Stats of Exception: Watchmen and Nixon’s NSC

. . . no more Stalins, no more Hitlers . . .

—William Burroughs

Covert activities place a great strain on the process of decision in a free society.

—The Tower Commission Report

 
Clark Kent may be what Superman thinks of us, but Christopher Reeve is what we think of Superman: disabled without that cape, less a costumed hero than a mortal pretending to be one. We like him and his fellow vigilantes so much because we don’t believe in them. We can’t. They conjure a world where it would be possible to right social wrongs with a satin mask, a stiff uppercut, and maybe the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, a world where people stronger and more confidently dressed than ourselves possess special powers and do amazing things—like protect us from bullies or make us breakfast. But it isn’t simply that Superman and his comic book ilk reincarnate memories of childhood. They perform a more speculative function too, staging a popular meditation on the legitimacy of vigilante violence. Caped crusaders are secret sovereigns, fighting crime with special powers. If one of the grievances of growing up is watching family heroes grow old, then it seems inevitable to wonder whether these will too. Does sovereignty outlive Superman?¹ If so, what forms does it take today?
 
A question, perhaps, for comics. Imposing cultural forces are at play here, which appear to divest such heroes of historical relevance. That at least is the thesis of the comic book that reflects most directly on the comic book as cultural artifact: Watchmen, the Hugo Award winning collaboration between Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen‘s 1995 cover, the familiar blood-spattered smiley face, proclaims it “One of Time Magazine‘s 100 Best Novels.” When it appeared serialized by DC Comics between September 1986 and October 1987, it hardly aspired to that august distinction. Writer Alan Moore never dignified Watchmen with the term “graphic novel”: “It’s a marketing term… that I never had any sympathy with. The term ‘comic’ does just as well for me” (Moore qtd. in “Graphic Novel”). As a serial comic, it took a year for Watchmen to unfold—a very interesting year in the annals of American foreign policy. Rekindling that ambient history throws the events it depicts into bold relief, highlighting its enduring urgency.
 
Watchmen is an alternative history written at a time when alternative history set the terms for real life, at least in Reagan’s America. It offers an extended meditation on the cultural fate of the costumed crusader. In typical comic book fashion, it approaches vigilante violence as an issue of extrajudicial exception and asks who wields it. One answer—the superhero—is oddly consonant with certain trends in contemporary political speculation. But that answer seems just as oddly incommensurable with the way things worked politically, or didn’t, during the year of Watchmen‘s publication. As a graphic examination of the politics of exception, Watchmen in some ways chimes nicely with Giorgio Agamben’s fretful interrogation of the use and abuse of civil violence in State of Exception. But as an alternative history of 1980s America, it sketches a geopolitics irreducible to that tidy if terrifying logic. Read in the flickering light of The Tower Commission Report, the official account of the Iran/Contra cover-up, Watchmen shows how exceptional circumstances can scatter the force of political decision and multiply its petty players.
 
“Who watches the Watchmen?” The graffito staining the background of so many of Watchman‘s frames asks an urgent political question. As Moore and Gibbons themselves note, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” (from Juvenal’s Satires), appears as an epigraph in The Tower Commission Report: specifically to “Appendix B,” which bears the title “The Iran/Contra Affair: A Narrative.” Appendix B provides the canonical account of the Regan administration’s great political debacle. It covers a historical period that closely parallels Watchmen‘s. And it too advances an alternative history to everyday life in the mid-eighties, the hidden history of the Iran/Contra affair. Appendix B and Watchmen thus frame that reality with competing versions of events. In one Earth hurtles toward nuclear holocaust. In the other America trades weapons for hostages. Neither version gibes with the reality most people thought they were living at the time. But both identify the true source of national security under such circumstances with a band of vigilantes. That one consists of erstwhile caped crusaders and the other of national security advisors might be little more than a matter of emphasis. Watchmen shares with The Tower Commission Report the revelation that American security rests with those willing and able, under exceptional circumstances, to deploy extrajudicial violence to achieve it. Looking back from the perspective of a world—our world—where drone aircraft target enemy belligerents for killing, it might be worth asking whether such practices are a thing of the past. Do masked vigilantes enforce justice today? Who—or what—orchestrates our interminable war on terror? Are drones our new vigilantes, masked by the global communications network that shrouds the true agents of retributive justice? If so, who watches these watchmen?
 

Superjustice

 
Hurled through a window high above the street, the body of Edward Blake lands with a viscid thunk on city pavement. Watchmen opens with a brutal murder, all the more curious for the blood-spattered smiley pin found at the scene. It marks the corpse as that of the Comedian, erstwhile masked vigilante, who retired his spandex on dubious terms. The Keene Act of 1977 put vigilantes out of business, with the exception, in the words of a detective on the scene, of a few “government-sponsored weirdos”—like Blake (I, 4). But a weirdo of another sort sees things differently, a masked sociopath known as Rorschach who once worked closely with the Comedian. He senses a conspiracy where the cops see only a corpse: the targeted killing of Blake and his aging band of costumed has-beens (including Rorschach himself). Not burglary but assassination caused this brutality. Somebody wants to kill masked crusaders. But why?
 
