War Games

There is much to be said about Operation Odyssey Dawn, the US’s name for the UN sanctioned strikes against Libya. We could start with its decidedly impractical name: How about Operation Support Civilian Protesters? I guess it is likely that Odyssey Dawn is more honest, the first phase of yet another potentially long term military odyssey for the US and its allies. However, on the 8th anniversary of the Coalition of the Willing’s illegal invasion of Iraq, and just over 24 hours into the military action against Libya, I simply want to focus on this image I found on the Sydney Morning Herald website earlier this morning.

Just a few days ago, I was discussing with a friend how reprehensible the mainstream media’s coverage of “Shock and Awe” was. I recalled how even though the days preceding the invasion were overwhelmed by mass global debate and protest, as soon as the bombing began, the politics fell out of the mainstream press. By “politics” I mean the US’s  (and the rest of the Coalition’s) Defiance of the UN, the fabrication of the reason for going to war, the massive resistance to the invasion from the citizens of the US, UK, Australia to name a few, and the conflict of military and business interests that Iraq presented the billionaire’s club Bush administration. On the day of the invasion all of this politics was trumped by the spectacular fireworks display that was the invasion bombing of Baghdad. The “Shock and Awe” campaign was designed to send shockwaves through the Iraqi population in order to lubricate the regime change (and wholesale privatisation of the state) [1], but also the “Shock and Awe” was replicated for us to marvel at on TV, only at a much safer distance. It was like some spectacular war game, people I remember would go home after work to “watch the war”. We are right to be angry and cynical about the media representation of the early days of the Iraq war, it was explicitly designed to distract us from the politics. Indeed, that the way in which the mainstream media lapped up the idea of “Shock and Awe” in those early days is possibly the one success story of the invasion. But, the spectacularisation of the invasion of Iraq makes a perverse kind of sense given the objectives of the Coalition; shameful and criminal as it was and still is, Iraq was designed to be shamelessly dazzling. This is not the same in Libya.

In Libya we have a popular uprising violently repressed by a militant dictator, and a concerned international community ‘intervening’ to support the people; or so they say. It is in the meaningful difference between Iraq and Libya that caused my despair upon seeing these images. The series of images captures the destruction one of Gaddafi’s jets, shot down by allied forces enforcing the no fly zone in order to attempt to thwart Gaddafi’s violent backlash against his own people. It is not the destruction of the jet that disturbs me so, it is the captions–“going”, “going”, “gone”–as though the plane was the highest bidder at a high-stakes military auction. For me the captions are an example of a particularly problematic, patronising, post-Shock and Awe, western gaze.

The captions serve no practical purpose; we can tell that the plane is crashing, crashing, crashed without them. While they do not tell us anything about the image itself, they do add something to it. Even though I have no idea who actually created the captions and for what purpose, these captions are fundamentally political. They adopt a moral high ground and neutralise debate around the military action by tacitly assuming that the Allied forces are doing what is right and that whomsoever the soldiers were in that plane got what was coming to them for siding with the enemy. In fact, less than 24hours into this conflict, the captions suggest war itself is a kind of fun game that they are already confidently winning. There is a kind of excitement imbedded in the destruction of this enemy target. The captions, it could be argued, have the same dehumanised tone as the soldiers caught on the wikileaks Collateral Murder video. It seems to me that these images with such playful captions is more at home on some right-wing pro-war discussion board than on a mainstream news website. To me these captions are the journalistic equivalent of Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” speech, only it is perhaps even more pre-emptive. One plane shot down and, mission accomplished, Gaddafi is going, going, gone. Not quite. Not even close.

This war that is less than 24hours old so much is unknown, when and how Gaddafi will retaliate is unknown and the effects are yet to be determined, except for the stated goal of trying to get Gaddafi to stop attacking the civilian protesters other Western interests remain undeclared (Oil?), will the action actually assist anti-government protesters in the end, and how many civilians will die in this process. In spite of the fact that the allied forces successfully shot down one plane with one of the 110 missiles used in the first day of conflict, what will happen in Libya is unknown. At this stage we can only hope that the hubris displayed by our anonymous caption-editor is not the same as those planning the battle, or we might find that it is another Iraq or Afghanistan dawning in North Africa.

*****

[1] “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’ … 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”

“Iraq … was the logical conclusion of Chicago School theory: a public sector reduced to a minimal number of employees, mostly contract workers, living in a Halliburton city state, tasked with signing corporate-friendly laws drafted by KPMG and handing out duffle bags of cash to Western contractors protected by mercenary soldiers, themselves shielded by full legal immunity. All around them were furious people, increasingly turning to religious fundamentalism because it is the only source of power in a hollowed out state. Like Russia’s gangsterism and Bush’s cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatise the world.”

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p.333 & 359

Post script: I spent today at two rallies unrelated to the Libyan conflict: Free Bradley Manning and No more Coal Mines/No Coal Seam Gas. Images here.