another and based on local cells, operating across borders and with little connection to established,
territorialized political authority. However, do our ethical concerns about the proportionality of violence reflect this, or, if not, how does this
contribute to the debate about military operations? When judging the proportionality of violence do we judge against the damage
inflicted against ‘global terrorism’, if such a label has utility, or do we judge it against the local cell and the environment in
which they are operating? Given the looseness of the affiliations and the absence of centralized command and control characteristic of
networked terrorism where, for example, al Qaeda is likened to a brand rather than any sort of centralised structure, can
attacks in one place be justified in terms of proportionality by reference to damaging affiliated elements of the network
elsewhere?Finally, thejus post bellum standard that emerges from the literature on humanitarian intervention and the war on terror
seems focused on creating functioning states. Ideally these are liberal and democratic in character , able to establish, protect
and embed social, political and economic structures that will secure the new state in the short-term and, looking further ahead, bring
about the kind of civic peace Elshtain advocates. This foundation will also help create economic prosperity to address social exclusion and
disillusionment that are often portrayed as deep-rooted explanations for the attractions of violence. Irrespective of the empirical accuracy of these
claims, this is, by any standards, a Herculean political task . It also represents an ethical prescription out of kilter with the
Just War tradition’s far more limited practice of addressing the immediate causes of war. Of course, the advocates of a more
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 248
ethically ambitious and transformative Just War are
able to appeal to classical authority for their ideas - the idea of a Just War being
one that will ensure there is no need to repeat the exercise, and thus the need to get to the root causes. However, the record in
Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq so far gives serious pause for thought about the viability of such an
approach, practically and ethically.More extensively, this paper has raised questions about the viability of a statist strategy for addressing the
challenge of jus post bellum. As we have seen, ethics, identity and security are being addressed at different scales and in different spaces, and these,
too, need to be part of the mix of debate about an ethical response to post-conflict societies and how to effectively address terrorism. Just War
thinking has yet to pick up on this in a systematic fashion and explore in depth and with sustained attention the opportunity for different spaces and
scales to play a positive role in how we think and act ethically in response to the aftermath of armed conflict.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 249
SOLVENCY - INDEPENDENCE
IF WE ABANDON OUR HARDLINE APPROACH TO OURPROFIT-DRIVEN COLONIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST, THEY
WILL DRIFT TOWARD SOVEREIGN INDEPENDENCE
Michael SCHWARTZ 2009 professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context
7/9/09 [“Colonizing Iraq: The Obama Doctorine?”, TomDispatch.com,
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175093/michael_schwartz_twenty_first_century)
In 2007, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, toldWashington Post reporter Bob Woodward that “taking Saddam out was
essential” - a point he made in his book The Age of Turbulence - because the United States could not afford to be “beholden to
potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas” in Iraq. It’s exactly that sort of thinking that’s still operating in U.S. policy
circles: the 2008 National Defense Strategy, for example, calls for the use of American military power to maintain “access to and flow of energy
resources vital to the world economy.” After only five months in office, the Obama administration has already provided significant evidence
that, like its predecessor, it remains committed to maintaining that “access to and flow of energy resources ” in Iraq, even as it
places its major military bet on winning the expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There can be no question that
Washington is now engaged in an effort to significantly reduce its military footprint in Iraq, but without, if all goes well for
Washington, reducing its influence. What this looks like is an attempted twenty-first-century version of colonial domination,
possibly on the cheap, as resources are transferred to the Eastern wing of the Greater Middle East. There is, of course, no
more a guarantee that this new strategy - perhaps best thought of as colonialism lite or the Obama Doctrine - will succeed than
there was for the many failed military-first offensives undertaken by the Bush administration . After all, in the unsettled, still
violent atmosphere of Iraq, even the major oil companies have hesitated to rush in and the auctioning of oil contracts has begun to look uncertain,
even as other “civilian” initiatives remain, at best, incomplete. As the Obama administration comes face-to-face with the reality of trying fulfill
General Odierno’s ambition of making Iraq into “a long-term partner with the United States in the Middle East” while fighting a major
counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, it may also encounter a familiar dilemma faced by nineteenth-century colonial powers:
that without the application of overwhelming military force, the intended colony may drift away toward sovereign
independence. If so, then the dreary prediction of Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent Thomas Ricks - that the United States is only
“halfway through this war” - may prove all too accurate.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 250
SOLVENCY - IMPERIALISM
The War on Terror is the linchpin of the imperialist mindset - the apparatus of power heavily favors U.S. ideals -
troop withdrawal serves as a mechanism to undermine the imperialistic mind of such a global hegemonic power -
key to access solvency.
Quarterly, ]
Those who assert we have witnessed a regression in the organisation of power internationally since 9/11 point to the
contingencies of the global political order during the 1990s.13 The end of the Cold War, it is said, bequeathed the USA a
preponderance of power internationally. The absence of a symmetrical threat allowed it, under the auspices of the Clinton
administration, to embark upon a multilateral strategy that involved the cultivation of the very forms of interdependence
and connectivity that Hardt and Negri, among others, assumed to signify a permanent and necessary change in the
organisation of international politics. The shift in administrative power nationally within the USA, coupled with the
World Trade Center attack, provided the grounds, it is now said, for a change of direction in US foreign policy and the
consequent return to a more traditionally unipolar and, ultimately, imperialist world order.14 As Michael Cox describes it,
the intellectual groundwork for a reassertion of US imperialism had been carried out some years in advance of the 9/11
attack. As early as 1997 the neo-conservative think-tank, ‘Project for the New American Century’, dedicated to the
reframing of the Republican agenda, was arguing for the ‘restoration of a foreign policy of American leadership’ based on
‘the three M’s of American foreign policy. . .Military strength, Morality, and Mastery’.15 BIOPOLITICS OF THE WAR
ON TERROR 241 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 18:25 16 July 2010 Not only was it the case that the
increasingly multilateral character of international politics during the 1990s was perceived to threaten the ‘national
interest’ of the USA. There was also a sense in which a more fundamentally normative commitment to the defence of the
international state system was at stake. The war on terror itself has been conceived within the USA in terms of an attempt
to defend the very form of the nation-state and the international state system from the incursions of a threat shaped and
conditioned by globalisation. ‘International terrorism is not dangerous because it can defeat us in a war, but because it can
potentially destroy the domestic contract of the state by further undermining its ability to protect its citizens from attack’
wrote Audrey Kurth Cronin after the 9/11 attack.16 The form of threat posed by Al-Qaeda as well as by other
international terrorist organisations appears to have been interpreted by the Republican right within the USA as that of an
advanced expression of the deterritorialising forces of globalisation. The war on terror has been articulated within areas of
the US foreign policy establishment as a commitment to defence of the traditional values and institutions of the nation-
state against that deterritorialising threat. The current strategy of the USA is articulated in these terms as an attempt to
force a regression within the international system to an older more reliable form of order. A regression that secures and re-
enforces boundaries against the encroachments and malign insecurities forged through processes of globalisation. One of
the most appealing ways to account for 21st century US strategy as initiating a return to imperialism is to consider the
copious amounts of imperialist rhetoric surrounding the current Bush administration. One of the most remarkable features
of the current articulation of US foreign policy is the apparently naked commitment to imperialism. The USA has
throughout much of its history been accused of pursuing an imperialist agenda.17 Customarily its foreign policies have
been accompanied by discursive commitments to democratically anti-imperialist ends. Yet the current reassertion of
American power is, it would appear, avowedly imperialist. ‘Mastery’ is a positive term of reference within the current
foreign policy lexicon and its concomitant condition of possibility-‘enslavement’-an inferred aim of US strategy.
Traditionally, international relations theorists are used to dealing with orthodoxies that either discount the role of
structural economic and political inequalities within the international system as unimportant for our understanding of how
that system functions (realism) or which account for those inequalities as contingencies that the system itself is in the
process of overcoming through the development of democratisation (liberal internationalism). In turn we are traditionally
accustomed to critiques of those orthodoxies which demonstrate how essential the production of inequality and
unevenness is to the existence of the international system.At the turn of the 21st century we appeared to witness a
puzzling reversal in the order of these debates. Neo-conservative discourses on the international system appeared to be
naked in their ambitions for the possibility and pursuit of imperialism, while the definitively critical account of
international politics JULIAN REID 242 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 18:25 16 July 2010 was still
insisting upon the permanence and necessity of the ‘post-imperialist’ order. The current state of world politics has made,
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 251
from the perspective of many, Hardt and Negri’s claims about the permanence and necessity of the postimperialist
moment in international politics look naı¨ve. Critical appraisals of the war on terror continually make reference to the
discourse of the neoconservative wing as if it were an unproblematically descriptive account of the deployment of US
power.18 Yet such critiques of the war on terror that buy into the regime’s own account of it as a return to imperialism
ignore the vital roles played in its conduct by agencies, practices and discourses of biopolitical form. The discursive
attempts among the Republican right to qualify US foreign policy today in terms of imperialism are, in a certain sense,
curiously out of synch with the actual deployment of the sovereign power of the USA internationally. The assertion of the
USA’s sovereign power occurring amid the war on terror remains conditioned by the continuing roles of the agencies and
practices that Hardt and Negri identified in the 1990s with the deterritorialisation of nation-state sovereignty and the
advance of biopolitics.Here I am thinking chiefly of the roles of the United Nations and the range of non-governmental
actors who defined the shifts in power that Hardt and Negri otherwise describe. These agencies and their practices remain
crucial both to the logistical efficacy and the assertions of legitimacy accompanying the reassertion of US sovereign po
wer. It is fair to say that Hardt and Negri’s account of Empire placed too large an emphasis on the prevalence of
biopolitical and deterritorialised forms and forces at the expense of the traditional units of sovereign power. Nevertheless,
in order to comprehend the strategy of power at work in the organisation of power internationally today it is necessary still
to pay heed to the role of these agencies and their practices. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 252
SOLVENCY - TERRORISM
THE STRIVE TO SECURITIZE OUR RESPONSE TO TERRORISM DESTROYS THE POSSIBILITY OF MUTUAL
INTERNATIONAL COEXISTENCE CAUSING THE SOVEIRGN ATTEMPTING TO PREVENT TERRORISM THROUGH
TERRORISTIC MEANS CREATING AN ANARCHIC SPHERE OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS - POLITICIANS MUST
REMAIN IN CONSTANT CRITICISM OF SECURITIZING THREATS AND RESPONDING MILITARILY OR FACE THE
INEVITABILITY OF WAR.
GIORGIO AGAMBEN, PHILOSOPHER AND PROFESSOR OF AESTHETICS AT UNIVERSITY OF VERONA ITALY, 2001 (“ON
SECURITY AND TERROR” FRANKFURTER)
Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic officials were not primarily concerned with the prevention of hunger or the regulation of production, but
wanted to allow for their development to then regulate and "secure" their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories,
measures of security lead to an opening and to globalization; while the law wants to prevent and regulate, security intervenes in
ongoing processes to direct them.In short, discipline wants to produce order, security wants to regulate disorder. Since
measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the
development of security accompanies the ideas of liberalism. Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments
in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state,
security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive measures of public administration
until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterium of political legitimation. The thought of security bears
within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can
always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic. We should not forget that the first major organization of terror after the
war, the Organisation de l¹Armée Secrète (OAS), was established by a French general, who thought of himself as a patriot, convinced that terrorism
was the only answer to the guerrilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way it was understood by theorists of the "science of
police" in the eighteenthe century, reduces itself to police, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappears. In the end security
and terrorism may form a single deadly system, in which they justify and legitimate each othetrs¹ actions. The risk is not
merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents, but that the search for security leads to a world civil war which makes all civil
coexistence impossible. In the new situation created by the end of the classical form of war between sovereign states it
becomes clear that security finds its end in globalization: it implies the idea of a new planetary order which is in truth the
worst of all disorders. But there is another danger. Because they require constant reference to a state of exception, measure of
security work towards a growing depoliticization of society. In the long run they are irreconcilable with democracy. Nothing is more
important than a revision of the concept of security as basic principle of state politics. European and American politicians
finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical general use of this figure of though. It is not that democracies
should cease to defend themselves: but maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, not
merely towards their control. On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of
emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and
destruction - and not to limits itself to attempts to control them once they have already occurred.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 253
WE MUST ADOPT A CRITICAL VIEW FOR ANALYSIS THE WAR ON TERROR - THE STATUS QUO PRESERVES NEO-
ORIENTALIST IDEOLOGY AND IGNORES HISTORICISM FAILING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS - THIS ALIENATES AND JUSTIFIES VIOLENCE AGAINST THE CONSTRUCTED THREAT OF
CHALLENGES TO US IMPERIALISM - OUR MILITARY INTERVENTION LIES AT THE HEART OF THIS FAILED
UNDERSTANDING.
AYLA GOL, LECTURER IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE EAST ISLAMIC STUDIES, PH. D AND BA, MARCH 18
2010 (“THE WAR ON TERROR AND THE RISE OF NEO-ORIENTALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY” INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,
HTTP://WWW.E-IR.INFO/?P=3505)
An imminent critique of the hegemonic discourse on the ‘War on Terror’ (WOT) is growing rapidly against the grain of an
overwhelming silence about the impacts of the global WOT on the non-Western and particularly the Muslim world. The new trend is
based on three basic epistemological and ontological assumptions of critical terrorism studies (CTS) that challenge orthodox studies on terrorism (Jackson et al. 2009):
the dominance of ‘state-centric’ perspectives; the pre-eminence of ‘problem-solving’ approaches; and largely ahistorical
accounts of terrorism. The value of CTS is embedded in the idea of multi-causality and the complexity of political violence and terrorism from a broad
historical and sociological perspective. The new critical approach calls into question asymmetrical power structures of the 21st
century by highlighting the ‘uneven’ distribution of economic, political, and social power between the West and the non-
Western countries with the ‘combined development’ of globalisation. Following in the footsteps of critical thinkers such as Bhabha (1983),
Derrida (1974), Deleuze and Guattari (1977), Foucault (1980), and Said (1978), who warned about the hegemonic power of the West to legitimate and confirm their
centrality against ‘Others’, history proves that the 9/11 attacks were not an entirely unprecedented consequence of the highest
stage of political, economic, and cultural imperialism (Amin 1977). Indeed, long before the emergence of the international
terrorism of 9/11 and beyond, Abdel-Malek (1981) had already warned about the inherence of politics in the discourses of hegemonic
imperialism that attempts to dominate the hearts and minds of others: Contemporary imperialism is, in a real sense, a hegemonic
imperialism, exercising to a maximum degree a rationalized violence taken to a higher level than ever before - through fire and sword, but
also through the attempt to control hearts and minds. For its content is defined by the combined action of the military-
industrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centres of the West , all of them founded on the advanced levels of development attained by
monopoly and finance capital, and supported by the benefits of both the scientific and technological revolution and the second industrial revolution itself. (pp. 145-146;
emphasis added) Hence, for those who have heeded these warnings and for students of critical and modern social theories, the ‘West’s road to 9/11’ (Carlton 2005) and
the following 7/7 (London), Istanbul, and Madrid bombings were not at all surprising. What is surprising is how the rise of neo-Orientalism in the digital revolution of
the 21st century continuously continues reproducing distorted images and (mis)representations of the ‘East’, ‘Oriental’ or ‘Islamic world’, which is consigned to the
category of ‘non-Western’ or ‘the rest of the world’ (Said 1978, 1993, 1997). This ‘rest of the world’ - the Global South - is a territory peopled by ‘Others’ that can be
labelled as ‘uncivilised’, ‘traditional’, ‘irrational’, and ‘violent’, much as they were centuries ago. The main aims of a critical approach to the WOT are threefold:
First, it identifies the repeating discourses and patterns of Western hegemony, which manifest in the revival of neo-
Orientalism. This approach neither tries to privilege the perspectives from the ‘Orient’ or the voices of ‘Others’ as somehow more authentic, nor does it seek to
represent all non-Western, Eastern and Islamic countries as a monolith. Rather, the new trend seeks to open new space for the inclusion of
indigenous views and dissident voices, voices that are explicitly critical of ahistorical, apolitical, state-centric, and mono-
causal understandings of political violence and terrorism. Second, a critical approach must contextualise the particular
historical, political, social, and ideological power structures that lead an individual or a group to use force and violent
tactics in order to challenge the existing status quo.Without engaging with contextual dimensions, any study is bound to
fail to understand the complex realities of international terrorism and, particularly, so-called ‘Islamic terrorism’ (Jackson
2007). It has become fashionable to attribute terrorism to ‘religion’ or ‘religious extremism’, in particular, Islam. Third, a critical approach would question
why the burgeoning literature on ‘religious terrorism’ contains virtually nothing on ‘Christian terrorism’ , ‘Jewish terrorism’, or
‘Hindu terrorism’. By singling out Islam as a violent religion, uncritical studies of terrorism do more harm than good in understanding the new set of
challenges of the post-Cold War era. Much of the literature adopts a rather simplistic and stereotypical view of Islam as a violent,
irrational, and backward religion that turns ordinary Muslims into potential terrorists . Such a simplistic view impedes the understanding
of terrorism by creating a ‘false-consciousness’ for non-Muslims as rational, non-violent, and peaceful beings; but this view also alienates the dedicated
(and diverse) followers of Islam across the world. The ethnocentric and cultural biases that enter into contemporary discussions of the relationship
between Islam and violence have become particularly problematic in the international relations of the 21st century. The age-old discourse of the ‘clash of civilisations’
between the West and the rest of the world was originally coined by Bernard Lewis in the 1950s but revived by Samuel Huntington, and reinserted into political
discourse in the post-Cold War era in the 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Communism, the Western model of liberal state and democracy
has been presented as the only option in the search for post-Cold War order. Meanwhile, the use of military and political interventions in order to
achieve socio-political change in Muslim countries has failed - as seen in Afghanistan and Iraq - during this search.
Explanations for these failures shaped by Western cultural biases have led to the conclusion that Western strategies have
been ineffectual because of the rigidity of strongly religious and traditional Muslim societies. This is a self-fulfilling
prophecy on two accounts: on the one hand, orthodox views of terrorism are based on the implicit assumption that Islam - in all its
complexities, contradictions, and cultural differences, as well as different political trajectories - is monolithic and homogenous, and that Islam is the primary
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 254
referent in the theory and praxis of violence. On the other hand, such an
uncritical approach refrains from analysing the asymmetry in
existing power structures and the wrongdoings of Western - i.e., US and UK - foreign policies towards not only the Muslim world, but also
the Global South as a whole. The wrongdoings of the West and its challengers that intend to establish hegemony regionally or
globally, need to be critically questioned.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 255
Turn: the plan increases the effectiveness of anti-terrorism/insurgency efforts by withdrawal. This would
collaterally solve unjustifiable genocides like torture
(Anthony) Burke, (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales,) 06 (For a Cautious
Utopianism,Ethics & International AffairsVolume 19 Issue 2, Pages 97 - 98)
Ithank Professor Elshtain for herresponse to my article, and the editorsfor inviting me to make some clarifications and
engage in what is emerging as aprofound normative dispute about theunderlying hopes and worldview of
“justwar”thinkers and various post-Kantian tendencies. This dispute is centered on ourview ofthe role of war in
international society,the normative promise and understanding of “peace,”and, to a lesser extent, oncritiques ofsovereignty
and the state.Ifourexchange has any value, it will be to highlight the considerable stakes ofthis dispute,
Whichmight have otherwise remained hidden in a few short pages of Elshtain’s important Women and War.1True,I don’t
spell out my critique ofjustwar theory in depth, having done so in a2004International Affairsarticle.2Whilethereis value in
the legacy of just war thinking,Isawproblems with its idea of “rightauthority”(central to my dispute with thenew
internationalists),the concepts of “proportionality”and “unintentional”killing,and its confidence in a procedural ethics.That
article convincingly highlighted suchproblems in the conduct of the war on terrorism, even if I do agree that jus adbellum-
but not jus in bello-was satisfiedin the U.S.war in Afghanistan.While it is welcome that states prosecute(some) violations
by their own troops, theuse of airpower-arguably the mostdestructive element of modern warfare-has not been subject
satisfactorily torestraint, a problem compounded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence on substituting
technology for troopsin his plan for “defense transformation.” Mysolution-I didhaveone-was a new test:“avoidable harm.”
This would put the onuson operational commanders to devise tactics that put consideration of damage toinnocents and
crucial infrastructure beforeshort-term operational priorities. The challenge is to reconceive the relationshipbetween
tactics and strategy beyond thenarrowly instrumental: more restraintwould have important strategic benefits,especially
when states are engaged in struggles against terrorism and insurgency incomplex conflicts.Abu Ghraib adds a further
disturbing element to this problem-but rather thanbeing the “aberrant behavior” of “out-of-control rogues,”as Elshtain
claims,there isnowasmall library of journalism and analysis showing that it was the logical endpointof a systematic policy
approved at high levels of the Bush administration.Hence,myproblem with sovereignty and the state.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 256
SOLVENCY - BIOPOWER
The War on Terror reinforces the U.S. imperialistic mindset of injecting American ideals into the lifeblood of Iraq
and Afghanistan - the alternative to this mindset is to halt and recede our deployment of biopower and sovereignty
from other states - pack up and go home.
Quarterly, ]
With the World Trade Center attack of 11 September 2001, the US declaration of the ‘war on terror’, and the subsequent
invasions by the USA of Afghanistan and Iraq, the global order is now widely said to be fragmenting into a mode of
organisation more anachronistic than it is innovative. Faced by vital threats to their security, the major nation-states of the
Western world are, it is argued, reasserting themselves territorially, militarily and politically. Among them the USA has
committed itself to a war and a strategy that has invoked descriptions and accusations of a traditional form of
‘imperialism’.8The postmodern complexities and fluidities of the global order are, it is argued, being rent asunder by the re-imposition of a form
of power and a unit of organisation enduringly modern, the sovereign and imperialistic power of the nation-state, most especially the sovereign
power of the imperial USA. The ‘permanence, eternality, and necessity’ which Hardt and Negri attributed to the postmodern
global order is claimed to be exposed for its fragility and, ultimately, its decrepitude. Consequently we are witnessing a
return to a condition of international politics that some consider more consistent with models of the late 19th century.9 In
contrast to these assertions, the central line of argument that I want to pursue here is that it is a mistake to construe the war on terror, the
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the broader reassertion of US military and strategic power globally in simple terms
as the ‘return’ of imperialism.10 The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center did initiate some changes in the organisation
of power internationally yet it did not forge a regression. Central to my discussion is the problem of how we understand
the relation of sovereign power to biopower in the context of the war on terror. In essence, while there are problems with
the argument that Hardt and Negri make as to the extent to which biopolitical forces exceeded the traditional sovereign
power of nation-states at the end of the 20th century, their main observations on the increasingly biopolitical character of
international order today still ring true.The major weakness with Hardt and Negri’s account was their failure to fully theorise the
intersections and oscillations between biopower BIOPOLITICS OF THE WAR ON TERROR 239 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At:
18:25 16 July 2010 and sovereignty that constitute the strategy of power pursued within a late modern context. This failing can be remedied
nevertheless via the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from whom the concept of deterritorialisation derives.11 In turn , by thinking
about how deterritorialisations effected by biopolitical bodies are intersecting with reterritorialisations pursued by
sovereign nation states, we can understand the contemporary war on terror in continuity with the forms of development
that reshaped the international system during the 1990s.I argue that accounts which insist upon reading contemporary US
strategy as a reassertion of a traditional form of imperialism that destroys the complex systems of global governance
created during the 1990s are overstated in that they neglect the integral logistical and normative roles that biopolitical
forces continue to play in the organisation of power internationally today. In addition, such accounts place too great an
emphasis on the role and agency of government, and especially the discursive shift that has occurred within US foreign
policy and in the articulation of its strategy since the declaration of the war on terror. A closer analysis of the ways in
which the war on terror is being conducted, with particular focus on the war in Iraq, demonstrates the continuing
importance of biopolitical forces in the constitution of power internationally today. Following from this, I also want to think about
what the consequences of such a reading of the contemporary organisation of power are for prevailing understandings of the potential for critical
responses to the war on terror. In interpreting this warIR theorists are still largely trapped within the narrow confines of debate
between Hobbesian and Kantian positions.12Can the codification of international law and the development of multilateral international
institutions posit a solution to the problem of sovereignty? Or does sovereignty always, by necessity, override the potential for a cosmopolitan world
order? These are the kinds of parameters that, in the face of the complex changes presaged by the war on terror, we still see being used to frame
debate within international relations theory in the 21st century. Attempting to think about problems of the relations between law and
force in such dichotomous terms forges the kinds of simplistic characterisations of international order in terms of anarchy
or order that sustains the age-old dialectic of realism and liberalism which remains the motor of IR theory. One of the
many contributions that a text such as Empire makes to IR theory is to demonstrate the collusion between sovereign and
biopolitical forms in the constitution of modern power internationally. The development of international organisations, of
international law, the codification of human rights, the range of liberal aggression at work in the onslaught of
globalisation, are all features of a set of forces that can only superficially be distinguished from the modern institutions of
sovereign state power. There is continuity between the form of sovereignty with which nationstates still today utilise force
in breach of law and the sovereignty with which the most narrowly biopolitical account of man is enforced through law by
humanitarian and other liberal actors in the world today. This is JULIAN REID 240 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At:
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 257
18:25 16 July 2010 something which IR theory still struggles to recognise. If
we want to resist the reassertion of the form of sovereignty
at work today in the context of the war on terror it is essential that we focus upon this complicity of law and force: in other
terms the complicity of the biopolitical and the sovereign. The rest of this paper proceeds thus. In the following section I will give a brief
account of how the war on terror is being interpreted in terms of a reassertion of the sovereign and imperial power of the nation-state. I criticise
thataccount for its over-emphasis upon the role of the shift in the discourse of government and foreign policy in the USA
as an explanation for that reassertion.In the third and fourth sections I demonstrate the extent to which the actual deployment of US sovereign
power in the context of the war on terror remains conditioned by features that are continuous with the forms of developments within the international
system that occurred in the 1990s and which Hardt and Negri otherwise identify with the degeneration of the sovereign power of nation-states. In the
fifth section I reflect on where this analysis takes and leaves us in terms of thinking about the political legacies of humanist politics, and on the
necessities of avoiding the fall into the cheap humanist traps currently being set by thinkers concerned with the promotion of a global civil society as
a response to the phenomenon of terror. At the very least the aim is to illustrate the extent to which the organisation of power in the
21st century remains defined by features that emerged in the 20th and the consequences of such a reading for political
engagement and critique of the war on terror.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 258
SOLVENCY - RAWA
RAWA is the best agency to solve for gender inequality in Afghanistan - it focuses on issues broader than the
burqa and has the potential to acquire a broader base of support
We close this essay by offering an alternative representation of covering practices in Afghan society. In contrast to the
epistemic violence wrought by representations of burqa-clad Afghan women on the Feminist Majority Foundation
website, Kensinger describes the image of Meena Keshwar Kamal, founder of RAWA, on the latter organization’s
website. Kamal’s image accompanies a counter-hegemonic discourse that requires viewers to confront
Afghanistan’s neocolonial cold war history with both the Soviet Union and the United States (Kensinger 2003, 8). The
RAWA website also represents a far more effective call for the elimination of imposed covering. The RAWA
argument contextualizes covering practices within and across cultures, noting that they are not unique to Afghanistan,
Islam, or the third world. “[F]undamentalists” are identifi ed as the root cause of the oppression of women. Through the
use of inclusive language to explicate their position on “[t]he Islamic hejab (veil),” RAWA avoids the myopic fi xation
on the burqa, a particular regime, or geographic locale, as is characteristic of many U.S. representations of Afghan
women (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan n.d.). RAWA’s discourse thus opens up possibilities
for transnational solidarity with women subjugated by diverse forms of “fundamentalism” independent of
covering practices. The criticism in this article should therefore not be read as a condemnation of U.S. interest in gender
equality in Afghanistan, but as a call for support of the experience and knowledge of indigenous activists working toward
this goal. This refl exive alternative to uncritically speaking for others will be more productive when conducted as a
collective enterprise with those others, “by which aspects of our location less obvious to us might be revealed” (Alcoff
1995, 112). Against the portrayal of Islamic women in the United States post- 9/11, RAWA’s website also
accurately presents covering as a cultural, rather than religious, issue. When forcibly imposed, the burqa becomes a
misogynistic instrument of terror designed to objectify women, relegating their social status to that of “chattel” by making
them literally invisible in the Afghan public sphere. Although a call is issued for “rejection of the veil as a symbolic form
of resistance,” by recognizing and respecting the personal nature of individual women’s decisions regarding
covering, the social meaning of such practices is acknowledged in a fashion that preserves the agency of Afghan
women while challenging the structural power at work through imposed covering (Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan n.d.). RAWA thus seeks to empower women through advocacy shaped by their shared
experience of gender relations in Afghanistan (Brodsky 2003). The RAWA website also emphasizes the gendered
Taliban policies that target men, “a subtlety that disrupts any inclination to see the situation as simply one of Afghan men
against Afghan women” (Kensinger 2003, 12). Although men cannot become members, male supporters play a vital role
in RAWA, recognizing that it is “not only a woman’s organization” (Brodsky 2003, 203). Philosophically and
strategically, RAWA’s vision and ongoing practice are consciously grounded in the struggle for democracy for all
Afghans (194). Because of the cultural constraints on Afghan women’s mobility and participation in activities outside the
home, the support of men is vital. As one RAWA member explains, “[w]e are not anti-male. We also can’t work
without men” (193). Perhaps even more important than the elimination of the Taliban, raising the consciousness of
Afghan men is one of the organization’s greatest achievements and essential to their long-term goals (218). RAWA’s
activism, on multiple levels, thus avoids Spivak’s concern about Western discourses that position white men as
“saving brown women from brown men” (1999, 284).
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 259
SOLVENCY - GENDER
The plan is a prerequisite to any future progress in Afganistan
Sonali Kolhatkar and Mariam Rawi (Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a US-based non-profit that funds health,
educational, and training projects for Afghan women/Mariam Rawi is a member of the Revolutionary Association of Women of
Afghanistan writing under a pseudonym) July 8, 2009(Why Is a Leading Feminist Organization Lending Its Name to Support
Escalation in Afghanistan?, Alter Net,
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/141165/why_is_a_leading_feminist_organization_lending_its_name_to_support_escalatio
n_in_afghanistan/?page=entire)
Years ago, following the initial military success of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the temporary fall of the Taliban,
the people of Afghanistan were promised that the occupying armies would rebuild the country and improve life for the
Afghan people. Today, eight years after the U.S. entered Kabul, there are still piles of garbage in the streets . There is no
running water. There is only intermittent electricity in the cities, and none in the countryside. Afghans live under the
constant threat of military violence. The U.S. invasion has been a failure, and increasing the U.S. troop presence will not
undo the destruction the war has brought to the daily lives of Afghans. As humanitarians and as feminists, it is the welfare
of the civilian population in Afghanistan that concerns us most deeply. That is why it was so discouraging to learn that
theFeminist Majority Foundation has lent its good name -- and the good name of feminism in general -- to advocate for
further troop escalation and war. On its foundation Web site, the first stated objective of the Feminist Majority
Foundation's "Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls" is to "expand peacekeeping forces." First of all, coalition troops
are combat forces and are there to fight a war, not to preserve peace. Not even the Pentagon uses that language to describe
U.S. forces there. More importantly, the tired claim that one of the chief objectives of the military occupation of
Afghanistan is to liberate Afghan women is not only absurd, it is offensive. Waging war does not lead to the liberation
of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women's rights can be
won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté. The Feminist Majority should know this
instinctively. Here are the facts: After the invasion, Americans received reports that newly liberated women had cast off
their burquas and gone back to work. Those reports were mythmaking and propaganda. Aside from a small number of
women in Kabul, life for Afghan women since the fall of the Taliban has remained the same or become much worse.
Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were
poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as
children. Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable
difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their
families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their
own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan. In the past few years,
some cosmetic changes were made regarding Afghan women. The establishment of a Ministry of Women's Affairs was
one celebrated example. In fact, this ministry is so useless many think that it should be dissolved. The quota for 25 percent
women in the Afghan parliament was another such show. Although there are 67 women in the Afghan parliament, most of
them are pro-warlord and are themselves enemies of women's rights. When the famed marriage rape law was passed in the
parliament, none of them seriously raised their voice against it. Malalai Joya, an outspoken feminist in the parliament at
the time, has said that she has been abused and threatened by these pro-warlord women in the parliament. The U.S.
military may have removed the Taliban, but it installed warlords who are as anti-woman and as criminal as the Taliban.
Misogynistic, patriarchal views are now embodied by the Afghan cabinet, they are expressed in the courts, and they are
embodied by President Hamid Karzai. Paper gains for women's rights mean nothing when, according to the chief
justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, the only two rights women are guaranteed by the constitution are the right to
obey their husbands and the right to pray, but not in a mosque. These are the convictions of the government the
U.S. has helped to create. The American presence in Afghanistan will do nothing to diminish them. Sadly, as
horrifying as the status of women in Afghanistan may sound to those of us who live in the West, the biggest problems
faced by Afghan women are not related to patriarchy. Their biggest problem is war. More than 2,000 civilians were killed
in Afghanistan in 2008. And disastrous air strikes like the one in Farah province in May that killed an estimated 120
people -- many of them women and children -- are pushing the death toll ever higher. Afghans who survive these attacks
often flee to cities, where overcrowded refugee camps strain to accommodate them. Living in tents without food, water
and often blankets, the mortality rate soars. For those who do not flee, life is not better. One in three Afghans suffers from
severe poverty. With a 1 in 55 chance of mothers surviving delivery, Afghanistan has been, and still, is the second most
dangerous place for women to give birth. Afghan infants still face a 25 percent risk of dying before their fifth birthdays.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 260
These are the consequences of war. In addition, in the eight years since the U.S. invasion, opium production has exploded
by 4,400 percent, making Afghanistan the world capital of opium. The violence of the drug mafia now poses greater
danger to Afghanistan and its women than the rule of the Taliban.Some of the biggest drug-traffickers are part of the U.S.
puppet regime. To make matters worse, corruption in the Afghan government has never been so prevalent -- even under
the Taliban. Now, even Western sources say that only pennies of every dollar spent on aid reach the people who need it. If
coalition forces are really concerned about women, these are the problems that must be addressed. The military
establishment claims that it must win the military victory first, and then the U.S. will take care of humanitarian needs. But
they have it backward. Improve living conditions and security will improve. Focus on security at the expense of
humanitarian goals, and coalition forces will accomplish neither. The first step toward improving people's lives is a
negotiated settlement to end the war.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 261
***FRAMEWORK***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 262
JWT = UTIL
Utilitarian calculus is essential to just war
(Anthony) Burke, (Foreign Policy Expert,) 04(Just war or ethical peace? Moral discourses of strategic violence after
9/11)
On the other hand, in the recent writings of Jean Bethke Elshtain just war doctrine blurs into and in fact sanctifies ‘reason of state’ as she
simultaneously lays claim to a ‘Christian tradition [that] tells us government is instituted by God’ and ‘an Augustinian realism that resists
sentimentalism and insists on ethical restraint’.13 This is symptomatic of a more general phenomenon: that more conventionally ‘realist’
arguments for war based on national integrity and survival draw on and deploy moral discourses, even as we
think of realists being governed more by instrumental concerns with interests, utility and effectiveness. Michael
Walzer makes a significant point in his recent admission that ‘there are now reasons of state for fighting justly’-even if I see it as a problem and he
as a potential virtue.14 In the face of this interweaving and proliferation of moral discourses in favour of strategic violence, a number of important
questions arise. Are our moral discourses-whether they are couched in realist, ‘just war’ or liberal/legal terms -adequate to the problem and
phenomenon of war, and especially war against terror? Where they set out rules, criteria and restraints, are those provisions observed and enforced?
Are they adequate as moral standards in themselves, or can they be criticized in these terms? Do they adequately understand either war or terror, and
will war against terror ever succeed in eliminating either from our world? Do they unfairly colonize the possible space of discourse about morality,
ethics and strategic violence-and what alternative ways of thinking might be possible were we to shake off their constraints? I will address these
questions with a particular focus on ‘just war’ rhetoric and theory as they have been mobilized in the United States after 9/11.
My exploration arises out of what I had originally thought of as a tangential project examining the influence of instrumental reason on strategic
discourse and war -until it became clear that moral discourses areclosely intertwined with instrumental/rational processes of strategic
calculation, even as their result might be forms of violence many consider to be morally unacceptable. The no-man’s-
land that joins these discourses and processes is my analytical terrain; a land where, as the phrase suggests, morally
acceptable slaughter, suffering and chaos are described as ‘regrettable’, but occur because they are ‘unintentional’,
‘collateral’ or ‘necessary’.Is an international community based on modern liberal principles really willing to treat this as morally acceptable,
and leave its theories, laws and systems of enforcement untouched? One of my conclusions is that moral discourses of strategic violence
have, in the post-Enlightenment period, internalized the instrumental (Clausewitzian) assumption that war is both a normal and
a rational pursuit of political ends. This is what unites and underpins the various moral discourses of war-realist, liberal
and neo-Augustinian: the conviction that has made war such a pervasive modern phenomenon, that war ‘is a mere
continuation of policy by other means’.15
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 263
UTIL BAD
There is no neutral form of reason. Utilitarianism is deployed by political strategists to justify and create
wars. War is not a rational pursuit of policy goals. The rational act is to end the wars we are in now, not
maintain them.
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer at School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, 2005 (“Iraq:
Strategy’s Burnt Offering,” Global Change, Peace & Security, Volume 17, Number 2, June 2005, P. 191 -
213//DN)
Just over a year before the Cuban missile crisis, the physicist and civilian leader of the Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer gave a speech at the
University of Puerto Rico. Perhaps, a little removed from American soil, he felt freer to express his thoughts-profound, untimely and all the more
remarkable thoughts coming from a man who had spent many years close to the US military establishment, and who was so imbued with the
positivist and instrumental traditions of post-Newtonian science. He had helped to create the most fearsome weapons known to humanity, had tried to
prevent the development of the even more fearsome thermonuclear weapons, and it was their role in American nuclear strategy and political culture
that now weighed on his mind.3 He complained that ‘there has been no ethical discourse of any excellence or nobility of weight, dealing with how
one should handle, how one should regard . . . atomic weapons’: What are we to make of a civilization which has always thought of
ethical questions as quite essential in human life, and which has always had a deep, articulate, fervent conviction , probably
the returning of good for evil was the right way to behave, what are we to
never a majority conviction but always there, that
think of such a civilization which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing everybody, or almost everybody,
except in terms of calculation and prudence?4 Oppenheimer spoke of a hypothetical-if still alarmingly possible-future in which the
if for us the stakes appear a little lower, the outcomes are more concrete. A ‘war on
survival of humanity seemed to be at stake;
terror’ has been initiated, first against Afghanistan and then Iraq, with the certainty that many thousands are dead, amid
intense debate about whether the wars have enhanced global security or merely given greater impetus to future instability
and terror.The more than 3000 civilian dead in Afghanistan, the well over 15,000 in Iraq, and the thousands more
wounded, maimed and terrorised-what discourse governed their fate?Calculation and prudence. Oppenheimer’s words
resonate well beyond 1960. What is so remarkable about the speech is that Oppenheimer had not only questioned US strategy and the weapons
themselves (this he had been doing since 1949) but brought into question the silence that had surrounded them, that constrained debate about their
existence and potential use. Oppenheimer had raised questions far more profound than those containedwithin apolicy debate,
or even a debate about the merits or dangers of a particular weapons system- he had asked questions that brought that debate itself into
question.He had questioned an entire system of thinking and understanding whose purpose was toconstrain the activity of
thought itself-and which, in particular, constrained the possibility of thinking ethically about the use and politics of force,
outside the iron walls of calculation and prudence.5 He had raised questions about the boundaries of an entire discourse, even if he only
poorly understood its origins, and was groping blindly for a way to challenge and escape it. Our challenge is to understand the origins and
depth of this discourse-an instrumental discourse linking war, politics and technology that we know asstrategy-and to
understand how it forms a matrix of common assumptions and cultural truth beneath the apparently profound
disagreements over the legitimacy and prosecution of the 2003 Gulf War . These disagreements have taken many forms-whether or
not it should have been authorised by a UN resolution, whether it met the criteria for ‘just war’, whether it was a prudent or ‘necessary’ use of US
power and resources in the war on terror-and I do not wish to belittle their importance or value. However, what does need to be questioned is
the assumption underlying them that, under varying circumstances,war is necessary and right-that war is a rational
mechanism for the pursuit of policy goals, that it has a place in modern politics and that it can be waged with discretion
and control. This, following Anatole Rapoport6, I will call the ‘political’ theory of war, which derives from Carl von Clausewitz’s argument that
war ‘is a mere continuation of policy by other means’. War, he famously wrote, was ‘not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a
continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means’. War is not an extraordinary event in the life of a state, but part of its
lifeblood; it is not a terrible and dangerous escalation of violence, difficult to predict and control, but is rather ‘a pulsation of violent force . . . subject
to the will of a guiding intelligence’.7 The claim to war’s rationality here, however disturbing, must be taken seriously. It is a marker of strategy’s
embeddedness in a deeper system of modern political and technological reason. Michael Howard makes an important point when he argues, in The
Causes of Wars, that the conflicts ‘which have usually led to war have normally arisen, not from any irrational or emotive
drives, but from almost asuperabundance of analytic rationality . . . Men have fought during the last two hundred years
not because they are aggressive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because they are reasoning ones.’8 In
his Postmodern War Chris Hables Gray rightly challenges the value judgement implicit in Howard’s argument-‘ if this is truly so’, he writes, ‘we
should start to worry that maybe something is wrong with rationality . . . it is only the most shallow rationality that is used to justify wars, especially
in the modern era’-but by doing so perhaps Gray devalues the power both of the claim to rationality and the larger system of instrumental reason that
provides Clausewitzian strategy with such depth and ongoing force.9 While the emotive and superior connotations of rationality
certainly act as a powerful form of justification, we need to shift analytical framesto understand its true power.
‘Rationality’ can then be thought of in more neutral terms as the operation of specific political and cultural
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 264
deployments of power that combine discursive, institutional, legal, economic, technological and scientific
frameworks in a strategic fashion, according to primarily utilitarian criteria of effectiveness and efficiency. As
Michel Foucault argues, in
the exercise of political power it ‘is not “reason in general” which is implemented, but always a
very specific type of rationality’. He argues for an investigation of the links between rationalisation and power which does not take ‘as a
whole the rationalisation of society or culture’, but analyses ‘this process in several fields’-not to question whether political practices ‘conform to
principles of rationality’, but to discover the ‘kind of rationality’ that is in use.10 At the same time, it is also possible to identify a
particularly sweeping and dominant form of instrumental reason at work in strategic thought and policy . Its claims and
features, and its continuing power over Western policy towards Iraq , is the subject of this essay.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 265
UTIL BAD
Utilitarian strategy and “policy objectives” in Iraq extends beyond the prevention of high intensity war
with smaller wars, using strategies of coercive diplomacy, disarmament, covert operations, sanctions,
coups, and destabilization, making Iraq into a shadowland of war based on constant force and violence.
Not only do these lands inevitably escalate to high intensity conflict, but this deployment of “reason”
separate people from the contingency of life, making us all tools and means for utilitarianism’s
narcissistic and self defeating ends.
213//DN)
While there are a variety of definitions for ‘strategy’, virtually all remain centred around Clausewitz’s effort to match military means to political ends
in a calculated and rational way. For example Richard Betts defines it as ‘a plan for using military means to achieve political ends . . . a rational
scheme to achieve an objective through combat or the threat of it’; and Clark Murdock, extending this definition to national security strategy, writes
that strategy is ‘a plan for using the means of national power (economic, military, diplomatic, law enforcement, cultural etc.) to achieve political
ends’.11 My use of the term echoes this wider definition, because an interrogation of modern strategic reason cannot be confined to
war. Modern strategy is a machinery that also relies on the use of coercive and tactical mechanisms short of high-intensity war: as Edward Mead
Earle wrote in a 1940 article that had enormous influence on US strategic thinking, ‘strategy . . . is not merely a concept of wartime but
aninseparable element of statecraft at all time . . . [it] is the art of controlling and utilising the resources of a nation -or a
coalition of nations-including the armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured
against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed’.12 Given the continuity of war and politics in Clausewitzian strategy, high-
intensity war must be placed on a continuum of policy approaches-trade, intelligence, diplomacy, spying, foreign aid, war
by proxy, sanctions, covert operations, coups and more. What links them is their tactical combination towards the same
ends in which levels of pressure, force and violence can seemingly be manipulated and controlled in pursuit of
somepolicy objective. Clausewitzian thinking has been influential in the development of these shadowlands of war ,
which fall short of high-intensity war’s threshold but often replicate its destructive power, its loss of life and its traumatic
impact-while always threatening to escalate into more intense conflict.13 In this way strategy blurs into geopolitics. Iraq is
a particularly tragic example, having been the subject of not only UN efforts at coercive disarmament-backed by sanctions
that have been little more than a mechanism ofslow-motion slaughter -but also more than a decade of botched US covert
intervention aimed at destabilising and overthrowing the Hussein regime . This longer history thus raises an important question:
what larger structure of political and technological reason, disavowed and subterranean, shapes, enables, valorises and
governs these policies? A tacit acceptance of the rationalist ‘political’ theory of war united both supporters and many opponents of the 2003
Gulf War, whether they considered the war illegal or irrational or both. Against the arguments of those who considered the war illegitimate because
the US defied the United Nations Security Council to launch it, I will ask whether it would have been legitimate and just even if the UN had done so;
against the arguments of those who view the war as an ‘irrational’, ideological perversion of strategic policymaking, I will argue that the line between
rationality and irrationality in modern strategy is a thin (and perhaps imaginary) one indeed; and against the arguments of those who raised a
confusing blizzard of justifications for the war, I will argue the potential moral and political disaster that lies within every operation of the ‘rational’
theory of war as a ‘continuation of policy by other means’. Across all these positions calculation and prudence are strongly present,
modified by varying concerns over international process, legality, priority and effectiveness. All three views are united by this stubborn
founding discourse of the political utility of force, bringing about an uncanny situation where the apparently
untranslatable languages of preventive war, deterrence and collective security speak suddenly from a single face . One name
for that face is Carl von Clausewitz-but we should not blame a single thinker, however influential. Another name for the face is Homo
Faber, modernist ‘man’, the ‘lord and master of all nature’ freed by technology and reason from the necessity and
contingency of life.14 As Martin van Creveld has argued, one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his ‘ideas seemed to have
chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial revolution’.15 Clausewitz is thus a pivotal figure
in the development of this modernist system of human action, statecraft and warfare that Hubert Dreyfus calls, after the philosopher Martin
Heidegger, the ‘technological understanding of being’.16 This essay will argue that such an understanding has formed the discursive
matrix for Western (strategic) policy towards Iraq since 1980, playing out a system of utilitarian reason that draws on earlier
thinkers such as Newton, Bacon and Descartes.17 This
system demands that everything (even humans) become a tool, a
means for the achievement of some end that in turn becomes means for further ends-a narcissistic, self-
defeating chain that reveals strategy as an end in itself, an illusory promise of political power, certainty and
reassurance.18 This is the malign cultural force that Oppenheimer struggled with, and that has produced the human, social
and geopolitical tragedy that is Iraq. Until it is understood, no ‘ethic’ will ever stand a chance.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 266
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 267
UTIL BAD
There is no neutral form of reason. Utilitarianism is deployed by political strategists to justify and create
wars. War is not a rational pursuit of policy goals. The rational act is to end the wars we’re in now, not
maintain them
213//DN)
Just over a year before the Cuban missile crisis, the physicist and civilian leader of the Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer gave a speech at the
University of Puerto Rico. Perhaps, a little removed from American soil, he felt freer to express his thoughts-profound, untimely and all the more
remarkable thoughts coming from a man who had spent many years close to the US military establishment, and who was so imbued with the
positivist and instrumental traditions of post-Newtonian science. He had helped to create the most fearsome weapons known to humanity, had tried to
prevent the development of the even more fearsome thermonuclear weapons, and it was their role in American nuclear strategy and political culture
that now weighed on his mind.3 He complained that ‘there has been no ethical discourse of any excellence or nobility of weight, dealing with how
one should handle, how one should regard . . . atomic weapons’: What are we to make of a civilization which has always thought of
ethical questions as quite essential in human life, and which has always had a deep, articulate, fervent conviction , probably
the returning of good for evil was the right way to behave, what are we to
never a majority conviction but always there, that
think of such a civilization which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing everybody, or almost everybody,
except in terms of calculation and prudence?4 Oppenheimer spoke of a hypothetical-if still alarmingly possible-future in which the
if for us the stakes appear a little lower, the outcomes are more concrete. A ‘war on
survival of humanity seemed to be at stake;
terror’ has been initiated, first against Afghanistan and then Iraq, with the certainty that many thousands are dead, amid
intense debate about whether the wars have enhanced global security or merely given greater impetus to future instability
and terror.The more than 3000 civilian dead in Afghanistan, the well over 15,000 in Iraq, and the thousands more
wounded, maimed and terrorised-what discourse governed their fate?Calculation and prudence. Oppenheimer’s words
resonate well beyond 1960. What is so remarkable about the speech is that Oppenheimer had not only questioned US strategy and the weapons
themselves (this he had been doing since 1949) but brought into question the silence that had surrounded them, that constrained debate about their
existence and potential use. Oppenheimer had raised questions far more profound than those containedwithin apolicy debate,
or even a debate about the merits or dangers of a particular weapons system- he had asked questions that brought that debate itself into
question.He had questioned an entire system of thinking and understanding whose purpose was toconstrain the activity of
thought itself-and which, in particular, constrained the possibility of thinking ethically about the use and politics of force,
outside the iron walls of calculation and prudence.5 He had raised questions about the boundaries of an entire discourse, even if he only
poorly understood its origins, and was groping blindly for a way to challenge and escape it. Our challenge is to understand the origins and
depth of this discourse-an instrumental discourse linking war, politics and technology that we know asstrategy-and to
understand how it forms a matrix of common assumptions and cultural truth beneath the apparently profound
disagreements over the legitimacy and prosecution of the 2003 Gulf War . These disagreements have taken many forms-whether or
not it should have been authorised by a UN resolution, whether it met the criteria for ‘just war’, whether it was a prudent or ‘necessary’ use of US
power and resources in the war on terror-and I do not wish to belittle their importance or value. However, what does need to be questioned is
the assumption underlying them that, under varying circumstances,war is necessary and right-that war is a rational
mechanism for the pursuit of policy goals, that it has a place in modern politics and that it can be waged with discretion
and control. This, following Anatole Rapoport6, I will call the ‘political’ theory of war, which derives from Carl von Clausewitz’s argument that
war ‘is a mere continuation of policy by other means’. War, he famously wrote, was ‘not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a
continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means’. War is not an extraordinary event in the life of a state, but part of its
lifeblood; it is not a terrible and dangerous escalation of violence, difficult to predict and control, but is rather ‘a pulsation of violent force . . . subject
to the will of a guiding intelligence’.7 The claim to war’s rationality here, however disturbing, must be taken seriously. It is a marker of strategy’s
embeddedness in a deeper system of modern political and technological reason. Michael Howard makes an important point when he argues, in The
Causes of Wars, that the conflicts ‘which have usually led to war have normally arisen, not from any irrational or emotive
drives, but from almost asuperabundance of analytic rationality . . . Men have fought during the last two hundred years
not because they are aggressive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because they are reasoning ones.’8 In
his Postmodern War Chris Hables Gray rightly challenges the value judgement implicit in Howard’s argument-‘ if this is truly so’, he writes, ‘we
should start to worry that maybe something is wrong with rationality . . . it is only the most shallow rationality that is used to justify wars, especially
in the modern era’-but by doing so perhaps Gray devalues the power both of the claim to rationality and the larger system of instrumental reason that
provides Clausewitzian strategy with such depth and ongoing force.9 While the emotive and superior connotations of rationality
certainly act as a powerful form of justification, we need to shift analytical framesto understand its true power.
‘Rationality’ can then be thought of in more neutral terms as the operation of specific political and cultural
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 268
deployments of power that combine discursive, institutional, legal, economic, technological and scientific
frameworks in a strategic fashion, according to primarily utilitarian criteria of effectiveness and efficiency. As
Michel Foucault argues, in
the exercise of political power it ‘is not “reason in general” which is implemented, but always a
very specific type of rationality’. He argues for an investigation of the links between rationalisation and power which does not take ‘as a
whole the rationalisation of society or culture’, but analyses ‘this process in several fields’-not to question whether political practices ‘conform to
principles of rationality’, but to discover the ‘kind of rationality’ that is in use.10 At the same time, it is also possible to identify a
particularly sweeping and dominant form of instrumental reason at work in strategic thought and policy . Its claims and
features, and its continuing power over Western policy towards Iraq , is the subject of this essay
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 269
UTIL BAD
The technological rational discourse of utilitarianism marginalizes non-Western populations who have
not adopted this technocratic view, justifying intervention in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and
reduces humans to a standing reserve of tools for mass murder.
213//DN)
I am not seeking to argue that the scientific method , and the modern rationalism it underpinned, has no value-indeed it has brought
advances that have cured diseases, fed the hungry and enriched human culture with new forms of political practice, communication
and artistic endeavour. However, its legacy has been ambivalent, and rarely more so than in its translation into modern strategy,
weapons and warfare. Empirical claims to truth and certainty, while they may partially hold for many areas of natural science, have
been mapped onto social realityand thus deny its irrefutable status as a construct of human power and thought. Furthermore,
as Arendt suggested, the scientific method is nested in an instrumental, utilitarian attitude that ‘degrade [s] nature and the world
into mere means, robbing both of their independent dignity’, importing these values into human action in a way that has disturbing
(and unpredictable) political and ethical consequences .48 Even though he could not predict it, and can hardly be blamed, Bacon’s
technological hubris emerges in the language and ontology of the modern strategist in the form of Henry Kissinger’s 1969 argument that post-war US
foreign policy had been based ‘on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to
bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries’. This ‘scientific revolution’ had ‘for all practical purposes, removed technical limits
from the exercise of power in foreign policy’. At the same time, Kissinger clung to the view that the West is ‘deeply committed to the
notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data-the more
accurately the better’. This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set the West apart from an ‘undeveloped’ world that
contains ‘cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking’ and remain wedded to the ‘essentially pre-
Newtonian view that the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer’ .49 Two implications flow from this-firstly, that the
instrumental policymaker seeks to alter and shape the world to their will, but refuses to accept (ethical) responsibility
for doing so; and second, it provides a licence forWestern interventioninto the developing world because, as James William
Gibson writes, by doing so the West believes itself to be ‘ bring[ing] reality to the Third World’.50 Such convictions draw
onOrientalist discoursesthat justifiedcolonial and imperial controlby appeal to the West’s civilising mission,
technological advancement and martial power. In Orientalism Edward Said places Kissinger on an imperial continuum with Arthur Balfour
and the former British governor of Egypt, Lord Cromer: is not Kissinger’s hunger for international order, he asks, ‘similar to Cromer’s vision of a
harmoniously working machine designed ultimately to benefit some central authority, which opposes the developing world’?51 In this view, as
Aaron Beers Sampson writes, rationality, civilisation and modernity are opposed to less developed societies whose actions are
seen as ‘products of passionate reflexes’. Early anthropology and social theory, strongly embedded in Orientalist
traditions, portrayed such societies as ‘decentralised, disorganised and anarchic’, which the West then naturally had a role
to organise and control.52 Sampson shows how such divisions wereinternalisedby modern international relations theory,
especially Realism, which draws on British social anthropologyand the functional sociology of Emile Durkheim to portray the
international system as a ‘primitive’ form of ‘tropical anarchy’ . Influential US realist Kenneth Waltz identified this as a
justification for America’s ordering mission during the Cold War: the dangers of international anarchy can be moderated
by ‘transforming an anarchic system into a hierarchic one’. He wrote that just as Imperial Britain claimed the ‘white
man’s burden’ and Imperial France her mission civilisatrice, ‘we, in like spirit . . . say that we act to make and maintain
world order’. While Waltz took the view that nakedly imperial ‘global burden bear[ing]’ would be detrimental to American interests, his preferred
solution, ‘the detached management of world affairs’, nonetheless betrayed the same mechanistic hubris central to Kissinger’s vision of US power.53
This matrix of cultural and epistemological assumptions is central both to modern strategy and US foreign policy towards
the Middle East, played out as a ruthless Cartesian search for geopolitical certainty, order and control . Immediately following
his hubristic boast that ‘technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system’ Kissinger was to write that
‘this direct “operational” concept of international order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an
American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though
overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers.’54 Kissinger’s frustration was later visible when in 1975, using the
pseudonym ‘Miles Ignotus’, he published an article in Harper’s entitled ‘Seizing Arab Oil’. This argued that ‘we could solve all
our economic and political problems by taking over the Arab oilfields [and] bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to
operate them’. In the same year he told Business Week that the US could bring oil prices down though ‘massive political warfare against countries
like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate.’55 Now, it seems not
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 270
accidentally, Americans are indeed running Iraqi oilfields .56 Kissinger’s article helped father the policy now pursued by the Bush
administration and, as Robert Dreyfuss shows, began the process of deepening US intervention in the Persian Gulf through the creation of the Rapid
Deployment Force and Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida, and the forward deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.57 In
short, despite writing that a direct ‘operational’ concept of order was ‘too simple’, Kissinger could not let go of it. Visible here is a vicious,
historic irony played out two decades later in Iraq: a desire to utilise and control nature, technology, society and
human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. Martin Heidegger shows us both why it was
so difficult for Kissinger to rethink his Cartesian investment in technology and order, and why Oppenheimer’s anguish about the imperviousness of
calculation to ethics continues to haunt us. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger’s startling argument is that in the modernising
West technology is not merely a tool, a ‘means to an end’ (that we assume humans might be easily able to control and subordinate to
other values like ‘ethics’). Rather technology has become agoverning imageof the modern universe, one that has come
toorder, limit and definehuman existence as a ‘calculable coherence of forces’ and a ‘standing reserve’ of energy .
‘Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, ’ Heidegger writes, ‘whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But
we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral.’58 (How revealing then that the
influential strategist Colin Gray recently argued that ‘strategy is, and can only be, a value-neutral tool’.)59 Technology is not a neutral
instrument subordinate to humans, but has become the very definition of humanity. This derives not merely from scientific
discovery and invention, but from a larger structure of thinking which defines humanity’s relation to itself and to the world in a new and instrumental
way, and for which the work of Newton, Bacon and Descartes formed a prophetic template. This is a sobering realisation: as Heidegger writes, ‘the
threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already
affected man in his essence.’60 Heidegger describes the modern technological existence as only possible within a form of
‘revealing’ which is now also a ‘challenging’-one that ‘puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that
can be extracted and stored [for use] as such’ . He contrasts the modern ‘challenging’ of nature with an older form of revealing which
resulted in a ‘bringing- forth’ or ‘unconcealment’ of things-of the kind achieved by the craftsman, the artist or the peasant tilling a field in order to
‘take care of and maintain’ the soil and nurture its possibilities for growth. He argues that in this earlier form of revealing, the craftsman or farmer
was simultaneously ‘responsible and indebted’ to and for what they had brought forth, and that this is how we must think about causality: as not
merely a ‘result’ or ‘effect’. We should not think of technology as simply a tool or a means to an end, without thinking morally
and responsibly about the entire creative process (scientific, social, political, ecological) that brought it about and into
which it enters. Heidegger laments that ‘today we are too easily inclined to understand being responsible or indebted
moralistically as a lapse’.61 Yet under the technological understanding of being humankind has become obsessed with the
causa efficiens-the end result-and no longer ‘takes care’ of the earth but ‘has come under the grip of a different kind of
setting-in-order which sets upon nature . . . in the sense of challenging it’: Agriculture is now the mechanised food industry. Air
is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium; uranium is set up to yield atomic energy,
which can be released either for destruction or atomic use .62 Heidegger argues that this in turn becomes paradigmatic for modern
science, whose ‘way of representing pursues and entraps nature . . . as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve’. This process Heidegger
calls ‘enframing’ and through it the scientific mind demands that ‘nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation
and remains orderable as a system of information’. This is Oppenheimer’s problem: an ‘ethical’, questioning relation to technology and strategy
cannot challenge prudence and calculation because the enframing technological mode of being ‘has already claimed man and has
done so so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed’.63 Man is not a being who makes and
uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather man has imagined the world
as a machine and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. This is what is at stake when strategy is
assumed, when debate takes place only within its frame . Man becomes not only unable to think outside enframing and
calculation, as a user and controller of nature, but becomes an orderable resource itself: [Man] comes to the very brink of a
precipitous fall . . . where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to
the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only in so far as it is his
construct.64 Technological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within
this project as a calculable resource: matter to be mined, ordered, enhanced, driven, destroyed. In strategy and geopolitics human bodies,
actions and aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason: humans are made
‘citizens’, patriots and soldiers; desires for freedom or selfdetermination become weapons to be directed at enemies, or
‘threats’ to be managed or eliminated; resistance and protest become ‘instability’ to be stabilised; human lives become
tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate matter. Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s analyses of ‘biopower’ have analogies to
Heidegger’s insights here. In an incisive commentary Julian Reid shows that Foucault saw biopower as a ‘life-administering power’ that developed at
the same time as a ‘strategic’ formation of tactical and productive power began to spread through western societies. Biopower, argued Foucault,
sought to ‘incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise and organise the forces under it . . . distributing the living in the domain of value and utility’.65
Agamben, while he did not specifically refer to strategy and war, identified in the emergence of ‘biopolitics’ a disturbing
convergence between democratic and totalitarian power. Biopolitics simultaneously makes all life ‘political’ and reduces
some to ‘bare life’ that ‘may be killed and yet not sacrificed’. While Agamben argued that the ‘camp’66 was the paradigmatic space of
this transformation, I would also argue that such a form of power in which ‘human life is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 271
exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)’ is operating in any space where the ‘exception’ is put into play (the border, the war zone, the
geopolitical zone of ‘containment’), where the rule of law and prohibitions on suffering and murder are suspended or qualified.67 (In this sense the
US prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are not only disturbing evidence of a new extra-legal norm in US security policy; they form a natural
continuity with the callous attitude to ‘life’ typical of modern war.) Reid also refers to a humanistic protest against such power visible in Paul
Virilio’s view that the rationalising war-politics relation ‘disrupts the ‘essential values of the human disposition,
turning all human beings into nodes within the logistic networks of war preparation’.68 This certainly evokes the
experience of Iraq, as do Foucault’s bitter remarks in his essay ‘The Right to Death and Power over Life’: ‘wars are no longer waged in
the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations
are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital’ .69
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UTIL/PUBLIC INTEREST BAD
The value of ‘the public interest’ has been both theoretically and empirically denied in the 20 th century. It
completely ignores the actual effects of public policy and is used simply as a scapegoat when a particular policy is
unpopular.
Heather Campbelland Robert Marshall in ’02 (professors of public policy and planning at the University of Sheffield,
2002, utilitarianism’s Bad Breath: A re-Evaluation of the public interest justification)
The legitimization of planningas an activity which intervenes in land and property marketshas long rested on the notion that some
restrictions of individual rights are necessary if the public interest is to be upheld. This idea of a determinative public interest or
public good was central to the deliberations which produced the great 1947 Town and Country Planning Act in Britain and it has continued to
underpin attempts to place explicitly value on the land use planning activity. Despite this, there are a number of writers (commenting often from very
different ideological positions) who have questioned the value of the ‘public interest’ as a legitimizing concept because it
cannot be given meaning either by those who make policy or by those who evaluate it.It is merely, some would argue, an
expression of preference or commendation which provides no standard against which decisions or policies can be judged
or evaluated (Flathman, 1966). Reade (1987, 1997), for example, has argued that the public interest is a smokescreen or
facade which prohibits any real evaluation of what effects the planning system actually has in practice.Within the arena of
theoretical debate postmodernist critiques have rendered universalizing concepts, such as the public interest, problematic
in a world of difference.Sandercock (1998: 197), for example, asserts that ‘class, gender, and racebased critiques have left this
particular notion of “the public interest” in tatters, as have the lived realities of late twentieth century existence.’ While we
accept the problematic and contested nature of the concept, we nevertheless contend that the discourse central to the idea of the public interest
remains the pivot around which discussions concerning the purpose and role of planning must turn. As Flathman (1966: 13) has said: Determining
justifiable government policy in the face of conflict and diversity is central to the political order. . . . The much discussed difficulties with
the concept of the public interest are difficulties with morals and politics. We are free to abandon the concept but if we do so we
simply have to wrestle with the problems under some other heading. In its most limited sense ‘public interest’ is used to express
approval, approbation or commendation of public policy(Flathman, 1966) and, as noted above, some would argue that this
is all that the public interest represents which renders it useless as a standard against which to judge public
actions.However, governments are expected to justify their actions and it is in this descriptive sense of defining what is ‘good’ that it provides a
normative standard against which decisions or policies can be evaluated. Public interest functions to justify action in situations in which
there is disagreement. It relates to the problem of the ‘one and the many’ (Pennock, 1962). It is in this spirit that we explore the
problems of the concept in relation to contemporary reflections on the role and purpose of planning. We begin by briefly examining the origins of the
concept. This is followed by a consideration of the way in which ‘public interest’ has been regarded in the planning literature in the period since the
Second World War. The third section is devoted to an evaluation of alternative conceptions of ‘public interest’. This is premised upon a typology
which distinguishes both procedural (deontological) as well as outcome focused (consequentialist) conceptualizations of the public interest. It is
argued that while deontological theories have become dominant, planning practice cannot evade the responsibility for making determinative and
ethical choices in public policymaking.
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REALISM INSUFFICIENT
Realism is just one of many political interpretations - the failure to explain 9-11 demands a radical re-thinking of
how we understand international affairs.
Roland Bleiker (is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. He is a former Swiss
diplomat., Aestheticising terrorism: alternative approaches to 11 September). 2003
Such a critical engagement must start with re-interpreting the very events of 11 September . To do so is not necessarily easy, for
the prevalent public discourse, repeated in a variety of forums, holds that this is a "time for realism, not abstract
philosophising". (14) But events themselves do not have any meaning. Meaning emerges only with the process of
representation. And realism is, of course, only one of many forms of political interpretation. It is no less abstract than others,
except that we have become so used to its metaphors --from the balance of power to collateral damage-that we are no longer aware
of their arbitrary and highly political nature. To declare realism realistic, and to depoliticise its metaphors, is to foreclose
the option of understanding a phenomenon like terrorism . Dealing with interpretation, and by definition with abstraction,
is thus inevitable if one is to look for innovative solutions that can break the cycle of violence. One of the crucial questions,
often falsely dismissed as "insensitive and irrelevant", is to ask why 11 September has come to be seen as a major event in global
politics. But this question is not as absurd as it seems. Indeed, it is an important precondition for understanding the politics of representation
that lies at the heart of terrorism and the fight against it. The death toll alone could hardly constitute 11 September as a major event .
About 3000 people lost their lives in the tragedy. Compare this to the 250,000 people who died in the Bosnian war, or those--estimated at up to one
million--who were killed in 1994 during a few months of genocidal violence in Rwanda. In Bosnia it took almost hall a decade for the international
community to organise an intervention that would stop the killing. In Rwanda the indifference and inaction of the international community was even
more stunning.
Anarchic nature of IR doesn’t necessitate self-interested states - intersubjective norms dictate the way
states act.
Alexander Wendt, prof @ yale, 95 [Constructing International Politics]

