Frederick M. Dolan

University of California at Berkeley

 

. . . the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

 

— Paul de Man

 

In the life of a nation, we’re called upon to define who we are and what we believe. Sometimes the choices are not easy. As today’s President, I ask for your support in the decision I’ve made to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong all in the cause of peace.

 

— George Bush

 

The crisis in the Gulf, as today’s President acknowledges, is in large measure a crisis of self- definition: a matter of identity (as in defining America’s role in a post-cold war world, and indeed of writing the rules for such a world), of marking or highlighting the boundary between self and other (as in the ownership and control of “the world’s largest oil reserves,” or as between the civilized and the uncivil). Following a long Orientalist tradition, the West feels compelled to go elsewhere in search of its defining characteristics, even if this means, to use President Bush’s own metaphor, drawing lines in the sand. As his image forces one to reflect, sand–especially the shifting, wind-blown sand of the Arabian Empty Quarter–is a most unstable medium, and a line drawn in it is likely to be erased with the next change in weather. The contours of the boundary lines and identity President Bush hopes to define remain, it is true, somewhat murky. At the same time, for those who have followed literary theory over the past two decades, the battle over what meaning to assign Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait possesses an uncanny familiarity. The seemingly anarchic spin-doctoring of American officials charged with formulating war aims that seem at once defensible and feasible, and the way in which their efforts have been judged and interpreted in the press, have to do, in particular, with the much-discussed questions of allegory, symbol, and irony.

 

At first glance, the debate in Congress and the media appears to be an argument over the appropriate allegorical reading of the Gulf crisis, with the Bush administration insisting on the pre-text of World War II and the lessons of Munich, and its critics favoring the script of Vietnam. To much of the public, the Bush administration’s deployment of nearly 400,000 troops, and billions of dollars of weaponry both high-tech and low, is allegorically intelligible in terms of the story of America’s tragic and ambiguous “involvement” in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, it is said, the United States is taking the lead in fighting somebody else’s war; as in Vietnam, the Middle East is figured as a “quagmire” in which American troops will become–what else?–“bogged down.” The Middle East will be transformed into a huge Lebanon, with the emergence of hopelessly ambiguous and complex factions intractable to the Manichaean American mind. American morale will gradually be destroyed, and America’s standing in the world will once again be diminished.

 

Against this allegorical interpretation of the crisis, officials, media pundits, and a farrago of “experts” on matters from national security to Middle Eastern politics insist that the events taking place in the Gulf bear no relevant relationship to Vietnam. Our commitment in the Gulf is clear and forceful where it was ambiguous and shifting in Vietnam. As opposed to the gradual escalation that characterized Vietnam, plans for war in the Gulf, in so far as we can tell from press reports, suggest an all-out, all-or-nothing operation. More importantly–though for ideological reasons this point,qua allegory, must remain tacit–the campaign against Saddam Hussein involves “big principles” and “vital interests” (the tacit point being that Vietnam involved neither). The vital interests are variously described as oil or jobs; the big principles are those of territorial integrity, opposition to aggressive war, and respect for United Nations resolutions. The allegorical pre-text for the Persian Gulf crisis, in this optic, must be World War II, in which economic interests and unassailable principles fortuitously combined to produce a “Good War.” Indeed, the invasion of Kuwait was allegorized almost from the beginning of the crisis. The first reported invocation of the Munich Analogy is attributed to “Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, [who] called Mr. Hussein `the Hitler of the Middle East’ and criticized Mr. Bush for not having moved earlier to forestall an invasion.”¹

 

The significance of the crisis was more fully articulated the next day in a column by Flora Lewis entitled “Fruits of Appeasement.”² Characterizing the takeover of Kuwait as a “blitzkrieg invasion,” Lewis notes how it caused “European commentators to remember Hitler,” whose lust for power also provoked a “dithering argument over whether it was wiser to indulge him or try to isolate and block him . . . until it was too late.” Like Hitler, Hussein’s aims are not regional, but global: “he is determined to become the great leader of the Arab nation, and not just another nation but a world power based on guns and oil. His relentless drive for a nuclear weapon is not only to threaten his neighbors and Israel; it is to change the whole balance of power.” The day after Lewis’s column appeared, A.M. Rosenthal confirmed her reading, characterizing the invasion as “a declaration of war against Western power and economic independence” and asserting that “Western leaders have failed in their duty to prepare action against the plainest threats of aggression since Adolf Hitler.”³ A few days later he rounded out the picture by placing the invasion of Kuwait within a larger narrative whose plot is driven by anti-Semitism: “Hussein’s dream of dominating the Arab Middle East was never separate from his vision of ultimate duty and destiny–the elimination of the state of Israel. […] For all other Arabs who long for Israel’s extinction, Saddam Hussein’s passion against the Jews is what counts. . . .”⁴

