Collateral damages: Tracing the debts and displacements of the Iraq War By NadiaEl‐Shaarawi. Oakland: University of California Press, 2025. 256 pp.

The term 'collateral damage' came into general use in 2003, during the US bombing campaign preceding the invasion of Iraq, to refer to civilians who were killed or injured unintentionally. The adverse human rights impacts of anti-trafficking measures had been noted by UN representatives and specialist non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the late 1990s, before the UN Trafficking Protocol was adopted. Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women's (GAATW)'s 2007 anthology reviewed anti-trafficking measures in eight countries. Some action has been taken since the publication of the 2007 GAATW anthology to reduce the collateral damage that it highlighted. The complicated definition of trafficking in persons in the Palermo Protocol, containing three elements, such as, an action, an abusive means (only in the case of adults, but not children), and an exploitative purpose, has routinely been difficult for investigators and prosecutors to prove in court. Mexico has adopted two successive laws against trafficking in persons, in 2007 and 2012.

I have found it difficult to concentrate on anything but the war in Iraq over the last couple of weeks. Like many others, I have been sucked in by the relentless war coverage, and engaged in long and heated discussions with colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic on the merits and substantial demerits of the Anglo-American adventure. War is a brutal and brutalizing undertaking, for those watching from afar as much as those taking part. Endlessly repeated images of movie-style bombing spectaculars or dusty, depersonalized corpses on the battlefield or bomb-site disengage the watcher from the horror of what they are seeing. The media’s studied avoidance of the harsh reality of battle deaths and ‘collateral damage’ – the image of the Iraqi child with half its head missing being a case in point – emphasizes the remoteness of war.

A key piece of conventional wisdom among scholars of modern armed conflict is that collateral damage is often strategically costly in war. Yet most combatants already know this and take actions after mistakes—most prominently, the distribution of “condolence payments” to civilian victims—in order to mitigate these costs. Do these payments work? This question is important not only for policymakers but also for deeper theoretical debates about how civilians respond to combatant signals in war. To examine these issues, I use micro-level conflict event data on 4,046 condolence payments made by Coalition forces to civilian victims during the Iraq War from 2004 to 2008, matching it with corresponding data on collateral damage and insurgent violence. The results of this analysis reveal that post-harm compensation does significantly diminish local rates of insurgent violence, and that this is true across different types of payments (cash handouts or in-kind assistance). Ultimately, these patterns can be best explained by a rationalist mechanism in which civilians update their beliefs about violent events based on new information about combatants’ wartime intentions. The results thus provide a compelling strategic rationale for combatants to compensate their victims in war, and suggest that civilians are not blinded to new information about conflict dynamics by their preexisting biases.

In his paper, "Collateral Damage and the 'Incident' at Haditha," Tom Engelhardt provides a comparative analysis of the massacres of innocent civilians in the Viet Nam and Iraqi wars. Focusing on the events of My Lai, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah, Engelhardt traces the uncanny resemblance between the ways that the military attempted to contain the flow of information about these atrocities. Engelhardt analyzes the rhetorical tropes of media coverage via the favored terms of "collateral damage" and "incident" and the preferred statistics that always claim that 99.9% of the military conducts itself professionally. The fact that the media not only accepts but also promotes such specious terms and statistics has dire consequences for the public's ability to make sense of the atrocities of war. Engelhardt's analysis reveals how the practice of war and the language it depends on create a mass of unknowable enemies that are easy to kill and even easier to forget.

This article explores how Sinan Antoon's novel The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) brings Arabic literary history into unlikely conversation with US military jargon as it offers an alternative catalogue of the destruction incurred during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the violence that followed. First, by drawing attention to the novel's original Arabic title Fihris (2016), which can be translated as ‘index' or ‘catalogue', I consider the titular transformation the novel underwent by translation and unpick intertextual strands woven through the text, focusing in particular on the tenth-century compendium of Arabic books Kitāb al-Fihrist, compiled by Ibn al-Nadim, as a key intertext. I then interrogate how the concept of ‘collateral damage', which has been widely used to refer to the unintentional damage and deaths incurred during military operations including the 2003 Iraq War, is creatively redeployed in the novel. Rather than reading the text as an attempt to ‘write back to' or ‘resist’ the dehumanising rhetoric of collateral damage, I argue instead that Antoon repurposes the logic of this abstract term, which blurs human and non-human destruction, to expose its absurd politics of personification. Presenting readers with a chorus of uncanny narrators – both human and non-human – who each tell the story of their destruction, the novel forms a literary compendium of collateral damage. By bringing together Arabic literary history and contemporary military jargon in this way, I argue that Antoon creates a poetics of infinity which asserts the impossibility of ever indexing the consequences of war while also attesting to the writerly compulsion to record, however imperfectly, this destruction.

The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the public use of (un)reason, such as the counterfactual pattern recognitions that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. The militarized datafication of the counterfactual is predicated on signal/noise discriminations or cacography. Interrogation by torture, promissory kill lists, prosecutorial, algorithmically generated metadata, drone signature strikes, superimposed kill boxes and enforced political disappearances become rumor materially enacted upon and lodged in cacographic, bodies, which, in turn, become rumor forms. The collaterally damaged as fabulations of the computational enemy are indispensable to the prosecution of a war. The circulating body deemed to be cacographic is the metadata underwriting the pattern recognition and excision of the politically anomalous. The hyperpeformativitiy of real-time data collection generates its own inadmissible cacographic surplus through “lossies” caused by compression technology. Asymmetrical war, seeking to purge the interference and cacophony of global asymmetry, returns us to the archaic association of rumor with the din of mobilized armies. Algorithmic warfare has not immunized itself from cacographic dissonance but produces it as surplus value through prosecutorial metadata, anomaly detection, and collateral damage.

