Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez (review)

Not much time has passed since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The conflict has not ended yet (and some might even say that the worst things are still before us), but sociologists are already prepared to publish serious articles and books about this political and military episode of global importance. This is to be welcomed since in the past sociology often was quite reluctant to deal with war and other forms of macro-violence at all. "Bringing the state (and war) back in" nowadays is not any longer an exclusive agenda for historical sociologists analyzing conflict constellations that existed decades or even centuries ago. It is our (violent) present time which increasingly begins to attract sociologists from all subfields of the discipline and which brings them in close cooperation (and competition!) with political scientists.

Philip Smith, sociologist at Yale University, is one of those who has dared to shoulder the task of analyzing the last Iraq War. As any reader will immediately recognize, this well-written book targets an academic audience and certainly is not some kind of a journalistic endeavour with the intent to sell as many copies as possible. In fact, Smith primarily has a theoretical interest and that's why he is heading towards a comparative research agenda: Focussing on the Suez Crisis of 1956, on the 1991 Gulf War and the still ongoing Iraq Conflict, Smith is looking at discourses surrounding these conflicts, discourses in four countries, in the United States of America, in Great Britain, in France and in Spain. This comparative setting is based on a very strong theoretical assumption, namely that in different nation-states there are "policy regulating civil discourse(s)"(12), which do have a strong causal effect on the way how nations perceive and treat each other. In the end, even waging war is a matter deeply influenced by cultural discourses. However, according to Smith, form and structure of civil discourses are not random or arbitrary. On the contrary, discourses are made up of binary codes "responsible for classifying the world… according to moral criteria, detailing the qualities and attributes of the sacred and profane, polluted and pure."(14) And out of these binary codes narratives are formed which define particular situations. If one follows Smith, then four narrative genres were central in structuring the debate on those three wars and crises under investigation: the apocalyptic mode of narration, the romantic mode, the genre of tragedy and the genre of "low mimesis," the last one is a kind of story telling which admits the existence of complex characters and situations and assumes that actions in the story are "pragmatic and constrained"(24) so that settling conflicts seems possible.

Smith's theoretical arguments are – to my opinion – best developed in his historical analysis of the Suez Crisis where he shows that in the United States Gamal Abdel Nasser from the outset was framed as a somewhat romantic, certainly not dangerous, hero of the Arab world whose actions – the nationalization of the Suez Canal which without a doubt damaged American interests – do not require serious military retaliation. In Britain and France the discourse developed differently in that the story of nationalization of the Suez Canal was soon to be told in terms of an alternative narrative genre, namely as the result of the actions of a dangerous politician who needs to be stopped by way of war. Spain's position during the Franco era (certainly not based on a discourse of a free and liberal civil society) was somewhere in between. As Smith argues, at first sight it was surprising that the United States in the Suez crises did not join France and Britain, but instead, sided with the USSR by forcing her closest allies to withdraw their troops from the canal. America's move in this particular case can only be explained by the causal role of discourses because "there is a certain path-dependence...