A. Military presence consists of non-combat troops.

This is the only way to give

meaning to “presence” and it’s acceptably broad
Thomason et al 2002 (IDA Paper P-3707, “Transforming US Overseas Military Presence: Evidence and
Options for DoD Volume I: Main Report” This paper has been prepared by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in
partial fulfillment of a task being performed for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense . The task, entitled
“Effects-Based Assessments of US Presence and Deployment Patterns,” is being conducted to help the DoD identify
evidence of the effects that actual and potential alternative US overseas military presence postures and activities have
or may have in promoting key US defense and national security strategy goals. James S. Thomason, Senior Analyst,
Strategy, Forces and Resources Division, Institute for Defense Analyses EDUCATION Ph.D., International
Relations, Northwestern University (1978) B.A., Government, Harvard College (1969) ,
http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/0207thomason.pdf)

WHAT IS OVERSEAS MILITARY PRESENCE? Our working definition of US overseas military

presence is that it consists of all the US military assets in overseas areas that are engaged in
relatively routine, regular, non-combat activities or functions.1 By this definition, forces that
are located overseas may or may not be engaging in presence activities. If they are engaging in
combat (such as Operation Enduring Freedom), or are involved in a one-time non-combat
action (such as an unscheduled carrier battle group deployment from the United States aimed at
calming or stabilizing an emerging crisis situation), then they are not engaging in presence
activities. Thus, an asset that is located (or present) overseas may or may not be “engaged in
presence activities,” may or may not be “doing presence.” We have thus far defined presence
activities chiefly in “negative” terms—what they are not. In more positive terms, what exactly are
presence activities, i.e., what do presence activities actually entail doing? Overseas military
presence activities are generally viewed as a subset of the overall class of activities that the US
government uses in its efforts to promote important military/security objectives [Dismukes,
1994]. A variety of recurrent, overseas military activities are normally placed under the
“umbrella” concept of military presence. These include but are not limited to US military efforts
overseas to train foreign militaries; to improve inter-operability of US and friendly forces; to
peacefully and visibly demonstrate US commitment and/or ability to defend US interests; to
gain intelligence and familiarity with a locale; to conduct peacekeeping activities; and to position
relevant, capable US military assets such that they are likely to be available sooner rather than
later in case an evolving security operation or contingency should call for them.2

Counter Insurgency includes combat- means at least theyre extra T

Petraeus & Amos 06, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army & Lieutenant General, U.S. Marine
Corps ( 12/2006, “Counterinsurgency”, http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCcQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fas.org%2Firp
%2Fdoddir%2Farmy%2Ffm3-24.pdf&ei=8eFATJSGO4T78Aa-qIQX&usg=AFQjCNF_J-
r1sJq92wfkv5V-eJZuVcSu5Q&sig2=Mj79Ntjg9im4fWcv8kjCeg )
Although logisticians support all LLOs, logistic support during COIN focuses on the
following LLOs:
Conduct combat operations /civil security operations.

B. Violation – the aff ends combat missions, not presence missions.

C. Voting issue -

1. limits – allowing combat missions allows affs to change specific strategies in

Afghanistan or Iraq, like ending cluster bombing without actually reducing forces
themselves, it explodes the literature base
2. negative ground – presence missions are about deterrence and reassurance –
including combat missions avoids core negative disads
We believe this debate should be about representations of American Hegemony.

