[...] defied, and, hardly coincidentally, of the bad guys’ first victims. For financial traders, that vexingly tenacious, quasi-mythical or imaginary link between 9/11 Al Qaedists and the defiant tyrant leader of enemy Iraq would have been more real or [...]
[...] we continue the walk down memory lane, bob recalls for us the “imminence” debate, which raged on for years, and is one element of the “Bush lied, people died” theory of [...]
Well most of the parties, opposed to the war, like the French, Germans and Russians, were in Iraq's pocket, If Iraq had readily available stockpiles, they would like likely have used them, and the casualties would be magnitudes higher then what we saw, the same tribesman who did little to fight the Baathists for nearly 40 years, were all to willing to murder the coalition forces, so I'm not terribly surprised about that.
The argument as I remember was not mere possession, although th weapons inspectors cast doubt on even that, but immenent threat.
Friends and foes agreed Iraq might have some/the capacity/the intention of some form of WMD, but the considerable international resistence to the war included the assessment that whatever Sadam had it did not constitute an immentent threat, that the sanctions and monitoring should continue.
The vacuum created by the doubtfulness of immenent threat created space for alternative explanations.
If one was solely concerned with oil, the target would have been Saudi Arabia, WMD was the consensus argument, because most everyone from the SVR to Jordanian Mukharabat thought they had them.
No doubt everyone on any side or sub-side of any war argument will run into trouble to whatever extent he or she over-interprets a particular talking point that makes whatever sense it makes only in a particular argumentative context, or, even worse, over-interprets someone else's over-interpretation, or still worse, over-interprets someone else's over-interpretation of someone else's over-interpretation. We're all subject to the tendency to say much less and much more than we mean to say, or than we might have thought we even could say or mean.
I think Feaver is right that the discourse is "contaminated" by myths, but maybe the notion that there is a single discourse on the war is also a kind of myth, or maybe the total discourse on the war has to be understood as a discourse made up of multiple relatively autonomous discourses. The overdetermination of war is also the overdetermination of a war of discourses. At any moment in the course of such a war, it is easy to mistake the discussion with which one is most familiar for "the" discussion, or to take the merely apparent results of whatever latest battle as the actual results of the actual war. Right now, we seem to be under an intellectual consensus regarding a particular war narrative, allowing for claims of having been "right" or confessions of having been "wrong." That such a superficial consensus depends upon suspicion regarding a former superficial consensus might awaken new suspicions. That it mostly seems not to ought to reinforce them...
re: Feaver's list of myths: I recall hearing the 3rd one from war supporters (i.e.: "Iraq is strategically important because of its oil, & we have an opportunity to make Iraq more politically favorable to us") to an extent.
The discussion around this is portrayed as "hah, we're gonna steal their oil!" vs considering oil as a factor by the opposition at all being denounced as crazy talk. If ones argument in opposition is more along the lines of "what a sovereign foreign nation chooses to do with its natural resources is not a legitimate grounds for war", just because Damn Hippies can agree with it doesn't make the concept itself nothing more than Damn Hippie "Blood for oil!" talk (to extent that being such automatically sticks it Out Of The Mainstream, that is).
[...] defied, and, hardly coincidentally, of the bad guys’ first victims. For financial traders, that vexingly tenacious, quasi-mythical or imaginary link between 9/11 Al Qaedists and the defiant tyrant leader of enemy Iraq would have been more real or [...]
[...] we continue the walk down memory lane, bob recalls for us the “imminence” debate, which raged on for years, and is one element of the “Bush lied, people died” theory of [...]
Well most of the parties, opposed to the war, like the French, Germans and Russians, were in Iraq's pocket, If Iraq had readily available stockpiles, they would like likely have used them, and the casualties would be magnitudes higher then what we saw, the same tribesman who did little to fight the Baathists for nearly 40 years, were all to willing to murder the coalition forces, so I'm not terribly surprised about that.
The argument as I remember was not mere possession, although th weapons inspectors cast doubt on even that, but immenent threat.
Friends and foes agreed Iraq might have some/the capacity/the intention of some form of WMD, but the considerable international resistence to the war included the assessment that whatever Sadam had it did not constitute an immentent threat, that the sanctions and monitoring should continue.
The vacuum created by the doubtfulness of immenent threat created space for alternative explanations.
If one was solely concerned with oil, the target would have been Saudi Arabia, WMD was the consensus argument, because most everyone from the SVR to Jordanian Mukharabat thought they had them.
No doubt everyone on any side or sub-side of any war argument will run into trouble to whatever extent he or she over-interprets a particular talking point that makes whatever sense it makes only in a particular argumentative context, or, even worse, over-interprets someone else's over-interpretation, or still worse, over-interprets someone else's over-interpretation of someone else's over-interpretation. We're all subject to the tendency to say much less and much more than we mean to say, or than we might have thought we even could say or mean.
I think Feaver is right that the discourse is "contaminated" by myths, but maybe the notion that there is a single discourse on the war is also a kind of myth, or maybe the total discourse on the war has to be understood as a discourse made up of multiple relatively autonomous discourses. The overdetermination of war is also the overdetermination of a war of discourses. At any moment in the course of such a war, it is easy to mistake the discussion with which one is most familiar for "the" discussion, or to take the merely apparent results of whatever latest battle as the actual results of the actual war. Right now, we seem to be under an intellectual consensus regarding a particular war narrative, allowing for claims of having been "right" or confessions of having been "wrong." That such a superficial consensus depends upon suspicion regarding a former superficial consensus might awaken new suspicions. That it mostly seems not to ought to reinforce them...
re: Feaver's list of myths: I recall hearing the 3rd one from war supporters (i.e.: "Iraq is strategically important because of its oil, & we have an opportunity to make Iraq more politically favorable to us") to an extent.
The discussion around this is portrayed as "hah, we're gonna steal their oil!" vs considering oil as a factor by the opposition at all being denounced as crazy talk. If ones argument in opposition is more along the lines of "what a sovereign foreign nation chooses to do with its natural resources is not a legitimate grounds for war", just because Damn Hippies can agree with it doesn't make the concept itself nothing more than Damn Hippie "Blood for oil!" talk (to extent that being such automatically sticks it Out Of The Mainstream, that is).