On Second Thought

Editors:I found Sam Chesters's “metamodern” framework for satire in “Don't Go All Earnest on Us” useful and encouraging, especially in an era in which, despite George Saunders's own increasing popularity, satire is viewed with skepticism by much of the reading public and the publishing industry.1I was a student of Saunders's two decades ago, and even then he was warning me against my tendency toward what Steven Weisenburger refers to as “degenerative satire,” which Chesters points out had been done well in the past but whose strategies, she hints, have by now become rigid, stale, and ineffective. Metamodern satire, in Chesters's account, “functions effectively by grappling with postmodernism and modernism in sequence, first by destabilizing metanarratives through the characteristic irony and cynicism of postmodernism and then proposing the genuinely tendered correction present in modernist satire” (41), which seems to me a concise formulation of what Saunders and I were only grasping at in those conversations, as well as an accurate description of most of Saunders's work.What seems daring to me is Chesters's decision to focus this thesis on “Brad Carrigan, American.” Saunders has lampooned television, and particularly reality television, as least as far back as Pastoralia's “Sea Oak,” but “Brad Carrigan” is the first of his stories that I'm aware of to be set in a television show, a setting he uses to directly confront “the metanarrative of neoliberalism” (41). And I hadn't before considered how Carrigan differs from Saunders's earlier characters—“the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history's winners have walked all over”—in being “very privileged but also oppressed” (59).Nonetheless, there is a darkness, a bitterness, to “Brad Carrigan,” and to much of the collection it appeared in, In Persuasion Nation, that I don't see elsewhere in Saunders's work. It may be worth pointing out that his first two books of short fiction were published before 9/11, during the “end of history.” With some exceptions (the novella Bounty being the most prominent one), the stories are a reassertion of compassion in the face of the comic nihilism of a culture that could produce, for example, Seinfeld and the pervasive self-referentiality of 1990s consumerism. The settings in these stories are carnivalesque, literally amusement parks and novel workplaces, and in them, a precarious and downtrodden laborer often comes to an epiphany about the inherent value of all people.But the reintrusion of history—the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq—has put a strain on Saunders's use of metamodern satire. In my reading, the cracks show. As Chesters points out, “Brad's final act is to concentrate on an improved version of himself that he hopes will guide his actions when he reemerges in his next life” (59). I agree this is the “correction” that Saunders intends, which distinguishes metamodern satire from its predecessor, and it's to Chesters's credit that she built this argument using one of Saunders's most fraught offerings. But while the story may deviate from the neoliberal metanarrative of its time, it seems to uphold today's, which not only expects neoliberal subjects to acquiesce to its boundaries but to blame themselves for an inability to transcend them, by retaining a focus on individualism. The characters in “Brad Carrigan” react with varying degrees of civility to the refugees who continually appear in the backyard, but no one, Brad included, gives much thought to where they come from or why or, perhaps most importantly, what could have been done to stop the war that killed them. And even if the victims can be comforted, in the world of the story, they're all already dead.Christian TeBordoRoosevelt UniversityEditors:What is crisis slapstick? In an era of rising authoritarianism, all-consuming media spectacle, and nonstop political carnival, slapstick itself is in crisis. I think about the crisis of slapstick all the time and was very intrigued to see an article on this topic in a recent issue of StAH. At first glance, the term seems to posit a vital zone of contestation between dystopian enjoyment and playful bodily protest.But Joshua Moss offers a different account of the genre. In “Cutting to the Punch: Graphic Stunt Comedy and the Emergence of Crisis Slapstick,” Moss defines what he claims as an original category by distancing it, first, from what it is not: classic slapstick. According to Moss, classic slapstick is exemplified by silent cinema's meticulously orchestrated pratfalls, which aestheticize danger but deftly manage actors’ own threats of bodily crisis.2 He places classic slapstick on the side of safety and catharsis, despite its projection of extravagant injury. For example, Buster Keaton's poetic survival of a collapsing house façade in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)—in a stunt that necessitated the star actor's foolproof blocking—fits snugly into the category of classic slapstick. As Moss puts it, the “absence of actual or lasting injury confirms that slapstick body violations are, in fact, superficial and inconsequential. Momentary dizziness, quickly shaken off, neutralizes whatever seeming violence has just taken place” (16). In other words, the disaster is only a trick; the spectator is aware at some level of this artful subterfuge; and that reassurance is what finally authorizes their carefree explosion into cathartic laughter.Crisis involves the eruption of danger on a deadline: stock market crash, political hostage snafu, pandemic viral contagion, or the spread of damaging disinformation—a volatile situation that needs to be managed with swift finesse before it unravels into a full-blown catastrophe. What, then, does the modifier of “crisis” add to the already crisis-fueled genre of violent, weird, uncanny, combustive, and punctually ill-timed slapstick? According to Moss, crisis slapstick throws both the comic stuntman and laughing spectator into the belly of the beast. Popularized by daredevils such as Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O of Jackass and Ralph Zavadil of the Cap'n Video series among others, crisis slapstick is the property of disaffected white male libidinal transgression. It is unclear, however, whether unfiltered misogyny is collateral damage or an essential characteristic of crisis slapstick's blurring of boundaries between safety and injury, comedy and horror, laughing spectator and self-eviscerating performer. Either way, Moss insists that the “erasure of women” is “critical” to the emergence of crisis slapstick as a performative mode, which he further associates with “the rise of a number of forms of illicit body spectacle media in home video, including porn, graphic horror, video nasties, and gross-out cinema” (22). Puzzlingly, he cites feminist porn scholars such as Linda Williams as evidence of porn's stone-cold patriarchal gaze without further exploring the gendered counterpleasures that feminist film theorists have elaborated on. There's plenty of fodder for antinormative crisis slapstick in the furious pornography and subversive aesthetics of Peggy Ahwesh, Doris Wishman, John Waters, Nelly Kaplan, and many others. But Moss's crisis slapstick, it seems, is all about the redemption of Oedipus.Transgression is really the wheelhouse of normative “crisis slapstick,” which has eerily alt-right vibes. Moss celebrates crisis slapstick as an outlet for the liberation of “primal masculine