CRISIS IN THE GULF, BY GEORGE BUSH, SADDAM HUSSEIN, ET ALIA.
AS TOLD TO _THE NEW YORK TIMES_.
by
FREDERICK M. DOLAN
University of California at Berkeley
Copyright (c) 1991 by Frederick M. Dolan, all rights reserved
_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.2 (January, 1991)
. . . the bases for historical knowledge are not
empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts
masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.
-- Paul de Man
In the life of a nation, we're called upon to define
who we are and what we believe. Sometimes the choices
are not easy. As today's President, I ask for your
support in the decision I've made to stand up for
what's right and condemn what's wrong all in the cause
of peace.
-- George Bush
[1] The crisis in the Gulf, as today's President
acknowledges, is in large measure a crisis of self-
definition: a matter of identity (as in defining America's
role in a post-cold war world, and indeed of writing the
rules for such a world), of marking or highlighting the
boundary between self and other (as in the ownership and
control of "the world's largest oil reserves," or as between
the civilized and the uncivil). Following a long
Orientalist tradition, the West feels compelled to go
_elsewhere_ in search of its defining characteristics, even
if this means, to use President Bush's own metaphor, drawing
lines in the sand. As his image forces one to reflect,
sand--especially the shifting, wind-blown sand of the
Arabian Empty Quarter--is a most unstable medium, and a line
drawn in it is likely to be erased with the next change in
weather. The contours of the boundary lines and identity
President Bush hopes to define remain, it is true, somewhat
murky. At the same time, for those who have followed
literary theory over the past two decades, the battle over
what meaning to assign Iraq's invasion of Kuwait possesses
an uncanny familiarity. The seemingly anarchic
spin-doctoring of American officials charged with
formulating war aims that seem at once defensible and
feasible, and the way in which their efforts have been
judged and interpreted in the press, have to do, in
particular, with the much-discussed questions of allegory,
symbol, and irony.
[2] At first glance, the debate in Congress and the media
appears to be an argument over the appropriate allegorical
reading of the Gulf crisis, with the Bush administration
insisting on the pre-text of World War II and the lessons of
Munich, and its critics favoring the script of Vietnam. To
much of the public, the Bush administration's deployment of
nearly 400,000 troops, and billions of dollars of weaponry
both high-tech and low, is allegorically intelligible in
terms of the story of America's tragic and ambiguous
"involvement" in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, it is said, the
United States is taking the lead in fighting somebody else's
war; as in Vietnam, the Middle East is figured as a
"quagmire" in which American troops will become--what
else?--"bogged down." The Middle East will be transformed
into a huge Lebanon, with the emergence of hopelessly
ambiguous and complex factions intractable to the Manichaean
American mind. American morale will gradually be destroyed,
and America's standing in the world will once again be
diminished.
[3] Against this allegorical interpretation of the crisis,
officials, media pundits, and a farrago of "experts" on
matters from national security to Middle Eastern politics
insist that the events taking place in the Gulf bear no
relevant relationship to Vietnam. Our commitment in the
Gulf is clear and forceful where it was ambiguous and
shifting in Vietnam. As opposed to the gradual escalation
that characterized Vietnam, plans for war in the Gulf, in so
far as we can tell from press reports, suggest an all-out,
all-or-nothing operation. More importantly--though for
ideological reasons this point, _qua_ allegory, must remain
tacit--the campaign against Saddam Hussein involves "big
principles" and "vital interests" (the tacit point being
that Vietnam involved neither). The vital interests are
variously described as oil or jobs; the big principles are
those of territorial integrity, opposition to aggressive
war, and respect for United Nations resolutions. The
allegorical pre-text for the Persian Gulf crisis, in this
optic, must be World War II, in which economic interests and
unassailable principles fortuitously combined to produce a
"Good War." Indeed, the invasion of Kuwait was allegorized
almost from the beginning of the crisis. The first reported
invocation of the Munich Analogy is attributed to "Senator
Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Democratic chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, [who] called Mr.
