KUWAIT 1991: A POSTMODERN WAR
 
by
 
CHRIS HABLES GRAY
Copyright (c) 1991 by Chris Hables Gray, all rights reserved.
Distributed by PMC-TALK@NCSUVM / PMC-TALK@NCSUVM.CC.NCSU.EDU
Filename: POMO WAR
 
 
 
     There is no war, then, without representation, no
sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification.
Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of
perception...                           --Paul Virilio^1^
 
     I couldn't have done it without the computers...
                         --Attributed to Gen. Schwartzkopf
 
 
POSTMODERN WAR^2^
 
     During the War for Kuwait the most amazing pictures
were shown on CNN and the other networks.  Bunkers, bridges,
and runways were destroyed again and again on international
television.  But other images captured by this same
technology, videos of scared men running from machines, and
dying by machines, were hidden away.  One reporter, who
managed to see some forbidden gun camera film from Apache
helicopter raids, said, the Iraqi soldiers were
     ...like ghostly sheep flushed from a pen--bewildered
     and terrified, jarred from sleep and fleeing their
     bunkers under a hellish fire.  One by one, they were
     cut down by attackers they could not see...blown to
     bits by bursts of 30mm exploding cannon shells.^3^
The Commander of Desert Shield and Desert Storm,^4^ Army
General H. Norman Schwartzkopf calls it "technology war."^5^
Certainly for the U.S. Forces it was often a technology-
mediated experience with little danger for most.  According
to one incredible statistic, it was more dangerous to be a
young man back in the U.S., with its automobile accidents
and urban murders, than to be serving in Desert Storm!^6^
For Iraqis it was quite a different matter,  hundreds of
thousands dead and the killing continued, as Civil War, into
the Spring and Summer.  It was a war notable for its
paradoxes and its intense "media"tion.  Certainly, it was
the most watched war in history.  But was it a new kind of
war?
     "The Persian Gulf conflict," intones Business Week,
"will almost certainly come to mark the transition between
two forms of war..."  They go on to specify what they
consider the most important elements of this "new war":
1) "the integration of high-technology-based systems,"
2) "a huge array of computer and communications systems"
and, 3) the realization that "politics and public relations
play" a crucial role "in achieving military objectives."^7^
But this is not that new.  It is not much different,
fundamentally, from that very different war, Vietnam.  While
the War for Kuwait certainly broke some new ground (and most
violently), for the last half of this century more and more
commentators have argued that war was changing a great deal.
     The more insightful observers have noticed the
implications of high technology weapons, especially
computers, and the permanent military mobilization that has
existed since 1945.  They have called this new type of war:
permanent war, technology war, high technology war,
technological war, technowar, perfect war, imaginary war,
computer war, war without end, Militarism USA, light war,
cyberwar, high modern war, hyper-modern war, and pure
war.^8^  I call it postmodern war.^9^  These labels all try
to mark how different war is now from World War II, so why
choose "postmodern" over the others?  There seem to be two
good reasons.  First, modern war as a category is used by
most military historians, who usually see it as starting in
the 1500s and continuing into the middle or late 20th
century.  The logic and culture of modern war changed
significantly during World War II.  The new kind of war,
while clearly related to modern war, is different enough to
deserve the appellation "postmodern."  Second, even though
_postmodern_ is a very complex and contradictory term, and
even though it is applied to various fields in wildly uneven
ways temporally and intellectually, there is enough
similarity between the different descriptions of postmodern
phenomena specifically, and in postmodernity in general, to
persuade me that there is something systematic happening in
areas as diverse as art, literature, economics, philosophy,
and war.
     So, I would claim that we are living in a system of
postmodern war, as we have been since 1945.  Cold War is a
big part of this system.  By that I don't just mean the
confrontation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.  Today, all
superpower confrontations are constrained from total war by
nuclear weapons and other devastating technologies.  The
tensions between the U.S. and other Great Powers, as they
used to be called, is relegated to "low-intensity conflicts"
with proxies, political struggles, and economic competition.
Postmodern war depends on international tension and the
resulting arms race that keeps weapons development at a
maximum and actual military combat between major powers at a
minimum.  Real wars still happen, but they are different.
Witness Kuwait 1991.
 