Thishas an important implication for the way in which we conceive of states in the state of nature before their
first encounter with each other. Because states do not have conceptions of self and other, and thus security
interests,apart from or prior to interaction, we assume too much about the state ofnature if we concur with Waltz that, in virtue of
anarchy, "internationalpolitical systems, like economic markets, are formed by the coaction ofself-regarding unit^."^' We also assume too
much if we argue that, in virtue of anarchy, states in the state of nature necessarily face a "stag hunt" or
"security dilemma."38 These claims presuppose a history of interaction in which actorshave acquired "selfish"
identities and interests; before interaction (and still inabstraction from first- and second-image factors) they would have no
experience upon which to base such definitions of self and other. To assume otherwise is to attribute to states in
the state of nature qualities that they canonly possess in society.39S self-help is an institution, not a constitutive
feature of anarchy.
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REALISM BAD
Realist assumptions about the global order paint over the genocidal violence that a stable state can commit on its
own citizens. This mis-reading is a foundational discourse of the imperial logic of the realist construction of the
world.
Jones, lecturer in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is editor of Critical
Theory and World Politics, in ‘99 [Richard, Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory]
A less familiar. though no less pervasive, corollary to these empirical claims regarding states is the realist assumption that states have
nomtative value in themselves. This assumption is often left implicit by authors working within this tradition and particular proponents
of its neorealist variant. Yet, as Christian Reus-Smit convincingly demonstrates, the realists’ proclivity to view the so-called nation-
state as an ‘°idea|ised political commu-nity” plays a vitally important simplifying role in their worldview (Reus- Smit 1992;
this argument is also made in Walker 1997 and Wheeler I996). Reus-Smit is not claiming that the realist view of the state is analogous to the view
adopted by romantic nationalist philosophers in the nineteenth century, that is. as some kind of organic entity to whose interests all individuals and
all other forms of community should become instrumental and subservient. Rather, his argument is that the ideal of the state as a unified and
relatively homogeneous (nationally. ethnically, and ideologically). coherent, and peaceful community “is fundamental to the
logical structure and coherence” of traditional security studies (Reus-Smit |9921 I4). For proponents of this view, the nation-state is a
sovereignty-bounded realm within which order. justice, liberty, and prosperity (the good life) is possible. In the well-known words of Osgood and
Tucker. the state is the “indis~ pensable condition of value" (Osgood and 'Pucker I967: 284). The profound implications of' this claim for security
discourse are summarized by Reus-Smit: ` Once the nation-state is seen as a unified political community, it is assumed that there
exists such a homogeneity of interests and identification within that community that security can be reduced to a minimal
conception of state survival which is seen as synonymous with aggregate individual security .... Political action . . . is thus
explained in terms of a unity of purpose among citizens coalescing around a common desire to limit threats by maximising
military capabilities. (Reus-Smit 1992: I7) Here the important simplifying effects of the assumption of an idealized political community are
laid bare. If it is assumed that there is an essential harmony of interests between individuals and their state, then analysts working within the
traditional paradigm can claim that their privileging of the state is justified because state security is a precondition for individual well-being within
that state. In other words, a normative justification for focusing on the state as the referent object of security discourse emerges
based on the claim that states are the agents that provide citizens with security at the domestic level . According to this
view. the main (existential) threat to their security emanates from other states that are perceived, in purportedly Hobbesian
fashion, to view their neighbors rapaciously, ready to pounce at the slightest sign of weakness. Thus the security of the state is regarded
as synonymous with the security of its inhabitants. Once this idealized view of the state is measured against the empirical evidence, the privileging of
the state that is characteristic of the traditional approach to security appears highly problematic. ln much of the world, states, far from
fostering an atmosphere within which stability can be attained and prosperity created. are one of the major sources of
insecurity for their citizens. As J. Ann 'Iickner points out: ln an international system which. in parts ot' the South, amounts to
domestic disorder and stability of international borders. often upheld by the interventions and interests of great powers.
the realist assumptions about boundaries between anarchy and order is turned on its head . (Tickner l995: l8l) Even if a very
narrow, military understanding of security is applied, it is apparent that the arms purchased and powers accrued by govemments in the
name of national security are far more potent threats to the liberty and physical safety of their citizens than any putative
extemal threat. This is true not only of states in the disadvantaged South but also of those in the North. When a broader definition of security that
includes nonmilitary threats is applied, it is clear that many states are deeply implicated in the creation of other forms of insecurity for their own
populations. for example, in such issues as food and environmental security. Viewed empirically, apparently aberrant “gangster states” are
closer to the norm of state behavior than the Eurocentric notion of the “guardian angel” state, which is central to the
traditional approach to security, would suggest (Wheeler I996). Furthermore, radical understandings of global politics suggest that those
few developed states that provide their citizens with a good deal of security (however defined) can do so only because of
their dominant, privileged position within the global economy (some of these arguments are summarized in l-lobden and Wyn Jones
1997). However, the very structure of this global economy creates and reinforces the gross dis- parities of wealth, the
environmental degradation, and the class, ethnic. and gender inequalities that are the sources of insecurity in the South. In
other words. the relative security of the inhabitants of the North is purchased at tlhe price of chronic insecurity for the vast
majority of the world population. Radical critics also suggest that the ideological function of the statism of the traditional approach is
actually to discipline those within the state who deign to challenge the status quo (Reus-Smit 1992; Campbell 1992). For example.
dissident voices on both sides of the iron curtain argued that “the principal axis of the Cold War conflict lay, not between the superpowers, but
between states and civil society" (Reus-Smit 1992: 22). So, far from being a necessary condition for the good life, statism
appears to be one of the main sources of insecurity- part of the problem rather than the solution.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 275
REALISM BAD
Even if power distribution and anarchy shape state politics, their threats are still constructions based on
ascribed meanings that are products of socialization
Alexander Wendt, prof @ yale, 95 [Constructing International Politics]

A fundamental principle of constructivist social theory is that people act toward objects, including other actors, on the basis of
the meanings that the objects have for them.21 States act differently toward enemies than they dotoward friends
because enemies are threatening and friends are not. Anarchy and the distribution of power are insufficient to
tell us which is which. U.S.military power has a different significance for Canada than for Cuba, despitetheir
similar "structural" positions, just as British missiles have a differentsignificance for the United States than do
Soviet missiles. The distribution of power may always affect states' calculations, but how it does so depends on
the intersubjective understandings and expectations, on the "distribution ofknowledge," that constitute their
conceptions of self and other.22 If society"forgets" what a university is, the powers and practices of professor
andstudent cease to exist; if the United States and Soviet Union decide that they are no longer enemies, "the
cold war is over." It is collective meanings that constitute the structures which organize our actions.
Realism in International Relations reduces and abstracts human life to the point that life becomes
disposable.
Richmond, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, 2007 Oliver, Alternatives 32.2,
OneFile
This means that much of orthodox IR theory is actually anti-peace. Its reduction and abstraction of human life within
"international relations," instead made up of "actors, anarchy, interdependencies, threats, rationality," power,
and interests leads to dangerous rational calculations that ultimately sacrifice human life. (72) IR represents its
knowledge systems as universal, when in fact they are local to the West/North. (73) Such representational habits
and knowledge systems are prone to isolating themselves in order to maintain their belief in universality. (74) For
example, Sylvester has shown how Waltzian neorealism led to a form of IR in which, "parsimonious explanatory power traded off the gender, class,
race, language, diversity, and cultural multiplicities of life." (75)
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 276
REALISM BAD
The establishment of a political hegemonic discourse utilizes history as a technology used for the subjugation and
exclusion of heterogeneous elements.
Jabri, Centre for International Relations, Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London, 2004
Vivienne, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29.3, Academic OneFile
There is much in the present condition that centers on a conception of the past that naturalizes and reifies. As Michel Foucault's analytic of power has
shown, (2) the establishment of a hegemonic discourse requires a uniform rendition of past and present, where, in a sense
the past comes to serve the present, is brought into the service of the present. Political discourses based on categories such as
homogeneous community, the right to sovereignty, family, the literal reading of religious doctrine, appear to seek legitimacy through
renditions of the past where the subject is uniform and content within the confines of family and community. History is rendered a
technology, deployed in the practices of exclusion that identify exclusively those agencies that may possess legitimacy in
renditions of past and present. Such historical technologies are not only aimed at the glorification of the past, but also at the reversal of
particular social and political turning points of the past. Relations of power come to be formative of the historical process and the
discursive practices that surround it. For Foucault, analyses of such relations must move beyond the dichotomy between
structure and event, for "the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the
concept of structure" since events differ in their "capacity to produce effects." (3)
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 277
REALISM FAILS
The establishment of a political hegemonic discourse utilizes history as a technology used for the subjugation and
exclusion of heterogeneous elements.
Jabri, Centre for International Relations, Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London, 2004
Vivienne, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29.3, Academic OneFile
There is much in the present condition that centers on a conception of the past that naturalizes and reifies. As Michel Foucault's analytic of power has
shown, (2) the establishment of a hegemonic discourse requires a uniform rendition of past and present, where, in a sense
the past comes to serve the present, is brought into the service of the present. Political discourses based on categories such as
homogeneous community, the right to sovereignty, family, the literal reading of religious doctrine, appear to seek legitimacy through
renditions of the past where the subject is uniform and content within the confines of family and community. History is rendered a
technology, deployed in the practices of exclusion that identify exclusively those agencies that may possess legitimacy in
renditions of past and present. Such historical technologies are not only aimed at the glorification of the past, but also at the reversal of
particular social and political turning points of the past. Relations of power come to be formative of the historical process and the
discursive practices that surround it. For Foucault, analyses of such relations must move beyond the dichotomy between
structure and event, for "the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the
concept of structure" since events differ in their "capacity to produce effects." (3)
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 278
SOCIOBIOLOGY BAD
SOCIOBIOLOGY IS COMPLETELY SKEWED - DOESN’T EVALUATE DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR - IGNORES

LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL ASPECTS OF MODERN DAY LIFE.
Duncan S.A Bell, doctoral candidate at the Center for International Studies, and Paul K. MacDonald, doctoral candidate
in the Department of Political Science, Columbia University, 2001 [“Start the Evolution without Us”, UT Library,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v026/26.1bell.html#authbio1]
Thayer advocates the adoption of sociobiological reasoning to augment the traditional realist account of human behavior
because sociobiology "offers a firm intellectual foundation" (p. 126) and a "sound scientific substructure" (p. 127) for
understanding the ultimate causes of egoistic and dominating behavior by human beings. He implies that sociobiology,
which can be broadly defined as the application of evolutionary theory to explain the genetic foundations of an organism's
social behavior, 2 is generally accepted as an unproblematic approach within the scientific community and that the
extrapolation of findings from sociobiological theories into the realm of human behavior is also widely regarded as
legitimate. Neither of these claims can be upheld: The science of sociobiology is the subject of great controversy within
biology as well as other cognate disciplines. 3Indeed, given the torrent of scientific criticism since the publication of
Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,4Thayer's failure to mention the ethically and scientifically
contested nature of sociobiology is surprising. Some advocates of sociobiology portray their opponents as motivated
primarily by political correctness. We believe, however, that there are serious ethical issues at stake in the attempt to
reduce complex social and political behavior to essential elements of human genetics. When accepted uncritically,
sociobiological claims contain the potential to be utilized in the naturalization of behaviors that are variable and in the
justification of discriminatory sociopolitical orders. 5 For this reason, sociobiological theories should be held to a high
standard of intellectual and analytical scrutiny before they are adopted as scientific fact, or be avoided altogether. Given
these concerns, international relations theorists should seriously consider the methodological criticisms leveled against
sociobiology. We briefly highlight three of the most salient of these criticisms. [End Page 188] First, the universality of
the sociobiological project--and specifically its applicability to the study of human behavior--is extremely controversial.
Thayer downplays the serious disagreements by claiming that the study of humans is central to the sociobiological
project (p. 130). In contrast, one commentator has noted that "most 'sociobiologists' . . . are quite uninterested in
humans."6 In particular, many biologists themselves dispute the applicability of sociobiological approaches to humans
because of the central role of culture, language, and self-reflexivity in determining human behavior. 7 Although advocates
of human sociobiology acknowledge the dual influences of culture and genetics in shaping human behavior, no consensus
exists on how to explain the complex interplay between these factors. Second, sociobiological explanations of human
behavior are often unacceptably functionalist. Sociobiologists take a particular form of human behavior and account for it
with reference to evolutionary fitness. Different sociobiologists explain behaviors ranging from selfishness to altruism and
from monogamy to rape based on the claim that they confer a selective advantage to the individuals or groups who
practice them. The quality of sociobiological explanations and the models used to demonstrate them vary tremendously,
but such arguments generally fall into the trap of what Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould call "adaptationism," the
attempt to understand all the physiological and behavioral traits of an organism as evolutionary adaptations. 8 Individual
traits may in fact be the result of a complex web of design and development in the organism's growth. The effects of
individual genes may not be discernable in isolation from their interaction with other genetic traits and environmental
factors. Traits may be nonadaptive and the product of allometry--the relative and incidental growth of a part of an
organism in relation to the whole bundle of traits that constitute an organism. Thus a particular behavior may be "a
consequence of adaptations rather than an adaptation in its own right." 9 The complexity and unpredictability of
interactions between individual selection pressures and particular traits create intractable problems for researchers
attempting to isolate the genetic foundations of behavior within variegated environmental and cultural contexts. In other
words, even if we develop an account of how any given behavior is functional with reference to evolutionary fitness, we
are a long way from being able to conclude that evolutionary mechanisms actually gave rise to that behavior. In this way,
sociobiological accounts easily degenerate into examples of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy generally associated
with other versions of functionalist explanations in the social [End Page 189] sciences. 10 This problem of isolating
particular genetic traits is compounded within human populations, which are not generally divided into isolated,
distinguishable gene pools and which, as mentioned above, attribute a large role to culture in determining socially
acceptable and legitimate behavior. 11 Third, sociobiologists themselves disagree over the unit of selection that should be
emphasized during evolution--whether it be the gene, the individual, or the group. 12 Because different sociobiological
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 279
studies examine selection at different analytical levels, they frequently produce different and contradictory hypotheses
about what behaviors should maximize fitness. Sociobiologists have not systematically examined how different units of
selection interact analytically, and they disagree as to what level exerts the greatest degree of influence on evolution. For
example, Maynard Smith argues that if fitness is exercised at an aggregate level, then group-level selection pressures must
be sufficiently stringent and rapid so that incentives to maximize individual fitness will not supersede those of the group.
13
Empirically assessing the relative degree and frequency of group selection pressures vis-à-vis individual or genetic
factors is extraordinarily complex, however, and in the messy world of human political and cultural interaction, this task is
practically impossible. This controversy is further muddied by disagreement over how to operationalize the theoretical
concept of the gene. Many biologists dispute the notion that particular genes can be understood in isolation, and
emphasize the importance of the interactions between genes in a complete, interconnected genome as well as to the
environment in which they are embedded. 14 Similarly, others criticize the fact that many sociobiologists do not actually
link particular behavior with an individual gene, but rather rely on population genetics and statistical analysis to identify
"hypothetical" genes that correlate with particular behaviors. These critics correctly view the highly stylized, formal
results of sociobiology as suspect, because they are never able to control for all possible exogenous variables and they
minimize the importance of controlled experimentation. 15[End Page 190] In sum, numerous evolutionary biologists,
anthropologists, and psychologists who, although extremely sympathetic to the scientific study of humans, regard socio-
biology as simplistic and misleadingly erroneous. 16 For this reason, sociobiology provides an unstable set of foundations
on which to construct a rigorously scientific approach to the study of world politics, for its scientific status remains
essentially contested.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 280
CALCULATION BAD
The state employs a nationalistic realist frame that does not take into account the non-linear global nature of
modern day conflict. It tries to apply this thinking to protect its population from disaster and conflict but this
approach is effectively useless and actually makes us prone to even worse disasters.
Der Derian, James (Director of the Global Security Program and Research Professor of International Studies at the
Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Fall 2005, An Accident Waiting to Happen, published in:
Predicting the Present, Vol. 27)
we place our
It often takes a catastrophe to reveal the illusory beliefs we continue to harbor in national and homeland security. To keep us safe,
faith in national borders and guards, bureaucracies and experts, technologies and armies. These and other
instruments of national security are empowered and legitimated by the assumption that it falls upon the
sovereign country to protect us from the turbulent state of nature and anarchy that permanently lies in
wait offshore and over the horizon for the unprepared and inadequately defended. But this parochial fear, posing as a realistic worldview, has
recently taken some very hard knocks. Prior to September 11, 2001, national borders were thought to be necessary and sufficient to keep our
enemies at bay; upon entry to Baghdad, a virtuous triumphalism and a revolution in military affairs were touted as
the best means to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East; and before Hurricane Katrina, emergency preparedness and an
intricate system of levees were supposed to keep New Orleans safe and dry. The intractability of disaster, especially its unexpected,
unplanned, unprecedented nature, erodes not onlythe very distinction of the local, national, and global, but, assisted and
amplified by an unblinking global media, reveals the contingent and highly interconnected character of life in
general.Yet when it comes to dealing with natural and unnatural disasters, we continue to expect (and, in the absence of a credible
alternative, understandably so) if not certainty and total safety at least a high level of probability and competence from our
national and homeland security experts. However, between the mixed metaphors and behind the metaphysical concepts given voice
by US Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff early into the Katrina crisis, there lurks an uneasy recognition that this administration-and
perhaps no national government-is up to the task of managing incidents that so rapidly cascade into global events.
Indeed, they suggest that our national plans and preparations for the “big one”-a force-five hurricane, terrorist attack,
pandemic disease-have become part of the problem, not the solution. His use of hyberbolic terms like “ultra-catastrophe”
and “fall-out” is telling: such events exceed not only local and national capabilities, but the capacity of
conventional language itself.An easy deflection would be to lay the blame on the neoconservative faithful of the
first term of US President George W. Bush, who, viewing through an inverted Wilsonian prism the world as they would
wish it to be, have now been forced by natural and unnatural disasters to face the world as it really is-and not even the most
sophisticated public affairs machine of dissimulations, distortions, and lies can close this gap. However , the discourse of the second
Bush term has increasingly returned to the dominant worldview of national security, realism. And if language is, as
Nietzsche claimed, a prisonhouse, realism is its supermax penitentiary. Based on linear notions of causality, a
correspondence theory of truth, and the materiality of power, how can realism possibly account-let alone prepare or provide remedies-for complex
catastrophes, like the toppling of the World Trade Center and attack on the Pentagon by a handful of jihadists armed with box-cutters and a few
months of flight-training? A force-five hurricane that might well have begun with the flapping of a butterfly’s wings? A northeast electrical blackout
that started with a falling tree limb in Ohio? A possible pandemic triggered by the mutation of an avian virus? How, for instance, are we to measure
the immaterial power of the CNN-effect on the first Gulf War, the Al-Jazeera-effect on the Iraq War, or the Nokia-effect on the London terrorist
bombings? For events of such complex, non-linear origins and with such tightly-coupled, quantum effects,
the national security discourse of realism is simply not up to the task. Worse, what if the “failure of imagination”
identified by the 9/11 Commission is built into our national and homeland security systems? What if the reliance on planning for the catastrophe that
never came reduced our capability to flexibly respond and improvise for the “ultra-catastrophe” that did? What if worse-case scenarios, simulation
training, and disaster exercises-as well as border guards, concrete barriers and earthen levees-not only prove inadequate but might well act as force-
multipliers-what organizational theorists identify as “negative synergy” and “cascading effects” -that produce the automated bungling (think Federal
Emergency Management Agency) that transform isolated events and singular attacks into global disasters? Just as “normal accidents” are built into
new technologies-from the Titanic sinking to the Chernobyl meltdown to the Challenger explosion-we must ask whether “ ultra-catastrophes”
are no longer the exception but now part and parcel of densely networked systems that defy national
management; in other words, “planned disasters.” What, then, is to be done? A first step is to move beyond the wheel-
spinning debates that perennially keep security discourse always one step behind the global event. It might well be
uni-, bi-, or multi-polar, but it is time to recognize that the power configuration of the states-system is rapidly being
subsumed by a heteropolar matrix, in which a wide range of different actors and technological drivers are
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 281
producing profound global effects through interconnectivity. Varying in identity, interests, and strength, these new actors
and drivers gain advantage through the broad bandwidth of information technology, for networked communication systems
provide the means to traverse political, economic, religious, and cultural boundaries, changing not only how we interpret events, but
making it ever more difficult to maintain the very distinction of intended from accidental events. According to the
legal philosopher of Nazi Germany, Carl Schmitt, when the state is unable to deliver on its traditional promissory notes
of safety, security, and well-being through legal, democratic means, it will necessarily exercise the
sovereign “exception:” declaring a state of emergency, defining friend from foe, and, if necessary,
eradicating the threat to the state. But what if the state, facing the global event, cannot discern the accidental from the intentional? An
external attack from an internal auto-immune response? The natural as opposed to the “planned disaster”? The enemy within from the enemy
without? We can, as the United States has done since September 11, continue to treat catastrophic threats as issues of
national rather than global security, and go it alone. However, once declared, bureaucratically installed, and repetitively gamed ,
national states of emergency grow recalcitrant and become prone to even worse disasters. As Paul Virilio,
master theorist of the war machine and the integral accident once told me: “ The full-scale accident is now the prolongation of total
war by other means.”
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PREDICTIONS BAD
Predictions sanction violence
Davis 2006 (Doug, Asst. Prof. English @ Gordon College, “Future-War Storytelling: National Security
and Popular Film, ReThinking Global Security,” ed by Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro, pg 16)
Strategic Fiction and the History of the Future Fictions of nuclear terrorism have become part of a priviledged class of
storytelling that represents the strategic facts of U.S. national security. Straddling facts and fiction, they are “strategic
fictions,” tales of catastrophic future warswhose scenarios everyday citizens and defense planners alike treat as
seriously as historical fact. Strategic fictions become an intrinsic part of U.S. national security strategyduring the
world war with the formulation of a policy of nuclear defense built on an imagined catastrophic future war. Imagined
nuclear terrorism and other kinds of indefensible catastrophic attacks now occupy the central place in the imaginary of
national defense once held by the vision of nuclear war. The events described by these stories and scenarios are not real, but
they could be. For national defense planners, that is reality enough. The catastrophic near-future worlds these
imaginary narratives build are, in a dramatic way, the future of our world. The threats they represent are a license to act,
to arm, and to war.
Predictions Obliterate agency
Bleiker 2000 (Roland, Senior Lecturer and Coordinater of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at
Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p. 48-49)
The very notion of prediction does, by its own logic, annihilate human agency. To assert that international relations is a
domain of political dynamics whose future should be predictable through a convincing set of theoretical propositions is to
assume that the course of global politics is to a certain extent predetermined. From such a vantage-point there is no more room
for interference and human agency, no more possibility for politics to overtake theory. A predictive approach thus runs the risk of
ending up in a form of inquiry that imposes a static image upon a far more complex set of transversal political practices. The
point of a theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly changing domain of international relations. Rather, the main objective must
consist of facilitating an understanding of transversal struggles that can grapple with those moments when people walk through walls precisely when
nobody expects them to do so. Prediction is a problematic assessment tool even if a theory is able to anticipate future events .
Important theories, such as realist interpretations of international politics, may well predict certain events only because their theoretical
premises have become so objectivised that they have started to shape decision makers and political dynamics. Dissent, in this case, is
the process that reshapes these entrenched perceptions and the ensuing political practices.
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PREDICTIONS FAIL
The credibility of realist studies and predictions equals those of dart-throwing monkeys.
Menand 2005 (Louis, The New Yorker, “Everybody’s an Expert,” November 28,
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051205crbo_books1)
Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. “It won’t last. She’ll dump him in a month.” If you’re wrong, no one
will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn’t really the point. The point is that you think he’s not worthy of her, and the prediction is just a
way of enhancing your judgment with a pleasant prevision of doom. Unless you’re putting money on it, nothing is at stake except your reputation for
wisdom in matters of the heart. If a month goes by and they’re still together, the deadline can be extended without penalty. “She’ll leave him, trust
me. It’s only a matter of time.” They get married: “Funny things happen. You never know.” You still weren’t wrong. Either the marriage is a bad
one-you erred in the right direction-or you got beaten by a low-probability outcome. It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new
book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their
business-people who appear as experts on television,get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and
businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables-are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong,
they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or
blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same
repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their
beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying
you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims thatthe better
known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The
accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown,
and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge.People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines
regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely
inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones. “Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist-
he teaches at Berkeley-and
his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked
two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and
economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not
come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specializedand in areas about which they were not expert. Would
there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the
United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate?(Many experts believed that it would, on the ground
that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked
questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated
new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate.
Tetlockgot a statistical handle on his task byputtingmost of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form.
The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status
quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth),or less of something (repression, recession).And he
measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of
happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first
scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all
three outcomes-if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings
who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing
monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 284
ONTOLOGY FIRST
Michael Dillon, University of Lancaster, 99 [Moral spaces, The scandal of the refugee]
The question ofontologywas not only reposed, however; the charge was also laid, to equally devastating effect, that the onto-theological yearnings
that characterized Western thought werethe source of its own understated but pervasive life-inimical violence. The return of the ontological
(which occurred in part, also, through the so-called "Language Turn" in philosophy) was, therefore, no mere turn of thought. It was prompted by
and resonated with the historical changes and events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: bureaucratization
and rationalization, global industrialization and technologization, and the advent of mass society, world war, and
holocaust, which themselves challenged statesmen and women, as well as thinkers, to reconsider the char acter of the
civilization they inhabited and the trajectory down which its own dynamics seemed to be propelling it.
World War I was pivotal in this regard. The subsequent advent of totalitarianism, together with the destruction of European Jewry, the advent
of genocide as a regular tool of policy, and the invention, employment, and global deployment ofweapons of mass destructioncompleted
the turn.Philosophy and politics were intimately, if obscurely and confusedly, allied in these developments, in respect not only of
science and technology, but also in terms of political movements, ideology, and the evolution of the thought of politics itself. Whereas the political
and economic character of the age seemed to demand a fundamental reappraisal of the fundaments to which it held, the philosophical reappraisal of
the fundaments called, in their turn, for a political reappraisal of the age . Modernity became the question, but the question was
increasingly formulated in ways that were concerned less with its realization and more with whether or not it was capable
of being outlived. Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence.
As Heidegger - himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political*-never tired of
pointing out,the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable . For one cannot say
anything about anything that is. without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of
thought, in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered within it.What this ontological turn does to other - regional -
modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate through-
out the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamen tal as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of
philosophy.
With ontology at issue,the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic . This
applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of
science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and
corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought
and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit,
how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger,
and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, thereforereposedthe fundamental and inescapable
difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment.
In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know
or acknowledge it,the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another .
You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed thatit intimately shapesnot only a way
of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision,a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way
of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it.This applies ,
indeed applies most, tothose mock-innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 285
ETHICAL PEACE
Ethical peace is not pacifism but decides itself to conflict resolution, disarment and a continual search for
justice and ethics.
Anthony Burke 2005 [“Against the New Internationalism”, Ethics & International Affairs 19, no.2 pg 85]
While perpetual peace does not imply an absolutist pacifism, or deny peoples a limited right to self-defense,
it withholds normative approval from war and demands a longer-term effort to eliminate it from human
society. With the aim of distinguishing such an approach from just war doctrine-which is based on a
norm of limited war-I have advocated such a long-term effort under the label “ethical peace.”Drawing inspiration from Kant’s vision,
ethical peace combines confidence building, conflict resolution, and sustained disarmament efforts with a
far more stringent and accountable normative regime for the use of force nested with inexisting
international law and norms. As an ethical system it is not based in a rigid procedural system of moral
reasoning-a “tick the box”ethic that has already taken too many lives-but in a relentlessly self-critical ethic that
is concerned as much with the outcomes of decisions as with adherence to rules. In this sense ethical peace is only
partially deontological: it is anchored in a universal normative claim (peace) but eschews the modernist confidence in procedure typical of much
moral theory.51 Ethical peace does not require the obsessive search for a metaphysical absolute divorced from
difficult realities, as Elshtain believes.It does, however, demand a single-minded, long- term effort to
dismantle security dilemmas, brick by terrible brick. Conflict will still be a part of human society, and
politics will be necessary, but it must be made less lethal.
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ETHICAL PEACE
AN ETHICAL PEACE FRAMEWORK DIFFERENTIATES FROM JUST WAR THEORIES BY A SEARCH FOR LEGITIMACY AND
PEACE. THIS IS A HARD APPROACH AIMED AT PRIORITIZING HUMAN RIGHTS.
Mary KaldorProfessor and Co-director of London School of Economics Global Governance 2007(“From Just War to Just Peace” The Viability of
Human Security Pg 41-43http://dare.uva.nl/document/131454#page=22.)
What made Northern Ireland different was the fact that the conflict took place on British territory. Bombing Belfast was not an option. It could also
be argued that the different response of American authorities to the Oklahoma bombing (1995) as opposed to September 11 can be explained partly
by the fact that this was a domestic rather than an international incident. The assumption that underlies a Just Peace is that it is no
longer possible, or relevant from the point of view of the victims, to distinguish between foreigners and citizens or
between the domestic and the international.Although the state has primary responsibility for dealing with domestic
violence, there are external situations where the local state itself is the cause of violence or where it is incapable of dealing with violence, where
international forces intervene but through methodsthat are not so very different from the methods that might be used in a domestic
setting.This reflects both the changed sensibilities of society where concerns about people far away have become more
urgent as a result of global communications and transnational communities, and an emerging global social contract where
by the international community adopts the Responsibility to Protect and recognises individual rights and not just state
rights.Of course, elements of these principles can also be found in Just War theorising, particularly in the pre-Westphalian era. Thus , the
emphasis on the protection of citizens is very much in keeping with notions of charity, humanitarianism and
civilisationthat have run through the Just War literature.The need for legitimate political authority and the priority of stabilisation
or peace rather than victory could be considered an Augustinian principle. The notion that the enemy is an individual was
central to the thinking of Vitoria. Moreover, any attempt to codify the Laws of Peace would need to incorporate
humanitarian law but alongside human rights law. It is human rights and the notion of global public authority that marks
this approach off from traditional Just War approaches. George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in
Washington, D.C., has suggested on several occasions thatthe ‘new things’ in the world today, particularly failing states and rogue
states, explain the need for a new kind of Just War, in which individual states take responsibility for ‘regime change’
using new precise and discriminate technology (including, among others, Weigel 1994). His argument is reflected in the national security
strategy announced by George Bush in 2002. I agree with Weigel that in our interconnected world, rogue states and failing states are
unacceptable. But I am very sceptical about the use of war-fighting as a way of bringing about ‘regime change’. The wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan have not created legitimate political authorities - they have speeded up the process of state failure,
contributing to an environment in which various armed groups can operate, and have accentuated a friend-enemy distinction that attracts
young disaffected people to extremist causes.However discriminate and proportionatethese wars appear from a Western
perspective, the civilian victims, even if not numerous by the traditions of twentieth-century wars, perceive these actions very
differently, as do members of linked transnational communities across the world, especially Muslims. Yet the ‘soft power’ approach of the
European Union is not able to deal with the needs of millions of people in the world who live in conditions of intolerable
insecurity.In the new war zones, whose borders are permeable and undefined, in places like the Middle East, the Balkans, West and Central
Africa, Central Asia, or the Caucasus, individuals and communities live in daily fear of being killed, robbed or kidnapped, losing
their homes, or being tortured or raped. Neither current security arrangements, based on traditional state-based
assumptions about the nature of war and the role of military forces, nor the ‘soft’ approaches of international and regional
organisations are able to address these everyday risks. I have proposed that those who are wrestling with the problem of
what constitutes the legitimate use of military force should adopt a human security approach rather than try to adapt more
traditional Just War thinking, even though some of the insights drawn from the notion of Just War may be relevant . A human security
approach is more straightforwardly applicable to the security problems we face today. Human security is sometimes considered a
‘soft’ security approach, relegated to the aftermath of conflicts when police and development experts are supposed to ‘mop up’. What I have argued
is that human security should be regarded as a hard security policy aimed at protecting individuals rather than states. As such,
a human security operation is actually more risky than current war-fighting operations. The human security officer risks his or her life to save others,
rather as police and firefighters are expected to do in domestic situations. But in ‘new wars’, the risks are likely to be greater. It is often
argued that politicians would be unwilling to take such risks and this is why, in many international missions,force protection
receives higher priority than the protection of civilians. Western publics may be more willing to take such risks than
politicians assume.After all, human rights activists, who volunteer, routinely take such risks.
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PERFORMATIVITY
INSTEAD OF A CONSTRUCTIONIST OR CLASSICAL POLICY MAKER VIEW IN WHICH AGENTS ARE OUTSIDE THE DOMAIN
OF CONSTITUTION AND HAVE INANIMATE CONTROL AND CAN MANIPULATE HISTORY AND CULTURE,
PERFORMATIVITY CHALLENGES THE IDEA OF A NATURALLY EXISTING SUBJECT AND POLITICAL PROCESSES ARE
RESONANT THAT CLASH, AMPLIFY, AND MORPH ONE ANOTHER
Campbell et al in 07(Luiza Bialasiewicz Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom , David Campbell
International Boundaries Research Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom , Stuart Elden
International Boundaries Research Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom , Stephen Graham
International Boundaries Research Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom , Alex Jeffrey School of
Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, and Alison Williams International Boundaries Research
Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom 07 “Performing security: The imaginative geographies of
current US strategy”Political Geography 26 page 405-422 ])
As a result, performativity differs from construction because, as Butler has argued, constructivistarguments tend to operate in two predominant
ways. In the first, discourse becomes an omnipotent force so deterministic that ‘it’ acts as the governing subject such that all accounts of human
agency are expunged. Thiswould produce an argument that emphasized linguistic features and paid insufficient attention to the
materiality of discourse.In the second ewhichmaintains the logic of the first, butchanges the character of the subject e the volitional
human agent reigns supreme and wilfully engages in construction without constraint (Butler, 1993: 4e12).In the context of
international relations, this would produce an argument in which policy makers or other agents are regarded as being
engaged in a sort of conscious and deliberate construction of reality. Such a position might assume, at least indirectly, that
policy makers are located outside of the domain of constitution, and have intentional control over variables such as
culture, history and identity. It is, finally, important to call attention to the difference between performativity and
performance.Performativity is a discursive mode through which ontological effects (the idea of the autonomous subject or
the notion of the pre-existing state) are established. Performativity thereby challenges the notion of the naturally existing
subject. But it does not eradicate the appearance of the subject or the idea of agency. Performance presumes a subject and occurs within
the conditions of possibility brought into being by the infrastructure of performativity. This is especially important when it
comes to considering the role of named individuals in the development and furtherance of security policy. Although the
citation of such names gives the appearance of wilful subjects exercising agency with volition, we argue in this paper,
despitecalling attention to the performances of individuals or policies, that the continuities between groups of security
officials and the arguments they propagate demonstrate the importance of performativity (especially recitation and reiteration as
constraints on those performances) in the production of policy. Methodologically this approach requires an alternative model of explanation,
one best explicated by the argument of William Connolly (2005: 869) that classical models of explanation based on ‘‘efficient causality’’ e whereby
‘‘you first separate factors and then show how one is the basic cause, or they cause each other, or how they together reflect a more basic cause’’ e
need to give way to the idea of ‘‘emergent causality’’ . In this conception, politics is understood as a resonant process in which
diverse elements infiltrate into the others, metabolizing into a moving complex e causation as resonance between elements
that become fused together to a considerable degree. Here causality, as relations of dependence between separate factors,
morphs into energized complexities of mutual imbrication and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or
loosely associated elements fold, blend, emulsify, and dissolve into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant
to classical models of explanation (Connolly, 2005: 870. See also Connolly, 2004).In this context, it is important to understand
what an individually named subject signifies, and how we can understand the place of agency within performativity once
pre-given subjectivity is contested.In his account of the contemporary American political condition, William Connolly argues that , in
contradistinction to any idea of a conspiratorial cabal exercising command, the US is run by a ‘‘theo-econopolitical
[resonance] machine’’ in which the Republican party, evangelical Christians, elements of the electronic media and
‘‘cowboy capitalists’’ come together in emergent and resonant, rather than efficient, relationships (Connolly, 2005: 878).This
means the major public figures e like the President and prominent media commentators e need to be understood in
particular ways.As Connolly (2005: 877) argues: It is pertinent to see how figures such asBush and O’Reilly dramatize the resonance
machine. But while doing so, it is critical to remember that they would merely be oddball characters unless they triggered,
expressed and amplified a resonance machine larger than them. They are catalyzing agents and shimmering points in the machine; their
departure will weaken it only if it does not spawn new persona to replace them.
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FIAT BAD
Debate depends upon the inclusion of critical views of policy. Charging kritik with postmodernism or
anachronistic leftism creates a climate of fear which silences ALL dissent about issues. This creates a
sphere of only like-minded debates, foreclosing democracy itself.
Judith Butler, Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkely, 2003 (PhD
Yale, The Precarious Life, July, Preface, P. XIX-XXI//DN)
Dissent and debate depend upon the inclusion of those who maintain critical views of state policy and civic culture
remaining part of a larger public discussion of the value of policies and politics . To charge those who voice critical views
with treason, terrorist sympathizing, anti-Semitism, moral relativism, postmodernism, juvenile behavior, collaboration,
anachronistic Leftism, is to seek todestroy the credibilitynot of the views that are held, but of the persons who hold
them.It produces theclimate of fearin which to voice a certain view is to risk being branded and shamed with a heinous
appellation. To continue to voice one's views under those conditions is not easy, since one must not only discount the truth of the appellation, but
brave the stigma that seizes up from the public domain. Dissent is quelled, in part, through threatening the speaking subject with an uninhabitable
identification. Because it would be heinous to identify as treasonous, as a collaborator, one fails to speak, or one speaks in throttled ways, in order to
sidestep the terrorizing identification that threatens to take hold. This strategy for quelling dissent and limiting the reach of critical
debate happens not only through a series of shaming tactics which have a certain psychological terrorization as their effect, but they work as well
by producingwhat will and will not countas a viable speaking subject and a reasonable opinion within the public domain . It
is precisely because one does not want to lose one's status as a viable speaking being that one does not say what one thinks. Under social conditions
that regulate identifications and the sense of viability to this degree, censorship operates implicitly and forcefully. The line that circumscribes
what is speakable and what is livable also functions as an instrument of censorship. To decide what views will count as reasonable
within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that
are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the media is not
open to him or her (though the internet, interestingly, is). The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate
anddemocratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism,
which ought to becentral to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity. Public policy. including foreign policy,
often seeks to restrain the public sphere from being open to certain forms of debate and the circulation of media coverage. One
way a hegemonic understanding of politics is achieved is through circumscribing what will and will not be admissible as part of the public sphere
itself. Without disposing populations in such a way that war seems good and right and true. no war can claim
popular consent, and no administration can maintain its popularity. To produce what will constitute the public sphere. however.
it is necessary to control the way in which people see. how they hear. what they see. The constraints are not only on content- certain images of
dead bodies in Iraq, for instance. are considered unacceptable for public visual consumption-but on what "can" be
heard, read, seen, felt, and known. The public sphere is constituted in part by what can appear, and the regulation of the sphere of appearance is one
way to establish what will count as reality, and what will not. It is also a way of establishing whose lives can be marked as lives, and whose deaths
will count as deaths. Our capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in the balance. But so, too, does the fate of the reality of certain lives and deaths as
well as the ability to think critically and publicly about the effects of war.
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***ANSWERS***
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A2: T - NOT ELIMINATE
Reduce includes elimination
US Code, 09 (26 CFR 54.4980F-1, lexis)
(c) Elimination or cessation of benefits. For purposes of this section, the terms reduce or reduction include eliminate
or cease or elimination or cessation.