energies” that the “creature comforts of modern privilege afforded [to] the young white male” had kept imprisoned in “a gilded cage” (18-19). Though he emphasizes its erosion of boundaries between viewer, screen, and performer, his analysis produces a tangible confusion between fetishism and critique. Were a wider debate to ensue from this essay, it might echo many of the recent conversations about comedic edginess, political correctness, and “wars of the words.” But instead of edgy rape jokes, here we have settler colonialism gags, “quasi-‘snuff’” blooper reels, suicidal naked cliff dives, and self-flagellating Peruvian jellyfish stunts, as if self-inflicted bodily harm somehow neutralized the aggressive display of “primal masculine energies.” Yes, comedy is most incisive when it violates social norms and threatens kneejerk beliefs. But that does not make all comedic transgression inherently progressive (or even particularly interesting), as far-right shock jocks understand all too well. Crisis slapstick comics, in many of Moss's examples, punch down against the already dispossessed under the cover of doing so while they themselves are being punched.It would have been productive if Moss had related crisis slapstick to the subsequent rise of cringe comedy, xenophobic insult humor, nihilist antijokes, weaponized trolling, and far-right infotainment. That seems to be where many of the impulses he elaborates have gone. Instead, he cites the dark humor absurdism of The Eric Andre Show as a contemporary example, which I honestly found very confusing. Even more confusing is his assessment of classic slapstick, which, as a silent film scholar familiar with histories and theories of the genre, I found almost unrecognizable. Again, he focuses on the modernist formations of slapstick (instead of on postmodern or far-right contextualizations of crisis slapstick) in order to partition classic and crisis. Whatever the former is, the latter is not (and vice versa). In that vein, the gender politics of crisis slapstick as Moss describes it feels especially off the mark. For example, Moss implies that playful violence inflicted by or against women in slapstick comedies does not simulate crisis because it is merely representational, as opposed to the unfolding crisis of a forty-year-old man filming himself motorcycling in a Speedo off the roof of a middle school. In the latter case, physical injury and performative politics are two sides of the same coin: that's what pushes slapstick over the edge from catharsis to crisis. The inextricability of social aesthetics from material reality is, however, the premise of a vast body of film scholarship on early cinema, political modernism, slapstick comedy, archival historiography, and feminist theory. Moss cites many of these works (by Jennifer Bean, Tom Gunning, Don Crafton, Lisa Trahair, Kristen Anderson Wagner, Rob King, and me) but appears to miss their main point. In this field, slapstick offers an aesthetic mode for destabilizing the known world, especially during moments of intense social change and political upheaval. Slapstick's play between peril and safety is radically dialectical, but Moss misreads that dialectic of finitude as an ultimate delivery into stability and catharsis.All radical comedy unleashes extravagant risk. As Walter Benjamin once put it (in the context of 1930s knockabout films and grotesque cartoons), slapstick laughter represents a “preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis,” in this case Nazism.3 At its best, slapstick converts the escalation of bodily crisis into the image of apocalyptic calamity in order to liberate the imagination and give vent to hell-raising political tensions. Self-proclaimed “laughing philosophers” have similarly toyed with the wager of taking intellectual pleasure in the very scene of their own mortal injury. From Friedrich Nietzsche's gay science and Georges Bataille's comic mysticism to Hélène Cixous’ Medusan decapitation and Ralph Ellison's homeopathic laughter, there is nothing new in the gesture to conjoin unorthodox joy with bodily abjection or ego-shattering annihilation. The most hopeful cultivations of humor (whether individual or collective) always place a vital equilibrium in danger. They demand a break from the cruel optimism of the present to clear the ground to move toward something different, something better: that is (and always has been) anarchic comedy's utopian impulse. When crisis engulfs the entire world, slapstick poses a reckless gamble and vital escape hatch from the nightmare of ordinary attachments. If nothing else, crisis slapstick is an evocative concept. Then again, circa 2021, what isn't crisis slapstick?Maggie HennefeldUniversity of Minnesota, Twin CitiesEditors:Todd Thompson's “Viral Jokes and Fugitive Humor in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reprinting” is an ambitiously thorough, cogent, and meticulously researched essay. It examines the recycling of one seemingly ubiquitous joke, “A Yankee Boast,” the earliest printing of which Thompson found in the December 24, 1855, issue of the Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch. He strongly suspects, however, that “A Yankee Boast” may have appeared earlier in the Boston Transcript because the joke's frame narrator reports hearing the exchange between the two principal characters, Jonathan and John Bull, in Boston. John Bull, who represents Great Britain, smugly criticizes American expansionism and quips, “Fortunately the Americans couldn't go farther westward than the Pacific shore.”4 Jonathan, an ingenuous Yankee and representative American, matter-of-factly replies, “Why, good gracious, they're already leveling the Rocky Mountains and carting dirt out West” (66). Jonathan finishes his response with a well-executed display of one-upmanship, noting that a letter from his cousin reports that he “is living two hundred miles west of the Pacific shore—on made land” (66). An abbreviated tall tale (at least the punch line), “A Yankee Boast” employs the battle-of-wits paradigm frequently found in nineteenth-century American humor wherein a common man of little formal education employs verbal wit to humiliate his vain and would-be superior.What is fascinating about “A Yankee Boast” (sometimes appearing under different titles such as “Not to Be Outdone,” “A Great Country,” “Going West,” “Further West”) is how often it was reprinted, sometimes with slight variations, in newspapers in all sections of the United States and in several of the same newspapers multiple times. Thompson found the joke to have been reprinted at least 104 times between 1855 and 1867 (67).Thompson not only demonstrates his masterful capability as a savvy and patient archival researcher, pointing out specific newspapers and other periodicals where “A Yankee Boast” was reprinted, but also makes an interesting argument, broadly suggesting that “tracing the circulation of jokes in the culture of reprinting … helps … reconstruct larger circulation patterns and practices of scissors-and-paste journalism in nineteenth-century American print culture” (64-65).One of Thompson's most notable findings is that “A Yankee Boast” often served to draw attention to actual historical concerns because it shared space with news stories in the newspapers treating similar, if not the same, topics. In describing his process, he writes that contextual close readings such as he offers in the second half of his essay “create a space for sociopolitically informed