Thinking About Human Rights During the Iraq War: Toward a Cartography of the Cognition of Western “Thought Communities”

Abstract

Any symposium in academic quarters these days on the war in Iraq is likely to contain primarily accounts that share a common narrative of negativity about the justifications for the war, the conduct of the war, the effect of the war on civil liberties in the United States, and bleak prognostications about how the war has made the world more unstable and dangerous. The most common thread of this narrative is that the war was ill conceived, illegitimate, and unjust and has led Iraq into a more precarious situation than it was in even under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein. From a Durkheimian point of view, antiwar narratives have become rituals of sorts, which identify and strengthen the solidarity of groups, primarily on the left of the political spectrum; it is in this sense that negative narratives of the war have served as very strong forms of symbolic capital for the personal and political agendas of Western spectators of the conflict in Iraq. The mass demonstrations that have occurred worldwide, the campus teach-ins, the academic symposia, and the antiwar blogosphere all constitute a constellation of cultural discourse with immense power to unify antiwar groups and foster political action. In this environment, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to sustain any type of argument that supports the war in any way shape or form, which focuses on positive outcomes of the war, or which considers the fate of the Iraqi people under their former master, Saddam Hussein, who aspired to counter US hegemony, destroy Israel, and control the Middle East, or their would be masters, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which aspires to defeat the United States and set up a Taliban-style fascist theocracy in Iraq. What Paul Berman (2003) has seen as the traditional value system of the liberal internationalist—antifascism, pro-democracy, solidarity with the oppressed, and the expansion of human rights—has become, ironically, a value system that is not at all at home within the cultural constructions of those from the left who have opposed the war. Among most people on the left, an argument for the war, especially one made in terms of human rights, is likely to produce, in its most benign forms, curiosity and puzzlement, and in its most hostile forms, anger, hostility, shunning, and banishment from the ideological collective. In the present-day left narratives