America is crumbling. We have bombed too many wedding parties, maintained too
many aggressive wars, flouted too many international treaties, consumed and
borrowed our economy too far into oblivion to ever lead the free world again. The
so-called Pax Americana has been anything but stabilizing, fueling two endless wars
and inflaming anti-american sentiment, reproducing the violence it was supposed to
protect us from. The affirmative is a call to resurrect the dream. More infantry
recruits will do nothing to alleviate global violence, which runs structurally deep
within American foreign policy, other than satiate our desire to act, reifying faith in
imperial control and digging the trench that separates America from the rest of the
world even deeper.
Chris Hedges, journalist, author, and war correspondent, America’s Wars of Self-
Destruction. November 17th, 2008.
< http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20081117_americas_wars_of_self_destructio
n/>.
War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to
ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease
it is meant to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body
politic of the United States. We believe that because we have the capacity to wage
war we have the right to wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that
we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant
our virtues—which we see as superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we
have a right to do this by force. This belief has corrupted Republicans and
Democrats alike. And if Barack Obama drinks, as it appears he will, the dark elixir of
war and imperial power offered to him by the national security state, he will
accelerate the downward spiral of the American empire.
Obama and those around him embrace the folly of the “war on terror.” They may
want to shift the emphasis of this war to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but this is a
difference in strategy, not policy. By clinging to Iraq and expanding the war in
Afghanistan, the poison will continue in deadly doses. These wars of occupation are
doomed to failure. We cannot afford them. The rash of home foreclosures, the
mounting job losses, the collapse of banks and the financial services industry, the
poverty that is ripping apart the working class, our crumbling infrastructure and the
killing of hapless Afghans in wedding parties and Iraqis by our iron fragmentation
bombs are neatly interwoven. These events form a perfect circle. The costly forms
of death we dispense on one side of the globe are hollowing us out from the inside
at home.
The “war on terror” is an absurd war against a tactic. It posits the idea of perpetual,
or what is now called “generational,” war. It has no discernable end. There is no
way to define victory. It is, in metaphysical terms, a war against evil, and evil, as
any good seminarian can tell you, will always be with us. The most destructive evils,
however, are not those that are externalized. The most destructive are those that
are internal. These hidden evils, often defined as virtues, are unleashed by our
hubris, self-delusion and ignorance. Evil masquerading as good is evil in its
deadliest form.
The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown
or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald
Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from
an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the
Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our
country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily
consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford.
We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable demand
for cheap oil. The years after World War II, when the United States accounted for
one-third of world exports and half of the world’s manufacturing, gave way to huge
trade imbalances, outsourced jobs, rusting hulks of abandoned factories, stagnant
wages and personal and public debts that most of us cannot repay.
The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals, but
those who promote the perverted ideology of national security that, as Andrew
Bacevich writes, is “our surrogate religion.” If we continue to believe that we can
expand our wars and go deeper into debt to maintain an unsustainable level of
consumption, we will dynamite the foundations of our society.
“The Big Lies are not the pledge of tax cuts, universal health care, family values
restored, or a world rendered peaceful through forceful demonstrations of American
leadership,” Bacevich writes in “The Limits of Power.” “The Big Lies are the truths
that remain unspoken: that freedom has an underside; that nations, like households,
must ultimately live within their means; that history’s purpose, the subject of so
many confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable. Above all, there is this:
Power is finite. Politicians pass over matters such as these in silence. As a
consequence, the absence of self-awareness that forms such an enduring element
of the American character persists.”
Those clustered around Barack Obama, from Madeline Albright to Hillary Clinton to
Dennis Ross to Colin Powell, have no interest in dismantling the structure of the
imperial presidency or the vast national security state. They will keep these
institutions intact and seek to increase their power. We have a childish belief that
Obama will magically save us from economic free fall, restore our profligate levels of
consumption and resurrect our imperial power. This naïve belief is part of our
disconnection with reality. The problems we face are structural. The old America is
not coming back.
The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform. This is the
Faustian bargain made between these corporate forces and the Republican and
Democratic parties. We will never, under the current system, achieve energy
independence. Energy independence would devastate the profits of the oil and gas
industry. It would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts, spoil the
financial health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to Blackwater and
render obsolete the existence of U.S. Central Command.
There are groups and people who seek to do us harm. The attacks of Sept. 11 will
not be the last acts of terrorism on American soil. But the only way to defeat
terrorism is to isolate terrorists within their own societies, to mount cultural and
propaganda wars, to discredit their ideas, to seek concurrence even with those
defined as our enemies. Force, while a part of this battle, is rarely necessary. The
2001 attacks that roused our fury and unleashed the “war on terror” also unleashed
a worldwide revulsion against al-Qaida and Islamic terrorism, including throughout
the Muslim world, where I was working as a reporter at the time. If we had had the
courage to be vulnerable, to build on this empathy rather than drop explosive
ordinance all over the Middle East, we would be far safer and more secure today. If
we had reached out for allies and partners instead of arrogantly assuming that
American military power would restore our sense of invulnerability and mitigate our
collective humiliation, we would have done much to defeat al-Qaida. But we did not.
We demanded that all kneel before us. And in our ruthless and indiscriminate use of
violence and illegal wars of occupation, we resurrected the very forces that we
could, under astute leadership, have marginalized. We forgot that fighting terrorism
is a war of shadows, an intelligence war, not a conventional war. We forgot that, as
strong as we may be militarily, no nation, including us, can survive isolated and
alone.
The American empire, along with our wanton self-indulgence and gluttonous
consumption, has come to an end. We are undergoing a period of profound
economic, political and military decline. We can continue to dance to the tunes of
self-delusion, circling the fire as we chant ridiculous mantras about our greatness,
virtue and power, or we can face the painful reality that has engulfed us. We cannot
reverse this decline. It will happen no matter what we do. But we can, if we break
free from our self-delusion, dismantle our crumbling empire and the national
security state with a minimum of damage to ourselves and others. If we refuse to
accept our limitations, if do not face the changes forced upon us by a bankrupt elite
that has grossly mismanaged our economy, our military and our government, we
will barrel forward toward internal and external collapse. Our self-delusion
constitutes our greatest danger. We will either confront reality or plunge headlong
into the minefields that lie before us.

The aff attempts to radically disavow the United States’ vulnerability while framing
the rest of the world as beholden to US military power, creating a schism that marks
off whole populations as ungrievable, because they are only so many roadblocks on
the path to primacy.
Judith Butler, professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, Frames of War. 2009.
P. 46-0.