 
RESTORING THE EMIR OF KUWAIT
 
     It was a strange war; but then all wars are strange.
It was a war that could, and should, have been avoided.
That is all past now, rain in the desert.  What we can
wonder at is the incredible effort George Bush and others
put into making this war happen, because it says a great
deal about the shape of the New World Order.  And the war
itself reveals something of the nature of future conflicts,
now more inevitable than ever.
     For the U.S. the New World Order is like the Old World
Order that's reigned since 1945, only more so.  Without the
specter of the Soviet threat to justify a massive military,
new threats have to be cultivated.  A continual state of war
and rumors of war is a key aspect of postmodern war.  In
modern war, war is an extension of politics.  With
postmodern war it is politics that serve as an extension of
war.
     Why is this?  Because war is in a crisis.  The ritual
war of cultures who kept no history first changed (in China
and the Middle East) into ancient civilized war, which
itself coevolved with the first nations and city-states.
The myths and songs of heroes became the history texts of
rulers and their battles.  In Europe, around the middle of
this millennium (common era), modern war developed at the
same time and in about the same place as modern science, the
first modern nation-states, and capitalism.  In war,
science, technology, and innovation began to displace the
incredible conservatism of military culture; aristocrats
gave way to engineers, artillery supplanted calvary,
logistics became more important than leadership, and
gunpowder more important than courage.  Europe began its 500
year conquest of most of the world.  Machiavelli became
modern war's first theorist when he called for a science of
war, general conscription, and decisive, destructive,
battles--in other words, total war.
     By 1945 total war had been perfected all too well.
Technoscience was triumphant in the military establishments
of Europe and North America.  This isn't just because of
atomic weapons, although they are the perfect %reductio ad
absurdum% of the drive for total war.  The conventional
bombing fleets, dependent on industrial might, powerful
bureaucracies to control their vast logistics, and high
explosives, killed many more people.  Chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons clearly are potentially more dangerous
than any possible military use.  But even "conventional" war
has grown incredibly deadly for soldiers, civilians, and
nature as well.  Total war, in a physical sense, is
impossible, so it has become displaced into extremely
violent but limited wars (low to mid-intensity) and total
war in the psychological and political realms.  As Sylvere
Lotringer put it, "War is impossible, [but] it continues
none the less."^10^
     Now we live in a hyper-military reality.  We war on
want, disease, hunger, pollution, AIDS.  We war on
communism, on protesters, on drugs.  We do war research and
weapons development and massive procurements and countless
deployments.  We prepare for nuclear war and conventional
war; we fight mid-intensity and low-intensity conflicts.  We
watch gang wars, civil wars, sf wars and private wars on the
screens.  We live through the race wars, the war of the
sexes, the war against ourselves, and the Cold War.  Yes,
the Cold War continues, except it is now clear what has
always been true: it is a war between the haves and the
have-nots, and it is getting hotter.
     Modern war was almost five hundred years of increasing
military technology and expanding Euro-American military
power.  It culminated in World War II, total war.  Since
then, war cannot be total because it would be apocalyptic,
and, starting with Indochina, the Western Empires have begun
to lose.  Not always, but often enough.  This period, with
its many different, almost incommensurable, types of war
from the extreme technophilia of computer war to the
appropriate technology of people's war, may not last very
long.  It is unstable.  So, unsurprisingly, postmodern war
is a system of paradoxes as much as anything else.  A
listing of the most interesting is revealing.
 
 
PARADOXES OF POMO WAR
 
--The main moral justification for war is now peace.
--The main practical justification for repression is the
fight for freedom.
--Security comes from putting the very future of the planet
in grave risk.
--People are too fragile for the new levels of lethality;
machines are too stupid for the complexity of battle.  War
is becoming inhuman.
--There is a continual tension between bodies and machines.
Militarily machines such as tanks, planes, ships, missiles,
guns, are more important than people.  But in many countries
the people are much more valuable politically.
--The pace of battle is set by the machines, experienced by
the humans.
--Advanced weapon systems are neither machines nor humans,
but both: cyborgs.^11^
--The battlefield is now three-dimensional and ranges high
into space.  It is on thousands of electronic wavelengths.
It is on the "homefront" as much as the battlefront.
--Battle now is beyond human scale--it is as fast as laser
lights, it goes 24-hours a day, it ranges through the
frequency spectrum from ultra-low to ultra-high, it extends
over thousands of miles.
--Obvious genocide, now that it is technologically easy, is
morally impossible.
--The industrialized countries want colonialism without
responsibility (neo); they want empire without casualties.
--Some people in the non-industrial and industrializing
regions want western technology without western culture;
others want both; others want neither.
--Soldiers are no longer uniform.  They range from the DoD
officials in suits to the women doctors at the front lines
with spies, flacks, analysts, commando-warriors, techs,
grunts, and many others besides.
--The traditional "male" gender of soldiers is collapsing,
although it was never absolute.  Woman can now be serve in
almost all the subcategories of postmodern soldier except
for those dedicated directly to killing.
--Civilians, and nature itself, are often more threatened in
battle than soldiers.
 
