Staging war as cultural encounter

The destructiveness of warfare is an affront to liberal sensibilities. ¹ Thus, in what is generally called the West, there has been a trend to make war less violent—gentler, if you will. Drawing lines between combatants and non-combatants and trying to keep the latter out of harm’s way as much as possible has played a significant role in this endeavour. Roughly from the 1991 Gulf War until the end of the so-called first phase of the war in Iraq, this meant that the West’s supreme capacity to blow up the right stuff with precision, that is without—or so the impression was created—hurting ‘innocent civilians’ played a significant role in the justification of war. Put differently, the West was seen to be ‘better’ at war on the grounds of its efficient use of high-tech weaponry. As I have argued elsewhere, this ‘better’ did not just refer to the West’s greater capacity to win whatever conflict it might enter, but also to its doing so in a way seen as more ethical because, or so the argument goes, the West was killing fewer civilians. ² Thus, technological superiority—and hence capacities derived from the natural sciences and engineering—provided not only the route to dominance but also the key to moral superiority.