Representing the Viewer

Abstract

Until August 3, the United States had been a bystander in relation to the dramatic series of international events which had been shaking up the world order, for months on end. President Bush was receiving kudos as a pragmatic facilitator of other nations' transformative acts, but for the first time since WWII, the continuing geo-political centrality of the United States seemed open to doubt. With his invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein provided President Bush with an irresistible opportunity to reenter the global spotlight. Indeed, the immediate bipartisan support in Washington for the decision to send American troops to the Middle East is most readily explained in terms of a general enthusiasm for the idea that the United States was once more taking a position of world leadership. Moreover, this was world leadership of a sort previous Presidents could only dream about. This was a post-cold-war Hollywood global cominander in chief role. That brave western everyman, George Bush, and his American troops would quell the Darth Vader of the Middle East. After 45 years of thankless military interventionism, inured to local ingratitude and international condemnation, a US military action was being welcomed by almost everyone, and hailed for its moral purposiveness. The once serious risks that any such conflict would escalate into bi-polar hostilities and nuclear war were now merely a bad memory. With communist systems in self-flagellating eclipse throughout the world, the Gulf Crisis was just the occasion to experience what may be termed the virtual political unity, ensuing upon the historic demise of binary ideological positions. The gulf crisis is exciting from the perspective of political epistemology insofar as it is one of those quite rare events which are so sudden and unforeseen that we can experience their coming into existence as co-temporal with our first thoughts about them. This makes it possible to suppress the naturalistic assumption of a metaphysical difference between the actual event and our later awareness of it. We can better analyze the very existence of this event as constituted by our particular relationships to it, noticing its different reality for those with different relationships to it.