Oil Empire Strikes Back: U.S. Postmodern War with Iraq

David M. Boje, Ph.D., New Mexico State University, Jan 16 2003

Critical Postmodern Track of IABD - To appear in Business Research Yearbook

Photo: Kurt Nimo (2003)[i]

Jan 18 2003 one million people, in cities around the world, held Peace Vigils.  In Las Cruces, New Mexico 121 people turned up with signs, puppets, and costumes in front of the federal building. I brought my oversize Bush puppet-head made from paper maché, with signs attached saying, “Bush = Oil $” and “Impeach Bush.” I also held a sign that read, “Join PeaceAware.com.” Channel 9 and the Sun News were there, an unusual occurrence since mostly the press ignores the peace movement. CNN reported "tens of thousands" of people in attendance in Washington when the number was closer to 500,000; CNN ran a photo of a confrontation between an antiwar demonstrator.[ii] NY Times did not feel one million people in Peace Vigils was important enough for page 1, buried in the paper they explain they undercount the DC event, with a headline that says “Thousands in DC protest Iraq war plans,” they list the activist groups, then explain," Still, many of those marching today were not part of organized groups, but were simply skeptical and frustrated citizens who felt compelled to attend" (as if they really didn't want to).[iii]

Despite press portrayal, we are a non-violent. Iraq students from New Mexico State U had huge Iraq flags and held signs in Arabic about peace, not war. “Is that a website?” asked the Channel 9 cameraman. “Yes,” I replied, “it’s a web site I operate; there is also a listserve to keep people informed about the peace movement in New Mexico.” Our Peace Vigil does its street theatre every Wednesday, plus special events like today and Martin Luther King’s Day (Jan 20). Oct 28 we did our Teach-In Speak-Out at NMSU.

 Boje addressing Oct 28 Teach-In Speak-Out crowd at NMSU

Ours is carnivalesque theatre, which resists the spectacle theatre of Bush administration. Spectacle theatre is a multimillion marketing campaign to sell the public on the merits of preemptive strike war on Iraq. Spectacle theatre is mainstream media, which is corporate-owned TV and print media that persuades us we are out of our minds to want peace. Spectacle is one of Aristotle’s (350 BCE) tragic-elements of Poetics (plus plot, character, theme, dialog and rhythm).  Tragic theatre evokes emotions from spectators; in this case fear that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction will attack the United States, like bin Laden did on Sept 11. Key is the tragic flaw, the heroes’ reversal of fortune, its a lesson to spectators to purge that trait or suffer the same fate as the passengers in the air who collapsed the World Trade Center, and crushed more civilians. We are told that unless we purge our civil liberties and jump on the Iraq war bandwagon, our hero President Bush Jr. will not be able to save us from the bogeyman, Saddam.

Nimo (2003a) Photo Essay on Las Cruces Peace Vigil

Our carnivalesque street theatre presents a different tragedy. In our plot, the oil and arms corporations operate a puppet government, purchasing and electing presidents and congress, so we have a plutocracy, not a democracy. This is the oil presidency. George W. Bush, 1978-84 was senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration and Spectrum 7 oil companies; 1986-90 Bush was senior executive of the Harken oil company (part of their purchase of Spectrum 7). VP Dick Cheney, 1995-2000 was CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil service company. Both firms are immersed in accounting scandals. Condoleeza Rice, 1991-2000 was senior executive with Chevron Oil, which named an oil tanker after her. Five Bush administration members were Enron executives. ExxonMobil contributed $1.2 million to the Republican Party in 2000, second only to Enron; ExxonMobil spent $47 million lobbying the US Congress and Presidential Administrations since 1997 (stopExxonMobil.org). Oil and Enron scripted US energy policy.[iv] 100 officials in the Bush White House have put the majority of their personal investments, up to $144.6 million, into the old-guard energy sector (Gonsalves, 2002).

In carnival-theatre, the tragic reversal of fortune is one a half million Iraqi civilians, including half a million children, who have died of starvation, disease, and radiation poisoning as a result of U.S. sanctions on medicine, food, and any item that would rebuild water sanitation. The reversal of fortune is the 185,780 U.S. service men and women in the first Gulf War (1991) who filed for disability (9,592 died) from uranium 238 the pentagon used in its munitions.  The reversal of fortune is the loss of American democracy as Homeland Security cashes in our civil liberties and brings back a level of surveillance and restriction we knew in McCarthyism; war on terrorism is the new cold war.  The tragic reversal is how this war Wags the Dog, as money from education and health care is put into the $400 billion war machine.