It takes a year and twelve installments of Watchmen to find out, but as the graphic narrative unfurls between 1986 and 1987, it advances an alternative history (or better, an alternative present) that illustrates both the logical outcome and the political obsolescence of Cold War strategies of total domination. In its world, Richard Nixon remains President of the United States, secure in his authority thanks to victory in Vietnam. The law-and-order executive maintains his sway over America, however, in both domestic and international terms, with the patriotic help of an unusual accomplice, a tall, blue and exceptionally gifted man (if that is the right word). Jon Osterman is a onetime nuclear scientist who, owing to a mishap at Gila Flats, site of government funded “intrinsic field experiments,” has acquired special powers along with his cerulean pigmentation (IV, 6). Dr. Manhattan, as he is popularly known, is a superhero—in fact the only superhero in Watchmen. His ability to transcend the limits of human agency sets him apart from other men, making him singularly useful to the task of governance. He asserts domestic stability by appearing regularly in the media. He maintains national security by projecting American military prowess abroad. He calms the nation and cows its enemies. After all he (and not Nixon) all but blue-handedly won the war in Vietnam (Fig. 1). Dr. Manhattan is the not-so-secret weapon in the US arsenal of civil defense. Only his origins remain unknown to the world: the secret of master science gone awry, whose opacity (in all its gendered splendor) his nakedness parodies.²

 
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Fig. 1.

Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam. From Watchmen IV, 20.

© DC Comics. Used by permission.

 
Watchmen presents a hypothetical test case for the doomsday scenario wired into the cultural software of the Cold War. Dreams of global domination structure its world, framed by the familiar antagonism of West versus East, the US versus the USSR. Dr. Manhattan stands between these global titans (sometimes literally) and the mutually assured destruction that promises to fulfill and obliterate their dreams of dominion. When an existential crisis (provoked by his apparently carcinogenic effect on those he loves) sends him sulking to the surface of Mars (he’s a superhero, remember), those pesky Ruskies take advantage of his absence to invade Afghanistan, threatening to answer any American reprisal with nuclear barrage. The ensuing standoff proves terminal—or will, if nothing can be done to interrupt the algorithm of annihilation that clicks into place with the retreat of Nixon and his staff into bunkers and his declaration of Defcon 2 (the next to highest Defense Readiness Condition, invoked historically only once—during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962).
 
The political problem here is as serious as its circumstances are fantastic: how to avoid total destruction in a Cold War world where ideological opposition escalates violence to the point of apocalypse. William Burroughs confronts this terminal logic in his early science fiction cut-up, Nova Express, and reduces its operation to a simple imperative: “Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts” (35). The outcome is inevitable and devastating: “Manipulated on a global scale,” this logic “feeds back nuclear war and nova” (54). Such is the grim operation of “the nova mechanism” (53). Amped by the global resonator of West versus East, destruction turns mutually assured. Watchmen‘s alternative Cold War history asks a simple question: how might a world driven by the nova mechanism avoid this doomsday scenario? It remains an urgent question today because doomsday has failed to arrive. For all Burroughs’ prophetic bile, nova never happened. Reading Nova Express now is a bit like listening to grandpa (clutching his .454 Casull) maunder on about imminent nuclear threat and alien invasion. While nuclear exchange may remain an abstract possibility, the agents and means of today’s global mayhem have changed: terrorists with dirty bombs, states with guided drones. Watchmen tracks the emergence of another scenario. If not mutually assured destruction, then what?
 
Its answer bears pondering, particularly in view of Agamben’s recent meditation on the function of violence during the “state of exception” in a book bearing that title. Agamben derives this phrase directly from the work of Carl Schmitt and indirectly from the Roman institution of the iustitium.³ Because “state of emergency” might better capture Agamben’s nuance for ears attuned to the tradition of common law, it seems important to acknowledge that State of Exception explores the long shadow of a specifically Roman legal heritage.⁴ Characteristically, Agamben shows less interest in a detailed history of the state of exception than in its constitutive and recurring structure: “The state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law” (39). Such a state suspends the rule of law (anomie) to dissociate force (violence) from its operation. In a sense it liberates violence from its practical legal applications of producing or preserving norms. In Agamben’s more specialized description, “In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference” (40).
 
Balefully, however, this anomie coincides (in Roman tradition) with the strange exceptionality of the sovereign, who stands both within and beyond the rule of law, able therefore both to enforce and to suspend it: “Being-outside, and yet belonging: this is the topological structure of the state of exception, and only because the sovereign, who decides on the state of exception, is, in truth, logically defined in his being by the state of exception, can he too logically be defined by the oxymoron ecstasy-belonging” (35). The sovereign emerges, in Agamben’s analysis, as the imperious ghost in “the juridical-political machine” for his capacity not merely to decide on the state of exception, but also to deploy the violence that ensues toward the practical end of installing new norms (86). The sovereign, then, wields a decision that suspends law and legitimates (extrajudicial) violence.
 
The state of exception augurs little happiness in democratic social circumstances. Agamben’s regular invocation of the dark trinity of totalitarian rule (Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin) provides historical endorsement for an analysis whose true target is contemporary politics. Agamben aims to illuminate less the fascist past than a menacing present. The state of exception, in his view, is fast becoming the “dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” (2). It’s easy to see how this paradigm installs crisis as a principle of economic governance: hard times require strict measures, including government intervention to secure fiscal stability. If governance occurs increasingly through protocols of security, the state of exception becomes less and less exceptional: “in conformity with a continuing tendency in all of the Western democracies, the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (14). Nor is this security-creep confined to historically liberal societies. In Agamben’s view “the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment” (87). Under such unexceptionally exceptional circumstances, in which to live is to live the state of exception (in its virulence and banality), the point of living politically acquires a simple if transnational aim: “ceaselessly to try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war” (87).⁵
 