     All these paradoxes stem from the central problem of
postmodern war--war itself.  Unless war changes radically it
will be impossible for war and humanity to coexist.  So the
old and conservative discourse of war, a very male-gendered
culture, has become wildly experimental and has
institutionalized innovation to an amazing degree, including
the colonization of much of western science and technology,
seeking ways to keep war viable.  If weapons are incredibly
powerful, make them smart.  If combat is unbearably horrible
for soldiers, make of them machines or make machines
soldiers.  If war cannot become total expand it into new
realms, war on your own public like the Argentine military
did in their "dirty" war or, as is happening in the U.S.,
with a war on drugs.  Make new enemies, war for the hearts
and minds of your own public, contain the media, demonize
those who wish to escape your system.  Keep war alive.
     The recent War to restore the Emir of Kuwait and
Chastise Iraq is a good example of how the high-technology
armies of the West have tried to solve the paradoxes of
postmodern war--in this case with great success thanks to
the military and political policies of Saddam Hussein.  Bear
in mind that the other important half of the postmodern war
equation is the successful evolution of irregular (aka
small, little, "imperfect, guerilla, low-intensity,
people's) war from its first victory in North America in the
1770s to its latest successes, still incomplete, in
Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia.  Hussein did not fight
such a war; he didn't have the people or the politics.  He
fought an incompetent, low-grade, high-tech war and it
showed.
     Almost all wars are overdetermined.  There are so many
good reasons to have them.  In the case of Kuwait they were
legion.  Bush's domestic difficulties, the Pentagon's fear
of the peace dividend, the economic importance of MidEast
oil and Kuwaiti banks, the racism against people of color;
but lets not neglect war's own  self-reproducing dynamic.
Barbara Ehrenreich describes this war as, in large part,
"War for war's sake."  Earlier, she had pointed out that,
"it is not only that men make wars, but that wars make
men."^12^  This seems particularly true to me of postmodern
war.
     The implications of this can be seen in some of the
important postmodern elements in the Iraq-UN war.
 
 
ELEMENTS OF POSTMODERN WAR
 
Politics are War Continued by Other Means
 
     Michel Foucault argued that today politics are just war
continued by other means" in a system that is "the
continuation of war" with an "end result [that] can only
be...war."^13^  Both Bush and Hussein see politics as war by
other means.  Bush performed prodigious political feats
simply to get war approved by the UN and the Congress.
Hussein's foreign policy (toward Iran, Kuwait, and Israel)
and much of his domestic policy (especially toward the Kurds
and Shiites)  is war.  Hussein started his political career
as an assassin and he rose to power through his leadership
of the secret police.  Bush's political career started as a
bomber pilot and his rise to power was strongly shaped by
his leadership role in U.S. secret organizations such as the
CIA.
 
Informational War
 
     Information is now the crucial military resource and
information processing a central military function.^14^
Computers were the primary weapon of the U.S.-Allied
victory.  Computers to organize and track the movement of
the massive armies to the Saudi dessert.  Computers to soak
up and sort out the thousands of satellite images and the
hours of captured electronic transmissions.  Computers to
help fly the planes, drones, and helicopters that, along
with all the other weapons, were produced in computerized
factories by robots as often as humans.  Computers to guide
the bombs and missiles and even the artillery shells.
Computers to jam the radars and fool the targeting computers
of the Iraqis.  Computers to send messages and point
satellite dishes as much for CNN as DoD.  Computers to game
the Iraqi responses and predict the regions weather.
Computers to track the weapon platforms and their
maintenance.  Computers to count the weapons expended.
Computers to look up the home addresses of the dead.
     Military theorists decided that for modern war you
needed C-2:  Command and Control.  Early in postmodern war
that became C-cubed-I:  Command, Control, Communications,
and Intelligence.  Just recently it became C-4-I-2:
Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence,
and Interoperability.  Interoperability--computers talking
to other computers and to humans.  Computers, alone among
these categories, are artifacts instead of ideals.  Or
aren't they really both?  The Iraqis responded to the
computer-directed barrage of computer-guided weapons and
televised bombings shown on the countless televised
briefings with fiber-optic communication channels, numerous
simulated targets, and a few stories on CNN.  It was an
uneven contest.  High technology can be defeated but it
takes organization, loyalty, sacrifice, courage, patience,
political acumen, nationalism and allies.  For its part,
while the peace movement in the World could mobilize more
anti-war protesters than there were pro-war, it could not
garner even the same level of coverage either of the war-
sides could.  Still, it was a near thing.  Peace seemed
always about to break out.  The careful deployment of
images, arguments, and weapons by both Hussein and Bush kept
the war alive.
     So, obviously, the centrality of information to
postmodern war is not limited to the battle space.
Controlling information at home is just as important ,and it
has been Pentagon policy since Vietnam to do just that.
 