interpretations that are simply not available to a reading of the joke alone, divorced from the context of the information and opinions surrounding it in newsprint” (76). Such an interpretative strategy enables Thompson to show just how flexible “A Yankee Boast” can be when placed beside or near similarly and seriously themed contents in a given issue of a newspaper. Among the many materials that he finds juxtaposed to the joke are editorials and articles, such as commentary on westward migration, the vast size of the United States, the advancement of slavery in the West, and the sheer magnitude of American natural phenomena.Thompson encourages further cultural work adopting the approach he has employed so proficiently in his essay, claiming it “could shed light on most any piece of fugitive humor, about any topic, in most any time period in which a corpus of digitalized periodicals is available” (84), and one area of American humor seems to me particularly ripe for this approach, namely, old southwestern humor that flourished between the 1830s and the 1860s, a genre Thompson himself mentions several times. Many of the sketches, tall tales, mock letters to the editor, almanac pieces, anecdotes, turf reports, and mock sermons published in newspapers were recycled frequently, appearing again and again during times of sociopolitical upheaval along with articles on historical events and on significant issues that occupied the news of the times. It seems to me that tracing the reprinted Old Southwest humor texts and examining them alongside the serious content of the newspapers and reinterpreting them in relation to the time frames in which they appeared would prove a fruitful undertaking.Among the many newspapers, the eager researcher may begin looking for originally printed and reprinted materials of southern frontier humor in the New York Spirit of the Times, the New Orleans Picayune, the New Orleans True Delta, the St. Louis Reveille, the Milledgeville, Georgia, Southern Recorder, the Augusta, Georgia, States Rights Sentinel, the Cincinnati News, the Columbia South Carolinian, the Montgomery, Alabama, Mail, the Knoxville Press and Messenger, the Knoxville Daily Press and Herald, the and American, the Daily the the Georgia, the Southern the Daily the New York Picayune, the South Messenger, the Daily News, the Daily American the South the Southern the Daily the and the American the and the significant is especially for and In one will Old Southwest humor texts in such as the Southern Messenger, the and If the can the that such a will the from the close reading of reprinted old southwestern humor materials in the of the serious contents in periodicals will as Thompson's work well worth the his essay Humor on the on and as a frame to the in which humor and laughter to social boundaries on the frontier among white while approach also helps how humor and them into in the before the on theories of carnivalesque, and the humor in the of and and which an among humor an in how it may also be by to social at least analysis of the of humor in boundaries the that and produces into the of of in frontier in this as well as in other frontier could be a to on these Such an would account for the as of the social they in their and how their as their assessment of theories of humor on to social formations in frontier settings would also be useful in the of other that come to are The on and in the American States, and New for the Daily the New York the southern and on a of social and their cultural practices and He often humor to from southern to social and in order to the of which was for the in the and often satire his own and the and of his humor of and other and from New York to a frontier in in account, New their and early in the and describes the (or and other of living on the between frontier and makes account so from is use of humor, which more often than not own and as to the anecdotes, she the social of New York and an with frontier of of and other in a frontier home and the of among on the in of carnivalesque, spectacle, and which in his of would similarly to out the of social and to to and social and cultural of I a in which were to a assessment known as the The the to the that describes from such as and As I through the the I and of my The more I over what the the I was them to I a with the that me to agree or with would be known as a than an but by that I was that the assessment was to my as the Then a change in the of the final that I to a of a and with a in the I at the of this at its content as well as at its at the of a of I at a that to I the of that the image along with the and of other of to stories than simply them is to article of the the in in the issue of in American that of the home who home from the to their these as and by their close with the space of the they evidence is from a of from genre to books and periodicals such as and of which she in The of argument is its on humor, and gender to the of a in which the gender of both and women were in with as attention not only to what is but how it is especially reading of genre The at this that the is a of the home in his in a a he is and set his the is as a are literally as the young them to the the humor in this image in the of the who is not his as are to as well as in the that he is being toyed just as the of in the is being about by a is a of satire than is in other considered by such as the for the in which the of the is a and and the at are a and the humor of is only by close by The of are by and as well as by a a that has stability the The in the image is by the of the and and by the of light and dark in the The that is through the the is by the dark of the that is that and the entire half of the Whatever the this young has to out the war at he is now in the of the

prominence. Yet in the background of his lengthy prose grew just as rich a mastery of brief fiction. With Minutes of Glory and Other Stories, Ngũgĩ assembles the quintessential collection of short stories spanning the length of his literary career. Just as the scope of Ngũgĩ’s craft encompasses a myriad of Kenyan culture, so too does this anthology channel an equally broad spectrum of emotions and ideas. Divided into four major movements, Minutes of Glory includes the nearly sixty-yearold short story “The Fig Tree” alongside the much more recent “The Ghost of Michael Jackson.” Such a wide gamut likewise offers a biographical peek into Ngũgĩ’s career previously unavailable through his novels, albeit not entirely assembled chronologically .The first two overarching subjects of the collection are also its most permeating as Ngũgĩ wrestles with trials of family and faith. “The Village Priest” details the titular priest’s struggle to conjure rain and maintain his spirituality against a far more prolific rainmaker. Throughout his text, traditional practice rallies against Western influence seeking to assimilate if not render the bulk of Kenya vestigial. At the heart of each tale pulses the rhythm of an individual as Ngũgĩ finds the agency to prevail against any social influence. Even so, and such is the case with “The Black Bird” and “Goodbye Africa,” Ngũgĩ acknowledges the quest for agency is often tragic. Though the collection’s third part also contain its eponymous story, the preceding movement, “Fighters and Martyrs,” carries the most weight. Minutes of Glory’s final three pieces seem almost auxiliary, as if to only give one a better sense of Ngũgĩ’s musings in retrospect. This aside is not inappropriate but would have perhaps been better woven into the text’s earlier works. Structural weaknesses aside, Minutes of Glory is still a necessary staple of Kenyan literature. Ultimately, the text offers an insight deeper into Ngũgĩ himself than any other form of his prose possibly can. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City Sinan Antoon The Book of Collateral Damage Trans. Jonathan Wright. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2019. 303 pages. So many books have been written about the Iraq War (2003–2011) from both sides of that conflict, but Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage is unique in that it chooses to represent the human and environmental cost of that war. Nameer, an Iraqi American intellectual, visits his home country after the war and is traumatized by the hurt and damage he witnesses . Navigating the divide of his home and host cultures’ views of the war, he collects pieces of American news stories of the war and files them as “collateral damage.” Wadood, his narrative double, imagines and documents the detailed history of the war as expressed by “colloquies” of the people, places and things damaged by the war. The two meet at al-Mutanabi Street, the historical cultural hub of Baghdad. Nameer is hired by American filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Wadood, an eccentric bookseller, sends him a manuscript of a narrative catalog, “a circular history” of the war as experienced by the victims and the things that the war has destroyed. Nameer reads Wadood’s narrative as he navigates his life in the post-9/11 United States. The manuscript transfers Wadood’s trauma to Nameer, who is diagnosed with PTSD but refuses the bourgeois psychoanalytical approach to his condition. Wadood’s colloquies lead to the central moment of an explosion that took place in al-Mutanabi Street in 2007. The moment of the explosion crystallizes the story of the war, bringing past and present together, As Shiferraw gives space to the messy multiplicity of a self born from trauma, again she offers a rebuke to the demand that she silence the complicated. Throughout the collection, the poet’s lens expands beyond the self to other women, most movingly her mother. In “The Fruit Mother,” Shiferraw returns to the symbol of cactus fruit, also found in her 2016 collection , Fuchsia. With the beles, the reader is again plunged into a violent invasion of the domestic. “My mother is a cactus fruit, but...

Reviewed by: Recovering Christian Realism: Just War Theory as a Political Ethic by H. David Baer Maurice Lee Recovering Christian Realism: Just War Theory as a Political Ethic. By H. David Baer. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. viii + 119 pp. This slim volume seeks to articulate the political-theological reasoning underlying the classical just war ethic, drawing heavily (though not exclusively) on modern sources and using an irenically Lutheran perspective. The first chapter offers a framework for the project, briefly critiquing both the Niebuhrian “realist” position and Yoder/Hauerwas-style pacifism, and an overview of Baer’s argument. [End Page 76] The central chapters consider the series of classical just-war criteria derived from Aquinas, each raising issues addressed by the next. Chapter 2, “The criterion of legitimate authority,” uses a two-kingdom approach to identify the heart of the political act—that is, what a legitimate human government does—as judgment informed by love in the service of God’s kingdom, both establishing the locus of the authority to use power (force) and inviting ethical evaluation of the use of that power. Chapter 3, “The criterion of just cause,” finds, since political justice is relative to the particular interests of communities (nations) and their governments, and no actual government may rise above its particularity to render universal judgment, that force may be employed only for defense, with rare exceptions. Chapter 4, “The criterion of just intention,” explores the larger purpose of international relations—relations among political communities—identifying it as a peace harmonizing the various interests of a plurality of communities and consistent with the moral (not narrowly legal) “Law of Nations.” Chapter 5, “Justice in bello,” taking as a fundamental principle of ethical conduct in warfare the “principle of discrimination”— that is, the difference between combatants and civilians—reflects on the perpetual problems of proportionality and collateral damage. A final chapter accepts and defends the label “Christian realism” for the position that the author has outlined. Baer’s argument is accessible even without a specialist’s familiarity with just-war discussions. Some points might be puzzling for the beginner in the absence of other resources. For example, the distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello is not introduced before it is used. Moreover, the contours of the deeper theological vision animating “Christian realism” are not made clear. The author’s Lutheran allegiance and Luther himself are appealed to (not, to be sure, in an exclusive or partisan fashion), but why this should be particularly appropriate is not explained. Key terms like “kingdom of God” and “eschatology”—and, for that matter, “love”—are deployed but not developed. Baer maintains critical distance from the Christian pacifist tradition, interacting with it and its concerns very little. He does not apply the argument to messy, concrete instances of international conflict (as in Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, 2006), except for a brief, fascinating reflection on the first Iraq war in Chapter 6. [End Page 77] All of these issues are easily explained by the book’s limited size and scope. In its purpose, laying out a theologically-grounded way to understand the unity and cogency of classical just-war thinking, given certain clear assumptions, this book is informative, insightful, and provocative. Maurice Lee Prince of Peace Lutheran Church Santa Barbara, California Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

This chapter contrasts the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 with the humanitarian refugee crisis. Following the terrorist attacks in Paris, a state of emergency was declared by the French government. On the international level, there was further securitization of Europe at the expense of civil liberties and due process. The second half of the chapter documents the power of the securitization discourse to induce fear and promote the dehumanization of those most in need. It demonstrates how the fear of terrorism became synonymous with the fear of refugees, leading countries to abandon their duty towards other human beings. As with the previous chapters, this chapter also explores state practices and state crimes in relation to political instability and terrorism, making evident how wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria not only led to the decay of human life (creating a climate where mass death became collateral damage), but also a reality where individuals had the choice of either joining a terrorist group or potentially dying trying to migrate to a place of safety.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq resulted in both military and civilian casualties. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians died which was often described with an unfortunate term “collateral damage” by Allied forces led by the Americans and British.