If that’s the standard of political engagement, then Watchmen is a deeply political comic book. It shares Agamben’s diagnosis of a world in which the pursuit of security increasingly operates as a technique of government. American democracy seems little more than a means of regulating life in the name of safety. Domestically, the Keene Act reigns in any attempt to pursue justice outside established legal norms. It unmasks vigilantes in the name of state regulation, assimilating their violence to legislation that maintains a dreary status quo. Internationally, nuclear holocaust threatens the globe with incineration. It justifies using weapons of mass destruction to secure the safety of the masses. Both internally and externally, democracy gives way to security as the primary means of American governance, which is why Dr. Manhattan (not an elected so much as an electric official) looms so large in the pantheon of Western diplomacy. He alone secures the lives of those masses, American and Soviet alike, from mutually assured destruction. Not the nova mechanism but Dr. Manhattan assures the security of the world. In his exceptionality, he embodies the violence that both menaces and maintains the stability of the status quo. The superhero promulgates a superjustice that quantifies life en masse for the purpose of securing it. Although he ostensibly serves the cause of Western democracy, in fact he safeguards the global persistence of life itself, behaving less like Agamben’s sovereign than something even greater, perhaps a god.⁶ When he leaves for Mars, the state of exception he embodies and occludes erupts into the open, and “global civil war” turns all but inevitable.
 
But there’s something surprising about Watchmen‘s version of these events: the ostensible sovereign in this scenario, Richard Nixon—the man with his finger on the nuclear button—neither invokes the state of exception nor deploys its constitutive violence. After declaring Defcon 2 (a state penultimate to exception), Nixon retreats with his staff to the case-hardened subterranean bunker where American sovereignty might ride out nuclear exchange. He faces the decision, which senior advisor G. Gordon Liddy puts in plain language, to declare Defcon 1 and launch nuclear weapons against the Soviets: “Mr. President, our analysis shows good percentages on a first strike” (X, 3). But Nixon refuses. He resists the logic of exception, choosing to play Godot rather than God: “We do what we came down here for: we stay at Defcon two … and we sit … and we wait” (X, 3). In the absence of superjustice, Dr. Manhattan’s sovereignty over life itself, state sovereignty turns optative, a local refuge against global apocalypse. Decision and politics dissociate under Watchmen‘s circumstances of impending “global civil war,” exactly the circumstances Agamben attributes to “the generalization of the paradigm of security.”
 
Under such circumstances, according to Watchmen, sovereignty mutates. “There will be no more Hitlers, no more Stalins” (Burroughs “No More”).⁷ Another kind of decider emerges to administrate security in a world of nuclear doom. If not Richard Nixon, if not Dr. Manhattan, then who—or what? Watchmen gropes toward an answer whose very lunacy is instructive. Each new issue (or chapter) opens with a doomsday clock ticking relentlessly toward nuclear midnight. The nova mechanism works implacably. Neither Nixon nor his Soviet counterpart can commandeer its inevitable violence. The Cold War lumbers toward an incendiary peace that will render sovereignty obsolete—unless a way can be found to create unity out of terminal conflict. At the last minute before midnight, an event occurs that does just that, turning sworn enemies into allies, obviating the necessity for mutually assured destruction. An alien invasion all but destroys New York, leaving countless dead and the city in ruins.
 
We readers (such are the comforts of irony) know this attack to be a sham. The deaths are real, but the invasion is not.⁸ Brainchild of another retired vigilante, the transnational übertycoon Ozymandias (also known as Adrian Veidt), it nevertheless provides the appearance of a common enemy so powerful as to render nuclear weapons and their exterminating violence pointless. At his polar hideaway, Ozymandias monitors news reports that broadcast the sudden prospect of a calculated peace (Fig. 2): “. . . eth toll in the millions”; “and in New York millions of”; “and news just in of a response from Russia”; “immediate end to hostilities until we’ve evaluated this new threat to”; “end the war”; “York tonight, three million” (XII, 19).

 
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Fig. 2.

Ozymandias triumphs. From Watchmen XII, 19.

© DC Comics. Used by permission.

Ozymandias cries in triumph “I did it!” (XII, 19). He interrupts the operation of the global war machine. As CEO of a corporate empire coextensive with global capitalism, he’s perfectly positioned to do so. It takes little subtlety to notice that Watchmen redirects the operation of sovereignty away from politics and toward economics.

 
But rather than view Ozymandias as just another decider, the new sovereign as CEO, it’s worth emphasizing the ultimate source of his authority. It’s not the exceptionality of the sovereign per se that legitimates his deployment of violence but the brute statistical force of the broadcast body count. His bloody stunt, beamed around the world, produces a “peace millions died for” (XII, 20). The result is to secure the lives of many, many more. “Killing millions to save billions”—that’s how the movie version puts it (Watchmen). The forbidding wisdom of statistics, and not the sovereign’s exceptionality, legitimates deploying extralegal violence in the name of peace. The paradigm of security, generalized to embrace the world, operates no longer in accordance with the decision of the political sovereign but with the banal force of arithmetic: superjustice as computational imperative.
 
Ozymandias may be an ersatz superhero, and his fake invasion may be an exceptional event, but his decision to deploy violence originates in the anonymous sovereignty of numbers. Hence his anonymity as efficient cause. He’s no Hitler bawling across the airwaves to loving minions. Television decides the fate of humanity as it beams statistics around the globe, quantifying death—and life. “What’s that in your hand, Veidt,” asks Dr. Manhattan. “Another ultimate weapon?” Veidt replies, holding a remote, “Yes, you could say that” (XII, 18).⁹ Televised images of staged catastrophe consolidate the sovereignty of numbers. It’s simple addition with visual aids. Do the bloody math. Besides, old-time apocalypse is bad for business. Ozymandias ends conflict, but to his lasting advantage less as sovereign than global capitalist. His authority must remain a secret, as Dr. Manhattan grudgingly acknowledges in costumed company including his old girlfriend, Laurie Juspeczyk: “Logically, I’m afraid he’s right. Exposing this plot, we destroy any chance of peace, dooming earth to worse destruction. On Mars, [Laurie] demonstrated life’s value. If we would preserve life here, we must remain silent” (XII, 20). Security works through statistics to consolidate a secret, distributed sovereignty, the province perhaps of a few agents in the know, but hardly a means to dictatorial political power. With security comes biopower: the administration of “the production and reproduction of life” itself without ultimate regard to political sovereignty.¹⁰
 