The expansion of war
 
     War has spread not just to every corner of the globe
but to the very heavens as well.  The U.S. showed itself
quite capable of fighting a major war in the desert, which
included bombing runs flown from snowy England and tropical
Diego Garcia.  It is equally well prepared for industrial
Europe, the jungles of Asia, and even the arctic.  The
battlefield doctrine used in Kuwait was AirLand Battle,
originally prepared for the European Theater (sounds
festive!).  It means that the Air (including space) and the
ground are equally important.  Battle is three-dimensional
now and as it spreads into physical space it compresses in
our version of time.  AirLand Battle goes 24-hours-a-day
thanks to caffeine, amphetamines, radar and infrared.  Rapid
attacks, slashing and thrusting, shatter the enemy fronts
and armies in a matter of hours instead of the days
blitzkriegs took or the weeks and months of most modern war
offensives.  As Paul Virilio has emphasized in his work,
speed becomes crucial.  "There is a struggle...between
metabolic speed, the speed of the living, and technological
speed, the speed of death.^15^  The milliseconds a laser
takes to target a bunker or a jammer to confuse a radar are
the margins of victory.  In the war of mechanical speed
against human reactions bodies are the only real losers.
 
 
Humans--Machines
 
     The U.S. military has been striving for years to
replace men in battle with machines so as to make foreign
wars more palatable to an American public that still refuses
to admit to itself that they are citizens of the World's
most powerful Imperial power ever.  In this particular war,
thanks to overwhelming air superiority and impressed Iraqi
troops a remarkably low U.S. casualty count was achieved,
making the public very happy.  Reagan got more troops blown
up in one hour in Lebanon than Bush lost in the whole war.
But we should not forget that tens of thousands of Iraqi and
Kuwaiti soldiers and civilian were killed.  The second
benefit of the machines-for-men policy that goes back to
Eisenhower officially, is that machines help people kill
more enemies, not just physically but psychologically.  The
thousands of civilians confirmed killed in Iraq by air
attacks (and there are probably tens of thousands dead)
would represent a terrible war crime if they had been killed
by soldiers with guns.
     The morality of the incredible air attacks, the most
powerful ever, can be gauged by this pilot's account of his
experience: "Its almost like you flipped on the light in the
kitchen at night and the cock-roaches start scurrying, and
we're killing them."  Iraqi casualties (civilians too) were
high to keep U.S. casualties low.  Similar decisions were
made, albeit shamefully, during modern wars but to bomb
civilians so as to lose fewer soldiers would have been
considered quite unmanly by earlier standards.  War is no
longer so "manly"--which makes the point that war is no
longer just for men.  Cynthia Enloe has shown that women
have always been important for war, but seldom have they
been allowed to participate directly.  Lately, however,
woman have been allowed closer and closer to the very heart
of war.16  The female soldier's identity collapses into the
soldier persona creating a vaguely male, vaguely mechanical
image.  As one female U.S. soldier put it:  "There aren't
any men or women here, just soldiers."^17^
 
 
War against nature
 
     The Persian Gulf War has been one of the most
disastrous ever for the environment, especially considering
the war's limited scope and duration.  It wasn't just the
direct air, water, and land pollution from the combat or
other hostile actions.  The indirect ecological costs of the
armies, from manufacture to deployment, was at least as
great as the direct battle destruction and probably equals
whatever conscious ecological destruction Hussein ordered.
While humans can now destroy nature the military isn't
really aware of it.  Bureaucratic/logistical and
technoscientific power can now overwhelm the biosphere even
by "accident" or "mistake" as the case may be.
 