 

Bush quickly caught on. Although in his first statements he invoked Hitler only obliquely, describing how “Iraq’s tanks stormed in blitzkrieg fashion through Kuwait in a few short hours,”⁵ and attempted to justify possible war by reference to U.S. economic and energy interests, by the middle of August he was relying heavily on the allegory of World War II. In a speech to the Pentagon, for example, the President reminded his audience that “A half a century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor,” and went on to vow that “We are not going to make the same mistake again.”⁶ Over the next few months, Bush struggled to make U.S. policy in the Gulf allegorically intelligible through reference to World War II. Iraqi aggression, Bush said in early November as he announced new troop deployments, “is not just a challenge to the security of Kuwait and other Gulf nations, but to the better world that we have all hoped to build in the wake of the cold war. The state of Kuwait must be restored, or no nation will be safe, and the promising future we anticipate will indeed be jeopardized.”⁷ In December Bush was still offering this theme. In Hussein, he insisted, like Hitler, we find “a dangerous dictator all too willing to use force, who has weapons of mass destruction and is seeking new ones and who desires to control one of the world’s key resources. . . .”⁸ Indeed, Hussein was at one point alleged to beworse than Hitler.

 

Whatis the allegorical significance of World War II? The obvious meaning has to do with the dangers of appeasing tyrants, of course, and this is the interpretation supplied by the Bush administration. But I think I can discern in the speeches and pronouncements and debates another meaning as well, one that becomes accessible through Paul de Man’s interpretation of the ideological function of the “symbol” in Romantic literature.⁹ The symbol was understood by the Romantics as a privileged representation whose meaning derived from its evocation of an extra-linguistic relationship as opposed to significance generated through linguistic conventions or relationships, such as allegory, where the meaning of a story depends upon a larger narrative. For de Man, the appeal of a symbolic understanding of representation is to allow the time-bound, finite subject to “supplement” himself with nature’s eternal laws:

 

The temptation exists . . . for the self to borrow, so to speak, the temporal stability that it lacks from nature, and to devise strategies by means of which nature is brought down to a human level while still escaping from "the unimaginable touch of time." (De Man, 197)

 

Wordsworth, for example, represents the “movements of nature” as “endurance within a pattern of change, the assertion of a metatemporal, stationary state beyond the apparent decay of a mutability that attacks certain outward aspects of nature but leaves the core intact” as in “The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed / The stationary blast of waterfalls. . . .” (The Prelude, quoted in De Man, 197). Through such privileged signs, the subject moves beyond temporal limits to a confrontation with the eternal real. For de Man, however, the very idea of a symbol, as a figure, relies on an act of “ontological bad faith,” a mystification of language that suppresses the dependence ofalllinguistic figuration on a range of pre-texts or pre-existing literary signs.

 

The utility of de Man’s analysis is that it enables us to grasp that the official allegorizing of the Gulf crisis is notput forward as allegory; rather, the intent is to establish Iraqi aggression as asymbol in the Romantic sense. World War II was the “Good War” because it rescued us from our finite, mutable, temporal concerns and put us in direct contact with the Real: the eternal, unchanging moral and political principles that define us as a nation. President Bush hopes to convince us that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait offers an opportunity to step outside the everyday administrative concerns of politics and business as usual, and renew our commitment to the principles that make us who we are; it is in this sense that, in Bush’s words, the Gulf crisis calls us to “define who we are and what we believe.” According to de Man, the way out of the bad faith of the symbolic leads through irony, but he is quick to warn that irony carries with it its own potential for mystification. Through irony, he argues, the self is led to recognize its constructed rather than original character:

 

The reflective disjunction [characteristic of irony] not only occursby means of language as a privileged category, but it transfers the self out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language--a language that it finds in the world like one entity among others, but that remains unique in being the only entity by means of which it can differentiate itself from the world. (De Man, 213)

 

It is too crude, however, to say that irony subverts the claim of symbolic language to have accessed the Real by exposing and foregrounding the lack of closure between the linguistic sign and its meaning, because the latter is characteristic of figural language generally: the “structure shared by irony and allegory is that, in both cases, the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous, involving an extraneous principle that determines the point and the manner at and in which the relationship is articulated” (De Man, 209). What is unique about irony is its dynamism:

 

Irony is unrelievedvertige, dizziness to the point of madness. Sanity can exist only because we are willing to function within the conventions of duplicity and dissimulation, just as social language dissimulates the inherent violence of the actual relationships between human beings. Once this mask is shown to be a mask, the authentic being underneath appears necessarily as on the verge of madness." (De Man, 215-216)

 

For this reason, irony can operate as a trope of demystification, replacing the reassurance of interpretative conventions with the madness of endless interpretation. Yet as the current contest of allegories suggests, a mere plurality of competing perspectives, however healthy for politics, does not suffice for the purposes of demystification. And it is demystification–the sifting and evaluation of truth claims, the establishment of a reliable account of the world–upon which the institutional privilege of journalism thrives. In this context it is noteworthy that the press has resorted to irony in its attempt to cast doubt on official explanations of policy. In a world of agonistic interpretations–literally, apolemicalpublic sphere in which no absolute ground is recognized or can be discovered–the press can fulfill its pledge to deliver the Real only through ironizing the public agon, that is, only by analyzing it in terms of meanings which are different from and displace those signified by the public discourses themselves. To place itself on the ground of the Real, journalism must constantly foreground the discrepancy between the public claims and the “real” meaning of these claims. Thus the press forces to self-consciousness the constructed character of public discourse, in part simply by highlighting the availability of differing allegorical readings of the event. Bush’s Munich Analogy never quite took, and the public and press continued to find in the stories of Vietnam allegorical meanings of a more relevant nature. A few days after Bush’s November escalation of the U.S. troop presence in the Gulf, doubts about the Munich analogy and fear of a “repeat” of Vietnam were front-page news: “In a joint statement, the House Speaker, Representative Thomas S. Foley, Democrat of Washington, and the majority leader, Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, said, `We urge the President to explain fully to the American people the strategy and aims that underlie his decision to dispatch additional forces to the region’.” The article moved quickly to frame the issue in terms of the appropriate allegorical reading:

 

On explaining the motives for American action, President Bush has stopped emphasizing the need to protect oil supplies, an issue he once cited along with the need to resist aggression. He now concentrates on opposing aggression, comparing Mr. Hussein to Hitler. There are critics of both rationales, and a fear of repeating the Vietnam experience--suffering great loss of life for little purpose. [...] One-third of voters surveyed on Election Day opposed American military action that would produce heavy casualties, a level of opposition reached during the Vietnam War only after several years of fighting. The survey also found the clear beginnings of the sort of partisan division that tore the country during Vietnam: two-thirds of those opposing American action in the gulf, and in particular, Black Americans, voted Democratic. But more than half of those who say the nation should persevere even in the face of many casualties voted Republican.¹⁰

 

A few days later, the public’s insistence on allegorizing the Gulf crisis through Vietnam was again front-page news: “as Americans confront the possibility of another war, history seems to present a troubling multiple-choice question: Would this be another World War II, or another Vietnam?”¹¹

 

Amidst the clash of allegories, the Bush administration reeled to-and-fro from one explanation to another, to the point where narrative incoherency itself was explicitly thematized as a public concern. In early November, a week before the escalation, Bush tested the waters by issuing more condemnations of Iraq. The result was hysteria among Republicans running for re-election in the Senate and House, who attacked Bush for deploying confusing messages: “Republican strategists continued to express their disdain for the performance of the White House in this critical week before the election. `They don’t have their act together,’ one counselor to the White House said. `They’re living in a fog. They’re confusing the American public.'”¹² The inability to tell a coherent story quickly became a public, not merely partisan, issue: “A common complaint . . . [among the public] was that the Bush Administration seemed unable to come up with a consistent–and compelling–account of what the United States was preparing to fight for. Was it to protect oil sources, they wanted to know, or to prevent further aggression, or simply to maintain the status quo?” (Kolbert, A10). Indeed, within a few weeks it began to appear as if journalists were more concerned about the incoherency of the narratives on offer than with the substance of policy itself, and by mid-November, the inability of the administration to construct a satisfying story had become a source of frustration within Bush’s cabinet itself: “Mr. Baker, Mr. Bush’s former campaign chairman, is said to have grown exasperated with White House speech writers’ inability to present the President’s gulf policy in a simple, coherent and compelling fashion so that it will have the sustained support of the American public.”¹³ Bush himself was eventually forced to acknowledge widespread fears of ambiguity and lack of closure: “if there must be war . . . I pledge to you there will not be any murky ending” (“Excerpts From President’s News Conference” 4). In effect, Bush promised that the war would be fought in such a way as to allow for the telling of coherent realist narratives, with endings implicit in their beginnings and unambiguous resolutions.