Contra/dictions

 
Mercifully, Watchmen presents what in retrospect seems an obsolete alternative history of Cold War apocalypse. Perhaps to the surprise of its late-1980’s audience, the wall dividing West from East would come tumbling down only two years later, transforming the structure of international relations. That this development was well under way during the months of Watchmen‘s serial publication is one of the many lessons of the comic’s great political companion-piece, an alternative history written in an openly juridical mode, the Report of the President’s Special Review Board, more popularly known as the Tower Commission Report. It appeared February 26, 1987, about midway through the original serial run of Watchmen. The trade paperback compilation of Watchmen‘s twelve issues, also published in 1987, acknowledges this affinity by quoting the Latin epigraph mentioned above.
 
To sustain its analysis of mutating sovereignty, Watchmen creates a web of cultural and political references, among which the Tower Commission Report is only the most obvious. Popular music blares in the background throughout, sounding notes of urban menace (Iggy Pop’s “Neighborhood Threat”) and existential camp (Devo’s Are We Not Men?). Bob Dylan, as usual, proves the conscience of apocalypse. “All Along the Watchtower” frames Chapter X (“Outside in the distance a wild cat did growl, two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl”), but it’s “Desolation Row” that sets the mood for the whole series, ominously punctuating Chapter 1: “At midnight, all the agents and superhuman crew, go out and round up everyone who knows more than they do.” ¹¹ The lines conjure Cold War paranoia (Highway 61 Revisited, which included the tune, was released in 1965) and recall the blunt force of old-style sovereignty.
 
Their political correlative appears, perhaps surprisingly, in John F. Kennedy’s last speech—the one he intended to deliver on November 22, 1963, to the annual meeting of the Dallas Citizen’s Council, but for obvious reasons never did. The speech plies textbook Cold War rhetoric in the service of American military, scientific, and economic might. The word “security” appears nine times, always in the context of imminent Soviet threat. A peculiarly resonant peroration follows, given the coming work of Moore and Gibbons:
 

We, in this country, in this generation are—by destiny rather than by choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as it was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain.”

A more direct—and perhaps innocent—description of the aims of sovereignty could hardly be written to order, complete with a quotation of Psalm 127 that aligns its agents with ultimate authority. Kennedy’s watchmen serve freedom—and the Lord. Moore and Gibbons’ inhabit a world bereft of such a liege, where not wisdom but statistics condone the righteousness of a cause. Watchmen gathers the Lord’s watchmen into a web of intertextual reference that secures its sense of Cold War’s passing by historical contrast. With Kennedy’s assassination would come the ultimate textual antecedent to Watchmen‘s critique: The Warren Commission Report, whose devotion to the causes of truth and a lone gunman (“in recognition of the right of people everywhere to full and truthful knowledge concerning these events”) would consolidate the sovereignty, if only in retrospect, of “a young and vigorous leader” (1).

 
One more intertextual connection bears noting, this one contemporary with the comic’s original publication. Ronald Reagan looms large in The Tower Commission Report, a paper sovereign whose ostensible agency diffuses over a host of covert operatives. His address to the Forty-Second Session of the United Nations General Assembly ends with an idea—a fantasy really—that he believes could unify a divided world. Reagan delivered the speech on the 21^st of September, 1987: the penultimate month of Watchmen‘s serialization. Perhaps he was an avid fan. Befitting his UN venue, he proffers a world tour of prospering economies and promising democracies. Laggard nations, like Afghanistan and Nicaragua, come in for generous attention from an America ready and willing to advance the cause of freedom. Then comes the weird fantasy that seems lifted from the (yet unpublished) final chapter of Watchmen—or more likely an Outer Limits episode buried in Reagan’s brain:
 

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we sometimes forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?

This from a President approving covert war in Nicaragua. Not a state of exception, but exceptionalism pure and simple guides Reagan’s vision of united humanity. His fantasy provides a nostalgic backdrop to Watchmen‘s account of a simulated alien invasion whose lethal effect is to secure life—in part to preserve a market for Veidt’s hottest commodity, a perfume called “Nostalgia.”¹²

 
Watchmen constellates such intertextual references to consolidate its assessment of mutating sovereignty, and nowhere more explicitly than in its relationship to the Tower Commission Report. Edward Blake, the masked vigilante whose broken corpse opens Watchmen‘s narrative, worked both ends of the Iran/Contra affair as a goon in government employ, as the text testifies at least twice: “after his handling of the Iran hostage situation, even his harshest critics fall silent” (IV, 23); “returning from Nicaragua by air, [and] suspecting Sandinista bases, he resolved to investigate” (IX, 24). From handling hostages in Iran to combating Sandinistas in Nicaragua: Blake’s clandestine operations in Watchmen parallel those described in The Tower Commission Report. Between them these alternative histories sketch new conditions for governance emerging to replace the oppositional logic of the nova mechanism, with its ICBMs and its doomsday countdown.
 
