Today marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war. America's fearless leader pronounced the removal of Saddam Hussein to be the "right decision." What began with significant public support is now an unpopular undertaking, the first big geopolitical blunder of the 21st century. The costs in Iraqi and American lives, wounded bodies, and money are well known. The political costs for the war seeking Republican party have been only partially registered. The big prize for the Conservative movement, the White House, is very much at risk. Further erosion of the Republican numbers in the Congress portend one of those tectonic shifts in the bedrock of governance, the size of which was last seen in 1980. Noble goals of advancing democracy and restoring human rights have been swamp by ignoble acts: fudged intelligence reports, bullying at the U. N., Democratic party expediency, political manipulation of the terror alert code, a willful pre-emptive war, the absence of weapons of mass destruction, Abu Ghraib, insurgency and civil war, torture, corruption, and generalized incompetence from the Pentagon, State Department, and White House.
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However, the Iraq war's actual beginnings go back to the first days after 9.11, during which emotion reigned over reason, the Congress handed the President a blank check to wage a war on terrorism, and even critical intellectuals went along for the ride. On 9.21.01 philosopher Michael Walzer published an Op-Ed in the New York Times which supported the use of the term "war":
So is it war? The word is unobjectionable as long as those who use it understand what a metaphor is. There is, right now, no enemy state, no obvious battlefield. "War" may well serve, however, as a metaphor to signify struggle, commitment, endurance. Military action, though it may come, is not the first thing we should be thinking about. Instead, in this "war" on terrorism three other things take precedence: intensive police work across national borders, an ideological campaign to engage all the arguments and excuses for terrorism and reject them, and a serious and sustained diplomatic effort.
Although the qualifying remark at the end of this passage is significant, it should not have been placed in a subordinate position with respect to the metaphor war. When a conference was held in the days after this Op-Ed was published, Walzer appeared on stage with a political theorist who was in no mood for metaphorical speech: "If it looks like a war and smells like a war, it is a war." Later in the fall of 2001, the cream of the post-New Left critical intelligentsia assembled in New York to assess the situation; all but one used the term "we" to describe the relationship between "us" (the West, the United States) and "them" (terrorists, middle easterners). This "consensus" was that "our" values and political institutions should be defended. The slippage from metaphor to reality came easily. But beyond these best and brightest critical intellectuals, the State does not know metaphor, it knows only concrete action. War doesn't signify anything to a State. War is the use of force.
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What was required at the time was skepticism towards the use of the word war. Reasons for suspecting the inadequacy of this definition arise when its discursive and practical limits are explored. In order to examine these limits, one must first ask what kind of action is entailed by defining an act of war. Rather than treating this action as self-evident, as a natural or necessary consequence of the events of 9.11, it should be viewed as a world-constituting action that sets the context for specific practical interventions. The declaration of an act of war is a meaning making event. The logic and consequences of this discursive move requires interrogation because the definition of the situation sets limits on future permissible and impermissible actions, both domestically and internationally.
Because of its clear Hobbesian overtones, Carl Schmitt's Political Theology* is a useful tool for bringing clarity to the discursive implications of being-at-war (metaphorical or otherwise). Of direct relevance to the events of 9.11 is his concept of the "exception" and its relation to sovereignty and actions that suspend the rule of law.
Sovereign is he who decides the exception (...). The assertion that the exception is truly appropriate for the juristic definition of sovereignty has systematic, legal-logical foundation. The decision on the exception is a decision in the true sense of the word. Because a general norm, as represented by an ordinary legal prescription, can never encompass as total exception, the decision that a real exception exists cannot therefore be entirely derived from this norm (...). The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law. (pp. 5-6)
What Schmitt imagines is a scenario in which sovereignty comes into sharp focus, such as when the State (a single or collective actor) takes an action that transcends the existing legal order. Such an exceptional action, which Schmitt associates with a situation of extreme political or economic peril, abjures the rule of law even if the decision on the exception is premised on the presence of legal norms. The decision corresponds to events that cannot be entirely planned for within the normatively and normally valid legal system. In short, the occurrence of the unexpected calls forth, and can only be addressed by, the decision on the exception: the sovereign. Schmitt intends his discussion as a presentation of a "general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree and state of siege." (p. 5) His larger point is to ground the legal order on sovereignty rather than a norm: "After all, every legal order, which is applied as something self-evident, contains within it the contrast or two distinct elements of the juristic -- norm and decision. Like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm." (p. 10) Schmitt's decisionism is not the concern here; rather, I am only interested in the insight that his concept of sovereignty provides on the decision that defines an act of war (being-in-war and being-at-war).
In this formulation, Schmitt affirms that it is the sovereign who possesses unlimited power. He points out that the tendency of the liberal constitutional state is to "repress the question of sovereignty by a division and mutual control of competences." Such a tendency is evidenced by the system of checks and balances provided for in the American Constitution, of which the enactment of the War Powers Act of 1973 is a prime example. Yet, according to Schmitt, no amount on constitutional maneuvering can remove the defining moment of sovereignty: the act of deciding the exception. Although Schmitt does provide insight into the ontological conditions of the political, his account of this relationship cannot be accepted at face value. What he defines as an ontological difference (sovereignty versus the nor) is a very practical one. What is missing in Schmitt's otherwise crystalline account of sovereign power is a logically prior step on the way to the decision. This step involves the definition of a state of affairs as anomalous enough to warrant a decision on the exception. The representation of a state of affairs as a state of emergency is the discursive precondition of the enactment of sovereignty. Nonetheless, a state of emergency is itself not self-evident. From an ontological perspective, it might be construed as a state of existence which is outside the norm; a rupture in the fabric of everyday life by something unexpected. From a practical perspective, however, the definition of this break with everyday life is the irruption of the political: the "break" is an act of political definition. This act constitutes a world or space of experience, authorizes certain relations of authority within this experience (sovereignty), which then override other relations of authority (the rule of law).
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In the days before the war began, Jean Baudrillard** described the imminent war as a nonevent.
The analysis must start with this will of cancellation, obliteration, and laundering of the original event [9.11], which makes this war ghostly, to some extent unimaginable since it does not have a final purpose, a necessity, or even of a true enemy (Saddam is only a puppet). This war merely has the form of a conspiracy, of an event that is precisely impossible to do away with. The result is that it is already perpetual, before even having been started. In fact, it has already taken place, and the suspense itself is part of this masquerade. It opens towards and endless war that will never take place. And it is this suspense that awaits us in the future, this diffuse topicality of blackmail and terror in the form of a universal principle of prevention.
This "mask of war", a war foreshadowed by the declaration of a state of emergency, extends the invocation of sovereignty around the world.
This global situation gives credence to Virilio when he speaks about a planetary civil war. The most dramatic political consequence of these events is the collapse of any concept of international community and, more generally, of any system of representation and legitimacy. And the recent world mass demonstrations against the war where, one believes, a rising countervailing power is emerging, are themselves only a worrying symptom of his hiatus, of this fracture of representation. Nobody wants the war, and yet it will take place no matter what, with the more or less camouflaged approval of all powers.
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The exception, unleashed by Bush's decision, has not been entirely tamed. But events such as the failures to legitimate the state of emergency and the overwhelming inadequacy of the sovereign have reduce the scope of the exception. In the end, only regime change can bring the norm back, but will even that be enough?
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*Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 1985 [1934]).
photo credit: bomb exploding in Baghdad 3.19.03, Tyler Hicks @ New York Times
photo credit: Butterfly by Ascona, 3.22.03
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