Reduce can include an elimination

Federal Register, 10 (26 CFR 1.411(d)-3, Current as of 5/19/10, lexis)
(7) Eliminate; elimination; reduce; reduction. The terms eliminate or elimination when used in connection with a section
411(d)(6)(B) [26 USCS § 411(d)(6)(B)] protected benefit mean to eliminate or the elimination of an optional form of
benefit or an early retirement benefit and to reduce or a reduction in a retirement-type subsidy. The terms reduce or
reduction when used in connection with a retirement-type subsidy mean to reduce or a reduction in the amount of the
subsidy. For purposes of this section, an elimination includes a reduction and a reduction includes an elimination.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 291
A2: T - MILITARY PRESENCE
Military Presence is Defined by a Country Where There is a Military Base, Aid, Personnel, or Soldiers Engaged in
Combat Theatres
Ladan Nekoomaram, graduate student at American University in the journalism master’s program, 11/10/09[ “US military presence in foreign countries exceeds
rest of world”, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ivAWIWAme0kJ:inews6.americanobserver.net/articles/us-military-presence-foreign-countries-
exceeds-rest-world+%22military+presence+is%22&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari]
U.S. troops today are stationed throughout the Middle East, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey and Kuwait. While some
countries are home to military bases, others require military disaster relief after a crisis, like a tsunami. Others have
become battlefields, resulting in the deaths of U.S. soldiers and foreign civilians. Military presence is defined by any
nation where the U.S. has a military base, where the U.S. is providing military aid, active duty military personnel, or
where U.S. soldiers are engaged in combat theaters. The 2008 Department of Defense Base Structure Report, which details military real estate,
indicates that the U.S. military has 761 properties overseas.
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A2: OCCIDENTALISM K
NO IMPACT TO INTERNALIZATION OF OCCIDENTALIST IMAGES - THEY ARE NOT OFFENSIVE TO WESTERN IDEOLOGY,
THEY ONLY EXIST AS A COUNTERBALANCE TO CURRENT WESTERN ORIENTALIST IDEOLOGY.
DR. HASSAN HANAFI, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, CAIRO UNIVERSITY, NO DATE [“FROM ORIENTALISM TO
OCCIDENTALISM” GOETHE-INSTITUTE]
Orientalism is born in an ethno-racist culture. It expresses Euro-centerism, based on historical pride and organic
superiority. This pits White against Black, knowledge against ignorance, logic against contradiction, reason against magic,
rationalization against ethico-religious practice, dignity and human rights against dignity and rights of God or of the king,
democracy versus despotism or in short, Life against death, Being against nothingness. Occidentalism corrects this type of
relationship between the West as Self and the Orient as Other to the Orient as self and the West as Other. The relation
between the self and the Other, either way, can be an equal relation, not a high-low relation, an even and sane inter-
subjective relation instead of a superiority-inferiority complex. Constructive Occidentalism is the substitute for destructive
Orientalism. The history of the world was written as if the West was the very center of the Universe and the end of
history. History of ancient civilizations was reduced to the minimum. History of modern times in the West is blown up to
the maximum. Three thousand years of the Orient are summarized in one chapter, while five hundred years of history of
the modern West is expounded in several chapters. Orientalism was the victim of Western philosophies of history, which
conceived Europe as the peak of all civilizations, the fruits in modern times after planting the seeds in ancient times, the
accomplishment of a theological development, the perfection of things after the abrogation of all previous imperfections,
the unique Christ after the prophets of Israel, repeated in history. Occidentalism aims at evening the balance of World
historiography against this historical injustice in history of world civilization. Neutrality and objectivity were claimed to
be the conditions of Western science. However, Orientalism is neither neutral nor objective. It is an oriented and
committed discipline, expressing the inclinations and the profound motivation in European consciousness. It reveals the
passions of the subject, more than it describes the neutral object. It substitutes for the independent object the mental image
of the subject. Neutrality and Objectivity appear to be a cover-up for partiality and subjectivism. Occidentalism is just the
opposite. It is not motivated by rancor or the desire to dominate. It does not consciously or unconsciously deforms the
object by stereotyped images, or make value-judgements on it. It tries to be a vigorous science by its object, method and
purpose. The desire to liberate one's self from the yoke of the image imposed on him by the Other is a creative power,
unveiling the truth of power relationships between the subject and the object in Orientalism, controlling the Other by the
image, or in Occidentalism, liberating one's self from the image imposed on him by the other. Occidentalism may produce
counter-images for the Other, with its desire to dominate, and for the self, with a self-producing image of endogenous
creativity, as a desire for self-liberation. The object of Occidentalism is to counterbalance Westernization tendencies in
the Third World. The West became a model of modernization outside itself, in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Western
Life style became very common in Non-Western countries, especially in the ruling classes. The imitation of the West
became almost a national behaviour. These Westernization tendencies have generated anti-Western attitudes as they
appear in religious conservatism and fundamentalism. Occidentalism is partly a defence of national character, national
culture and national life-style against alienation and disloyalty; a popular option against Orientalism as a minority option;
a mass culture against Orientalism as an elite culture; an ideology for the ruled against Orientalism as an ideology of the
ruler; a liberating device like liberation theology against Orientalism as a dominating device, like church dogmatics.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 293
A2 OCCIDENTALISM
Occidentalism is reactionary to Western Orientalism - aff solves your impacts
Ian BurumaA Professor of Human Rights, Democracy and New-Media studies at Bard College and a regular contributor to the New York Review
of BooksFebruary 6, 2004(“The Origins of Occidentalism” Chronicle of Higher Education Vol. 50 No. 22 Pg B10 http://www.hartford-
hwp.com/archives/10/117.html)
When the West is under attack, as it was on September 11, it is often assumed-not only in America-that the West means
the United States. This goes for those on the left, who believe that U.S. foreign policy (or “imperialism”) and U.S.
corporate power (or “globalization”) have brought the suicide bombers and holy warriors upon America by
marginalizing and bullying the millions of people who have failed to benefit from the capitalist world order. But it
also goes for conservatives, who think that Islamist radicalism, like Communism before, is an attack on “our
values,” that is, on the “American way of life.” There is some truth to those claims. The worldwide reach of Wall
Street, Hollywood, and the U.S. armed forces invites resentment. And to the extent that those institutions represent
the American way of life, they are indeed targets of the Islamist jihad. It is also true that U.S. foreign policy can be
misguided, even brutal. And global capitalism can do a great deal of damage as well as good. Finally, the United States,
as the only Western superpower, has indeed come to stand for the West as a whole. And countries, such as Israel, that
are looked upon as U.S. proxies provoke violent hostility for that reason alone. However, the kind of violence
currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothÃ¨que in Bali, is not just
about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their
poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the
maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.
Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call Occidentalism (the title of our new book):
a war against a particular idea of the West, which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism. The current
jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer. This idea has historical
roots that long precede any form of “U.S. imperialism.” Similar hostility, though not always as lethal, has been directed in
the past against Britain and France as much as against America. What, then, is the Occidentalist idea of the West? That
is the problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals who gathered for a conference in Kyoto in
1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find
an ideological justification for Japan's mission to smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia. The
topic of discussion was “how to overcome the modern.” Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly
with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the
Japanese spirit. The “modern thing,” said another, was a “European thing.” Others believed that “Americanism” was the
enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World
(there would certainly have been takers in Europe). There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in
knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were
capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and
democracy. These had to be “overcome.”All agreed that culture-that is, traditional Japanese culture-was spiritual and
profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West,
particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where
people mixed to produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would
restore the warm organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was
between Japanese blood and Western intellect. Precisely the same terms had been used by others, in other places, at
other times. Blood, soil, and the spirit of the Volk were what German romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
invoked against the universalist claims of the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon's invading
armies. This notion of national soul was taken over by the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, who used it to attack the
“Westernizers,” that is, Russian advocates of liberal reforms. It came up again and again, in the 1930s, when European
fascists and National Socialists sought to smash “Americanism,” Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and “rootless
cosmopolitanism” (meaning Jews). Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian scholar, wrote a book in the 1930s about fascist
ideology in Austria and Germany. He called it War Against the West. Communism, too, especially under Stalin,
although a bastard child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was the sworn enemy of Western liberalism
and “rootless cosmopolitanism.”Many Islamic radicals borrowed their anti-Western concepts from Russia and
Germany. The founders of the Ba’ath Party in Syria were keen readers of prewar German race theories. Jalal Al-e
Ahmad, an influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s,coined the phrase “Westoxification” to describe the
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 294
poisonous influence of Western civilization on other cultures. He, too, was an admirer of German ideas on blood and
soil. Clearly, the idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots
in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-
Enlightenment, to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization. Some Marxists have been attracted to it,
but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold,
mechanical West, the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism
provoked Occidentalism, and so does global capitalism today.But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the
revolt against the West becomes a form of pure destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when
rebellion means murder. Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. Isaiah Berlin
once described the German revolt against Napoleon as “the original exemplar of the reaction of many a backward,
exploited, or at any rate patronized society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by
turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural
character.” The same thing might be said about Japan in the 1930s, after almost a century of feeling snubbed and
patronized by the West, whose achievements it so fervently tried to emulate. It has been true of the Russians, who
have often slipped into the role of inferior upstarts, stuck in the outer reaches of Asia and Europe. But nothing
matches the sense of failure and humiliation that afflicts the Arab world, a once glorious civilization left behind in
every respect by the post-Enlightenment West. Humiliation can easily turn into a cult of the pure and the
authentic. Amongthe most resented attributes of the hated Occident are its claims to universalism. Christianity is a
universalist faith, but so is the Enlightenment belief in reason. Napoleon was a universalist who believed in a common
civil code for all his conquered subjects. The conviction that the United States represents universal values and has the
God-given duty to spread democracy in the benighted world belongs to the same universalist tradition. Some of
these values may indeed be universal. One would like to think that all people could benefit from democracy or the
use of reason. The Code Napoleon brought many benefits. But when universal solutions are imposed by force, or
when people feel threatened or humiliated or unable to compete with the powers that promote such solutions, that
is when we see the dangerous retreat into dreams of purity. Not all dreams of local authenticity and cultural
uniqueness are noxious, or even wrong. As Isaiah Berlin also pointed out, the crooked timber of humanity cannot be
forcibly straightened along universal standards with impunity. The experiments on the human soul by Communism
showed how bloody universalist dreams can be. And the poetic romanticism of 19th-century German idealists was often a
welcome antidote to the dogmatic rationalism that came with the Enlightenment.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 295
A2: GUILT K
Realization of guilt is key to prevent the actualization of morally repugnant deeds - their alternative is a
psychoanalytic nightmare and doesn’t solve case.
HerbertFingarette, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, September 1955 [“Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Moral Guilt and
Responsibility: A Re-evaluation” P h i l o s o p h y a n d P h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l R e s e a r c , http://www.jstor.org/stable/2103446 ]
Let us leave, for the moment, this inconclusive point, and proceed to a consideration of question (3) for further light on
the matter. Is the aim of therapy to remove guilt or to alleviate it? It is often supposed that this is so, but the point needs
careful examination. From the psychological standpoint, said Freud, "we have from the very beginning attributed the
function of instigating repression to the moral and esthetic tendencies in the ego... "2 From this it follows that to reduce
the sense of guilt would be to weaken the repressive (i.e., moral) forces. But to do this alone would make it more probable
than before that the evil wish would in fact be expressed in a deed. This is therapeutically and morally bad. Even when we
recognize that repression is often an irrational means of suppressing evil impulses, and that, as a consequence, the
objective of analysis is to remove (some) repressions, this does not imply the removal of guilt. For where irrational
repression is given up as a means of keeping evil impulses from being directly expressed, a substitute rational suppressive
guilt mechanism is used. Analysis replaces the process of repression, which is an automatic and excessive one, by a
temperate and purposeful control on the part of the highest mental faculties. In a word, analysis replaces repression by
conclemnation.3 (Italics in original.) In the previous quotation, 'excessive' refers, as we shall see, not to the degree of guilt
but to the scope and rigidity of the repressive process. From the preceding, it is apparent that it could not be the objective
of therapy simply to remove the sense of guilt for evil wishes. From a therapeutic standpoint and from a moral standpoint,
such a result could be disastrous. The doctrine that the deed merits greater guilt than the wish, however plausible a
doctrine to the modern, "rational" mind, requires recon-sideration in the light of this psychological analysis. Here I return
to the earlier point suggested but undeveloped: guilt is associated with the nature or "essence" of a wish, its meaning, not
its realization. He who identifies his own purposes with its meaning, i.e., either wishes to do it or purposefully does it,
merits the appropriate guilt. I do not, of course, mean to minimize the social consequences of the actual deed and the
additional values or disvalues produced. There is, of course, a significant relationship between the moral character of a
certain type of wish and the consequences of actual instances of it, either as wish or overt action. There is a relationship,
but it is not simple. It is certainly not that guilt is in direct proportion to the actual value-consequences of any one instance
of the wish. It is not my purpose to go into this question here, since, for practical purposes, in this essay, it suffices to
recognize the substantial autonomy of the relation between guilt and the essence of the act. In summary, the guilt
associated with an evil wish is, from a psycho-analytic standpoint, an essential element in the prevention of the reali-
zation of that wish. Hence, in this sense, it is warranted. This is consistent with the (Christian) moral view that it is no
moral excuse to have wished but not acted. Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit
adultery; But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her
already in his heart. The objective of psychoanalytic therapy is to remove both the wish and its attendant guilt. This is
accomplished in the final analysis by removing the evil wish. Removal of the wish brings with it removal of the guilt. The
relationship between the wish and the guilt is left essentially unchanged. They appear together and disappear together.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 296
A2: GUILT K
Engaging in guilt for actions is a prerequisite to national pride - guilt allows us to correct problems in governance
making Western ideology even more appealing and prevent making those mistakes again - turns net benefit -
proves they lead to a slippery slope of total destruction of Western ideals and don’t solve case - plan is a method of
self correction.
F a r i d A b d e l - N o u r , professor of political science at San Diego State University , O c t 2 0 0 3 [ “ N a t i o n a l R e s p o n s i b i l i t y ” P o l i t i c a l T h e o r y ,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3595692 ]
It is here that a minimal account of national responsibility can be anchored. If by dint of her national belonging an
individual can "win wars," "civilize barbarians," "build empires," and so on, is it not only logical to ask whether
corresponding to these her imagined exploits she does not incur a responsibility for all of the bad states of affairs that
these same actions have brought about? Like all complex political actions, those with which she identifies as agent have
probably had other less heroic outcomes. Presumably the actions with which "barbarians" were civilized also exterminated
large numbers of them on the way, and what won the war are presumably the same Abdel-Nour / NATIONAL
RESPONSIBILITY 703 actions that brought about destruction. In short, if the national bond creates imagined agents,
ought these agents not be imagined as responsible? My core claim is this: national responsibility is actively incurred by
individuals with every proud thought they have and every proud statement they make about the achievements of their
nation. This, however, is also the limit of their national responsibility, which only extends to the actions that have
historically brought about the objects of their national pride. The consequences of this argument for every person who
takes her national belonging seriously are at the very least the following: when arguments are made establishing a causal
link between a bad state of affairs and actions that have also brought about some of the objects of one's national pride, a
potential path of responsibility between oneself and the bad state of affairs in question is established. Under such
circumstances, one cannot simply dismiss all talk of responsibility for the past out of hand by simply pointing to one's
date of birth. If one is attached to one's nation then one would need to at least engage the causal arguments linking its
great achievements to the bad state of affairs, even if only to try to offer better arguments that challenge the links in
question. It ought not to be surprising that a bond as counterintuitive as the national one should be associated with unusual
and counterintuitive ideas of responsibility. Jaspers 's reference to the guilt of the fathers, it turns out, is indeed intelligible
(albeit within limits) when we speak of the national bond. II. THE NATURE OF THE RESPONSE So far I have argued
that there is a way in which individuals can be understood to incur responsibility for their nation. Their pride in the
achievements of their nation establishes a type of causal link between them and the actions that brought about these
achievements no matter when and by whom they were performed. Accepting that controversy is an inescapable part of the
causal claims involved, we can ask: what consequences can be meaningfully attached to this responsibility, once it is
established in a particular dialogical encounter or context? Responsibility, as we saw, is the notion that a bad state of
affairs having been brought about calls for a response by those whose actions brought it about. In this part, I argue that national responsibility as I
described it in part I cannot meaningfully lead to punishment. Furthermore, national responsibility can be cast in one of two vocabularies: that of national guilt or that of national shame. The latter vocabulary is more
promising, as it better accounts for the current hold that the national idea has on contemporary political imaginations. 704 POLITICAL THEORY / October 2003 Responses Demanded by Others: Punishment and Vengeance
In his account Williams conveniently divides possible responses into two types: ones demanded by the agent herself and ones demanded by others. Responses demanded by others can be further divided into those that are
demanded by a legal authority and those that are demanded by victims as well as members of the community. A response demanded by an established authority of someone who has brought about a bad state of affairs is
"punishment" (broadly understood). The authority might demand that the individual in question lose her life, suffer pain, lose her freedom, return what she took, apologize, show remorse, offer reparations, or be humiliated
and shamed in public. The authority can justify any one of these demands in a number of ways. It may justify punishment as retribution (the controlled revenge of the Lex Talionis),' rehabilitation, deterrence, healing, or the
restoration of broken bonds between criminal, victim, and community. No matter how it is justified the claim to punishing is always a claim to targeting specific individuals who have brought about the bad state of affairs in
question. This is why punishment is always accompanied by some proceeding designed to at least appear to calibrate the severity of the response to the severity of the offense, and to avoid punishing the wrong person. This
proceeding can be cursory, or as elaborate as a formal trial under due process protections. Where there is no public authority, victims and others will most certainly make their own demands for a response.' Theirs too are
demands for punishment that can include any of the responses usually demanded by authorities. Furthermore, they can justify their demands by any of the rationales available to established authorities. However, in the
absence of a public authority, the rationale of retribution easily serves to justify uncontrolled revenge. Without the restraints of an authority, retribution has the potential of being too blunt and rough.' Whereas the retributive
punishment of the Lex Talionis adjusts the punishment to the extent of the offense, raw revenge tends towards excess and broad targets, self-love giving one's own pain and suffering potentially cosmic proportions.
Furthermore, punishment is expected to be applied on the right person, but raw revenge follows a different logic that Martha Nussbaum illustrates well in a brief discussion of Anaximander, the sixth-century B.C. Greek
philosopher. In Anaximander's cosmology she writes "'encroachments' by one element are made up in exact proportion, over time, by compensatory 'encroachments' of the corresponding opposite ele-ment." It is premised on
a certain "neglect of particulars."' She adds: Abdel-Nour / NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY 705 Very often the original offender is no longer on the scene, or is inaccessible to the victim, and yet the balance still remains to be
righted. What then happens is that a substitute target must be found, usually some member of the offender's family. The crimes of Atreus are avenged against Agamehmon, Agamemnon's offense burdens Orestes.53 With its
neglect of particulars, which might have been appropriate for what Joel Feinberg calls a "frankpledge system. . of compulsory group self policing,"" vengeance has disastrous consequences in contexts where the concept of
individual innocence has taken root. Here the innocent blood of those who are used as substitutes for an offender tends to elicit calls for its own revenge. In a world that recognizes innocent individuals, punishment seeks to
localize the offense, while raw vengeance seems to spread it. Therefore raw revenge, because of its propensity forexcess and for targeting broadly, tends in our world to appear in self-perpetuating cycles.' Cycles of
vengeance, such as the one that has overtaken Israeli-Palestinian relations in the last two years, are some of the most poignant reminders we have of the fragility of all stable human existence. No matter how "natural" one
might consider the impulse towards revenge to be, its "neglect of particulars" is horrifying, and not only to liberal
sensibilities. Indeed, the most vocal defenders of the retributive emotions are defenders of retributive punishment and not of raw revenge. Even the church fathers whom Nietzsche exposes as the masters of hatred and
vengeance do not defend the neglect of particulars.' Raw vengeance, therefore, can never be a legitimate way of extracting a response for a bad state of affairs in this world. As soon as we recognize individual innocence, the
neglect of particulars becomes itself an offense. This means that the only acceptable demand that others can make of someone for being connected with causing a bad state of affairs is punishment. What remains to be
considered at this point is whether, given the account offered in part I, punishment can be meaningfully applied in the case of national responsibility. Punishment requires clear, recognized norms of behavior, the
transgressions of which are either examined by an established authority whose decisions are enforced or, in the absence of such an authority, are dealt with in a way that attends to particulars. The account of national
responsibility that I have offered in part I is premised on individuals' pride in actions performed by others. To demand punishment for national responsibility is tantamount to criminalizing fantasies and feelings. To consider
pride in anything as an offense for which others can make someone answerable by means of punishment is to evoke a dystopia as terrifying as Orwell's famous image. 706 POLITICAL THEORY! October 2003 Just as an
accused's sense of being someone other than the offender does not nullify all other evidence linking her to the offense, similarly her sincere sense of being the same as the offender is not decisive in establishing her identity for
the purpose ofpunishment. Punishment, while it might be applied either to the body or to the "soul" of the offender, relies on as concrete a continuity as possible between the self that committed the offense and the punishable
self. In the words of Gabriel de Tarde: A "soul" is modified, a "myself' is altered; but as long as ... the body, or the person endure[s], the transformations taking place in them are variations upon a theme which remains more
or less identical and whose identity, attenuated but not destroyed, gives us the right to [locate in them] the cause of an act previously committed, the same cause or very nearly the same.57 What is significant here is that it is
the endurance of the person in the body that counts in establishing identity for the purpose of dispensing punishment. This is the case even when the disciplining of the soul, as Foucault has so beautifully illustrated, becomes
the focus of punishment. When we seek to punish we only care about one question of identity: that of mistaken identity. In the case of national responsibility we know that the continuity between the accused bearer of national
responsibility and the offender is neither intuitively obvious nor concrete but imagined. The question of whether this is the same body or person who performed the deed does not arise literally in this context but only
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 297
metaphorically. While it is by all means necessary to take seriously the individual's sense of continuity with past members of her nation, we ought not in so doing confute the following two analytically distinct questions of
identity. Over the identity of the older Oedipus with the younger we can expect consensus among reasonable persons who have access to all necessary information. Here the question of identity arises, in Hannah Arendt's
terms, as a question of "factual truth" that we raise in order to avoid not only error but also deliberate falsehood." However, when we raise the question of the identity of today's proud member of the nation with the one who
brought about her objects of pride two hundred years ago, we can expect reasonable people to disagree according to their differing conceptions of political identity and their own sense of national belonging. It is not a question
of factual truth but a political question. It cannot meaningfully be raised in an attempt to avoid error or falsehood. It belongs in the realm of opinion and consensus formation. It would be hard to find a more energetic defender
To erase this
of opinion than Arendt. Yet she cautions against the dangers of "blurring . . . the dividing line between factual truth and opinion."' Abdel-Nour / NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY 707
distinction in asking the question of national responsibility would not only be analytically sloppy but also normatively
problematic. It would ascribe essentialized national identities to individuals and would treat them as exemplars of their
national group. Precisely the kind of thing that lies beyond the thick red line of which I spoke early on and that ought to be avoided at all costs. Yet there is no way of imagining punishment as an appropriate
response in this context without falling into these dangerous essentializing traps. In other words punishment, which is a perfectly adequate response for wrongs that individuals incur by means of their individual actions, is out
of the question for wrongs they incur via their imagination. When state apparatuses and terrorist organizations use the language of "collective punishment" (that is, when authorities place entire populations under curfew for
the actions of one of their members, and when random inhabitants of cities are said to be "punished" for the actions of other members of their nation by acts of violence), the language of punishment is being misused. In such
cases it merely serves as a form of doublespeak in which raw revenge against "the enemy" is accorded an undeserved respectability. Responses Demanded by the Agent Demands made on someone for a response to a harmful
For [an agent] to be responsible is not simply to be
act do not only come from others. As Williams explains, the agent can make demands on herself for a response. Williams writes:
properly held responsible by others, by the institutions of control and cohesion, but to hold himself responsible. . . to hold
oneself responsible only when the public could rightly hold one responsible is not a sign of maturity.° A mature agent
holds herself responsible even when it would be inappropriate for institutions to do so. The demands that she can make on
herself as a result can be associated with her own guilt or her own shame. The mature agent reasons thus: "what I have
done points in one direction towards what has happened to others, in another direction to what I am."61 Her feelings of
guilt attend to "what has happened to others," but since "what I have done" also points to "what I am," it can lead the
agent to have feelings of shame. Guilt propels the agent towards the performance of some act to right the imbalance
caused by the deed. Shame, however, is an experience of exposure, especially of "peculiarly sensitive . . . vulnerable
aspects of the self."' As a result, the agent's shame makes her want to hide. Whether they emanate from guilt or shame, the
responses that the agent demands of herself do not serve as alternatives to the responses demanded by others. They are
merely part of the complex tapestry of responsibility. Their significance however is intensified wherever there is no room for meaningful demands to be made by others, as is the
case in national responsibility. Both types of response that the individual agent can demand of herself are appropriate for the context of national responsibility. However, responses elicited by shame have broader reach in this
context than do those elicited by guilt. From Nietzsche we learn that "the moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the material concept Schulden [debt]," so that guilt involves "the idea of an equivalence between the
injury and pain that one can inflict."' Guilt, whether it is ascribed to the agent by an external authority or assigned by the agent to herself, has a logic of symmetry and balance. The demands emanating from guilt that an agent
makes on herself are analogous to those made by an external authority. They involve some form of punishment such as restitution or reparations. In short, they involve the performance of an appropriate act that substitutes for
the impossible task of undoing the deed.' Acts induced by guilt can range from compensatory behavior to self-mutilation and suicide. When Freud characterizes guilt as the inward turning of human aggressiveness, he is
clearly thinking more of the latter possibility.' Whatever form it takes, a response elicited by an agent's feelings of guilt implies the following: that the agent understands herself to have transgressed a norm she recognizes This
means that in retrospect at least, she sees that the act ought never to have been performed. Furthermore, some finite acts constitute in her mind appropriate ways of paying the debt she incurred with her transgression." Not all
the demands for a response that a mature agent can make on herself emanate from guilt; that is, not all of these demands are for performing an act that substitutes for undoing the deed. Self-imposed demands take a different
form when they emanate from shame. In Williams's words, "what arouses shame. . . is something that typically elicits from others contempt or derision or avoidance. This may equally be an act or omission, but it need not be:
it may be some failing or defect?"67 To experience shame, the agent need not think that she has transgressed a recognized action norm. Rather, her action may make her aware of a failing of hers. She may discover her failure
to be tolerant, courageous, loyal, a good teacher, a good Muslim, or a decent human being. All that her shame involves is an idealized image, no matter how vague, of who she is and an audience (real or imagined) by whom
she is not fit to be seen as she is. This is an audience whose opinion she values. Hence the impulse to hide that shame elicits rather than the impulse to make right that guilt elicits. Depending on her idealized self-image, the
agent's Abdel-Nour / NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY 709 shame can be potentially damaging or it can be a reminder (sometimes one of the last ones left) of her very humanity. In Augustin's terms, shame collapses the
sinner with the sin. It tends to focus the agent's attention on who she is. Herein lies its potential problem but also the hope implicit in it. The problem is that shame can lead the agent to hate or be disgusted with herself. The
hope, however, is that her shame can be an occasion for the agent to grow and develop and "to become a person that is not shameful?"68 For the only way to get rid of shame is to change oneself.' Shame, therefore, by
While the question of national
directing the agent's attention to her failings in the eyes of an audience whose opinion she values, points her towards the possibility of self-transformation.
responsibility cannot arise meaningfully for institutions of control and cohesion, it can certainly arise for the mature agent
who will hold herself responsible even when it would be inappropriate for institutions to do so. The demands for a response that an agent makes
on herself are more attuned to the national bond connecting her with members of her nation than are demands made by others. When an individual experiences guilt for any number of actions that she did not individually
perform, she gives expression to an internal tension. As a member of a nation, she might be proud of the establishment of the state in which her national aspirations culminate. Indeed, she might identify with the founding
generation. However, once she becomes aware that this achievement came about by means of actions that dispossessed or exterminated a group of people, she might feel guilty. This means that she might consider restitution,
Her guilt emerges precisely because her national pride allows her to imagine herself as having
reparations, or an apology appropriate.
participated in bringing about these outcomes. If she does not feel proud of any achievements of her nation, then no other
person who ascribes a national identity to her can succeed in making her feel guilty for horrors associated with that nation.
If anything, she can be expected to respond to such an attempt with indignation. To speak of actions undertaken by an
individual out of guilt she experiences because of her national identity is a meaningful way to speak of national
responsibility. However, there are some significant limitations to the vocabulary of guilt in this context. In order to feel
guilty, a person must consider the actions in question to be clear transgressions of norms that she herself recognizes In
other words, they need to be actions about which she can clearly say in retrospect that under the historical circumstances
in question they ought not to have been performed. Only then could we say that she is trying to substitute for the
impossible task of undoing the deed. These cannot be actions about which she can say today, in good conscience, "I
would do it again!" To speak of her feeling of national guilt, we would have to conceive 710 POLITICAL THEORY /
October 2003 of her as wishing that the actions in question had not taken place, even if this were to mean that her objects
of national pride might not have been realized. An American national who is proud of the U.S. Constitution might, upon
learning about the compromise with slave-owning interests that the document's ratification required, feel guilty. To say
that she experiences guilt over this matter is to say that she considers such a compromise to be so odious as to be
unacceptable under the historical circumstances in question and that it at least requires an admission of guilt or an
apology. She is someone who upon considering the historical alternatives wishes that another course of action had been
taken. The risk of founding a smaller, weaker, more vulnerable, and less stable union would have been, in her view,
preferable to engaging in a compromise with slave-owning interests. If this means that the nation and Constitution that she
now knows and loves might not have survived, then so be it. This discourse of guilt presents a serious challenge when we consider mature agents who are deeply committed
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 298
to their nation's aspirations. First, it requires them to judge in their own case and to apply norms to their own imagined actions, leaving a lot of room for their "self-love" to interfere. Second, someone who is deeply committed
to her nation might think that under the historical circumstances in question, the compromise with slave-owning interests was inevitable and as a result justifiable, precisely because of the paucity of viable alternatives.
Nonetheless such a person might not be indifferent to the moral weight of engaging in such a compromise. The discourse of guilt does not leave room for such a person's response. The discourse of shame, on the other hand,
does. When a mature agent who takes her national belonging seriously discovers that the objects of her national pride have been brought about by actions that also caused a bad state of affairs, she might not conclude that a
clear norm had been transgressed. She might think that no amount of careful deliberation, rationality, or foresight could have avoided the bad results. Even in retrospect, upon careful consideration, she might find the action
that caused the bad state of affairs to be beyond reproach and justifiable. In other words, she might have no reason to feel guilty. This, however, does not necessarily put an end to the demands for a response she might make
on herself. In such a situation, available to her, is the spectrum of moral emotions that in the case of the lorry driver manifests itself as agent's regret. As Williams explains it is a "very importantly wrong" idea to think that "to
A mature person who
the extent that results of our agency could not be affected by greater rationality, we should regard them as like the results of someone else's agency or like a natural event."'
conceives of herself as an imagined national agent need not think that "we" ought or could have acted differently from the
way "we" actually Abdel-Nour / NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY 711 acted before she can demand a response from
herself for bad outcomes brought about by "our" actions. When she discovers that the founding of the strong, stable union
came at the heavy price of legitimating the institution of slavery for more than half a century, such a person is not led to
an admission of guilt (that would be disingenuous, since she would do it again). Rather, she might be led to reflect on the kind of person she is, at what it says
about her to be proud of this act of founding. The discourse of shame opens up this possibility. Unlike an agent's guilt that is other-directed, her shame is self-directed. Shame is characterized by self-consciousness. As
Gabriele Taylor explains: The involvement of an audience in shame means that shame requires a sophisticated type of self-consciousness. A person feeling shame. . . will suddenly become self-aware and self-critical. . . .
[This] element of drama in shifting viewpoints and the sudden realization of one's changed position is quite missing in the case of pride. The point of view, the seeing eye, is not built into the structure of pride as it is built into
An agent's shame (when, and if, it emerges) is precisely a sign of her capacity for self-awareness and self-
the structure of shame.71
criticism. Pride, however, the aspect of national identity in which this account of national responsibility is anchored, does
not require much self-awareness on the part of the agent. This means that to posit national shame as a vocabulary of
national responsibility is to call for greater self-consciousness on the part of members of the nation. When the member of
a nation is proud of certain achievements of her nation that are associated with some past wrongs, one response that she
can expect of herself as a mature agent is that of reflecting on what it says about her to be proud of such actions. The
agent might, for example, confront the fact that she does not live up to the image she had of herself. Previouslyshe might
have been invested in an image of herself as belonging to a moral, pure nation whose state was built by the purest of
means, against all odds, and she might be genuinely surprised to discover the unsavory character of the actions that
realized her national dream. She might be horrified to discover that brute force, deception, and compromises with evil
were instrumental in bringing about these great achievements of which she is proud. Faced with all this, even if she does not think that a moral imperative
had been violated, she might still be ashamed. Her shame might be private; it might come from looking at herself squarely in the mirror and seeing the disparity between that cold reflection and the idealized image she had
earlier had of herself and her nation. Alternatively, her shame can come from her realization that her nation does not live up to all the claims she had for years made publicly on its behalf and in its defense. In 712
POLITICAL THEORY / October 2003 other words, she might be ashamed to look those people in the eye to whom she used to, with some confidence, assert the myths of her national narrative, myths that she now discovers
to have been composed of the kind of historical error and forgetting that Ernest Renan has long taught us all nations thrive on.72 To the extent that she values the opinion of such an audience, she might think of herself as
unfit to be seen by them. This audience, however, need not be composed of actual persons. In either case, the discovery she makes about the actions of others translates into a failure of hers. For these are actions of which she
was actively proud, and that pride could only be reconciled with the image she had of herself as long as the actions were understood in a certain light. Shown to have had awful consequences, these same actions can only lend
guilt, an agent's shame
themselves to her pride at the cost of causing a tension in her idealized self-image and the image she projects publicly. Now she is potentially in crisis about who she is. Like her
can call her to action. She might feel compelled to transform her nation, herself individually, or both. One thing that her
national shame can induce her to do is to transform the myths of her nation. The cultural left in America, whose focus on national shame Richard Rorty finds so
distasteful, has made this its focus, as have the "New Historians" in Israel.' The promise of their work of debunking national myths is that it shakes the self-righteous indignation and smug self-satisfaction that these myths
have tended to foster amongst members of the nation. Alternatively, however, an agent's national shame might induce her to engage in a more personal form of transformation. She might refine the ways in which she is
connected to her nation. For example, she might change her mind about exactly which achievements of her fellow nationals are worth being proud of. It is also possible that her adherence to the national narrative might
. Her shame can cause the participant in national belonging to demand any of the above responses from
weaken or become more nuanced
herself. We can then say that to national belonging, the dominant form of collective political identification in the last two
hundred years, is attached a concomitant responsibility. The agent who participates in this form of belonging incurs a
responsibility for that part of herself that is caught up in the nation. This responsibility she incurs by means of her national
identity alone. In practical terms this means that her birth after the abolition of slavery, the extermination or expulsion of
native populations, or any other horror in the nation's past does not in itself necessarily absolve her of all responsibility for
these horrors. Whether she is in fact responsible for these horrors will depend entirely upon her objects of national pride
and the relationship between the actions that brought them about, on the one hand, and the horrors in question, on the
other. The agent can implicate herself with the causes of these horrors Abdel-Nour / NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY 713
via her imagination. When she is actively proud of national achievements in a way that allows her to imagine herself as
having brought them about, she renders herself responsible for the specific historical actions with which they were in fact
brought about. In this way she imaginatively renders herself responsible for all the horrors that the same actions have
caused. To paraphrase Williams, a mature agent who takes her national belonging seriously cannot look at such travesties
as would a spectator. Rather, she must hold herself responsible in the direction either of guilt or of shame. If she cannot
bring herself to wish that the actions had not taken place, that is, if she cannot do without the objects of her pride that they
in fact yielded, then the path of guilt is closed to her. In that case, however, she still has the option of national shame. Her
moral maturity demands nothing less.' However, should she adopt a different attitude towards the same achievements, and
merely look at them with approval, without connecting them in any way to her standing in the world, should these
achievements cease to be objects of pride for her but merely objects of her admiration, then she incurs no national
responsibility.' But about such a person we must ask whether she still has a national identity. My conclusion is simple.
Where there is national pride, there is national responsibility. The latter can only disappear in a world devoid of national
identity. Until then, let the participants in national identity recognize that their fantasy opens the door to "the guilt of the
fathers."
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 299
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 300
A2: GUILT K
Collective guilt key to prevent repetition of atrocities - alternative has no long term solvency
AnthonyO'Hear, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham and Head of the Department of Education ,1977[“Guilt and Shame as Moral Concepts”
Blackwell Publishing, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544900]
As Peter Berkowitz has observed, this does not imply "that Fletcher has a scintilla of sympathy for the likes of Milosevic"
or Eichmann.5s We might well ask, however, what sorts of sympathies do motivate Fletcher's argument, since the appeal
of mitigating punishment for perpetrators of genocide or crimes against humanity is hardly obvious. The book suggests at
least two alternative answers. The first would claim that in order to identify accurately the scope of agency in judging
criminal behavior, it is necessary to consider the extent to which a defendant's acts may simultaneously reflect the
intentions of a broader collective. This line of argument, on which doing justice to the individual demands an
assessment of collective guilt, initially departs from liberal individualism, but ultimately vindicates liberal notions of
culpability by purporting to hold individuals to account for their own actions and no one else's.6 The second apparent
motivation is somewhat less developed, yet arguably even more important to Fletcher's overall project. By applying
collective guilt to crimes committed in the name of the nation itself, a society characterizes such crimes in a manner
that has important implications for their victims. Recognizing collective guilt, Fletcher argues, is a means of
producing an institutional memory or archive of the crime that, in turn, can pave the way toward reconciliation (p.
209). If a nation commits genocide, for example-a crime that Fletcher argues cannot, by definition, be undertaken by
individuals acting alone7-punishing the individual killers is not sufficient, since it risks dispensing with all
responsibility for, even all memory of, the dominant culture's role in the killing. In contrast, acknowledging collective
guilt in addition to the guilt of individuals memorializes the crime and calls attention to the rift it has produced
within society, thereby providing for the possibility of reintegration. In this respect, "collective guilt ... fulfills an
important social function" (p. 203). The mitigation of individual guilt can be seen as instrumental in achieving this
broader social aim.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 301
A2: SCHMITT K
SCHMITTIAN POLITICAL ONTOLOGIES OF FRIENDS AND ENEMIES RENDER WAR UNAVOIDABLE - SUCH CLAIMS ROPE
DIFFERENCE AND OTHERNESS INTO THE CONFINES OF ENMITY, GUARANTEEING CONFLICT
ANTHONY BURKE, SENIOR LECTURER AT UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WHALES, 2007[“ONTOLOGIES OF WAR: VIOLENCE,
EXISTENCE AND REASON”]
Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and
limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to the inevitability and
perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes the political', which must be understood
through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his
31
nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are possible'. The
figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'. 32 Without it society is not political and a
people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of
conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of
existence.Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting
collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a
relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a
relationship...in its entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'. 34War,
in short, is an existential condition: the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy
and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential
35
negation of the enemy. Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political
signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but
it is
hard to accept his caveat at face value .36 When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form)
such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a
rational way of resolving political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are
ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says: 'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility
of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join
into a closed circle of mutual support and justification.