Chapter 1 Globalizing Production in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan Chapter 2 Dollar Devaluations Chapter 3 Fighting Inflation Chapter 4 Debt Crisis and Globalization Chapter 5 An Age of Migrations Chapter 6 Dictatorship and Democracy Chapter 7 The Rise of China Chapter 8 Collateral Damage: The Causes and Consequences of 9/11 Chapter 9 The Legacy of Partition in India and Pakistan: 1947-1948 Chapter 10 Partition in Palestine: 1948 Chapter 11 Revolution and War in Iran and Iraq: 1978-1980 Chapter 12 Revolution and War in Afghanistan Chapter 13 The Aftermath of 9/11 Chapter 14 Global Climate Change

First of all, let me record my gratitude to colleagues for their having taken the time and trouble to read and comment on my book. Their attention honors it, and their comments serve to test and develop it—sometimes confirming, sometimes correcting, and sometimes identifying further work that remains to be done.Charles Mathewes observes that all three wars that I analyze in detail—Britain's against Germany in 1914– 18, NATO's against Serbia in Kosovo in 1999, and the U.S.-led coalition's against Iraq in 2003—I reckon justified. This might well fuel skeptics' suspicion that just war reasoning is little more than the elaborate ethical rationalization of Realpolitik. In case that is so, let me point out that I do mention in passing two instances of belligerency that fall foul of “just war” criteria—the Spanish conquistadors' invasion of the Americas and the British bombardment of Canton in 1841 (2013, 161). I also imply a lack of justification for war-waging by the opponents of each of my justified belligerencies—Germany's against Britain, Serbia's against NATO, and Iraq's against the coalition. I would happily swell the ranks of unjust warriors with the Irish nationalists who staged the Easter Rising against the British in 1916. And, lest it seem that the Anglo-Saxons are always righteous in my eyes, let me add to the bombardment of Canton the British invasion of Cetshwayo's Zulu kingdom in 1879. That my list of unjustified wars is not longer yet is attributable simply to the limits of my historical knowledge.Both Mathewes and Cian O'Driscoll find In Defence of War weak in its admission of the tragedy and moral ambiguity of war. Mathewes suggests that its account of just war is unbalanced in the predominance of its “legal-ethical algorithmic” dimension over its appreciation of war's tragic and downright sinful aspects. Lisa Cahill leans in the same direction. I am sure that readers can find passages where I admit, even lament, the often tragic and sometimes sinful character of war. But if I have not made it clear enough, let me do so now: often the just warrior bears a measure of responsibility for the unjust warrior's wrongdoing, and sometimes military killing is so driven by hatred that it shakes off all restraint and becomes simply murderous. I do not doubt this for a moment. Nevertheless, it is true that that is not where the center of gravity of my thinking lies. Rather, it lies in how, despite tragedy and sin, the waging of war can nevertheless be justified—how it can be right for fellow sinners to wage it, how it can be motivated by love, how it can avoid intending the deaths of the enemy. So I acknowledge the imbalance. There is a reason for it, however, and I believe it to be a good one. When thinking and writing about war, I usually imagine myself in the shoes of those who bear the responsibility of making political and military decisions, and of doing so under the unrelenting pressure of time. These are they who cannot allow themselves to wallow in the mess and drift in the fog. These are they who have to cut through the complexity and the ambiguity with a decisive (and fateful) yes or no. These are they who have to pull the trigger, or not. I think it salutary for academic ethicists to stand in those shoes, and I think that Christian ethicists have a pastoral responsibility to do so. So I am not inclined to apologize for my book's bias toward ethical analysis and the crafting of decisive judgments, although I do accept that more overt lamentation of the tragedy and sin that attend war might have been rhetorically prudent.Both O'Driscoll and Mathewes would have had me ponder more than I did the moral and spiritual decay that the experience of combat causes and the correlative need for confession and penance, whether religious or secular. I do not doubt the problem or the need or their importance, and they are indeed among the several things that I could have considered, but did not. On reflection, I can muster three reasons why I did not consider them: first, because others with greater empirical authority than I have already written about them;1 second, because the moral and spiritual decay of combat soldiers is neither universal nor inevitable; and third, because the fact of them makes no difference to the possibility of the moral justification of war. This last reason issues from my general assumption that the world happens to be such that, tragically, we can be obliged to do things that cause terrible damage, which we should lament, and that an endeavor can still be morally justified while containing moments of wrongdoing, of which we should repent. It also occurs to me to add that, if combat soldiers sometimes need to repent of the sins of bloodlust and ruthlessness, those who refuse war sometimes need to repent of the sins of indifference and wishful thinking. Moral and spiritual decay need not always wear a uniform; sometimes they appear in mufti.O'Driscoll thinks that I distill complex historical experience into a series of stark moral dilemmas (e.g., Rwanda or Srebrenica), thereby occluding questions about such things as whether the West should have devoted more support to the 1993 Arusha Accords, or whether Europe should have engaged more extensively with nonviolent leaders of Kosovar resistance to Serbian domination such as Ibrahim Rugova. I agree: it is quite possible that there are things that we should have done, which we failed to do; that we therefore bear some responsibility for putting ourselves in the position of having to decide between war and not-war; and that we ought to let our consciences torment us over whether we could have done more to avoid it. Hindsight, of course, is a fine thing, affording us a quasi-Olympian clarity that is simply not available down in the fog-bound valleys of real-time human action. It also plays both ways: it is arguable, for example, that, had the West been more robust in its military support for the Syrian rebels in 2011–12, it could have prevented the rise of jihadism among them, the consequent fracturing of the opposition, and the current ascendancy of the murderous Assad regime. Besides, only in a daydream of wishful thinking does conscientious speculation about what might have been relieve us of the burden of responsibility for making a decision about what actually is, here and now.Cian O'Driscoll is absolutely right to point out that callousness is a dangerous virtue. I argue and I continue to believe that callousness is sometimes a virtue. The surgeon needs it when cutting into living flesh (especially where anesthetics are unavailable), the parent needs it when punishing the child, the manager needs it when making a colleague redundant—and the general needs it when ordering his own troops (maybe some of them his personal friends) to fight to the last man. Since it belongs to ordinary life that it is sometimes right that we should do things that have painful, even destructive, side effects, we all need a certain callousness—a certain thickened skin—to do them. Stefan Zweig was right: sometimes compassion and pity are vices.2 Sometimes a bleeding heart is a harmful self-indulgence. Having said that, a callous lack of compassion can also be a vice, of course, issuing in a dehumanized view of the enemy and in