A Joint Enterprise: Fiction

Abstract

I have argued in previous chapters that in literature the invasion of Iraq has been unquestioningly constructed as ‘war’ (i.e. implicitly as a more or less equitable military engagement between opposed alignments), largely by drawing upon a tradition of war literature. Thus, anti-invasion poetry in 2003 found it expedient to allude to past ‘anti-war’ poetry, and theatre of the Iraq ‘frontline’ assimilated pre-existing conceptions about the theatre of ‘war’. This argument gives the impression that the pat construction of the invasion as ‘war’ works through some kind of internal literary logic. That is, however, not quite right, especially in the USA and UK: it is obvious that the invasion of Iraq has come to be constructed as the ‘Iraq War’ generally, in the mass media as much as in various kinds of retrospective accounts as in academic writing as in popular discourse. The ‘Iraq War’ is now standard shorthand for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003–4. Modes of mediating perception are evidently at work in this preference for ‘war’: ‘war’ suggests a somewhat regulated affair, for which there are principles and procedures and laws to fall back upon, whereas ‘invasion’ is a messier and more intractable business, with a rawer sense of power politics and brute force at work. ‘War’ suggests a predominantly military engagement and involves highlighting military operations, while ‘invasion’ suggests that the integrity of a civil domain has been disturbed. Designating the invasion as ‘war’ shows a preference for confining attention to the military aspects and having the reassurance of regulatory principles to refer to. Contemplation of ‘invasion’ is more disturbing, blurred, unregulated, intractable. Preferring ‘war’ is a matter of rhetorical management or rhetorical choice.