UTNIF 2010 PAGE 302
A2: SCHMITT K
THEIR POLITICAL ONTOLOGY PREMISED ON THE FRIEND AND ENEMY DISTINCTION GUARANTEES THAT OTHERNESS
ITSELF INVARIABLY FIGURES AS THREATENING - ATTEMPTS TO MANAGE AND CONTROL DISORDER THROUGH
STRATEGIC REASON MAKE CONFLICT INEVITABLE AS THE ANTAGONISM INHERENT IN SOCIAL LIFE GETS
TRANSFIGURED INTO WARS BETWEEN STATES
ANTHONY BURKE, SENIOR LECTURER AT UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WHALES,2007[“ONTOLOGIES OF WAR: VIOLENCE,
EXISTENCE AND REASON”]
This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of conflict can
generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between
friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions,
judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and
responsibility from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or
quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and
unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social
sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a
conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict
as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant
portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action. Secondly, the
militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can
judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life' .38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial
in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that:...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more
inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the
state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition
39
as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury... Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking
and can be defended andredeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the
other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was
a core political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth
century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document
40
NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere') and frames
dominant Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen
41
security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.') It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of
the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism
and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians. On the reerse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial
preparedness and action are vital or healthy for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of
war as an act of policy does not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples: When wole communities go to war -- whole
peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is
42
an act of policy. Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political
act'), and thus
creates an inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict and Clausewitz's declared
aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete, untrammelled, absolute manifestation of
violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of
chance and probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone') merges the existential
44
and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 303
A2: LANGUAGE K
Critiques of speech produces a reactionary politics in which change is focused on language directly trading off with
efforts to reform the socioeconomic root causes of injustice
Brown, Professor Political Science UC Berkeley, 2001 (Wendy, Politics Out of History, pg. 35-37)
“Speech codes kill critique,” Henry Louis Gates remarked in a 1993 essay on hate speech. 14 Although Gates was referring
to what happens when hate speech regulations, and the debates about them, usurp the discursive space in which one might
have offered a substantive political response to bigoted epithets, his point also applies to prohibitions against questioning
from within selected political practices or institutions. But turning political questions into moralistic ones-as speech codes
of any sort do-not only prohibits certain questions and mandates certain genuflections, it also expresses a profound
hostility toward political life insofar as it seeks to preempt argument with a legislated and enforced truth. And the
realization of that patently undemocratic desire can only and always convert emancipatory aspirations into reactionary
ones. Indeed, it insulates those aspirations from questioning at the very moment that Weberian forces of rationalization
and bureaucratization are quite likely to be domesticating them from another direction. Here we greet a persistent political
paradox: the moralistic defense of critical practices, or of any besieged identity, weakens what it strives to fortify
precisely by sequestering those practices from the kind of critical inquiry out of which they were born. Thus Gates might
have said, “Speech codes, born of social critique, kill critique.” And, we might add, contemporary identity-based
institutions, born of social critique, invariably become conservative as they are forced to essentialize the identity and
naturalize the boundaries of what they once grasped as a contingent effect of historically specific social powers. But
moralistic reproaches to certain kinds of speech or argument kill critique not only by displacing it with arguments about
abstract rights versus identity-bound injuries, but also by configuring political injustice and political righteousness as a
problem of remarks, attitude, and speech rather than as a matter of historical, political-economic, and cultural formations
of power. Rather than offering analytically substantive accounts of the forces of injustice or injury, they condemn the
manifestation of these forces in particular remarks or events. There is, in the inclination to ban (formally or informally)
certain utterances and to mandate others, a politics of rhetoric and gesture that itself symptomizes despair over effecting
change at more significant levels. As vast quantities of left and liberal attention go to determining what socially marked
individuals say, how they are represented, and how many of each kind appear in certain institutions or are appointed to
various commissions, the sources that generate racism, poverty, violence against women, and other elements of social
injustice remain relatively unarticulated and unaddressed.We are lost as how to address those sources; but rather than
examine this loss or disorientation, rather than bear the humiliation of our impotence, we posture as if we were still
fighting the big and good fight in our clamor over words and names. Don’t mourn, moralize
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 304
A2: GLOBAL/LOCAL K
THEIR ALTERNATIVE TO GLOBAL THINKING CREATES A FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN GLOBAL AND LOCAL AND
IGNORES THE CONSTITUTION OF THE LOCAL BY THE GLOBAL
Hardt & Negri 2000
(Empire p 44)
Today this localist position…is both false and damaging. It is false first of all because the problem is poorly posed. In
many characterizations the problems rests on a false dichotomy between the global and the local, assuming that the global
entails homogenization and undifferentiated identity whereas the local preserves heterogeneity and difference…This view
can easily devolve into a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities. What needs to
be addressed, instead, is precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and re-create the
identities and differences that are understood as the local. The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural
but rather the effects of a regime of production. Globalization similarly should not be understood in terms of cultural,
political, or economic homogenization. Globalization, like localization, should be understood as a regime of the
production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization…It is false, in any case, to claim
that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital
and Empire. This Leftist strategy of resistance to globalization and defense of locality is also damaging because in many
cases what appear as local identities are not autonomous or self-determining but actually feed into and support the
development of the capitalist imperial machine…The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy.
44-45 Hardt and Negri
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 305
A2: GLOBAL/LOCAL K
TURN-THERE IS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND LOCAL-ALL POLITICS OCCURS LOCALLY, WE MUST
SEEK OUT THE POINTS OF INTERSECTION WHERE THE GLOBAL IS ENTAILED IN THE LOCAL
Grossberg, Professor of Speech @ U of Illinois, 1992,
[Lawrence, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Pg.]
Without such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that
we act on behalf of others who cannot act on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global
capitalism, and everyone’s position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take much to change the position
of an individual in the United States, as the experience of many of the homeless, the elderly, and the “fallen” middle class
demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a
politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their lives (and the world) better, since the two
are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of affirmation action as in everyone’s best interests,
because of the possibilities it opens. We need to think with what Axelos has described as a “planetary thought” which
“would be a coherent thought - but not a rationalizing and ‘rationalist’ inflection; it would be a fragmentary thought of the
open totality - for what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality.
Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over
the other) for the ways in which the former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance
is always a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to connect into it global
structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of
articulation between them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the
meaning of these terms has to be understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally
and locally! Fight locally because that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency.
Local struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into the field of
immanence.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 306
A2: MEDIA CP
MEDIA ANALYSIS OF US INTERVENTION IN AFGHAN FAILS TO SHOW THAT US GEOSTRATEGIC INTERESTS IN
AFGHANISTAN ARE THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE OPPRESSIVE INSTRUCTIONS THAT INFRINGE ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN
THE REGION.
CAROL STABILE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE AND DEEPA KUMAR, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, 2005
(“UNVEILING IMPERIALISM: MEDIA, GENDER AND THE WAR ON AFGHANISTAN” MEDIA, CULTURE AND SOCIETY,
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, HTTP://MCS.SAGEPUB.COM/CONTENT/27/5/765.SHORT)
With the help of Pakistani intelligence, the US armed and trained mujahideen fighters from Afghanistan and elsewhere in
camps set up in Pakistan and Afghanistan. One of these recruits was a Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden, who made
contacts at these camps that enabled him to form al Qaeda in the early 1990s. Throughout the 1980s, the US supplied
large quantities of arms such as C-4 plastic explosives, long-range sniper rifles, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, Stinger
anti-aircraft missiles, as well as extensive satellite reconnaissance data on the location of Soviet targets 767 Stabile &
Kumar, Unveiling imperialism (Coll, 1992: A1). The US not only armed and trained the Islamists, they also poured
money into the region: some US $3 billion, more than any other aid program to insurgent groups, was spent on this effort.
Ultimately, the Soviet Union was defeated, externally and internally. When it began its withdrawal from Afghanistan in
1989, the country had been devastated. Over 2 million Afghans had been killed during the Soviet occupation, half a
million had been maimed and Afghanistan had become the most heavily land-mined country in the world. Women’s
political situation immediately began to worsen. To fully comprehend the gender apartheid instituted by the Taliban
beginning in 1996, one must first understand what their situation was prior to the rise of the mujahideen and Islamic
fundamentalism. Even in the early 1990s, large numbers of Afghan women in urban centers participated in the workforce
and in public life. Afghanistan’s Constitution, written in 1964, ensured basic rights for women such as universal suffrage
and equal pay. Since the 1950s, girls in Kabul and other cities attended schools. Half of university students were women,
and women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. A
small number of women even held important political posts as members of Parliament and judges. Most women did not
wear the burqa. Even many devout Muslim women wore headscarves and long dresses, but not the burqa (Smeal, 2001).
Attacks on women began in 1989, when mujahideen leaders based in Peshawar, Pakistan, issued a fatwa (or a religious
decree) ordering the assassination of women who worked for humanitarian organizations. Shortly after this, women were
ordered to wear the hijab, a black garment that covers the entire body with a veil on the head. In 1990, women were
forbidden from attending school. To underscore the point, a Peshawar girls’ school was sprayed with bullets (Goodwin
and Neuwirth, 2001: A19). The US, more or less responsible for the situation in Afghanistan, chose not to act. Rather than
redirect resources from funding insurgents to rebuilding the ravaged country’s infrastructure, the US abandoned the
people who had fought their proxy war with the USSR. A power struggle among the various misogynistic factions of the
mujahideen ensued, which exacerbated already dire conditions. Then, in 1992, an unstable government called the
Mujahideen Government of the Islamic State of Afghanistan emerged as coalition of seven mujahideen parties (Marsden,
1998: 42). Its president, Burhannudin Rabbani, suspended the Constitution and issued religious decrees that prevented
women from holding government jobs or jobs in broadcasting, and required them to wear a veil (Goodwin and Neuwirth,
2001: A19). The ascendance of the mujahideen government in 1992, who would later form the Northern Alliance, meant
that women’s rights were severely curtailed. What rights remained would be summarily denied when the Taliban came to
power in 1996. 768 Media, Culture & Society 27(5) The Taliban implemented four central policies regarding women.
First, women were forbidden to hold jobs. Second, they could not attend schools until the Taliban had come up with a
curriculum appropriate for their primary role of bringing up the next generation of Muslims. Third, women were forced to
wear burqas, while men had to wear shalwar kameez (a long tunic and pants), maintain beards and were not permitted to
style their hair. Finally, women were denied freedom of movement. They could only leave their homes if escorted by male
relatives and had to avoid contact with male strangers (Marsden, 1998: 88-9). If these rules were transgressed, the
religious police would mete out punishments like public beatings and sometimes even death. Despite these open violations
of women’s rights, the US supported the Taliban, support that grew out of US efforts to secure a contract for an oil
pipeline through Afghanistan that would enable a US-based oil corporation, Unocal, to gain access to Caspian Sea oil
(Rashid, 2000: 171-82). Because of these economic interests and the desire not to antagonize the Taliban, the US
remained silent when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 and began its assault on women. One US diplomat expressed
the logic of this silence - and the underlying lack of regard for women’s rights - when he observed: ‘Taliban will develop
like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that’
(quoted in Rashid, 2000: 179). Clearly, Unocal and pipelines took precedence over democracy and women’s rights, just as
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 307
they had in Saudi Arabia, which, despite its atrocious record on women’s rights, has long been an ally of the US. The
similarities between Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan are striking: Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi strand of Islam resembles the
Deobandi Islam of the Taliban and Saudi Arabia helped to finance the schools, or madrassas, where the Taliban were
trained. In reality, the Taliban’s brand of extreme Islam has no historical roots in Afghanistan. Rather, it is the product of
US and Saudi involvement in the region; a fact that directly undermines the idea that the Taliban’s repression of women is
natural or endemic, and stems from the ‘tribal’ nature of that society. This is the history and material context completely
elided by media accounts of Afghan women.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 308
A2: MEDIA CP
TURN - MEDIA SPINS OUR WAR EFFORTS AS THE SOLE CAUSE OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS SUCCESS - DISCREDITING
MICROPOLITICAL HUMANITARIAN ORGANIZATIONS - ONLY FURTHERS IMPERIALISM
In this scenario, women’s oppression is ‘natural’ within ‘primitive’ societies, apparently unaffected by repeated invasions
and attacks. The flip side of this assumption about ‘tribal’ and uncivilized Afghanistan is that the enlightened US has just
as naturally and ahistorically valued women’s rights. Thus the historical narrative of Afghanistan’s record on women’s
rights is selective and does not examine Afghan women’s own struggle for equal rights, such as the role of RAWA.
Instead, the rise of women’s rights is seen as the result of the external influence of Russians in the late 1970s. These
reforms, the article states ‘alienated some in Afghanistan’s traditionbound society’ (Lacayo, 2001: 44). The article
concludes that since ‘Afghanistan is famously resistant to outside interference’, because nonsexist ideas can come only
from the outside (read ‘the West’), progress on gender equality is ‘likely to be slow’ (Lacayo, 2001: 48). What is
naturalized in this article, as well as others in the mainstream media, in other words, is the rhetoric of the ‘clash of
civilizations’ and Orientalist constructions of the East upon which such a clash is predicated. Numerous articles reflect
this ideology of Western supremacy. For instance, an editorial argued that: However much we would like to regard
women’s liberation as a natural right, it is the product and achievement of a complex, advanced civilization. Recent events
remind us that this civilization is fragile, and that its enemies are hostile to freedom for anyone - but especially women.
Feminists, more than anyone else, should realize that the West is worth defending. (Young, 2001: B1) But Business Week most lucidly articulated this
message. Shortly after the war on Afghanistan began, Business Week ran an issue that featured a photograph of an unveiled Afghan woman with the word ‘liberation’ printed above her (Nussbaum, 2001 ). The cover
page declared, ‘the US victory is a defining moment - for the Afghan people, for Western values, and for the cause of
moderation in the Muslim world’. The article continued by arguing that the: . . . liberation of Afghanistan from the
tyranny of the Taliban is a watershed event that could reverberate for years. The warm embrace by ordinary people of the
freedom to do ordinary things is a major victory for Western humanist values. This victory of values, in the long run, may
count for far more than the hunt for Osama bin Laden. (Nussbaum, 2001: 32) Constructed almost wholly within the logic
of the ‘clash of civilizations,’ the article goes on to praise Western civilization: 774 Media, Culture & Society 27(5)
America has been in the throes of a debate over values for some time now. Many people, particularly on college
campuses, have been reluctant to champion American values. In fact, the study of Western civilization has been
deemphasized at many of the nation’s best schools in favor of multiculturalism. It’s one thing to understand and respect
other cultures. But the battle for Afghanistan changes the nature of the debate. Women are either free or not free. Other
religions are either respected or not. A clear polarity of values has been revealed on the streets of Kabul. When extremists
take over a culture, we do have a clash of civilizations, and the tolerant one, in the end is better than the other. That’s what
the lesson of Afghanistan teaches us all. (Nussbaum, 2001: 33) While this article claims to be on the side of ‘moderates’ and against the ‘extremists’ in Afghanistan, what becomes clear is
that, as in the Newsweek piece and editorial discussed earlier , the only source of legitimate resistance is the ‘superior’ culture. This logic not only
erases the struggles of women in Afghanistan for their own liberation, but it also erases the struggles of women in the
West against sexism. By presenting women’s equality as a natural part of ‘Western humanist values’, centuries of
women’s political activity for suffrage (gained less than a century ago), for equal pay (still not achieved today), for
reproductive rights (presently under attack by Christian fundamentalist terrorists), are evacuated from history. Not only is
the subjectivity of Western and Afghan women rendered invisible by this discourse, it also constructs artificial barriers to
international solidarity. By consenting to an Orientalist logic that paternalistically seeks to protect women, and that serves
primarily as a cover for imperialist aims, progressive individuals and organizations risk distancing themselves from the
struggles of ordinary people around the world.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 309
A2: MEDIA CP
TURN - MEDIA HAS INCENTIVES NOT TO PUBLISH NEWS THAT IS CONTROVERSIAL AND AGAINST WAR EFFORTS - THE
COUNTERPLAN WILL GIVE US A SENSE OF HOLLOW HOPE AND COMPLACENCY TO LOCAL MOVEMENTS
These realities have not prevented journalists from glorifying the US invasion of Afghanistan. ‘What a difference regime
change makes,’ enthused CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (explicitly endorsing the invasion of Iraq) on a segment of
60 Minutes broadcast over a year after the bombing of Afghanistan commenced. Entitled ‘The Women of
Afghanistan’, the segment proposed to look at ‘how women have fared’ one year later (CBS, 2002) Not
surprisingly, the program dealt mainly with girls’ education and women’s liberation from the burqa. There was no
mention of outbreaks of diseases like polio and measles, of chronic hunger or dreadful poverty. Over the past two years,
coverage of Afghanistan in the mainstream media has all but vanished; few stories have covered the in-fighting among
various warlords and the shambles that the country is now in. In retrospect, the coverage of Afghan women that
followed from 11 September 2001 can only be understood as a cynical and opportunistic use of women. Few journalists
and reporters could have believed that the sudden interest in Afghan women was anything other than a cover for the
Bush administration’s dreams of empire, particularly given the absence of coverage of issues involving women and
violence in the US media in general. Additionally, had journalists had some memory of the 1980s media coverage of
the Afghan-Soviet war and the mujahideen, out of which the Taliban emerged, they would have remembered that
it was 776 Media, Culture & Society 27(5) positively glowing. As David Gibbs observes, there was ‘near unanimous
agreement that the [mujahideen] guerillas were “heroic,” “courageous” and above all “freedom fighters”’ (2002).
As we have seen, however, references to history were largely absent from the story of Afghanistan . Indeed, the figure of
the veiled Afghan woman, who could be set in opposition to the bearded, unsmiling face of the Islamic patriarch, was a
perfect pawn in this game of dehistoricization. Unmarked by time or any recognizable economic context, Afghan
women’s oppression was represented largely in ahistorical religious and cultural terms. And their oppression
commenced, as numerous reports suggested, with the rise of the Taliban. For instance, one report stated: Since
taking Afghanistan’s capital Kabul in 1996, the Taliban has prohibited schooling for girls over age 8, shut down
the women’s university, and forced women to quit their jobs, the report said. The Taliban restricted access to
medical care for women and limited the ability of women to move about freely. (USA Today, 2001). 7 While it is
true that the Taliban did curtail women’s rights, this did not result from some peculiarly Afghan historical inevitability .
Rather, what Afghan history reveals is that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and consequent attacks on women is
due, in no small part, to US policy - a history and legacy that the media went to some lengths to obscure . When US
politicians and news media suddenly take notice of women, particularly women in war-torn nations, advocates of
women’s rights need to be cautious. We need to recall the fact that US media have never been particularly good on
domestic women’s issues, much less international women’s issues, for a host of reasons. Since the early days of
television, news producers have avoided topics that might prove ‘controversial’ , a word that was and remains a
euphemism for arguments that might indict capitalism as an economic system. Thus, when issues relating to women
do make it onto the news agenda, we can expect that these issues will support the status quo by diligently avoiding
questions about class or economic issues in general.8 Importantly, ‘controversy’ is bad for advertisers, media owners
and politicians - the very elites whose special interests dominate the mass media’s agenda . Broadcasting controversial
information about a corporation or corporate wrongdoing is bad for business. Offering rationales for war that
foreground US economic interests in regions like Afghanistan and Iraq is bad for business; additionally, it exposes
the base materialistic interests of the class that benefits from these wars. Afghan women, in contrast, work well,
especially when they are not allowed to speak for themselves. US women are also useful pawns in this construction.
The ‘rescue’ of Private Jessica Lynch, one of the crowning moments of the war on Iraq, was a US military
fabrication. As Kumar (2004) argues, Lynch’s story served as way 777 Stabile & Kumar, Unveiling imperialism to
galvanize patriotism in the US and to demonize the Iraqi people, despite the fact that it was Iraqi doctors and
nurses who saved her life. Rhetorically, it served the US well. As The Guardian noted: . . . [h]er rescue will go
down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into
the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon’s media managers, and has produced a template from
which America hopes to present its future wars. (The Guardian, 2003) Even after the BBC and The Guardian
exposed the inaccuracies and the willful manipulation of the Lynch story by the military and the media, this did
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 310
not stop various media conglomerates from trying to outbid each other to secure lucrative book deals and movie
contracts. Time will tell which version of the story we will get to see and read. Most likely, it will be the version that
does not expose the military’s lies - that would be simply too ‘controversial’. At the same time, however, these
discourses of protection do provide some traction for critics of the War on Terror, largely because they so
obviously ring false in light of the US’s overall lack of concern for the condition of women, men, and children
throughout the world. Consider, for example, that the US is, as Rosalind Petchesky (2001) has pointed out, one of
only two countries (along with Afghanistan) that have failed to ratify the Women’s Convention and the only
country that hasn’t ratified the Children’s Convention. Domestically, the far right that President Bush has
consistently placated (perhaps most notably in his appointment of John Ashcroft as Attorney General) has offered
the most active and militant opposition to feminist politics (not to mention their position on lesbian and gay issues -
a position not that far removed from that of Islamic fundamentalists). As long as women are not permitted to speak
for themselves, they provide the perfect grounds for an elaborate ventriloquist act, in which they serve as the passive
vehicle for the representation of US interests. In the case of Afghan women, despite calls by the Afghan Women’s
Mission and RAWA to halt the bombing, both organizations received little or no press in the US. The representations of
Afghan women in the days following 11 September 2001, and their cynical usage by US politicians, were solely aimed
at supporting the US case for intervention. They were meant to supply the US with the ideological (if not ethical)
justification for bombing a country whose infrastructure had been destroyed decades before . Today, the news media
have finally ‘discovered’ that the Bush administration was lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Now that the US war is a fait accompli and the occupation of Iraq, which is not going as well as planned, promises
to continue for months and even years, 778 Media, Culture & Society 27(5) the mass media can turn its attention to
the factual lapses in the case for war. 9 Amidst this flurry of finger pointing, waffling and dissembling, we should
point out an earlier lie and a half-hearted promise made to the women of Afghanistan. We should assert that the rhetoric
of women’s liberation was a lie as monumental as the claims about WMD . But in a society as deeply sexist as the US, and
a media system more engrossed with weapons than with women’s issues, we can expect that this lie will go unchallenged.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 311
A2: MEDIA CP
THE MEDIA WIDENS THE GAP BETWEEN EAST AND WEST BY USING RACIST AND SEXIST STEREOTYPES WHEN
COVERING STORIES ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST.
The ideological function of the news media, as the bearer of 'news,' as a sentinel of warning, and as a purveyor of
hegemonic views of ourselves vis--vis the world, lends it a certain kind of influence and legitimacy.40 The portrayal of the
Orientalized and gendered body in the news media thus demands interrogation at various levels : In terms of its strategic use to
define the boundariesof nation or imagined community;41 and as the contemporary signifier of an 'other' who is considered to be the
repository of all that is the antithesis of the 'self.' The current and shifting nature of the news enables one to examine representations of an 'other' from
different historical vantage points. In other words, how is the representation being constructed at a given point in time in order to facilitate its
consumption and hence its legitimization as part of common sense?42 Furthermore, to what political ends are these representations being used?
There has been considerable criticism of the coverage of Muslims inthe dominant Western media . Jack Shaheen, author of
The TV Arab, argued that the consistently negativestereotyping of Arabs in popular media resulted in negative
consequences for those Arabs living within the US .43 Edward Said's seminal work covering Islam identifies the various tropes
used by journalists in their coverage of nations governed by Islamic laws , many of which center around the notion of Islam
as a monolith resistant and threatening to the development (read 'rescue') efforts of the West.44 Part of this discourse furthermore
essentializes Arab/Muslim cultures as interchangeable entities that are inherently and innately violent and primitive . The themes
identified in the preceding section are also apparent in contemporary news media coverage of the 'Orient.' Within the context of post-September
11, 2001, news coverage, representations of the gendered Orientalized body did not depart from the existing pool of
stereotypical images. The militant martyr or suicide bomber was a constant figure (perpetuated in part by the coverage of the situation in
Palestine), as were hostage taking and violent upheavals. Likewise, the veiled woman received much media attention, depicted as both
being oppressed by and subjugated under Islam, as well as unable to liberate herself without the help of Western power s.45
With regard to these stereotypical representations, The Gazette shared much in common with the dominant Western media, albeit with an interesting
twist given the demographics it serves and Quebec's unique political and linguistic climate.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 312
A2: HUMANITARIAN PIC
Military humanitarian aid is selective and excludes areas of Afghanistan not key to geostrategic interests
Aunohita Mojumdar, Indian freelance journalist based in Kabul. She has reported on the South Asian region for the past 18 years, April 29 20 09 [“Afghanistan:
Exclusionary Humanitarian Aid Practices Hitting Hearts and Minds” http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav043009b.shtml
The governor of Balkh, a northern Afghan province bordering Uzbekistan, is a smooth-talking, dapper former mujaheddin
commander, Atta Mohammad. During a recent interview, he repeatedly expressed frustration with the international
approach to Afghanistan. His chief complaint: Despite totally eradicating poppy cultivation in 2007, his province is being
ignored by the international aid community. Atta expressed pride in achieving a measure of security and stability in
Balkh. Crime is low and anti-government insurgents are not posing a particular problem. But endemic poverty and a
critical humanitarian situation, he said, are threatening to reverse these fragile gains. Under current conditions aid
agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the population's needs. The reason, many say: donors predominantly
fund political and military objectives. Balkh's plight seems to be connected in large part to this competition for resources.
Dependent on rain-fed agriculture, the province was devastated by severe drought in 2008, crippling a region without
substantial access to ground water. Yet despite the security and the need, Balkh's overwhelming needs have largely gone
unaddressed. If the issue was one of scarce funds thinly spread between competing emergencies, the Balkh governor
would perhaps not be complaining. The reason for his resentment, though, is that there seems to be plenty of money
available -- so much that some donors have been "throwing it at NGOs" says one aid worker. Money is available for the
asking, if aid agencies and NGOs are willing to work for projects when and where the donors dictate. "We have no
problems getting funds for conflict areas," says Dave Hampson of Save the Children, "but it is a struggle to continue
excellent work in the non-conflict areas. The interest of donors is quite often in the areas where they have troops. It is
understandable for them as a country, but it is not a division of resources based on humanitarian aid needs." Mudasser
Hussain Siddiqui, Manager of Policy Advocacy and Research of Action Aid Afghanistan, concurs. "Aid is tied to
locations where [a donor's] troops are based. Some countries preference them through PRTs," he says, referring to the
controversial civil-military provincial reconstruction teams. ECHO, the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office,
is the only donor giving independent funding to NGOs now, he says. Humanitarian aid, intended for basic survival and
emergencies, is under pressure. On a visit to Afghanistan in early April, Esko Kentrschynskyj, the Head of Unit for Asia
and Latin America of ECHO, emphasized that despite the huge commitment for development and reconstruction in
Afghanistan, humanitarian aid had been very limited. "One should not lose sight of significant humanitarian needs that
remain in this country," he told journalists in Kabul.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 313
Humanitarian aid is used to promote geostrategic military goals
ColumLynch, Washington Post staff writer, November 19 2008[“Report: U.S. Uses Aid to Promote Non-Humanitarian Goals” Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/19/AR2008111902390.html]
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 19--The United States, the world's largest international aid donor, is among the worst at
promoting the independence, impartiality and neutrality of humanitarian aid deliveries to needy populations, according to
a survey by a Madrid-based nonprofit group that monitors donors' performance. The Development Assistance Research
Associates (DARA) Humanitarian Response Index 2008 measures how effectively the world's 23 largest donors deliver
aid. The United States ranked 15th in overall effectiveness and only 13th in the level of generosity measured by the size of
its economy. But it ranked near the bottom, 22nd, when it came to adherence to principles and guidelines established by
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to ensure that political considerations don't exclude worthy
recipients of aid. DARA's findings reflect what it called the United States' use of humanitarian assistance to achieve
military or political goals in eight crisis zones the group studied, including Afghanistan, Colombia and the Palestinian
territories. ad_icon The "assessment challenges the view of the United States, deeply embedded in the American psyche
and regularly reinforced in the rhetoric of public officials, as the world's pre-eminent humanitarian actor, the paragon of
global compassion," Larry Minear, a retired professor at Tufts University, wrote in the report. Silvia Hidalgo, DARA's
executive director and co-founder, urged President-elect Barack Obama to improve the U.S. approach. "American
leadership in the field of humanitarian relief would improve the perception that people around the world have of the
United States and would also inspire other donor countries to do their best on behalf of the world's least fortunate,"
Hidalgo said. DARA's survey is based on interviews with more than 350 humanitarian aid agencies in 11 crisis areas --
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Congo,Nicaragua, the occupied Palestinian
territories, Peru, Sri Lanka and Sudan. Sweden, Norway and Denmark were the highest performers, while France, Austria,
Italy, Portugal, and Greece received the lowest marks. The findings echo concerns by humanitarian aid workers that
American strategy subordinates humanitarian considerations to the need to achieve military objectives. During the past
decade, the Pentagon's share of the U.S. overseas development assistance budget has grown from 3.5 percent to 18
percent, said George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee. For instance, the United States and its
NATO partners channel much of their aid dollars in Afghanistan through Provincial Reconstruction Teams(PRTs),
military groups that oversee military and civilian activities in the country's conflict zones. The report said that placing
NATO forces in charge of some relief and development operations has "blurred" the line between civilian and military
activities, threatening to expose humanitarian aid workers to attacks by Taliban militants.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 314
Media portrayal of humanitarian aid makes the public more tolerant of the atrocities committed in the war and
portrays the same people who kill innocent people as heroes.
Current Affairs, international news source, July 24 2003[“Humanitarian Aid ‒ a new Political and Military Tool?” IPB
http://www.ipb.org/disarmdevelop/militarisation%20of%20aid/Media%20and%20the%20Instrumentalisation%20of%20Aid,%20Military%20Involvement%20in
%20Distribution%20of%20Aid.pdf]
A particularly alarming trend, according to the Red Cross report, is the growing military involvement in the distribution of
humanitarian aid. Critics claim that aid is being seen increasingly as an instrument of international foreign and security
policy, as a way to increase support among the local population and at home. Solders passing out food packets makes for
good television and the most important battle for many politicians is decided at home in front of the screen. “The whole
field of humanitarian aid has become very interesting as it’s portrayed in the media,” said Peter Runge of the
nongovernmental organization VENRO. “Many ministers and heads of government use aid as a way to spruce up their
images. It garners a lot of attention, and it has a good affect on the troops, improving their standing and increasing their
support at home.”
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 315
Humanitarian aid hides grander military strategy - interferes with actual humanitarian organizations ability to
deliver actual aid
But this so-called “humanitarian” aid often hides a political or military strategy. According to Runge, it can become hard
to differentiate which organizations are independent and neutral,there to help people who are in need, and which are
helping people because they belong to aparticular ethnic or political group.
Besides the ethical dilemma, such a blurring of the boundaries can have serious, practical
consequences for aid workers, according to Ramm of Terre des Hommes.
“The U.S. military assigns humanitarian groups a strategic role, even in the planning stages of a war,” he said. “Besides
journalists, the Americans ‘embedded’ humanitarian organizationswith the troops.” Who was soldier and who was aid
worker was no longer evident".
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 316
Humanitarian assistance is only given due to its political expedient and used as a veil to cover up for the atrocities
committed by the military.
Humanitarian organizations complain that aid is becoming less a response to real need and more a part of military strategy
or a reaction t o the media spotlight, often guided by p olitical expediency. For months Iraq has been in the absolute center
of the media spotlight. Hundreds of journalists have been reporting on all aspects of the U.S.-led war and continue to file
stories on the chaotic postwar situation. The government in Washington, who feared not only media pictures of wounded
and killed soldiers, but also images of a civilian population without clean water and adequate food sources that could play
badly with Americans at home, realized early on that a plan of action was needed. In April, the U.S. Defense Department
made $1.7 billion (􀀁1.5 billion) available for the rebuilding of Iraq. A generous gift to a people in need, but one with a
darker side. At the same time that money started flowing from American coffers to Iraq, the U.S. cut $1 billion from its
contribution to the World Food Program. According to the 2003 International Red Cross Catastrophe Report, that directly
affected 40 million Africans in some 22 countries. “It was a deadly decision for a continent wracked by civil war, hunger
and disease,” Fredrik Barkenhammar of the German Red Cross told Deutsche Welle. “AIDS alone kills 6,500 people a
day in Africa.” According to him, this case illustrates a growing trend. Politicians with money at their disposal often direct
those funds to areas that are currently in the headlines, in part to show voters their humanitarian credentials and to prove
they take action in crisis situations. The report cites Afghanistan as another example. The country has seen its U.S. aid
amount triple since September 11, 2001, although the basic need in the country has generally remained the same.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 317
Human rights legitimizes the expansion of U.S. empire and ever increasing coercion for national interest
46, Number 1, 2009, pp. 20-44 (Article) Published by Penn State University PressDOI: 10.1353/cls.0.0062 Muse
How might we historicize the turn to rhetorics of human rights as legitimation strategies in the reproduction of
empire?And what further light might be shed on the coercive narrative forms of the contemporary thriller if we historicize the state’s appropriation of human rights
in this way, as a component or refl ex of empire? One inestimable value of Douzinas’s Human Rights and Empire is that,like Porter’s aside about
torturers’ “standards of productivity,” it does the important diagnostic work of linking the new hegemony of state-
sponsored human rights discourse to its specifically economic functions, enabling us in turn to view the state’s new
enthusiasm for human rights as an ideology produced by capitalist- and thus class-histories and confl icts. Human
rights has become “the ideology after the end of ideologies, the ideology at the end of history,” Douzinas asserts, “the lingua
franca of the new world order . . . the main way of doing business and acquiring friends in the globalised marketplace” (Douzinas, 33, 32). For Douzinas, in their
contemporary form the human rights ideologies of the state are not political abstractions or metaphysical entitlements: they derive from and help secure the global
hegemony of twenty-first-century American capitalism. “The globalisation of the sui generis morality of human rights,” he notes, “follows the gradual unification of
world markets. As economic practices, legal rules and governance are standardised, a unified ethics, semiotics and law becomes the international lingua franca”
(Douzinas, 193). Douzinas uses the motif “globalisation” to periodize the imperialism of human rights. This essay prefers to historicize the phenomenon in a somewhat
broader frame, locatingstate-sponsored human rights discourse as an ideology that has come of age in the traumatic period
of capitalistworld history often referred to as “post-Fordism,” then “neoliberalism” (or more recently the crisis of these): roughly, the period of political and
economic reforms that begin with Reaganism and Thatcherism at the end of the 1970s, a period of dizzying, epoch-defi ning expansions and retrenchments in
worldwide markets, global instability, and the locally devastating effects of systemic restructuring in the transnational capitalist economy. It is also a period
when the odds on the US maintaining reliable long-term access to diminishing energy resources in the Middle East
have lengthened considerably.The conjunction of these trends with the dawn of a unipolar world order, and with the national security crises posed by 9/11
and the rise of anti-American Islamism, form the deep imperial structures of the war on terror. This essay presumes that all these factors are in play in the political
unconscious of the contemporary thriller, and in Douzinas’s description of state-sponsored human rights discourse as an ideology of “globalisation.” It is within these
contexts that Marxist geographer, DavidHarvey, describes the war on terror as the marker of a broader crisis in neoliberal
capitalism’s assumption that markets alone can drive “Westernisation,” providing public goods that secure both
the consent of imperial subjects and balances of power that are favorable to American national security and
interests. Since 9/11, Harvey argues,American political culture has been governed by a broad shift from “consent to
coercion” in the administration of the empire at home and abroad. 22 Thisprofound, crisis-ledshifthas shaken existing frameworks
of international law, andhas subverted the political and military institutions on which the post-1945 world order was
substantially built. Its seismic impact can also be measured by the extent to which it has already sunk into the
fabric of Western popular culture. The authoritarian turn that Harvey describes as a period or stage in the longer term crisis of American empire can be
glimpsed, in passing, in the coercive narrative point of view in the contemporary thriller, where part of the contract struck between genre-reader and genre-text means
the willing abasement of readers to imperial narrative points of view, andto the security sublime that encodes imperial state power.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 318
There’s a reason one of the first sites bombed in Iraq was the International Red Cross in Baghdad-U.S. power
projection is partially dependent on humanitarian action
In a seminal essay, “The American Empire: The Burden”-also known as “The American Empire (Get Used to It)”-fi rst
published in the Sunday New York Times Magazine in January 2003, leading liberal intellectual of the early war on
terror, Michael Ignatieff, described American empire as an “empire lite,” “a global hegemony whose grace notes are free
markets, human rights and democracy.” 6 Ignatieff’s essay was a key moment in the intellectual history of the time, partly
because its publication coincided with preparations for the invasion of Iraq, and partly because Ignatieff was the fi rst
established public intellectual in the West to offer an affi rmative, essay- length reading of US “empire” in such a
prestigious popular source. “The American Empire: The Burden” was also significant because it articulated cogently the
contemporary hook-up between liberal human rights discourse and affirmations of American power-projection-a
rhetorical fi gure that featured prominently in the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy ( NSS ), and in
justifi cations for the Afghan and Iraq wars offered by political elites and their constituencies in the US and Britain.
7 Costas Douzinas is one of many commentators who have argued that, since Kosovo (where US-led NATO forces
fought a war on “humanitarian” grounds without the backing of the UN Security Council in 1999), human rights have
been co-opted by the US and its allies and redeployed not as restraints on state power but as tools of it, and as
powerful rhetorical weapons in geopolitical confl icts.Human rights, Douzinas argues, have become both the
preferred ideological “ism” of western elites and a governing ideology of American empire. “If the colonial
prototypes were the missionary and the colonial administrator,” today’s colonial functionaries “bringing civilisation to
the barbarians” are the human rights campaigner and the NGO operative. “Despite differences in content, colonialism
and the human rights movement form a continuum, episodes in the same drama, which started with the great
discoveries of the new world and is now carried out in the streets of Iraq.” 8 On the eve of the Afghan war, Douzinas
notes, there seemed nothing unusual or discordant about US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s description of
humanitarian NGOs as “a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team” (a point that was
vividly illustrated in October 2003, when one of the fi rst acts of the Iraqi insurgency was to blow up the
headquarters of the International Red Cross in Baghdad) (quoted in Douzinas, 61).
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A2: HUMANITARIAN PIC - TERMINOLOGY TURN
The term “humanitarian” should be used to describe neutral aid - US objectives in Afghanistan are to win hearts
and minds of citizens - labeling it as humanitarian causes ignorance of actual needs and gives us a sense of
complacency - turns the net benefit - aid should be given by the Afghani government.
IRIN, international humanitarian news network, January 262010 [“AFGHANISTAN: "Humanitarian aid" not something the military can do - experts” Reuters,
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/2c9f5559304d2c5f416282e2aecb909a.htm]
Humanitarian aid must be neutral, impartial and independent and should be a response to real needs. However,
distribution of aid by the military in Afghanistan is not impartial as it promotes the image of one set of belligerents,
experts say. "It is better for NATO to avoid using the term 'humanitarian' in describing its delivery of aid, when such
activities are part of an overall military strategy to win the 'hearts and mind' of the local population and defeat the
Taliban," Edward Burke, a researcher at the Madrid-based think-tank FRIDE, told IRIN. Similar criticism has been aired
by Antonio Donini, a humanitarian expert and senior researcher at the Feinstein International Center: "In my view the
military should refrain from the direct provision of aid and in any case they should not call it 'humanitarian'." He said
radios could benefit communities which have little access to information but the distribution of radio sets by the military
could hardly be considered a humanitarian activity. According to the civil military guidelines which were endorsed by
pro-government Afghan and foreign forces and aid agencies in August 2008, military actors can only engage in
humanitarian activities as a "last resort" and when there is no civilian actor on the ground to deliver assistance. The
guidelines also prohibit the use of humanitarian assistance for political and military gain or relationship-building. "It
would be better if they use the term 'stability operations' to describe their operations as this is clearly military, or at least
civil-military, parlance and cannot be confused with activities by conventional intergovernmental or non-governmental
humanitarian organizations," said Burke of FRIDE. IRIN was unable to obtain any comment from NATO's press office in
Kabul. "Counter-productive" The military's involvement in humanitarian and development activities not only blurs
traditional boundaries between civil and military activities but jeopardizes the safety of aid workers and beneficiaries, aid
agencies contend. "The military emphasis on using aid to 'win hearts and minds' and promote security as part of their
stabilization strategy is misplaced and even counter-productive in some instances," the British and Irish Agencies
Afghanistan Group (BAAG) said in a 2009 report. "The involvement of [the] military in development activities results in
focusing more on short-term results at the expense of long-term objectives and has caused harm to civilians by drawing
them into the conflict," six consortiums of local and international NGOs and civil society organizations said in a statement
on 21 January. Over the past few years aid agencies have lost access to large swathes of the country due to insecurity and
attacks on aid workers and humanitarian convoys. Where aid agencies cannot reach and respond to needs "stability
operations" should be initiated by pro-government Afghan and foreign forces, said FRIDE's Edward Burke. "The delivery
of aid should be reverted as soon as possible to the control of civilian humanitarian agencies."
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A2: CLEANUP PIC
Permutation do the counterplan - Clean-up is normal means
Potter, Matthew (works supporting US Army aviation programs. He holds degrees in history as well as studying at the
Defense Acquisition University, “U.S. Lets Contracts To Clean Up Overseas Bases Tetra Tech To Benefit”
http://industry.bnet.com/government/10004898/us-lets-contracts-to-clean-up-overseas-bases-tetra-tech-to-benefit/) Jan 18,
2010
The United States military over the last nine years has established and operated large bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.The Global War on Terror
(GWOT)/Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) required substantial investment in new basesin places as diverse as
Uzbekistan and Djibouti as well as new facilities at existing military installations in Europe and Asia. These bases may not be owned and maintained
forever by the U.S.As part of the realignment of U.S. forces and the draw down in Iraq some of the existing facilities will be
closed or given to Iraq. As part of this process the U.S. will have to clean up the bases and remove their equipment. To
carry out the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) part of this function the U.S. Army recently awarded an omnibus
contract that could be worth almost a billion dollars. Tetra Tech (TTEK) recently announced that they were one of the seven large
businesses who qualified for this contract. The way these contracts work is that teams are qualified to bid for specific tasks under it. These are often
time and material contracts and the Government competes the tasks among the qualified companies. The benefit to the Government is that the long
and difficult source selection process is done during the qualification phase. Tasks can be awarded quickly with less effort as all of the teams bidding
have already proven that they meet the requirements of the base contract. This contract will provide for EOD services and clean up
anywhere the U.S. military has operated. It includes clean up of training munitions and sites as well. Tetra Tech has already
worked on the previous contract for this and possesses abilities to not only deal with munitions but hazardous, toxic, and radioactive waste (HTRW)
remediation.
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A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD
Total US withdrawal is the only way to achieve true Afghan liberation and solve the regional socioeconomic
problems
MikeEly, founder Kasama Project, Demand Complete and Immediate Withdrawal from Afghanistan,2002.
http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/demand-complete-and-immediate-withdrawal-from-aghanistan/
1) Politics and social life in Afghanistan are rather awful. That country is not a coherent nation-state and never has been. It is scattered
and fragmented because of the feudal and tribal-patriarchal character of its social system, and that backward social character is reinforced by the
impoverished, remote and mountainous nature of the countryside. Afghanistan has, historically, has one of the most extreme and oppressive
traditional treatment of women. It was even mentioned by Marco Polo as he passed through centuries ago, and predates the rise of Islam.As a result,
the Afghani countryside is not ruled by the governments in Kabul, and never have been. The forces that the U.S. media calls “warlords” are (in
effect) the modern feudal and tribal lords that rule various patches of land - greatly corrupted and empowered by the repeated arming and financing
by imperialist powers.In short,Afghanistan needs a very radical revolutionary movement - and the existing social conditions (of
poverty, male supremacy, feudal agriculture, etc.) are intolerable.But liberation will not come from the victory of one or
another imperialist power. 2) There is a long and sad history of attempting to “bring” changes to Afghanistan by riding on
the coattails of some invader. Yes there are some women’s activists in a few urban areas who have emerged from the
shadows and operated with some protection from U.S. imperialism. And there were (in the 1980s) similar forces who staked their
hopes on the Soviet imperialist invasion.And yes, such forces fear the withdrawal of the U.S. and its allies. And yes some of them
may be forced into exile if the u.s. leaves.But the point to draw from this is that liberation in Afghanistan has to come
from a process that is anti-imperialist, and that engages the masses of people in their own liberation.The theory that
“modernity” (including women’s equality) can come from a U.S. imperialist occupation is (to put it mildly) a false theory.
U.S. occupation will (at best) bring the “equality” of the Philippines sex trade and the Bangladeshi sweatshop.And (in
case anyone didn’t notice) the U.S. has been straining to cement alliances with “sections of the warlords and Taliban”
(which means gathering an indigenous feudal base of support for a reliable puppet government). And (in case anyone
didn’t notice) that has included the passage of a theocratic constitution and laws justifying marital rape, and more in areas
of U.S. control. It is the U.S. (and its CIA) that empowered, armed, financed and unleashed the ugly theocratic forces in
Afghanistan during the 1980s. And it is extremely naive (and tortured) to imagine scenarios where (somehow, somehow)
a continued U.S. presence (or a slowed timetable of U.S. withdrawal) will somehow protect or help women.
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A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD
Only opposition to US imperialism and presence can spur progressive moments against socioeconomic injustices in
Afghanistan
MikeEly, founder Kasama Project, Demand Complete and Immediate Withdrawal from Afghanistan,2002.
http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/demand-complete-and-immediate-withdrawal-from-aghanistan/
5) Even if there are no visible “good guys” fighting the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever…. it is still wrong (very
wrong) to support continued U.S. occupation. If we mean by “good guys” (a term sarcastically lifted from the know-
nothing vocab of rightwing idiots and cops) progressive, secular, radical forces. How do suchprogressive forces emerge?
It is through struggle against oppression. They will not emerge as a byproduct of joining the U.S. sphere of influence.
They will not emerge as junior partners of this vicious occupier. They certainly will not gain popular support by acting as
collaborators with the American and European invaders. New radical secular pro-socialist forces can only arise, gain
popular traction, and make strategic progress only through consistent opposition to U.S. imperialism, and cannot
conceivably emerge under its wing and protection. And we can’t be confused by the pleas of political forces who
(however critically or uneasily) serve in the puppet government of Afghanistan or work for NGO’s in the penumbra of
U.S. occupation. These forces (however liberal and forward-looking they may seem in comparison to the masses of
pepole) are pursuing their own strategies, class interests and not-so-radical view of what progress means.It strikes me as
problematic to wish for a prolonged U.S. presences in order to buy time for people who have rushed to conduct their
politics in the protective shadow of U.S. forces. Many are (frankly) collaborators who are helping to prettify the U.S.
occupation inside Afghanistan and out, and they will be judged by the people (as well as pursued by the Taliban, which is
not the same thing).
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Total US withdrawal of Afghanistan destroys legitimacy of oppressive forces in Afghanistan
Kolhatkar, Sonali. (Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission and the host and producer of Uprising Radio. A Call for
Clarity on The War in Afghanistan. http://www.zcommunications.org/a-call-for-clarity-on-the-afghanistan-war-by-sonali-
kolhatkar) November 03, 2009
The damage isn't being prevented by the United States - it's being carried out by the United States.Instead of subjecting
Afghans to the three oppressive forces of a stronger Taliban, a corrupt and criminal government, and a deadly foreign occupation,the
first thing we Americans can control most directly is to end our occupation immediately. This alone won't address the Taliban and
Northern Alliance. But it will reduce the oppressive forces at work, and potentiallyreduce the legitimacy of the warlords and the
motives driving the Taliban.How do we undo the damage we have subjected innocent Afghans to? Afghans themselves have the answers to that. Surveys
have shown that a majority of Afghans want a complete disarmament of our warlord allies - essentially that the U.S. needs to take back the guns we put into the hands
of the Northern Alliance and their private militias. Surveys have also shown that Afghans want war crimes tribunals to hold all the corrupt and criminal fundamentalists
accountable in some sort of court, perhaps even the International Criminal Court (U.S. government officials shouldn't be exempt from this type of accountability either).
With weapons, warlords, and U.S. troops gone, real democracy could potentially take root and pro-democracy forces could someday operate freely. Many have also
called for a massive Marshall Plan for poverty-stricken Afghanistan, to flood the country with money in the hands of small groups, organizations, and civil society, and
eventually to help rebuild the country with a strong, non-drug-based economy. With all the money freed up from military operations that would be fairly feasible.As for
the Taliban, even the U.S. government publicly admits that the Pakistani government's own agencies have long supported the renegade army as a tool for national and
regional stability. With the U.S. troops gone, the Taliban's raison d'être inside Afghanistan would be greatly weakened. If the United States were to take the lead in
regional talks between Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and China to address the Pakistani government's fears of a hostile regime in Afghanistan, it would go a very long
way toward undermining the Taliban.These measures are necessary but may not guarantee stability for Afghanistan. Still the current occupation only
guarantees instability, so at the very least the time for a non-military solution is now. In other words, we can choose to repeat a failed
experiment with predictably negative results by extending the war in any number of ways. Orwe can implement the complex, constructive measures that could
potentially help stabilize Afghanistan, undermine the fundamentalist misogynist criminals, help the Afghan people take back their country, and undermine the
conditions for violence.These are complex demands to make of the Obama administration. But it has taken a complex set of destructive American
policies and many years to destroy Afghanistan. It will take a similar amount of time and complexity, as well as trial and error, to help rebuild
Afghanistan for ordinary Afghans, and by extension make Americans safer. We can make these demands as secondary points in our call for an end to
the war. Butthe primary demand easily fits on a protest placard: "End the U.S. War in Afghanistan NOW." Let's make that
call loudly, clearly, and ubiquitously, as soon as possible, so that Obama and Congress can't ignore us any longer.
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A2: WITHDRAWAL BAD
The idea that the US can positively reconstruct Afghanistan is an illusion, and withdrawal allows for
Afghani struggles against the Taliban and is net better.
Kenneth J. Theisen 09 (organizer with World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime!
http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php/features-mainmenu-220/the-war-of-terror/5395-reject-the-excuses-for-imperialist-war-in-afghanistan)
As before, women are still the most oppressed in Afghanistan. They have been given unenforced legal rights, but essentially remain imprisoned in
oppressive, violent traditional relations and Islamic strictures. An Afghan woman dies during childbirth every 30 minutes; 87 percent of Afghan
women are illiterate; only 30 percent of girls have access to education; one-third of women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence;
and 70 to 80 percent of women face forced marriages. For some reason, the U.S. propagandists who condemned the Taliban rule for its oppression of
women are largely silent now that the U.S. is in charge. #3: We broke it, now we must rebuild it Still another reason given for
continuing with the war in Afghanistan is the “you broke it, you bought it” rule. The argument is that even
though the initial invasion was wrong, the U.S. now owes it to the Afghan people to rebuild the country. While
Obama was campaigning for president he stated that in addition to sending more troops into Afghanistan, he would also emphasize more economic
aid. But even during the Bush regime the Afghan people heard promises of economic aid and improvement from the U.S. government. What little aid
is delivered to the country evaporates into a cauldron of corruption and is used to support the reactionary rulers of the country. A recent poll
conducted by the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research indicates that the vast majority of the Afghan population views public
corruption as a major problem. Apologists for the U.S. occupation would argue that at least the U.S. is making people in Afghanistan more secure.
But in the above poll only 42% had confidence that the U.S. coalition forces could provide security in their areas. In the least secure areas, the poll
could not even be conducted. One in six of those polled reported nearby bombing or shelling by U.S. forces in their area. One in five reported
civilians being killed by U.S. coalition forces in the last year in the areas where they lived. (See “Poll shows Afghan faith in U.S. eroding”, Feb. 10,
2009,http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/02/10/MN3C15Q9RL.DTL) While the destruction that the U.S. has
brought to the people of Afghanistan certainly makes the U.S. morally responsible for compensation to the
country, it is an illusion to believe that continuing occupation by the U.S. and its allies will actually bring about
reconstruction in the interests of the Afghan people. Let us look at what seven-plus years of occupation has
delivered. While some corrupt government officials certainly improved their economic standing and Swiss bank accounts, the vast majority in the
country continue to suffer. According to the United Nations Human Development Index, Afghanistan ranks 174 th of 178 nations in terms of economic
well-being--only four other countries are poorer. Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in December 2008 reported that
37 percent (about ten million people) in Afghanistan suffer from severe poverty, with millions earning less than $1 per day. The U.S. State
Department in 2008 reported the infant mortality rate as 154.67 deaths per 1,000 live births, and two percent of women giving birth die during the
process. The U.S. State Department admits that at least three million Afghans are refugees in other countries, with most in Iran or Pakistan. Less than
a quarter of the adult population is literate, with the U.S. State Department estimating that only 12 percent of females are literate. Life expectancy is
only 43.1 years. The CIA’s World Fact Book estimates the unemployment rate for Afghanistan in 2008 as 40%. It is clear that the U.S. has brought
much death and destruction to the Afghan people and nation in the last seven years, but it is foolhardy to think that continuing U.S. occupation will
“fix” this situation. More troops will only increase the death and destruction and the longer the U.S. and its allies
remain, the longer the suffering will continue for the Afghan people. #4: If the U.S. and it allies leave, the Taliban will
return to power and it will be even worse than before the invasion It is unclear exactly what portion of the country is now ruled by the Taliban,
but it is true that it dominates many areas of Afghanistan. They and other fundamentalists are taking advantage of the chaos and misery created by the
U.S. occupation and it puppet government. They are advancing their war and imposing their theocracy over more of the country and its people. The
reactionary nature of the U.S. war and occupation has ended up reinforcing and fueling reactionary Islamic fundamentalism. The Taliban are
reactionaries and their rule is not in the interests of the Afghan people. But it is equally true that rule by the U.S., through its puppet
allies, is also not in the interests of the Afghan population. The country is already fragmented and ruled by reactionaries of various
sorts - drug lords, war lords, corrupt Karzai government politicians, etc. But the continuing U.S. war will not change this. Two historically outmoded
and reactionary forces are in contention in the country--the Islamic fundamentalist forces led by the Taliban and the outmoded ruling strata of the
imperialist system, led by the U.S. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. But supporting the U.S.
imperialists to defeat the Taliban will not advance the interests of the Afghan people. Our choices are not
limited to supporting the Taliban or supporting the U.S. imperialist in the war. Look at what seven years of war and
occupation has brought. Will more war bring a stable peace to the country? How? Ultimately, the Afghan people will have to deal with the Taliban
and other reactionaries, and the longer the U.S. and its allies remain the longer the people will have to wait to resolve
the situation themselves. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the U.S. presence will improve the lives
of the Afghan people and seven-plus years of evidence show that life for the average Afghan will remain miserable as long as the U.S.
remains in the country. Demand U.S. withdrawal When Obama announced his escalation of the Afghan war on February 17 th he said, "I do it today
mindful that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action." He is right that the situation is urgent and demands
swift action, but not in the way he meant. We must demand the removal of all U.S. forces, including allied forces,
immediately. We must oppose the war and occupation and expose the crimes of the U.S. imperialists there. To
do less will forsake the people of Afghanistan and enable the U.S. to continue its crimes in that country.
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THE AFGHANI PEOPLE ARE IN A UNIQUELY WORSE SITUATION THAN THEY WERE PRIOR TO INVASION.
Another profound flaw in just war theory is exposed by the suffering and instability faced by the people of Afghanistan
following the fall of the Taleban. Afghanistan has been left with an enormous humanitarian crisis, damaged and
deteriorated infrastructure, a vacuum of legitimate authority outside Kabul that has been filled by warlords (many allied
with the US), and a massive resumption of opium production. While the Bonn Agreement on a new democratic frame
work for Afghanistan was welcome, it has been undermined by the precarious nature of the interim government’s
authority and by the refusal of the US and Russia to encourage the creation of a nationwide peacekeeping force that might
challenge warlord power. The 4,500 troops of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) are a shadow of the 30,000 the PDA estimated
would be needed to have ‘mitigated the challenges faced by the interim government, dampened the potential for internecine violence, and facilitated
humanitarian relief efforts’. Such a force could also have ‘served to support disarmament efforts and train a new national army’, which along with a
large civilian police force is seen as essential to re-establishing security; but observers now say that ‘it will take a number of years for a fully
functional national army and police force to be developed.’64 Peter Marsden rightly insists that ‘security is regarded by all as the absolute
prerequisite for a successful reconstruction process’, butby making deals with warlords to enable continued military
operations against Al- Qaeda and the Taleban to take place, the US appears (in a typically realist fashion) to have valued
its own security over that of the Afghan people.65 While the adoption of a new constitution in late 2003 and planned elections for 2004 are
extremely positive developments, continuing warlord power and a resurgence of Taleban attacks suggest to many that the basic
stability necessary to secure Afghanistan’s political future may never be achieved
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Iraq is trying to resolve issues but cannot fully commit to this due to US presence. US withdrawal will allow for the
Iraqis to solve their own problems
Patrick Berry Guardian.co.uk March 5, 2010“Iraq elections won’t stop US withdrawal”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/05/iraq-election-violence-us-withdrawal
The view toward Iraq from Washington these days is that as the country nears its second parliamentary elections,
it once again stands at a precipice. The reasoning goes that political instability brought on by the polling will spur a
wave of violence that forces the US to renege on its promise to begin withdrawing in earnest. However, this analysis
ignores powerful factors - dramatically reduced attacks, meaningful shifts in favour of resolving challenges
through political means and finally, a fierce urge among Iraqis to take charge of their own affairs - that make
today's Iraq altogether different from the one that went to the polls in 2005. Make no mistake, Iraq's violence should
trouble observers. The recent spike of attacks in the run up to the elections, are a serious concern. But compared to what,
exactly? Such violence bears little resemblance to the days of 2006 and 2007. As Iraq tracker Bill Roggio reminds
us, attacks are one-tenth what they were in that period, diving from 220 per month in 2006 to just 20 per month today.
That's hardly comforting for Iraqis going to elect a new government, but it should tamp down alarmism. Iraq worriers
also leave out the country's political trends when forecasting doom and gloom. They point to a de-Baathification
campaign aimed at weakening Iraq's Sunni parties, raising fears of a repeat of the 2005 elections that saw a Sunni
boycott turn into a full-scale sectarian civil war. But again, the picture is more complicated. The feeling by most Iraqi
Sunnis is that sitting out of the 2005 polls was a mistake which they cannot afford to make this time around (a point
demonstrated by Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlaq's decision to keep his party in the election, despite his own
disqualification because of Baathist ties.) Sectarianism remains part of the fabric of Iraq, but there are increasing
signs that it can be handled politically. A final trope in this narrative of "unravelling" contains two elements. First,
that US diplomacy is dangerously subdued. And second, that the military is concerned with trends in Iraq. Taken
together, these dynamics suggest that the only responsible choice for the Obama administration is to hold off on
withdrawal. But diplomacy without fuss is not the absence of diplomacy. And a military without a contingency plan is not
the US military. In fact, US policymakers have worked with Iraqis behind the scenes on such thorny issues as last
year's election law passage and the de-Baathification struggle. Higher profile involvement is simply not wanted. As
for any plans to re-evaluate the terms of US military presence? As state department spokesman PJ Crowley said yesterday,
"these are ultimately choices for Iraq to make". What is sadly left out of all of this is that Iraqis themselves are looking
not to the elections, but the challenges that come after: forming a government and dealing with Iraq's persisting
problems.The US has a role in assisting Iraq as it confronts such challenges, but it is best played quietly, against a
backdrop of decreasing military presence.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 327
A2: TALIBAN HURTS WOMEN
The use of the evil face of the Taliban and the liberated face of women is a false one. The burka is a
positive cultural sign behind which feminism can operate. The image of the “liberated unveiling” of
women only serves to extend US imperialism
Judith Butler, Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkely, 200 4 (PhD Yale, The Precarious Life, July, The
Precarious Life, P. 141-142 //DN)
We may have to think of different ways that violence can happen: one is precisely through the production of the face the
face of Osama bin Laden, the face of Yasser Arafat, the face of Saddam Hussein. What has been done with these faces in
the media? They are framed, surely, but they are also playing to the frame. And the result is invariably tendentious. These
are media portraits that are often marshaled in the service of war, as if bin Laden's face were the face of terror itself, as if
Arafat were the face of deception, as if Hussein's face were the face of contemporary tyranny. And then there is the face
of Colin Powell, as it is framed and circulated, seated before the shrouded canvas of Picasso's Guernica: a face that is
foregrounded, we might say, against a background of effacement. Then there are the faces of the Afghan girls who
stripped off, or let fall, their burkas. One week last winter, I visited a political theorist who proudly displayed these faces
on his refrigerator door, right next to some apparently valuable super. market coupons, as a sign of the success of
democracy. A few days later, I attended a conference in which I heard a talk about the important cultural meanings of the
burka, the way in which it signifiesbelongingnessto a community and religion, afamily, an extended history of kin
relations, an exercise of modesty and pride, a protection against shame, and operates as well as a veil behind which, and
through which,feminine agency can and does work. The fear of the speaker was that the destruction of the burka, as if
it were a sign of repression, backwardness or, indeed, a resistance to cultural modernity itself, would result in a
significantdecimation of Islamic culture and the extension of US cultural assumptions about how sexuality and agency
ought to be organized and represented, According to the triumphalist photos that dominated the front page of the New
York Times, these young women bared their faces as an act of liberation, an act of gratitude to the us military, and an
expression of a pleasure that had become suddenly and ecstatically permissible. The American viewer was ready, as it
were, to see the face, and it was to the camera, and for the camera, after all, that the face was finally bared, where it
became, in a flash,a symbol of successfully exported American cultural progress. It became bared to us, at that
moment, and we were, as it were, in possession of the face; not only did our cameras capture it, but we arranged for the
face to capture our triumph, and act as the rationale for our violence, the incursion on sovereignty. the deaths of civilians.
Where is loss in that face? And where is the suffering over war? Indeed, the photographed face seemed to conceal or
displace the face in the Levinasian sense, since we saw and heard through that face no vocalization of grief or agony. no
sense of the precariousness of life.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 328
A2: DISADS
Their politics construct threats through manipulation and induced paranoia using fear politics for biopolitical
mobilization of populations
Zizek 2008 Slavoj Violence p 40-41
Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics-an awesome example of theoretical jargon which,
however, can easily be unpacked: “post-political” is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and
instead focus on expert management and administration, while “bio-politics” designates the regulation of the security and
welfare of human lives as its primary goal.’ It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big
ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life... almost only that. That is to say, with the
depoliticised, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only
way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s
subjectivity. For this reason, bio-politics is ultimately a politics of fear; it focuses on defence from potential victimisation
or harassment. This is what separates a radical emancipatory politics from our political status quo. We’re talking here not
about the difference between two visions, or sets of axioms, but about the difference between politics based on a set of
universal axioms and a politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as
its ultimate mobilising principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive
state itself, with its burden of high taxation, fear of ecological catastrophe, fear of harassment. Political correctness is the
exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear. Such a (post-)politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochios
or multitude: it is the frightening rallying of frightened people. Thus the big event of 2006 was when anti-immigration
politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected it to far-right fringe parties. From France to
Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in cultural and historical identity, the main parties now found
it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who must accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the
host society- “It is our country, love it or leave it.” Today’s liberal tolerance towards others, the respect of otherness and
openness towards it, is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the Other is just fine, but only insofar
as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as this Other is not really other. . . In a strict homology with the paradoxical
structure of the previous chapter’s chocolate laxative, tolerance coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards
the Other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, intrude on his space. In other words, I should respect his
intolerance of my over-proximity. What increasingly emerges as the central human right in late-capitalist society is the
right not to be harassed, which is a right to remain at a safe distance from others.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 329
A2: DISADS
Reflection, grief and the dislocation of First World privilege and militarism, our responses to 9/11, allow
for a space to imagine a non-violent system of politics and non-violent world.
Preface, P. XI-XIII//DN)
The five essays collected here were all written after
September 11, 1001, and in response to the conditions of heightened
vulnerability and aggression that followed from those events. It was my sense in the fall of 2001 that the United States was missing an
opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global community when, instead, it heightened nationalist discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms,
suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship. These events led public intellectuals to waver in their public
commitment to principles of justice and prompted journalists to take leave of the time-honored tradition of investigative journalism. That US
boundaries were breached, that an unbearable vulnerability was exposed, that a terrible toll on human life was
taken, were, and are, cause for fear and for mourning; they are also instigations forpatient political reflection.
These events posed the question, implicitly at least, as to what form political reflection and deliberation ought to
take if we take injurability and aggression as two points of departure for political life. That we can be injured, that others
can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief. What is less certain, however, is
whether the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead straightaway to military violence and retribution.
There are other passages. If we are interested inarrestingcycles of violence to produceless violent outcomes, it is
no doubt important to ask what, politically,might be made of griefbesidesa cry for war. One insight that injury
affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This
fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this
dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact. What this means, concretely, will vary across the
globe. There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence
than others. But in that order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more
contested and vulnerable nations and peoples of the world. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the
mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways.
If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in
suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege,
however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which thatviolence might be minimized, in which
an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not
knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the
recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they
are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 330
A2: DISADS
“THE STATE” CAME TO CONTROL BY MONOPOLIZING POWER AND THUS KNOWLEDGE IT PRODUCES IS INEVITABLY STATE-
CENTRIC.
SHAPIRO 1999 (Michael J., Social Text, 60, U of Hawaii, Muse) JLR
Nevertheless, there are alternative ways to tell the story of how nations became states . As in the case of historical attempts to
consolidate Christendom, those who help reproduce the nation-state's claims to the attachments of its constituency must deal with states' ambiguous
spatiotemporality, which is reflected in the hyphenated term nation-state. While a state is understood (within dominant narratives) as a
territorial entity that historically expanded its political, legal, and administrative control by monopolizing violence and
incorporating various subunits into a legal and administrative entity with definitive boundaries , the primary understanding of the modern
"nation" segment of the hyphenated term is that it embodies a coherent culture, united on the basis of shared descent or, at least,
incorporating a "people" with a historically stable coherence . Inasmuch as states that contain coherent historically stable communities of
shared descent are largely absent, the maintenance of the coherence of the nation-state requires, at a discursive level, a management of historical
narratives along the deployment of a juridical/political discourse on territorial sovereignty. Those who support states' aspirations to nation-
state existence become state biographers, writing a story that imposes a coherence on what is instead a series of
fragmentary, arbitrary, and power-driven conditions of historical assemblage,masked in various mythic narrations of emerging
consensuality. In order to appreciate this aspect of the complicit biographical performances legitimating the contemporary nation-state, it is useful
to turn to Jtirgen Habermas's recent enactment of it in his reflections on the impact of globalization on civic attachment. His discussion is an
exemplar of attempts to impose a democratic consensuality on arbitrary and disjunctive structures of allegiance.
STATE-CENTRIC EVIDENCE INSTITUTIONALIZES VIOLENCE (SUCH AS OTHERIZING THE OPPONENTS OF THE WAR ON TERROR)
TO KEEP THE PUBLIC DOCILE, AND UNQUESTIONING OF ITS PLACE AS “THE HEAD OF THINKERS”. BE SKEPTICAL OF THE
OPPOSITION’S EVIDENCE.
SHAPIRO,MICHAEL J, 2002 [INTL STUDS REVIEW, U OF HAWAII]
To elaborate on the implications of Bourdieu's remark, we need to specify some of the waysthat the modern state-often misleadingly
rendered as a "nationstate"-is in the "head of thinkers."In the social sciences in general, and especially in a national sovereignty-
enthralled international studies, the state dominates conceptions of political space. To the extent that one adheres to a
simplistic narrative of nation-building, in which states are seen as the consummation of more or less consensual political
developments, the space of the state is rendered politically incontestable.However, as one counternarrative would have it,
the state has, in numerous cases, been a "nation killer" rather than a "nation builder." 24 While "traditional empires were
generally tolerant of, or at least indifferent to, ethnic, linguistic or even religious diversity," 25 and therefore contained a plurality of
cultures and even nations, the violent process of state consolidation was in part driven by a legitimation-oriented drive to
become a unitary and coherent national culture. Neglecting the institutionalized violence implied in this counternarrativemuch
of American social and political science has therefore been "professional" in the sense that what has been professed is a trained inattention
to the historical meta-politics of their political imaginaries.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 331
A2: DISADS
The plan opens up a space for a consideration of corporeal vulnerability- the intense feeling of insecurity
that the fate of our life is perpetually in the hands of others. Accepting grief instead of pushing on
toward resolving that vulnerability is the only way to prevent the infinite wars in the name of a “war on
terror”
Violence, Mourning, Politics, P. 28-31 //DN)
Let us return to the issue of grief, to the moments in which one undergoes something outside one's control and
finds that one isbeside oneself, not at one with oneself. Perhaps we can say that grief contains the possibility of
apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am. This possibility does not dispute the fact of my
autonomy, but it does qualify that claim through recourse to the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are, from the start and
by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own. If I do not always know what seizes
me on such occasions, and if I do not always know what it is in another person that I have lost, it may be that this sphere of dispossession is precisely
the one that exposes my unknowingness, the unconscious imprint of my primary sociality. Can this insight lead to a normative
reorientation for politics? Can this situation of mourning---one that is so dramatic for those in social movements
who have undergone innumerable losses-supply a perspective by which to begin to apprehend the contemporary
global situation? Mourning, fear, anxiety, rage. In the United States, we have been surrounded with violence, having
perpetrated it and perpetrating it still, having suffered it, living in fear of it, planning more of it, if not an open
future of infinite war in the name of a "war on terrorism." Violence is surely a touch of the worst order, a way a primary
human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another,
a way in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another. To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on
another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with
this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot
preempt. This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, especially those in which violence is
a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited. Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims
fornon-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery (an
institutionalized fantasy of mastery) can fuel theinstruments of war. We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability.
We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with
the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, a situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others. Is there
something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition?
I think, for instance, that we have seen, are seeing, various ways of dealing with vulnerability and grief, so that, for instance, William Safire citing
Milton writes we must "banish melancholy," as if the repudiation of melancholy ever did anything other than fortify its affective strucn.tre under
another name, since melancholy is already the repudiation of mourning; so that, for instance, President Bush announced on September
21 that we have finished grieving and that now it is time for resolute action to take the place of grief.6 When
grieving is something to be feared, our fears can give rise to the impulse toresolve it quickly, to banish it in the
name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order, or to
reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly. Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with
grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be
gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the
sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human
vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a
dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal
vulnerability is distributed globally? To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other
human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must lake our bearings and find our way. To grieve, and
to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the
slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief-"Who have I
become?" or, indeed, "What is left of me?" "What is it in the Other that I have lost?"posits the "I" in the mode of unknowingness. But this can be
a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of
the vulnerability of others.Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain
human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others. From
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 332
where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered,
if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability? I do not mean to deny that vulnerability is differentiated, that it
is allocated differentially across the globe. I do not even mean to presume upon a common notion of the human, although to speak in its "name" is
already (and perhaps only) to fathom its possibility. I am referring to violence, vulnerability, and mourning, but there is a more general conception of
the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even
prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are
vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range
that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 333
A2: EXTINCTION
APOCALYPTIC SCENARIOS ARE THE PERFECTION OF BIOPOLITICS - REDUCING US TO PASSIVE SUBJECTS IN THE
SERVICE OF STATE VIOLENCE.
Peter Coviello, 1999, assist prof of English @ Bowdoin College, Queer Frontiers, ed b Joseph Allen Boone, p. 40-41
Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I
began by saying, changed-it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event
threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida's suitably menacing phrase) <41> "remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,"6 then in the postnuclear
world apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else,
always to an "other" people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished "general
population." This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag's incisive observation, from 1989, that, "Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not 'Apocalypse
Now' but 'Apocalypse from Now On.'"7 The decisive point here inthe perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length,
to miss) is that apocalypseis
ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is everuseful. That is,through the
perpetual threat of destruction-throughthe constant reproduction of the figure of apocalypse-agencies of power
ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population . No one turns this point more persuasively than
Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than
productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, "life-administering." Power, he contends, "exerts a positive influence on life . .. [and] endeavors to administer,
optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations." In his brief comments on what he calls "the atomic situation," however,
Foucault insists as well thatthe productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent
orevenlethal means. For as "managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,"agencies of modern power presume to act
"on the behalf of the existence of everyone"Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this
way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive or, indeed, potentiallyannihilating. "If genocide is
indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, "this is not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population."8 For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill
its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patterns and functioning of its collective life, the
threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 334
A2: OBAMA SOLVES
THERE NEEDS TO BE A PEACE MOVEMENT THAT UNITES AGAINST OBAMA’S UNCLEAR MILITARY DOMINATION. A
MOVEMENT THAT WILL DEMAND AN EXIT STRATEGY IN AFGHANISTAN.
Kevin Zeese executive director of Voters for Peace and political activist December 3 2009 (“War is peace; Escalation is withdrawal”
Concurrents.org http://www.countercurrents.org/zeese031209.htm)
If I ever get cancer, I want Barack Obama to tell me I’m dying. He could probably convince someone like me who does not believe in the
supernatural that death is life. He certainly did his best on Tuesday night to convince the American public that war means peace,
and escalation means withdrawal. President Obama is not President Bush. He is a much more effective and eloquent advocate
for American militarism who makes his case in ways that will challenge people who oppose war.He does not seek to
merely energize his base, as President Bush did, but more to nullify and confuse it, something he is not only doing on war but on health
care, banking, climate change . . . seemingly every issue he touches. In his new Afghanistan war plan he tried to give everyone
something. He gave General McChrystal and the war hawks what they want - tens of thousands of more troops. He gave the majority of
Americans who oppose the war what they want - a promise, however vague, to begin withdrawal in 18 months. He told Pakistan that the
U.S. will be there for them and escalated the war in Pakistan without clearly saying so. He gave the corrupt President Karzai the
protection he needs to stay in office. Everybody’s happy, right? Well, not exactly. In fact, promising all things to all people seems
likely to make no one happy. But, it may confuse people enough so that Obama gets the war funding he needs to escalate
the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. From the perspective of a peace voter, I can say, I’m not happy. It makes no sense to send more troops to
Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence estimates that there are 100 al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. Do we need 100,000 troops to defeat them? Obama is
concerned about the momentum of the Taliban . Aren’t more air strikes, killings of civilians and a larger presence of U.S. forces going to be
a recruiting tool for the Taliban? And, with more than 10% unemployment, nearly 20% underemployment, record foreclosures, rising bankruptcies
and record debt - how does it make economic sense to borrow more money to pay the $1 million per troop cost of escalation? Wouldn’t it be better to
come home, America? As to the promise to begin withdrawing troops in 18 months, this was the only thing different from what President Bush
would have done in Afghanistan. It is consistent with Obama’s style of trying to give all sides something and he coupled it with
the escalation: “And, as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an
additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan . After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.” No doubt the unpopularity of the
Afghanistan War and people persistently pushing Congress to end the war made Obama include the withdrawal plan. But, he did not provide
any details and only discussed beginning the withdrawal not completing the withdrawal. And, he made it clear that things could
change depending on the situation saying “we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.” Does that mean
if the escalation is failing that the troops will stay? Or, does that mean if the escalation is succeeding the troops will stay? Obama has raised a
challenge to the peace movement to continue to push to have the war end and troops return home. The peace movement is showing signs of
stepping up after being confused by a media that labeled Obama the peace candidate. Cindy Sheehan is leading an effort in
Washington, DC, Peace of the Action (see www.PeaceoftheAction.org), that promises “an historic escalation of Peace Activism like we have not
seen in the United States for a very long time.” Another new coalition, End US Wars ( http://www.enduswars.org) is bringing together anti-war
activists for an emergency rally against the escalation on December 12th. Plans are being made for mass anti-war rallies in Washington, DC on the
anniversary of the Iraq invasion on Saturday, March 20th. People who oppose the war need to remember that under the Constitution
it is the Congress that declares war and funds war. So, Obama is not the last word. And, in Congress it is our job to make
sure they hear our voices. Peace advocates need to support efforts in Congress for an exit strategy from Afghanistan (Rep.
Jim McGovern’s resolution favoring an exit strategy H.R. 2402 which is 100 co-sponsors deserves support) and efforts to stop funding of the
escalation (Rep. Barbara Lee’s bill to prevent funding, HR 3699, has 23 co-sponsors). Rep. Obey, the Chair of the powerful House Appropriations
Committee, is talking about a war tax to pay for the war, but the White House and Democratic leadership does not seem interested. The peace
community needs to point out the U.S. cannot afford more war. Anti-war advocates are counting heads in Congress, see http://noescalation.org/
and http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/whipwars -- join the effort. We cannot let Obama’s vague 18 month withdrawal confuse
us. War does not equal peace and escalation does not equal withdrawal. Americans no better than to believe that. The anti-war
movement needs to unify and speak against the wars so that the majority of Americans who oppose them recognize they
can make a difference.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 335
A2: TERRORISM IMPACT
The terror alerts that the neg espouses, asking us to be on guard from unspecified threats with unclear
scenarios create a radical desire for security. The impact is a rampant racism toward those merely
appearing Arab, leading to the suspension of civil liberties and a rise of nationalism
Violence, Mourning, Politics, P. 39 //DN)
Most Americans have probably experienced something like the loss of their First Worldism as a result of the
events of September 11 and its aftermath. What kind of loss is this? It is the loss of the prerogative, only and always, to be
the one who transgresses the sovereign boundaries of other states, but never to be in the position of having one's
own boundaries transgressed. The United States was supposed to be the place that could not be attacked, where
life was safe from violence initiated from abroad, where the only violence we knew was the kind that we
inflicted on ourselves. The violence that we inflict on others is only-and always-selectively brought into public view. We now see that
the national border was more permeable than we thought. Our general response is anxiety, rage;a radical desire
for security, a shoring-up of the borders against what is perceived as alien; a heightened surveillance of Arab peoples and
anyone who looks vaguely Arab in the dominant racial imaginary, anyone who looks like someone you once
knew who was of Arab descent, or who you thought was----often citizens, it turns out, often Sikhs, often Hindus, even
sometimes Israelis, especially Sephardim, often Arab-Americans, recent arrivals or those who have been in the us for decades. Various terror
alerts that go out over the media authorize and heighten racial hysteria in which fear is directed anywhere and
nowhere, in which individuals are asked to be on guard but not told what to be on guard against; so everyone is
free to imagine and identify the source of terror. The result is that an amorphous racism abounds,
rationalized by the claim of "self-defense." A generalized panic works in tandem with the shoring-up of the
sovereign state and the suspension of civil liberties. Indeed, when the alert goes out, every member of the
population is asked to become a "foot soldier" in Bush's army. The loss of First World presumption is the loss of a certain
horizon of experience, a certain sense of the world itself as a national entitlement.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 336
A2: HEG - UNSUSTAINABLE
Military intervention dooms heg to inevitable collapse
ChalmersJohnson(is an American author and professor of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean war, was
a consultant for the CIA from 1967-1973, and led the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years.
He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, 3 Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire,
MotherJones.comhttp://motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/three-good-reasons-liquidate-our-empire?page=1 ) July 30,2009
However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any
reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding
reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire
of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in
missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating
trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the
former Soviet Union. According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our
empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in
46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people
connected to U.S. military forces living and working there - 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent
family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the
largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.These massive concentrations of American military power
outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous
conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the
website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global
military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony - that is, control or dominance - over as many nations
on the planet as possible. We arelike the British at the end of World War II:desperately trying to shore up an empire that
we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -
including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British
decision, starting in 1945, to liquidatetheir empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in
war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow
the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in
Afghanistan.) Here are three basic reasons whywe must liquidate our empireor else watch it liquidate us. 1. We Can No Longer
Afford Our Postwar Expansionism. Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of
his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009,
in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation
will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement
address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military
dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen." What he failed to note is that the United States no longer
has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster. According to a growing
consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that
role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history
of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of
Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes: "America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of
the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic
weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If
present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony." There is something
absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:
"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered
reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a
person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of
maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to
sustain them He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his
bases." In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.
Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at
Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves. Our
unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner
assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well
they might. In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 337
projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to
repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures - if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It
is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP. Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of
only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not
smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of
fiscal integrity.
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US hegemony decline in Iraq and Afghanistan is inevitable
ChrisPhillips, London-based writer and analyst of Middle Eastern Affairs, May 312010 [“US hegemony in Middle East is ending” The Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/us-hegemony-middle-east-ending]
In the same interview he asserted that there was a new triple alliance between Syria, Turkey and Iran - part of a "northern
alliance" that Damascus has been trying to construct against Israel and the US - with Russia now cast in the role as
superpower benefactor. As leader of a small power attempting to defy the global hegemon, it is in Assad's interests to
exaggerate the strength of such an alliance. Yet no such cohesive united bloc actually exists. Russia is pursuing a realist
regional agenda, ensuring it can maximise its influence without unnecessarily confronting the US - a cornerstone of
Dmitry Medvedev's foreign policy. A recent spat with Tehran over Russian support for Washington's new UN sanctions
on Iran hardly suggests a united anti-American/anti-Israeli front. Turkey, too, is not tying itself to any camp. Damascus
may regard Ankara's rekindled relationship with Iraq, Iran and Syria as crucial for any new alignment, but Turkey's "zero
problems with neighbours" policy is not limited to those states on its southern border. Turkey is seeking influence and
markets for its rapidly expanding economy across the region, including Israel. Though prime minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan's rhetoric has been increasingly populist and anti-Israeli since the Gaza war of 2008-2009, the deep commercial,
economic and military ties between the Turkish and Israeli establishments show no signs of receding. Like Russia, Turkey
is pursuing its own interests by asserting its influence in the whole Middle East, not just as the lynchpin of an anti-
America/Israel bloc. Yet even though the return to cold war bi-polar blocs in the Middle East is unlikely, the region's
international relations are changing. US power is waning. Though Washington remains the world's only superpower, the
quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan have exposed the limits of US ambitions, while the economic crisis has forced the
Obama administration to focus energy elsewhere. While the Bush era saw the US hegemonic in the region, squeezing the
defiant few like Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, today's Middle East sees a power vacuum led by partial US retreat
being filled by assertive regional and middle powers. Turkey and Brazil's recent nuclear deal with Iran typify this
emerging new climate. Stephen Walt has highlighted that this shift in power is global, with Asia's share of GDP already
outstripping that of the US or Europe. As ever, it seems the Middle East could prove a microcosm of these international
changes. If the age of American uni-polarity is coming to an end, perhaps hastened by unnecessary wars and economic
shortsightedness, it is much more likely that international relations in the Middle East will come to reflect the multi-polar
world that will follow rather than revert to a bi-polar cold war. In such circumstances, it won't just be Russia and Turkey
expanding their reach in the region, but China, India and Brazil will all bid for a role, too - presumably having fewer
demands than Washington about their clients pursuing democratic reforms and peace with Israel. Saudi Arabia's growing
relationship with China might signify the shape of things to come. Not that this era is yet upon us. The US remains the
superpower and could still effect serious change in the region, should it desire. However, the recent actions of Russia and
Turkey in the Middle East do show a new assertiveness from regional powers to pursue their own path in defiance of US
will, whether through arms deals, trade agreements or diplomatic coups. A new cold war is unlikely, but the age of
unchallenged US hegemony in the Middle East could be ending.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 339
Defense spending makes heg unsustainable
Conetta 2007 (Carl, “Toward a sustainable US defense posture: an option to save $60+ billion over the next five
years, Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Memo #42. Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, 02 August
2007. http://www.comw.org/pda/0708bm42.html)
The post-1998 defense boost has added to debt, rather than taxes, however - thus softening its political impact. Indeed, the
Bush administration went further - mating its defense increments with a program of tax cuts, also born of borrowing, that
is even more costly. And so, the historic tension between "guns and butter" has been mitigated by adding more than $3
trillion to the gross federal debt -- much of this borrowed from social security and other "trust" funds. This putative
"solution" is not sustainable. Very soon the amount of cheap credit available to the federal government from social trust
funds will begin to decline; then it will disappear - probably around 2015. Thus, some variable in the current spending
equation will have to give - and soon: defense spending, other federal spending, tax cuts, or current social security or
Medicare benefits. To the extent that government focuses the pinch on variables other than defense - as the Pentagon
might prefer - we can expect greater public sensitivity to the size of the Pentagon budget. Put simply: if taxes climb or
services decline, the public will begin to feel the burden of the post-1998 defense budget increases.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 340
LACK OF STRATEGY MAKES HEGEMONY UNSUSTAINABLE
LIEUTENANT COLONEL NATHAN FREIER, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS AT THE US ARMY WAR
COLLEGE'S STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE, 2006, PARAMETERS, VOL. 36, NO. 3
Today, the greatest risk to American position is not defeat at the hands of a peer competitor, but slow voluntary retreat
from international activism hastened by a cultural aversion to grand strategic calculation AND risk assessment. Quite
simply, the end of American primacy may come via a persistent , unwelcome, and unanticipated accumulation of strategic
costs, as successive American executives exercise great power without reference to grand design, and as average
Americans, their most influential opinion elites, and those states upon whom the United States relies for support grow
increasingly weary of the price associated with doing so. Absent a real ends-focused, ways and means-rationalized, and
risk-informed grand design, the United Statesis vulnerable to slow surrender to strategic exhaustion and voluntary retreat
from that essential activism necessary to the security of its position in perpetuity.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 341
Public will makes heg unsustainable
Charles A. Kupchan, Senior Fellow and Director of Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Spring 2003,
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 118, No. 2
The second trend that will bring the unipolar moment to an end sooner rather than later is the changing character
of internationalism in the UNITED STATES. Unipolarity rests on the existence of a polity that not only enjoys
preponderance but also is prepared to underwrite order in a manner that affirms its international legitimacy and benign
character. If the United Stateswere to tire of being the global protector of last resort or behave in a way that induced
other nations to rally against rather than with U.S. power, unipolarity would still come undone even if American
resources were to remain supreme. This hypothetical is in the midst of turning into reality. America's diminishing
appetite for liberal internationalism is a direct product of the changing international environment . America refused to
embrace liberal internationalism until World War II, when the prospect of Germany and Japan becoming aggressors with
global reach necessitated its multilateral involvement in shaping the balance of power in both Europe and East Asia. The
Soviet threat then ensured that the United States would maintain extensive overseas commitments and institutional
entanglements for the rest of the twentieth century.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 342
Hegemony decline inevitable - now is key timeframe to wean away from it and pursue a more ethical international
politics
AllanWatson, Department of Geography, Staffordshire University, 2010[“US Hegemony and the Obama Administration: Towards a New World Order?”
Antipode]
Given this, it now seems that US hegemony is in decline, economically and politically, and that we will begin to see the
emergence of a new world order. It is difficult to see how one man, no matter how well supported, can change well-
practised unilateral US foreign policies or solve deep-rooted national anxieties. The above discussion suggests that the
fundamental principles of US engagement with the rest of the world will change very little under an Obama-led US
administration. But I shall end this intervention on a note of optimism. The election of the first black president of the USA
was after all an historic event, and undoubtedly the effects will continue to ripple around the world. It gives the USA a
chance to re-invent itself as a more open and tolerant nation and practice what may be termed as a “moral hegemony” (see
Kobayashi and Peake 2000), without the need to exercise the hard coercive unilateral military or economic power upon
the rest of the world. From this perspective, the signing of the executive order to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay
detention facility, and Obama’s carefully crafted speech at Cairo University in June 2009 aimed at easing tensions with
the Muslim world, both signalled a sharp break with the previous Bush administration and have strengthened the global
wave of diplomatic and popular goodwill (see Black 2009; Finn 2008).
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 343
A2: HEG - UNSUSTAINABLE/BAD
US hegemonic influence is a unsustainable and highly violent model of world order forcing other states to retaliate
- this will cause massive wars with unprecedented amount of destruction.
Foster,co-editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon,2k3[John, “The new Age of Imperialism,” Monthly
Review 55.3]
At the same time, it is clear that in the
present period of global hegemonic imperialism the United States is geared above all to
expanding its imperial power to whatever extent possible and subordinating the rest of the capitalist world to its interests.The
Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea Basin represent not only the bulk of world petroleum reserves, but also a rapidly increasing proportion of total
reserves, as high production rates diminish reserves elsewhere. This has provided much of the stimulus for the United States to gain greater control of
these resources-at the expense of its present and potential rivals. But U.S. imperial ambitions do not end there, since they are driven by economic
ambitions that know no bounds. As Harry Magdoff noted in the closing pages of The Age of Imperialism in 1969, "it is the professed goal" of
U.S. multinational corporations "to control as large a share of the world market as they do of the United States market,"
and this hunger for foreign markets persists today. Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corporation has won prison privatization
contracts in Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands Antilles ("Prison Industry Goes Global,"
www.futurenet.org, fall 2000).Promotion of U.S. corporate interests abroad is one of the primary responsibilities of the U.S.
state. Consider the cases of Monsanto and genetically modified food, Microsoft and intellectual property, Bechtel and the war on Iraq. It would be
impossible to exaggerate how dangerous this dual expansionism of U.S. corporations and the U.S. stateisto the world at large.As
Istvan Meszaros observed in 2001 in Socialism or Barbarism, theU.S. attempt to seize global control,which is inherent in the
workings of capitalism and imperialism,is now threatening humanity with the "extreme violent rule of the whole world by
one hegemonic imperialist country on a permanent basis...an absurd and unsustainable way of running the world order."*
This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them attempts by other major powers to
assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent means , and all sorts of strategies by weaker states and non-state
actors to engage in "asymmetric" forms of warfare. Given the unprecedented destructiveness of contemporary weapons,
which are diffused ever more widely, the consequences for the population of the world could well be devastating beyond
anything ever before witnessed. Rather than generatinga new "Pax Americana" the United States may be paving the way
to new global holocausts. The greatest hope in these dire circumstances lies in a rising tide of revolt from below , both in
the United States and globally. The growth of the antiglobalization movement, which dominated the world stage for nearly two years
following the events in Seattle in November 1999, was succeeded in February 2003 by the largest global wave of antiwar protests in human history.
Never before has the world's population risen up so quickly and in such massive numbers in the attempt to stop an imperialist war. The new age of
imperialism is also a new age of revolt. The Vietnam Syndrome, which has so worried the strategic planners of the imperial order for decades, now
seems not only to have left a deep legacy within the United States but also to have been coupled this time around with an Empire Syndrome on a
much more global scale--something that no one really expected.This more than anything else makes it clear that the strategy of the American
ruling class to expand the American Empire cannot possibly succeed in the long run, and will prove to be its own--we
hope not the world's-undoing.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 344
A2: HEG - UNSUSTAINABLE/BAD
9/11 has made hegemony violent and aggressive - its decline is inevitable - maintenance ensures global violence and
continuation of policy failure in Iraq and Afghanistan
AllanWatson, Department of Geography, Staffordshire University, 2010[“US Hegemony and the Obama Administration: Towards a New World Order?”
Antipode]
We appear to have reached a turning point in American hegemony. The election of a new American president, Barack
Obama, combined with global financial crisis, have left us in uncertain times. While the 9/11 attacks were a defining
moment for the USA and its relationship with the rest of the world, as the pretext for a more aggressive and contradictory
hegemony (Anderson 2003), the events of late 2008 could arguably prove to have more fundamental and far-reaching
consequences. Worldwide media coverage of Obama’s “historic” election win was unprecedented in its scale. However, as Sarah Starkweather
argues in the preceding intervention, the constitution of an extra-national public around the election should be seen as more than a media spectacle.
Perhaps most significant is that it reflects how American national policies have far-reaching effects well outside of national politics. Both among
those who do have recourse in American electoral politics, and those who do not, the result of the election has brought universal talk of change and of
the dawn of a “new world”. However, while the effect of such optimism should not be understated, the actual impact that an Obama
administration will be able to have in changing deep-rooted US policies, and in halting global shifts which already have
momentum, needs to be more carefully considered. The aim of this short intervention is to speculate as to the likely impacts of the events
of 2008, and to stimulate debate as to the future shape of global geopolitics. With the election of Obama have come hopes that the USA will now
enter a bright new age of multilateralism. These hopes will arguably prove to be misguided. While it is widely recognised that under the Bush
administration there was a distinctunilateralism and prioritisation of US interests bound up in an aggressive geopolitics, the main
themes of US foreign policy and its relations with “allies” and “enemies” were well established before the Bush
administration was in place (Anderson 2003; see also Agnew 2003; Andr´ eani 2004; Kelly 2003). For Toal (2003) US
geopolitical culture is triangulated between universalism, regionalism, and ignorance, and for Slater (2004a) it is only the
lack of attempts to conceal such a strategy that made the Bush administration distinctive. While the banner of
multilateralism may well be waved by the new administration, it is likely to be in their interests to simply return to a more
concealed form of unilateralism. The unilateral use of military power in Iraq has had many negative consequences,
including the labelling of the USA as the leading terrorist state, a rogue with massive economic and military power (Blum
2000; Sardar and Davis 2002; also see Bauman 2001), and the “unaccountable hegemon” (Anderson 2003). For Toal
(2003), these US displays of violence have however offered only an illusion of power, and indeed it is in projecting US
hegemonic power that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan would appear to have failed most dramatically (Allin and
Simon 2004; Ikenberry 2004): Bush’s tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot
squad ... has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts.
He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the American empire (Roy 2003). Currently, US
hegemony looks extremely vulnerable, and it is less in command of a world that looks entirely more closed and hostile to
American values. This condition is in part due to a legacy of isolation from the international community and European
allies, relationships which Obama must rebuild if he truly wishes to build a new American age. Obama has spoken openly
about the task of relationship rebuilding, but while his words may suggest a multilateral approach, his focus has been very
much on US global “leadership”:
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 345
A2: HEG - DEFENSE
U.S. influence and hegemony do not stop wars nor have then in the past.
Layne, Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty, 2006
Christopher Layne, (is a Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute and Mary Julia and George R. Jordan Professorship
of International Affairs at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the
University of California, LL.M. in international law from University of Virginia Law School, and J.D. from the University of Southern California Law Center.Dr.
Layne has been Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of Miami; a Fellow in the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA,
Cato Institute, and Center for International Studies at the University of Southern Californiahttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_85/ai_n16832448/pg_3/)
September 2006
A second contention advanced by proponents of American hegemony is that the United States cannot withdraw from
Eurasia because a great power war there could shape the postconflict international system in ways harmful to U.S.
interests. Hence, the United States “could suffer few economic losses during a war, or even benefit somewhat, and still
find the postwar environment quite costly to its own trade and investment.”59 This really is not an economic argument but
rather an argument about the consequences of Eurasia’s political and ideological, as well as economic, closure.
Proponents of hegemony fear that if great power wars in Eurasia occur, they could bring to power militaristic or
totalitarian regimes. Here, several points need to be made. First, proponents of American hegemony overestimate the
amount of influence that the United States has on the international system. There are numerous possible geopolitical
rivalries in Eurasia. Most of these will not culminate in war, but it’s a good bet that some will. But regardless of whether
Eurasian great powers remain at peace, the outcomes are going to be caused more by those states’ calculations of their
interests than by the presence of U.S. forces in Eurasia. The United States has only limited power to affect the amount of
war and peace in the international system, and whatever influence it does have is being eroded by the creeping
multipolarization under way in Eurasia. Second, the possible benefits of “environment shaping” have to be weighed
against the possible costs of U.S. involvement in a big Eurasian war. Finally, distilled to its essence, this argument is a
restatement of the fear that U.S. security and interests inevitably will be jeopardized by a Eurasian hegemon.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 346
A2: HEG - DEFENSE
Decline doesn’t cause war
Daniel Geller and Joel Singer, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Wayne State University, “Nations at war: a
scientific study of international conflict p. 116-117”, 1999
Hopf (1991) and Levy (1984) examine the frequency, magnitude and severity of wars using polarity (Hopf) and “system
size” (Levy) as predictors. Hopf’s database includes warfare in the European subsystems for the restricted temporal period
of 1495-1559. The system is classified as multipolar for the years 1495-1520 and as bipolar for the years 1521-1559. Hopf
reports that the amount of warfare during those two periods was essentially equivalent. He concludes that polarity has
little relationship to patterns of war for the historical period under examination. Levy (1984) explores a possible linear
association between the number of great powers (system size) and warfor the extended temporal span of 1495 - 1974. His
findings coincide with those of Hopf; he reports that the frequency, magnitude and severity of war in the international
system is unrelated to the number of major powers in the system.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 347
A2: HEG - DEFENSE
Hegemony doesn’t solve war
Michael Mastanduno, Professor of Government at Dartmouth, “World Politics 61 No. 1,” Ebsco, 2009
During the cold war the United States dictated the terms of adjustment. It derived the necessary leverage because it
provided for the security of its economic partners and because there were no viable alter natives to an economic order
centered on the United States. After the cold war the outcome of adjustment struggles is less certain because the United
States is no longer in a position to dictate the terms. The United States, notwithstanding its preponderant power, no longer
enjoys the same type of security leverage it once possessed, and the very success of the U.S.-centered world economy has
afforded America’s supporters a greater range of international and domestic economic options. The claim that the United
States is unipolar is a statement about its cumulative economic, military, and other capabilities.1 But preponderant
capabilities across the board do not guarantee effective influence in any given arena. U.S. dominance in the international
security arena no longer translates into effective leverage in the international economic arena. And although the United
States remains a dominant international economic player in absolute terms, after the cold war it has found itself more
vulnerable and constrained than it was during the golden economic era after World War II. It faces rising economic
challengers with their own agendas and with greater discretion in international economic policy than America’s cold war
allies had enjoyed. The United States may continue to act its own way, but it can no longer count on getting its own way.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 348
A2: OBAMA ISN’T BUSH
Media depictions of Obama as progressive and as anti-war are as biased as their reporting on the wars
themselves. Obama is merely an extension of the Bush regime of militarism and capitalism.
ICFI (International Committee of the Fourth International, Withdraw all Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan!, World Socialist Web
Site, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/res4-a21.shtml) April 21 2010
This resolution on war was passed unanimously at the SEP Emergency Conference on the Social Crisis & War,
held April 17-18 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Further resolutions and articles on the conference will be posted in
the coming days. This conference condemns the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, their extension into
Pakistan, and the unending threats against Iran. It calls for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all
American and foreign troops from the region. We denounce the widespread, daily brutality committed by US
and NATO forces against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US government and media campaign in
support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is based on lies. The massive presence of the American military in
the Middle East and Central Asia has nothing to do with the so-called “war on terror,” establishing democracy
or stabilizing the area. These wars were launched in order to seize the region’s energy supplies in the interests
of the same corporate and financial elite that is attacking workers in the US. This is a new colonialism. The
economic crisis is intensifying tensions throughout the world. The capitalist powers are seeking to divide and
redivide the world among themselves, to force their rivals to bear the burden of the crisis, with the US the
leading aggressor. The Obama administration, elected by the American people in large part to end the two wars,
has taken up where the Bush government left off. In Iraq, seven years of US occupation have devastated the
economy and social infrastructure and destroyed entire cities. More than 1 million Iraqis have died and millions more have been forced
into exile. The danger of renewed sectarian fighting remains ever-present. More than 4,000 American military personnel have died in Iraq, and tens of thousands have
been wounded. The US will have nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan when the current redeployment is complete,
and the total number of NATO and other foreign military personnel will exceed 150,000. The purpose of this
army of occupation is to terrorize the Afghan people, impose an American-backed puppet on it by force, and
create a launching pad for further US military operations in the region. Afghan president Hamid Karzai charges
Washington with wanting “a puppet government…a servant government.” In turn, US officials and the
American media describe Karzai as a corrupt despot, who rigged the most recent election and has no credibility
with his population. US authorities do want an utterly pliant regime in Kabul. Karzai is a wealthy thug and
tyrant, and, through his brother, is linked to the narcotics trade and death squads. According to a recent study,
US-occupied Afghanistan is the world’s second most corrupt country, while US-occupied Iraq ranks fourth on
the list. This is what young American men and women are being sent to fight and die for-in the name of
“freedom” and “democracy.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will have cost $1 trillion dollars by September 2010. This is money that could have been
spent to build hospitals, schools and roads. US government actions in the Middle East and Central Asia violate the principles established at the post-World War II
Nuremberg trials. Aggressive war is a war crime banned by international law. The murderous drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the policy of assassination of
political opponents, including US citizens; the continued use of “rendition” (sending prisoners of war to countries where they will be tortured)-all this demonstrates that
the American ruling elite has descended into barbarism. The
election of the Democrat Obama has meant the abandonment of
serious opposition on the part of the official “anti-war” movement, although popular hostility to the Iraq and
Afghan wars is pervasive in the US. For those on the liberal left, the brutal conflicts have now become “good
wars,” since these political elements all agree that the Obama administration is “progressive” in both domestic
and foreign policy. This conference encourages mass protests against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. We call for
the immediate withdrawal of all US and foreign troops from the Middle East and Central Asia, the closure of all
military bases, and the disbursement of billions of dollars in reparations to the populations of the affected
countries. A peaceful and humane global society is impossible without the dismantling of the US military and
CIA, by far the main perpetrators of “terrorism” in the world today. Opposition to imperialist war can develop
now only as a working class movement, linked to an international socialist political program. There is no way to
halt the American ruling elite’s insane drive for world
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 349
A2: UTOPIAN POLITICS BAD
1. NOLINK - ETHICAL PEACE IS NOT UTOPIAN. RATHER IT IS A MINDSET THAT ALLOWS CONFLICT, BUT
CALLS FOR A LIMITED AND ETHICAL RESPONSE TO SUCH CONFLICTS, AS APPROVED BY INTERNATIONAL
ORGANIZATIONS.
2. LABELING AN IDEA AS UTOPIAN IS BAD - OUR SURVIVAL RELIES ON UTOPIAN THINKING