 

But the press also emphasizes the difference between sign and meaning by undermining in its own voice the coherency of the proffered explanations and justifications. Very early in the crisis, Thomas L. Friedman drew attention to the vagueness of the Bush administration’s justifications of policy and attributed this to U.S. officials’ unwillingness to state publicly the real rationale for the policy.¹⁴ “[S]peaking privately,” these officials list “three interests at stake in the Gulf. One is the price of oil. Another is who controls the oil. The third is the need to uphold the integrity of territorial boundaries so that predatory regional powers will not simply begin devouring their neighbors.” But Friedman goes on to question even these “private” reasons as valid explanations for the policy, suggesting at one point that, for Bush and his advisers, U.S. control of the Persian Gulf is such a deeply held assumption that they may be incapable of explicitly defending it. The real explanation, Friedman suggests, is that the United States wants to preserve the status quo in the Persian Gulf, a desire prompted by economic interest: “Troops have been sent to retain control of oil in the hands of pro-American Saudi Arabia, so prices will remain low.” Anna Quindlen bemoans the discrepancy between sign and meaning in a similar vein:

 

Our reality has outstripped the traditional stories of brave men going out to fight and die for a great cause while their women wait staunchly at home and provide security and normalcy for their children. We have become more complicated than the scripts of old movies. Now we have brave women going out to fight and die for a cause none of us is sure of while their children struggle to feel secure with grandparents or aunts and uncles. We are going to war for oil, and, by extension, for the economy. The President trots out his Hitler similes to convince us otherwise.¹⁵

 

At times, the general public awareness of this discrepancy, fueled, of course, by the rhetorical strategies of the press itself, acquires a news value of its own: “what marks the current crisis is the way Americans are talking openly about the President’s inability to `sell’ war to a wary populace” (Kolbert, A1).

 

The reader will have noticed that in these examples, the “dynamism” or “madness” that de Man attributes to irony is conspicuously lacking; instead, irony is presented as yet another journalistic factoid, to be objectively represented. As practiced byThe New York Times, ironization has the opposite effect of demystification. De Man cautions against seeing irony as “a kind of therapy, a cure of madness by means of the spoken or written word”:

 

When we speak . . . of irony originating at the cost of the empirical self, the statement has to be taken seriously enough to be carried to the extreme: absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself. But this reflection is made possible only by the double structure of ironic language: the ironist invents a form of himself that is "mad" but that does not know his own madness; he then proceeds to reflect on his madness thus objectified. (De Man, 216)

 

This, de Man says, makes it easy to see irony as a kind of folie lucidewhich, in allowing “language to prevail even in extreme stages of self-alienation,” might be viewed as a remedy for the mad displacement of sign and meaning through rigorous self-consciousness about the irony of language. This indeed seems to be precisely the claim of the press, which, under the circumstances of a phantasmagoric public sphere, maintains its claim to a privileged surveillance and objectivity by delivering the truth that all public representations are false.

 

But to construe irony in this way, de Man argues, is the ultimate mystification. To illustrate, he discusses Jean Starobinski’s reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’sPrinzessin Brambilla. In Hoffmann’s tale, an acting couple who confuse their own lives with the “meaningful” roles they play on stage are “`cured’ of this delusion by the discovery of irony,” after which they find happiness in domesticity. But as de Man insists, “the bourgeois idyll of the end is treated by Hoffmann as pure parody . . . far from having returned to their natural selves, [the hero and heroine] are more than ever playing the artificial parts of the happy couple” (De Man, 217-218). De Man concludes that “at the very moment that irony is thought of as a knowledge able to order and cure the world, the source of its invention immediately runs dry. The instant that it construes the fall of the self as an event that could somehow benefit the self, it discovers that it has in fact substituted death for madness” (De Man, 218). For de Man, then, “true irony” would be “irony to the second power or `irony of irony.'” Through continual invention, such ironizing would state “the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world” (De Man, 218). This is achieved only by refusing to see irony as a trope of mastery or reconciliation; and yet it is precisely as a sign of mastery that irony is deployed by the press. Ironically–I use the term advisedly–the Bush administration occupies the vanguard when it comes to the impossibility of reconciling world and text, in its insistence on the impossibility of knowing what the U.S. Constitution says about the authority to use force, and hence of knowing precisely how the Constitution is to be applied to the real world. While Congress insists on the text’s legibility (only Congress, Congress says, has the power to make war), Bush insists on its ambiguity:

 

On Tuesday, influential lawmakers pressed Mr. Bush to call a special session, with many members of Congress saying that the President would be usurping their constitutional power to send American troops into combat if he acted without Congressional approval. Mr. Bush responded today by pulling a copy of the Constitution from his suit pocket at a meeting with Congressional leaders from both parties and telling him that he understood what it said about the responsibility of Congress to declare war. But, he added, "It also says that I'm the Commander in Chief."

 

Later, Baker had a two-hour meeting with congressional leaders and held a news conference:

 

While agreeing that only Congress has the authority to declare war, Mr. Baker said, "There are many, many circumstances and situations indeed where there could be action taken against American citizens or against American interests that would call for a very prompt and substantial response." Mr. Baker said that Mr. Bush would follow the Constitution, but added with a smile, "It's a question of what the Constitution requires."¹⁶

 

But Bush’s insistence on the ambiguity of the Constitution should not lead us to assimilate his conduct in office to Ronald Reagan’s postmodern presidency. While Reagan taught us to celebrate, and above all to exploit, a political and social world in which distinctions between the simulated and the real were simply irrelevant, Bush, it would appear, intends to lead us back to the Real, to invent a politics beyond that of Reagan’s handlers–which, of course, means war, since death, as always, is the union card of the Real, the one “event” that escapes the handler’s grasp. Bush, we might say, is Romantic where Reagan was postmodern. Arrayed against Bush’s Romantic symbolism is the weak irony–that is, the mystified lucidity–of the press. Indeed, lucidity–in a precisely defined official sense–is fast becoming a condition of death as well as life. In the issue ofThe New York Times that featured the report on widespread public awareness of the discrepancy between political sign and political meaning, an editorial referred to the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling that a murderer who became insane after he was condemned to death could be forced to take a drug that would render him “mentally competent” to undergo execution. The weak irony cultivated by theTimes may well involve a similar economy: we must be just lucid enough–that is, just skeptical and uncertain enough–to feel that we master the world, so that we may sacrifice ourselves to its truths, and in particular to the truths of who we are and what we believe.

 

Notes

 

1. R.W. Apple, Jr., “Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait And Its Oil; U.S. Condemns Attack, Urges United Action,”The New York Times, August 3, 1990, A1, A8.

 

2. Flora Lewis, “Fruits of Appeasement,”The New York Times, August 4, 1990, 24.

 

3. A.M. Rosenthal, “Making a Killer,”The New York Times, August 5, 1990, E19.

 

4. A.M. Rosenthal, “Saddam’s Next Target,”The New York Times, August 9, 1990, A23.

 

5. “Excerpts From Bush’s Statement on U.S. Defense of Saudis,”The New York Times, August 9, 1990, A18.

 

6. Quoted in R.W. Apple, Jr., “Bush Says Iraqi Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life,'”The New York Times, August 16, 1990, A14.

 

7. “Excerpts From Bush’s Remarks on His Order to Enlarge U.S. Gulf Force,”The New York Times, November 9, 1990, A12.

 

8. “Excerpts From President’s News Conference on Crisis in Gulf,”The New York Times, December 1, 1990, 4.

 

9. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228.

 

10. Michael Oreskes, “A Debate Unfolds Over Going To War Against The Iraqis,”The New York Times, November 12, 1990, A1.

 

11. Elizabeth Kolbert, “No Talk of Glory, but of Blood on Sand,”The New York Times, November 15, 1990, A1.

 

12. Maureen Dowd, “Bush Intensifies A War Of Words Against The Iraqis,”The New York Times, November 1, 1990, A1.

 

13. Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Jobs at Stake in Gulf, Baker Says,”The New York Times, November 14, 1990, A8.

 

14. Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Gulf Policy: Vague `Vital Interests,'”The New York Times, August 12, 1990, A1.

 

15. Anna Quindlen, “New World at War,”The New York Times, September 15, 1990, A21.

 

16. Maureen Dowd, “President Seems to Blunt Calls For Gulf Session,”The New York Times, October 29, 1990, A1.