If we take Klein's point that destructiveness is the problem for the

human subject, it would seem that it is also what links the human and
non-human. This seems most acutely true in times of war when sentient life
of all kinds is put at heightened risk, and it seems to me acutely true for
those who have the power to wage war, that is, to become subjects whose
destructiveness threatens whole populations and environments. So if I
conduct a certain first-world criticism of the destructive impulse in this
chapter, it will be precisely because I am a citizen of a country that systematically
idealizes its own capacity for murder. I think it was in the film Rush Hour 3 that,
when the lead characters get into a taxi in Paris, the taxi driver realizes they
are Americans and expresses his enthusiastic interest in the impending
American adventure.1° Along the way, he offers a keen ethnographic insight:
"Americans!" he says, They kill people for no reason!" Now, of course,
the US government gives all kinds of reasons for its killings while at the
same time refusing to call those killings "killings" at all. But if I undertake
an inquiry into this question of destructiveness, and if I turn toward the
question of precariousness and vulnerability, then it is precisely because I
think a certain dislocation of perspective is necessary for the rethinking of
global politics. The notion of the subject produced by the recent wars
conducted by the US, including its torture operations, is one in which the
US subject seeks to produce itself as impermeable, to define itself as protected
permanently against incursion and as radically invulnerable to attack. Nationalism
works in part by producing and sustaining a certain version of the subject. We
can call it imaginary, if we wish, but we have to remember that it is
produced and sustained through powerful forms of media, and that what
gives power to their version of the subject is precisely the way in which
they are able to render the subject's own destructiveness righteous and its own destructibility
unthinkable.
The question of how those relations or interdependencies are conceived is
thus linked with whether and how we can extend our sense of political
dependency and obligation to a global arena beyond the nation.
Nationalism in the US has, of course, been heightened since the
attacks of 9/11, but let us remember that this is a country that extends
its jurisdiction beyond its own borders, that suspends its constitutional
obligations within those borders, and that understands itself as exempt
from any number of international agreements. It jealously guards its right to
sovereign self-protection while making righteous incursions into other
sovereignties or, in the case of Palestine, refusing to honor any principles
of sovereignty at all . I want to emphasize that the move to affirm
dependency and obligation outside the nation-state has to be distinguished
from those forms of imperialism that assert claims of sovereignty outside the
boundaries of the nation-state. This is not an easy distinction to make or to
secure, but I think it presents an urgent and contemporary challenge for our
times.
When I refer to a schism that structures (and de-structures) thenational
sub ject, I am referring to those modes of defense and displacement—to borrow
a psychoanalytic category—that lead us, in the name of sovereignty, to
defend a border in one instance and to violate it in another with impunity. The
call to interdependency is also, then, a call to overcome this schism and to
move toward the recognition of a generalized condition of precariousness. It
cannot be that the other is destructible while I am not; nor vice versa. It can
only be that life, conceived as precarious life, is a generalized condition, and
that under certain political conditions it becomes radically exacerbated or
radically disavowed. This is a schism in which the subject asserts its own
righteous destructiveness at the same time as it seeks to immunize itself
against the thought of its own precariousness. It belongs to a politics driven
by horror at the thought of the nation's destructibility, or that of its allies. It
constitutes a kind of unreasoned rift at the core of the subject of nationalism.
The point is not to oppose destructiveness per se., to counter this split subject
of US nationalism with a subject whose psyche wants always and only
peace. I accept that aggression is part of life and hence part of politics as well.
But aggression can and must be separated from violence (violence being one
form that aggression assumes), and there are ways of giving form to
aggression that work in the service of democratic life, including "antagonism"
and discursive conflict, strikes, civil disobedience, and even revolution.
Hegel and Freud both understood that the repression of destruction can
only happen by relocating destruction in the action of repression, from which
it follows that any pacifism based on repression will have simply found
another venue for destructiveness and in no way succeeded in its obliteration.
It would further follow that the only other alternative is to find ways of crafting
and checking destructiveness, giving it a livable form, which would be a way
of affirming its continuing existence and assuming responsibility for the social
and political forms in which it emerges. This would be a different labor than
either repression or unbridled and "liberated" expression.

If I call for an overcoming of a certain schism in the national subject, it is

not in the service of rehabilitating a unified and coherent subject. The
subject is always outside itself, other than itself, since its relation to the
other is essential to what it is (here, clearly, I remain, perversely, a
Hegelian). So the following question emerges: how do we understand
what it means to be a subject who is constituted in or as its relations,
whose survivability is a function and effect of its modes of its
relationality?

With these insights in mind, let us return to the question Asad poses to us
about moral responsiveness. If just or justified violence is enacted by states,
and if unjustifiable violence is enacted by non-state actors or actors
opposed to existing states, then we have a way of explaining why we react
to certain forms of violence with horror and to other forms with a sense of
acceptance, possibly even with righteousness and triumphalism. The
affective responses seem to be primary, in need of no explanation, prior to
the work of understanding and interpretation. We are, as it were, against
interpretation in those moments in which we react with moral horror in the
face of violence. But as long as we remain against interpretation in such
moments, we will not be able to give an account of why the affect of horror is
differentially experienced_ We will then not only proceed on the basis of this
unreason, but will take it as the sign of our commendable native moral
sentiment, perhaps even of our "fundamental humanity."
Paradoxically, the unreasoned schism in our responsiveness makes it impossible to react
with the same horror to violence committed against all sorts of populations, In this way,
when we take our moral horror to be a sign of our humanity, we fail to note that the humanity in question is in fact, implicitly divided
between those for whom we feel urgent and unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as
lives at all. How are we to understand the regulatory power that creates this differential at the level of affective and moral responsiveness? Perhaps it
is important to remember that responsibility requires responsiveness, and that responsiveness is not a merely subjective state, but a
way of responding to what is before us with the resources that are available to us. We are already social beings, working within elaborate
social interpretations both when we feel horror and when we fail to feel it at all. Our affect is never merely our own: affect is from the start,
communicated from elsewhere. It disposes us to perceive the world in a certain way, to let certain dimensions of the world in and to resist
others. But if a response is always a response to a perceived state of the world, what is it that allows some aspect of the world to become
perceivable and another not? How do we re-approach this question of affective response and moral evaluation by considering those
already operative frameworks within which certain lives are regarded worthy of protection while others are not, precisely because they
are nor quite "lives" according to prevailing norms of recognizability? Affect depends upon social supports for feeling: we come to feel only in
relation to a perceivable loss, one that depends on social structures of perception; and we can only feeI and claim affect as our own on the
condition that we have already been inscribed in a circuit of social affect.

One might, for instance, believe in the sanctity of life or adhere to a

general philosophy that opposes violent action of all kinds against
sentient beings, and one might invest powerful feelings in such .a belief.
but if certain lives are not perceivable as lives, and this includes sentient
beings who are not human, then the moral prohibition against violence
will be only selectively applied (and our own sentience will be only
selectively mobilized). The critique of violence must begin with the
question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become
visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that
keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way? The
problem concerns the media, at the most general level, since a life can
be accorded a value only on the condition that it is perceivable as a
life, but it is only on the condition of certain embedded evaluative
structures that a life becomes perceivable at all.
Hegemony is the opposite of stabilizing - all of our attempts to follow through on our
military threat have failed, slaughtering civilians, overstretching our military and
exacerbating intra-state violence. The affs endorsement of infantry dominance is a
snake eating its tail- maintaining the macho-fantasy only alienates our allies and
forecloses the possibility of cooperation on every major global problem, turning the
case.
Phillip Slater, Ph. D. from Harvard and Professor of Sociology at Harvard, Brandeis,
and UCSC. “Realpolitik vs. Reality”. November 12th, 2008.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/realpolitik-vs-reality_b_143312.html>.
Obama's election provides an opportunity to reconsider the utility of realpolitik, the guiding principle of
American foreign policy for the past sixty years. Realpolitik is supposed to be 'practical', but one
can't escape the feeling that it would be better termed dummheitpolitik, since it has been the major
cause of almost every foreign policy problem we face in the world today. Building up Osama bin
Laden to harass the Russians in Afghanistan comes to mind, not to mention building up Saddam Hussein
to fight Iran. And of course there's Iran--possibly the most democratic nation in the Muslim world before
we sabotaged Mossadegh and installed the Shah's dictatorship, whose oppressive regime opened the door
to the fundamentalist Mullahs.
When you get right down to it, realpolitik is merely macho politics--a kind of Johnny-one-note foreign
policy. You rattle sabers, hoping someone will wimp out. When they don't, you waste billions slaughtering
civilians for a few years, then carry on as before, only with a considerably weakened economy,
fewer resources, more enemies, and less real influence. Or you subvert other countries--
overthrowing their democratically-elected governments, as we did all over Latin America, achieving
nothing beyond a few years of easy sailing for American corporations followed by a huge loss of
influence and goodwill all over the continent, so that today more than half of Latin America either views
us as the enemy or simply ignores us altogether.
The dinosaurs are already wetting their drawers over Obama's suggestion that negotiation with Iran might
conceivably be an alternative to another stupid adventure. Our media are also appalled, for the media are
consistently more knee-jerk-macho than the American public. War, after all, is so much more newsworthy
than peace. Violence sells.
Why is talking considered so fraught with terrible peril? Why is it, when we've been pushing the rest of the
world around for the last 60 years that negotiating with countries much weaker than we are is considered
'dangerously naïve'? Why is the assumption always made that American diplomats will be outwitted by
evil, sly foreigners? Why are Americans such Nervous Nellies that they want get out the nukes every time
anyone disagrees with us?
When a huge giant acts like a timid little victim in a cartoon, it's humorous. When the world's only
superpower, having bombed and/or invaded sovereign nations on four continents--none of them having
threatened us in any way--tries to pass itself off as a poor little weak victim, it's just disgusting, and
unworthy of a great nation.
Realpolitik means reacting to every tension spot in the world by throwing bombs at it.
Realpolitik means making sure an entire nation is against us, when only a small minority is.
Realpolitik means choosing foreign policy leaders on the basis of their belligerence and paranoia.
It's time for Americans to grow up, get their heads out of the sand, and put Realpolitik to bed. Our policy
of bombing wedding parties, torturing prisoners, ignoring international law and international treaties,
and treating every nation's territory as our personal property is not 'realistic', it's just short-sighted.
Realpolitik has always been contrasted with internationalism, which was seen as idealistic.
That was true a century ago. Today, internationalism is the only reality. The problems we
face all require international solutions. The world has shrunk, and the nation-state is
obsolete as an ultimate authority. Corporations are international, terrorism is international,
the economy is international, nature is international, pollution is international, labor is
international, poverty is international, disease is international.
The credit crisis should have been a wake-up call. Banks and other corporations have for a long time taken
rich advantage of the fact that politicians cling to meaningless national boundaries. Nations compete with
one another, allowing multinationals to play them off against each other. But when trouble came, the
banks were forced to reveal the truth to their nationalistic suckers: unite or we all go down.
The world we live in today is one of networks. The largest network will succeed, the others will fail. When
Citibank tried to maintain a closed network of ATM machines, for example, several smaller banks banded
together to form an open ATM network, which Citibank was ultimately forced to join because it was
larger. Isolationism today is a losing strategy.
And networks are not empires--they're composed of equals. The United States can no longer
dictate to the rest of the world--by attempting to, under the Bush administration, it has seen
its influence around the world sink to its lowest depth in history.
It's time to conduct our foreign policy like grownups, living in a grownup world, not like hyperactive
ten-year-old boys living in comic-book dreams of superheroes.
We control the internal link to war and extinction- Warfare happens when states
believe their vulnerability can be assuaged, and their military deployments are
predictably effective. This happens through ideological mystification- military
intervention is never stabilizing because it cannot map out nor control the socio-
political realities of its object- every US war of occupation proves our argument.
Burke 7 (Anthony Burke, Int'l Studies @ U of New South Wales, “Ontologies of War,” in Theory &
Event, Vol. 10, Iss. 2)

This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath
analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of
institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and
should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a
powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential'
and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments,
rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political
leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and
rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we
have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and
how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about
the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of
epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development
and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical
order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic
inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon ; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of
things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising
about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an
underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is
thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political
context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see
such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly,
when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim:
a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries
of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The
second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual
structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology
of violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous
because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation
either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be
picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly
the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel)
and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they
crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This
creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they
embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of
technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force
-- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises
because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we
could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era
of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence
collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them' )
take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing
comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own
substance'. 21 What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is
not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and
violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between
electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and
political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability
to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing
them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be
useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but
while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break
down in action. The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic
clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an
end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique
quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure
national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to
any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way
knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate
purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an
instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things,
including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms,
technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being . This combination could be
seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political
leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier,
while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted
Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that
was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural
phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22 The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being,
means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined .
As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in
the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the
path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong
ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the
Bush administration's 'war on terror'. Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological
24

commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth. 25 However such rationalist critiques rely
on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up
choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's
thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to
be made.
Their motivation for withdrawal – that current presence is not effective at reproducing the
global order – maintains the logic of legitimation that justifies COIN in the first place
Hardt and Negri 04 (*Michael, Professor of Literature and Italian, Duke University, Ph.D in Comparative
Literature, University of Washington, and *Antonio, Former professor in State Theory, Padua University, Multitude,
30, jbh)
Violence is legitimated most effectively today, it seems to us, not on any a priori framework, moral or legal,
but only a posteriori, based on its results. It might seem that the violence of the
strong is automatically legitimated and the violence of the weak
immediately labeled terrorism, but the logic of legitimation has
more to do with the effects of the violence. The reinforcement
or reestablishment of the current global order is what
retroactively legitimates the use of violence. In the span of just over a
decade we have seen the complete shift among these forms of
legitimation. The first Gulf War was legitimated on the basis of
international law, since it was aimed officially at restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait. The NATO
intervention in Kosovo, by contrast, sought legitimation on moral
humanitarian grounds. The second Gulf War, a preemptive war, calls for
legitimation primarily on the basis of its results. 46 A military
and/or police power will be granted legitimacy as long and only
as long as it is effective in rectifying global disorders—not
necessarily bringing peace but maintaining order. By this logic a
power such as the U.S. military can exercise violence that may
or may not be legal or moral and as long as that violence results
in the reproduction of imperial order it will be legitimated. As
soon as the violence ceases to bring order, however, or as soon
as it fails to preserve the security of the present global order,
the legitimation will be removed. This is a most precarious and
unstable form of legitimation.

The alternative is to reject the hegemonic discourse of the 1AC.

