The ‘good war’ on terror: rewriting empire from George W. Bush to American Sniper

Abstract

Starting in the mid-2000s, a number of films were produced that challenged George W. Bush’s conflation of the War on Terror with the so-called “good war.” The films, which despite critical acclaim saw relatively low box-office returns, interrogated not only the rationale for and conduct of the War on Terror but the ontological claims of narrative and visual representation as such; resisting the dualisms, the easy resolutions and the proclaimed self-evidence of the “good war” model, they revealed both the war and its legitimation as intrinsically constructed, redacted and selective. This article identifies, in Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper, a return to the tropes of the “good” war that has sought to confer legitimacy and necessity upon the “War on Terror” and its exceptional/extrajudicial measures, arguing that, ultimately, it is precisely their expression in these terms that most starkly betrays the ideals for which the “good war” was ostensibly fought.