There are plenty of reasons to read them together as complementary documents of the Cold War’s closing days. The Tower Commission Report advances a version of recent events no less fantastic than Watchmen‘s for being, according to the President’s Special Review Board, true. As alternative histories, they partake of the same speculative genre. Their truth arises as a function less of metaphysics than consensus. If all histories today are in that sense alternative histories, then ratings and sales become one index of their truth—a circumstance confirmed not only by the comic’s immediate success but also by the huge popularity of the live broadcast of the Iran/Contra hearings between May and August 1987, a real time TV drama anticipating today’s reality shows except with better actors. The Tower Commission Report shares with Watchmen and other artifacts of postmodern culture a characteristic multiplication of narratives and tendency toward pastiche, qualities that in comparison turn The Warren Commission Report into a document of high modernism.¹³ Watchmen contains several mutually disrupting story lines (the death of Edwards, the disillusionment of Dr. Manhattan, the immanence of nuclear apocalypse, and the comic within the comic Tales of the Black Freighter—not to mention miscellanies of textual matter appended to the end of each episode). The Tower Commission Report does, too: its central story, entitled “The Iran/Contra Affair: A Narrative,” appears as the second of eight appendices following a five-part narrative analysis. Formally, it offers an exploded diagram of the new conditions for governance emerging as the Cold War grinds to a close. Thematically, it offers an extended tutorial in the way a generalized “paradigm of security” works—or doesn’t. Its central lesson, if it can be said to have one, is continuous with its form: American governance, or what it is becoming in the late 1980s, also eschews traditional notions of authority.
 
Just where you would expect, if you were a reader of either political history or Agamben, to find a sovereign wielding the extrajudicial force of decision to promote security (as the “dominant paradigm for government in contemporary politics”), you get, for lack of a better term, Ronald Reagan, a leader better known for not knowing about Iran/Contra than for any decision to assert sovereignty through violence. His primary concern through the whole duplicitous ordeal was to secure the safety of the American hostages held by Iranian terrorists in Tehran. Security in this instance (and the situation of the hostages in Iran clearly stands in for that of all Americans under a threat of mutually assured destruction) mandates not sovereign decision but ignorance, as Reagan’s later note to Chairman Tower attests: “In trying to recall events that happened eighteenth months ago I’m afraid that I let myself be influenced by others’ recollections, not my own” (Tower B-19). This sovereign can’t decide what he remembers or whether his memories are even his own.
 
If they aren’t his, whose are they? Who, in other words, inherits sovereignty in a world where the complex task of securing safety discourages the sovereign from deploying exceptional violence (in order to avoid either nuclear apocalypse or capitulation to terrorists)? The Tower Commission Report provides a long, rambling answer that is really as simple as the letters N-S-C. Sovereignty, no longer the sovereign’s exclusive privilege, diffuses among a surrogate collective, the National Security Council. One purpose of The Tower Commission Report is to provide a detailed account of how the National Security Council works, not merely in the instance of the Iran/Contra scandal, but more generally as means of American (or better, global) governance. Apparently “the paradigm of security” distributes sovereignty in such a way that the sovereign remains ignorant of the means of his ostensible agency. No wonder Reagan can’t remember what he said. Security requires secret heroics, and who better to provide them than of a band of masked vigilantes?
 
History ties the National Security Council, as The Tower Commission Report indicates, directly to the Cold War (II-1, II-3). With the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower after World War II, the Truman administration felt the need for an agency that could coordinate foreign policy with strategic defense. The National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council to serve the President in an advisory capacity, integrating those concerns under the rubric of national security. Originally comprising seven permanent members (the Secretaries of State and Defense; Chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force; and the Chair of the National Security Resources Board), its charge remained restricted to advising the Chief Executive (“United States”). He alone retained the capacity to make policy decisions. The Tower Commission Report makes much of this subordination, as if to forestall any question regarding the sovereignty of the decider: “the President is responsible for the national security policy of the Unites States. In development and execution of that policy, the President is the decision-maker” (I-2). The National Security Council only assists in the decision-making process. It remains “properly the President’s creature” and serves “the creative impulses of the President” (I-3). The President, like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s famous novel, breathes life into this creature, and he bears full responsibility for its behavior: “The NSC system will not work unless the President makes it work. After all, this system was created to serve the President of the United States in ways of his choosing” (IV-10).
 
But in politics as in fiction, such creatures can acquire a life of their own. “This,” in the Tower Commission’s dry judgment, “presents any President with a series of dilemmas” (II-3). The particular creature in question here is the National Security Advisor, an entity whose existence is neither formally established by law nor subject to Congressional hearing and approval. What guarantees the subordination of such advisors or the system that empowers them to the President? Only the President, the sovereign, the superior being responsible for his creatures’ deeds. And this President, in the Commission’s view, in the end proved a flaccid master: “Had the President chosen to drive the NSC system, the outcome could well have been different” (IV-10). On this account the sovereign retains his sovereignty. He just fails to use it. His creatures run amok, more as neglected children than secret agents of a distributed agency.
 
The Tower Commission Report nevertheless supports the possibility that, as the end of the Cold War approaches, sovereignty diffuses beyond the sovereign. The Commission’s reconstruction of the clunky international plot to trade arms for American hostages in Iran while funneling profits to the Contras fighting in Nicaragua is familiar enough not to require repeating. Details matter less anyway than the conditions for governance that made them possible. Granted, Cold War antagonism still frames the entire drama, as Colonel Oliver North, its lead player, acknowledges at one point to an unnamed Iranian official in a Tehran hotel: “This is not a deal of weapons for release of the hostages. It has to do with what we see regarding Soviet intentions in the region” (B-107). But the structure of global politics is getting rickety. As in Watchmen, it configures an apocalyptic show-down that would defeat the explicit purpose of governance to secure the safety of those hostages—or the larger populations they represent. Under such circumstances, the state of exception doesn’t empower so much as incapacitate the sovereign. Terrorism trumps apocalypse. Like Watchmen‘s Nixon, The Tower Commission Report‘s Reagan can only wait, watch, and hope for a solution to a security problem that exposes the impotence of sovereignty.
 