 
War as Spectacle
 
     War was once a ritual.  As such it had as part of its
very rationale a focus that linked effective and holy
display with material and metaphysical  efficacy.  As war
became "civilized" the show was less for the Gods and
Goddesses and more for the morale of the warriors on both
sides.  Still, Paul Virilio is right when he says "War can
never break free from the magical spectacle because its very
purpose is to produce that spectacle..."  With postmodern
war, however, a mass media war, it isn't only the U.S. and
allied troops who were ennobled by the great display of
Western weapons, it was all of the West.  And it wasn't just
the Iraqi troops who were bedazzled by their glamour and
their destructive power, although they felt it most truly,
in their bodies.  But it was us, the television watching
world, that witnessed the raids on Baghdad, that rode smart
bombs into shelters and bunkers, that saw Patriots meet
Scuds in cloudy skies.  We were dazzled as well, with
horror, or awe, or pleasure, or all.
     And it was to us, the viewing public represented by the
camera crews of the infotainment industry, that many of the
Iraqi troops surrendered, sometimes even chanting "George
Bush, George Bush."  J. Glenn Gray points out in his
remarkable book, Men in Battle, that the beauty of
explosions and the eroticism of the speed and the sounds of
battle, was very attractive to many soldiers.  Now, from our
living rooms, we can watch these lethal pyrotechnics in real
time and with now danger.  Robert E. Lee said, "It is good
that war is so horrible; lest we grow to fond of it."
Postmodern war isn't horrible at all...for some.
 
 
The new emotions of war
 
     War has always been emotional: fearful, awful,
inspiring, dreadful.  Great currents of love (for comrades
and distant families), pity (for enemy soldiers or civilian
casualties) and hate (for the rear echelons, the brass, and
civilians at home in general) have been felt by most
soldiers in modern war.  Now, however, these emotions
centered around other humans are being replaced by emotions
about machines, especially love for them (technophilia) and
the belief that they can save us (technism).  The
technoeuphoria of the Iraq-U.S. war has only been mitigated
slightly by a nostalgic regard for our soldiers,
particularly those on TV.
 
 
THE SPECIAL DISCOURSE OF POSTMODERN WAR
 
     In postmodern war, the central role of human bodies in
war^18^ is being eclipsed by the role of machines in general
and weapons in particular.  The number of Iraqi tanks and
planes destroyed was always available, the count of dead
Iraqi bodies was not.  It was even considered a
"distasteful" or "pornographic" interest by one British
briefing officer.^19^
     War has always been a discourse system, as many
commentators have noticed.  The gestalt historian Sue
Mansfield argued that, "Traditional cultures clearly
understood war as a form of discourse between the human and
'the other.'" and the meticulous Quincy Wright concluded
"modern war tends to be about words more than about things,
about potentialities, hopes, and aspirations more than about
facts, grievances, and conditions."^20^  So it shouldn't
surprise us to hear Gen. Schwartzkopf remark that "It's hard
to read an army" or Bush defend the war as an act of
definition: "We're called upon to define who we are and what
we believe."  But in postmodern war discourse the best
arguments are weapons and they trump bodies again and again.
While in earlier wars the discourse was limited to "those
who were there" now it is a conversation for the whole
electronic culture, and one where images and simulations are
often much more important than actual events.
     All of these elements increase the chance of future war
which, in spite of the best laid plans of generals and
presidents, always means death, destruction, and confusion.
 