SCHELL, JOHNATHAN, 1982 [STAFF WRITER FOR THE NEW YORKER, THE FATE OF THE EARTH]
In this timid, crippled thinking, “realism” is the title given to beliefs whose most notable characteristic is their
failure to recognize the chief reality of the age, the pit into which our species threatens to jump; “utopian” is the
term of scorn for any plan that shows serious promise of enabling the species to keep from killing itself (if it is
“utopian” to want to survive, then it must be “realistic” to be dead); and the political arrangements that keep us
on the edge of annihilation are deemed “moderate,” and are found to be “respectable,” whereas new
arrangements, which might enable us to draw a few steps back from the brink, are called “extreme,” or
“radical.”
3.UTOPIAN THINKING HAS MUCH TO OFFER FOR HEURISTIC SOLUTIONS

MILLER, LYNN H. 1990[PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY]
The great value of the more utopian suggestions is that they should force both those who conceive them and
those who study them to consider all the many possibilities for political change that may or may not be
realizable at the moment. In other words we should not measure their worth solely in terms of whether they
might soon be adopted; rather, we should let them direct us toward the kinds of realistic policies that could
eventually produce a political environment more supportive of such arrangements.
4. EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT ETHICAL PEACE IS UTOPIAN, THE PLAN IS JUST A STEP IN THE RIGHT
DIRECTION. WE ARE ENGAGED IN PREVENTATIVE WARS AND HAVE THE ABILITY TO STOP THE HUMAN-
RIGHTS VIOLATIONS. TO SAY WE SHOULDN’T TO THE PLAN BECAUSE IT IS IN PURSUIT OF THE GREATER
GOOD IS ILLOGICAL.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 350
A2: JWT RESTRAINS WAR
History is on our side. Even if moral rules theoretically restrain violence, they require voluntary adherence and
empirically fail to do so.
My argument is not that moral discourses on war do not sometimes work to limit strategic violence, particularly when
they have been codified in the law of war and internalized in military operations . However, it is arguable that the law of war
is flawed and extremely difficult to enforce-which throws the focus back on to its voluntary observance by governments
and militaries, who nonetheless remain largely unaccountable for violations. We can point to a large number of possible
violations of the laws of war (and other important international human rights laws) by the US and its allies in the course of
the war on terror, few if any of which can be prosecuted and all of which the internalization of legal or moral rules sadly
failed to prevent.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 351
A2: OCCUPATION SOLVES
Middle East intervention fails -the local military becomes reliant upon the US for military/police force, making
independence impossible for decades
Michael Schwartz professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in
Context 7/9/09 [“Colonizing Iraq: The Obama Doctorine?”, TomDispatch.com,
One wayto “free up” the American military for withdrawal would, of course, be if the Iraqi military could manage the
pacification mission alone. But don’t expect that any time soon. According to media reports, if all goes well, this isn’t
likely to occur for at least a decade. One telltale sign of this is the pervasive presence of American military advisors still
embedded in Iraqi combat units. First Lt. Matthew Liebal, for example, “sits every day beside Lt. Col Mohammed Hadi,”
the commander of the Iraqi 43rd Army Brigade that patrols eastern Baghdad.
When it comes to the Iraqi military, this sort of supervision won’t be temporary. After all, the military the U.S. helped
create in Iraq still lacks, among other things, significant logistical capability, heavy artillery, and an air force.
Consequently, U.S. forces transport and re-supply Iraqi troops, position and fire high-caliber ordnance, and supply air
support when needed. Since the U.S. military is unwilling to allow Iraqi officers to command American soldiers, they
obviously can’t make decisions about firing artillery, launching and directing U.S. Air Force planes, or sending U.S.
logistical personnel into war zones. All major Iraqi missions are, then, fated to be accompanied by U.S. advisors and
support personnel for an unknown period to come.
The Iraqi military is not expected to get a wing of modern jet fighters (or have the trained pilots to fly them) until at least
2015. This means that, wherever U.S. air power might be stationed, including the massive air base at Balad north of
Baghdad, it will, in effect, be the Iraqi air force for the foreseeable future.
Even the simplest policing functions of the military might prove problematic without the American presence. Typically,
when an Iraqi battalion commander was asked by New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers “whether he needed
American backup for a criminal arrest, he replied simply, ‘Of course.’” John Snell, an Australian advisor to the U.S.
military, was just as blunt, telling an Agence France Presse reporter that, if the United States withdrew its troops, the Iraqi
military “would rapidly disintegrate.”
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 352
A2: OCCUPATION SOLVES
Middle East colonization fails - intervention in Iraq proves that U.S. administrators do not support local
institutions and revert to American utilities
Michael Schwartz professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context 7/9/09
Most colonial regimes erect systems in which foreigners involved in occupation duties are served (and disciplined) by an
institutional structure separate from the one that governs the indigenous population. In Iraq, the U.S. has been building
such a structure since 2003, and the Obama administration shows every sign of extending it.
As in all embassies around the world, U.S. embassy officials are not subject to the laws of the host country. The difference
is that, in Iraq, they are not simply stamping visas and the like, but engaged in crucial projects involving them in myriad
aspects of daily life and governance, although as an essentially separate caste within Iraqi society. Military personnel are
part of this segregated structure: the recently signed SOFA insures that American soldiers will remain virtually
untouchable by Iraqi law, even if they kill innocent civilians.
Versions of this immunity extend to everyone associated with the occupation. Private security, construction, and
commercial contractors employed by occupation forces are not protected by the SOFA agreement, but are nonetheless
shielded from the laws and regulations that apply to normal Iraqi residents. As an Iraq-based FBI official told the New
York Times, the obligations of contractors are defined by “new arrangements between Iraq and the United States
governing contractors’ legal status.” In a recent case in which five employees of one U.S. contractor were charged with
killing another contractor, the case was jointly investigated by Iraqi police and “local representatives of the FBI,” with
ultimate jurisdiction negotiated by Iraqi and U.S. embassy officials. The FBI has established a substantial presence in Iraq
to carry out these “new arrangements.”
This special handling extends to enterprises servicing the billions of dollars spent every month in Iraq on U.S. contracts. A
contractor’s prime responsibility is to follow “guidelines the U.S. military handed down in 2006.” In all this, Iraqi law has
a distinctly secondary role. In one apparently typical case, a Kuwaiti contractor hired to feed U.S. soldiers was accused of
imprisoning its foreign workers and then, when they protested, sending them home without pay. This case was handled by
U.S. officials, not the Iraqi government.
Beyond this legal segregation, the U.S. has also been erecting a segregated infrastructure within Iraq. Most embassies and
military bases around the world rely on the host country for food, electricity, water, communications, and daily supplies.
Not the U.S. embassy or the five major bases that are at the heart of the American military presence in that country. They
all have their own electrical generating and water purification systems, their own dedicated communications, and
imported food from outside the country. None, naturally, offer indigenous Iraqi cuisine; the embassy imports ingredients
suitable for reasonably upscale American restaurants, and the military bases feature American fast food and chain
restaurant fare.
The United States has even created the rudiments of its own transportation system. Iraqis often are delayed when traveling
within or between cities, thanks to an occupation-created (and now often Iraqi-manned) maze of checkpoints, cement
barriers, and bombed-out streets and roads; on the other hand, U.S. soldiers and officials in certain areas can move around
more quickly, thanks to special privileges and segregated facilities.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 353
A2: OCCUPATION GOOD
The Afghani people are in a uniquely worse situation than they were prior to invasion.
Another profound flaw in just war theory is exposed by the suffering and instability faced by the people of Afghanistan
following the fall of the Taleban. Afghanistan has been left with an enormous humanitarian crisis, damaged and
deteriorated infrastructure, a vacuum of legitimate authority outside Kabul that has been filled by warlords (many allied
with the US), and a massive resumption of opium production. While the Bonn Agreement on a new democratic frame
work for Afghanistan was welcome, it has been undermined by the precarious nature of the interim government’s
authority and by the refusal of the US and Russia to encourage the creation of a nationwide peacekeeping force that might
challenge warlord power. The 4,500 troops of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) are a shadow of the 30,000 the PDA estimated
would be needed to have ‘mitigated the challenges faced by the interim government, dampened the potential for internecine violence, and facilitated
humanitarian relief efforts’. Such a force could also have ‘served to support disarmament efforts and train a new national army’, which along with a
large civilian police force is seen as essential to re-establishing security; but observers now say that ‘it will take a number of years for a fully
functional national army and police force to be developed.’64 Peter Marsden rightly insists that ‘security is regarded by all as the absolute
prerequisite for a successful reconstruction process’, butby making deals with warlords to enable continued military
operations against Al- Qaeda and the Taleban to take place, the US appears (in a typically realist fashion) to have valued
its own security over that of the Afghan people.65 While the adoption of a new constitution in late 2003 and planned elections for 2004 are
extremely positive developments, continuing warlord power and a resurgence of Taleban attacks suggest to many that the basic
stability necessary to secure Afghanistan’s political future may never be achieved
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 354
A2: REALISM (WOMEN)
Realist conceptions of IR ignore the suffering of women - particularly epistemological violence caused by the
rhetoric of needing to save the Afghan women as a justification for the war
The concept of “security” has not always been considered particularly problematic in the study of international
relations. For much of the twentiethcentury, and to a signifi cant degree today, much of the theory and practice of
international relations has been conducted from within the perspective of political realism, realpolitik, or its
derivative, neorealism(Desch 1996, 361; Vasquez 1983, 160-72). Within the realist paradigm,security fl ows from
power, specifi cally state power and military strength. Recent feminist scholarship has challenged this notion of
security on the grounds that women have never been secure r within (or without) the nation state-they are always
disproportionately affected by war, forced migration, famine, and other forms of social, political, and economic
turmoil (Mohanty 2002, 514; Tickner 2001, 50-1). The statist theoretical framework of political realism is thus
inadequate to explain the myriad conditions that make women insecure in the world today. In the wake of the “war
on terrorism” and its mobilization of women’s bodies to justify U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, feminist
analyses of international relations must broaden the concept of security, in J. Ann Tickner’s words, to “seek to
understand how the security of individuals and groups is compromised by violence, both physical and structural”
(2001, 48). To the types of violenceexamined by feminist international relations scholarship, we would addthe concept of
epistemic violence (see Spivak 1999, 266).While the physical and structural violence inflicted upon womenmust remain a
central component of feminist theory and criticism, the war on terrorism in Afghanistan also demonstrates that the
Western appropriation and homogenization of third-world women’s voices perform a kind of epistemic violence
that must be addressed along with material oppressions.1 This essay argues that representations of the women of
Afghanistan as gendered slaves in need of “saving” by the West constitute epistemic violence, the construction of a
violent knowledge of the thirdworld Other that erases women as subjects in international relations. In claiming to
secure Afghan women from the oppression of the Taliban, the United States has reinscribed an ostensibly
benevolent paternalismof which we should remain wary. In particular, the image of the Afghan woman shrouded in
the burqa has played a leading role in various public arguments seeking to justify U.S. military intervention in
Afghanistanfollowing the 9/11 attacks. This rhetorical construction of Afghan women as objects of knowledge
legitimized U.S. military intervention under the rubric of “liberation” at the same time that it masked the root
causes of structural violence in Afghanistan. The pursuit of gender securitymust therefore account for the diverse ways
in which the neocolonialismof some Western discourses about third-world women creates the epistemological
conditions for material harm. Although the distinctionsamong epistemic, physical, and structural violence in this article
allowfor analytic precision in the sense that these forms of violence are indeed different in kind, we must recognize
their complicitous relationship.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 355
A2: REPS K (WOMEN)
Theoretical concerns that do not interact with the material violence being done towards Afghani women should be
rejected for their irresponsibility - a focus on the material and discursive is key
Because the postcolonial theory used in this article draws heavily upon poststructuralist insights, a brief overview seems
in order. As Chandra Mohanty observes, “[f]aulty and inadequate analytic frames engender ineffective political
action and strategizing for social transformation” (2002, 515). Some feminist scholars have used the poststructuralist
disarticulation of linguistic representation from ontological essence to demonstrate both the arbitrariness of various ideas
about gender and the role of language in constructing those ideas. Postcolonial feminism has been particularly critical
of representations of “third-world women” in Western feminist discourses. Gayatri Spivak argues that, in some of
these discourses, “ ‘woman’ is important, not race, class, and empire” (1999, 409). Without minimizing the importance
of gender or biological materiality, Spivak’s point is that the conditions experienced by women in the third world cannot
be reduced only to y gender or biology; exploitation by multinational capital, the deeply etched racism not only among
some indigenous populations but also in the legacy of colonial relations between “fi rst” and “third” worlds, and a host of
other factors all conspire to oppress women. Moreover, one of postcolonialism’s most trenchant insights has been the
untenability of homogenized depictions of thirdworld women that essentialize the third world as if it were a
singular locale. Such homogenization slips all too easily into the exoticization of the foreign Other, often tinged
with an ethnocentric kind of pity for the oppressed’s condition that reads in a manner similar to colonial texts
proclaiming the need to save the oppressed from themselves (Mani 1998). The goal of postcolonial feminism is
therefore often framed as a deconstructive genealogy of “the production of the ‘third world woman’ as a singular
monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts” (Mohanty 1991b, 51). The connections between
postcolonial theory and postmodernism, however, have raised concerns with some about the political implications of
postcolonial critique. The concept of, and a certain respect for, irreducible difference upon which deconstruction
and much of postcolonial theory is founded have often been accused of fostering cultural relativism (e.g., Moghissi
1999, 52-3). While respect for the unique experience, history, and traditions of other cultures is a sentiment to
which few would object, cultural specifi city should not be used to justify unjust or oppressive practices. Moghissi
argues, however, that “the postmodern relativists collude with the fundamentalists’ culturalist solutions to crises of
modernity and ofmodernization” (8). The sweeping generalizations about postmodernism as well as fundamentalism
remain problematic in Moghissi’s work, yet her worry should resonate with any feminist scholar. No theory should
leave us passively accepting behaviors that threaten the basic dignity of human beings. Nonetheless, the attribution
of relativism to all theories carrying the whiff of postmodernism needs to be greeted with skepticism. 2 The
violations of human dignity infl icted upon women (and men) all over the globe do, however, require that so-called
postmodern frameworks account for the material conditions of discrete historical-cultural contexts. The
complementary application of poststructuralist and materialist criticism thus allows for the most comprehensive
analysis of the epistemic, physical, and structural effects that follow from U.S. discourses about the oppression of
women in Afghanistan. The need for such a theoretical rapprochement is especially significant in the feminist study of
international relations. Christine Sylvester, for example, warns of the problem faced by some poststructuralist versions of
Critical Security Studies that avoid accounting for gender either as a factor in the material conditions under which women
live or as a symbol for political organizing (1994, 182). Postcolonialism is especially apt for engaging this theoretical
divide as it brings to the forefront the intimate relationship between discursive representation and material
conditions.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 356
A2: BUTLER
Butler’s criticism - sans a focus on the specific violence committed amongst Afghanis and Iraqis - reproduces
whiteness because it claims the space for voice for a universalized white subject
the `War on Terror', Feminist Theory 8, p. 176-8)
The common experience of vulnerability that Butler’s conceptualization of the human subject foregrounds may be
relevant in some phenomenological, existential sense. But the use of such ‘primal vulnerability’ as the primary lens
for an examination of an imperialist war places her discussion in a liberal-individualist frame so abstract as to
severely hinder understandings of how geo-political power relations are being restructured by the US through this
War. Indeed, the specific vulnerabilities created by imperialist relations become secondary to the primary
vulnerability of theinfant condition. Consequently, Butler’s imposition of the collective ‘we’ in prioritizing a condition
of infancy assumes the primacy of this condition as also the ontological point of departure for the Other (if they are
to beincluded in her conception of the human). The implication is that the experiences of occupied peoples can be
approached as being essentially the same as those of imperial subjects. Such a commonality of experience,I argue, is
practicably impossible in the absence of the transformation ofthe conditions of imperialist domination. Butler seems to
reject humanistassumptions and yet applies them to develop her analysis of violence. Hergeneric ‘human’ subject relies
on an implicit denial of the recognition that the injuries, violence and losses suffered by occupied populations are
significantly different, and that these peoples are immensely more threatened with violence and injury than are the
subjects of imperialist powers.In making the racialized distinctions between the forms and degrees of violence
experienced by Afghans, Iraqis and other Muslims and white subjects disappear through her resort to humanist
assumptions, the experience and perspective of the (imperial) white subject is restored to centrality.Richard Dyer
points out that one way in which whiteness is reproduced is through the treatment of whites as a human norm. He
argues that it is racial power that enables white subjects to claim this position of the human: ‘There is no more
powerful position than that of being “just”human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of
humanity. Raced people can’t do that - they can only speak for their race’ (Dyer, 1997: 2). Butler reproduces a
classic feature of racial power by making whiteness invisible, even as the definition of the human is claimedby the
white subject.My concern with Butler’s framing of events is not so much that thepsychoanalytic and philosophical
approaches she uses cannot be useful inshedding light on the War on Terror. After all, many critical race theorists,from
Frantz Fanon onwards, have drawn very fruitfully on both for theorizingviolence, suffering and pain (Fanon, 1986). What
I find problematic is Butler’s reproduction of the universalist assumptions of Western philosophical and
psychoanalytic traditions. Commenting on Sigmund Freud’sinsistence that the ‘individual factor’ required attention,
Fanon hadcautioned that ‘the Black man’s alienation is not an individual question’,for, ‘[b]eside phylogeny and ontogeny
stand sociogeny’ (1986: 13). Hecriticized psychoanalysis for ‘its failure to account for the relationshipbetween personal
history and history writ large. Psychoanalysis, he argued, disregarded history’s “organizing line of force” and the
ensuing repercussion on the individual psyche, as well as on the unconscious, when it was destroyed or eradicated’
(Cherki, 2006: 21). Butler’s placing of the injury to the US at the centre enables the presentation of the most
powerful political community on the planet as vulnerable to the vastly unequal societies that it is invading and
occupying. She gives credence, however inadvertently,to the paranoid fantasies of Western vulnerability by way of a
psychoanalytic theory that does not acknowledge the impact of race and white supremacy on the psyche.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 357
A2: MEDIA CP (WOMEN)
MEDIA ANALYSIS OF US INTERVENTION IN AFGHAN WOMEN RIGHTS FAILS TO SHOW THAT US GEOSTRATEGIC
INTERESTS IN AFGHANISTAN ARE THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE OPPRESSIVE INSTRUCTIONS THAT INFRINGE ON WOMEN’S
RIGHTS IN THE REGION.
CAROLSTABILE,UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE AND DEEPAKUMAR,RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, 2005 (“UNVEILING IMPERIALISM: MEDIA, GENDER
AND THE WAR ON AFGHANISTAN” MEDIA, CULTURE AND SOCIETY, SAGE PUBLICATIONS, HTTP://MCS.SAGEPUB.COM/CONTENT/27/5/765.SHORT)
With the help of Pakistani intelligence, the US armed and trained mujahideen fighters from Afghanistan and elsewhere in camps set up
in Pakistan and Afghanistan. One of these recruits was a Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden, who made contacts at these camps
that enabled him to form al Qaeda in the early 1990s. Throughout the 1980s, the US supplied large quantities of arms such as C-4
plastic explosives, long-range sniper rifles, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, as well as extensive satellite reconnaissance
data on the location of Soviet targets 767 Stabile & Kumar, Unveiling imperialism (Coll, 1992: A1). The US not only armed and trained the
Islamists, they also poured money into the region: some US $3 billion, more than any other aid program to insurgent groups,
was spent on this effort. Ultimately, the Soviet Union was defeated, externally and internally. When it began its withdrawal from Afghanistan in
1989, the country had been devastated. Over 2 million Afghans had been killed during the Soviet occupation, half a million had been maimed and
Afghanistan had become the most heavily land-mined country in the world. Women’s political situation immediately began to worsen.
To fully comprehend the gender apartheid instituted by the Taliban beginning in 1996, one must first understand what their situation was prior to the
rise of the mujahideen and Islamic fundamentalism. Even in the early 1990s, large numbers of Afghan women in urban centers
participated in the workforce and in public life. Afghanistan’s Constitution , written in 1964, ensured basic rights for women
such as universal suffrage and equal pay. Since the 1950s, girls in Kabul and other cities attended schools. Half of university students were
women, and women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. A small number of
women even held important political posts as members of Parliament and judges. Most women did not wear the burqa. Even many devout Muslim
women wore headscarves and long dresses, but not the burqa (Smeal, 2001). Attacks on women began in 1989, when mujahideen leaders based
in Peshawar, Pakistan, issued a fatwa (or a religious decree) ordering the assassination of women who worked for humanitarian
organizations. Shortly after this, women were ordered to wear the hijab, a black garment that covers the entire body with a veil on the
head. In 1990, women were forbidden from attending school. To underscore the point, a Peshawar girls’ school was sprayed with bullets
(Goodwin and Neuwirth, 2001: A19). The US, more or less responsible for the situation in Afghanistan, chose not to act. Rather
than redirect resources from funding insurgents to rebuilding the ravaged country’s infrastructure, the US abandoned the
people who had fought their proxy war with the USSR. A power struggle among the various misogynistic factions of the mujahideen
ensued, which exacerbated already dire conditions. Then, in 1992, an unstable government called the Mujahideen Government of the Islamic State of
Afghanistan emerged as coalition of seven mujahideen parties (Marsden, 1998: 42). Its president, Burhannudin Rabbani, suspended the
Constitution and issued religious decrees that prevented women from holding government jobs or jobs in broadcasting,
and required them to wear a veil (Goodwin and Neuwirth, 2001: A19). The ascendance of the mujahideen government in 1992, who would
later form the Northern Alliance, meant that women’s rights were severely curtailed . What rights remained would be summarily denied
when the Taliban came to power in 1996. 768 Media, Culture & Society 27(5) The Taliban implemented four central policies regarding women.
First, women were forbidden to hold jobs. Second, they could not attend schools until the Taliban had come up with a curriculum appropriate for
their primary role of bringing up the next generation of Muslims. Third, women were forced to wear burqas, while men had to wear shalwar kameez
(a long tunic and pants), maintain beards and were not permitted to style their hair. Finally, women were denied freedom of movement. They could
only leave their homes if escorted by male relatives and had to avoid contact with male strangers (Marsden, 1998: 88-9). If these rules were
transgressed, the religious police would mete out punishments like public beatings and sometimes even death. Despite these open violations of
women’s rights, the US supported the Taliban, support that grew out of US efforts to secure a contract for an oil pipeline
through Afghanistan that would enable a US-based oil corporation, Unocal, to gain access to Caspian Sea oil (Rashid, 2000: 171-82). Because
of these economic interests and the desire not to antagonize the Taliban, the US remained silent when the Taliban captured
Kabul in 1996 and began its assault on women. One US diplomat expressed the logic of this silence - and the underlying lack of regard for
women’s rights - when he observed: ‘Taliban will develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of
Sharia law. We can live with that’ (quoted in Rashid, 2000: 179). Clearly , Unocal and pipelines took precedence over democracy and
women’s rights, just as they had in Saudi Arabia, which, despite its atrocious record on women’s rights, has long been an ally of
the US. The similarities between Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan are striking: Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi strand of Islam resembles the Deobandi Islam
of the Taliban and Saudi Arabia helped to finance the schools, or madrassas, where the Taliban were trained. In reality, the Taliban’s brand of
extreme Islam has no historical roots in Afghanistan. Rather, it is the product of US and Saudi involvement in the region; a fact that
directly undermines the idea that the Taliban’s repression of women is natural or endemic, and stems from the ‘tribal’
nature of that society. This is the history and material context completely elided by media accounts of Afghan women.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 358
A2: CAP K (WOMEN)
Capitalist exploitation of women is justified by Western cultural dominance. Troops are intrinsic to the
commoditization of women in Afghanistan.
Jennifer L. Fluri (Geography Department and Women's and Gender Studies Program, Dartmouth College) June 2009
[(The beautiful 'other': a critical examination of 'western' representations of Afghan feminine corporeal modernity,
Gender, Place and Culture pp. 241-252)]
The Beauty Academy of Kabul, and the participation of Miss Afghanistan (sponsored by the US) in the 2003 Miss Earth
pageant, occupy an important chapter in socially and politically constructed western ideologies for ‘saving’ Afghan women .
Afghan women’s bodies are unveiled into the beauty parlor in order to reveal feminine corporeal modernity as a significant, and
at times ‘necessary’, link to western ideals of freedom and liberty. Beauty pageant participation by Miss Afghanistan is similarly used
to exemplify corporeal freedoms, despite the contests’ restrictions. After the removal of the Taliban from Kabul, Afghan women and men were
released from many restrictions that had been imposed on them, including the ability to openly run beauty salons or shave one’s beard. However ,
linking beauty products to liberty as brought forth by US women and their beauty industry sponsors, or identifying a
beauty pageant as an emblematic example of women’s rights, remains lost in translation . The publicity the Beauty
Academy of Kabul, a small and temporally limited project, received in the US reinforces the drama of beauty as liberation
for thelocal US (rather than Afghan) consumer. Beauty developers became quasi- ‘feminists’ by way of linking Afghan women’s acceptance
and desire for corporeal modernity with their liberation. The publicly displayed female body is in many respects a key part of the
process of western modernity (Brumberg 1997; Jay 1993). Placing the public (unveiled) body in continual contrast with the private (veiled)
body contributes to the identification of the former as both an example of modernity and, as demonstrated in this article, an example of democratic
expectations of liberty and freedom (Barlas 2002). Moreover, democratic ideals and communicative processes in capitalist societies
such as the US are often subverted by the economic power of large corporations (Cole 2003). Modifications to the feminine
body through beauty products, dress, or surgery are not compulsory; however, the expected corporeal appearances and
performances as part of public life for women are fraught with subtle complications associated with seductive power such
as found in advertising (see Allen 2003). Women in the US who choose not to participate in the use of beauty products or technologies
(depending on a variety of factors such as socioeconomic class, racial category, and career path) may risk their social and, at times, economic and
political status. Similarly, when women choose to participate in beauty-body regimes of modification are they truly making a
‘free choice’ when by doing so they are supporting dominant beauty paradigms (Menon 2005)? Conceptions of choice and
freedom are directly linked to the Beauty Academy of Kabul in popular tales about this project. For example, the titles of several articles in
women’s magazines about the Beauty Academy of Kabul identify the project as: ‘Lipstick Power’, ‘Extreme Makeover’, ‘The Power of Beauty’, and ‘Life, Liberty and a Touch up’ (Wintour 2003; Reed 2003; Johnson 2002;
Schulman 2003). Similarly, the text of these articles also link make-up to expressions of freedom and liberty. For example, a Site News article states: Hairdos and makeup help define a woman’s persona, but at a beauty
school in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, each stroke of red lipstick and each snip of the scissors boldly punctuated a new found freedom for women in Afghanistan . . . The Beauty Academy of Kabul, where perms and
blush are metaphors for freedom. (Stiles 2006, 1). Afghan women’s clandestine uses of beauty products under the Taliban, as discussed in US beauty magazines, dramatize the otherwise ordinary and banal expectations of
product use in the US. This strengthens the interconnected web of politically and socially produced expectations on the modern feminine body, which acts as a representative space to monitor levels of acceptance to or
The script for the Beauty Academy of
rejection of western modernity (see Scott 2007). Consequently, corporeal modernity becomes a public marker for identifying a state’s democratic ideals.
Kabul drama directly associates the burqa with the Taliban regime: this then provides the necessary backdrop against
which the tale of corporeal liberation can be written. Importantly, it also serves to relinquish the United States’ role in
creating the conditions that led to the rise of the Taliban (such as US foreign policy and negotiations with the
Taliban, funding for the Taliban, and the role of US-based oil company Unocal - see Rashid 2001). Afghan women’s
bodies act as a spatial and social metaphor for deliverance by way of their manufactured transformation into a modern,
western and hegemonic model of the global feminine subject. T his modern feminine body must be presented publicly and meet (or
strive for) narrowly defined ideals of beauty, largely associated with light skin color and Anglo-Saxon facial features combined with a thin, tall and
young looking body. This article, then, investigates beauty demands on women in the US at the site of Afghan women’s faces and bodies, and the
particular manner in which corporeal modernity is (re)constructed within the beauty salon and the beauty pageant as a symbol of liberty. The
following sections of this paper include: an overview of the methods used for this study; a critical examination of the press coverage of and
documentary film on the Beauty Academy of Kabul; and the use women’s bodies as an emblem of corporeal modernity in beauty pageantry at the
national and international scale.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 359
A2: WE SHOULD STAY-TALIBAN/WOMEN
Threat of the Taliban is not a reason to stay-our military presence is doing nothing to protect women. Sonali
Kolhatkar and Mariam Rawi (Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a US-based non-profit that funds health,
educational, and training projects for Afghan women/Mariam Rawi is a member of the Revolutionary Association of
Women of Afghanistan writing under a pseudonym) July 8, 2009(Why Is a Leading Feminist Organization Lending Its
Name to Support Escalation in Afghanistan?, Alter Net,
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/141165/why_is_a_leading_feminist_organization_lending_its_name_to_supp
ort_escalation_in_afghanistan/?page=entire)
In our conversations arguing this point, we are told that the U.S. cannot leave Afghanistan because of what will happen to
women if they go. Let us be clear: Women are being gang raped, brutalized and killed in Afghanistan. Forced marriages
continue, and more women than ever are being forced into prostitution -- often to meet the demand of foreign troops.The
U.S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was
never as high as it is now. When there is no justice for women, they find no other way out but suicide.Feminists and other
humanitarians should learn from history. This isn't the first time the welfare of women has been trotted out as a pretext for
imperialist military aggression.
Your version of feminism masks and justifies more violence. Withdrawal is the only way we can be sure our
intentions aren’t violent.
Sonali Kolhatkar and Mariam Rawi (Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a US-based non-profit that funds
health, educational, and training projects for Afghan women/Mariam Rawi is a member of the Revolutionary Association
of Women of Afghanistan writing under a pseudonym) July 8, 2009(Why Is a Leading Feminist Organization Lending Its
Name to Support Escalation in Afghanistan?, Alter Net,
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/141165/why_is_a_leading_feminist_organization_lending_its_name_to_supp
ort_escalation_in_afghanistan/?page=entire)
Columbia Professor Lila Abu-Lughod, a woman of Palestinian descent, writes: "We need to be suspicious when neat
cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives; so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in
British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or
liberating Muslim women." Feminists around the world must refuse to allow the good name of feminism to be
manipulated to provide political cover for yet another war of aggression. The Feminist Majority Foundation would do
well to heed the demand of dissident Member of Parliament Malalai Joya, representing Farah province, who was kicked
out of the parliament last year for courageously speaking out. Addressing a press conference in the wake of the U.S.
bombing of her province she was clear: "We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war
crimes." That should be the first action item for the Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign for Afghan Women and
Girls.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 360
***NEG STUFFS***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 361
HUMANITARIANISM PIC
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 362
1NC SHELL
Counterplan text: The United States Federal Government should withdraw all non-humanitarian presence in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
The net-benefit: Humanitarian efforts key to self-determination
American Forces Press Service (Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Ernesto Hernandez Fonte, Air Force Master Sgt. Tracy
DeMarco, and Marine Corps Sgt. Brian Tuthill) Jan 11 2010 (“U.S. Leads Noncombat Missions in Afghanistan”, online)
U.S. forces have taken part in several important noncombat missions throughout Afghanistan in recent days, including
meetings between residents and government leaders, humanitarian outreach, construction training and transferring
responsibilities to Afghans. In southern Ghazni province’s Nawa district, U.S. Marines were on hand as dozens of residents met
with their governmental leaders Jan. 8 near Forward Operating Base Fiddler's Green in what is believed to be the first such gathering
in decades. More than 50 people attended the meeting and some residents took the opportunity to speak their minds to representatives
from Nawa and the city of Marjeh. They explained how some had not had direct interaction with their government in years. "There
was a lot of pent-up frustration at this shura because many of them have not seen government representatives in decades ,"
said Marine Corps Maj. David J. Fennell, civil affairs detachment team leader, 4th Civil Affairs Group. " This is the most productive
thing I've seen since I've been here. The government officials had the confidence to come down here. There is security for
the people, so they came here. Everything we're doing in this region keeps gaining momentum and continues to speed up.
It's going well." Marine commanders of Regimental Combat Team 7; 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment; 1st Battalion, 6th Marine
Regiment; and 3rd Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, joined the meeting to be introduced and to hear some of the concerns of the
Afghan citizens they protect. "In the recent weeks, you've seen hundreds of Marines in this area," said Lt. Col. Cal L. Worth,
commanding officer of 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, which will arrive in the Shorshorak area in the coming weeks. "I am here
to bring a thousand Marines and hundreds of Afghan soldiers here to improve stability in this region. We will form a team for long-
lasting peace here. I look forward to serving you both here and in Marjeh." During the discussions, citizens brought up their
concerns, such as security, land rights, building infrastructure and working with Marines and other NATO International
Security Assistance Force units. The importance of securing Shorshorak was an issue for both parties due to Taliban influence
stemming from Marjeh to their west. "I encourage you to do this the right way and support us to rebuild a strong Afghanistan," said
Haji Zahir, district governor of Marjeh, who led many of the conversations for the government representatives. "We want to make sure
you keep your land. The Marines are here to help us. They are not only bringing safety and security, but they are helping
with the roads, hospitals, mosques and schools." To showcase some of the achievements after discussions ended, the group
walked down the road and symbolically cut ribbons to christen two new bridges and a new water well pump. "Here we are standing on
this new bridge," Zahir told the group after cutting the first ribbon. "Afghans built this bridge. It is for us. The Americans will leave
here one day and it will be on us to build together for our future here and in Marjeh." Each of the construction projects is significant to
Shorshorak not only because they were needed and wanted by the people in the area, but the work was done entirely by Afghan
contractors, Fennell said. "Once the people were able to go see these completed government projects, firsthand, after the meeting, I
think that speaks volumes to the positive impacts of future projects," said Lt. Col. Todd R. Finley, commanding officer of 3rd
Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, whose Marines helped organize the day's events. "It also helps build people's confidence in their
government." Although some elders who attended said tension still persists between them and their government, they
agreed it was a good starting point for their future.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 363
1NC SHELL
Self-determination solves the root cause of the affirmative harms
(William) Barth (doctorate in Politics from the University of Oxford) 09 (“Obama Must Negotiate with Taliban About
Afghan Self-Determination & Capture of Osama bin Laden”, Salem-News)
Even though European colonialism has long since ended, insurgents still continue their battles to eradicate colonialism’s
legacy. Insurgency is also used by indigenous populations in order to gain self-governance in regions still controlled by
states unsympathetic to local political aspirations. It is difficult to understand why Americans oppose such movements,
given that self-determination has long since become a jus cogens (universally recognized) principle of international
law.Whilst insurgencies generally act in the name of self-determination , this does not, naturally, in any way excuse their use of
terror-tactics; that is, crimes of violence against civilians. What is the case, though, is that terrorism would very likely be reduced were
remedies to be created within international organizations, such as the United Nations (UN), as well as other regional bodies, that do
not currently recognize insurgent claims.It is important to cultivate responsibility within insurgencies by adopting standards
that bring them into the political process. Otherwise, these groups will remain alienated from procedures that they already
consider to be illegitimate. The best way to achieve this result in Afghanistan is by opening direct negotiations with the Taliban.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 364
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS KEY TO SELF-D
Humanitarian efforts are necessary to establish self-determination
Cian O’Driscoll (lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow. He completed his PhD in 2006 at the
University of Wales, Aberystwyth.) 08 (The Renegotiation of the Just War Tradition, page 73-75)
Walzer returned to this argument in an article published in DissentMagazine in 2002, "The Argument about Humanitarian
Intervention." This piece further stresses Walzer's assertions that instances of misrule and tyranny must be "extreme" if they are to
justify humanitarian intervention. Every violation of human rights, he argues, is not a justification: "The common brutalities of
authoritarian politics, the daily oppressiveness of traditional social practices-these are not occasions for intervention."" Only the
worst instances of human suffering, where the stakes are so high that the international community cannot reasonably
affect disinterest, should provoke intervention; everything else is best left to the troubled society to deal with by itself in
its own way." Moreover, where intervention does take place, it must be animated by "minimalist" goals .39 He specifically
argues against the idea that interventions should be undertaken to promote "democratic or liberal or pluralist or (even) capitalist"
values in the more brutal corners of this world. Rather, intervention is best conceived as a "limited" task that aims only at
ensuring that some basic level of order attends the process of self-determination within communities .A similarly restrained
approach to humanitarian war marks the work of Nicholas Wheeler and Alex Bellamy. Wheeler, for example, argues that
humanitarian war is only justified in exceptional cases where a genuine "supreme humanitarian emergency" exists." This ensures that
the bat for the use of force is set very high, ruling out the possibility that humanitarian wars might be fought to end "ordinary routine
abuse of human rights."" In a similar vein, Alex Bellamy refers to intervention as "the humanitarian exception to the legal ban
on the use of force" and stipulates that it may only be justified in "humanitarian emergencies ."" Bellamy and Wheeler both
display substantial concern, then, that the tight to intervention is suitably circumscribed by thresholds and safeguards. The restrained
approach to humanitarian war adopted by Walzer, Wheeler, and Bellamy reflects a more general presumption against the use of
nondefensive force in international affairs. Their deliberate concern to circumscribe the right of intervention with thresholds
and limits is emblematic of a broader caution regarding the role of nondefensive force in international society . 43
International law and church thinking present two of the clearest expressions of this skepticism concerning the utility of war as a tool
of foreign policy. International law establishes a broad prohibition on the use of force for any purpose that is not conceived as self-
defense or collective security, as the UN Charter affirms. Church thinking on war and peace exhibits a similar disposition. As the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) wrote in their influential 1983 pastoral letter, the unprecedented gravity of the
nuclear threat leads us to assume that a "presumption against war" must stand at the "beginning of just war thinking" today." "Only if
war cannot be rationally avoided," they continue, "does the teaching then seek to restrict and reduce its horrors. It does this by
establishing a set of rigorous conditions which must be met if the decision to go to war is to be morally permissible. Such a decision,
especially today, requires extraordinarily strong reasons for overriding the presumption in favor of peace and against war."45 This
general presumption against nondefensive force evident in international law and church doctrine precipitates a skepticism regarding
humanitarian war. International law, for example, affords no general permission for humanitarian war. Instead, its legality is
conditional upon a customary law exception to Article 2(4) of the UN Chartet.46 Meanwhile, the NCCB's pastoral letter fails to
acknowledge any right of humanitarian intervention, arguing that the only just cause for war in the modern world is self-
defense.47Viewed against the restrained approach to humanitarian intervention just essayed, Bush and Blair’s "moral case
for war" against Iraq appears divorced from the mainline of the just war thinking in the twentieth century . Certainly, their
arguments do not sit easily with the presumption against the nondefensive use of force that appears to rest at the heart of recent just
war thought. Yet, some contemporary scholars of the just war tradition, most notably James Turner Johnson, argue that the idea of a
presumption against the nondefensive use of force (which he refers to in a more general idiom as a "presumption against war") is
itself a twentieth-century conceit that is alien to the just war tradition properly understood ." According to Johnson,
underpinning the "presumption against war" is a conviction that the use of force is always morally problematic .49 At the very
least, it requires special justification, while some go so far as to say that it is an inherently immoral exercise." At the heart of this moral problematic is the conviction
that modern war must inevitably tend toward dispropos-rionaliry and nuclear armageddon. Given the destructive capacity of modern military hardware, and the serious
possibility that any conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange, war has ceased for the most part to provide a reasonable tradition, Johnson argues, threatens to give
the game away by treating the justification of war as an exercise in overriding a prima facie case against war rather than as part and parcel of the charge of responsible
government and good statecraft. It promises to shift the just war over "into a position effectively pacifist in practice.""' Such a development would divorce
contemporary just war reasoning from its own heritage, thereby displaying a lack of fidelity to the idea of the just war. 102 It would squander the wisdom of the ages, as
it were. On these grounds, Johnson rejects the emergence of a presumption against war in the just war tradition.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 365
HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS KEY TO SELF-D
Humanitarian aid solves self-determination Michael Walzer
(A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor of the political-intellectual quarterly
Dissent.) 12/3 09(“Is Obama’s War in Afghanistan Just?” Dissent Magazine Online)
But it may be too late. After all the mistakes, the cost of “winning”- significantly reducing the strength of the Taliban, stimulating
local resistance, training a national army, working with Pakistan to shut down al Qaeda havens across the border- may now be too
high. The number of troops that would be necessary to “win” may be far greater than the number the president has
committed and far greater than the American people would be willing to commit. And if that is true, then the continuation
of the war can’t be justified-for it is one of the key criteria of a just war that there be a realistic possibility of achieving a
just peace. BUT THERE is one strong argument for undertaking the effort Obama has called for that he didn’t make and that may be
more compelling than the strategic arguments he did make. It’s a moral and political argument about what we owe the Afghan people
eight years after we invaded their country.Things have not gotten better for most Afghans in those years, and for many of them, who
live in the battle zones or who endure the rapaciousness of government officials, things have probably gotten much worse. At the same
time, however, there have been some gains, in parts of the countryside and in the more secure cities. American and European
NGOs have been doing good work in areas like public health, health care, and education. Schools have opened, and
teachers have been recruited, for some two million girls. Organizations of many different sorts, including trade unions and
women’s groups, have sprung up in a new, largely secular, civil society. A version of democratic politics has emerged,
radically incomplete but valuable still. And all the people involved in these different activities would be at risk-at risk for
their lives-if the United States simply withdrew. Given everything we did wrong in Afghanistan, the work of these people-
democrats, feminists, union activists, and teachers-is a small miracle worth defending against the Taliban resurgence.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 366
SELF-D KEY TO SOLVENCY
Self-determination is key to reshape the ideologies the affirmative tries to solve for
The role of the interpretative community is actually quite central to the form that the tradition takes at any given time. Just
as an argument is constituted by the contending positions of those who enjoin it, the just war tradition is, to a large degree,
what its interpretative community makes of it. This means that the tradition will always be subject to negotiation and
renegotiation, as its cluster of practitioners contest among themselves how it should be understood and approached . This, it
must be stressed, is an act of interpretation and not an act of invention, discovery, or description."' It is working out of meanings
already present or latent in the tradition (though they may have been previously ignored or overlooked). Thus, the tradition
comes to reflect the contestation, dispute, disagreement, and flux that mark the debates of its interpretative community ."'
Accordingly, it is not a static or fixed entity; rather, it is a permanently shifting field that reflects the interactions of its exponents. The
disagreements and disputations of Walxer, Elshtain, and Johnson regarding the proper characterization of the just war tradition
actually constitute, then, on this view, the warp and woof of the tradition, They provide the impetus behind its shifting form, if not its
substance.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 367
ETHICAL OBLIGATION FOR SELF-D
We have an ethical obligation to multilaterally establish self-determination in Afghanistan ValerieDixon
(Ph.D. in religion and society from Temple University) 7-52010(“Just Peace in Afghanistan, a global moral obligation” The
Washington Post)
It would be a mistake to pack our bags and leave abruptly. We would commit the same error we made at the end of
Charlie Wilson's war. We would leave a power vacuum that the Taliban would fill. Thus, the necessity to work with the
Afghan government to establish a stable government that can meet the security needs of its people. This will necessarily
mean some accommodation with the Taliban.Afghanistan is a country with enormous potential. Its history tells not only of war,
but of great intellectual development around the city of Herat. Poetry, philosophy, and theology found expression there. Today, most
of Afghanistan's people are illiterate. They lack food, clean water and proper sanitation. It is our moral obligation to help
them to develop these things so they can have the capacity to develop their other human and natural resources . However, it
is not our obligation alone. It is a global moral obligation . Let us compete as in a race toward this virtue.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 368
A2: AFGHANIS DON’T WANT SELF-DETERMINATION
Many Afghanistans are discontent with Afghani governmental structure Mujib Mashal
(Columbia College majoring in history) 7-122010 (“Poll Shows Afghans’ Frustration with Corruption”, NYT)
According to the findings, corruption remains the third-biggest concern to Afghans, following security and unemployment .
One in seven adults experienced direct bribery in the past two years. The total of bribes paid by Afghans in 2009 added to roughly $1
billion, almost double the amount in 2007. The average bribe paid was $156. Many Afghans believe corruption within the
Afghan government is helping the Taliban insurgency.Bribery, in many cases, seems unavoidable in securing one’s
income within the framework of the government. In the survey, 29 percent of civil servants and self-employed
professionals reported that they had to pay bribes , either to superiors or business regulators, to be able to maintain their jobs.
Furthermore, there seems to be a dramatic rise in the use of intermediaries for obtaining relevant services. In 44 percent of the bribery
cases, a commission-taker was employed by the citizen to pursue his case. For his fee, the commission-taker distributed suitable bribes
to obtain the service on behalf of the citizen.The survey indicates that such institutionalized corruption is a high threat to the
legitimacy of the state, because the citizens are forced to turn to non-state actors. For example, some 50 percent of respondents
with legal claims said they turned to alternatives such as local councils and religious leaders because they felt that they
couldn’t get justice through the corrupt judiciary.Furthermore, 50 percent of the participants said that such corruption gives
the Taliban political capital and helps their insurgency. One third of the respondents report having heard the Taliban denounce
government corruption and use it as a means for mobilizing. In fact, 14 percent of the respondents still believe the Taliban are efficient
in fighting corruption - in the South, the percentage is higher than 30 percent.The study also shows that, compared with 2007,
Afghans have grown much less tolerant of corruption. “The public has gained more acute knowledge of the nature of
corruption,” says Lorenzo Delesgues, one of the report’s authors. “They are less tolerant of the lavish lifestyles of public officials
facilitated through corruption and they ask for increased accountability.”
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 369
NET-BENEFIT 2 SHELL: MULTILATERALISM
Transition to multilateralism in the Middle East now
Chris Phillips (Staff Writer for The Guardian, Middle East Specialist) 5-31 2010 (“US Hegemony in Middle East is
Ending”)
Yet even though the return to cold war bi-polar blocs in the Middle East is unlikely, the region's international relations are
changing. US power is waning. Though Washington remains the world's only superpower, the quagmires of Iraq and
Afghanistan have exposed the limits of US ambitions, while the economic crisis has forced the Obama administration to focus
energy elsewhere.While the Bush era saw the US hegemonic in the region, squeezing the defiant few like Syria and Saddam Hussein's
Iraq, today's Middle East sees a power vacuum led by partial US retreat being filled by assertive regional and middle
powers. Turkey and Brazil's recent nuclear deal with Iran typify this emerging new climate.Stephen Walt has highlighted that this
shift in power is global, with Asia's share of GDP already outstripping that of the US or Europe. As ever, it seems the Middle East
could prove a microcosm of these international changes. If the age of American uni-polarity is coming to an end, perhaps
hastened by unnecessary wars and economic shortsightedness, it is much more likely that international relations in the
Middle East will come to reflect the multi-polar world that will follow rather than revert to a bi-polar cold war.
Humanitarian presence in Afghanistan is key to multilateral credibility
J. Alexander Thier11/30/09J Alexander Thier is the director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He is co-author and editor
of The Future ofAfghanistan http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/afghanistan_is_still_worth_the_fight?page=full
The final argument that compels continued U.S. engagement in Afghanistan is perhaps the most difficult for Obama to
make: failure in Afghanistan will have broad and unpredictable implications for the U.S. role in the world.The United
States and NATO would suffer a credibility crisis if the Taliban and al Qaeda can claim a full military victory in
Afghanistan. On the heels of the disastrous U.S. experience in Iraq, the United States risks appearing feckless, unable to
accomplish its highest priority national security objectives and perhaps unable to even define them. Where will its allies
be willing to follow the United States next? If NATO is similarly unable to sustain commitment to its first-ever
declaration of collective action in defense of a member, how will it respond to other challenges in the future?This is not a
question of "saving face"-- the lifespan of al Qaeda and Talibanism will be determined by the perceptions of the region's
populations about the strength and righteousness of the militants. In 2001, the Taliban were not just weakened, but
discredited. In 2009, will the Taliban be seen as Afghanistan's (and Pakistan's) future?This malaise is likely to hit the
United States at home, as well. Americans will grow increasingly skeptical of their ability to act effectively in the world,
to deliver aid, to keep a difficult peace. Whatever happens in Afghanistan, U.S. engagement in the unstable corners of our
world will remain an essential element of our security and prosperity in the next century. In that context, Afghanistan,
beset by extremism, conflict, and poverty remains not only important in its own right, but a critical exemplar of the
challenges we must meet in the decades to come.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 370
NET-BENEFIT 2 SHELL: MULTILATERALISM
United States multilateral credibility is empirically key to Middle Eastern stability
Steven Spiegel (Professor of Political Science at UCLA and National Scholar at IPF, is among the world's foremost
experts on American foreign policy in the Middle East) 09 (“Building Momentum for Mid-East Peace: Bring Back the
Multilaterals” Huffington Post)
In his speech to the UN General Assembly, President Obama provided the direction for a new approach, when he said that in pursuit
of his goal of peace between Israel and "its many neighbors ", "we will develop regional initiatives with multilateral participation, alongside bilateral negotiations," to use the
Why not revive the regional "multilateral" approach that provided breathtaking examples
President's words. We have an idea for just such an initiative.
of what could happen in the Middle East in the 1990's. It's hard to believe now, but after the Madrid Conference in 1991, Israelis, Palestinians, and
nearly all Arab states met regularly in five international groups to redress such common problems as water scarcity, environmental degradation, refugees, economic
development, and regional security. Among their achievements, they agreed to establish a regional desalination research center for producing fresh water, a program to
reunite refugee families, an environmental code of conduct, a regional development bank, and pacts to avoid dangerous incidents at sea and require early notification of
certain military activities in order to augur greater transparency and comfort.Equally important, seeing their diplomats on television engaging
each other for the first time in various Middle East capitals on these issues gave Israelis and Arabs confidence in the
overall peace process. Sponsored by America and Russia, and facilitated by Japan, Canada, the European Union, Turkey, China,
India, and other "extra-regional" states, the multilaterals demonstrated the potential fruits of regional peace , while Israel and its
immediate neighbors engaged in direct bilateral negotiations. Progress was pegged tightly to the outcomes from the bilaterals. When those negotiations deteriorated, so
did the multilaterals' five working groups. It didn't help that a heated dispute developed in the Arms Control and Regional Security group, largely on Israel's purported
nuclear force, and poisoned the rest of the multilaterals as a consequence. With strong American support, the eight multilateral working
groups could serve to accelerate the momentum for peace agreements in a genuinely altered Middle East environment as
negotiations begin and the tough process of making concessions is initiated. They would alter the role of President Obama from a stern
teacher lecturing the parties on their failings to a lofty visionary showing the way for a better future. The Obama administration's policies are the right way to go, and
the administration is right to proceed. As the President told the UN, "even though there will be setbacks and false starts and tough days, I will not waver in my pursuit
of peace". We think that the revival of the multilaterals would ease the way in the negotiations themselves and enhance the prospects for his success.
Increased Middle Eastern instability goes nuclear