So that agency diffuses, drifting to the NSC—but not solely because the President fails to oversee its operation. On the contrary, The Tower Commission Report indicates quite clearly and in spite of its presidential critique that the peculiar status of the NSC as an executive agency positions it to assimilate the agency of the executive, a situation summed up in the report’s portentous section heading, “The NSC Staff Steps into the Void.” In 1981 Reagan himself consolidated this status with Executive Order 12333 (quoted by the Tower Commission on page C-12), which states that “the NSC shall act as the highest Executive Branch entity that provides review of, guidance for and direction to the conduct of all national foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and special activities, and attendant policies and programs” (C-12). The words “direction to” in this summation of agency open a rhetorical door to significant NSC initiative in “the conduct of all national foreign intelligence.” And indeed, the whole question of the legitimacy of its agency in the Iran/Contra affair boils down to whether an Executive Office agency so charged remains subject to Congressional legislation, specifically the Boland Amendment of 1982 barring the CIA and Department of Defense from funding insurgence in Nicaragua.¹⁴ The legal void Reagan’s NSC stepped into arose as much from its para-executive status as any lapse of presidential leadership, as if exception were structured into its very existence as a security council: a portable sovereignty by proxy.
 
That under Reagan the NSC was eager to take this step is the lesson of a weird little fantasy contained in a memo from its Chair, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, to Deputy National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter. Describing a recent secret meeting in Tehran with Iranian officials, McFarlane suggests the following scenario as a context for operations: “It may be best for us to try to picture what it would be like if after a nuclear attack, a surviving Tatar became Vice President; a recent grad student became Secretary of state; and a bookie became the interlocutor for all discourse with foreign countries” (B-101). McFarlane is denigrating the Iranian delegation, of course, but what’s revealing (if a little frightful) is that the context he imagines for NSC operations is post-apocalyptic. In his head the MIRVs have flown and found their targets, damaging the structure of global governance almost beyond recognition. Sovereignty here is a thing of the past, political agency a matter of improvisation. The new agents of governance will move nimbly, bargaining with rank amateurs who nevertheless threaten the security of America, or what’s left of it after the nuclear rain. Better the NSC than a lumbering Congress or the sweet old executive wielding an obsolete sovereignty.
 
After the Cold War—or nuclear apocalypse, they’re the same for McFarlane—global politics will work differently, at least in regard to national security. The Tower Commission Report prognosticates the ways simply by describing the activity of the NSC. As an agency of the Executive Branch, it is perfectly positioned to undertake operations beyond the reach of judicial or legislative regulation. Doing so openly, of course, would exceed the Council’s charge merely to advise the President on matters of national security. But as a means of advancing covert operations, the NSC combines juridical-political autonomy with para-executive authority. Masked by their proximity to the President, its members comprise a band of vigilantes reminiscent of the extrajudicial crusaders in Watchmen. Exceptional circumstances require covert operations—and agents.
 
That’s how the NSC justified the arms for hostages overture to Iran, as Attorney General Edwin Meese recollected during his interview with the Tower Commission. To the suggestion that the deal would involve a breach of the President’s policy against negotiating with terrorists, he recalls the position of a senior NSC official: “The rejoinder, I think by Poindexter, was that this was a special situation and that this was not at odds with our overall policy; it was an exception to the general situation” (B-62). Exceptionality here exonerates the extra-judicial agency of the NSC, granting it the diffused force of a distributed sovereignty in order to advance Presidential policy by breaching it—under cover. Covert operations become the means necessary for an NSC empowered by exception to advance inadmissible policy, as becomes the case on the Contra end of the arms for hostages initiative as well: “The activities of the NSC staff in support of the Contras sought to achieve an important objective of the Administration’s foreign policy. The President had publicly and emphatically declared his support for the Nicaragua resistance. That brought his policy in direct conflict with that of the Congress” (IV-3). Enter the NSC. It covertly advances prohibited Presidential policy, as if in accordance with executive sovereignty but absent any clear decision to invoke it. Plausible deniability or flexible exceptionality? Either way, sovereignty gets redistributed to include a band of masked vigilantes.
 
They share with Watchmen‘s Ozymandias the tendency to view global politics as an extension of global capitalism. Reagan’s NSC combined the double Presidential aims of securing the safety of American hostages and supporting anti-Sandinista insurgence in a singular set of business transactions: sales of TOW antitank missiles and HAWK missile replacement parts to Iranian government officials and diversion of the ensuing profits to Nicaraguan Contras. In its reach and financial complexity the deal resembles the operations of corporate capitalism (as the several flow-charts published with The Tower Commission Report illustrate), with the difference that governments and not just corporations were jockeying for transnational advantage. The Cold War may have provided a general background to negotiations, but their means were pure business, a haggling among profiteers. Not the business of politics, then, but business as politics.¹⁵ Colonel Oliver North nicely crystallizes the perils of such dealings: “I have no problem w/ someone making an honest profit on honest business. I do have a problem if it means the compromise of sensitive political or operational details” (B-70). But in the Iran/Contra affair, sensitive political details and honest profit fuse beyond reckoning. HAWK missile replacement parts valued at 6.5 million dollars, for instance, cost Iran 15 million to acquire from the U.S., leaving a tidy profit for diversion to those Nicaraguan freedom fighters. Oliver North indeed has a problem. As the conditions for governance shift from diplomacy to business, from ideological antagonism to transnational exchange as the condition of engagement, it falls to the NSC to conduct the business of politics on behalf of an executive whose erstwhile sovereignty is better suited to the nova mechanism than covert operations.
 