 
THE NEW WORLD DISORDER
 
     In some ways the most surprising thing about the Gulf
War is that it almost didn't happen.  Up until the collapse
of the Cold War with the Soviets the U.S. military never
would have signed on for such a conflict.  Vietnam had
taught the Pentagon that it went into long bloody unpopular
wars at its own peril.  There has been a quiet and heated
debate in the services about every potential war that come
based on a tough criteria, including low casualties and a
short duration.  By the late 80s, with the threat of the
peace dividend, the leadership of the military decided a
larger war, a mid-intensity conflict, would be worth the
risk under certain conditions.
     The U.S. made a commitment to the continuation of the
Cold War militarization of domestic and foreign policy even
as the Soviet Empire began its collapse.  As a Marine Corp
Colonel puts it in an article on "The Corp in 2001":
     Increasing nationalism, religious and racial strife,
     bitter sectarian enmities, competition for materials
     and energy, and endemic poverty will ensure a slow burn
     into the 21st century...The United States for its part
     must be a steadfast 'Arsenal of Democracy' in
     low-intensity warfare, and a combatant only when U.S.
     national interests cannot otherwise be protected.  The
     moral imperative for the United States in the world is
     to be neither victim nor executioner...^21^
     Col. Karch went on to predict numerous low-intensity
conflicts (LICs) and at least one mid-intensity conflict
involving the U.S., most likely in Korea, Southwest Asia, or
the Mediterranean.  Noam Chomsky^22^ quotes a Dimitri Simes,
a well-connected academic, for one version of this new
"American Peace" that many governmental commissions, such as
the recent Kissinger Panel on long-range strategy, have
echoed.  It doesn't seem that peaceful at all.
     First, the US can shift NATO costs to its European
     competitors...Second, it can end the manipulation of
     America by Third World nations...Third...the apparent
     decline of the Soviet threat...makes military power
     more useful as a United States foreign policy
     instrument...
     To justify this new aggressiveness the military had to
claim that today's world was even more dangerous than the
Superpower stand-off.  By 1990 this had become official U.S.
policy.^23^  In 1991 the U.S. made it true.
     Horrible as this war has been it doesn't mark the
beginning of any new era or new type of war.  The New World
Order is the Old World Disorder.  There are some important
things that this war, called by some World War III,^24^
didn't prove.
 
 
WHAT THIS WAR DOESN'T MEAN
 
-- It doesn't mean that high-technology and "smart" weapons
are crucial to winning wars.  The Alliance would have won
this war with dumb weapons.  Almost all the weapons, from
the dumbest to the smartest, worked with the limited
efficiency of everything in war.  The Iraqis had some of the
newest equipment in the world.  It didn't help them.  This
war shows how human will, accurate judgements, and political
alliances are more important than ever in war today.
---This war does not erase the "Vietnam Syndrome."  This is
just wishful, and dangerous, thinking.  The Vietnamese won
the first postmodern war because they had the proper
strategy, motivation, and organization (including important
allies) to match their enemies.  The Iraqis had none of
this.  The Soviets were driven from Afghanistan for similar
reasons.  Fundamentally, both were because the people of the
West and North aren't willing to support long bloody wars
for the sake of empire while many people of the East and
South are willing to fight and die for the hope of something
better than what they have now, or at least to drive foreign
armies out of their countries.
     It doesn't cure the syndrome at home, either.  There
was a truly significant level of resistance to this war,
despite the brilliant political mobilization orchestrated by
the war movement.  It didn't stop this war but the peace
movement came close.  The peace movement is stronger now
than before the war, as is the war movement.  For a while
the right will be euphoric and surly.  In March, Pres. Bush
was gloating that "We led without gloating or arrogance,
which is also an American Tradition."  As time passes,
however, this war, whatever it ends up being called, will
not glitter so brightly.  It certainly is a dangerous step
past Grenada, Libya, and Panama but it also was predicated
on low U.S. casualties and many other factors.  The U.S. may
not get such a clear enemy as Hussein for quite some time.
     This war hardly reestablishes the U.S. hegemony.  That
hegemony was never gone, although there's been some relative
decline since the 1950s.  The troubles in the Soviet Union
seem like a victory now but by eliminating the only "equal"
to U.S. power, the justification for U.S. domination in
Europe and the Far East will be questioned more and more.
In the Middle East things can only get worse.  I expect
Nietzsche will be proven right when he said, "War...makes
the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful."
     In the long run the collapse of the bipolar world could
well lead to opponents with economic power and cultural
influence equal to the U.S. for a change.  Military power is
very important, but just as important are IBM, the World
Bank, Harvard, Hollywood, and CNN.  If military power is
used in place of other forms, and the elite may feel it has
to, than there will be tragedy.
     Many Western analysts have been struck by the power of
this war in terms of images and spectacle.  These are
important, especially in justifying war and seducing many to
its glamour.  But simulations are not as important as the
real, Baudrillard to the contrary.  For those who were
there, or anyone who reflects seriously on what being there
meant, this was war like war has been for thousands of
years--death, fear, relief and many more emotions and real
bodies really dead at another's hand, no matter how remote.
This is the real horror and it holds the true glamour in its
old twisted rituals.
     War is not inevitable.  Actually, it seems to me that
this war demonstrates that postmodern war is a very unstable
and transitional type of war, although there certainly isn't
space here to prove it.  What is clear is that the future is
quite undetermined.
     In the writing class I was teaching during the war we
tried counting all the other wars happening during the War
for Kuwait.  We couldn't.  We ended up with almost 20 but
over the next few days another half-dozen came to mind.  War
is certainly not in danger of disappearing right away.  But
it is in crisis.  Everywhere in the world people are
questioning specific wars and wars in general.  This is as
true in the military as outside it.  You, dear reader, are
also part of that discussion.  With a little thought and
much effort we can all help decide the future of war, and
therefore, of ourselves.
 