Spectacle and Carnival are in dialectic opposition, with no synthesis in sight. Peace vigils by disenfranchised students and senior citizens are no match for multimillion-dollar spectacle advertising campaigns. The nation is scared, the evangelicals have declared holy war, and spectacle makes the bogeymen and Bush-the-hero, appear larger than life. There is a willing suspension of disbelief, a refusal to seek alternative media sources. High school children repeat their parents’ call to round up every Arab and put them into camps.

The oil empire strikes back. Iraq War II is the sequel to the Bush’s father’s Gulf War. President Bush Jr.’s document, "The National Security Strategy of the United States," (Sept 2002) says, “The enemy is terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.”[v]  Dec 31, 2000, President Bush appointed a former aide to the American oil company Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan (Martin, 2002). On Dec 27 2002 Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan signed the agreement with Unocal of the US and Saudi Arabia's Delta oil company, major partners in a planned consortium to build the $2.5 billion gas pipeline (Badri, 2002). Unocal alum, Hamid Karzai, is the U.S.-anointed president of Afghanistan. On May 20, 2002 Unocal Chairman Charles R. Williamson told Unocal stockholders that Unocal has no plans or interest in becoming involved in any projects in Afghanistan, including natural gas or crude oil pipelines.[vi]

Without Iraq II, Bush and Cheney would be mired in Enrongate, electoral scandal and accounting sleaze at Harken and Halliburton. These megaspectacles point to what is wrong with the American political economy.

Iraq is postmodern war, part of the entertainment economy of Disneyfied and McDonaldized US. Best and Kellner (2001: 73) say the Gulf War “was ‘postmodern’ in that, first, it was a media event that was experienced as a live occurrence for the whole global village. Second, it managed to blur the distinction between truth and reality in a triumph of the orchestrated image and spectacle. Third, the conflict exhibited a heightened merging of individuals and technology, previewing a new type of cyberwar that featured information technology and ‘smart’ weapons.” I think Iraq II is McWar, one in which we will not see the bodies of children killed by sanctions. McWar, here will mean the McDonaldization, Las Vegasization, and Disneyfication theatrics that transform war through cyber and biotech into something postmodern infecting the social body.  McWar relies upon the Disneyfication-theming of good and bad on the global and digital stage, the McDonaldization-scripting of the mechanistic-scripting of war as romantic, and the Las Vegasization-disciplining of individual passions, the management and control of spectators and actors (or just spect-actors) by directors. For the past 12 years, US sanctions program spearheaded the genocide of 1.5 million Iraqi, close to a million are children under ten. According to a UN study, the Iraq war will result in "the outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions."[vii]

References

Best, S. & D. Kellner (2001). Postmodern Adventure. UK/NY: Guilford Press.

Boje, D. M. (2002a). Critical Dramaturgical Analysis of Enron Antenarratives and Metatheatre. Plenary presentation to 5th International Conference on Organizational Discourse: From Micro-Utterances to Macro-Inferences, Wednesday 24th - Friday 26th July (London).
http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/ENRON_critical_dramaturgical_analysis.htm

Boje, D. M. (2002b). Oil and Empire: Say No to the Oil War. October 2, 2002; Revised 18 Oct. http://www.zianet.com/boje/1/pages/oil_wars.htm

Boje, D. M. (2002c). Postmodern Oil War: Part II: Empire Strikes Back. http://www.zianet.com/boje/peace/facts_and_myths_about_iraq_war.htm

Dougherty, Jon (2003). Homeland Insecurity: Terror alerts manufactured? World Net Daily. January 4. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30312

Gonsalves, Sean (2002b). Connecting the energy dots to Afghanistan. Alternet. September 5. http://www.oceanbooks.com.au/iraq/articles2/264.html

Holhut, Randolph T. (2003). On Native Ground: The real ‘luckie duckies.’ The American Reporter. Vol. 9, No. 2017, January 14.  http://www.american-reporter.com/2017/11.html

Lobe, Jim (2002). Africa Eclipsed in 2002 U.S. Media Coverage, Says Report. One World.net Report. Dec 3 http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/oneworld/20021231/wl_oneworld/1032_1041292700

Lynch, Colum (2003). US fights timing of weapons reports. Washington Post. Jan 15 on line at http://msnbc.com/news/860023.asp?0cv=CA01#BODY

Martin, Patrick (2002). Oil company adviser named US representative to Afghanistan, 3 January. World Socialist Website. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/oil-j03.shtml