War, Otherness, and Illusionary Identifications with the State

Abstract

t is useful to distinguish among five different contexts in which the U.S. war effort in the Middle East can be analyzed and critiqued: 1. Long-term U.S. power politics and imperial objectives of domination, including military intervention in the Third World to secure strategically and economically important resources. Publications by Noam Chomsky and Joel Beinin may very well be the best-known and most effective among these critiques. 2. Inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the official moral legitimation of the war, raising questions such as the following: If U.S. foreign policy is guided by morality, why does the U.S. not intervene-even diplomatically-when thousands are murdered by a Suharto in Last Timor or a Pinochet in Chile? Does it not give pause that the images, for example, of gassed Kurdish children, that are used to demonstrate Hussein's disdain for human life, largely date back to a time when he was the friend of the United States against the then-popular tyrant, Khomeini? Why weren't these images disseminated in the media earlier? Why does the