-----------------------------------------------------------
 
                            NOTES
 
     1  Paul Virilio, _War and Cinema: The Logistics of
Perception_ (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 6.
 
     2  The term "postmodern war" was first used by Fredric
Jameson when he labeled Vietnam the first postmodern war in
his article "Postmodernism, or on the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism," _New Left Review_, no. 146, July-August, 1984,
pp. 53-92.  There isn't space in this article to explain
postmodernism, or even postmodern war for that matter.
Rather, this essay is just meant to be suggestive and
provocative, hence its collage-like structure of lists which
hope to show how this war was replete with features
generally ascribed to postmodernity.  A full discussion of
postmodern war that contextualizes it historically as well
as theoretically can be found in my forthcoming book,
_Postmodern War: Computers as Myths and Metaphors_, or, in a
somewhat longer and more academic form, in my doctoral
dissertation, _Computers as Weapons and Metaphors: The U.S.
Military 1940-1990 and Postmodern War_, available from UMI
Dissertation Services.
 
     3  John Balzar, "Video horror of apache victims'
deaths," _The Manchester Guardian_, Feb. 25, 1991.  Film
from the Apaches, shot during the U.S. invasion of Panama,
is still being censored as well, even from Congressional
Representatives such as the Honorable Charles Rangel.  He
suspects the film shows Panamanian civilians being gunned
down.  See his article, "The Pentagon Pictures," _New
Patriot_, vol. 4, no. 2, March-April 1991, pp. 12-13.
 
     4  Originally, the attack on Iraq-Kuwait was to be
called Desert Sword, but it was decided for public relations
concerns to try and portray the war as more of a natural
force.  Usually, all military operations are given random
computer-generated names but not in this case--which at
least shows some understanding of the limits of computers.
Perhaps the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, made the
change.  He renamed the Invasion of Panama and Arrest of
Noriega "Just Cause" after the computer gave it the
designation "Blue Spoon".  Blue Spoon just isn't a grand
enough title for an operation that killed hundreds of
civilians and leveled whole neighborhoods just to arrest one
man.  See "Inside the Invasion," _Newsweek_, June 25, 1990,
pp. 28-32.
 
     5  "The High-Tech War Machine" _Business Week_, Feb. 4
1991, p. 38.
 
     6  Leah Garchik, "War Was Healthy and So Are Sardines,"
_The San Francisco Chronicle_, March 18, 1991, p. A8.
Garchik cites _Life_ magazine's fourth and final special war
issue.  Life and Prof. Charles Lave of UC Irvine calculated
that almost 300 U.S. soldiers were saved by their service in
Desert Shield and Storm.  As of March 6, 181 U.S. deaths
were recorded, only 39% of the 467 Lave predicts would have
occurred if the half-million soldiers had been in the U.S.
 
     7  "The High-Tech War Machine," p. 39, "The Army
Marches on Silicon," p. 42, "Managing the War," p. 37, all
in _Business Week_, Feb. 4, 1991.
 