Morgan, Political Writer, 07
(Stephen J., Political Writer and Former Member of the British Labour Party Executive Committee, “Better another Taliban Afghanistan,
than a Taliban NUCLEAR Pakistan!?”, 9-23, )
However events may prove him sorely wrong. Indeed, his policy could completely backfire upon him. As the war
intensifies, he has no guarantees that the current autonomy may yet burgeon into a separatist movement. Appetite comes with eating, as they say. Moreover, should the Taliban fail to re-conquer al of Afghanistan, as
looks likely, but captures at least half of the country, then a Taliban Pashtun caliphate could be established which would act as a magnet to separatist Pashtuns in Pakistan. Then, the likely break up of
Afghanistan along ethnic lines, could, indeed, lead the way to the break up of Pakistan, as well. Strong centrifugal forces have always bedevilled the
stability and unity of Pakistan, and, in the context of the new world situation, the country could be faced with civil wars and popular fundamentalist
uprisings, probably including a military-fundamentalist coup d’état. Fundamentalism is deeply rooted in Pakistan society. The fact that in the year following 9/11, the
most popular name given to male children born that year was “Osama” (not a Pakistani name) is a small indication of the mood. Given the weakening base of the traditional, secular opposition parties, conditions would be
ripe for a coup d’état by the fundamentalist wing of the Army and ISI, leaning on the radicalised masses to take power. Some form of radical, military Islamic regime, where legal powers would shift to Islamic courts and
forms of shira law would be likely. Although, even then, this might not take place outside of a protracted crisis of upheaval and civil war conditions, mixing fundamentalist movements with nationalist uprisings and sectarian
violence between the Sunni and minority Shia populations. The nightmare that is now Iraq would take on gothic proportions across the continent. The prophesy ofan
arc of civil war over Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq would spread to south Asia, stretching from Pakistan to Palestine, through Afghanistan into Iraq and up to the
Mediterranean coast. Undoubtedly, this would also spill over into India both with regards to the Muslim community and Kashmir. Border
clashes, terrorist attacks, sectarian pogroms and insurgencywould break out. A new war, and possibly nuclear war, between Pakistan and
India could no be ruled out. Atomic Al Qaeda Should Pakistan break down completely, a Taliban-style government with strong Al Qaeda influence is a real possibility. Such deep chaos would, of
course, open a “Pandora's box” for the region and the world.With the possibility of unstable clerical and military fundamentalist elements being in
control of the Pakistan nuclear arsenal, not only their use against India, but Israel becomes a possibility, as well as the
acquisition of nuclear and other deadly weapons secrets by Al Qaeda. Invading Pakistan would not be an option for America. Therefore a nuclear war would now again
become a real strategic possibility. This would bring a shift in the tectonic plates of global relations . It could usher in a new Cold War with China and Russia pitted
against the US.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 371
NET-BENEFIT 2: MULTILATERALISM GOOD
Multilateralism is key to solve nuclear war and Middle East stability Luis Carlos
Montalvan (Dual Master's degrees in Journalism and Strategic Communications at Columbia University in New York City and is a member of the Council for
Emerging National Security Affairs 4-23, 2010(“Multilateralism is essential for peace in the 21 st Century”, Huffinton Post)
Unilateralism is the wrong approach for American Diplomacy .There is nothing to suggest its efficacy since 9/11 . There is nothing to suggest its
usefulness for future conflict. In allowing the US to go it alone, America's partners and allies risk the havoc and catastrophic
consequences that will accompany "Imperial Overstretch."The residue of overstretch will include loss of US leadership in the world, an economy whose decline affects billions of dollars
As the bloodiest 100 years in recorded
in international markets, and certainly emboldens rogue states. The whole world will pay the price if we let unilateralism pervade this century.
history, the 20th Century is replete with examples of how policy and practice intersect to foment war. The proliferation of
nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the constantly mutating dynamic of terrorism inform our current, dangerous
reality.Amidst this backdrop of destruction, there are lessons for those who are looking for them. Seeds of peacemaking and conflict resolution were planted which we
must germinate in order to halt and then reverse the trend toward violence and chaos. Perhaps the 21st Century could be the first 100
years in which nations invest more in building peace than in making war. In the 20th Century, local conflicts ignited global tensions and genocide on an unprecedented scale,
costing incalculable life and treasure. The two world wars and other explosive conflicts erupted over such issues as ethnic disputes, the securing of
natural resources, corporate interests, ideology and religion. The international business of war produced economies of scale prompted by the industrial, technological, and communications revolutions. The assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo by anarchist Gavrilo Princip was the spark that ignited WWI. In time, some 15 million people would be killed. The sheer brutality of that war led Woodrow Wilson to issue his "Fourteen Points" in 1918, which
included the establishment of a League of Nations "for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." Just like our present-day difficulties in pursuing compromise, the US Congress
The subsequent failure of the League of Nations to prevent WWII may have galvanized our
politicized the concept, bucked the President, and did not support that initiative.
culture's distrust of multilateralism. Throughout the 20th Century and until today, nations and other entities have invested precious
financial, intellectual, social, institutional and political capital into arming themselves with weaponry, instead of building their
capacity for peace.Technologies change and improve with increasing rapidity, but those advances have included improvements in how to kill more people more efficiently and with smaller devices. WWII
was the shining example of multilateralism and its power. Vietnam and Korea were examples of its limitations. South
Africa and India demonstrated that the support of the international community could enable countries to pull themselves up
by their own bootstraps.All these contribute and form the basis of the state of nations today. The 20th Century left us at a crossroads: will we perpetuate the machinery and culture of war or surpass our
greatest dreams by encouraging and enforcing peace policies and practices worldwide? The 21st Century began ominously with the attacks of September 11, 2001, which ushered in a new era of US foreign policy and global
Rather than engage a sympathetic world in developing multilateral and inclusive strategies similar to the
response to war, conflict and terrorism.
precursors to the 2003 Iraq War and as was done before the Persian Gulf War, the US squandered its global capital to pursue "pre-
emptive" unilateral military action.The equal and increasingly matching reaction is a global culture of military aggression and war. The resulting disintegration of the
international community contributed to the most serious economic disaster since the Great Depression. Already struggling
to survive amidst broken economies, the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and global terrorism
strains multilateralism when it should embolden it.If it is true that every weapon invented is eventually used, we have
much to fear if we do not reverse this lethal trend . Since national conflicts frequently spill over into regional and world-wide conflict, multilateral organizations
have been very strong supporters of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Even the US found a way to first investigate and then
come to terms with its terrible policy of putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII and apologized and paid
reparations to survivors and their children. There were important Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, supported by the international community. Victims and
perpetrators of Apartheid who participated in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions demonstrated in compelling ways the healing and restorative power of those
gatherings. Perhaps more importantly, they showed the world that a nonviolent response to unthinkable oppression and injustice can foster the peaceful
development of a society intent upon making amends for the past and embarking upon a brighter, shared future. Since conflict-resolution and
peacemaking at the local or national level work, why not apply it multilaterally? Concerned about the resurgence of unilateralism in the US's current Marjeh and Kandahar operations in Afghanistan, former
Assistant Secretary of State Gene Dewey recently noted that "it's been very lonely being a leading multilateralist in Washington over the last nine years. Too few policy-makers have sensed where our unilateralism has led,
and other authoritarian Islamic countries generated the seeds that not only birthed the terrorists who carried out 9/11, but also attacks in Madrid, London,
and is leading." Saudi Arabia
No matter where terrorists are determined to attempt to disrupt the lives of others, it's time for countries to
Mumbai and Chechnya.
realize that the only way to confront contemporary terrorism is through multilateralism. This must be a multilateralism
that is thoroughly infused with peacemaking and conflict-resolution, instead of only "joint forces." At this crossroads, we can use the knowledge
economy, social network and the international community to turn the rhetoric of hope into reality. We sit upon an
historical precipice of policies and practices of sustainable, culturally responsive peace-building and violence prevention
within and beyond our borders.Despite their faults, theinstitutions set up after in response to WWII (UN) andthe Cold War (NATO) can be the 21st Century's vehicles for peace. We can use
those instruments of multilateralism to build the peacekeeping, disaster relief, and conflict resolution forces that bring
countries together.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 372
NET-BENEFIT 2 UNIQUENESS: MULTILATERALISM
America is postured to maintain unilateralism in the status quo (Taha) Ozhan
(Staff Writer for Foreign Policy Magazine, Director-General of SETA, a research institute and a think tank, headquartered
in Ankara, Turkey.) 6-3 2010 (“Multilateralism in foreign policy and nuclear swap deal”)
The United States has entered into six different wars since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its involvement in wars in Panama,
Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice) has shown that the US has become more of a force causing frictions than
fostering mutual understanding appropriate for the nature of the post-Cold War global system . Towards the end of the second term of the Bush
administration, similar criticisms and perspectives began to be offered by prominent American thinkers, politicians, and in military circles that centered around three major issues: 1) multi-polarity and multilateralism; 2)
emerging powers; and 3) post-America. These discussions were further encouraged by Obama's election to the American presidency, which appeared as an influential and inspiring factor for the establishment of a new and
different approach to the changing global order.Obama came to power strongly utilizing the rhetoric of change . There was an expectation, both domestically and
internationally, that he was going to follow a very different route from that of the Bush administration. Although he started off his administration having to be a spectator to the Israeli attack on Gaza, Obama underlined that
Especially on the issues of Iran, Afghanistan, and
his administration's attitude in dealing with global problems was going to involve more dialogue and a more democratic approach.
Iraq, he pledged that he was going to stay away from the previous administration's approach and policies. However, he first had to take a step backwards on the Afghanistan issue, and then, he let the Iraq issue take on an
unclear course.The Obama administration's approach to the Iran issue is now swinging in the opposite direction after Iran accepted
the IAEA's October 2009 offer on a fuel-swap through the recent diplomatic efforts of Brazil and Turkey.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 373
NET-BENEFIT 3: JUST WAR CRITICISM BAD
The affirmative’s monolithic narrative of just war doctrine guts solvency and turns case
In fine, there is an inbuilt conservatism in Johnson's conception of the just war tradition. His writings reflect a pronounced antipathy toward those scholars who would
discount the wisdom of the past, preferring instead to recast the just war categories as they see fir, imposing on them whatever meaning they find attractive or useful in
the here and now. Against this view, Johnson repeatedly insists that taking the just war tradition seriously requires that we engage in an ongoing conversation with those
who have come before us. At the heart of his writing, then, lies a respect for the authority of tradition and a rejection of the short-sighted "presentism" that marks much
current just war thought.` All three accounts of the just war tradition surveyed above are very different from one another. Each privileges different postulates as
providing the basic premise of the just war tradition. Where WaIzer speaks of the tradition as a moral language, Elshraln focuses on its
Augustinian roots, and Johnson stresses the historically constituted core idea of just war. All three writers consequently
produce divergent and sometimes seemingly incommensurable conceptions of just what the just war tradition is supposed
to be. Faced with this plurality of competing and seemingly incommensurable accounts of the just war tradition, we must
acknowledge the possibility that there is no such a thing as the just war tradition, singularly conceived. For a start, the idea
of a multiplicity of just war traditions renders it impossible to speak directly of the just war tradition without qualification.
Put simply, it suggests that we cannot speak or write of the tradition without stating whose version of it we are referring
to. There would be, on this view, as many just war traditions as there are just war theorists. Instead, then, of a unified and
coherent just war tradition, we would be left with nothing more than a knot of rival theories and competing visions. If we
concede this view, it casts doubt upon the notion that we share a common just war tradition with Augustine, Aquinas, and
Grotius (and even Bush and Blalr, among others). This does not seem quite right, though; it does not reflect how we typically refer
to the just war tradition. Nor, indeed, does it reflect how these theorists refer to the just war tradition . Even though we (and here I am
including the theorists just discussed) can recognize a plurality of just war theories, we commonly tend to refer to some idea of a unitary just war tradition that
encompasses all these different versions and voices. Johnson, for instance, has written that though there may be a variety of different theories of just war in play at any
one time, we may still speak in terms of a singular just war tradition; he submits that there is a sufficient amount of overlap between the various accounts of the just war
to justify treating them as comprising a
He presents the argument that there is one just war tradition rather than many, and that this just war tradition accommodates a multiplicity of rival and competing voices
(though his recent writings suggest a desire to discipline this pluralism, as previously discussed)." This is an assumption that is shared by both Walzer and Elshrain.
Walzer refers on numerous occasions to the tradition as a framework that accommodates both consensus and disagreement, while Elshtain acknowledges that the
tradition encompasses a variety of positions (not all of which are compatible with her own).112 But on what grounds might such claims about the unity of the just war
tradition stand? Is there a solid basis for assuming its existence? And if there are good grounds for assuming its existence, how
should we conceptualize it? The task of this section is to examine these questions. In the course of so doing I will offer a
substantive account of the just war tradition.
This suggests that we can speak comfortably of a unified just war tradition on the basis that it comprises a bounded
rationality, and reflects the common possession of a moral vocabulary and mode of reasoning that is historically
associated with the idea of just war. Yet there is more to it than this. This leads us, then, to our third observation. It is this: no moral vocabulary or mode of
reasoning is freestanding; moral vocabularies always presuppose the existence of an interpretative community (that engages itself in arguing about how best to make
sense of the given moral vocabulary and mode of reasoning). In this case, then, the third factor supporting the idea that there is such a thing as a unified just war
tradition is the presence of such an interpretative community-which we might refer to as "the just war communiry"-represented here by Walxer, Elshtain, and Johnson
(and Bush, Blair, and myself), engaged in attempting to understand the just war tradition. The phrase "just war community" is borrowed from Brian Otend, but it
reflects Valzers notion of the interpretative community. 119 For Walzer, an interpretative community is a body of people bound to a certain tradition by the flirt that
they look to find meaning and a vocabulary through which to express themselves within '° Over the course of this book, I have extended this idea to those people who
look to find meaning and a mode of expression within the just war tradition. Consequently, the just war community comprises that body of people who engage the
tradition by arguing through (and about) the historically loaded terminology and vocabulary that is associated with it. This is a broad understanding of the just war
community that allows that membership is open to anyone, be they an academic, a politician, or a member of the general public, who speaks its language.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 374
A2: K OF HUMANITARIAN PRESENCE
The counterplan doesn’t link to the impacts of just war doctrine. Humanitarian need is uniquely high
The third justification offered by Bush and Blair for the invasion of Iraq focused on humanitarian imperatives . This justification
was the subject matter of Chapter 4, which related how Bush and Blair pressed a far-reaching justification for humanitarian war against Saddam Hussein's regime that resonated quite strongly
with the classical idea of the just war-at least as it is presented by Johnson. It also made the point that this justification cuts against the grain of most twentieth-century just war thinking on
humanitarian war. This section will examine how Bush and Blair's humanitarian arguments have been received by the just war community since the outbreak of hostilities with Iraq. Have
contemporary just war theorists been receptive to the expansive humanitarianism advocated by Bush and Blair, or have they refused its validity; preferring instead to reassert a more
conventional twentieth- century approach? The aim of this section, then, is to ascertain whether or not Bush and Blair's arguments have impacted upon how humanitarian war is approached
from a just war perspective. To this end, it will be divided into three subsections, as with the first two sections. The first subsection will outline the nature of the challenge posed to the just war
tradition by Bush and Blair's arguments. The second will survey the response that these arguments generated from the just war community; The third will look to draw some conclusions
regarding the place of humanitarian war in the just war tradition today. The principal argument that will be articulated here is that there is currently an influential and broad body of scholars
who wish to expand the just war tradition to encompass a greater humanitarian impulse. Interestingly, the strategy adopted by these theorists has not included any attempt to argue that the cur-
rent security environment presents a set of circumstances that justifies a greater emphasis on humanitarian concerns in the jus ad helIum than has hitherto been the case. Rather, their prime
strategy has been to stress that the just war tradition has historically fostered humanitarianism in international affairs. Thus the call for a greater element of humanitarianism in the
contemporary just war tradition takes on the semblance of a call for a return to roots for just war thinking. Such a move reflects a claim to fix the historical meaning of the just war tradition so
as to stake some kind of claim over its future development. Bush and Blair's justifications for humanitarian war against Iraq "re-ignited" important j us ad helium debates according to Alex
Bellamy.'°5 They did so mainly because they challenged extant understandings of the right to war today, particularly with respect to the license to use force for humanitarian ends. But how
exactly did Bush
and Blair's justifications for humanitarian war against Iraq frame a challenge to the just war tradition? As Chapter 4 indicated, they
rejected the conventional twentieth-century understanding that humanitarian war is only acceptable as a response to cases
of massive human suffering, or what Nicholas Wheeler terms "supreme humanitarian emergencies.""' This view was given its clearest expression by It J.
Vincent who wrote, in his 1986 book Human Rights and International Relations, that "humanitarian intervention is... reserved for extraordinary oppression, not the day-
to-day." 117 Walxer's writings, as noted in Chapter 4, reflect a similar position. Just and Unjust Wars set out the view that intervention is only justifiable in response to
acts such as genocide and massacre, acts that "shock the conscience of mankind.""' He reaffirmed and developed this view in subsequent papers.109 In one piece
published in 2002, he specifically makes the case that humanitarian war is only justified in the most horrendous of cases; put simply, routine oppression will not suffice
as a cause for humanitarian war. In his own words, The occasions have to be extreme if they are to justify, perhaps even require, the use of force across an international
boundary. Every violation of human rights isn't a justification. The common brutalities of authoritarian politics, the daily oppressiveness of traditional social practices-
these are not occasions for intervention... But when what is going on is the "ethnic cleansing" of a province or country or the systematic massacre of a religious or
national community, it doesn't seem possible to wait for a local response. Now we are on the other aide of the chasm. The stakes are too high,
the suffering already too great. Perhaps there is no capacity to respond among the people directly at risk and no will to
respond among their fellow citizens.The victims are weak and vulnerable; their high, and that this is where it should stay It should only be an option in
extreme circumstances that is, cases such as genocide and enslavement. 121 Humanitarian war, he writes, should be "concerned with rescuing particular
victims of violence here and now, not with achieving universal liberty in the long run. It is remedial, not revolutionary. 11122 He rejectsthe focus on
regime change, arguing that the emphasis of any intervention must be squarely on halting or alleviating ongoing atrocities
rather than spreading the ideals of democratic governance.'23
He reiterated these views on other occasions, suggesting also that although the Iraqi government was a bastion of oppression, this by itself did not qualify it for regime
change."" Evans made a similar case in an article published in 2003 in the Financial Times. Quite simply, he writes, the human rights situation in Iraq was not urgent or
exceptional enough to justify humanitarian war.Humanitarian war should only be reserved for the "worst cases," and Iraq did not reach
this level in 2003.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 375
CP SOLVES WITHOUT MILITARY PRESENCE
Military involvement destroys humanitarian relief credibility and effectiveness
Arne Strandis a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway, and holds a PhD in Post-war Recovery Studies. Strand directed Norwegian
NGOs in Pakistan/Afghanistan between 1988 and 1997, and has undertaken a range of reviews and research projects in Afghanistan since 1998. 2007 [ways to regain
trust Canadian Consortium on human security volume 5 issue 1http://www.humansecurity.info/#/vol51-strand/4527476365]
Another reason for Afghans to take a more cautious attitude towards humanitarian agencies is that the lines between
humanitarian and military interventions have been blurred. In November 2002, the US military introduced Provincial
Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and the notion of 'winning hearts and minds' as a military strategy through implementation
of humanitarian projects in areas under their control. To support these plans and as a means of force protection US troops
tried to associate themselves closely with any humanitarian and development activity under way. One such way was the
use of white cars to capitalise on the humanitarian profile of NGOs and UN agencies. This has turned NGOs into targets
for military groups opposing the international military presence and portrayed projects such as new school buildings as
symbols of foreign interference, not unlike how they were perceived during the Soviet invasion. While some NGOs
capitalised on this new funding opportunity, the majority protested on grounds of principle. Out of fear for their security
they advocated a clear separation between humanitarian and military interventions.[iii] While the US continued its dual
strategy in the south, other nations that were part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) opted for a clearer
separation between their military and humanitarian engagements, following the example of British troops in Northern
Afghanistan. However, due to the lack of a common ISAF policy, each PRT nation was left to develop its own approach
subject to its military and humanitarian strategy and depending on the funds it had available.[iv]Research undertaken in
different parts of Afghanistan over recent years has allowed a comparison of attitudes towards the international forces and
NGOs. A doctor asked rhetorically: '...are the forces here to protect us or themselves?', representing a common scepticism
in southern Afghanistanabout the aggressive military intervention they have experienced. In the north, by contrast,
interviews revealed that ordinary Afghans regarded the international troops as a guarantee against renewed warlordism
and warfare, and a sign of continued international engagement. While most experienced NGOs operating in the south have
avoided contact with military forces, the separation that has been established between the military and humanitarian
agendas in the north has reduced this tension considerably.[v] Thus, if humanitarian agencies are to regain the trust of the
Afghans it remains of crucial importance that they continue to demonstrate their distance from the military forces. For
their part, the military forces need to understand and respect this strategy and refrain from using humanitarian symbols
and projects. However, there is more to be done. Other findings make it equally clear that the NGOs have a major job to
do in informing Afghans of their intentions and their programmes, and to stick to the promises they make. All the signs
indicate that they need to reflect critically on their own position. On the one hand, they need to decide whether they just
wish to capitalise on available funds and limit themselves to project implementation. On the other, they may choose to
side with the Afghan population and voice their concerns against aggressively performed military operations, oppressive
and corrupt government officials, humanitarian agencies failing to live up to people's expectations and the violence that
particularly affects women. The latter strategymightresultin less funding but warmer welcomes in Afghan villages and
townships.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 376
HUMANITARIAN AID GOOD
The state is ethically obliged to provide humanitarian aid
(Jean) Elshtain 2003 ([“Against the New Utopianism”, Ethics & International Affairs, p. 91 -
95])
In criticizing my position of “equal moralregard for all persons” and an international
ethic that, once a certain set of criteria aremet, calls upon responsible states to act when
people are being systematically, egregiously,and unremittingly assaulted, Burke pounces
on my use of the “Spider-Man ethic”-namely, that “the more powerful have greater
responsibilities.” For Burke this means thatthe United States is “recast as superhero, with
all the absence of moral ambiguity such ametaphor implies”(p.80). With all duerespect to
Mr. Burke, I do not believe heknows anything about Spider-Man. Anyreader of Marvel
Comics appreciates thatSpider-Man is a tormented superhero andthat his life is riddled
with moral conflict andambiguity. Does his loyalty to family and girlfriend take precedence
over his duty to protect the innocent from torture and death?How can he be fair to the
“domestic” and the“trans-domestic” at the same time? SpiderMan is always in danger of
stretching himselftoo thin; always a bit exhausted; always wondering if he is doing the right
thing. I choseSpider-Man rather than, say, Superman precisely becauseof the perduring
conflictsSpidey faces. What a pity that Burke has notfamiliarized himself with this existential
andtroubled hero! If I am guilty of anything hereit is in assuming that those engaged in cultural
criticism have some knowledge of theworld of superheroes, the troubled (SpiderMan, Batman)
and the untroubled (Superman). (Alas, and I sigh as I write this, myexplanation will probably be
another strikeagainst me-a case of cultural imperialism.)Let me be clear about what I call for in
theessay Burke criticizes: it is a world of” minimally decent” states-not perfect states
andcertainly not a world of perpetual peace. (Ifthere is such a world, it is not of this
earth.)But to say this is not to fall into despair, butrather to endorse a chastened and
restrainedhope that the world can be made less brutaland less unjust, and this means
more respectfor human rights and more democracies,insofar as democracy involves respect
for persons qua persons. Saying this does not dictateany particular form of government save
thatno one is born to be a slave, to be tormented,or to be slaughtered because of who he or
sheis-whether American or Palestinian orIsraeli or Jew or Christian or Muslim or maleor
female. The real challenge to my perspective is to require of me that I spell out the criteria
for what counts as “minimally decent”and what threshold conditions obtain-thatis to say, at
what point armed interventionbecomes necessary to uphold equal moralregard. That
would be a real challenge to myessay. I fear that Burke’s rejoinder fails to
articulate such a challenge because he cannotresist a flight into utopianism.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 377
HUMANITARIAN AID GOOD
Denying humanitarian need bears the same dogmatic ignorance as just war theory
95])
People fight for good reasons and for badones. It is the obligation of citizens
andresponsible statespersons to distinguish goodand bad reasons to engage in armed
conflict
and-here I agree with Burke-to find waysto chasten overambitious and enthusiasticrecourse to
the use of force. This can only bedone if particular citizens in particular placesact
politically to tame their own states whenthey find them in the wrong. And to do thatthey
require some sort of workable set ofprinciples that places limits on the use offorce and
animates realistic and hopeful possibilities in a way that abstract models cannot.Those who
endorse utopian visions of perpetual peace neglect the hard, nitty-grittypolitical and
ethical work. I hope Burke turnshis considerable intelligence and learning to aconcrete account
of how a Kantian vision canbe realized and, when he does so, I believe hewill realize that the
dualistic contrast between“perpetual peace” and “perpetual war” is achimera that ignores
ambiguity, nuance, thesmudginess of real human lives and history-the very things he
accuses me ofdownplaying when they form the very background assumptions out of which I
work.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 378
A2: HUMANITARY IS MILITARY
Total peace is impossible. Even if they win a risk some of humanitarian presence could be potentially be
militaristic, some militarism is inevitable - that’s why self-determination comes first
95])
So I, pace Burke, have not forgotten “thevision of the great cosmopolitan” ImmanuelKant.
Instead, I profoundly disagree with it.Perpetual peace is a fantasy of at-oneness, asI have
called it, of a world in which differenceshave all been rubbed off and sameness invites
“the definitive abolition of the need to resortto war”(p.83). For Kant, all hostilities must
be concluded without any “secret reservationof material for a future war.” Otherwise, one
has a mere-mere-truce, not authenticpeace. Here, and elsewhere, we find Kantdowngrading the
humanly possible work andthe arduous tasks of diplomats, statespersons, international
organizations of citizens,and so on, in favor of a utopian fantasy ofeternity-the ability of human
beings to, ineffect,freeze a particular vision or arrangement and for that arrangement to
continueundisturbed in perpetuity. To reduce soldiering, as Kant does, to hiring men “to kill
or bekilled” is stunningly reductionist, and itmocks those who have died to fight fascism,
slavery, and other evils. Kant may enjoin thedestruction of standing armies until he is
blue in the face, but that is not going to happen. It is not going to happen because eliminating
human fear, envy, jealousy, anger,rage-including rage at injustice-is notpossible. What
Burke calls “dismantl[ing]security dilemmas, brick by terrible brick”(p.85) also requires the
dismantling of humanbeings as we know them. His positive visionruns contrary to the entirety
of the historicand even paleontological record; there hasnever been an epoch in which armed
conflicthas been altogether absent. The challenge isnot to eliminate-presumably if that
couldbe done it would by now have been done-but rather to limit the occasions for war
andthe destructiveness of war. (And, contrary toBurke, modern warfare such as the
UnitedStates fights is less, not more, destructive,capable of realizing the ideal of discrimination
better than ever before; consider whetherit would have been better to be in Baghdad in2003or in
Berlin in 1944.)
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 379
FRAMEWORK: RESPONSIBILITY TO CITIZENS
Adopting a framework of Responsibility to Protect solves the harms of the affirmative better by also
acknowledging individuals rights , which is necessary to establish regional stability
Mary Kaldor Professor and Co-director of London School of Economics Global Governance 2007(“From Just War to Just Peace” The Viability of
Human Security Pg 41-43 http://dare.uva.nl/document/131454#page=22.)
What made Northern Ireland different was the fact that the conflict took place on British territory. Bombing Belfast was not an option. It could also be argued that the different response of
American authorities to the Oklahoma bombing (1995) as opposed to September 11 can be explained partly by the fact that this was a domestic rather than an international incident. The
assumption that underlies a Just Peace is that it is no longer possible, or relevant from the point of view of the victims, to
distinguish between foreigners and citizens or between the domestic and the international.Although the state has primary
responsibility for dealing with domestic violence,there are external situations where the local state itself is the cause of violence or where it is
incapable of dealing with violence, where international forces intervenebut through methodsthat are not so very different from the methodsthat
might be used in a domestic setting.This reflects boththe changed sensibilities of society where concerns about people far
awayhave become more urgent as a result of global communications and transnational communities,and an emerging global social
contractwherebythe international community adopts the Responsibility to Protect and recognises individual rights and not just
state rights. Of course, elements of these principles can also be found in Just War theorising, particularly in the pre-Westphalian era. Thus, the emphasis on the
protection of citizens is very much in keeping with notions of charity, humanitarianism and civilisation that have runthrough
the Just War literature. The need for legitimate political authority and the priority of stabilisation or peace rather than victory
could be considered an Augustinian principle. The notion that theenemy is an individual was central to the thinking of Vitoria.
Moreover,any attempt to codify the Laws of Peace would need to incorporate humanitarian law but alongside human rights
law. It is human rights and the notion of global public authority that marks this approach off from traditional Just War
approaches.George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Centerin Washington, D.C., has suggested on several
occasions that the ‘new things’ in the world today, particularly failing states and roguestates, explain the need for a new kind of
Just War, in which individual states take responsibility for ‘regime change’ using new precise and discriminate
technology(including, among others, Weigel 1994). His argument is reflected in the national security strategy announced by George Bush in 2002. I agree with Weigel thatin our
interconnected world, rogue states and failing states are unacceptable. But I am very sceptical about the use of war-fighting as a
way ofbringing about ‘regime change’. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not created legitimate political authorities -
they have speeded up the process of state failure , contributing to an environment in which various armed groups can operate,and have accentuated a
friend-enemy distinction that attracts young disaffected people to extremist causes. However discriminate and proportionatethese wars
appear from a Western perspective, the civilian victims , even if not numerous by the traditions of twentieth-century wars,perceive these
actions very differently,as do members of linked transnational communities across the world, especially Muslims. Yet the ‘soft power’ approach of
the European Union is not able to deal with the needs of millions of people in the world who live in conditions of intolerable
insecurity.In the new war zones, whose borders are permeable and undefined, in places like the Middle East, the Balkans, West and Central Africa, Central
Asia, or the Caucasus,individuals and communities live in daily fear of being killed, robbed or kidnapped, losing their homes, or
being tortured or raped. Neither current security arrangements , based on traditional state-based assumptionsabout the nature of
war and the role of military forces, nor the ‘soft’ approaches of international and regional organisations are able to address
these everyday risks.I have proposed that those who are wrestling with the problem of what constitutes the legitimate use of
military force should adopt a human security approach rather than try to adapt more traditional Just War thinking , even
though some of the insights drawn from thenotion of Just War may be relevant. A human security approach is more
straightforwardly applicable to the security problems we face today. Human security is sometimes considered a ‘soft’ security approach,
relegated to the aftermath of conflicts when police and development experts are supposed to ‘mop up’. What I have argued is that human security should be
regarded as a hard security policy aimed at protecting individuals rather than states .As such, a human security operation is actually more risky
than current war-fighting operations. The human security officer risks his or her life to save others, rather as police and firefighters are expected to do in domestic situations. But in ‘new
wars’, the risks are likely to be greater. It is often argued that politicians would be unwilling to take such risks and this is
why, in many international missions, force protection receives higher priority than the protection of civilians. Western
publics may be more willing to take such risks than politicians assume. After all, human rights activists, who volunteer, routinely take such
risks.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 380
***REALISM***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 381
REALISM INEVITABLE
Psychology makes violence inherent in human existence
PhD van der Dennen, researcher at the Section Political Science of the Department of Legal Theory, University of Groningen;
Earned doctorate in behavioral sciences at the University of Groningen; Current or formerly the secretary of the European
Sociobiological Society, President of the International Society for Human Ethology, and a member of the Human Behavior and
Evolution Society, ‘5 (Johan M. G., “David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill,” Politics and the
Life Sciences 24(1):76-86, March)
Have you ever fantasized about killing someone? If you answered yes, you are not alone. A ground-breaking study by leading
psychological researcher David Buss reveals that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had at least one vivid
fantasy- often intense and astonishingly detailed - of committing murder. Though we may like to think that murderers are either
pathological misfits or hardened criminals, as Buss highlights,the vast majority of murders are committed by people who, until
the day they kill,seem perfectly normal.The Murderer Next Door is a riveting look into the dark underworld of the human mind and why, Buss
reveals, the pressures of evolutionary competition have adapted our minds for murder. Buss takes us on a fascinating journey into the killing mind
with gripping stories about specific murder cases, murderer's own accounts of why they killed, and many astonishing quotes from the most massive
study of homicidal fantasies ever conducted, with people's amazingly detailed accounts of the murders they considered committing … Whereas
previous theories of murder propose that homicide is something outside of human nature - a pathology imposed from
without by the distorting influences of culture, media images, poverty, or child abuse, Buss argues that killing is
fundamentally in our nature. Because of the aeons of human evolution, murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the
intense game of reproductive competition, our minds have developed adaptations to kill. Buss's main thesis, in brief, is that “there
is a fundamental logic to murder - ruthless but rational - and that it resides not only in the minds of people who actually become murderers, but in the
minds of all of us” (p. 5). “[T]he human mind has developedadaptations for killing - deeply ingrained patterns of thought, often
accompanied by internal dialogue, anchored in powerful emotions - that motivate us to murder … Sometimes hate motivates
murder; sometimes envy; sometimes greed; sometimes fear; sometimes jealousy; sometimes spite. And sometimes, a complex combination of
emotions motivates murder” (p. 8). “Murder is a product of the evolutionary pressures our species confronted and adapted to” (p.
9). Buss critically reviews the main theories of violence and criminality in general - social-environmental theories, pathological theories, and
sociological theories - and, not unexpectedly, finds them hopelessly inadequate, not least because murder, in these theories, is viewed as merely an
extreme manifestation on a continuum of violence or criminality, while, according to Buss, “murder is qualitatively different from all other forms of
violence” (p. 24). “The patterns that I discovered in the triggers of homicidal fantasies support a radical new theory of murder - that all of us house
in our large brain specific specialized psychological circuits that lead us to contemplate murder as a solution to specific
adaptive problems” (p. 30). Elsewhere these specialized psychological circuits are called “psychological circuits for homicide” and a “killing
module” or “homicide module.” This homicidal ideation - like sexual fantasy -allows us to fashion alternative scenarios and
evaluate theextendedcosts, benefits, and consequences of each. Though homicidal thoughts usually precede murder, they do
not invariably, or even very often, lead to murder. In fact, most fantasies help to put the brakes on murderous impulses,
inhibiting the intent to kill, because we usually appraise the costs as too high and choose more effective, less risky
solutions (p. 31). That is not to say, however, that they are not “real” expressions of murderous intent. Homicidal ideation almost invariably
precedes carried-out kills (p. 32). Buss contends thatmurder, in the grand game of reproductive competition through the eons, has
proved a remarkably successful behavior(pp. 36-44). His arguments can be summarized in this one quote: “To deprive others of their
life is one of the most effective means of increasing one's fitness.
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Regardless of liberal kritikal alternatives, eminty will remain the primary characteristic of the
international system. Attempting to eliminate enmity produces more enemies.
Thorup in ‘6 /lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and History of Ideas at the University of Aarhus in Denmark/
[Mikkel, In Defense of Enmity - Critiques of Liberal Globalism, Ph.D. Dissertation]
This has not really been a defence of enmity; at least not of enmity as such. Rather, it has been, firstly, an insistence on enmity as an important category of scientific investigation and, secondly, of the political enmity as a
critical corrective to the other forms discussed above. Only it that sense has it been a defence. Enmity is a neglected category of investigation, unless one includes the many moralist denunciations. It seems fair to presume that
enmity is here to stay. If this is so, then we have to find ways to live with it. One very significant way is the liberal translation of enemies into conflict partners. This is a true humanist achievement. Yet it comes fraught with
dangers or shadow sides. One of those is the uneventful life, mediocrity, the debased beings of liberal sociability; another is the ossifying of political life. I've been concentrating on some of the exclusionary effects of this
translation of enmity and not least on the claim of a complete end of enmity proclaimed by liberal internationalism and then again by liberal globalism. In this way, the insistence on the persistence or returns of enmity, and
not least on the political enmity as a contained and manageable one becomes a critical tool of informing liberalism of how, paradoxically, the embedding of its project keeps undermining its proclaimed goals: Liberal
globalism becomes anti-pluralist; democratic peace becomes an instrument and argument of war; freedom becomes an excuse for bombardment; critique of nationalism helps force the vilified into more hardened, intransigent
forms; critique of sovereignty becomes a new sovereigntist language; self-determination becomes the recipe for neo-colonial protectorates; the war on terror produces ever more terror ; legitimacy becomes an instrument of
dis-recognition; establishment of a new international law institutionalizes sovereign inequality; the move from politics to morality reintroduces the just war; finally, the end of enmity produces new enemies, also, and not
least, the moral enmity of good and evil, competent and incompetent, self-determining and other-determining.
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REALISM GOOD
Realism solves their otherization offense by placing the self and other on equal footing- this is the only
way to produce a responsibility to act.
Williams, ‘5 /University of Wales, Aberystwyth/
[Michael, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, pg. 165-7]
The use of limited pieces of text as a means of comparatively demonstrating a point is, of course, a tricky and intrinsically limited argumentative device. I am not claiming that there are not substantial differences between, for
example, Campbell's and Morgenthou's analysis of the 'American identity' and its political Consequences. And I am certainly not claiming that Morgenthau was a 'post-structuralist' all along (any more than such an
anachronistic and essentially meaningless point would apply to Hobbes or Rousseau). What I am arguing, however, is that the idea that there are unbreachable chasms between
poststructuralism and realism is simply fallacious. Similarly, the idea(put about by both its purported defenders and its critics) that
the 'Realist tradition'exemplified by someone like Morgenthau represents a 'modernist' stance unfamiliar with and untroubled
by(for better or worse)issues such as the relational nature of identity and other themes often characterised as 'postmodem' is
equally false. My goal here is simply to point to the extraordinary shared interests and insights that may exist, and above all to call for an acknowledgment of the diversity of thought and a call for a greater degree of openness in its light. 78
Taking the wilful Realist position more seriously also poses significant challenges to ways in which some forms of postmodern thinking have located their relationship to the practice of international politics. By identifying Realism as a form of
modernist 'essentialism' comprising either a rationalist vision of subjectivity, an objectivist theory of knowledge, or both, some postmodern approaches have tended to present an non-objectivist, anti-essentialist, and primarily deconstructive theory as a return to practice,
as an attempt to open up questions of practice and 'the political' foreclosed by the Realist tradition.79 While this argument has considerable merit in the context of the neo-neo debate, it does scarce justice to the engagements of wilful Realism. The constitution of 'the
political' was hardly an unknown question for Morgenthau, for example, who as noted earlier devoted much of his early intellectual energy and a substantial portion of his second book to a sustained consideration of Carl Schmitt's' concepl of the political'. The revived
influence of Schmitt, discernible in many challenges to rationalist politics thus, can hardly be viewed as radical and novel challenge to this aspect of the Realist tradition. Moreover, the links between septical realism and prevalent postmodern themes go more
post-structural approaches can be usefully

deeply than this, particularly as they apply to attempts by post-structural thinking to reopen questions of responsibility and ethics. 80 In part, the goals of
characterized, to borrow Stephcn White's illuminating contrast, as expressions of 'responsibility to otherness' which question and
challenge modernist equations of responsibility with a 'responsibility to act'. A responsibility to otherness seeks to reveal
and open the constitutive processes and claims of subjects and subjectivities a foundational modernism has effaced in its
narrow identification of responsibility with a 'responsibility to act'.81 Deconstruction can from this perspective be seen as a principled
stance unwilling to succumb to modernist essentialism which in the name of responsibility assumes and reifies subjects and structures, obscures
forms of power and violence which are constitutive of them, and at the same time forecloses a consideration of alternative possibilities and practices.
Yet it is my claim that the wilful Realist tradition docs not lack an understanding of the contingency of practice or a
vision of responsibility to otherness. On the contrary, its strategy of objectification is precisely an attempt to bring
together a responsibility to otherness and a responsibility to act within a wilfully liberal vision. The construction of a
realm of objectivity and calculation is not just a consequence of a need to act-the framing of an epistemic context for
successful calculation. It is a form of responsibility to otherness, an attempt to allow for diversity and irreconcilability
precisely by- at least initially - reducing the self and the other to a structure of material calculation in order to allow a
structure of mutual intelligibility, mediation, and salability. It is, in short, a strategy of limitation:a wilful attempt to construct a
subject and a social world limited - both epistemically and politically - in the name of a politics of toleration, a liberal strategy that John
Gray has recently characterized as one of modus vivendi.82 If this is the case, then the deconstructive move that gains some of its weight by contrasting itself to a non- or apolitical objectivism must engage with the more complex contrast to a sceptical Realist tradition
that is itself a constructed, ethical practice. This issue becomes even more acute if one considers Iver Neumann's incisive questions concerning postmodern constructions of identity, action, and responsibility.83 As Neumann points out, the insight that identities are
inescapably contingent and relationally constructed, and even the claim that identities are inescapably indebted to otherness, do not in themselves provide a foundation for practice, particularly in situations where identities are 'sedimented' and conflictually defined, In
, deconstruction alone will not suffice unless it can demonstrate a capacity to counter in practice (and not just in
these cases
philosophic practice) the essentialist dynamics it confronts.84 Here, a responsibility to act must go beyond deconstruction
to consider viable alternatives and counter-practices.. To take this critique seriously is not necessarilyto be subject yet
againto thestraightforward'blackmail of the Enlightenment' and a narrow 'modernist' vision of responsibility,85 While an
unwillingness to move beyond a deconstructive ethic of responsibility to otherness for fear that an essentialist stance is the
only(or most likely) alternative expresses a legitimate concern, it should not license a retreat from such questions or their
practical demands. Rather, such situations demand also an evaluation of the structures (of identity and institutions) that might viably be mobilised in order to offset the worst implications of violently
exclusionary identities. It requires, as Neumann nicely puts it, the generation of compelling 'as if' stories around which countcr-subjectvities and political practices can coalesce. Wilful Realism, I submit, arises, out of an
appreciation of these issues, and comprises an attempt to craft precisely such 'stories' within a broadcr intellectual and sociological analysis of their conditions of produdion, possibilities of success, and likely consequences.
The question is, to what extent are these limits capable of success, and to what extent might they be limits upon their own aspirations toward responsibility? These are crucial questions, but they will not be addressed by
retreating yet again into further reversals of same old dichotomies.
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REALISM INEVITABLE
Evolutionary biology predicts that humans will possess the traits of egotism, domination, and enemy
construction because of evolved traits. This type of behavior is most likely.
Thayer, Baylor University Political Science Professor, in ‘10

[Darwin and International Relations Theory: Improving Theoretical Assumptions of Political Behavior, Political Studies Association]
Evolutionary theory explains why individuals are motivated to act as
I argue that evolutionary theory also offers a fundamental cause for offensive realist behavior.
offensive realism expects, whether an individual is a captain of industry or a conquistador. My argument anarchy is even more important than most
scholars recognize. The human environment of evolutionary adaptation was anarchic, our ancestors lived in a state of nature where resources were poor and
dangers from other humans and the environment were great -so great that it is truly remarkable that a mammal standing 3 feet high, without claws or strong teeth, not
particularly strong or swift, survived and evolved to become what we consider human. Humans survived because natural selection gave them the right behaviors to survive in those conditions. This environment
produced the behaviors examined here: egoism, domination, and the in-group/out-group distinction. They are sufficient to explain why
leaders will behave, in the proper circumstances, as offensive realists expect them to behave. That is, even if they must hurt other humans or risk injury to themselves,
they will strive to maximize their power, demand as either control over others, for example through wealth or leadership, or controlover an environmental circumstance, such as
meeting their own and their family’s or tribe’s need for food, shelter, or other resources, even if this means hurting other humans or risking injury to oneself. Evolutionary theory explains why people seek control over
environmental circumstances-we are all egotistic and concerned about food-why we will struggle to control our group, and why some of us, particularly males, will seek to dominate others by maintaining a privileged in a
Clearly, as the leaders of states are human, they too will be influenced by evolutionary theory as they react to
dominance hierarchy.
the actions of other states and as they make decisions for their own state. I have already discussed these two elements of my argument: thatevolutionary
theory allows realist scholars to explain why state decisionmakers are, first, egoistic and, second, strive to dominate others
when circumstances permit. These adaptations were critically important in the course of human evolution and remain a significant ultimate cause of human behavior. Recalling that biology is
good probability, not destiny, we should expect that leaders of states and major decisionmakers will possess these traits and are not likely to suppress them, they are likely doing so
only for tactical reason or as required by specific circumstances. In fact, a state’s elites-the captains of industry and media, and military and political
leaders-are more likely than average to show these traits in abundance since most leaders rise to the top of their respective
hierarchies through an intensively competitive process. This is almost always the case for political leaders.
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REALISM INEVITABLE
The difficulty in rising to the top necessitates the dominate of egotism, domination, and enemy
construction.

The rise to the top is the resultof an often arduous, and perhaps physically dangerous, process; those who triumph, whether Mao or Clinton,are almost certain to be egoistic
individuals who are used to dominating the individuals or institutions around them. Even those who inherit the throne have discovered time and again that
keeping it involves almost endless struggle and sacrifice. Shakespeare has King Henry remind us in Henry IV, Part 2 (Act III, scene i), that “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” And the king struggles
against internal as well as external enemies, as the Bard captures so well in MacBeth (Act II, scene ii) with MacBeth’s murder of Duncan, and with his suspicion of what the murder would
cost him: Me throught I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! MacBeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care A third cause of offensive realist behavior in humans is
the in-group/out-group distinction commonly made in psychology, anthropology, and sociology. The basic points here are thathumans
divide their worldview into an “Us,” the in-group, versus “Them,” the out-group, in order to simplify the human mind’s information
processing. Psychologists refer to the in-group as one’s own group toward which one is positively biased, perhaps a family, tribe, organization or corporation, or state. They argue that in-groups develop from a need
for self-definition, both positive and negative. The in-group identity provides people with meaning, purpose, and a sense of community, but also with knowledge of what they are not-the out-group. The out-group may also be
another family, tribe, organization or corporation, or state. The in-group/out-group distinction is important to evolutionary theory’s explanation of offensive realism because it explains why humans created these ideas and
why we often fear out-groups. When the out-group is another state, we can see it as a threat to our state’s resources or territory, or to our elite’s political or economic interests. By explaining the origins of the distinction
between in-groups and out-groups evolutionary theory shows why humans make the distinction trivial, life-or-death distinction held by a Hutu or a Tutsi, a kulak or a commissar, a friend or foe. Humans make in-group/out-
humans seek resources-food, water, and shelter to care for themselves and relatives, and they seek
group distinctions for three reasons. First
mates to reproduce their genotype; in sum, they are egoisticfor the reasons advanced by Darwin, William Hamiltonand other
evolutionary theoristsas I described in the discussion above. They are unlikely to assist those who are not related, but may do so occasionally, expecting reciprocal behavior. Humans behave
in these ways because resources were scarce in the late-Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holoceneenvironments in which we evolved. In that environment, it is
easy to understand why humans would prefer more resources to fewer: more strength is preferable to less strength, more wealth to less wealth, domination to bring dominated. Most people do indeed prefer more resources to
fewer; the rich want even more wealth, and seldom say they are too wealthy. Rather, they seem to worry about protecting their wealth from those who may take it from them, such as revolutionaries or the government, or
from investing mistakes that may cause them to lose their wealth. In essence, inprehistoric times when there was too little to go around, humans discriminated
between self and others, family and others, tribe and others, in-groups and out-groups. This behavior remains today. We humans are likely to perceive
out-groups as threats to our resources, the resources we need to maintain ourselves and our families, and extended in-groups such as the tribe or state. Second living and evolving in dangerous
environments, humans like other animals, need the ability to assess threats rapidly and react quickly. The in-group/out-
group distinction may be thought of as the human mind’s immediate threat assessment. It is a mechanism for determining whether or not non-related
conspecifics presented a threat. In sum, our mind rapidly debates: no threat/threat. Is the outsider a threat to oneself or to one’s family? As a result, over the course of human evolution, strangers were first likely to fear one
humans also learned to assess fairly quickly whether the
another, at least until they became familiar. Third, in addition to the immediate threat posed by conspecifics,
outsider was a threat in the long run to the in-group, or to one’s position in the dominance hierarchy. Members of the in-
group might ask whether the presence of an individual or group would be a threat to their future resources-the scarce and
precious resources needed to survive. The evolutionary origins of this distinction suggests that elites, as people will also fear other states because they are the out-group and they may have the
power to take control from them if they cannot deter an attack. Thus, evolutionary theory explains why people will be egoistic, strive to dominate, and create in-groups and out-groups, and this explains why
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REALISM INEVITABLE
Violence is inevitable due to evolutionarily developed traits.

WARFARE AND FITNESS. For humans, there are two sufficient explanations for war: inclusive fitness and group selection. William
Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory (also called kin selection) suggests that reproductive success is measured not only in terms of individual animals but also in terms of their relatives.81 Masters summarizes how inclusive
fitness modifies traditional Dar- winian evolutionary theory: "natural selection favors the ability of individuals to transmit their genes to posterity.... however, an organism's reproductive success can sometimes be furthered by
assisting others, instead of by mating."82 Thus understood, an individual's self-interest can be served by assisting genetically related individuals.83 Evolutionary theory suggests that groups may go to war to increase inclu-
Doing so is logical for offensive and defensive reasons. A group becomes more fit if it can successfully attack to
sive fitness.84
take the resources of others.85Also, it must be able to wage a defensive war when competitors threaten its resources. 86
Evolutionary theorist William Durham argues that intergroup aggression develops as a behavioral adaptation to conditions
of competition for resources.87 War is one means by which individuals "may improve the material conditions of their lives and thereby increase their ability to survive and reproduce."88
According to Durham's research, a group can expand its resource base by aggressively seizing resources from other groups. Pressure might be particularly acute if population size is increasing faster than resources.
Ethnographer Andrew Vayda's classic study of the Iban of Borneo and the Maori of New Zealand is instructive here. According to Vayda, the Iban case "shows the warlike extension of territory as a means whereby a group
conquest of neighboring groups was easier than
can avoid experiencing any very great privations due to the pressure of population upon available resources."89 For the Maori,
expanding into new areas to cultivate resources : "If the time and effort required for clearing new virgin land were considerably more than were necessary for . .. conquest and the
preparation of previously used land for cultivation, it follows that territorial conquests, such as some of those recorded in Maori traditional history, would have added more efficiently to the prosperity of particular groups
than would peaceful dispersion."90 Wilson's explanation of the origins and continuation of warfare dovetails with Durham's argument and Vayda's ethnography. According to Wilson, warfare may have begun when one
group of early humans considered "the significance of adjacent social groups and [how] to deal with them in an intelligent, organized fashion. A band might then dispose of a neighboring band, appropriate its territory, and
this band would retain the memory of the event and by repeating it would
increase its own genetic representation in the 86. metapopulation."91 Furthermore,
increase its control of resources.92 The victories of the original band "might propel the spread of the genes through the
genetic constitution of the metapopulation. Once begun, such a mutual reinforcement could be irreversible."93
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REALISM INEVITABLE
Global leaders mirror animal leadership. This produces dominance seeking behavior inevitably.

Leaders of states are far from a typical group of people. They are
The power of these findings may be appreciated when we apply it to political decision makers.
older than average, overwhelmingly male, with an overrepresentation of the characteristics of the extreme male mind
including great ambition, a great sensitivity to threats, less sensitivity to fear, aggression, a high tolerance for risk and
solitude or isolation, and low empathy for other humans.23 These behaviors are so common among political leaders or
scientists that they are ordinary. Think of Isaac Newton’s ability to enter into seclusion for days while working on a theoretical problem, or Albert Einstein’s intense focus while doing the same.
Consider as well Stalin’s reactions to mass killings (one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic) or, as a man, his reactions to his mother’s or son’s death.24 Mao’s mind must have worked remarkably like Stalin’s.
Reflect on Mao’s similar reactions to mass killings during the 316 B. A. Thayer Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, or, again at a personal level, as a man, to his son’s death in the Korean
War.25 More recently, there have been numerous stories in the British Press about the behavior of Gordon Brown, who has been described as “a control freak,” “taciturn,” “uncooperative,” but, tellingly, really no different
from most of those who are at the top of politics. According to one former British minister, who worked with Brown: “If being psychologically flawed means he focuses on details, almost obsessively so about the detail, then
he is guilty as charged. He is aworkaholic. He is difficult. But tell me which prime minister hasn’t been.”26 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment to Ernest Hemingway that the very rich really are different also applies to leaders’
brains. Clearly, the leader of a nuclear state with VMPC trauma or VMPC symptoms due to genetic causes would be a particularly difficult case to deter. He might be very willing to sacrifice a population or a segment of a
population for the general will or an ideological goal. If we ponder the great leaders of history, we cannot know, of course, precisely how their brains functioned, but if we consider their behavior through its lens, some of their
Ultimately, the behaviors associated with these variations in the male brain would have paid dividends
actions are more understandable.
for humans in the environments of evolutionary adaptation of the human past.27 These individuals have minds that are
most likely to be ruthless, to be in positions of leadership, and to engage in bold and risk-accepting behavior, if unchecked
by other factors, which will lead to deterrence failure.
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REALISM INEVITABLE
Evolutionary theory can be extrapolated to international relations-their indicts does not preclude its
usefulness in proving realism’s thesis
Thayer 01(Political Science Professor @ Baylor University; Duncan S.A. Bell - Ph.D. Candidate at Cambridge; Paul McDonald,
Center for International Security and Cooperation, “Don’t Start the Revolution without us,” Ebsco)
Bell and MacDonald also argue that evolutionary theorists disagree about the level at which natural selection operates.
Althoughthere is indeed some debate over this issue, the consensus among contemporary evolutionary theorists is that
evolution works at the level of the gene. They also agree that for almost all animals, including humans, the individual is important because the phenotype must survive long enough to
reproduce and possibly pass to posterity favorable genetic mutations. On the other hand, some evolutionary theorists suggest that natural selection can operate at the group level (group selection).10 The ultimate
resolution of this debate does not prevent the use of evolutionary theory in international relations, however, any more than scholarship in
international politics is encumbered by its levels of analysis. Which is more valuable is often an empirical question. Thus, as with any science, evolutionary theory has its share of
disagreements , but rather than being a problem, this should be taken as an indication of its robustness. understanding what theories can and
cannot accomplish Bell and MacDonald’s second major criticism is that evolutionary approaches do not provide explanatory leverage. To support this position, they advance two arguments. First, after acknowledging that
sociobiology recognizes complexity in causation of behavior, they fault it because it is “extremely difficult to methodologically distinguish between biological and environmental sources of observed behavior.” In response, it
is important to underscore what theories can and cannot accomplish. Evolutionary theory, for example, can provide an ultimate causation of behavior. It cannot elucidate why a particular animal did something at a particular
time, just as neorealism cannot explain why a given state undertook a specific policy at a specific time. This does not mean that neorealism has little or no explanatory leverage, and is to misunderstand the role of theory in
To explain the behavior of a particular animal is to move from an ultimate to a proximate
international politics. So it is for evolutionary theory.
explanation. Combining insights drawn from evolutionary theory with those drawn from environmental factors, scholars
can then explicate this behavior. Thus the false dichotomy between nature and environment should be rejected. In “Bringing in
Darwin,” I did not seek to establish that evolutionary causes of behavior trump environmental causes. One does not trump the other. Rather I suggested that evolutionary theory can assist the study of certain issues in
international politics (e.g., warfare and ethnic conflict). Evolutionary theorists often use the metaphor of a cake to make this point. Just as all the ingredients in a recipe are required to make the cake, so too are evolutionary
and environmental causes necessary to explain behavior. Once this is understood, scholars will no longer believe that a methodological test is necessary or desirable to determine what is wholly genetic or environmental. Bell
and MacDonald also contend that my argument offers “contradictory predictions about what types of behavior evolutionary pressures generate” because, they submit, I maintain that humans are egoists who often act
submissively in dominance hierarchies but at other times may act altruistically. But I did not argue that this was the totality of human behavior or that evolutionary theory can explain all. Indeed it seems obvious that humans
and other animals are capable of these behaviors-and many more-given the right circumstances. It is important to stress this point. Evolutionary theory explains why individual animals are egoistic, why they may live in a
dominance hierarchy, or why they may be altruistic. It does not submit that animals solely pursue these types of behaviors, because an explanation of specific individual action requires incorporating environmental causes.
Thus, when Bell and MacDonald write that “Thayer’s account cannot tell us when individual humans will behave egoistically, submissively, or altruistically” is to misunderstand evolutionary theory, ultimate causation, and
the value of theories. Furthermore, Bell and MacDonald argue that I did not describe the mechanisms to “conclusively sketch” how “individual motivations aggregate to social groups.” My succinct answer is
evolutionary theory can provide insight into human group behavior, although precisely how depends in part on the
that
empirical issue being examined. Despite Bell and MacDonald’s claim to the contrary, evolutionary theory can provide
insight into what they describe as the fundamental issue of international politics: “the behavior and interactions of human
aggregates” such as states and ethnic groups .11 Furthermore, if we adopt a broader conception of what the fundamental issues are in international politics to include,
for example, the psychological approaches of Irving Janis, Robert Jervis, Yuen Foong Khong, and Deborah Welch Larson, then given time evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology are
likely to generate signifcant insights for first-image approaches. Indeed evolutionary theory has the potential to reinvigorate first-image scholarship, improve rational choice theory, and
promote a better understanding of agency. evolutionary theory and realism: a definite improvement Finally, Bell and MacDonald argue that realism may be anchored on rational choice theory
or neorealism. I agree, but would make two observations. First, my intent was to show that evolutionary theory could scienti.cally ground the realism of Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold
Niebuhr. I did not argue that this was necessarily the sole foundation for realism, and it obviously is not for neorealism. Second, although
there are competing
conceptions in the philosophy of science of the proper metrics to judge almost every aspect of a theory, including
antecedent conditions and testability, ultimate causal explanations based on evolutionary theory are testable. By any
standard, this signi.cantly improves realism’s explanatory power because the metaphysical and religious foundations on
which Morgenthau’s and Niebuhr’s theories are based are no longer required
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FILL IN TURN
Even if the international system isn’t real, States will still act in their own self-interest. Unilateral
disengagement from the system will allow China and Russia to control the international system
Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall
Fund, 8-30-2K8(Robert, “Power Play”, Wall Street Journal)
When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was VladimirPutin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there
Where are the realists?
was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor -- a 21st century Frederick the Great or
Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing "interest
defined as power," to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau,acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the "objective law" of
international power politics. Yetwhere are Mr. Morgenthau's disciples to remind us thatRussia's latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant
but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging ?
Today's "realists," who we're told are locked in some titanic struggle with "neoconservatives" on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and international law. They
propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is
counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus. They are fond of citing Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan as their intellectual forebears, but those gentlemen would have found most of their prescriptions naive. Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman's Secretary of State, had nothing but
disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of "people who could not face the truth about human nature" and "preferred to preserve their illusions intact." He strongly supported the
NATO alliance but ultimately put his faith not in international institutions but in "the continued moral, military and economic power of the United States." He aimed to build a "preponderance of power" and to create "situations of strength" around the world. Until the United States acquired this predominant power, he believed,
negotiations and international conferences with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with Moscow throughout his entire time in office. Those early realists had little faith in the persuasive influence of the community of nations or world opinion. "The prestige of the international community," Mr.
Niebuhr argued, was "not great enough...to achieve a communal spirit sufficiently unified, to discipline recalcitrant nations." The great mid-century theologian warned against "a too uncritical glorification of co-operation and mutuality" between powerful nations with opposing interests. Yet it is precisely the prospect of cooperation and
mutuality that present-day realists glorify. They revere President George H. W. Bush, who spoke of a "new world order" in which "the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony," where "the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle," where nations "recognize the shared responsibility for
freedom and justice." Today the elder Bush is hailed by realists because he went to the United Nations Security Council, while the younger George W. Bush is condemned because he treated the U.N. as the delusion Dean Acheson said it was. Realism has pulled itself inside out. Leading realists today see the world not as Mr.
Morgenthau did, as an anarchic system in which nations consistently pursue "interest defined as power," but as a world of converging interests, in which economics, not power, is the primary driving force. Thus Russia and China are not interested in expanding their power so much as in enhancing their economic well-being and security.
If they use force against their neighbors, or engage in arms buildups, it is not because this is in the nature of great powers. It is because the United States or the West has provoked them. The natural state of the world is harmonious; only aggressive behavior by the United States disturbs the harmony. In such a world, the task of the
United States is not to check the rising powers but to steer them gently along the path that the realists insist they are already on, toward the embrace of an international community with laws and rules to govern their behavior in ways that benefit all. As the self-described realist Fareed Zakaria explains, "The single largest strategic
challenge facing the United States in the decades ahead is to draw in the world's new rising powers and make them stakeholders in the global economic and political order." China and Russia, along with India and Brazil, are "embracing markets, democratic government...and greater openness and transparency." America's job "is to push
these progressive forces forward, using soft power more than hard, and to try to get the world's major powers to solve the world's major problems." The world, after all, "is going the United States' way." The original realists had no patience for such Candide-like optimism about the inevitable upward progress of mankind. "Whoever
thinks the future is going to be easier than the past is certainly mad," wrote Mr. Kennan in 1951, six years after the most destructive war in history, five years into the Cold War, and one year into what was widely seen at the time as disastrous and seemingly hopeless American intervention in Korea. Mr. Kennan's provocative assertion
aimed to jolt Americans out of their yearning to believe that the future would be different. But now it is leading realists who embrace The End of History, with an unshakable faith in the inevitable convergence of humanity around shared values and common interests. These were exactly the hopes and dreams Mr. Morgenthau set out to
vanquish decades ago. The original realists were not without their flaws, some of them fatal. Mr. Morgenthau's insistence that ideology and regime type are irrelevant to a nation's behavior was a terrible blind spot for realism, then and now. Mr. Putin's turn toward autocratic rule at home and his revival of old imperial pretensions abroad
are intimately related. Mr. Putin himself argues that strength and control at home allow Russia to be strong abroad. He and his ruling clique clearly believe that avenging the demise of the Soviet Union will help keep them in power. And who but a Russian autocrat would have regarded the "color revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine as
intolerable provocations? Alexander I took quite the same view of liberal rumblings in Poland and Spain in the early 19th century. To ignore ideology and regime today is to misunderstand gravely the motives of autocratic leaders, whether in Moscow or in Beijing. Nor is the realists' own hostility to democracy, including American
democracy, particularly edifying. Mr. Kennan and the columnist Walter Lippmann flaunted their disgust at what they regarded as the stupidity and ignorance of the American public -- Mr. Kennan likened American democracy to "one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as [a] room and a brain the size of a pin." Mr.
Acheson was the great exception because he harbored no antidemocratic prejudices and actually believed the messy American democracy would nevertheless prove stronger in the long run. But most realists throughout the decades, including today, have complained bitterly about the influence of domestic political constituencies and the
various ethnic groups that allegedly distort America's understanding of its "true" interests. Even so we could use a little dose of the old realism now, at least the part that would recognize a great grab for power like Mr. Putin's and understand that it will take more than offers of cooperation and benevolent tutelage to address Russia's
revived appetites. Perhaps a bit of realism can challenge the widespread belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas alone or on the natural unfolding of human progress. This deterministic conviction that Francis Fukuyama popularized is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the enlightenment
worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product. Many in Europe still believe the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, as it had to, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage in humanity's march from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and
It is a testament to the vitality ofthis enlightenment vision that hopes for a brand-new era in human history took hold with
prosperous coexistence.
such force after the fall of Soviet communism . But a little more skepticism, and realism, was in order. After all, had mankind truly progressed so
far? The most destructive century in all the millennia of human history was only just concluding. Our modern, supposedly
enlightened era produced the greatest of horrors -- the massive aggressions, the "total wars," the famines and the genocides -- and the perpetrators of these horrors were among the
world's most advanced and enlightened nations. Recognition of this terrible reality -- that modernity had produced not greater good but only worse forms of evil --was a staple of
philosophical discussion in the 20th century. It was the great problem that Mr.Niebuhr wrestled withandwhichled him to
conclude that for moral men to do good, they would sometimes have to play by the same rules as immoral men -- and yes, he
believed he could tell the difference. What reason was there to imagine that after 1989 humankind was suddenly on the cusp of a brand-new order? The focus on the dazzling pageant of
progress at the end of the Cold War ignored the wires andthe beams and the scaffolding that had made such progress
possible. The global shift toward liberal democracy coincided with the historical shift in the balance of power toward
those nations and peoples who favored theliberal democraticidea, a shift that began with the triumph of the democratic powers over fascism in World War II and that was followed by a
second triumph of the democracies over communism in the Cold War. The liberal international order that emerged after these two victories reflected the new overwhelming global balance in favor of liberal forces. But
those victories were not inevitable, and they need not be lasting. After the Second World War, another moment in history when hopes for a new kind of international order
were rampant, Mr.Morgenthau warned idealists against imagining that at some point "the final curtain would fall and the game of
power politics would no longer be played." Moscow's invasion of Georgia has opened a new act in the endless drama. The
only question now is whether the United States will play its part, and with the appropriate blend of realism about the world as it exists and idealism about what a strong
and determined democratic community can do to shape it. As Mr. Niebuhr put it six decades ago, "the world problem cannot be solved if America does not accept its
full share of responsibility in solving it."
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FILL IN TURN
And, this creates an infinitely more oppressive and dangerous world - even if America is bad, the
government has never used tanks to crush students protesting in Time Square
Kagan,senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall
Fund, 4-23-2K8(Robert, “The End of the End of History; Why the twenty-first century will look like the nineteenth.”, The New
Republic)
The economic and ideological determinismof the early post-Cold War yearsproduced two broad assumptionsthat shaped both policies and expectations. One was an
abiding belief in the inevitability of human progress, the belief that history moves in only one direction--a faith born in the
Enlightenment, dashed by the brutality of the twentieth century, and given new life by the fall of communism. The other was a prescription for patience and restraint. Rather than
confront and challenge autocracies, it was better to enmesh them in the global economy, support the rule of law and the creation of stronger state institutions, and let the ineluctable forces of
human progress work their magic.But the grand expectation that the world had entered an era of convergence has proved wrong.We have entered an age of
divergence. Since the mid-1990s,the nascentdemocratic transformation in Russia has given way towhat may best be described asa "czarist" political
system, in which all important decisions are taken by one man and his powerful coterie. Vladimir Putin and his spokesmen speak of "democracy," but they define the term much as the Chinese do. For Putin, democracy
is not about competitive elections so much as the implementation of popular will. The regime is democratic because the government consults with and listens to the Russian people, discerns what they need and want, and then
"The Kremlin thinks not in terms of citizens' rights but in terms of the population's needs. "
attempts to give it to them. As Ivan Krastev notes,
The legal system is a tool to be

Elections do not offer a choice, but only a chance to ratify choices made by Putin, as in the recent "selection" of Dmitry Medvedev to succeed Putin as president.
used against political opponents. The party system has been purged of political groups not approved by Putin The power apparatus .
around Putin controls most of the national media, especially television. A majority of Russians seem content with autocratic rule, at least for now. Unlike communism, Putin's rule does not impinge much on their personal
lives, as long as they stay out of politics. Unlike the tumultuous Russian democracy of the 1990s, the present government, thanks to the high prices of oil and gas, has at least produced a rising standard of living. Putin's efforts
to undo the humiliating post-Cold War settlement and restore the greatness of Russia is popular. His political advisers believe that "avenging the demise of the Soviet Union will keep us in power." For Putin, there is a
symbiosis between the nature of his rule and his success in returning Russia to "great power" status. Strength and control at home allow Russia to be strong abroad. Strength abroad justifies strong rule at home. Russia's
growing international clout also shields Putin's autocracy from foreign pressures. European and American statesmen find they have a full plate of international issues on which a strong Russia can make life easier or harder,
from energy supplies to Iran. Under the circumstances, they are far less eager to confront the Russian government over the fairness of its elections or the openness of its political system. Putin has created a guiding national
philosophy out of the correlation between power abroad and autocracy at home. He calls Russia a "sovereign democracy," a term that neatly encapsulates the nation's return to greatness, its escape from the impositions of the
West, and its adoption of an "eastern" model of democracy. In Putin's view, only a great and powerful Russia is strong enough to defend and advance its interests, and also strong enough to resist foreign demands for western
political reforms that Russia neither needs nor wants. In the 1990s, Russia wielded little influence on the world stage but opened itself wide to the intrusions of foreign businessmen and foreign governments. Putin wants
Russia to have great influence over others around the world while shielding itself from the influence of unwelcome global forces. Putin looks to China as a model, and for good reason. While the Soviet Union collapsed and
lost everything after 1989, as first Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin sued for peace with the West and invited its meddling, Chinese leaders weathered their own crisis by defying the West. They cracked down at
home and then battened down the hatches until the storm of Western disapproval blew over. The results in the two great powers were instructive. Russia by the end of the 1990s was flat on its back. China was on its way to
The Chinese learned from the Soviet experience, too. While the democratic
unprecedented economic growth, military power, and international influence.
world waited after Tiananmen Square for China to resume its inevitable course upward to liberal democratic modernity,
theChinese Communist Party leadershipset about shoring up its dominance in the nation. In recent years, despite repeated predictions in the West of an
imminent political opening, the trend has been toward consolidation of the Chinese autocracy rather than reform. As it became clear that the Chinese leadership had no intention of reforming itself out of power, Western
observers hoped that they might be forced to reform despite themselves, if only to keep China on a path of economic growth and to manage the myriad internal problems that growth brings. But that now seems unlikely as
well. Today most economists believe that China's remarkable growth should be sustainable for some time to come. Keen observers of the Chinese political system see a sufficient combination of competence and ruthlessness
on the part of the Chinese leadership to handle problems as they arise, and a population prepared to accept autocratic government so long as economic growth continues. As Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley have written,
the present leadership is unlikely to "succumb to a rising tide of problems or surrender graciously to liberal values infiltrated by means of economic globalization." Until events "justify taking a different attitude, the outside
world would be well advised to treat the new Chinese leaders as if they are here to stay." Growing national wealth and autocracy have proven compatible after all. Autocrats learn and adjust. The autocracies of Russia and
China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. They have seen that people making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut
off. New wealth gives autocracies a greater ability to control information--to monopolize television stations, and to keep a grip on Internet traffic--often with the assistance of foreign corporations eager to do business with
them. In the long run, rising prosperity may well produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run?
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 391
T - REDUCE
A. Interpretation - Reduce excludes eliminate
Words and Phrases, 2 (vol 36B, p. 80)

Mass. 1905. Rev.Laws, c.203, § 9, provides that, if two or more cases are tried together in the superior court, the
presiding judge may “reduce” the witness fees and other costs, but “not less than the ordinary witness fees, and other costs
recoverable in one of the cases” which are so tried together shall be allowed. Held that, in reducing the costs, the amount
in all the cases together is to be considered and reduced, providing that there must be left in the aggregate an amount not
less than the largest sum recoverable in any of the cases. The word “reduce,” in its ordinary
signification, does not mean to cancel, destroy, or bring to naught, but todiminish, lower, or
bring to an inferior state.-Green v. Sklar, 74 N.E. 595, 188 Mass. 363.

