Demystifying the “Victimized State”

Ross Mcgarry

doi:10.1177/1054137316675717

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to illustrate prescient issues relating to current and ex-military communities in the United Kingdom who have featured heavily within the policy arena over the past decade in relation to several key areas of importance. It will be illustrated how this population becomes visible within the public imagination (via military losses), how discourses relating to the harms they experience are structured and articulated within political and policy domains (particularly in relation to mental health) via “state talk” (qua Sim), and what the potential social consequences are for politically rendering an unproblematized populist view of current and ex-military communities (i.e., pending crises). This argument is made with the express intention of reengaging critical recognition of the distancing of the military institution from the physical and psychological vulnerability of those who have participated in war and military environments. This is an argument returned to pertinence from the recent publication of the Chilcot Inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war.

Highlights

As part of an international military coalition, the declared ‘original objective’ of the British New Labour government during the war in Iraq (2003–2009) was stated as removing Saddam Hussein from power; a proposed policy ‘‘success’’ intimated as conjoined with being ‘based on the benefit of the target group’ of the Iraqi population (McConnell, 2010, p. 107, emphasis in original)
Following the prolonged publication of the Chilcot Inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war, the invasion and its aftermath has been formally established as a foreign policy failure on behalf of the British government and Ministry of Defence
By illustrating how institutionalized vulnerability can be obfuscated from public view in the interests of the military institution, this article concludes by following Brown (2008) in proposing that current policy making and research regarding serving and ex-military communities to be potentially facilitating a crisis in waiting

Summary

Introduction

As part of an international military coalition, the declared ‘original objective’ of the British New Labour government during the war in Iraq (2003–2009) was stated as removing Saddam Hussein from power; a proposed policy ‘‘success’’ intimated as conjoined with being ‘based on the benefit of the target group’ of the Iraqi population (McConnell, 2010, p. 107, emphasis in original). ‘this number represents the cost only to the United States It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq’ Within his opening address to the British Iraq war inquiry, Sir John Chilcot (2016d) did acknowledge that ‘the people of Iraq have suffered greatly’ For Stiglitz and Blimes (2008), accounting for the consequences of such risks to military personnel is a central component for understanding the full domestic costs of the violence of the Iraq war. A comprehensive view of the far-reaching costs of the Iraq war upon the serving and ex-military community in the United Kingdom remained peripheral from the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry, and public scrutiny

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion