ABSTRACT
The Iraq War has powerfully complicated United States (US) citizens’ relationship to trauma and the discourse that surrounds it. In the absence of compelling official narratives or a cohesive place in American popular memory, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has often been understood and represented through the lens of trauma. The Iraq War has become a site of the production of American trauma, but is distanced and contained away from a US homeland that lacks imaginative unity or a stable wartime geography. The March 2003 invasion of Iraq offered a media spectacle of high tech “Shock and Awe” bombing that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the generals and war planners promised would traumatize the entire Iraqi nation into rapid submission. Like the promotion of high tech warfare, the scale and pervasiveness of media embedding during the Iraq War presents formidable challenges to conventional accounts of war trauma.