VIOLENCE SUSTAINS ITSELF THROUGH A CONSTANT REITERATION OF
SOVEREIGNTY AND CONTROL. A REFUSAL TO ACT ENFORCES THE
REALIZATION THAT FUELING THE WAR MACHINE CANNOT PROTECT US, AND
ENDANGERS GLOBAL POPULATIONS WHO WE ARE INEVITABLY DEPENDENT
ON.
Judith Butler, professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, Frames of War. 2009. P. 178-4.
State violence often articulates itself through the positing of the sovereign subject. The sovereign subject poses as
precisely not the one who is impinged upon by others, precisely not the one whose permanent and irreversible
injurability forms the condition and horizon of its actions. Such a sovereign position not only denies its own constitutive
injurability but tries to relocate injurability in the other as an effect of doing injury to that other and exposing that other as by
definition, injurable. If the violent act is among other things, a way of relocating the capacity to be violated (always)
elsewhere, it produces the appearance that the subject who enacts violence is impermeable to violence, The
accomplishment of this appearance becomes one aim of violence; one locates injurability with the other by
injuring the other and then taking the sign of injury as the truth of the other. The specific moralization of this
scene takes place when the violence is "justified" as "legitimate" and even "virtuous,"
even though its primary purpose is to secure an impossible effect of mastery, inviolability,
and impermeability through destructive means. To avow injurability does not in any way guarantee a
politics of non-violence, But what may well make a difference would be the consideration of precarious life, and so too injurability, as
a generalized condition, rather than as a differential way of marking a cultural identity, that is, a recurrent or timeless feature of a cultural
subject who is persecuted or injured by definition and irregardless of historical circumstance. In the first instance, the "subject" proves to be
counter-productive for understanding a shared condition of precariousness and interdependency. In the second instance, the "subject" is re-
installed and becomes defined by its injury (past) and injurability (present and future).'' If a particular subject considers her- or himself
to be by definition injured or indeed persecuted, then whatever acts of violence such a subject commits cannot register as "doing
injury," since the subject who does them is by definition, precluded from doing anything but suffering injury. As a result, the production
of the subject on the basis of its injured status then produces a permanent ground for legitimating (and disavowing) its own violent actions. As
much as the sovereign subject disavows his injurability, relocating it in the other as a permanent repository, so the persecuted subject
can disavow his own violent acts, since no empirical act can refute the a priori presumption of victimization. If non-violence has the
opportunity to emerge here, it would take its departure not from a recognition of the injurability of all peoples
(however true that might be), but from an understanding of the possibilities of one's own violent actions in
relation to those lives to which one is bound, including those whom one never chose and never knew, and so those whose
relation to me precedes the stipulations of contract. Those others make a claim upon me, but what are the conditions under which I
can hear or respond to their claims? It is not enough to say, in Levinasian vein, that the claim is made upon me prior to my knowing
and as an inaugurating instance of my coming into being. That may be formally true, but its truth is of no use to me when I
lack the conditions for responsiveness that allow me to apprehend it in the midst of this social and political life. Those "conditions"
include not just my private resources, but the various mediating forms and frames that make responsiveness possible. In other
words, the claim upon me takes place, when it takes place, through the senses, which arc crafted in part through various forms of media:
the social organization of sound and voice, of image and text, of tactility and smell. If the claim of the other upon me is to reach
me, it must be mediated in some way, which means that our very capacity to respond with non-violence (to act
against a certain violent act, or to defer to the "non-act" in the face of violent provocation) depends upon
the frames by which the world is given and by which the domain of appearance is
circumscribed. The claim to non-violence does not merely interpellate me as an individual person who must
decide one way or another. If the claim is registered, it reveals me less as an "ego" than as a being
bound up with others in inextricable and irreversible ways, existing in a generalized
condition of precariousness and interdependency, affectively driven and crafted by those whose
effects on me I never chose, The injunction to non-violence always presupposes that there is some field of
beings in relation to whom nonviolence ought to be the appropriate bearing. Because that field is invariably
circumscribed, non-violence can only make its appeal by differentiating between those against whom
violence ought not to be waged and those who are simply not covered" by the injunction itself . For the
injunction to non-violence to make sense, it is first necessary to overcome the
presumption of this very differential—a schematic and non-theorized inegalitarianism—
that operates throughout perceptual life. If the injunction to non-violence is to avoid becoming meaningless, it must be
allied with a critical intervention apropos the norms that differentiate between those lives that count as livable and grievable and those that do
not. Only on the condition that lives are grievable (construed within the future anterior) does the call to non-violence avoid complicity with
forms of epistemic inegalitarianism. The desire to commit violence is thus always attended by the anxiety of having violence returned, since all the
potential actors in the scene are equally vulnerable, Even when such an insight follows from a eakula don of the consequences of a violent act, it
testifies to an ontological interrelation that is prior to any calculation. Precariousness is not the effect of a certain strategy, but the generalized
condition for any strategy whatsoever. A certain apprehension of equality thus follows from this invariably
shared condition, one that is most difficult to hold fast in thought: non-violence is derived from the
apprehension of equality in the midst of precariousness. For this purpose, we do not need to know in
advance what "a life" will be, but only to find and support those modes of representation and appearance that
allow the claim of life to be made and heard (in this way, media and survival are linked ). Ethics is less
a calculation than something that follows from being addressed and addressable in sustainable ways, which
means, at a global level, there can be no ethics without a sustained practice of translation—between languages, but also between forms of
media.'1. The ethical question of whether or not to do violence emerges only in relation to the "you" who figures as
the potential object of my injury. But if there is no "you," or the "you" cannot be heard or seen, then there
is no ethical relation. One can lose the "you" through the exclusive postures of sovereignty and
persecution alike, especially when neither admits to being implicated in the position of the other. Indeed, one effect
of such modes of sovereignty is precisely to "lose the you." Non-violence thus would seem to require a struggle
over the domain of appearance and the senses, asking how best to organize media in order to overcome the
differential ways through which grievability is allocated and a life is regarded as a life worth living on indeed,
as a living life. It is also to struggle against those notions of the political subject that assume
that permeability and injurability can be monopolized at one site and fully refused at
another. No subject has a monopoly on "being persecuted" or "being persecuting," even when thickly sedimented histories
(densely compounded forms of iteration) have produced that ontological effect. If no claim to radical impermeability is finally acceptable
as true, then no claim to radical persecutabiliry is finally acceptable either, To call into question this frame by which
injurability is falsely and unequally distributed is precisely to call into question one of the
dominant frames sustaining the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the
Middle East. The claim of non-violence not only requires that the conditions are in place for the claim to he heard
and registered (there can be no "claim" without its mode of presentation), but that anger and rage also find a way
of articulating that claim in a way that might be registered by others, In this sense, non-violence is not a
peaceful state, but a social and political struggle to make rage articulate and effective—the
carefully crafted "fuck you." In effect, one has to come up against violence to practice non-violence they are bound together,
and tensely so); but, it bears repeating, the violence one is up against does not issue exclusively from the outside. What we call
aggression and rage can move in the direction of nullifying the other; but if who we "are" is precisely a shared precariousness, then we
risk our own nullification. This happens not because we are discrete subjects calculating in relation to one another, but because, prior
to any calculation, we are already constituted through ties that bind and unbind in specific and consequential ways. Ontologically, the
forming and un-forming of such bonds is prior to any question of the subject and is, in fact, the social and affective condition of subjectivity.
It is also a condition that installs a dynamic ambivalence at the heart of psychic life. To say that we have "needs" is thus to say that who we
"are" involves an invariable and reiterated struggle of dependency and separation, and does not merely designate a stage of
childhood to be surmounted. It is not just "one's own" struggle or the apparent struggle of "another' but precisely the dehiscence at the
basis of the "we," the condition under which we are passionately bound together: ragefully, desirously, murderously, lovingly. To
walk the line is, yes, to live the line, the impasse of rage and fear, and to find a mode of
conduct that does not seek to resolve the anxiety of that position too quickly through a
decision. It is, of course, fine to decide on nonviolence, but decision cannot finally be the ground for the struggle
for nonviolence. Decision fortifies the deciding "I," sometimes at the expense of relationality itself. So the problem is
not really about how the subject should act, but about what a refusal to act might look
like when it issues from the apprehension of a generalized condition of precariousness
or, in other words, of the radically egalitarian character of grievability. Even the "refusal to
act" does not quite capture the forms of stalled action or stoppage that can, for instance, constitute the
non violent operation of the strike. There are other ways of conceiving the blocking of those reiterated actions
that reproduce the taken-for-granted effects of war in daily life. To paralyze the infrastructure that
allows armies to reproduce themselves is a matter of dismantling military machinery as
well as resisting conscription. When the norms of violence are reiterated without end and
without interruption, non-violence seeks to stop the iteration or to redirect it in ways that
counter its driving aims. When that iteration continues in the name of "progress," civilizational or otherwise, it=.\_3 makes sense
to heed Walter Benjamin's trenchant remark that "Perhaps revolutions are nothing other than human
beings on the train of progress reaching for the emergency brake."" To reach for the brake is an
"act," but it is one that seeks to forestall the apparent inexorability of a reiterated set of acts that postures as the
motor of history itself. Maybe the "act" in its singularity and heroism is overrated: it loses sight of the iterable process in which a
critical intervention is needed, and it can become the very means by which the "subject" is produced at the expense of a relational social ontology.
Of course, relationality is no utopian term, but a framework (the work of a new frame) for the consideration of those affects invariably
articulated within the political field: fear and rage, desire and loss, love and hatred, to name a few. All this is just another way of saying
that it is most difficult when in a state of pain to stay responsive to the equal claim of the other for shelter, for conditions of livability and
grievability. And yet, this vexed domain is the site of a necessary struggle, a struggle to stay responsive to a vicissitude of equality that is
enormously difficult to affirm, that has vet to be theorised by the defenders of egalitarianism, and that figures in a fugitive way in the
affective and perceptual dimensions of theory. Under such circumstances, when acting reproduces the subject
at the expense of another, not to act is, after all, a way of comporting oneself so as to break
with the closed circle of reflexivity, a way of ceding to the ties that bind and unbind, a way
of registering and demanding equality affectively. It is even a mode of resistance,
especially when it refuses and breaks the frames by which war is wrought time and again
And, terrorist advantage:
no risk of nuclear terror – technical and logistical hurdles like access
to heu are impossible to overcome
Mueller 1/1/2008
John Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center Professor of Political Science Department of Political Science, Ohio
State University. THE ATOMIC TERRORIST: ASSESSING THE LIKELIHOOD Prepared for presentation at the Program on International
Security Policy, University of Chicago, January 15, 2008 ]