Hussein `the Hitler of the Middle East' and criticized Mr.
Bush for not having moved earlier to forestall an
invasion."^1^
[4] The significance of the crisis was more fully
articulated the next day in a column by Flora Lewis entitled
"Fruits of Appeasement."^2^ Characterizing the takeover of
Kuwait as a "blitzkrieg invasion," Lewis notes how it caused
"European commentators to remember Hitler," whose lust for
power also provoked a "dithering argument over whether it
was wiser to indulge him or try to isolate and block him
. . . until it was too late." Like Hitler, Hussein's aims
are not regional, but global: "he is determined to become
the great leader of the Arab nation, and not just another
nation but a world power based on guns and oil. His
relentless drive for a nuclear weapon is not only to
threaten his neighbors and Israel; it is to change the whole
balance of power." The day after Lewis's column appeared,
A.M. Rosenthal confirmed her reading, characterizing the
invasion as "a declaration of war against Western power and
economic independence" and asserting that "Western leaders
have failed in their duty to prepare action against the
plainest threats of aggression since Adolf Hitler."^3^ A
few days later he rounded out the picture by placing the
invasion of Kuwait within a larger narrative whose plot is
driven by anti-Semitism: "Hussein's dream of dominating the
Arab Middle East was never separate from his vision of
ultimate duty and destiny--the elimination of the state of
Israel. [...] For all other Arabs who long for Israel's
extinction, Saddam Hussein's passion against the Jews is
what counts. . . ."^4^
[5] Bush quickly caught on. Although in his first
statements he invoked Hitler only obliquely, describing how
"Iraq's tanks stormed in blitzkrieg fashion through Kuwait
in a few short hours,"^5^ and attempted to justify possible
war by reference to U.S. economic and energy interests, by
the middle of August he was relying heavily on the allegory
of World War II. In a speech to the Pentagon, for example,
the President reminded his audience that "A half a century
ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an
aggressor," and went on to vow that "We are not going to
make the same mistake again."^6^ Over the next few months,
Bush struggled to make U.S. policy in the Gulf allegorically
intelligible through reference to World War II. Iraqi
aggression, Bush said in early November as he announced new
troop deployments, "is not just a challenge to the security
of Kuwait and other Gulf nations, but to the better world
that we have all hoped to build in the wake of the cold war.
The state of Kuwait must be restored, or no nation will be
safe, and the promising future we anticipate will indeed be
jeopardized."^7^ In December Bush was still offering this
theme. In Hussein, he insisted, like Hitler, we find "a
dangerous dictator all too willing to use force, who has
weapons of mass destruction and is seeking new ones and who
desires to control one of the world's key
resources. . . ."^8^ Indeed, Hussein was at one point
alleged to be _worse_ than Hitler.
[6] What _is_ the allegorical significance of World War II?
The obvious meaning has to do with the dangers of appeasing
tyrants, of course, and this is the interpretation supplied
by the Bush administration. But I think I can discern in
the speeches and pronouncements and debates another meaning
as well, one that becomes accessible through Paul de Man's
interpretation of the ideological function of the "symbol"
in Romantic literature.^9^ The symbol was understood by the
Romantics as a privileged representation whose meaning
derived from its evocation of an extra-linguistic
relationship as opposed to significance generated through
linguistic conventions or relationships, such as allegory,
where the meaning of a story depends upon a larger
narrative. For de Man, the appeal of a symbolic
understanding of representation is to allow the time-bound,
finite subject to "supplement" himself with nature's eternal
laws:
The temptation exists . . . for the self to borrow, so
to speak, the temporal stability that it lacks from
nature, and to devise strategies by means of which
nature is brought down to a human level while still
escaping from "the unimaginable touch of time." (De
Man, 197)
Wordsworth, for example, represents the "movements of
nature" as "endurance within a pattern of change, the
assertion of a metatemporal, stationary state beyond the
apparent decay of a mutability that attacks certain outward
aspects of nature but leaves the core intact" as in "The
immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed
/ The stationary blast of waterfalls. . . ." (_The Prelude_,
quoted in De Man, 197). Through such privileged signs, the
subject moves beyond temporal limits to a confrontation with
the eternal real. For de Man, however, the very idea of a
symbol, as a figure, relies on an act of "ontological bad
faith," a mystification of language that suppresses the
dependence of _all_ linguistic figuration on a range of
pre-texts or pre-existing literary signs.
