Extract from Conquering Hearts and Mind (by Andy Davison)
This work reveals the systematic militarization of public opinion by the three successive American Presidential administrations under whose leadership the United States confronted its most militant opponents in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, namely, the regime of Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda Islamist movement. Focusing on the period beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and continuing through the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the work exposes how each administration undermined democratic deliberation by outfitting the citizenry exclusively with those understandings that would make war seem both obligatory and inevitable. Together, these understandings represent what I call the “official American war ideology”: an obfuscating system of beliefs that enabled the “war on terror” to proceed without significant domestic dissent until its controversial extension to Iraq in 2003. The work demonstrates how the terms of this ideology - repeated time and again in televised Presidential speeches, press conferences, and mainstream news programs - have been strategically deployed by top administration officials. It argues that a concerted interrogation of these terms is necessary in order to counter their corrupting influence. The work also situates the official American war ideology in the larger context of conflict over governance in the petroleum-rich gulf. It demonstrates how the terms of this ideology functioned to defend and extend US dominance, in part by undercutting the conditions for democratic debate in the U.S. over energy policy and over the militaristic and religiopolitical foundations of global American power. Despite the readily apparent damage they have done to democratic deliberation and despite their central role in the intensification of conflict in the gulf, the terms of the American war ideology have yet to be adequately questioned. By extending understanding of the ideological manipulations that have functioned to justify war since 1990, this work seeks both to challenge the dominant terms of the public debate on U.S. foreign policy in the gulf and to promote a genuinely deliberative reconsideration of the terms and implications of the “war on terror.” …[T]he American people have been shepherded into war under highly debatable terms, thinking that wars in the Gulf, or in parts of Asia and Africa where its opponents to its Gulf presence conduct their operations, are wars over existence, not over a highly troubling, unaccountable organization of power in the Gulf, “wars on terrorism” not “wars over the Gulf.” The people were told that America’s most militant opponents took up arms against them out of hatred alone, that the world produces evil and it is within their sense of responsibility to rid the world of it. They backed war because they believed that the conflict had nothing to do with earthly considerations of power and human needs. These beliefs must be corrected, and the tide reversed’.
Andrew Davison. 2005. Conquering Hearts and Minds: The American War Ideology in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, 1990-2003. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press. Available through tulumba.com and amazon.com
Andy Davison :: Feb.01.2006 :: Politics :: No Comments »