consequent atrocity. An important job of work remains to be done, therefore, in scrutinizing cases of compassion and callousness for clues about what makes them virtuous or vicious, and in working out how military personnel can be trained to exercise the right kinds and eschew the wrong kinds.In my book I hold that a vital part of making the case that war may be waged by Christians involves arguing that it can be motivated, and therefore qualified, by love—including love for the unjust enemy. Lisa Cahill demurs. She claims that compassionate care and love of enemies, not violence and killing, are works of love “properly speaking”; that war is “not fully compatible” with the intention of love; that the Christian gospel's vision is “nonviolent”; that the empirical evidence I adduce in chapter 2 demonstrates that war “not atypically” disposes to hatred and war crimes; and that to describe war as “loving” is to obscure its moral ambiguity, encourage wholehearted endorsement, and divert us from the need for constraints and the difficulty of maintaining them. One might infer from this that Cahill is a Christian pacifist, eschewing violence always and everywhere. Apparently not, for she admits that using violent force can “very rarely” follow from loving threatened neighbors.This is all very thought-provoking, even puzzling. It is clear that Cahill considers herself to be arguing against me. But how, exactly? Is it that she thinks that Christian love cannot qualify the use of violent force? No, because she claims that violence is not a work of love “properly speaking” and that they are not “fully compatible,” implying that violence is an improper work of love and that they are somewhat compatible. What sense should we make of this? The most promising candidate is that there is a prima facie oddness about an act of love that causes temporary pain or harm to the object of love—as, for example, when a parent punishes a child. In ordinary cases the appearance of oddness fades, once the benevolent intention becomes clear. When punishment involves the infliction of permanent or lethal harm, however, the oddness remains as an irreducible sign of lamentable tragedy. This I fully accept, but I observe two things: first, that it serves to confirm rather than deny my argument that Christian love can qualify the waging of war; and second, that it does not sit easily with the characterization of the Christian gospel as “nonviolent.” Nevertheless, I agree with Cahill that to describe war as “loving” simply and without qualification is to endow it with a dangerous lack of moral ambiguity, and if I have done that, I resolve not to do it again. I think it fair to point out, however, that I argue that it is precisely Christian love for the enemy as fellow sinner, whose life may not be taken malevolently or disproportionately, that generates moral constraints upon the use of violence. It does not—indeed, given its nature, it cannot—hand just warriors a carte blanche.Still, there is a crucial practical question, which both Cahill and O'Driscoll raise, about how psychologically possible it is for combat soldiers to withhold themselves from hatred. This is crucial, since, if it is not possible, then Christian love cannot actually qualify the use of violence. Cahill reports that the chapter where I address this question “actually proves that not atypically war tends to form dispositions to hatred and war crimes.” O'Driscoll is less cautious, claiming that I cite testimony indicating that soldiers “are frequently prone to animus in battle.” Neither report is accurate, my readers having seen what they wanted rather than what was there. The phrase “not atypical” is a curious one, meaning, I suppose, “not exactly typical, but not very far from it.” In contrast “frequently” has the merit of being unequivocal. In fact, all that I say and show is that rage can overtake soldiers in combat under certain circumstances, that it is not always unwarranted, that it is not normal, that it can be contained, that its prevalence depends on the quality of military leadership and discipline, and that combat soldiers in several wars have been horrified to find a prevalence of hatred among civilians that was entirely missing among their comrades. My recent rereading of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia has added further empirical backing to these claims.3While Cahill finds my account of intention and double effect rather better than some others, Scott Davis certainly does not: he finds it “seriously flawed.” He objects to my stipulation that an unintended evil effect (e.g., the death of the enemy) of a deliberate action should be accepted with appropriate reluctance, although he concedes that it would be appropriate to “regret” it. The distinction between reluctance and regret seems to me a very fine one, and I struggle to see what hangs on it. But let me put that aside, for the heart of Davis's objection is that to claim, as I do, that soldiers should not intend to harm the enemy but should instead accept that harm with reluctance, is to say that they do not intend the lethal means that they choose and are therefore not responsible for its evil effect. Our quarrel here turns on different meanings of “to intend.” By it I mean “to want.” I prefer this meaning, in order to make clear what is wrong with intending an evil effect, namely, the corrupting identification of the agent, via his will, with evil. I also distinguish intending from choosing, since one can choose what one does not want, and according to the principle of double effect, one may choose what one should not want. Therefore, when I say that a soldier should not intend the death of his enemy, I am not saying that he should not choose it or that he is not responsible or accountable for his choice. He is accountable, but he can give a justifying account, if, among other things, he can say that he did not want the evil effect he chose to bring about, and if he can substantiate his not wanting by evidence of reluctance. And here it becomes clear to me why I prefer reluctance to regret: reluctance requires the soldier to prefer disabling his enemy to killing him, if that is practicable, and it withholds him from killing his enemy, once disabled.Lisa Cahill also objects to my characterization of just war as a form of punishment. This is because she thinks that it implies that vengeful retaliation is a sufficient purpose, and that it shifts the focus from the good to be protected to the grievance suffered, thus loosening the reins on anger and resentment. Instead, she prefers to think of justified war in terms of defense of the common good. I do not entirely disagree. Just war is certainly defensive of public goods, but it is defensive of them against wrongful harm, and the defense that it offers is hostile and coercive toward the perpetrators of that harm. In this sense, it seems to me that just war is irreducibly punitive—and indeed, retaliatory and retributive. Nevertheless, I do take care, I think, to distinguish punishment, retaliation, and retribution, on the one hand, from retributivism and vengeance, on the other, and to say that just punishment can never be retributivist in the sense of seeking the suffering or destruction of the wrongdoer per se or vengeful in the sense of seeking them excessively. Suffering and destruction should never be ends in themselves but only tragically necessary means to defend public goods, stop and deter wrongdoing, and reform wrongdoers. To talk about defense without talking about punishment is to shield oneself from the unpleasant fact that in this case justified defense requires that wrongdoers be coerced, violently.If Lisa Cahill doubts that In Defence of War is Christian enough (since the gospel is “nonviolent”), Nahed Artoul Zehr is inclined to think it too Christian. She rightly discerns that I intend to address a broad