It is essential to note, however, that making

a bomb is an extraordinarily difficult task. Thus, a set of
counterterrorism and nuclear experts interviewed in 2004 by Dafna Linzer for the Washington Post pointed to the
"enormous technical and logistical obstacles confronting would-be nuclear terrorists, and to the fact
that neither al-Qaeda nor any other group has come close to demonstrating the means to
overcome them." Allison nonetheless opines that a dedicated terrorist group, al-Qaeda in
particular, could get around all the problems in time and eventually steal, produce, or procure a
"crude" bomb or device, one that he however acknowledges would be "large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and
inefficient" (2004, 97; see also Bunn and Wier 2006, 139; Pluta and Zimmerman 2006, 61). In his recent book, Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the
Nuclear Poor, William Langewiesche spends a great deal of time and effort assessing the process by means of which a terrorist group could
The best
come up with a bomb. Unlike Allison, he concludes that it "remains very, very unlikely. It's a possibility, but unlikely." Also:
information is that no one has gotten anywhere near this. I mean, if you look carefully and
practically at this process, you see that it is an enormous undertaking full of risks for the would-be
terrorists. And so far there is no public case, at least known, of any appreciable amount of weapons-grade
HEU [highly enriched uranium] disappearing. And that's the first step. If you don't have that, you don't
have anything.
Terrorist rhetoric shuts off solutions to terrorism, necessitates eradication of those who its applied to,
and incites racist violence
Kapitan and Schulte 2 (Tomis and Erich, Thomas – Prof of Philosophy @ N Illionois U, and Erich – , Journal of Political and Military
Sociology Vol. 30 Iss. 1, 2002, pp. 172+, Questia) JPG