B. Violation - the affirmative withdraws completely

C. Voting issue -

1. limits - they create six more affirmatives and explode the topic literature base; we have to be accountable for the entire
peace movement and answer critical affs which require distinct strategies

2. predictability - our evidence signifies the ordinary meaning of reduce; moving beyond the ordinary meaning of words
sets a precedent to interpret the all other words unpredictably
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 392
***DISADVANTAGES***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 393
POLITICS - PLAN UNPOPULAR
The aff would be massively unpopular and wouldn’t garner any political weight in congress Jim
Abrams(AP Staff Writer)March 102010 (“House rejects quick troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, but anti-war lawmakers get to
vent”)
The House on Wednesday soundly rejected an effort by anti-war lawmakers to force a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from
Afghanistan by the end of the year.The outcome of the vote, 356-65 against the resolution, was never in doubt . But the 3
1/2 hours of debate did give those who oppose President Barack Obama’s war policies a platform to vent their frustrations. Opposing
the resolution was easy for almost all Republicans , who have been solidly behind Obama’s decision to increase U.S. troop
strength in Afghanistan from 70,000 to 100,000. Only five Republicans supported the measure.It was a harder vote for some
Democrats, particularly in an election year where opposing the war can be equated with opposing the troops. Several expressed
discomfort with a war that has lasted 8 1/2 years and cost the nation more than 930 American lives and the treasury more than $200
billion, but said they were voting against the resolution because it was ill-timed and unrealistic .In the middle were
Democrats such as Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who voted against the resolutiondespite “profound reservations” about
committing troops and vast resources to one of the world’s most corrupt nations. He said the debate was essential, “even though
I don’t agree with the resolution that somehow we’re going to be able to pull the plug and be able to end this in 30 days or
30 weeks.”
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America has high hegemony now

Brooks & Wohlforth 08[Associate Professors in the Department of Government @ Dartmouth College (World Out of Balance, p. 27-31)])
American primacy is also rooted in the country’s position as the world’s leading technological power. The United States
remains dominant globally in overall R&D investments, high-technology production, commercial innovation, and higher
education (table 2.3). Despite the weight of this evidence, elite perceptions of U.S power had shifted toward pessimism by
the middle of the first decade of this century. As we noted in chapter 1, this was partly the result of an Iraq-induced
doubtabout the utility of material predominance, a doubt redolent of the post-Vietnam mood. In retrospect, many assessments of U.S
economic and technological prowess from the 1990s were overly optimistic; by the next decade important potential vulnerabilities
were evident. In particular, chronically imbalanced domestic finances and accelerating public debt convinced some analysts that the
United States once again confronted a competitiveness crisis.If concerns continue to mount, this will count as the fourth such
crisis since 1945; the first three occurred during the 1950s (Sputnik), the 1970s (Vietnam and stagflation), and the 1980s
(the Soviet threat and Japan’s challenge). None of these crises, however, shifted the international system’s
structure:multipolarity did not return in the 1960s, 1970s or early 1990s, and each scare over competitiveness ended with
the American position of primacy retained or strengthened.Our review of the evidence of U.S. predominance is not meant
to suggest that the United States lacks vulnerabilities or causes for concern. In fact, it confronts a number of significant
vulnerabilities; of course, this is also true of the other major powers. The point is that adverse trends for the United States
will not cause a polarity shift in the near future. If we take a long view of U.S. competitiveness and the prospects for
relative declines in economic and technological dominance, one takeaway stands out: relative power shifts slowly. The
United States has accounted for a quarter to a third of global output for over a century. No other economy will match its
combination of wealth, size, technological capacity, and productivity in the foreseeable future (table 2.2 and 2.3) The
depth, scale, and projected longevity of the U.S. lead in each critical dimension of power are noteworthy. But what truly
distinguishes the current distribution of capabilities is American dominance in all of them simultaneously.The chief lesson
of Kennedy’s 500-year survey of leading powers is that nothing remotely similar ever occurred in the historical
experience that informs modern international relations theory. The implication is both simple and underappreciated:the
counterbalancing constraint is inoperative and will remain so until the distribution of capabilities changes fundamentally.
The next section explains why.
Reduction of troops from countries will lead to a weakening of the U.S. and global instability
Bradley A. Thayer 06 Associate Professor in the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies of Missouri State University
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_86/ai_n27065796/?tag=content;col1
Those arguing for a grand strategy of retrenchment are a diverse lot. They include isolationists, who want no foreign
military commitments; selective engagers, who want U.S. military commitments to centers of economic might; and
offshore balancers, who want a modified form of selective engagement that would have the United States abandon its
landpower presence abroad in favor of relying on airpower and seapower to defend its interests.
But retrenchment, in any of its guises, must be avoided. If the United States adopted such a strategy, it would be a
profound strategic mistake that would lead to far greater instability and war in the world, imperil American security and
deny the United States and its allies the benefits of primacy.
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There is no alternative to hegemony- total collapse of US unipolarity would cause a power vacuum that would lead
to several nuclear wars
Niall Ferguson 04 Professor of History at Harvard, Hoover Digest, “A World without Power”
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3009996.html
So what is left? Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities.
These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The
trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the
ninth century. For the world is much more populous-roughly 20 times more-meaning that friction between the
world’s disparate “tribes” is bound to be more frequent. Technology has transformed production; now human
societies depend not merely on fresh water and the harvest but also on supplies of fossil fuels that are known to
be finite. Technology has upgraded destruction, too; it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it.
For more than two decades, globalization-the integration of world markets for commodities, labor, and capital-
has raised living standards throughout the world, except where countries have shut themselves off from the
process through tyranny or civil war. The reversal of globalization-which a new Dark Age would produce-
would certainly lead to economic stagnation and even depression. As the United States sought to protect itself
after a second September 11 devastates, say, Houston or Chicago, it would inevitably become a less open
society, less hospitable for foreigners seeking to work, visit, or do business. Meanwhile, as Europe’s Muslim
enclaves grew, Islamist extremists’ infiltration of the E.U. would become irreversible, increasing transatlantic
tensions over the Middle East to the breaking point. An economic meltdown in China would plunge the
communist system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that undermined previous Chinese empires.
Western investors would lose out and conclude that lower returns at home were preferable to the risks of default
abroad.
The worst effects of the new Dark Age would be felt on the edges of the waning great powers. The wealthiest
ports of the global economy-from New York to Rotterdam to Shanghai-would become the targets of
plunderersand pirates. With ease, terrorists could disrupt the freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers, aircraft
carriers, and cruise liners, while Western nations frantically concentrated on making their airports secure.
Meanwhile, limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in the Korean peninsula and
Kashmir, perhaps ending catastrophically in the Middle East. In Latin America, wretchedly poor citizens would
seek solace in evangelical Christianity imported by U.S. religious orders. In Africa, the great plagues of AIDS
and malaria would continue their deadly work. The few remaining solvent airlines would simply suspend
services to many cities in these continents; who would wish to leave their privately guarded safe havens to go
there?
For all these reasons, the prospect of an apolar world should frighten us today a great deal more than it
frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If theUnited States retreats from global hegemonymony-its fragile self-
image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier-its critics at home and abroad must not pretend that
they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony or even a return to the good old balance of power. Be
careful what you wish for. The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity-
a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit from such a
not-so-new world disorder.
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HEG - LINK EXTENSIONS
Pull out/defeat of Afghanistan will hurt U.S. international credibility

Sen. Joe Lieberman (Interview with Major Garrett on Fox News) July 4, 2010
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/07/04/interview_with_senator_lieberman_in_afghanistan_106207.html
I must say in the unfortunate statements that Michael Steele, the Republican national chairman, made today, which were
certainly interpreted as calling this Obama's war and suggesting that we get out - although I know he clarified that, the
reaction from some of the leading Republican spokespeople to me was very heartening, which is, "No, we've got to win in
Afghanistan. It's important to America's security and freedom."If we lose here, if we pull out, it's going to energize those
radical Islamist extremist groups, those terrorist groups, all around the world. And it'll be a tremendous cut down in
America's prestige and credibility in the world, and that ultimately is bad for the safety and freedom of the American
people.
Withdrawal emboldens terrorists - leads to new funding and recruitment

,
MuXuequan Editor of Xinhua News Agency, 09-28- 2009,
“Pentagon opposes timeline to withdraw troops from Afghanistan,” China View, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-
09/28/content_12118798.htm
The Pentagon on Sunday opposed setting timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan as U.S. President Barack
Obama is weighing on a decision whether to further increase troop levels there. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
told CNN during an interview that setting such timelines or laying out an exit strategy would be a "strategic mistake" that
could embolden al-Qaida and the Taliban. "The reality is, failure in Afghanistan would be a huge setback for the
United States," he said, suggesting that a premature pullout would be perceived by the extremists as a victory over the
United States, similar to the former Soviet Union's withdrawal from the country in 1989. "Taliban and al-Qaida, as far
as they're concerned, defeated one superpower. For them to be seen to defeat a second, I think, would have catastrophic
consequences in terms of energizing the extremist movement, al-Qaida recruitment, operations, fundraising, and so on,"
Gates said.
A strong US presence is key to prevent terrorist takeover in Pakistan and Afghanistan

JohnNagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, 08-31-2009, “Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?,” The Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083103131.html
America has vital national security interests in Afghanistan that make fighting there necessary. The key objectives of the
campaign are preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a sanctuary for terrorists with global reach and ensuring that it
does not become the catalyst for a broader regional security meltdown. Afghanistan also serves as a base from which the
United States attacks al-Qaeda forces inside Pakistan and thus assists in the broader campaign against that terrorist
organization -- one that we clearly must win. U.S. policymakers must, of course, weigh all actions against America's
global interests and the possible opportunity costs. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, low-cost strategies do not have an
encouraging record of success. U.S. efforts to secure Afghanistan on the cheap after 2001 led it to support local strongmen
whose actions alienated the population and thereby enabled the Taliban to reestablish itself as an insurgent force. Drone
attacks, although efficient eliminators of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, have not prevented extremist forces from
spreading and threatening to undermine both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The so-called "light footprint" option has failed to
secure U.S. objectives; as the Obama administration and the U.S. military leadership have recognized, it is well past time
for a more comprehensive approach.
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HEG - SOLVES COUNTER BALANCING
U.S. Primacy creates a bandwagoning effect preventing counter balancing and solving a major power wars
Bradley A. Thayer 06 Associate Professor in the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies of Missouri State University
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_86/ai_n27065796/?tag=content;col1
A remarkable fact about international politics today--in a world where American primacy is clearly and unambiguously on
display--is that countries want to align themselves with the United States. Of course, this is not out of any sense of
altruism, in most cases, but because doing so allows them to use the power of the United States for their own purposes--
their own protection, or to gain greater influence.Of 192 countries, 84 are allied with America--their security is tied to the
United States through treaties and other informal arrangements--and they include almost all of the major economic and
military powers. That is a ratio of almost 17 to one (85 to five), and a big change from the Cold War when the ratio was
about 1.8 to one of states aligned with the United States versus the Soviet Union. Never before in its history has this
country, or any country, had so many allies.
U.S. primacy--and the bandwagoning effect--has also given us extensive influence in international politics, allowing the
United States to shape the behavior of states and international institutions. Such influence comes in many forms, one of
which is America's ability to create coalitions of like-minded states to free Kosovo, stabilize Afghanistan, invade Iraq or
to stop proliferation through the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Doing so allows the United States to operate with
allies outside of the UN, where it can be stymied by opponents. American-led wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq stand
in contrast to the UN's inability to save the people of Darfur or even to conduct any military campaign to realize the goals
of its charter. The quiet effectiveness of the PSI in dismantling Libya's WMD programs and unraveling the A. Q. Khan
proliferation network are in sharp relief to the typically toothless attempts by the UN to halt proliferation.You can count
with one hand countries opposed to the United States. They are the "Gang of Five": China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and
Venezuela. Of course, countries like India, for example, do not agree with all policy choices made by the United States,
such as toward Iran, but New Delhi is friendly to Washington. Only the "Gang of Five" may be expected to consistently
resist the agenda and actions of the United States.China is clearly the most important of these states because it is a rising
great power. But even Beijing is intimidated by the United States and refrains from openly challenging U.S. power. China
proclaims that it will, if necessary, resort to other mechanisms of challenging the United States, including asymmetric
strategies such as targeting communication and intelligence satellites upon which the United States depends. But China
may not be confident those strategies would work, and so it is likely to refrain from testing the United States directly for
the foreseeable future because China's power benefits, as we shall see, from the international order U.S. primacy creates.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 398
HEG - SUSTAINABLE
Hege is and will remain sustainable
Brooks & Wohlforth 08[Associate Professors in the Department of Government @ Dartmouth College (World Out of Balance, p. 27-31)])
“Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power;nothing,” historian Paul Kennedy observes: “I have returned to all
of the comparative defense spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close.” Though assessments of U.S. power have changed since
those words were written in 2002, they remain true. Even when capabilities are understood broadly to include economic,
technological, and other wellsprings of national power, they are concentrated in the United States to a degree never before
experienced in the history of the modern system of states and thus never contemplated by balance-of-power theorists. The
United spends more on defense that all the other major military powers combined, and most of those powers are its allies.
Its massive investments in the human, institutional, and technological requisites of military power, cumulated over many
decades, make any effort to match U.S. capabilities even more daunting that the gross spending numbers imply. Military
research and development (R&D) may best capture the scale of the long-term investment that give the United States a
dramatic qualitative edge in military capabilities. As table 2.1 shows, in 2004 U.S. military R&D expenditures were more
than six times greater than those of Germany, Japan, France, and Britain combined. By some estimates over half the
military R&D expenditures in the world are American. Andthis disparity has been sustained for decades: over the past 30
years, for example, the United States has invested over three times more than the entire European Union on military R&D.
These vast commitments have created a preeminence in military capabilities vis-à-vis all the other major powers that is
unique after the seventeenth century. While other powers could contest U.S. forces near their homelands, especially over
issues on which nuclear deterrence is credible, theUnited States is and will long remain the only state capable of
projecting major military power globally. This capacity arises from “command of the commons” - that is, unassailable
military dominance over the sea, air, and space. As Barry Posen puts it, Command of the commons is the key military
enabler of the U.S global power position. It allows the United States to exploit more fully other sources of power,
including its own economic and military might as well as the economic and military might of its allies.Command of the
commons also helps the United States to weaken its adversaries, by restricting their access to economic, military, and
political assistance….Command of the commons provides the United States with more useful military potential for a
hegemonic foreign policy than any other offshore power has ever had.Posen’s study of American military primacy ratifies
Kennedy’s emphasis on the historical importance of the economic foundations of national power. It is the combination of
military and economic potential that sets the United States apart from its predecessors at the top of the international
system. Previous leading states were either great commercial and naval powers or great military powers on land, never
both. The British Empire in its heyday and the United States during the Cold War, for example, shared the world with other powers that matched or exceeded them in
some areas. Even at the height of the Pax Britannica, the United Kingdom was outspent, outmanned, and outgunned by both France and Russia. Similarly, at the dawn
of the Cold War the United States was dominant economically as well as in air and naval capabilities. But the Soviet Union retained overall military parity, and thanks
to geography and investment in land power it had a superior ability to seize territory in Eurasia.The United States’ share of world GDP in 2006, 27.5
percent, surpassed that of any leading state in modern history, with the sole exception of its own position after 1945 (when
World War II had temporarily depressed every other major economy).The size of the U.S economy means that its massive
military capabilities required roughly 4 percent of its GDP in 2005, far less than the nearly 10 percent it averaged over the
peak years of the Cold War, 1950-70, and the burden borne by most of the major powers of the past. As Kennedy sums
up, “Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world’s single superpower on the cheap is astonishing.”
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 399
HEG - SECURITY GOOD
Security competition between states is normal in the realm of international politics and U.S. primacy prevents
major power wars
Bradley A. Thayer 07Associate Professor in the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies of Missouri State University, American Empire: A
Debate, p. 42
Peace, like good health, is not often noticed, but certainly is missed when absent. Throughout history, peace and stability
have been a major benefit of empires. In fact, pax Romana in Latin means the Roman peace, or the stability brought about
by the Roman Empire. Rome's power was so overwhelming that no one could challenge it successfully for hundreds of
years. The result was stability within the Roman Empire. Where Rome conquered, peace, law, order, education, a
common language, and much else followed. That was true of the British Empire (pax Britannica) too. So it is with the
United States today. Peace and stability are major benefits of the American Empire. The fact that America is so powerful
actually reduces the likelihood of major war. Scholars of international politics have found that the presence of a dominant
state in international politics actually reduces the likelihood of war because weaker states, including even great powers,
know that it is unlikely that they could challenge the dominant state and win. They may resort to other mechanisms or
tactics to challenge the dominant country, but are unlikely to do so directly. This means that there will be no wars between
great powers. At least, not until a challenger (certainly China) thinks it can overthrow the dominant state (the United
States). But there will be intense security competition-both China and the United States will watch each other closely,
with their intelligence communities increasingly focused on each other, their diplomats striving to ensure that countries
around the world do not align with the other, and their militaries seeing the other as their principal threat. This is not
unusual in international politics but, in fact, is its "normal" condition. Americans may not pay much attention to it until a
crisis occurs. But right now states are competing with one another. This is because international politics does not sleep; it
never takes a rest.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 400
***ON-CASE***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 401
TIMETABLE: OBAMA COMMITTED
Obama is signaling strong commitment to the timetable

(Ali) Weinberg(NBCNews Analyst) 6-242010(“Obama: Afghan Timetable Unchanged”, msnbc online)
A day after he replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystalwith Gen. David Petraeus as commander of the war in Afghanistan, President
Obama dismissed a suggestion that the change in command would affect his timetable for withdrawal of combat troops
from the country.
At a joint press conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Obama answered a reporter's question on the timetable by
saying that an assessment of the war's progress -- to be held in December, a year after Obama announced his 30,000-troop increase in
Afghanistan -- will help determine the pace of withdrawal from the region."We are in the midpoint of implementing the strategy
that we came up with last year," Obama said. "We did not say that, starting July 2011, suddenly there would be no troops
from the United States or allied countries in Afghanistan . We didn't say we should be switching off the lights or closing the door
behind us," he added.Obama also reiterated his support of Petraeus in his new role. "We will not miss a beat because of a change
in command in the Afghan theater," he said. The two leaders' wide-ranging East Room press conference covered trade and
economic issues as well -- with Obama expressing support for Russia's acceptance in the World Trade Organization and praising
Medvedev's agreement to lift a ban on American poultry exports.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 402
DRONES TURN
Turn: The plan causes a surge of drone attacks Jonathon Alter
(Editor of Newsweek) 7-3 2010 (“T Minus Two Years”, Newsweek online)
On the way to the Oval Office before the Petraeus meeting,Biden asked Obama if beginning a significant withdrawal was a presidential order that
could not be countermanded by the military. The president said it was. Petraeus has immense stature, of course, and after the firing of two commanding generals in a
row (Gen. David McKiernan was relieved in early 2009), Obama can’t get rid of him without a firestorm. But the general knows that with Afghanistan already the longest
war in American history, he has only a small window in which to combine military force with creative diplomacy in a way that yields real improvement on the ground. If he can’t do it fast
enough, the president will conclude that 100,000 troops actually harm progress by making the U.S. look like occupiers. At
which point he’ll revert to the Biden Plan-kill Al Qaeda operatives with drones-and forget about Petraeus’s theories of
counterinsurgency. The country simply cannot afford a trillion-dollar commitment to nation building. The only way funding will continue much longer is if Republicans take control of Congress this fall. Even then, the war remains unpopular with the public, a point that won’t be lost on the GOP (as RNC
chair Michael Steele’s antiwar comments last week attest). And Obama is hardly oblivious to the electoral implications. Let’s say that Petraeus insists that the July 2011 timeline be pushed back a year, which is quite possible considering the current problems on the ground. That means the de-escalation-and the political windfall-will
begin around the summer of 2012, just in time for the Democratic National Convention. In other words, Americans should get used to it: we ain’t staying long.
And this turns case - drone warfare outweighs just war

Grove, PhD Candidate Johns Hopkins, 2010 [Jairus, “New Wars, New Warriors”, Mar 16th,
http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-wars-new-warriors.html ]
What keeps me up at
This, of course, has nothing to do with the atom bomb per se. Airpower, cruise missiles, the "Prompt Global Strike" initiative, can all accomplish this task without a nuclear warhead.
night is not the magnitude of the weapons but the event without warning that strikes like a lightning bolt . More to the point it is the
inequality and the regularity of the inequality with which these weapons strike such that only a few populations in the
world truly live with the daily dread that they or their loved ones could be next . I don't believe for one second that this is the tragic inevitability of war. Nor do
I believe that this is just some flaw in the mortal condition. Death from above is different than someone kicking in your door or invading your city.
There is no countermeasure, no response, no resistance, no possibility for combat. If the bomb arrives there is only what I imagine is a few seconds of shock, sadness and then maybe even relief that
you do not have to bear another day of waiting to be visited by the bomb. This is all a long of way of saying that, for me, the debate over continuing the war in Afghanistan
elides a question much more troubling that is not even being asked on the major news networks, much less openly by the Obama
administration: Will we continue to send drones to shoot 'Hellfire' missiles into villages between Afghanistan and Pakistan and
beyond?Will more or less troops even have any bearing on the decision to increasingly automate the war ? So far there
seems to have only been a steady increase in drone attacks since the so called Afghanistan surge . Is it possible that future troop reductions in
Afghanistan and Iraq will lead to an increasing reliance on this prosthetic means of warfare ? For all of the changes in strategy, diplomatic posture,
and real commitments to a better world in both word and deed by the Obama administration, the first drone attack took place January 23rd 2009, just a few days after Obama was inaugurated. I remember because I had just
returned from the Obama Campaign's Staff Party when I read the news update on my computer. Even then in the haze of one of the best nights of my life the news made me sad. So much had changed and yet this continued
unabated, seemingly without pause. Since then the attacks have become more regular. In fact the Obama administration has already authorized and ordered more
Predator attacks than the Bush administration did the previous year.I have no idea what a drone sounds like . I imagine it to be
like a remote control airplane. Something high-pitched, like an airplane but shriller. What I do know is that every child in the territory of
Waziristan must talk about it constantly. In an area of the world in which indoor plumbing and consistent electricity
would be 'the future' the boogeyman is not a vampire or some disfigured monster as it was for me growing up in the Texas suburbs. It is
a polished, faceless, white UFO armed to kill and operated by remote or automated control. I am sure, in fact I know, that the statistical success of these weapons is
unimpeachable. If the question is do they work than the answer is yes. If by work you mean they, in the words of the Revolution in Military Affairs, 'hit to kill'. I can't argue with the numbers. However I can't help
wondering what the world will be like in ten or twenty years , not just in Waziristan, but in every country we deploy these
weapons, if the United States of America becomes synonymous with this faceless, bringer of death. It will not be those
maimed or killed that all Americans will have to answer to but the millions that couldn't sleep, that woke up drenched in
sweat, or simply wanted to die because they could not stand the waiting . What must it be like to start every day wondering
if you are next. If the plane you hear in the distance, the buzz you thought you heard, the unholy dread of a sudden
stillness, the oppressive weight of silence, is the arrival of precision American engineering. War is hell. This is slow
sadistic torture. Every flash in the sky, the low hum of an engine, the constant sense of unease, all of it is a waiting game
that would make me wish for hell's certainty and finality. This cannot be the best we can do.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 403
COLONIZATION TURN
China and warlords will permanently colonize Afghanistan for mineral resources - turns case
Donald McNeil (Editor of New York Times) 6-182010(“Next for Afghanistan, the Curse of Plenty?”)
Let’s suppose there is $1 trillion worth of minerals under Afghanistan, as senior American officials and a confidential Pentagon
memo said last week.Is that a good thing - for either Afghanistan or the United States?Some experts in mining and in Third World
resource politics argue that it is not.Because it takes up to 20 years for a mine to start earning profits and Afghanistan has been
a battleground for 31 years, “no mining company in its right mind would go into Afghanistan now,” said Murray W. Hitzman, a
professor of economic geology at the Colorado School of Mines.The country’s underground treasure “will be good for the
warlords and good for China, but not good for Afghans or the United States ,” predicted Michael T. Klare, a professor of peace
and world security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and the author of “Resource Wars” and “Blood and Oil.” History
tends to second such skepticism. The great empires of the world were built thanks to gold mines, not atop them. It’s the little
mercantile nations with their cohesive political systems and fierce navies that have looted the big feudal ones paved with
rubies.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 404
PATRIARCHY TURN
Withdrawal without humanitarian presence destroys women’s rights and causes a relapsing war Thea Garland
(Free Lance writer based in London)7-14 2010 (“Will We Abandon Afghan Women?” New York Times Online)
While it is hard to disagree with the generals and politicians who say that a military victory is not possible and a political
solution must be found, are the women of Afghanistan going to be asked to pay for this political settlement with their
rights?In any negotiations, the West will insist that the Taliban not allow Al Qaeda to set up training camps, or otherwise operate
from Afghan territory. The Taliban may agree to this. But that is not sufficient. The United States and NATO should not
withdraw their troops without a commitment to respect civil liberties and guarantee the rights of women . Is this possible?By
way of reminder, this is the same Taliban whose brutal repression saw women under virtual house arrest and subject to incessant terror
during their six-year reign.This is the same Taliban that denied women the right to education and employment, deprived
them of social and political participation and that whipped, beat and verbally abused them for laughing aloud or for failing
to cover their already shrouded and faceless bodies in exact accordance with Taliban rules.This is the same Taliban that
hauled girls into the Kabul football stadium to be executed publicly, and for conduct that would not be considered
criminal under any democratic law.Are we prepared to walk away knowing that women may once again be bound, buried
neck-deep in the ground and stoned until they slowly bleed to death? After invading the country, do we not have a moral
imperative to leave it better than we found it?Even if the Taliban committed itself to honoring the rights of women, it is
difficult to conceive how this would be enforceable. If the Taliban were to renege on a promise not to allow Al Qaeda
bases, it is easy to imagine that American missiles would once again rain down on the country. Would the West go back to
war if the Taliban tore up a promise to allow girls to go to school, women to work?
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 405
JUST WAR GOOD
Attempts to completely abandon just war theory fundamentally misunderstand the context in which our decisions
are made. Just War theory has become dominant because it is capable of changing and adopting new positions.
completely abandoning just war theory just wouldn’t work
NicholasReneggerprofessor of international relations at university of St. Andrews2002[International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-),
Vol. 78, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 353-363http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3095686.pdf]
Yet the question remains, would we be better off without this flawed and problematic survivor from earlier times in our
new, technologically sophisticated, late modem world? Could we not simply start afresh and think our own ideas on how
to legitimate and justify force? Some, who would not claim to be pacifists and yet who would not wish to adopt an
'anything goes' position, would seem to be left facing this path if they do not wish to follow the just war tradition.
However, to assume that it is possible to 'start from scratch' in this sort of context is precisely to misread the context in
which our moral and political choices are made. The just war tradition is a tradition of thought precisely because it has
considered many different ways of understanding the relation between war and politics. Some have become dominant in
the tradition, as it has developed, to be sure. But that leaves others to be recaptured if we so choose. And perhaps for this
reason, above all, and notwithstanding all its problems, it seems to me that itwould be a mistake to abandon the just war
tradition.
Just war theory is good it emphasizes our freedom and restricts war
NicholasReneggerprofessor of international relations at university of St. Andrews2002[International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-),
Vol. 78, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 353-363http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3095686.pdf]
As I have tried to emphasize throughout, it is a tradition that emphasizes reflection on moral and political purposes and
choices. Inasmuch as it does this, it is closer in fact to liberal thinking on politics than often appears to be the case. The
just war tradition emphasizes choice; the freedom, indeed, even perhaps the requirement, to make choices for ourselves
about moral and political issues. Of course, it is a tradition. It emphasizes that choices are made in contexts of obligations
and freedoms that are given to us and not always chosen ex nihilo. Nonetheless, this process is one that is central to the
lives of free and reasonable persons. The legal and cultural sediment built up over the last few hundred years had closed
off aspects of this process, and, despite the renaissance of writing and thinking of the last forty years, it has only very
partially and episodically been opened up again. But the tradition is still there-a resource, for those who would understand
it and use it aright, that enables us to evaluate and assess the character of our societies' use of force in all of its aspects. It
does not think war is a good (only, sometimes, a lesser evil); nor does it glamorize or celebrate 'warriors' (as some seem
increasingly to wish to do today); rather, it accepts that in the quotidian world in which we all live, there will be
circumstances where force is used and even, perhaps, circumstances where it should be used, but, most of all, it asserts
that in neither case does this absolve us from the requirements of reflection and choice that we should all understand are
the necessary partners to our freedoms.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 406
JUST WAR GOOD
Since violence always exists in this world, it is our moral duty to make sure that this violence does not go
unnoticed; furthermore, a just war will bring justice and peace to everyone. (Jean)Elshtain, (Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School) 2003([Just War Against Terror])
What occasions or events justify the use of violence? Augustine begins by specifying what is not permitted: Wars of aggression and
aggrandizement are unacceptable because they violate not only the civic peace but the framework of justice. Once again we see that,
in deciding whether a war is just, we must get the critical distinctions right, beginning with a distinction between peace and justice.
Some versions of “peace” violate norms of justice and do so egregiously. For the sake of keeping the peace, statesmen often acquiesce
in terrible injustices. Peace is a good, and so is justice, but neither is an absolute good. Neither automatically trumps the other, save
for those pacifists who claim that “violence is never the solution,” “fighting never settled anything,” and “violence only begets more
violence.” Does it? Not always, not necessarily. One can point to one historical example after another of force being deployed in
the name of justice and leading to not only a less violent world but a more just one. Consider the force used to combat
Japanese militarism in World War II. Defeating Japan in the war, occupying Japan in its aftermath and imposing a
constitutional order did not incite further Japanese aggression of the sort witnessed in its full horror in what came to be known as
“the rape of Manchuria.” What emerged instead was a democratic Japan. Are there living Japanese who believe it is time to return
to a violent world of militarist dominance or the world of violent self-help associated with the samurai tradition? When the great
Japanese writer Yukio Mishima called for a mass uprising and restoration of the old militarism in 1970, only a couple of pathetic
disciples responded. Mishima’s bizarre fantasy of the return of a more violent world was regarded by the Japanese as daft and nigh-
unintelligible. All violence, including the rule-governed violence of warfare, is tragic. But even more tragic is permitting gross
injustices and massive crimes to go unpunished.Just war stipulates that the goods of settled social life cannot be achieved in the
face of pervasive and unrelenting violence. The horror of today’s so-called failed states is testament to that basic requirement
of the “tranquility of order.” In Somalia, as warlords have jostled for power for more than a decade, people have been abused
cynically and routinely. Anyone at anytime may be a target. The tragedy of American involvement in Somalia is not that U.S.
soldiers were sent there, but that the American commitment was not sufficient to restore minimal civic peace and to permit the
Somalian people to begin to rebuild their shattered social framework. Can anyone doubt that a sufficient use of force to stop predators
from killing and starving people outright would have been the more just course in Somalia and, in the long run, the one most
conducive to civic peace?
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 407
JUST WAR GOOD
Fighting in consideration of both proportionality and discrimination leads to a more just war. (Jean)Elshtain,
(Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School) 2003([Just War
Against Terror])
The two key in bello requirements are proportionality and discrimination. Proportionality refers to the need to use the level of
force commensurate with the nature of the threat. If a nation faces a threat from a small, renegade band carrying out indiscriminate
assassinations, it does not call in a tactical nuclear strike; rather, it puts a mobile unit in the field to track down this band and stop
them. Discrimination refers to the need to differentiate between combatants and noncombatants. Noncombatants historically
have been women, children, the aged and infirm, all unarmed persons going about their daily lives, and prisoners of war who have
been disarmed by definition. Knowingly and intentionally placing noncombatants in jeopardy and putting in place strategies
that bring the greatest suffering and harm to noncombatants rather than to combatants is unacceptable on just war grounds.
According to just war thinking, it is better to risk the lives of one's own combatants than those of enemy noncombatants. In the
case of U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan, of course, the noncombatants were not foes because they too had been victims of Al
Qaeda and the Taliban. Even as US. forces attempted to strike only legitimate war targets, however, the campaign in Afghanistan
renewed an old debate about what constitutes a legitimate war target. Legitimate war targets may vary from conflict to conflict
depending on what is deemed essential to the war effort of one's opponents. It is always suspect to destroy the infrastructure of
civilian life. People should not be deprived of drinking water, for example. In the early formulations of the principle of
proportionality, it was stipulated that wells from which persons and animals drink are never to be poisoned.Although civilian
casualties should be avoided if at all possible, they occur in every war. Inevitably, civilians fall in harm's way because a shell or
bomb goes astray and misses its primary target or because war fighters are given faulty intelligence about where combatants are
hidden, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The question of "collateral damage" should never be taken lightly. That the
United States takes this matter very seriously indeed was noted in chapter 1. Every incident in which civilian lives are lost is
investigated and invokes a reevaluation of tactics in an attempt to prevent such incidents in the future. The First Geneva Protocol of
1977, additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12. 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Con
frets, codified basic just war norms on civilian and nonmilitary targeting, building these into the interstices of international norms on
warmaking. The demands of proportionality and discrimination are strenuous and cannot be alternately satisfied or ignored,
depending on whether they serve one's war aims. The norms require that a war-fighting country ask itself critical questions about
each criterion. The United States knows that it must try to answer these questions about its war on terrorism, even with all the
difficulties attendant upon separating combatants from noncombatants when fighting a shadowy entity that is not a state actor and has
neither de jute nor de facto accountability to any wider international community.During and after a conflict, those animated by the just
war tradition assess the conduct of a war-fighting nation by how its warriors conducted themselves. Did they rape and pillage? Were
they operating under careful rules of engagement? Did they make every attempt to limit civilian casualties, knowing that, in time of
war, civilians are invariably going to fall in harm's way? It is unworthy of the solemn nature of these questions to respond cynically or
naively.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 408
JUST WAR GOOD
The U.S. is doing everything it can, using just punishment, to protect Afghani civilians from death.
(Jean)Elshtain, (Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity
School)2003([Just War Against Terror])
Since the Vietnam War and the restructuring of the US. military, those who train U.S. soldiers have taken pains to underscore
the codes of ethics that derive from the just war tradition. No institution in America pays more attention to ethical restraint on
the use of force than does the U.S. military. Thus, we do not threaten to kill and target explicitly three thousand civilians because
that number of our own civilians were intentionally slaughtered. The soldier, by contrast to the terrorist, searches out and punishes
those responsible for planning, aiding and abetting, and perpetrating the attacks, the act of aggression that servedthe trigger for going
to war. Preventing future attacks is a critical motivation. Just punishment, which observes restraints, is different from revenge,
which knows no limits. Have in bello criteria been met in the US. war on terrorism? On the rule of discrimination, it is clear that
every effort is being made to separate combatants from noncombatants, and that targeting civilians has been ruled out as an explicit
war-fighting strategy. As the author and war historian Caleb Carr puts it: 'Warfare against civilians must never get answered in kind.
For as failed a tactic as such warfare has been, reprisals similarly directed at civilians have been even more so-particularly when they
have exceeded the original assault in scope ....Terror must never be answered with terror; but war can only be answered with
war, and it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists
can contrive." What the terrorists are planning, if they can acquire effective biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, are attacks on
civilians. What we are planning is to interdict their plans: to stop them without resorting to their methods.The improved accuracy of
the U.S. air war, conducted with weaponry that is more precise and does less damage to the surround than was possible only a few
years ago, serves the ends of discrimination. A senior navy officer, quoted by the New York Times, observed that: 'With precision-
guided weapons, you don't have to use as many bombs to achieve the desired effects, and using fewer weapons reduces the risk of
collateral damage." It is difficult to assess civilian casualties in a war theater, particularly in the patchwork that is Afghanistan, where
different areas are under at least partial control of contesting tribal leaders (some of whom may have called in U.S. strikes against the
Taliban when they were in fact trying to kill their own ethnic or tribal rivals, and this on more than one occasion). But attempts to
come up with an accurate estimate of civilian deaths in Afghanistan have been made by human rights groups, the U.S. military, and
the Los Angeles Times. As of July 3, 2002, the consensus Was that Afghan civilian casualties numbered between 1,000 and 2,000. The
Los Angeles Times reviewed more than 2,000 news stories covering 194incidents. Theft count was between 1,067 and 1,201. Relief
officials of the Afghan government gave the same figures.The Los Angeles Times concluded that the numbers suggest a very low
casualty rate compared with earlier Afghan conflicts. In the early battles between competing Afghan warlords, an estimated 50,000
civilians were killed, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Soviet air raids in March 1979 killed 20,000 civilians
in a few days in the western city of Herat-just a fraction of the estimated 670,000 civilian, who died during the ten-year Soviet
occupation. In the current conflict, Afghans themselves report that the big problem is not the accuracy of U.S. weaponry but flawed
intelligence.For example, before it fell, the Taliban put out false information about U.S. warplanes hitting a hospital in central Kabul.
"Lies-al lies," said Ghulam Hussain, an emergency room nurse who said he was on duty that night. "Not a single person in this
hospital was hurt. No rockets, no bombs, no missiles. Not even a window was broken."' 5 The president of the Afghan Red Crescent
(the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross), a foe of the Taliban, is quoted as saying: "The Taliban propaganda created a huge
distortion in the outside world, especially early in the war . . . . Civilians were killed, of course, but not nearly as many at the
Taliban said, or in the way they said .. . . The Americans were careful and their bombs were very accurate. They checked to
see for sure that they were targeting Taliban or al-Qaida bases or convoys. The people who died in it was accidental, not
deliberate."To signal the serious nature of mistaken bombings in which civilians are harmed, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz visited Afghanistan in
July 2002 to explore recent incidents and to insist that these incidents be fully investigated.'7 The New York Times reported the results of an investigation in which on-
site reviews were conducted of eleven locations where airstrikes had killed an estimated four hundred civilians. These reviews "suggest that American commanders
have sometimes relied on mistaken information from local Afghans." Another factor was an understandable preference to use airstrikes with precision, high-tech
weaponry rather than to put more soldiers in harm's way. American military commanders reiterated that "they take pains to ensure that civilians are spared, often
verifying their targets with several sources of information. In many of the cases ... they insist that they struck valid military targets."18 The investigation concluded that
too many men in the field had been given cell phones to call in intelligence; not all of them shared the interest of the coalition fighting terrorism in trying to uproot the
last of the Al Qaeda-Taliban nexus. The New York Times report also suggested that there might be a pattern in U.S. military of overreliance on air power. During the
Kosovo war, I criticized the Clinton administration for its stated zero-casualty policy. In that conflict, we aimed to sacrifice Serbian civilians rather than risk the life of a
single American soldier. Such a policy is not acceptable on just war grounds. To his credit, President Bush warned from the beginning that American lives would
be at risk and some would be lost. That commitment must always be carried through on the battlefield in order to protect
civilians as thoroughly as possible in a theater of modern war. The United States must do everything it can to minimize civilian
deaths-and it is doing so. The United States must express remorse for every civilian death in a way that is not simply rote-and it is
doing so. The United States must investigate every incident in which civilians are killed-and it is doing so. The United States must
make some sort of recompense for unintended civilian casualties, and it may be making plans to do so-an unusual, even unheard of,
act in wartime.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 409
WITHDRAWAL CAUSES WAR
Strong US presence in Afghanistan key to prevent instability that would spread across the region
Erin Simpson, Former professor at the Marine Command and Staff College, 08-31- 2009, “Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?,” The
Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083103131.html
The war is worth fighting, and it's worth fighting well. Years of strategic neglect and severely limited resources have
seriously undermined U.S. and NATO efforts in Afghanistan. In the last year we finally acknowledged that Pakistan is
critical to the success of our efforts in Afghanistan. In the next year we must recognize the degree to which Afghanistan is
key to Pakistan's future stability. A fragmented, war-torn, or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would offer both al Qaeda and
Pakistani Taliban a plush sanctuary with greater freedom of movement than is currently enjoyed in Pakistan. It is the
future stability of this nuclear-armed neighbor that demands our presence and our perseverance in Afghanistan. Some
might argue for a quarantine strategy for Afghanistan, akin to previous counterterrorism missions. But this is not a war
that can be meaningfully fought from stand-off range. The intelligence demands are daunting and cannot be met from
either the Indian Ocean or satellites in orbit. And even if they could, given the distances involved, such information is
perishable. Only people on the ground -- civilians and soldiers, Americans and Afghans -- can secure the population and
deny our adversaries the sanctuaries they crave. Is the War in Afghanistan worth fighting? Yes, but we've really only just
begun.
Withdrawal causes Taliban fill-in and civil war

