ABSTRACT
Paradoxically, after a moment of utmost insecurity-11 September 2001-the USA gained a moral standing that for a short time legitimized the beginnings of a globalizing war. Condemnation of the attacks of September 11 and the outpourings of fellow human feeling generated a brief and unprecedented consensus on a global scale. This consensus made the job of legitimizing acts of counter-aggression relatively easy for a time, effectively resuscitating the standing of US military extension into the Middle East and Central Asia. However, the relationship between insecurity and security, sympathy and consent, is unstable. Almost every action taken by the USA since September 11 to obtain greater security has whittled away the nation’s capacity to draw upon that initial moral outrage and sympathy, particularly as actions taken in its name have relied on divisive models of collective identity. The present anthology is directed towards uncovering the sources of the
profound insecurity in the world today, including that experienced by the West. Within this brief I want to concentrate on the paradoxical and evershifting relationship between sympathy, consent, and insecurity-and how this relates to the uneven effects of a self-projection of insecurity through the Western media. The focus of this chapter is on the post-2001 US response to insecurity and the way in which consent has been both produced and diminished in relation to the Iraq War. In an all-too-obvious sense, the unraveling of consent to the war has gained momentum in the last couple of years as the casualty lists have grown and the conflict has turned into an intractable civil war. However, the unraveling of consent also occurred earlier as alternate perspectives and images were made available through various digital means of communication. This is not how the story of the mass media usually goes. Channels of communication are not uncommonly associated with methods of securing and destabilizing consent. The argument is often made that contemporary forms of highly technological warfare have, alongside modes of managing news flow and imagery, engineered greater consent to military responses to insecurity. This chapter examines this claim and the part played by technologies of communication in relation to consent to the Iraq War.
