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The “Global War on Terror,” Identity, and Changing Perceptions: Iraqi Responses to America's War in Iraq

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

JENNA PITCHFORD
JENNA PITCHFORD
Affiliation:
Jenna Pitchford is Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK. Email: jenna.pitchford@ntu.ac.uk.
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Abstract

For many years opposition to US foreign policy has frequently been interpreted by cultural commentators and the wider media as “anti-Americanism.” Such “anti-Americanism” has been situated as dangerous, irrational and violent, and this apparent link has been reinforced continuously since 9/11. However, by making a reading of two Iraqi weblogs which have gained significant recognition in Iraq and the West, this article challenges such a simplified definition of alternative perspectives on foreign policy as “anti-Americanism.” This article focusses on the blog entries of two Iraqis, Salam Pax and “Riverbend,” who lived in Baghdad throughout the Iraq War (2003–9) and during the subsequent years of civil unrest. It explores how their online responses to the US action in Iraq illustrate the complexity of perceived “anti-Americanism.” The bloggers do not situate themselves as “anti-American.” Instead they draw a clear distinction between opposition to US foreign policy and hostility towards America and its people, thus problematizing previous definitions of “anti-Americanism.” However, this article also recognizes that whilst these texts highlight this distinction, the negative impact of US foreign policy on Iraq since the occupation, coupled with the militarized image that America projects of itself, has caused the distinction between a disapproval of US foreign policy and an objection to US culture in broader terms to become increasingly blurred. Indeed, these narratives indicate that rather than situating 9/11 as the first move in a campaign of “anti-Americanism,” it could be argued that it is the American government's reaction to the attacks, and the impact of the subsequent occupation of Iraq, which acted as a catalyst for the growth of opposition to US foreign policy, and to some extent a rejection of US culture, in Iraq.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4: 10 Years After 9/11 , November 2011 , pp. 695 - 716
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Riverbend, “Media and Falloojeh, Wednesday April 14, 2004,” Baghdad Burning, available at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com and Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (London: Marion Boyars, 2005), 295.

2 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? America's Great Debate (London: The Free Press, 2004), 366–67.

3 Riverbend, Baghdad Burning, http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com, from August 2003 to October 2008. Salam Pax, Where is Raed?, http://dear_raed.blogspot.com, from September 2002 to August 2004. Pax maintains a new blog, Salam Pax: The Baghdad Blogger, at http://salampax.wordpress.com, which dates from September 2003 to the present day. Both blogs have been adapted into book format; as such, page numbers for the printed versions are provided throughout this article in addition to the title of each blog entry.

4 See Kayla Williams's Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the US Army (London: Phoenix, 2006); Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq (London: Doubleday, 2005); and Rory McCarthy's Nobody Told Us We Were Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq (London: Guardian Books, 2006).

5 Friedman, Max, “Anti-Americanism and U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History, 32, 4 (Sept. 2008), 497–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 501.

6 Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140; and Russell A. Berman, Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2004), xvi and 114, cited in Friedman, 498.

7 Richard B. Parker, “Anti-American Attitudes in the Arab World,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 497, Anti-Americanism: Origins and Context (May 1988), 46–57, 53.

8 Berman, 114, cited in Friedman, 498.

9 Richard Crockatt, After 9/11: Cultural Dimensions of American Global Power (London: Routledge, 2007), 14.

10 Crockatt, 14.

11 Patman, Robert G., “Globalisation, the New US Exceptionalism and the War on Terror,” Third World Quarterly, 27, 6 (2006), 963–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 973.

12 George W. Bush, cited in Patman, 972–73.

13 Crockatt, 4.

14 Friedman, 499.

15 Ibid.

16 Alan McPherson, Anti-Americanism in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 271.

17 New Republic, 24 Sept. 2001, 100, cited in Richard Crockatt, America Embattled: September 11, Anti-Americanism and the Global Order (London: Routledge, 2003), 43.

18 Riverbend, “Setting the Record Straight, Friday August 22, 2003,” Baghdad Burning, 40.

19 Riverbend, “End of another year …, December 29, 2006,” Baghdad Burning, online only: the second volume of Riverbend's blog entries concludes on 5 Aug. 2006. Online blog entries are available up to October 2008.

20 Hollander, Anti-Americanism, 334–5.

21 “You had to wonder if the subsequent souring of relations with the locals was connected to the escalation in our security. Whether when you cut people's access off to their religious shrines and began to treat them like criminals, they then maybe started to act like criminals?” Williams, Love My Rifle More Than You, 201. Also: “you are never going to build relationships with the civilian population, or win hearts and minds, when you treat everybody as a threat. It's impossible to walk that line.” Ibid., 237.

22 Ivan Krastev and Alan McPherson, eds., The Anti-American Century (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 1.