[7] The utility of de Man's analysis is that it enables us
to grasp that the official allegorizing of the Gulf crisis
is not _put forward_ as allegory; rather, the intent is to
establish Iraqi aggression as a _symbol_ in the Romantic
sense. World War II was the "Good War" because it rescued
us from our finite, mutable, temporal concerns and put us in
direct contact with the Real: the eternal, unchanging moral
and political principles that define us as a nation.
President Bush hopes to convince us that Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait offers an opportunity to step outside the everyday
administrative concerns of politics and business as usual,
and renew our commitment to the principles that make us who
we are; it is in this sense that, in Bush's words, the Gulf
crisis calls us to "define who we are and what we believe."
According to de Man, the way out of the bad faith of the
symbolic leads through irony, but he is quick to warn that
irony carries with it its own potential for mystification.
Through irony, he argues, the self is led to recognize its
constructed rather than original character:
The reflective disjunction [characteristic of irony]
not only occurs _by means of_ language as a privileged
category, but it transfers the self out of the
empirical world into a world constituted out of, and
in, language--a language that it finds in the world
like one entity among others, but that remains unique
in being the only entity by means of which it can
differentiate itself from the world. (De Man, 213)
It is too crude, however, to say that irony subverts the
claim of symbolic language to have accessed the Real by
exposing and foregrounding the lack of closure between the
linguistic sign and its meaning, because the latter is
characteristic of figural language generally: the "structure
shared by irony and allegory is that, in both cases, the
relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous,
involving an extraneous principle that determines the point
and the manner at and in which the relationship is
articulated" (De Man, 209). What is unique about irony is
its dynamism:
Irony is unrelieved _vertige_, dizziness to the point
of madness. Sanity can exist only because we are
willing to function within the conventions of
duplicity and dissimulation, just as social language
dissimulates the inherent violence of the actual
relationships between human beings. Once this mask is
shown to be a mask, the authentic being underneath
appears necessarily as on the verge of madness." (De
Man, 215-216)
For this reason, irony can operate as a trope of
demystification, replacing the reassurance of interpretative
conventions with the madness of endless interpretation. Yet
as the current contest of allegories suggests, a mere
plurality of competing perspectives, however healthy for
politics, does not suffice for the purposes of
demystification. And it is demystification--the sifting and
evaluation of truth claims, the establishment of a reliable
account of the world--upon which the institutional privilege
of journalism thrives. In this context it is noteworthy
that the press has resorted to irony in its attempt to cast
doubt on official explanations of policy. In a world of
agonistic interpretations--literally, a _polemical_ public
sphere in which no absolute ground is recognized or can be
discovered--the press can fulfill its pledge to deliver the
Real only through ironizing the public agon, that is, only
by analyzing it in terms of meanings which are different
from and displace those signified by the public discourses
themselves. To place itself on the ground of the Real,
journalism must constantly foreground the discrepancy
between the public claims and the "real" meaning of these
claims. Thus the press forces to self-consciousness the
constructed character of public discourse, in part simply by
highlighting the availability of differing allegorical
readings of the event. Bush's Munich Analogy never quite
took, and the public and press continued to find in the
stories of Vietnam allegorical meanings of a more relevant
nature. A few days after Bush's November escalation of the
U.S. troop presence in the Gulf, doubts about the Munich
analogy and fear of a "repeat" of Vietnam were front-page
news: "In a joint statement, the House Speaker,
Representative Thomas S. Foley, Democrat of Washington, and
the majority leader, Representative Richard A. Gephardt,
Democrat of Missouri, said, `We urge the President to
explain fully to the American people the strategy and aims
that underlie his decision to dispatch additional forces to
the region'." The article moved quickly to frame the issue
in terms of the appropriate allegorical reading:
On explaining the motives for American action,
President Bush has stopped emphasizing the need to
protect oil supplies, an issue he once cited along
with the need to resist aggression. He now
concentrates on opposing aggression, comparing Mr.