VandaFelbab-Brown, fellow at the Brookings Institution, 12-02-2009, “President Obama’s New Strategy in Afghanistan: Questions and
Answers,” Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/1202_afghanistan_felbabbrown.aspx
If the United States withdrew today, significant portions of the country, especially in the south and east, would fall into
the hands of the Taliban. Other parts would either become engulfed in Taliban-generated and other local conflicts, or
splinter into fiefdoms. Civil war à la the 1990s could easily be envisioned under such circumstances. At the same time,
continuing with the current troop deployments would at best mean a stalemate, or at worst, a deepening of a quagmire.
Pull out of Afghanistan would cause massive Taliban take over of the country and they will open it as a terrorist
safe haven for them to launch attacks on the west
ANI (http://www.newkerala.com/news/fullnews-146585.html, Afghanistan will be in throes of Taliban tyranny if US pulls out early: NATO) 7-
14-2010
While the United States, Britain and other allied countries are planning to pull out from Afghanistan in two to three years
time,NATO secretary general Anders FoghRasmussen has warned that such a move could prove catastrophic, with the Taliban
very quickly likely to bring the entire country under it tyrannical rule. During a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameroon
here, Rasmussen said that the nations supporting the US -led 'war on terror' in Afghanistan should keep their soldiers in the
country as long as necessary."We can have our hopes, we can have our expectations, but I cannot give any guarantee as far as an exact date or year is
concerned," The Daily Times quoted Rasmussen, as saying."The Taliban follow the political debate in troop-contributing countries
closely, and if they discover that through their attacks, they can weaken the support for our presence in Afghanistan, they
will just be encouraged to step up their attacks on foreign troops," he added.The NATO secretary general said that an early
departure from Afghanistan could see the Taliban return to power, which could have far reaching effects. "If the world
forces left too soon, the Taliban would return to Afghanistan which would once again become a safe haven for terrorist
groups who would use it as a launch pad for attacks on North America and Europe," Rasmussen said.He also underlined
that the coalition forces' pull out could destabilise Afghanistan's 'nuclear' neighbour-Pakistan.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 410
CAPITALISM K - LINK
The war in Afghanistan is solely to stabilize capitalism (Malcolm) Haslett
(BBC Eurasia Analyst) October 01(“Afghanistan: the pipeline war?”, online BBC News)
Some attractively original theories have been going the rounds about the real reasons for the Afghan war. It is obviously much more,
some columnists and political theorists suggest, than a simple effort to stamp out terrorism. Apart from the popular theory (in some
parts of Europe as well as the Middle East) that this is a war on Islam, there is also the theory that it is a war motivated mainly -
or even purely - by long-term economic and political goals. The importance of Central Asian oil and gas has suddenly been
noticed. The valuable deposits of fossil fuels in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, previously discussed only by regional
experts and international energy companies, are now being mulled over on the opinion pages of popular dailies. The Afghan war, it
has been discovered, has an economic side to it. Oil is undeniably important to the Americans. Some writers, indeed, have
gone further, suggesting that economic considerations provide the main, or at the very least a major, motivation for US and
western involvement in Afghanistan. If one discounts the more extreme and emotional versions of this theory, the argument boils
down to this: Afghanistan has been proposed by more than one western oil company (the US-based Unocal is often mentioned, but it
is not the only one) as the best route by which to export the Central Asian republics' important output of oil and gas. Given the
increasing importance of finding and exploiting new sources of fossil fuel, governments like those of the US and the UK
are enormously keen to gain influence in the Central Asian region in order to secure those supplies for the West. In order to
achieve that, and get those energy supplies moving out of Central Asia, they need to set up a pro-western government in Afghanistan.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 411
CAPITALISM K - LINK
Destroying capitalism is a prerequisite to solving the plan, otherwise we’re doomed permanent presence in
Afghanistan. Recent discoveries of a new mineral market prove (Ben) Arnoldy
(Staff Writer for Christian Science Monitor) 6-15 10 (“News of Afghanistan's mineral wealth deepens suspicion of US
aims”, online CS Monitor)
The Pentagon’s announcement that Afghanistan possesses $1 trillion worth of unexploited minerals will have the
unintended consequence of confirming one of the most deeply entrenched conspiracy theories among Afghans. Many
Afghans I have spoken with believe firmly that America wants to permanently occupy the country in order to take Afghan
land and resources. Even educated Afghan friends who generally support a temporary US presence have told me the same.
I had to laugh when one suggested that Americans would want to move to Afghanistan to snatch up Afghan land for homes.This fear
has flourished despite - not because of - American rhetoric. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously dismissed the
country, saying there weren't any good bombing targets in Afghanistan. President Obama has set a timeline for troops to begin
withdrawing. But Afghans are proud of their country. And, for many Afghans, it makes no sense that the United States cannot
wrap up the Taliban - so an imperialist land grab becomes a plausible explanation. Having the Pentagon announce a quiet
survey of Afghanistan's is just the "evidence" that will confirm deep suspicions that the US is really there looking for war booty. And
that won't help American troops trying to win the trust of a population famous for tiring of invaders.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 412
CAPITALISM K - LINK
The perm is disadvantageous. The call to withdraw will only increase capitalism. The most successful strategy is a
collateral withdrawal from the collapse of capitalism
Aryn Baker (Staff Writer for Time Magazine) December 06 (“Capitalism Comes to Afghanistan”, online Time)
With his tattered gray turban, his threadbare waistcoat and the gnarled hands of a laborer, Karim Khan hardly looks like the ideal customer for a financial-services firm.
But to the Azizi Bank in Kabul, he's a prime client. Khan is one of some 60,000 Afghans who have opened an account at Azizi since a new savings product was
launched four months ago. Although his initial deposit of $100 in crumpled Afghani notes may seem paltry, because of customers like him Azizi is increasing its
deposit base faster than any other bank in the country. "You have business opportunities here in Afghanistan like nowhere else in the
world," says Hayatullah Dayani, the bank's chief of business development.Dayani is one of thousands of optimistic souls who
believe a prosperous future can emerge from the stony soil of strife-torn Afghanistan . Since the brutal Taliban regime was toppled five years ago by
Western coalition forces, the government of President Hamid Karzai, beset by warlords and Islamic militants, has struggled to maintain order and control. The country's primitive economy is dominated by illicit opium
production, which by some estimates accounts for as much as one-third of GDP. About 40% of Afghans are unemployed. And last month, the World Food Program warned that millions of rural Afghans might starve this
winter because a prolonged drought has devastated the wheat harvest. There are numerous reasons why profits may prove elusive for Coca-Cola's Afghan venture. The country's rustic road network means that product
Kandahar, a potentially large market in the south, is off-limits because militants and
distribution is limited to Kabul and a few other nearby cities;
bandits make it too dangerous to truck goods there.That sentiment is shared by Shakib Noori, p.r. director of the Afghanistan
Investment Support Agency, the country's business-licensing body. Afghanistan imports some $5 billion worth of goods every year, and "half of
those products could be produced here in Afghanistan," says Noori. "Dairy, foodstuffs, cement-there are huge opportunities, but the problem is that there is no
infrastructure." Most of the country is out of reach of an electrical grid. Even in Kabul, residents receive just three hours of electricity a day. Although a national
highway system is scheduled to be completed by 2010 and a planned electrical line from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the north could light up Kabul by 2008,
Afghanistan's unstable political situation is a further deterrent to foreign investment.A handful of foreign investors have been willing to take
their
chances. Foreign direct investment increased by 35% in 2005 to $253 million, according to the ADB, putting Afghanistan on par with a country
like Sri Lanka. Besides Coca-Cola, multinational firms such as DHL, Standard Chartered Bank, the Hyatt hotel group, Toyota and Alcatel have also set up Afghan
operations. In hope of convincing more to take the plunge, the ministry of commerce is reassessing tax laws, and groups like Afghanistan Investment Support Agency
are helping to build industrial parks to encourage manufacturing. A steady rise in consumer spending should also boost the economy-for nearly 30 years, Afghans
have been deprived of basic consumer goods, and they are eager to catch up. President Karzai, not surprisingly, has been
eager to draw attention to these rays of economic sunshine . "Whoever invested in Afghanistan in the past four years has earned a lot," he said a
few months ago at a conference to attract foreign investment. "Those who invest now in the still fresh, needy, greedy market in Afghanistan will make a lot." He may be
right. One thing is for sure:the nation's yearning for a better future has never been more intense . Just ask Khan as he waits in line to open his
account at Azizi Bank: "The
economy is moving forward. Afghans are hungry. We are tired of war and we want to buy. We
want to build. But I hope there is no more fighting-if that happens it will destroy everything ."
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 413
***LIBERAL GUILT K***
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 414
1NC
The affirmative is an exercise in liberal guilt they portray the west as self-interested, soulless, power and money
hungry. In doing this they are internalizing The Occidentalist view of the west
Ian Burumais a professor of human rights, democracy, and new-media studies at Bard College and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books
febuary 6th2004 [chronicle of higher education vol. 50 no. 22 pg b10 Origins of Occidentalism http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/117.html]
When the West is under attack, as it was on September 11, it is often assumed-not only in America-that the West means the United States. This goes for those on
the left, who believe that U.S. foreign policy (or “imperialism”) and U.S. corporate power (or “globalization”) have brought the suicide
bombers and holy warriors upon America by marginalizing and bullying the millions of people who have failed to benefit
from the capitalist world order. But it also goes for conservatives, who think that Islamist radicalism, like Communism before, is an attack on “our values,” that
is, on the “American way of life.” There is some truth to those claims. The worldwide reach of Wall Street, Hollywood, and the
U.S. armed forces invites resentment. And to the extent that those institutions represent the American way of life, they are indeed targets of the Islamist
jihad. It is also true that U.S. foreign policy can be misguided, even brutal . And global capitalism can do a great deal of damage as well as
good. Finally, the United States, as the only Western superpower, has indeed come to stand for the West as a whole. And countries, such as Israel, that are looked upon
as U.S. proxies provoke violent hostility for that reason alone. However, the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with
the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothÃ¨que in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to
global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do
not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of
suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok. Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call
Occidentalism (the title of our new book): a war against a particular idea of the West , which is neither new nor unique to Islamist
extremism. The current jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer . This
idea has historical roots that long precede any form of “U.S. imperialism .” Similar hostility, though not always as lethal, has been directed in
the past against Britain and France as much as against America . What, then, is the Occidentalistidea of the West? That is the
problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals whogathered for a conference in Kyoto in 1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was
not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find an ideological justification for Japan's mission to
smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia . The topic of discussion was “how to overcome the modern.”
Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the
Japanese spirit. The “modern thing,” said another, was a “European thing.” Others believed that “Americanism” was the enemy, and that Japan should make common
cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World (there would certainly have been takers in Europe). There was much talk about
unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to
blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom
and democracy. These had to be “overcome.”All agreed that culture-that is, traditional Japanese culture-was spiritual and
profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power . The West, particularly
the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to
produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would restore the warm
organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and
Western intellect. Precisely the same terms had been used by others, in other places, at other times. Blood, soil, and the spirit of the Volk were
what German romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries invoked against the universalist claims of the French
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon's invading armies. This notion of national soul was taken over by
the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, who used it to attack the “Westernizers,” that is, Russian advocates of liberal
reforms. It came up again and again, in the 1930s, when European fascists and National Socialists sought to smash
“Americanism,” Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and “rootless cosmopolitanism” (meaning Jews). Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian scholar, wrote
a book in the 1930s about fascist ideology in Austria and Germany . He called it War Against the West. Communism, too, especially
under Stalin, although a bastard child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was the sworn enemy of Western
liberalism and “rootless cosmopolitanism.”Many Islamic radicals borrowed their anti-Western concepts from Russia and
Germany. The founders of the Ba’ath Party in Syria were keen readers of prewar German race theories . Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an
influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s, coined the phrase “Westoxification” to describe the poisonous influence of
Western civilization on other cultures. He, too, was an admirer of German ideas on blood and soil. Clearly, the idea of the
West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical
terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment , to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization.
Some Marxists have been attracted to it, but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West,
the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global
capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure
destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder. Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 415
fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. Isaiah Berlin once described the German revolt against Napoleon as “the original exemplar of the reaction of many a
backward, exploited, or at any rate patronized society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and
glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character.” The same thing might be said about Japan in the 1930s, after almost a century of
feeling snubbed and patronized by the West, whose achievements it so fervently tried to emulate. It has been true of the Russians, who have often slipped into the role
of inferior upstarts, stuck in the outer reaches of Asia and Europe. But nothing matches the sense of failure and humiliation that afflicts the
Arab world, a once glorious civilization left behind in every respect by the post-Enlightenment West. Humiliation can
easily turn into a cult of the pure and the authentic . Among the most resented attributes of the hated Occident are its claims
to universalism. Christianity is a universalist faith, but so is the Enlightenment belief in reason . Napoleon was a
universalist who believed in a common civil code for all his conquered subjects . The conviction that the United States represents universal
values and has the God-given duty to spread democracy in the benighted world belongs to the same universalist tradition. Some of these values may indeed be
universal. One would like to think that all people could benefit from democracy or the use of reason. The Code Napoleon brought many
benefits. But when universal solutions are imposed by force, or when people feel threatened or humiliated or unable to compete with the
powers that promote such solutions, that is when we see the dangerous retreat into dreams of purity . Not all dreams of local
authenticity and cultural uniqueness are noxious, or even wrong. As Isaiah Berlin also pointed out, the crooked timber of humanity cannot be
forcibly straightened along universal standards with impunity . The experiments on the human soul by Communism showed how bloody
universalist dreams can be. And the poetic romanticism of 19th-century German idealists was often a welcome antidote to the dogmatic rationalism that came with the
Enlightenment. It is when purity or authenticity, of faith or race, leads to purges of the supposedly inauthentic, of the allegedly impure, that mass murder begins. The
fact that anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and a general hostility to the West often overlap is surely no
coincidence. Even in Japan, where Jews play no part in national life, one of the participants at the 1942 Kyoto conference
suggested that the war against the West was a war against the “poisonous materialist civilization” built on Jewish financial
capitalist power. At the same time, European anti-Semites, not only in Nazi Germany, were blaming the Jews for Bolshevism. Both Bolshevism and capitalism
are universalist systems in the sense that they do not recognize national, racial, or cultural borders. Since Jews are traditionally regarded by the defenders of purity as
the congenital outsiders, the archetypal “rootless cosmopolitans,” it is no wonder that they are also seen as the main carriers of the universalist virus. To be sure, Jews
had sound reasons to be attracted to such notions as equality before the law, secular politics, and internationalism, whether of a socialist or capitalist stamp. Exclusivity,
whether racial, religious, or nationalist, is never good for minorities. Only in the Middle East have Jews brought their own form of
exclusivity and nationalism. But Zionism came from the West. And so Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, is the colonial
outpost of “Westoxification.” Its material success only added to the Arab sense of historic humiliation. The idea, however, that Jews are a people
without a soul, mimics with no creative powers, is much older than the founding of the State of Israel. It was one of the
most common anti-Semitic slurs employed by Richard Wagner. He was neither the first to do so, nor very original in this
respect. Karl Marx, himself the grandson of a rabbi, called the Jews greedy parasites, whose souls were made of money.
The same kind of thing was often said by 19th-century Europeans about the British . The great Prussian novelist Theodor Fontane, who
rather admired England, nonetheless opined that “the cult of the Gold Calf is the disease of the English people.” He was convinced that English
society would be destroyed by “this yellow fever of gold, this sellout of all souls to the devil of Mammon.” And much the same is said today about the Americans.
Calculation-the accounting of money, interests, scientific evidence, and so on-is regarded as soulless. Authenticity lies in poetry, intuition, and blind faith. The
Occidentalist view of the West is of a bourgeois society, addicted to creature comforts, animal lusts, self-interest, and
security. It is by definition a society of cowards, who prize life above death. As a Taliban fighter once put it during the
war in Afghanistan, the Americans would never win, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love
death. This was also the language of Spanish fascists during the civil war, and of Nazi ideologues, and Japanese kamikaze
pilots.
And their Occidentalist view of the West necessitates its destruction. The West is seen as opposed to all that is good
The hero is one who acts without calculating his interests. He jumps into action without regard for his own safety, ever ready to sacrifice himself for the cause. And the
Occidentalist hero, whether he is a Nazi or an Islamist, is just as ready to destroy those who sully the purity of his race or creed. It is indeed his duty to do so. When
the West is seen as the threat to authenticity, then it is the duty of all holy warriors to destroy anything to do with the
“Zionist Crusaders,” whether it is a U.S. battleship, a British embassy, a Jewish cemetery, a chunk of lower Manhattan, or
a disco in Bali. The symbolic value of these attacks is at least as important as the damage inflicted. What, then, is new about the Islamist holy war against the
West? Perhaps it is the totality of its vision. Islamism, as an antidote to Westoxification, is an odd mixture of the universal and the
pure: universal because all people can, and in the eyes of the believers should, become orthodox Muslims; pure because
those who refuse the call are not simply lost souls but savages who must be removed from this earth . Hitler tried to
exterminate the Jews, among others, but did not view the entire West with hostility . In fact, he wanted to forge an alliance
with the British and other “Aryan” nations, and felt betrayed when they did not see things his way. Stalinists and Maoists
murdered class enemies and were opposed to capitalism. But they never saw the Western world as less than human and
thus to be physically eradicated. Japanese militarists went to war against Western empires but did not regard everything
about Western civilization as barbarous. The Islamist contribution to the long history of Occidentalism is a religious
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 416
vision of purity in which the idolatrous West simply has to be destroyed. The worship of false gods is the worst religious
sin in Islam as well as in ancient Judaism. The West, as conceived by Islamists, worships the false gods of money, sex,
and other animal lusts. In this barbarous world the thoughts and laws and desires of Man have replaced the kingdom of
God. The word for this state of affairs is jahiliyya, which can mean idolatry, religious ignorance, or barbarism. Applied to the pre-Islamic Arabs, it means ignorance:
People worshiped other gods because they did not know better. But the new jahiliyya, in the sense of barbarism, is everywhere, from Las Vegas and Wall Street to the
palaces of Riyadh. To an Islamist, anything that is not pure, that does not belong to the kingdom of God, is by definition barbarous and must be destroyed. Just as the
main enemies of Russian Slavophiles were Russian Westernizers, the most immediate targets of Islamists are the liberals, reformists, and
secular rulers in their own societies. They are the savage stains that have to be cleansed with blood. But the source of the barbarism
that has seduced Saudi princes and Algerian intellectuals as much as the whores and pimps of New York (and in a sense all infidels are whores and pimps) is the West.
And that is why holy war has been declared against the West.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 417
And The west is best liberal society is the most successful combination of strong economics and freedom. But this
society is under existential threat from the inside. It is under threat from both the imperialism the 1AC criticizes
and the manner in which the 1AC criticizes it. And that criticism inevitably results in the Suicide of the West
RichardKochbusiness entrepreneur author of many books Chris Smith british policy expert. Held multiple chairmenships of british government agencies as a
policymaker 2006 [suicide of the west continuum national publishing group]
Though Westerners rarely acknowledge it, western liberal civilization provides far greater benefits for its citizens than
other civilizations Liberal society is the most successful formula yet devised, and probably that could ever be devised, for
combining a vibrant economy and society with the highest ideals of human dignity an autonomy. The west is unique in
having, in all its countries, with their differing and ever-changing political complexions, one common political and social
culture, that of liberal civilization. While liberal societies exist outside the west the norm is quasi-liberal states, failed
states of tyranny. Liberalism is the theory and practice of freedom. Freedom arose as a result of unique European and
American historical developments, notably the influence of Christianity and of radical egalitarian ideas; the struggle for
political rights by self-confident and economically important individuals and groups; and the development of habits of
collaboration across groups and classes, fuelled by increasing wealth. It is more difficult for countries outside the west to
develop liberal civilization simply because their history is different from that of Europeans and Americans. Other
Countries need to go through a long period of struggle and constructive conflict, including the evolution of collaboration
between different social groups, if democracy and freedom are to mean anything when they arrive. It is possible that the
pressures of globalization and the arrival of instant pre-packaged Western mores may deny many non-western countries
the time and isolation necessary to develop their own viable liberal societies. Of course those outside the west may
develop even better polities and societies, building on or independent of western models; but the early signs are not
auspicious. If better models are not developed, the best that can be hoped for may be somewhat inauthentic imitations of
western liberalism that nonetheless work tolerably well. In the twentieth century, western liberalism was nearly killed off
by challenges from three competing western ideologies- national-ism fascism and communism. The current external
threats to liberalism-revolutionary Islam and other strains of terrorism- have large popular appeal in the west and are
militarily weak. Yet despite its success and the weakness of its external enemies liberal civilization is under dire threat.
The most serious dangers are all self-inflicted. Although the liberal agenda in the last century has been marvelously
effective in increasing the security, welfare and freedom of ordinary westerners, liberalism is much less appreciated than it
used to be. Liberalism arose because of the west’s history, but history alone cannot sustain liberalism. It needs constant
practice and renewal. ‘Liberal imperialism’ has tarnished America’s global image as the home of freedom. The media
have usurped and diminished the political stage; politics has become trivialized and devalued liberals have lost self-
confidence, passion and forward momentum. Most harmfully, the dogma of relativism has manufactured millions of anti-
social ‘victims’, removing the sense of civic responsibility without which liberal communities cannot thrive. The
devaluation and privatization of truth is profoundly dangerous, because ultimately a civilization requires a set of shared
beliefs that underpin confident, collaborative action. Unless enthusiastic liberals-of all political parties and persuasions,
and none-stand up for collaborative freedom and rekindle enthusiasm for it the west is likely to move to a less pleasant
civilization, where liberty and community fade because there is not inspiring cause to lift citizens above the relentless
pursuit of self-interest.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 418
The alternative is to do the plan without the 1AC’s Occidentalist representation of the west. attempting to force
western values on the Muslim world is wrong but that does not mean that western values should not be defended,
are not superior, and should not be promoted. The alternative is a way to rekindle the self-confidence, passion and
enthusiasm of liberals by making amends for the past imperialism while affirming the ultimate goodness of
Liberalism
those on
When the West is under attack, as it was on September 11, it is often assumed-not only in America-that the West means the United States. This goes for
the left, who believe that U.S. foreign policy (or “imperialism”) and U.S. corporate power (or “globalization”) have brought the suicide
bombers and holy warriors upon America by marginalizing and bullying the millions of people who have failed to benefit
from the capitalist world order. But it also goes for conservatives, who think that Islamist radicalism, like Communism before, is an attack on “our values,” that
is, on the “American way of life.” There is some truth to those claims. The worldwide reach of Wall Street, Hollywood, and the
U.S. armed forces invites resentment. And to the extent that those institutions represent the American way of life, they are indeed targets of the Islamist
jihad. It is also true that U.S. foreign policy can be misguided, even brutal . And global capitalism can do a great deal of damage as well as
good. Finally, the United States, as the only Western superpower, has indeed come to stand for the West as a whole. And countries, such as Israel, that are looked upon
as U.S. proxies provoke violent hostility for that reason alone. However, the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with
the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothÃ¨que in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to
global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do
not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of
suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok. Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call
Occidentalism (the title of our new book): a war against a particular idea of the West , which is neither new nor unique to Islamist
extremism. The current jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer . This
idea has historical roots that long precede any form of “U.S. imperialism .” Similar hostility, though not always as lethal, has been directed in
the past against Britain and France as much as against America . What, then, is the Occidentalistidea of the West? That is the
problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals whogathered for a conference in Kyoto in 1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was
not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find an ideological justification for Japan's mission to
smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia . The topic of discussion was “how to overcome the modern.”
Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the
Japanese spirit. The “modern thing,” said another, was a “European thing.” Others believed that “Americanism” was the enemy, and that Japan should make common
cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World (there would certainly have been takers in Europe). There was much talk about
unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to
blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom
and democracy. These had to be “overcome.”All agreed that culture-that is, traditional Japanese culture-was spiritual and
profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power . The West, particularly
the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to
produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would restore the warm
organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and
Western intellect. Precisely the same terms had been used by others, in other places, at other times. Blood, soil, and the spirit of the Volk were
what German romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries invoked against the universalist claims of the French
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon's invading armies. This notion of national soul was taken over by
the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, who used it to attack the “Westernizers,” that is, Russian advocates of liberal
reforms. It came up again and again, in the 1930s, when European fascists and National Socialists sought to smash
“Americanism,” Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and “rootless cosmopolitanism” (meaning Jews). Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian scholar, wrote
a book in the 1930s about fascist ideology in Austria and Germany . He called it War Against the West. Communism, too, especially
under Stalin, although a bastard child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was the sworn enemy of Western
liberalism and “rootless cosmopolitanism.”Many Islamic radicals borrowed their anti-Western concepts from Russia and
Germany. The founders of the Ba’ath Party in Syria were keen readers of prewar German race theories . Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an
influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s, coined the phrase “Westoxification” to describe the poisonous influence of
Western civilization on other cultures. He, too, was an admirer of German ideas on blood and soil. Clearly, the idea of the
West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical
terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment , to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization.
Some Marxists have been attracted to it, but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West,
the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global
capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 419
destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder. Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is
fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. Isaiah Berlin once described the German revolt against Napoleon as “the original exemplar of the reaction of many a
backward, exploited, or at any rate patronized society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and
glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character.” The same thing might be said about Japan in the 1930s, after almost a century of
feeling snubbed and patronized by the West, whose achievements it so fervently tried to emulate. It has been true of the Russians, who have often slipped into the role
of inferior upstarts, stuck in the outer reaches of Asia and Europe. But nothing matches the sense of failure and humiliation that afflicts the
Arab world, a once glorious civilization left behind in every respect by the post-Enlightenment West. Humiliation can
easily turn into a cult of the pure and the authentic .Among the most resented attributes of thehated Occident are its claims to
universalism. Christianity is a universalist faith, but so is the Enlightenment belief in reason. Napoleon was a universalist who
believed in a common civil code for all his conquered subjects . The conviction that the United States represents universal
values and has the God-given duty to spread democracy in the benighted world belongs to the same universalist tradition. Some of these
values may indeed be universal. One would like to think that all people could benefit fromdemocracyorthe use of
reason.The Code Napoleon brought many benefits. But when universal solutions are imposed by force, or when people feel threatened or humiliated or unable to
compete with the powers that promote such solutions, that is when we see the dangerous retreat into dreams of purity. Not all dreams of local authenticity and cultural
uniqueness are noxious, or even wrong. As Isaiah Berlin also pointed out, the crooked timber of humanity cannot be forcibly straightened
along universal standards with impunity. The experiments on the human soul by Communism showed how bloody universalist dreams can be. And the
poetic romanticism of 19th-century German idealists was often a welcome antidote to the dogmatic rationalism that came with the Enlightenment. It is when purity or
authenticity, of faith or race, leads to purges of the supposedly inauthentic, of the allegedly impure, that mass murder begins. The fact that anti-
Americanism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and a general hostility to the West often overlap is surely no coincidence.
Even in Japan, where Jews play no part in national life, one of the participants at the 1942 Kyoto conference suggested
that the war against the West was a war against the “poisonous materialist civilization” built on Jewish financial capitalist
power. At the same time, European anti-Semites, not only in Nazi Germany, were blaming the Jews for Bolshevism. Both Bolshevism and capitalism are universalist
systems in the sense that they do not recognize national, racial, or cultural borders. Since Jews are traditionally regarded by the defenders of purity as the congenital
outsiders, the archetypal “rootless cosmopolitans,” it is no wonder that they are also seen as the main carriers of the universalist virus. To be sure, Jews had sound
reasons to be attracted to such notions as equality before the law, secular politics, and internationalism, whether of a socialist or capitalist stamp. Exclusivity, whether
racial, religious, or nationalist, is never good for minorities. Only in the Middle East have Jews brought their own form of exclusivity and
nationalism. But Zionism came from the West. And so Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, is the colonial outpost of
“Westoxification.” Its material success only added to the Arab sense of historic humiliation. The idea, however, that Jews are a people without a
soul, mimics with no creative powers, is much older than the founding of the State of Israel. It was one of the most
common anti-Semitic slurs employed by Richard Wagner. He was neither the first to do so, nor very original in this
respect. Karl Marx, himself the grandson of a rabbi, called the Jews greedy parasites, whose souls were made of money.
The same kind of thing was often said by 19th-century Europeans about the British . The great Prussian novelist Theodor Fontane, who
rather admired England, nonetheless opined that “the cult of the Gold Calf is the disease of the English people.” He was convinced that English
society would be destroyed by “this yellow fever of gold, this sellout of all souls to the devil of Mammon.” And much the same is said today about the Americans.
Calculation-the accounting of money, interests, scientific evidence, and so on-is regarded as soulless. Authenticity lies in poetry, intuition, and blind faith. The
Occidentalist view of the West is of a bourgeois society, addicted to creature comforts, animal lusts, self-interest, and
security. It is by definition a society of cowards, who prize life above death. As a Taliban fighter once put it during the
war in Afghanistan, the Americans would never win, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love
death. This was also the language of Spanish fascists during the civil war, and of Nazi ideologues, and Japanese kamikaze
pilots. The hero is one who acts without calculating his interests. He jumps into action without regard for his own safety, ever ready to sacrifice himself for the cause.
And the Occidentalist hero, whether he is a Nazi or an Islamist, is just as ready to destroy those who sully the purity of his race or creed. It is indeed his duty to do so.
When the West is seen as the threat to authenticity, then it is the duty of all holy warriors to destroy anything to do with
the “Zionist Crusaders,” whether it is a U.S. battleship, a British embassy, a Jewish cemetery, a chunk of lower
Manhattan, or a disco in Bali. The symbolic value of these attacks is at least as important as the damage inflicted. What, then, is new about the Islamist holy
war against the West? Perhaps it is the totality of its vision. Islamism, as an antidote to Westoxification, is an odd mixture of the universal
and the pure: universal because all people can, and in the eyes of the believers should, become orthodox Muslims; pure
because those who refuse the call are not simply lost souls but savages who must be removed from this earth . Hitler tried
to exterminate the Jews, among others, but did not view the entire West with hostility . In fact, he wanted to forge an alliance
with the British and other “Aryan” nations, and felt betrayed when they did not see things his way. Stalinists and Maoists
murdered class enemies and were opposed to capitalism. But they never saw the Western world as less than human and
thus to be physically eradicated. Japanese militarists went to war against Western empires but did not regard everything
about Western civilization as barbarous. The Islamist contribution to the long history of Occidentalism is a religious
vision of purity in which the idolatrous West simply has to be destroyed. The worship of false gods is the worst religious
sin in Islam as well as in ancient Judaism. The West, as conceived by Islamists, worships the false gods of money, sex,
and other animal lusts. In this barbarous world the thoughts and laws and desires of Man have replaced the kingdom of
God. The word for this state of affairs is jahiliyya, which can mean idolatry, religious ignorance, or barbarism. Applied to the pre-Islamic Arabs, it means ignorance:
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 420
People worshiped other gods because they did not know better. But the new jahiliyya, in the sense of barbarism, is everywhere, from Las Vegas and Wall Street to the
palaces of Riyadh. To an Islamist, anything that is not pure, that does not belong to the kingdom of God, is by definition barbarous and must be destroyed. Just as the
main enemies of Russian Slavophiles were Russian Westernizers,the most immediate targets of Islamists are the liberals, reformists, and
secular rulers in their own societies. They are the savage stains that have to be cleansed with blood. But the source of the barbarism
that has seduced Saudi princes and Algerian intellectuals as much as the whores and pimps of New York (and in a sense all infidels are whores and pimps) is the West.
And that is whyholy war has been declared against the West. Since the target of the holy warriors is so large, figuring out how
to defend it is not easy. But it is not immediately apparentthat a war against Iraq was the most effective way to fight the
Islamist jihad. Saddam Hussein's Ba’ath regime was a murderous dictatorship that deserved to come to an end, but it was not in line with the holy revolution.
There is no evidence that Saddam wished to destroy the West. Osama bin Laden clearly does, and he is still at large. It may even be that attacking Iraq,
however gratifying in many ways, has made the defense against Islamist revolution harder. Moderate Muslims
everywhere are cowed into silence by aggressive U.S. actions, for fear of being seen as traitors or, worse, barbarous
idolators. As even President Bush has been at pains to point out, the battle with religious terrorism is not a war against Islam, or even religion. Violent
attempts to force secularism on Muslim societies in the past invited the problem of religious extremism and should not be
seen as the solution now. Zealotry was in part a reaction against the aggressive secularism of such regimes as Reza Shah's in Iran during the 1930s. If
political freedoms are to be guaranteed in the Muslim world through popular sovereignty, religion will have to be taken
into account. The best chance for democracies to succeed in countries as varied as Indonesia, Turkey, and Iraq is if moderate Muslims can be successfully
mobilized. But that will have to come from those countries themselves. Even though Western governments should back the
forces for democracy, the hard political struggle cannot be won in Washington, or through the force of U.S. arms. In the
West itself, we must defend our freedoms against the holy warriors who seek to destroy them. But we must also be careful
that in doing so we don’t end up undermining them ourselves. In the balance between security and civil liberty, the latter
should never be sacrificed to the former. We should also guard against the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with
our own forms of intolerance. To think that we are at war with Islamism in the name of Christianity, as some zealots believe, is a
fatal error, for that is to conform precisely to the Manichaeistic view of those who seek to defeat us. Muslims living in the West should not be
allowed to join the holy war against it. But their rights as Europeans or Americans must be respected. The survival of our liberties depends on our
willingness to defend them against enemies outside, but also against the temptation of our own leaders to use our fears in
order to destroy our freedoms.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 421
2NC LINK WALL
1. The aff is an example of liberal guilt- their purpose is not to condemn the violence in Afghanistan which
we have committed but it is to condemn the west as a whole their choice of criticism is no coincidence they criticize
violence only where that violence is done by the west
Jaron Bernstein is a municipal police officer in Ohio with a lifelong interest in military history. A veteran of the U.S. Naval Reserve, he was deployed in the
Middle East in 2008.http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/?p=2356
A personal disclosure is first needed. I am not on the political Right in most way that is reckoned. I am considered a
liberal in US domestic politics. I support fair trade, government regulation of large companies, a substantial tax rate to
fund the state, environmentally green programs, feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, social safety net programs, and
am a proud trade union member. I vote Democratic. Even with those credentials, I have a sufficient distaste for the self
hatred that many (but no means all) on the Left are prone to that I feel compelled to write this piece. While there is a
broad diversity of views among self-described “peace” groupings, there are articulable unified themes they hold in
common. I contend that for those who condemn western actions most vociferously, the real intent is not to support the
(numerous and quite real) victims of western actions. The real effect, and intent in some cases, is to undermine the west
itself. Remove Americans as the bad guys and those same protesters who express heartfelt outrage on the linked video
would be silent, even if the victims were just as dead at Taliban hands. In sum, western left criticism (especially the
farther left one goes on the spectrum) is directed based on theidentity of the actor rather than the actions themselves. That
sounds abstract, so a few selected concrete examples will serve to illustrate: 1. During the Abu Graib torture scandal there
was a newspaper photo of a genuinely outraged Egyptian woman protesting. You would think the idea of seeing Arabs
tortured horrified her so much that she took to the streets. But wait a minute. Saddam Hussein tortured Iraqis in Abu
Graib for far longer and in more nasty ways. Where was she? The Egyptian government in her own city on that very day
probably tortured fellow Egyptian citizens. What are the odds she cared about that enough to rally in public ? 2. Arab
governments routinely torture Palestinians. Arafat tortured Palestinians. Hamas and Fatah today torture Palestinians.
Yet, if you talk to western pro-Palestinian activists you would think that the only person who ever harmed a Palestinian
spoke Hebrew. So is this really about Palestinian rights? Or is it about using Palestinian nationalism and purported
human rights concerns as a useful tool to go after Israel? If the goon squad speaks Arabic then a boycott and sanction
effort isn’t merited? 3. Many on the western left claim to be (and are in many cases) feminist. They will strive mightily
for pro-choice legislation in Congress and the courts. The really brave ones (my spouse did this in her youth) serve as
escorts at abortion clinics. Yet these are the same people who exert little pressure to alter foreign policy toward a very
nasty gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia that also pervades much of the Muslim world to varied degrees. Why not?
Because the blame can’t be pinned on the West. Try explaining that to a Saudi woman who can’t drive, is trapped in a
polygamous marriage and has less freedom than an American woman in 1800. 4. In the video clip a protester was shown
with sign that decried the occupation of Afghanistan and Palestine. Only those two places. Nowhere else. Flag draped
protest coffins are shown at the end of the clip with mainly Palestinian flags. People around the globe die in politically
motivated violence as I type this. The casualty bills (mainly innocent civilians) are orders of magnitude higher than those
currently in the Israel/Palestine conflict or in Afghanistan. The body count in Congo runs into the millions with nary a
word from the organized western Left “peace” movement. Many ethnic groups have occupied homelands. Kurdistan and
Tibet suffer among the worst in terms of recent human rights violations. Yet at the protest shown on this video exactly
three occupations are registered; Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The only rational explanation is that “occupation” is
really just a tool to go after the West. This is the reason why I reject the western Left vision of morality in foreign policy,
whatever my domestic policy views. Self criticism has a valuable place in western thought and politics, but the self
criticism as depicted in the video protest shades into a hypocritical and destructive self hatred.
2. The affs response to the Taliban is worse arguments on case betray the true motives of their
criticism. They show that their impassioned criticism of violence is reserved for the west.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 422
A2 PERMS
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 423
A2 PERM DO THE ALT
1. The perm is severing out of the 1ACs Occidentalist representations. Severing out of 1ACs reps
makes the aff a moving target. It is impossible for the neg to win if the aff can change the meaning of the
1AC every speech. Severance kills in depth education because anytime the neg try to make an argument
about a finer point of the 1AC the aff would just sever out of it. Severance is a voting issue for fairness
and education
2. They chose to write the 1AC the way they did - they should be forced to defend it. Failure to
enforce this would enable teams to speak using horribly offensive language with no consequence
3. Saying “reps don’t change reality” is a tautology because the argument that “fiat doesn’t shape
reality” could be made under the same justifications. This doesn’t mean they should be allowed to sever
out of enforcement of the plan - thus severance of representations is equally abusive
A2 Perm Do both
1. The aff is either severing out of their Occidentalist representations or they are adding an intrinsic
plank something which is not in either the alt or the plan. As of the 2AC the perm is to vague to know
which one they are doing but either way it is a v.i because it makes the aff a moving target destroying
fairness and education
2. Its illogical- the alt is a pic it does the entirety of the plan. They cannot withdraw from
Afghanistan twice.
3. It still links- if they don’t sever out of the reps of the 1AC then they still are an act of liberal guilt
and internalize the occidentalist point of view which ultimately culminates in the suicide of the west
4. There is no net-benefit to doing the perm-we do all of the plan voting aff does not somehow make
the plan better
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 424
K OF THE K OF THE DA
1. K of the K of the DA- the affirmative attempt to criticize the disadvantage exposes their wish of
suicide. They claim that we should ignore the risk of the annihilation of the west because the west has
been imperialist and colonialist etc. etc. These claims are exactly what our Koch and Smith evidence are
talking about. The affs liberal guilt ultimately culminates in the decision to ignore existential threats like
the Disad: suicide
2. The alt solves the links to the DA: the Da functions in the status quo where our liberal self-confidence,
engagement, and passion are being destroyed. Because of our lack of passion the power of our ideas has become
less persuasive forcing us to adopt the mindset of deterrence and prevention of war
3. Thealternative revitalizes liberalism which solves for the impacts to the Das because our ideas are the
things which are most likely to protect us
Second Reinvigorated western ideals. In the contest of ideas and ideals, numbers do not count. If they did, views and
knowledge would never change. What matters is, to some extent, the intrinsic value of the ideas and ideals, and to a larger
extent the intensity with which they are believed. Every dominant religion started as a tiny sect, able to convert through
the power of example and persuasion. The ideological leadership of the west- the fact that no other civilization has an
advanced or coherent set of ideas that works so well- is no guarantee that the ideology will remain dominant or even
extant. If we respect diversity, and do not impose our ideals by force, then intensity of belief is paramount. Belief is not
mainly a matter of instrumental belief, that an idea is worthwhile because it is materially useful. Belief is mainly a matter
of ethical and/or spiritual belief, that an idea is also an ideal a worthy human aspiration. The west can sell oceans of coca-
cola, but oceans of coca-cola cannot sell the West. What the west can uniquely offer is not affluence, because this can
come, as Japan has shown, without adopting the full set of western values. What the west has to offer is personal freedom.
If westerners do not value personal freedom much, or affect not to, the west will have nothing to give and nothing that
will be preserved. Third, attract the rest to the west. Nowadaysm one does not gain a spouse or romantic partner by force,
or by importunate and over the top wooing. One attracts by being friendly, engaging, pleasing, intriguing, even diffident
or coy-in short by being attractive. In the modern market for partners and friends, a relationship is sought, not sold. If
there is any selling, it is extremely soft and subtly.
4. the only realistic way for the West to achieve lasting safety is through this soft power of ideas
the only realistic and sensible alternative is for the West to respect cultural differences, exercise patience and forbearance,
beilive in its best ideas. Spread its influence by example, let the ideas and their results speak for themselves, and gradually
disarm enemies and attract fellow travelers.
5. the affs post-modern critique of truth cuts at the very heart of liberalism. truth becomes privatized which
destroys the scientific investigation and public debate which liberalism is based on. this relativism is the final step
in our suicide. we blame ourselves for the creation of people who hate us. we can no longer recognize our enemies
and can no longer defend our principles.
Finally, there is liberalism’s internal compulsion toward self-destruction. Taken to an illogical but emotionally gratifying
extreme, liberalism denies its own superiority. The quest for precise equality of outcome can destroy equality of
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 425
opportunity. While the battle against remains a key cause for most liberals, it can easily slip into suppressing individuality.
A mistaken belief in the ‘politically correct’ tends to ignore uncomfortable results of scientific research, especially in
psychology and biology. Most importantly , the denial of authority can engender subjective sterility, where any point of
view appears as good as another. Postmodern philosophers assert that everything is relative. Truth becomes ‘privatized’, a
matter of personal opinion rather than a matter of importance arrived at by scientific investigation and public debate. Not
only is nothing better than anything else, but also we can never know the nature of truth. This dubious philosophy has
been used to justify ignorance and elevate emotion and opinion above reason and science. Relativism corrodes the sense
of responsibility without which liberal society cannot work. Reasoned debate can only impose obligations on members of
society if they acknowledge that there is such a thing as ‘the public good’ and that some policies and some forms of
behavior are better than others. The sense of personal responsibility is also being undermined by another development.
Increasingly, personal disadvantages, or the defects of society, are regarded as an excuse for antisocial behavior, whole
swathes of western society have come to see themselves as ‘victims’ who are therefore not liable for the consequences of
their actions. The mass manufacture of ‘victims’ has done untold damage both to them and to the sense of citizens’ mutual
responsibility that liberal communities require. History furnishes countless examples where the human spirit has
overcome war, disability, plague, oppression, famine, food, poverty, social discrimination, and even concentration camps.
It is insulting to assume that disadvantaged people cannot rise above their tribulations that the suffering and difficulties of
all human life somehow justify antisocial or criminal activity. Liberal civilization- in both its Anglo-Saxon and social-
democratic guises- rests on overcoming problems and bad behavior, not multiplying; on taking responsibility, not denying
it. Indiscriminate respect for all cultures, all people and all views shades into acceptance of anti-intellectualism and anti-
liberalism. If everything is relative , then anything-cannibalism, genocide-can be justified. Liberals can be soft touches.
An attempt to see all points of view, filtered through the liberal mind, can lead to a belief that if fanatics such as suicide
bombers hate us, therefore we must gave done something terrible to generate this hatred. That way lies our own suicide if
fascist enemies cannot be recognized, and if liberals will not fight for liberal values, then the barbarians will win. Many
western liberals are perversely unwilling to recognize the unprecedented virtues of western liberal society something that
other society could not have produced, something that is worth defending and, by mutual consent, extending. Perversely
the most dangerous enemy of liberalism is liberalism.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 426
AGENCY MINI-K
The aff denies agency to the other. they assume that the other is only reactive and that any violence they commit
must be our fault. Agency is the most basic part of humanity and denying it is the worst form of dehuminzation
The sense of personal responsibility is also being undermined by another development. Increasingly, personal
disadvantages, or the defects of society, are regarded as an excuse for antisocial behavior, whole swathes of western
society have come to see themselves as ‘victims’ who are therefore not liable for the consequences of their actions. The
mass manufacture of ‘victims’ has done untold damage both to them and to the sense of citizens’ mutual responsibility
that liberal communities require. History furnishes countless examples where the human spirit has overcome war,
disability, plague, oppression, famine, food, poverty, social discrimination, and even concentration camps. It is insulting
to assume that disadvantaged people cannot rise above their tribulations that the suffering and difficulties of all human life
somehow justify antisocial or criminal activity. Liberal civilization- in both its Anglo-Saxon and social-democratic guises-
rests on overcoming problems and bad behavior, not multiplying; on taking responsibility, not denying it.Indiscriminate
respect for all cultures, all people and all views shades into acceptance of anti-intellectualism and anti-liberalism. If
everything is relative , then anything-cannibalism, genocide-can be justified. Liberals can be soft touches. An attempt to
see all points of view, filtered through the liberal mind, can lead to a belief that if fanatics such as suicide bombers hate
us, therefore we must gave done something terrible to generate this hatred. That way lies our own suicide if fascist
enemies cannot be recognized, and if liberals will not fight for liberal values, then the barbarians will win. Many western
liberals are perversely unwilling to recognize the unprecedented virtues of western liberal society something that other
society could not have produced, something that is worth defending and, by mutual consent, extending. Perversely the
most dangerous enemy of liberalism is liberalism.
Dehumanization facilitates genocide

MichelleMaiese, philosophy graduate student at the University of Colorado, research staff at the Conflict Research Consortium,2003,“Dehumanization,”IntractableConflictKnowledgeBase
ProjectoftheConflictResearchConsortium,http://www.intractableconflict.org/m/dehumanization.jsp
Dehumanizationis a psychological process whereby opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving
of moral consideration. Jews in the eyes of Nazis and Tutsis in the eyes of Hutus (in the Rwandan genocide) are but two
examples. Protracted conflict strains relationships and makes it difficult for parties to recognize that they are part of a
shared human community. Such conditions often lead to feelings of intense hatred and alienation among conflicting
parties. The more severe the conflict, the more the psychological distance between groups will widen. Eventually, this can
result in moral exclusion. Those excluded are typically viewed as inferior, evil, or criminal. We typically think that all
people have some basic human rights that should not be violated. Innocent people should not be murdered, raped, or
tortured. Rather, international law suggests that they should be treated justly and fairly, with dignity and respect. They
deserve to have their basic needs met, and to have some freedom to make autonomous decisions. In times of war, parties
must take care to protect the lives of innocent civilians on the opposing side. Even those guilty of breaking the law should
receive a fair trial, and should not be subject to any sort of cruel or unusual punishment. However, for individuals viewed
as outside the scope of morality and justice, "the concepts of deserving basic needs and fair treatment do not apply and
can seem irrelevant." Any harm that befalls such individuals seems warranted, and perhaps even morally justified. Those
excluded from the scope of morality are typically perceived as psychologically distant, expendable, and deserving of
treatment that would not be acceptable for those included in one’s moral community. Common criteria for exclusion
include ideology, skin color, and cognitive capacity. We typically dehumanize those whom we perceive as a threat to our
well-being or values.Psychologically, it is necessary to categorize one’s enemy as sub-human in order to legitimize
increased violence or justify the violation of basic human rights. Moral exclusion reduces restraints against harming or
exploiting certain groups of people. In severe cases, dehumanization makes the violation of generally accepted norms of
behavior regarding one’s fellow man seem reasonable, or even necessary.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 427
A2 ORIENTALISM BAD
Said oversimplifies east-west relations. he overlooks the intellectual power of people in the orient
Science.Jrank.org <a href="http://science.jrank.org/pages/10519/Occidentalism-East-West-Dialogue-Other.html">Occidentalism - East-west Dialogue And
The Other</a>2001 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001.
While the discussion of Occidentalism is often in juxtaposition with that of Orientalism, it can also amount to a criticism
of the latter. Edward Said's critique of Orientalist writingshttp://science.jrank.org/pages/10519/Occidentalism-East-West-
Dialogue-Other.html and studies raised important questions about the Western hegemonic power in shaping the imagery
of the "Orient." But like the Orientalists, as Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi charges, Said, in presenting his thesis on the
Western discursive hegemony, underestimates and overlooks the intellectual power and contribution of the people in the
Orient. In his study of the Persianate writings in history and travelogue by Iranians and Indians during the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries, Tavakoli-Targhi notes that prior to the spread of European power, the Asians not only traveled to
and wrote about Europe, contributing to Persianate Europology, but they also helped the early European Orientalists to
acquire a knowledge of the Orient. In other words, in the exchanges between East and West, the East was not a passive,
silent Other, as portrayed by the Orientalists (and also, ironically, as endorsed by Edward Said). Rather, argues Tavakoli-
Targhi, the Persianate writers displayed equivalent intellectual capability to engage in cross-cultural communications with
their Western counterparts. That the Orientals contributed to the gestation of Orientalism has also been noticed by Arif
Dirlik in his study of South and East Asian history, although he casts this contribution in a more critical light.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 428
2NC- INTERNAL LINK TO DEMOCRACY
Liberal guilt destroys democracy- people won’t vote for the best candidates-this is a medical diagnosis
Lumrix.net Scientific BoardChairman scientific boardProf. em. Dr. Joachim Dudeck 1970-2003 Executive director of the Institute of Medical Informatics at
the University of Giessen. Founder and long-time chairman of the HL7 Usergroup Germany. Pioneer in the usage of XML applications in medicine. Chairman of
CEN XML Task Force in 2000/2001. Participation at several European XML pilot projects. Founder of the Standard Academy arranging lots of XML courses since the
last few years. http://www.lumrix.com/medical/symptoms/self-hatred.htmlNo Date
A more benign version of this type of White self-hatred is referred to as White Liberal Guilt. White Liberal Guilt can
cause a person to become overly-concerned with making up for past injustices and this influences their decisions and
actions. For example, a person voting between two candidates for public office, one white and one a minority, may decide
that even though they feel the white candidate is more qualified to be elected, they will feel guilty if they do not vote for
the minority candidate because it helps make up for past discrimination.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 429
A2 WEST IS NOT BEST
Liberal democracy prevents many scenarios for war and extinction

Diamond 95
Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, December 1995, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s,
http://wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm
OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia
nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful
international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous,
democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth,
the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security
are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy,with its provisions for legality,
accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of
this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war
with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders.
Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face
ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass
destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading
partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally
responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their
environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their
openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they
respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on
which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 430
DEMOCRACY GOOD - WAR
liberal democracy decreases war-the best models prove
Ward and Gleditsch 98
Michael D. Ward, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, and Kristian S. Gleditsch, graduate research
trainee in the Globalization and Democratization Program, at University of Colorado, Boulder, March 1998, The
American Political Science Review
As Figure 1 details, democratization-whether in mild or strong degrees-is accompanied by reduction, not increase,
in the risk of war. Though we do not present graphs of the converse, changes toward autocracy and reversals of
democratization are accompanied by increased risks of war involvement. These risks are proportionally greater
than the decline or benefits of further democratization. Thus, there is strong evidence that democratization has a
monadic effect: It reduces the probability that a country will be involved in a war. Although the probability of war
involvement does not decrease linearly, it does decrease monotonically, so that over the entire range of democracy minus
autocracy values, there is a reduction of about 50%. During the democratic transition, at every point along the way
as well as at the end points, there is an attendant reduction in the probability of a polity being at war. We also find
that reversals toward greater levels of autocracy (not shown) not only increase the probability of war involvement.
Apparently, it is more dangerous to be at a given level of democracy if that represents an increase in the level of
authoritarianism than it is to be at the same level of democracy if that represents a decrease in the authoritarian character
of the regime. Stated differently, reversals are riskier than progress.ll It has been argued that institutional constraints
are theoretically important in translating the effect of democracy into foreign policy (Bueno de Mesquita, Siverson, and
Woller 1992; Siverson 1995). If the idea of democracy is separated into its major components, then the degree of
executive constraints empirically dominates the democracy and autocracy scales (Gleditsch and Ward 1997). Accordingly,
we demonstrate that moving toward stronger executive constraints also yields a visible reduction in the risk of war.
It continues…
CONCLUSION Our results show that the process of democratization is accompanied by a decrease in the
probability of a country being involved in a war, either as a target or as an initiator. These results were obtained with
a more current (and corrected) database than was used in earlier work, and our analyses also focus more clearly on
the process of transition. In comparison to studies that look only at the existence of change in authority
characteristics, we examine the direction, magnitude, and smoothness of the transition process.
liberal democracy decreases the chance of war

Ward and Gleditsch 98
Michael D. Ward, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, and Kristian S. Gleditsch, graduate research
trainee in the Globalization and Democratization Program, at University of Colorado, Boulder, March 1998, The
American Political Science Review
The argument that democratization can bring about war is a powerful critique suggesting limits to the linkage between
democracy and peace. This research examines this claim. Our findings demonstrate that democratizing polities are
substantially less war prone than previously argued. By focusing on the characteristics of the transition process, we
show that as contemporary polities become more democratic they reduce their overall chances of being involved in
war by approximately half. We also find that rocky or especially rapid transitions or reversals are associated with a
countervailing effect; namely, they increase the risk of being involved in warfare. Both in the long term and while
societies undergo democratic change, the risks of war are reduced by democratization and exacerbated by
reversals in the democratization process. To reach these conclusions, we developed and applied a logit model linking
authority characteristics and war involvement using Polity III and Correlates of War databases.
liberal Democracy solves great power war - more likely to negotiate, and when they do fight they choose easy
targets
Tarzi 7
Shah, Professor of Economic Affairs @ Bradley, Democratic Peace, Illiberal Democracy and Conflict Behavior,
International Journal on World Peace, vol 24
Bueno de Mequita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith are among the few who have sought to overcome the conceptual
dilemmas noted above. Specifically they have provided insights on the link between institutions and foreign policy
choices with reference to international disputes and conflicts. They find that democratic leaders, when faced with a
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 431
choice, are more likely to shift greater resources to war efforts than leaders of the autocratic governments because political
survival of the elected democratic regime demands successful policy performance, especially as the winning coalition
grows. Thus, democratic regimes tend to have a military edge over autocratic regimes in war because of the extra efforts
required. Also, "democratic leaders only choose to fight when they are confident of victory. Otherwise they prefer to
negotiate." (22) Bueno de Mequita and his colleagues conclude,Democrats make relatively unattractive targets
because domestic reselection pressures cause leaders to mobilize resources for the war effort. This makes it
harder for other states to target them for aggression. In addition to trying harder than autocrats, democrats are
more selective in their choice of targets. Defeat typically leads to domestic replacement for democrats, so they
only initiate war when they expect to win. These two factors lead to the interaction between polities that is often
termed the democratic peace. Autocrats need a slight expected advantage over other autocratic adversaries in
devoting additional resources to the war effort. In order to initiate war, democrats need overwhelming odds of
victory, but that does not mean they are passive. Because democrats use their resources for the war effort rather than
reserve them to reward backers, they are generally able, given their selection criteria for fighting, to overwhelm
autocracies, which results in short and relatively less costly wars. Yet, democracies find it hard to overwhelm other
democracies because they also try hard. In general, democracies make unattractive targets, particularly for other
democracies. Hence, democratic states rarely attack one another . (23)
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 432
DEMOCRACY GOOD - ETHNIC CONFLICT
liberal Democracy solves ethnic conflict
Halperin 5
Morton Halperin et al, Senior Vice President of the Center for American Progress and Director of the Open Society Policy
Center, 2005, The Democracy Advantage, p. 96-97
Democracies’ capacity to avoid conflict appears to be particularly im portant in ethnically diverse societies.
Democratic governments generally manage social conflicts by channeling them into conventional politics. When
divisive ethnic issues surface in democracies, they usually are expressed in protest rather than rebellion and often
culminate in reformist policies.’7 Similarly, whereas ethnic diversity reduces growth by up to three percentage points in
dictatorships, it has no adverse effects on economic growth in democracies.’ 8 Evidently, democracies are better able to
incorporate the competing interests of diverse societies than are autocracies. The latter, by relying on a narrow
political, economic, and military base of power, tend to direct a disproportionate share of benefits to a single or lim-
ited number of ethnic groups. Indeed, this is a central mechanism by which they ensure the loyalty and discipline needed
to maintain their hold on power. However, the exclusivity and disenfranchisement of this system stirs resentment and
violent opposition.
Ethnic conflicts risk nuclear war

Brown 93
Michael Brown, Director of the Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace, 1993, Ethnic Conflict and
International Security, p. 18
Ethnic Wars and Weapons of Mass Destruction The proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
destruction has added a new dimension to ethnic conflicts: the possibility, however remote, that these weapons could
be used in interstate or intrastate ethnic wars. Both India and Pakistan have nuclear and chemical weapon capabilities,
and tensions between the two have risen to high levels on more than one occasion in recent years. One of the main sources
of tension between the two is India’s claim that Pakistan is supporting Kashmiri separatists and Pakistan’s claim that India
is supporting Sindh insurgents. India and Pakistan are also involved in a prolonged, bitter battle over the Siachen Glacier
and their northern border. Russia and Ukraine both have nuclear weapons stationed on their territory, although the latter
does note yet have operational control of the weapons on its soil. Although military hostilities between the two are
unlikely at present, they cannot be rules out for the future. Another possibility is that central authorities could use
weapons of mass destruction against would-be secessionists in desperate attempts to maintain integrity of their
states. China has both nuclear and chemical weapon capabilities, ad the current regime in Beijing would presumably use every means at its disposal
to prevent Tiber, Xinxiang, or inner Mongolia from seceding, which many in these nominally autonomous regions would like to do. Iran has
chemical weapon capabilities and is trying to develop or acquire nuclear weapon capabilities. One suspects that Tehran would not rule out using
harsh measures to keep Azeris in northwestern Iran from seceding, should they become inclined to push this course of action. It is not inconceivable
that Russian, Indian, and Pakistani leaders could be persuaded to take similar steps in the face of national collapse. Use of nuclear or chemical
weapons in any of these situations would undermine international taboos about the use of weapons of mass destruction and, thus, would be
detrimental to international nonproliferation efforts, as well as international security in general. Although the possibility that a state would use
weapons of mass destruction against its citizens might appear remote, it cannot be dismissed altogether: The Iraqi government used chemical
weapons in attacks on Kurdish civilians in the 1980s.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 433
DEMOCRACY GOOD - STATE FAILURE
liberal Democracy prevents state failure
Halperin 5
Morton Halperin et al, Senior Vice President of the Center for American Progress and Director of the Open Society Policy
Center, 2005, The Democracy Advantage, p. 97
Democratic government is also a bulwark against state failure-the collapse of a central state’s ability to maintain
political order outside the capital city.19 State failure usually results in violent civil conflict and is typified by the
experiences of Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and Afghanistan in the 1 990s. A comprehensive analysis of 75
potential predictors of state failure from 1955 to 1996 found that lack of democracy was one of the three most
important.20 (The two others were material well being as measured by infant mortality rates and the level of trade.) In
other words, the stronger a country’s democratic institutions, the lower the like lihood that it will become a failed
state.
liberal Democracy solves refugee flows

Diamond 95
Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, December 1995, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s,
http://wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm
As for immigration, it is true that people everywhere are drawn to prosperous, open, dynamic societies like those of the
United States, Canada, and Western Europe. But the sources of large (and rapid) immigration flows to the West
increasingly tend to be countries in the grip of civil war, political turmoil, economic disarray, and poor governance:
Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Central America, Algeria. And in Mexico, authoritarianism, corruption, and social injustice have
held back human development in ways that have spawned the largest sustained flow of immigrants to any Western
country--a flow that threatens to become a floodtide if the Zedillo government cannot rebuild Mexico's economy and
societal consensus around authentic democatic reform. In other cases--Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan--
immigration to the West has been modest only because of the greater logistical and political difficulties. However, in
impoverished areas of Africa and Asia more remote from the West, disarray is felt in the flows of refugees across
borders, hardly a benign development for world order. Of course, population growth also heavily drives these pressures.
But a common factor underlying all of these crisis-ridden emigration points is the absence of democracy. And,
strikingly, populations grow faster in authoritarian than democratic regimes.
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 434
DEMOCRACY GOOD - HUMAN RIGHTS
liberal democracy is essential to the advance of human rights
Sharansky 4
Nathan Sharansky, Israel’s Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs and former Soviet dissident, 2004, The Case for
Democracy, p. 205
In the post 9/11world, many democratic governments now have a better appreciation of how difficult it can be to find the
appropriate balance between providing maximum security to your citizens and protecting human rights. In debating issues
like the Patriot Act or the rights granted to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Americans are confronting a dilemma that Israel
has faced since the day it was established.
Human rights violations can and do take place in democratic societies. But one of the things that sets democracies
apart from fear societies is the way they respond to those violations. A fear society does not openly debate human rights
issues. Its people do not protest. Its regime does not investigate. Its press does not expose. Its courts do not protect. In
contrast, democratic societies are always engaged in self-examination. For example, look at how the United States dealt
with the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison. Even before the abuse
became publicly known, the army had suspended those involved and was conducting a full investigation. And as soon as
the disturbing pictures of the abuse were published, America’s democracy was shocked into action. The Congress,
determined to find the culprits, immediately convened public hearings, and demanded a full account of what led to the
abuse. Politicians and opinion makers insisted that the people responsible for the abuse be held accountable, including
those at the very top of the chain of command. The media mulled over the details, pursuing every allegation, tracking
down every lead. The American people openly discussed what the abuse said about their own country’s values, its image
in the world, and how that image would affect the broader War on Terror. The U.S. president, for his part, apologized to
the families of the victims and said that those responsible would be punished. But let’s not forget that the treatment of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib under Saddam was far worse than anything America was accused of. Yet were pictures
distributed of Saddam’s soldiers murdering, raping, and torturing Iraqis? If they had been distributed, would Iraq’s
parliament have conducted public hearings? Would the Iraqi media have reported it? Would anyone have publicly called
for the resignation of Saddam’s defense minister, let alone Saddam himself? Would Saddam have denounced the brutality
and apologized to the victims and their families? Far from showing that all societies are the same, the human rights
abuses that sometimes occur in democracies often help illustrate the tremendous moral divide that sepa rates free
and fear societies. While I have not always agreed with the decisions made by my government on issues related to human
rights, my experience has made me confident that these issues are thoroughly discussed and debated and that the need
to protect human rights is never ignored. I suspect that in most other free societies the situation is much the same.
Every democratic state will choose its own balance between protecting security and protecting human rights, but concern
for human rights will always be part of the decisionmaking process. The free world is not perfect, but the way it
responds to its imperfections is only further proof that human rights can only be protected in demo cratic societies.
washing away the fargreater crime of colonialism. Against every kind of moral reservation, then, there is a guilty conscience that
can paralyze any thought of criticism. For this generation, which saw colonialism in its worst moments and for
which it has a deep disgust, guilt lives on long after the circumstances that gave rise to it. And the severity of the
judge is in inverse proportion to the distance of the country in question. The farther away the country is from
European shores, the greater is its claim to total freedom from condemnation.The slightest scuffle with the police
in the streets of Paris, Berlin, or Milan proves the monstrous nature of the capitalist system. Every year, some
magazine or pundit predicts the return of fascism in France, Germany, or Italy. In contrast,hangings by the
dozen in some Near Eastern country, the almost systematic use of torture beyond the Mediterranean, and
"reeducation camps" in socialist countries are looked upon either as negligible or as ideologically justified.
South of theEquator, assassination is a humanitarian act and repression a historical necessity. The remorseless and
self-righteous critic who endlessly denounces the deceptions of parliamentary democracy is suddenly rapt with
admiration before the atrocities committed in the name of the Koran, the Vedas, the Great Helmsman, or negritude.
Because perfect democracy does not exist anywhere, theimperfect democracies of the West can be damned and the
worst forms of political power legitimated.What was a partisan feeling in the Northern hemisphere became
conformity to tyrannies elsewhere. There was no need to subscribe to the disciplines or dogmas of these regimes.
The fact that they were far away gave them a seal of authority that would have been suspect in Paris. This led
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 435
many non -Marxist intellectuals, even many Christian activists, to fawn on these states and the scholasticism they
spout as doctrine. Because of the unforgettable mistakes committed by the West, they placed their greatest hopes
on those who hated us and spat in our faces. Many could have echoed the phrase of the poet Louis Aragon,who wrote in 1925, “We
are the defeatists of Europe....We are the ones who always hold out our hands to the enemy...” Third Worldism validates this black-and-white vision, which
would have the sinfulness of one side stand forever as witness tothe grace and virtue of the other. The spiritual bankruptcy of certain liberation movements and
the crudest slogans of their leaders areexhibited as so many words form the Savior. At the same time, intellectual rigor, logic, and education, which are exclusive
property ofwealthy countries, are rejected as diabolical imperialist ploys. Puny insurrections and the slightest of uprisings are given enormous attention, far
out of proportion to their real importance. The ignorance and sectarianism of tropical gangsters are treated with reverence. Glory is given to the parade of
splendid Asians who have been called upon to destroy European civilization. The mostoutrageous lunacies are praised to the skies by enlightened intellectuals,
\ the splendor of a healthy barbarism”28 By this axiom, anyone who
who are only too happy to submit to a primitive authority toabase themselves “before
uplifts, praises, or celebrates the West is suspected of the worst sort of evil. Modesty, humility, self-
destructiveness, and whatever else might lead Europeans to effacethemselves and give up leadership are honored
and saluted as wonderfully progressive. The golden rule of this masochism is simple: Whatever comes from us is
bad; whatever comes from them is perfect. Formerly colonized peoples are prized as perfect through and
through. Love your enemies. Our atheistic times never followed this Christian exhortation more faithfully than in the
1970s. Of course, there was little difference-we do not hallow the enemy in hopes of a future reconciliation but
rather seek in him our own destruction. Since the Westerner was not a man except at the expense of the rest of the
human race, mankind will not become human again except at the expense of the West. This is why the outlaw has been a
figure of frenzied adoration in the West for thelast 30 years.How many of us, in our heart of hearts, have regretted that he was not born a worker, a woman, a
Chinese, Indian, or Ghanaian,since these are the categories of people endowed with inno cence in the European imagination? This is the typical mistake of
Third World-lovers, as soon as they become convinced that solidarity with underdeveloped countries requires that they admire, rather thancorrect, the sufferings.
In 1839, Lord Macaulay, Minister in Charge of Indian Affairs for His Majesty the King of England, declared,"Our native subjects have more to learn from us
than we do from them" (cited in Imperialism, Phil Centin, NY; Walker & Co., 1971).His great-great grandsons, only too happy to makeup for past mistakes,
say exactly the opposite, again and again. The passionatebelief in fantasies of the world dreamed by the formerly oppressed is the price for redeeming
Europe's classic claim to define itself asthe only measure of what was human. The white man, strangely enough, tries to describe himself
in the same oversimplified andmalicious terms once used by the colonizer to describe the colonized.30 Carefully
selected accounts end up showing only thoseepisodes of Western history that demonstrate that he is loathsome.
A sort of generalized and sweeping reductionism is practiced-one that cannot see subtleties.The more simplistic an
explanation is, the more chic it is. The "headhunter complex"-the ability to reduce a society to a few salient features in order to dismiss it-is at work here, just as
the Jivaro headhunter shrinks the headof his enemy to the size of an apple
UTNIF 2010 PAGE 436
GUILT K
Making you responsibility for all of colonialism negates life and results in totalitarian violence inthe name of guilt
purging.
Bruckner, French writer and philosopher, 1986[Pascal, ..The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt , p.126-127]
When the West is blamed for the evils of the world, three main types of accusations are presented: Guilt by history:
You are responsible for the frightful genocide of colonialism that was carried on against Indians and blacks from the
Renaissance to the twentieth century by your ancestors. Guilt by contagion: You are guilty of being the happy
descendants of these unscrupulous freebooters, and you must not forget that your prosperity is built on the corpses of
millions of natives. Guilt by confirmation: You demonstrate that you are no better than your conquering forefathers
because you do not react when hunger kills children and new nations are pushed into underdevelopment by your
selfishness. In short, the present is the consequence of the past, and the future will repeat it. The question is not open to discussion-day by day and year by
year the list of sins grows longer, sins imputed to a community of people on whom weighs the ancestral suspicion of having fouled the wellsprings of life.
Evil is a sort of anthropological curse that attaches to people in countries of the temperate zones. The West is supposed to be cruel and toxic-
like cat hairs are to an asthmatic. No matter what we may do, our error remains and we cannot expiate our sins. By a
device like that used n anti-Semitism or racism, collective characteristics are cited, and a whole group of people in all their variety are treated as a single
person whose criminal nature is ascribed. There are no more human beings, simply entities- the French, the Germans, the
Americans-in the same way as one talks of the Jews and the Arabs. The amalgamation of a certain group of people,
regime, or government guilty of certain actions with the people they belong to transforms political guilt into
metaphysical guilt. If the West is genocidal by definition (the way ice is cold), if the responsibility is collective and
goes back to the dawn of time, what is the point of denouncing its inherent criminality here or there in El Salvador,
Brazil, or South Africa, and seeking to pro tect its victims?What is past is past, irrevocably; why should we be eternally responsible for it?
How long will the peoples of Europe continue to be blamed for the atrocities committed by their ancestors? When will it end, this genealogical blackmail
that, in the name of reparations and collective interests, would make us the indirect accomplices of slave trading, massacres, and pillage? There is
nothing so dangerous as this idea of collective responsibility, which is transmitted¥ indefinitely from generation to
gen eration, and which evokes memories of the worst sort of totalitarian coercion. In the context of French history,
our army applied the concept of collective responsibility in Algeria, when, in response to a guerrilla attack, it razed
villages, massacred citizens, and tortured suspects. A respect for the past cannot be allowed to lead to confusion of
debts and charges. Penance for the wrongs of the past cannot be irretrievably committed to a seamless and endless
history. To suppose that Europeans and Americans are naturally or culturally evil is as intellectually lazy and
moralistic as to say the opposite . It avoids thinking seriously about contemporary conditions of violence and
oppression. It is wrong to declare that the West is guilty simply because it exists, as if it were an insult to
creation, a cosmic catastrophe, a monstrosity to be wiped off the face of the earth . The question of Israel is
fundamental in this regard. Throughnon-recognition of the Jewish state, the entire Western World is held to be
illegitimate.

Utnif 2010 Just War AFF (Final)

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JUST WAR AFF JOHNSON + HANTEL

UTNIF 2010 PAGE 1

GREGORY, DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY SCHOLAR AND PROFESSOR OF GEOGRAPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF

JWT DISCRETE ADVANTAGE

GENDER DISCRETE ADVANTAGE (6/7)

Bleiker, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, in ‘3

Der Derian 1998

Dillon, Department of Politics and International Relations University of Lancaster, in 07

Alexander Wendt, prof @ yale, 95 [Constructing International Politics]

Alexander Wendt, prof @ yale, 95 [Constructing International Politics]

SOCIOBIOLOGY IS COMPLETELY SKEWED - DOESN’T EVALUATE DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR - IGNORES

Predictions Obliterate agency

Reduce can include an elimination

2. LABELING AN IDEA AS UTOPIAN IS BAD - OUR SURVIVAL RELIES ON UTOPIAN THINKING

3.UTOPIAN THINKING HAS MUCH TO OFFER FOR HEURISTIC SOLUTIONS

Increased Middle Eastern instability goes nuclear

against the US.

post-structural approaches can be usefully

Thayer, Baylor University Political Science Professor, in ‘10

Thayer, Baylor University Political Science Professor, in ‘10

Violence is inevitable due to evolutionarily developed traits.

Thayer, Baylor University Political Science Professor, in ‘10

Thayer, Baylor University Political Science Professor, in ‘10

full share of responsibility in solving it."

The legal system is a tool to be

America has high hegemony now

Pull out/defeat of Afghanistan will hurt U.S. international credibility

Withdrawal emboldens terrorists - leads to new funding and recruitment

A strong US presence is key to prevent terrorist takeover in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Obama is signaling strong commitment to the timetable

And this turns case - drone warfare outweighs just war

Withdrawal causes Taliban fill-in and civil war

Dehumanization facilitates genocide

Liberal democracy prevents many scenarios for war and extinction

liberal democracy decreases the chance of war

Ethnic conflicts risk nuclear war

liberal Democracy solves refugee flows

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