     8  See Seymour Melman, _The Permanent War Economy:
American Capitalism in Decline_ (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1974) [permanent war]; Stefan Possony, Frances Kane and
Jerry Pournelle, _The Strategy of Technology_ (Cambridge,
MA: UP of Cambridge, 1970) [technology war]; Paul Edwards,
"Artificial Intelligence and High Technology War: The
Perspective of the Formal Machine," working paper no. 6,
Silicon Valley Research Group, University of California at
Santa Cruz, Nov., 1986 [high technology war, technological
war]; James Gibson, _The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam_
(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) [technowar, perfect
war]; Mary Kaldor, "The Imaginary War" in Smith & Thomson,
eds., _Prospectus for a Habitual Planet_ (New York: Penguin,
1987) [imaginary war]; Martin Van Creveld, _Technology and
War_ (New York: Free Press, 1989) [computer war]; Michael
Klare, _War Without End: American Planning for the Next
Vietnams_ (New York: Knopf, 1972) [war without end]; Col.
James Donovan, _Militarism U.S.A._ (New York: Scribner's,
1970) [Militarism USA]; Paul Virilio, _War and Cinema_
[light war]; James Derian "Cyberwar, Video Games, and the
New World Order," presented at the Second Annual Cyberspace
Conference, Santa Cruz, California, April, 1991 [high modern
war, cyberwar]; Owen Davies, "Robotic Warriors Clash in
Cyberwars," _Omni_, Jan., 1987, pp. 76-88 [cyberwars as
future wars]; Donna Haraway, personal communication, Winter
1991 [hyper-modern war]; and Paul Virilio and Sylvere
Lotringer, _Pure War_ (New York: Semiotext(e), 1982) [pure
war].
     Though all of these labels have something to recommend
them, none do justice to the complexity and sweeping nature
of the recent changes in war.  For example, Virilio's "pure
war" does capture poetically the deep penetration of war
into culture now, certainly in the West, especially into
politics.  But in a strong  sense the climax of World War II
was "pure war."  What we have now is very "impure" war,
called "imperfect" war in legalese, coming to the fore
because pure total war has become, thanks to technoscience,
suicidal.  War is diffused throughout the culture, helping
shift gender definitions, structuring the economy, selling
products, electing presidents, and boosting ratings.  But
the actual battles are not decisive or heroic, they are
confusing, distant, and squalid or one-sided.  With its
paradoxes, its instability, its structure of bricolage, its
infomania, and its inversions, perversions, and reversions
of the modern, war today seems best described as postmodern.
 
     10  Sylvere Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard" in
Baudrillard and Lotringer, Forget Foucault/Forget
Baudrillard (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), p. 111.
 
     11  Chris Gray, "The Cyborg Soldier: The U.S. Military
and the Postmodern Warrior," Les Levidow and Kevin Robins,
eds., _Cyborg worlds: Programming the military information
society_ (London: Free Association Press, 1989; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991).
 
     12  Barbara Ehrenreich, "War For War's Sake," _Z
Magazine_, March 1991, pp. 23-25 and her introduction to
Klaus Theweleit, _Male Fantasies_, Volume 1: Women, floods,
bodies, history (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), p. xii.
 
     13  Michel Foucault, _Power/Knowledge_ (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 244.
 
     14  Information has always been important in war but
until very recently valor, discipline, weapons and numbers
were all considered more important.  This has changed.
Information, and the computers that process it, is now
considered the single most important element of battle by
western armies.
 
     15  Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, _Pure War_, p.
140.
 
     16  Cynthia Enloe, _Does Khaki Become You?  The
Militarization of Women's Lives_ (Boston: South End Press,
1983).
 
     17  There is, of course, much more to this complex and
important change in war discourse.  For a very insightful
discussion of the gendering of this conflict in the DTO
(Desert Theater of Operations) see Miriam Cooke, "Postmodern
Wars: Phallomilitary Spectacles in the DTO," _The Journal of
Urban and Cultural Studies_, No. 3, forthcoming.
 
     18  See Elaine Scarry, _The Body in Pain: the Making
and Unmaking of the World_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985).
 
     19  Hugh Gusterson, "Nuclear War, the Gulf War, and the
Disappearing Body," _The Journal of Urban and Cultural
Studies_, no. 3, forthcoming.
 
     20  Sue Mansfield, _The Gestalts of War: An Inquiry
Into its Origins and Meanings as a Social Institution_ (New
York: Dial Press, 1982), p. 236 and Quincy Wright, _A Study
of War_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1942,  pp.
356-357.
 
     21  Col. Lawrence G.Karch, USMC, "The Corp in 2001,"
Proceedings--U.S. Naval Institute, Nov., 1989, pp. 40-45.
 
     22 Noam Chomsky, "The Fifth Freedom,"  _The Listener_,
23 March, 1989, pp. 6-9.
 
     23 Michael Klare quotes the Army's '91 Posture
Statement, "The United States faces as a complex and varied
a security environment as it enters the 1990s as in any time
in its history."  See Michael Klare, "Policing the Gulf--And
the World," _The Nation_, October 15, 1990.
 
     24  Throughout this paper I've been using various names
for the 1990-91 conflict between Iraq and the
Kuwait/U.S./Egypt/Saudi Arabia/Great Britain/France and many
others alliance.  The war has no official or accepted name,
as of this writing (7/20/91) so it seems appropriate, and
interesting, to use those I'd heard.  "World War III" is
actually one of the possibilities I think has no chance.
Unfortunately, a World War III would be much, much worse.
.