Hussein to Hitler. There are critics of both
rationales, and a fear of repeating the Vietnam
experience--suffering great loss of life for little
purpose.
[...]
One-third of voters surveyed on Election Day opposed
American military action that would produce heavy
casualties, a level of opposition reached during the
Vietnam War only after several years of fighting. The
survey also found the clear beginnings of the sort of
partisan division that tore the country during
Vietnam: two-thirds of those opposing American action
in the gulf, and in particular, Black Americans, voted
Democratic. But more than half of those who say the
nation should persevere even in the face of many
casualties voted Republican.^10^
A few days later, the public's insistence on allegorizing
the Gulf crisis through Vietnam was again front-page news:
"as Americans confront the possibility of another war,
history seems to present a troubling multiple-choice
question: Would this be another World War II, or another
Vietnam?"^11^
[8] Amidst the clash of allegories, the Bush administration
reeled to-and-fro from one explanation to another, to the
point where narrative incoherency itself was explicitly
thematized as a public concern. In early November, a week
before the escalation, Bush tested the waters by issuing
more condemnations of Iraq. The result was hysteria among
Republicans running for re-election in the Senate and House,
who attacked Bush for deploying confusing messages:
"Republican strategists continued to express their disdain
for the performance of the White House in this critical week
before the election. `They don't have their act together,'
one counselor to the White House said. `They're living in a
fog. They're confusing the American public.'"^12^ The
inability to tell a coherent story quickly became a public,
not merely partisan, issue: "A common complaint . . . [among
the public] was that the Bush Administration seemed unable
to come up with a consistent--and compelling--account of
what the United States was preparing to fight for. Was it
to protect oil sources, they wanted to know, or to prevent
further aggression, or simply to maintain the status quo?"
(Kolbert, A10). Indeed, within a few weeks it began to
appear as if journalists were more concerned about the
incoherency of the narratives on offer than with the
substance of policy itself, and by mid-November, the
inability of the administration to construct a satisfying
story had become a source of frustration within Bush's
cabinet itself: "Mr. Baker, Mr. Bush's former campaign
chairman, is said to have grown exasperated with White House
speech writers' inability to present the President's gulf
policy in a simple, coherent and compelling fashion so that
it will have the sustained support of the American
public."^13^ Bush himself was eventually forced to
acknowledge widespread fears of ambiguity and lack of
closure: "if there must be war . . . I pledge to you there
will not be any murky ending" ("Excerpts From President's
News Conference" 4). In effect, Bush promised that the war
would be fought in such a way as to allow for the telling of
coherent realist narratives, with endings implicit in their
beginnings and unambiguous resolutions.
[9] But the press also emphasizes the difference between
sign and meaning by undermining in its own voice the
coherency of the proffered explanations and justifications.
Very early in the crisis, Thomas L. Friedman drew attention
to the vagueness of the Bush administration's justifications
of policy and attributed this to U.S. officials'
unwillingness to state publicly the real rationale for the
policy.^14^ "[S]peaking privately," these officials list
"three interests at stake in the Gulf. One is the price of
oil. Another is who controls the oil. The third is the
need to uphold the integrity of territorial boundaries so
that predatory regional powers will not simply begin
devouring their neighbors." But Friedman goes on to
question even these "private" reasons as valid explanations
for the policy, suggesting at one point that, for Bush and
his advisers, U.S. control of the Persian Gulf is such a
deeply held assumption that they may be incapable of
explicitly defending it. The real explanation, Friedman
suggests, is that the United States wants to preserve the
status quo in the Persian Gulf, a desire prompted by
economic interest: "Troops have been sent to retain control
of oil in the hands of pro-American Saudi Arabia, so prices
will remain low." Anna Quindlen bemoans the discrepancy
between sign and meaning in a similar vein:
Our reality has outstripped the traditional stories of
brave men going out to fight and die for a great cause
while their women wait staunchly at home and provide
security and normalcy for their children. We have
become more complicated than the scripts of old
movies. Now we have brave women going out to fight
and die for a cause none of us is sure of while their
children struggle to feel secure with grandparents or
aunts and uncles. We are going to war for oil, and,
by extension, for the economy. The President trots
out his Hitler similes to convince us otherwise.^15^
At times, the general public awareness of this discrepancy,
fueled, of course, by the rhetorical strategies of the press
itself, acquires a news value of its own: "what marks the
current crisis is the way Americans are talking openly about
the President's inability to `sell' war to a wary populace"
(Kolbert, A1).