23 Krastev, “The Anti-American Century?”, in Krastev and McPherson, 7.

24 Krastev and McPherson, 2.

25 Krastev, 8.

26 Ibid.

27 Riverbend, “Media and Falloojeh,” 294.

28 “War thus becomes virtual from the technological point of view and bodyless from the military point of view; the bodies of US soldiers are kept free of risk, the enemy combatants are killed efficiently and invisibly.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004), 44–45.

29 See Rory McCarthy's Nobody Told Us for a detailed explanation of the de-Baathification process and its impact on Iraqi citizens.

30 Riverbend, “Will Work for Food, August 24, 2003,” Baghdad Burning, 49.

31 Riverbend, “A Bleak Eid, Saturday January 22, 2005,” Baghdad Burning Volume 2: The Unfolding Story (London: Marion Boyars, 2006), 62.

32 Riverbend, Baghdad Burning, 294.

33 McCarthy, 90.

34 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), 327.

35 Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004), 1–2.

36 Ibid., 2.

37 In the early days of the occupation, liberal Najwa had welcomed the American troops, waving to them and taking drinks out to them. She explains that over the last year, her perspective has changed. She identifies the strain of intermittent electricity supplies, rising prices and increased violence which seemingly goes unchecked by the American forces. She explains that now she finds the Americans rude and aggressive and this upsets her. McCarthy, 105–6.

38 Riverbend, “Media and Falloojeh,” 295.

39 Muscati, Sina Ali, “Arab/Muslim ‘Otherness’: The Role of Racial Constructions in the Gulf War and the Continuing Crisis with Iraq,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 22, 1 (2002), 131–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 133.

40 Muscati, 134.

41 Salam Pax, “12 February, 2004,” Where is Raed?

42 Ibid.

43 Pax, “Monday 24 March 2003,” Where is Raed? and The Baghdad Blog, 133.

44 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 180, original emphasis.

45 Crockatt, After 9/11, 56.

46 Ibid., 56.

47 Riverbend, “Setting the Record Straight, Friday 22 August 2003,” Baghdad Burning, 40.

48 Huntington, Who Are We?, 48.

49 The term was first coined in the 1840s by a New York journalist John L. O'Sullivan to describe what became a widely accepted concept over the course of the nineteenth century. For a full discussion of Manifest Destiny see Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 290.

50 Michael Ledeen (of the American Enterprise Institute), cited in Amy Bartholomew, ed., Empire's Law: The American Imperial Project and the “War to Remake the World” (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 1.

51 Williams, Love My Rifle, 164.

52 Epigraph to The Baghdad Blog by Salam Pax, quoted from Samuel P. Huntington, Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (London: The Free Press, 1996), 51.

53 Preliminary Declaration of the Jury of Conscience, World Tribunal on Iraq, Istanbul, 23–27 June 2005. The jury included figures such as François Houtart, David Krieger, Chandra Muzzafar, Arundhati Roy and Eve Ensler. See http://www.worldtribunal.org/main/?b=1>, cited in Bartholomew, 1.

54 “Waiting, with bravado and anxiety,” The Economist, 17 Oct. 2002, www.economist.com, cited in Pax, Where is Raed? and The Baghdad Blog, 19.

55 Hollis, Rosemary, “Getting Out of the Iraq Trap,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–), 79, 1 (Jan. 2003), 23–35Google Scholar, 23.

56 Huntington, Clash of Civilisations, 28.

57 Ibid., 21–28.

58 Riverbend, “Of Chalabi, Flags and Anthems, Monday, April 26,” Baghdad Burning, 297–99.

59 Interestingly, the suggestion of segregation and the subsequent discussions on Iraqi national identity are one of the points at which the reader witnesses intertextual exchanges of opinion between the blogs. Riverbend draws the reader's attention to Pax's entry on the subject in order to set up her own discussion. She then responds to his entry in order to provide her own perspective on the issue.

60 Riverbend, “Splitting Iraq, January 8, 2004,” Baghdad Burning, 220.

61 Salam Pax, “January 6, 2004,” Where is Raed?

62 Ibid.

63 Riverbend, “Media and Falloojeh,” 295.

64 This is perhaps most evident in outputs such as Generation Kill, originally written by in 2004, and adapted into an HBO television drama by, and Evan Wright in 2008.

65 Riverbend, “Media and Falloojeh,” 295.

66 Ibid.

67 Huntington, Who Are We?, 366–67.

68 Crockatt, After 9/11, 2.

69 James Ridgeway, “Introduction,” in Riverbend, Baghdad Burning, iv.

70 Riverbend, “Clashes and Churches, Saturday, August 7, 2004,” Baghdad Burning, 324.

71 Vietnamese Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh, quoted by Rev. Martin Luther King in his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” delivered at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City on 4 April 1967. See http://www.ssc.msu.edu/~sw/mlk/brkslnc.htm, accessed 3 March 2010.

72 Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 159.

73 Berman, Dark Ages America, 159.

74 Richard B. Parker, “Anti-American Attitudes in the Arab World,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 497, Anti-Americanism: Origins and Context (May 1988), 46–57, 57.