Reckoning Sacrifice in “War on Terror” Literature

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Eighteen months after the launch of the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech in which he emphasized the readiness of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq to use sacrifice and “weapons of mass destruction”: “it is a regime without a qualm in sacrificing the lives of its citizens to preserve itself, or starting wars with neighbouring states and it has used chemical weapons against its own people” (“Speech in Texas”). Less than a year later, in March 2003, the US, Britain, and other allies launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and in a subsequent speech before the US Congress, Blair extolled the sacrifices that British and US “brave service men and women” were making: “our tribute to them should be measured in this way, by showing them and their families that they did not strive or die in vain, but that through their sacrifice future generations can live in greater peace, prosperity and hope” (“Blair’s Speech”). Blair poses two forms of sacrificial militancy, then: on one hand, Saddam’s regime allegedly killing its citizens for political self-interest; on the other hand, allied service men and women giving their lives for others. President George W. Bush frequently iterated that contrast between good and bad sacrifices when justifying the US’s virtuous militancy against the corrupt belligerence of Al Qaeda and the “axis of evil.”¹ Moreover, despite subsequent shifts in policy with the administrations of President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron, both heads of state continue to underscore the “sacrifices” of armed services personnel in Afghanistan and other theaters of war.

Deciding to wage war always requires weighing various kinds of losses and gains, and whenever there’s a risk that losses might seem unreasonable, sacrifice can be invoked to rebalance the calculations, for sacrificial reckoning is superlative at converting finite losses into infinite gains in ideal (whether of religion, for example, or political “freedom”). That reckoning also requires some show of faith, for in calling on people to make sacrifices one must attest to a value of things that may be tangible but invisible, such as the lives of dead veterans or “future generations,” the ideal of freedom, or the threat to freedom from reported “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). As both US and British governments have frequently voiced faith in the sacrifices of their armed forces, and as those sacrifices have been called to the attention of US and British citizens by both their governments and their national media, I shall offer a comparative examination of how some US and British writers address the sacrificial reckonings of the war in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. With particular focus on how the writers explore the reckonings in terms of intimacy, sympathy, and bearing witness to the lives and deaths of others, I shall also compare how their explorations involve aspects of literary genre and style; specifically, lyric, fictional realism, and free indirect style. As well as offering some novel comparative insights into US and British writings on the war, then, I shall also make some fresh generic connections in analyzing responses in both poetry and novels.

Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) makes for a good introductory example of a writer adumbrating how the war’s sacrificial reckonings bear on workings of literature and the imagination. Set in London on 15 February 2003, the day on which millions of people around the world protested against invading Iraq, the novel repeatedly associates war, spectacle, and various kinds of faith.² Having seen television footage of London’s war protesters, the novel’s protagonist, brain surgeon Henry Perowne, considers the possible threat of WMD: “Does Saddam possess weapons of terrifying potential? Simply, the Prime Minister might be sincere and wrong. Some of his bitterest opponents don’t doubt his good faith. He could be on the verge of a monstrous miscalculation” (141). Perowne has firsthand experience of Blair making an error: at the opening of the Tate Modern, Blair mistook him for an artist and warmly greeted him; on being told by the surgeon that he was “making a mistake...