[10] The reader will have noticed that in these examples,
the "dynamism" or "madness" that de Man attributes to irony
is conspicuously lacking; instead, irony is presented as yet
another journalistic factoid, to be objectively represented.
As practiced by _The New York Times_, ironization has the
opposite effect of demystification. De Man cautions against
seeing irony as "a kind of therapy, a cure of madness by
means of the spoken or written word":
When we speak . . . of irony originating at the cost
of the empirical self, the statement has to be taken
seriously enough to be carried to the extreme:
absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself
the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of
a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the
inside of madness itself. But this reflection is made
possible only by the double structure of ironic
language: the ironist invents a form of himself that
is "mad" but that does not know his own madness; he
then proceeds to reflect on his madness thus
objectified. (De Man, 216)
This, de Man says, makes it easy to see irony as a kind of
_folie lucide_ which, in allowing "language to prevail even
in extreme stages of self-alienation," might be viewed as a
remedy for the mad displacement of sign and meaning through
rigorous self-consciousness about the irony of language.
This indeed seems to be precisely the claim of the press,
which, under the circumstances of a phantasmagoric public
sphere, maintains its claim to a privileged surveillance and
objectivity by delivering the truth that all public
representations are false.
[11] But to construe irony in this way, de Man argues, is
the ultimate mystification. To illustrate, he discusses
Jean Starobinski's reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann's _Prinzessin
Brambilla_. In Hoffmann's tale, an acting couple who
confuse their own lives with the "meaningful" roles they
play on stage are "`cured' of this delusion by the discovery
of irony," after which they find happiness in domesticity.
But as de Man insists, "the bourgeois idyll of the end is
treated by Hoffmann as pure parody . . . far from having
returned to their natural selves, [the hero and heroine] are
more than ever playing the artificial parts of the happy
couple" (De Man, 217-218). De Man concludes that "at the
very moment that irony is thought of as a knowledge able to
order and cure the world, the source of its invention
immediately runs dry. The instant that it construes the
fall of the self as an event that could somehow benefit the
self, it discovers that it has in fact substituted death for
madness" (De Man, 218). For de Man, then, "true irony"
would be "irony to the second power or `irony of irony.'"
Through continual invention, such ironizing would state "the
continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction
with the actual world" (De Man, 218). This is achieved only
by refusing to see irony as a trope of mastery or
reconciliation; and yet it is precisely as a sign of mastery
that irony is deployed by the press. Ironically--I use the
term advisedly--the Bush administration occupies the
vanguard when it comes to the impossibility of reconciling
world and text, in its insistence on the impossibility of
knowing what the U.S. Constitution says about the authority
to use force, and hence of knowing precisely how the
Constitution is to be applied to the real world. While
Congress insists on the text's legibility (only Congress,
Congress says, has the power to make war), Bush insists on
its ambiguity:
On Tuesday, influential lawmakers pressed Mr. Bush to
call a special session, with many members of Congress
saying that the President would be usurping their
constitutional power to send American troops into
combat if he acted without Congressional approval.
Mr. Bush responded today by pulling a copy of the
Constitution from his suit pocket at a meeting with
Congressional leaders from both parties and telling
him that he understood what it said about the
responsibility of Congress to declare war. But, he
added, "It also says that I'm the Commander in Chief."