That this business was not a workable solution in the long run is the lesson of bad outcomes. Iran may eventually have released the hostages, but when the NSC’s secret deal went public, the United States suffered a crisis in governance that triggered Congressional hearings and the indictment of several key National Security Council members, among them Colonel Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, and National Security Advisor Robert C. McFarlane. The first two were convicted (among other things) of obstruction of justice and the third of withholding evidence, but North and Poindexter saw their convictions overturned on appeal and McFarlane received a presidential pardon from George H. W. Bush (“Iran Contra”). The NSC as an Executive Office agency and its personnel were to that extent vindicated. Their dubious initiative in pursuing presidential policy aims prohibited by other branches of government was less to blame, apparently, than a sovereign asleep at the wheel. Reagan did his best to accept responsibility for the behavior of his rogue council, as he confessed during a press conference on November, 14, 1986: “I considered the risks of failure and the rewards of success, and I decided to proceed, and the responsibility for the decision and the operation is mine and mine alone” (D13).
 
Such are the responsibilities of sovereignty. But the whole affair indicates to the contrary that, when American lives are immediately at stake, security legitimates a redistribution of sovereignty among secret executive agents. The National Security Council may not be able to act with the impunity of an Ozymandias, but it shares with him and the other costumed crusaders of Watchmen a vigilante agenda whose extra-judicial status justifies covert operations. Reagan’s National Security Council also shares Ozymandias’ business instincts, if not acumen. Whether of human lives directly or missile profits, accounting becomes the means of political decision, identifying sovereign agency less with the state than with statistics.¹⁶ The Tower Commission Report renders Watchmen‘s alternative history in real-politic terms, advancing an alternative alternative history that shows how sovereignty works under the auspices of security. To return one last time to Agamben, if “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (State 14), then not sovereignty per se but its masked agents conduct the real business of global politics—securing the safety of hostages—which includes pretty much everybody.
 

Drone-state

 
What’s the point of reading Watchmen and The Tower Commission Report as companion inquiries into the place of sovereignty in contemporary governance? Precious little if their conclusions pertain only to an aberrant moment in the history of executive agency. But they continue to shed light on the workings of security as a technique of governance today. Since the Iran/Contra affair, the NSC has only expanded its number of members and scope of operations, thanks in no small part to the terrorist attack of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s ensuing scramble to improve national security. If one of the lessons of Iran/Contra was that a distributed executive agency courts investigation and recrimination (since only sovereign decision fully suspends the force of law), then the goal of security would be better served by a legal means of sanctioning such agency. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Congress provided that means in its joint resolution of September 14, 2001, known as The Authorization for the Use of Military Force. In compliance with the War Powers Resolution, it authorizes the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those who committed or abetted the terrorist attacks “in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States” (“Authorization”).
 
That language gives a big legal boost to the NSC as the executive agency charged with advising the President on matters of security. The Authorization declares war against terrorists, specifically those associated with al-Qa’ida, and in doing so legitimates violence that would otherwise require sovereign decision to deploy. Assassination or “targeted killing,” which Regan’s own Executive Order 12333 prohibits as state policy, becomes the use of “necessary and appropriate force” against an enemy belligerent. Under Reagan the NSC covertly sold TOWs to terrorists. It never openly targeted terrorists for killing. But The Authorization for the Use of Military Force sanctions that possibility, authorizing a subtle but decisive shift in the operation of the NSC, whose agency now involves advising the President on how to conduct a war against terror. Little wonder, then, that NSC membership has steadily grown over the last decade, a trend President Barack Obama only exaggerated with his Presidential Policy Statement of February 13, 2009, which consolidated the staffs of the NSC and the Office of Homeland Security while vastly expanding the variety of government officials authorized to attend regular meetings. The NSC now includes as statutory advisors the Director of National Intelligence as well as the Director of the CIA. Under Obama it has developed into archipelago of intelligence agencies. The war against terror, or at least the terrorists responsible for 9/11, provides a legal basis for the distribution of sovereignty to include the NSC in its capacity to advise the President. Exactly how appears quite clearly in current efforts to justify targeted killing not only of foreign terrorists, but also of American civilians linked to terrorist activities abroad. Under normal circumstances such killing would constitute assassination, but war is a state, if not quite of exception as Agamben understands it, then at least of exceptional legality regarding homicidal violence. That’s the position advanced in a Department of Justice White Paper obtained by NBC News. Its full title is long but instructive: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” The document takes pains to restrict legitimate targeted killing to the belligerents named by Congress in The Authorization for the Use of Military Force, thereby sidestepping any breach of Executive Order 12333. Only those formally at war with the U.S. can lawfully be targeted, and everyone knows it’s legal to kill enemy soldiers. After acknowledging that this particular war differs from others in that “The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and its associated forces” (3) (raising the problem of enemy soldiers-without-borders), the Department of Justice advances three criteria for targeting dispersed belligerents: first, that an “informed high-level official” determines that such an individual “poses an imminent threat of violent attack” against the United States; second, that capture is not feasible; and third, that targeting occurs in conformity with “applicable law of war principals” (6).
 