readership, but she is therefore puzzled by my explicit self-identification with a particular, religious tradition and by my making theological claims. How can Christian ideas guide the ethical decision making of non-Christians? Moreover, this confessional stance she deems “exceptionally uncomfortable” in a post-9/11 environment, where the and other have been of a My is I do not believe in the possibility of That is to I do not believe that there is a of terms that is between which of a should when with each other about public do I believe that religious are per se and that public be in order to be There is no view from there are only they or can we By out and what we think and by others to do the by in the of by identifying of by reasoning about of and by from one I do not doubt that readers find in my book and with which they disagree. But I am that of them find that they can all, the common world that we does in the of our What is different are absolutely to one certain of and for example, and both and are more theological than moral usually care to for the of the they no more (and with a good reason to stop their against the in Christian tradition than in the world with a good reason to stop their against the in all that, Zehr has a of In Defence of In to address both my fellow Christian ethicists and others in the same I have the of the who might have no in Christian or find religious terms or even a certain toward them. on an Mathewes did that, in order to readers on I should not the book with the chapter on Christian I fully the of his and it but in the I that had to take over the same however, I made a point of readers in the that each chapter is enough that they can to that no for them. Nevertheless, I that some readers would be is, and to themselves to in case they might Moreover, it to me that public and would be if more to that religious are not all about to do if my of is not too to Christian its is then how can it be or and why should be by he the of and the of their to and just war thinking. He I think, that is a more than I admit, and he observes the difficulty in over common of On the other hand, to in the he questions my about the for in the of ethical out that my to a universal implies the possibility of has put his on an important and in my and he is quite right to for further me some of First of all, to that a Christian is to believe that a is certainly not to that only Christians have such a nor yet to make a about how Christian is its their own of that but those need not be or I have been for example, by the between and thinking about just on the one hand, and the Christian “just war” on the other, the fact that and of each other the Nevertheless, it is true that not all Christian for example, not be to of the to the to avoid pain and then nor or are the of there is as it of what is and I agree: is a which since it is the of of always be by some of them and for example, even if does the to in the of a to stop the and the never acknowledge that in a of all, because their are not so second, because their is to the of the and its of is also the reason for my about the of Therefore, while is a of about it is not the only one. in lies the of in But cannot be the last for while is a guide to universal it has no of and have been to it So the consciences and the of be they or ethicists or that it is possible that and George (and their actually the of Iraq better than most and That is what I argue in the chapter of my where I that the invasion was justified. finds this even in the of the moral that my analysis she thinks that war is too complex a to be of she suggests that my to the Iraq war might have prevented and she considers me too in of doubt and and too inclined to She also offers a of more that the of is not to the of right that the lack of to Iraq by might be attributable to doubts about the of by the that the coalition's to the responsible for the of its is of wrong that I should have a more analysis of harm to and that my argument on in the book that the killing of the can be justified by an to their if to implies that of is morally they not and that the civilians obliged to give their are two reasons why I my argument to a first, the of the chapter is to use the case of Iraq to work out how the of just war can be and and second, I do not think that should themselves a of that is to decision I of course, that war is a complex and I believe that the invasion of Iraq was more morally complex than But a complex a that is not a complex that is I am to and and whether that my others for I hold no for I to being an of Nevertheless, I believe that, when writing the chapter on the I was to that it had indeed been a in my very on the I was more than I give of I do so to what has to me the lack of on the part of of the because of what I to be the between the reasoning and their and because one needs good reasons to withhold of and in this case I have not them. I of course, it is because they are not to their should be more to me can only be by down into the and the of So let me to each of that I have I do not argue that the of is to the of only that a action can be in part without being or if the for can be the of indifference to the of the then a to intend the of a just would be however, the is attributable instead to a about the means of political then that could still be with a intention of the That it was in fact so is by the evidence I that a for the was one of the in both and and by the fact that the of and over in to the of is quite that the lack of to Iraq by could have been by doubts about the need to or not it was so depends upon the empirical My of the suggests that that was not the the invasion the and all that Iraq had and and was on and that the was about the the of I think it fair to report that I do several the out that the of most of the not but that the bears responsibility in that it failed to and order Nevertheless, is in that my thinking about the general justification of killing the implies the of I am not with that but I see no to avoid it. I do not think that it makes sense to say that have a and right not to be do have a right not to be which that they be But it does not them in the of on military I imagine that most readers of this agree with me that the invasion of in was of the fact that it the deaths of us that it had or that in have its I cannot see am that the of justifying the killing of civilians on the that they have a to their seems and I it I am also of one case in which an has the of his own the invasion a by in the of a in made a point of on the as he to never see this for which I have for so but I that through my death others be the his was then what was true of him was true of of of that the of an of war should be that of a to since, the political she is to the use of it. O'Driscoll in the same when he observes that just war are part of war that they are to and how one can to the of without I of course, that those with political should be made accountable and therefore to I also agree that our if they their for rather than public I agree that political are to have their reasoning by the it And I agree that just warriors who never a war they do not one waged by their own are That I believe that we should all of to all of to and to as well as to public And I believe that our only the moral right to be when it has to be and and to withhold from the of and I do what O'Driscoll means when he of war do a of their sometimes which is to And yet where he a I see of in public who are more morally and than the less and who have and taken that me have to Our from the exercise of political is not just an it is also a to too the of righteous to in wishful to daydream among the and never to the necessary

Collateral damages: Tracing the debts and displacements of the Iraq War By NadiaEl‐Shaarawi, Oakland: University of California Press. 2025. 239 pp.