Later, Baker had a two-hour meeting with congressional
leaders and held a news conference:
While agreeing that only Congress has the authority to
declare war, Mr. Baker said, "There are many, many
circumstances and situations indeed where there could
be action taken against American citizens or against
American interests that would call for a very prompt
and substantial response." Mr. Baker said that Mr.
Bush would follow the Constitution, but added with a
smile, "It's a question of what the Constitution
requires."^16^
[12] But Bush's insistence on the ambiguity of the
Constitution should not lead us to assimilate his conduct in
office to Ronald Reagan's postmodern presidency. While
Reagan taught us to celebrate, and above all to exploit, a
political and social world in which distinctions between the
simulated and the real were simply irrelevant, Bush, it
would appear, intends to lead us back to the Real, to invent
a politics beyond that of Reagan's handlers--which, of
course, means war, since death, as always, is the union card
of the Real, the one "event" that escapes the handler's
grasp. Bush, we might say, is Romantic where Reagan was
postmodern. Arrayed against Bush's Romantic symbolism is
the weak irony--that is, the mystified lucidity--of the
press. Indeed, lucidity--in a precisely defined official
sense--is fast becoming a condition of death as well as
life. In the issue of _The New York Times_ that featured
the report on widespread public awareness of the discrepancy
between political sign and political meaning, an editorial
referred to the Louisiana Supreme Court's ruling that a
murderer who became insane after he was condemned to death
could be forced to take a drug that would render him
"mentally competent" to undergo execution. The weak irony
cultivated by the _Times_ may well involve a similar
economy: we must be just lucid enough--that is, just
skeptical and uncertain enough--to feel that we master the
world, so that we may sacrifice ourselves to its truths, and
in particular to the truths of who we are and what we
believe.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
^1^ R.W. Apple, Jr., "Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait And
Its Oil; U.S. Condemns Attack, Urges United Action," _The
New York Times_, August 3, 1990, A1, A8.
^2^ Flora Lewis, "Fruits of Appeasement," _The New York
Times_, August 4, 1990, 24.
^3^ A.M. Rosenthal, "Making a Killer," _The New York
Times_, August 5, 1990, E19.
^4^ A.M. Rosenthal, "Saddam's Next Target," _The New
York Times_, August 9, 1990, A23.
^5^ "Excerpts From Bush's Statement on U.S. Defense of
Saudis," _The New York Times_, August 9, 1990, A18.
^6^ Quoted in R.W. Apple, Jr., "Bush Says Iraqi
Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life,'" _The New York
Times_, August 16, 1990, A14.
^7^ "Excerpts From Bush's Remarks on His Order to
Enlarge U.S. Gulf Force," _The New York Times_, November 9,
1990, A12.
^8^ "Excerpts From President's News Conference on
Crisis in Gulf," _The New York Times_, December 1, 1990, 4.
^9^ See Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality,"
_Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism_ (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228.
^10^ Michael Oreskes, "A Debate Unfolds Over Going To
War Against The Iraqis," _The New York Times_, November 12,
1990, A1.
^11^ Elizabeth Kolbert, "No Talk of Glory, but of
Blood on Sand," _The New York Times_, November 15, 1990,
A1.
^12^ Maureen Dowd, "Bush Intensifies A War Of Words
Against The Iraqis," _The New York Times_, November 1,
1990, A1.
^13^ Thomas L. Friedman, "U.S. Jobs at Stake in Gulf,
Baker Says," _The New York Times_, November 14, 1990, A8.
^14^ Thomas L. Friedman, "U.S. Gulf Policy: Vague
`Vital Interests,'" _The New York Times_, August 12, 1990,
A1.
^15^ Anna Quindlen, "New World at War," _The New York
Times_, September 15, 1990, A21.
^16^ Maureen Dowd, "President Seems to Blunt Calls For
Gulf Session," _The New York Times_, October 29, 1990, A1.