The first of these criteria most clearly redistributes executive agency to the NSC. It isn’t simply that defining “imminent threat” turns out to be impossible, which the white paper demonstrates in self-deconstructing language when it admits “that the U.S. government may not be aware of all al-Qa’ida plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur” (7). The double negative here turns imminence into ubiquity. The real issue, however, involves not the definition of “imminent threat” but the process of identifying it. “A high-level senior official” determines that a “violent attack” will soon take place. Who is that high-level senior official? Surely not the President. How can he, ensconced in the Oval Office, know anything decisive about terrorist activities dispersed internationally across the globe? Through his advisors is how, specifically those serving the executive directly, the masked crusaders of the NSC. The Justice Department attributes to them an agency tantamount to sovereignty to the extent that they provide the advisory information that deems a threat imminent and determines targeting—of American citizens if necessary. They play Ozymandias in a nutshell, targeting a few to secure the safety of many.
 
But doesn’t the decision to target an enemy belligerent in a non-international armed conflict rest ultimately with the President, Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces? Not really. If the NSC (or its high-ranking officials) participate in a distributed sovereignty, so do their decisions, which is to say such decisions no longer originate with a decider in any conventional sense. Ozymandias had his arithmetic, the Reagan NSC its accounting: decisions made on the basis of computation. This tendency reaches its apogee in the problem of targeted killings. The war against terror proceeds in part in a future mood: The Authorization of the Use of Military Force undertakes to “prevent future attacks.” The dangerous terrorist plots today but acts tomorrow. Targeting him or her requires factoring tomorrow into a calculation of culpability. Hellfire missiles scream into a future made peaceable by their terminal violence. Short of the telepaths of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” the decision to target terrorists dispersed across national boundaries and camouflaged in inscrutable cultures must rely on the best available means of prediction.
 
Today those means have a name as benign as it is fateful: the “Disposition Matrix.” The Washington Post describes the way it works in some detail in a three-part article from late October, 2012. Obama administration officials view it, in the words of that report, as “an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit” (Miller). Less enthusiastic commentators call the Disposition Matrix, more simply, a kill list. In actual fact, it is a “gigantic data-mining operation” (“Disposition”), a complex database used to identify and target suspected al-Qa’ida related terrorists in a game of weaponized profiling. According to the Post, “The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations…. [It] is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the ‘disposition’ of suspects beyond the reach of American drones” (Miller). Any fan of science fiction movies will sense the morbid implications of the phrase “Disposition Matrix,” a euphemism of a piece with others made familiar by the war on terror, “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation.” This Matrix aims to kill—in a war against terror without end (the Post headline labels it “The Permanent War”) on a battlefield as potentially wide as the world.¹⁷
 
And who is the Ozymandias who wields the force of its calculations? Any “informed, high-level official” who determines which terrorists pose an “imminent threat.” The Disposition Matrix operates under the auspices of the National Counterintelligence Center, which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Post reports that it “was conceived as a clearinghouse for threat data and has no operational capacity” (Miller). It nevertheless generates the profiles and contingencies that send al-Qa’ida affiliated terrorists to paradise or prison in an undisclosed location. Computational analysis generates the data and high-ranking officials deploy it: the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA, other NSA officials, and, ultimately, the President of the United States. But one man stands apart as principal keeper of the deadly keys of disposition: John O. Brennan, founding director of the National Counterintelligence Center under George W. Bush, then Homeland Security Advisor under Barak Obama, and now Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Brennan, who told the Post, “I tend to do what I think is right,” is the architect and prime proponent of the superjustice of computational profiling and targeted killing (DeYoung). Ozymandias, like Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian before him, now works for Washington.
 
Perhaps the biggest problem with the Disposition Matrix, aside from its moral transparency, is that it works.¹⁸ As targeted killings have increased, violent attacks against American interests have decreased—or so administration officials claim in justifying the institutionalization of its wartime policy. Brennan plays a large role in administrating doom: “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it. Now the system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan’s desk, and subsequently presented to the president” (Miller). The decision to use deadly force against terrorists has clearly been distributed. The agency of the decider diffuses among information compilers and deployers: the Disposition Matrix, Brennan, and other “high-level” NCS officials (including the Director of the CIA, who has authority to approve targeted killings outside of Pakistan).¹⁹ The Matrix proposes and the administration disposes. All in the name of national security.
 
Drones do the dirty work. If circumstances appear statistically auspicious and appropriate officials concur, a remote controlled aircraft called a Predator lifts off from an American airbase in Djibouti, piloted by skilled technicians located a world away at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada or Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico (Whitlock). It steers a blind but guided course toward its target of opportunity on a battlefield without borders, maybe in Pakistan, maybe in Yemen, maybe in Afghanistan: wherever a “Senior Operational Leader of as-Qa’ida or an Associated Force” poses an imminent threat. Perhaps it finds the particular belligerent targeted for killing. Perhaps it lets fly a Hellfire missile, killing the cleric Anwar al-Awlake, an American Citizen, or perhaps his 16-year-old son.²⁰ Perhaps its kills innocent civilians too, inevitable if regrettable collateral damage—somewhere between 475 and 885 total in Pakistan 21 between 2004 and 2012.²¹ Perhaps Pakistanis, Somalis, Yeminis, Afghans come to view the United States as a demon spitting death. Perhaps not sovereignty but its computational equivalent now directs deadly force against enemy belligerents. Perhaps Ozymandias—or the Disposition Matrix—kills thousands to save billions. If the state of exception is indeed giving way to a paradigm of security as the prevailing technique of government, it’s neither the sovereign nor his exceptional decision that the world should be worrying about. It’s the program of lethal profiling that directs sovereign agency and statistically legitimates targeted killing. In the state of exception turned security, sovereignty belongs to the drone—in both senses of the word: the lethal buzz of pilotless aircraft and the reproductive function of the male bee. American drones breed global violence. As the drone state profiles its way to victory in an interminable war against terror, it produces the belligerence that legitimates security. Who watches its watchmen?