(En)gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (Gender in a GlobalLocal World) by Krista Hunt & Kim Rygiel

Author:Krista Hunt & Kim Rygiel [Hunt, Krista & Rygiel, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780754644811
Goodreads: 704964
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

‘Americans Like a Good Picture’7

Special Forces and ‘precision bombing’ in Afghanistan, and the ‘shock and awe’ strategy in Iraq were both initially presented as liberations carried out by highly professional and skilled soldiers. In the course of reporting on the millions raised for ‘America’s Fund for Afghan Children’ (established in October 2001, as a way to get US school kids to donate money to kids in Afghanistan), President Bush explained that all of America was ‘united in our concern for the innocent people of Afghanistan’. Laura Bush explained that ‘in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us’ (Bush, 2001a, p. 1; Laura Bush quoted in Hirschkind and Mahmood, 2002, p. 340). Less than a month after the invasion of Iraq, TV Guide consulted with child psychiatrists and psychologists about how to talk to children about the war. Dr. Paul McHugh gave simple advice: ‘Tell children that these American soldiers are heroes and that some people are lucky to have heroes to protect them’, a simple formula of protection, rescue, and manliness that has resonated historically in US popular culture (Lasswell, 2003, p. 20).

The success of both invasions was initially charted as breathtaking. Shanker, writing for The New York Times, declared that the conduct of war had been redefined with the success of Special Forces in Afghanistan (2002, p. 1). Ratnesar (2001, p. 40) described the military as displaying overwhelming technological superiority, with night-vision goggles, stun grenades, and laser pointers, while at the same time eager to outsource the war to their Afghan proxies (2001, p. 40). With the goal, according to one Army official, of ‘substituting information for armor’, and a 25 million dollar bounty on Osama bin Laden’s head, the war in Afghanistan was declared by Donald Rumsfeld to be the ‘first cavalry attack of the twenty-first century’ (Revkin, 2001, p. B4; Rumsfeld, 2002, p. 21). In Iraq, the ‘speed, nimbleness, and precision of US forces’ were declared the secret of US success in easily marching into Baghdad on April 9 2003 (Thomas and Brant, 2003, p. 28). Children chanted in the streets of Baghdad, ‘Good Bush, America Good’, and when American troops were fired upon, they initially were restrained and failed to fire back, especially if the incident occurred in a ‘market jammed with men, women, and children’ (Richey, 2003, p. 3).

Despite the fact that women serve in the US military in record numbers, the stories about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were about male soldiers protecting their families back home. Thus while masculine leadership of the war called for a combination of calculative rationality and good old-fashioned toughness, depictions of soldiering continued to provide narratives of protecting the homefront, a domestic sphere populated mostly by women and children. While there were stories of mom going to war and pieces on the special challenges faced by families with both parents deployed, the stories about the battlefield itself and the ‘human drama’ of the war placed male soldiers at the centerpiece as major combatants, with women and children anxiously awaiting their return home.

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