Given that a population has deeply rooted grievances it is determined to rectify, and given that, continually, its members have been willing to
resort to terrorist actions in pursuing its goals, then what is the intelligent response? One might try to beat them into submission, but
short of outright genocide, retaliation against a population from whose
ranks terrorists emerge will not solve anything so long as that population feels it has a legitimate
grievance worth dying for and decides that terrorism is the only viable response. Such "counter-terrorist" retaliation,
combined with a failure to address their grievances, only intensifies their hatred and resolve, their willingness to
engage in more terrorism, and soon the parties will find themselves wrapped in an ever-
increasing spiral of violence. Whether individual terrorists are driven by strategy, psychology, or a combination of
both, the rational approach to persistent terrorism stemming from a given group requires examining the situation wherein terrorism is seen as
the only route of resistance or outlet for outrage. Only then can intelligent moral responses be crafted. This brings us closer to our main
contentions. The prevalent rhetoric of 'terrorism' has not provided an intelligent
response to the problem of terrorism. To the contrary, it has shut off any
meaningful examination of causes or debate on policies and has left only the path of violence to solve differences.
Rather than promoting a free and open examination of the grievances of the group from which terrorists emerge, the 'terrorist'
label nips all questioning and debate in the bud. Terrorists are "evil"-as the U.S.
Administration has repeated on numerous occasions since September 11, 2001-and are therefore to be
eradicated. This sort of response to terrorist violence is nothing new; the 'terrorist' rhetoric has been steadily escalating since the
early 1970s, and under the Reagan Administration it became a principal foil for foreign policy. None of this has been
lost upon those who employ the rhetoric of 'terrorism' as a propaganda
device, to obfuscate and to deflect attention away from controversial
policies. A prime example in the 1980s was a book edited by Benjamin Netanyahu entitled, Terrorism: How the West Can
Win. While it offers a standard definition of 'terrorism,' both the editor and the contributors applied it selectively and argued that
the only way to combat terrorism is to respond with force, "to weaken and
destroy the terrorist's ability to consistently launch attacks," even though
it might involve the "risk of civilian casualties" (pp. 202-205). Throughout this book, very little is
said about the possible causes of terrorist violence beyond vague assertions about Islam's confrontation with modernity (p. 82), or passages
of this calibre: The
root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward
unbridled violence. This can be traced to a worldview that asserts that certain ideological and religious goals justify, indeed
demand, the shedding of all moral inhibitions. In this context, the observation that the root cause of terrorism is terrorists is more than a
tautology. (p. 204) One is tempted to pass off comments like this as pure rant, save for the fact that this book reached a large audience,
especially since its contributors included not only academics and journalists but also important policy makers. Netanyahu himself went on to
become the Israeli Prime Minister, and among the American contributors were U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, U.N. Ambassador
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Senators Daniel Moynihan and Alan Cranston, all of who voiced sentiments similar to those of Netanyahu. This
upshot of the book is that a
terrorist is portrayed as a carrier of "oppression and
enslavement," lacking moral sense, and "a perfect nihilist" (pp. 29-30). Given that the
overwhelming number of examples of terrorism are identified as coming from
the Arab and Islamic worlds, and that "retaliation" against terrorists is
repeatedly urged even at the expense of civilian casualties, then one
begins to see the point of Edward Said's assessment of the book as nothing short of "an incitement to anti-
Arab and anti-Moslem violence" (Said 1988:157).17

Terrorist representations and dehumanization pave the way for genocide

Steuter and Wills 9 (Erin and Deborah, both prof of sociology @ Mt. Allison U, Canada,
2009, Global Media Journal -- Canadian Edition, Volume 2, Issue 2, pp. 7-24,
www.gmj.uottawa.ca/0902/v2i2_steuter%20and%20wills.pdf) JPG

The metaphors that collectively construct the enemy in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
require attention because of their potential consequences. The saturation of these
metaphors in media reporting has resulted in the dominance of the complementary
enemy-as-animal, enemy-as-prey and enemy-as-disease patterns, a dominance that works to obscure public awareness that, first,
representational strategies are in play and, second, that these strategies are more than merely rhetorical in their effects. The
link
between the widespread dissemination of dehumanizing images of the
enemy and racism, oppression and even genocide has been well
established. Gregory Stanton (1996) observed that the first three stages leading to genocide
are classification, symbolization and dehumanization. Animal, prey and disease-related
metaphors accomplish in a single rhetorical gesture all three of these steps, powerfully conflating them into a process that
simultaneously identifies, marks, symbolizes and profoundly devalues the Other. For Stanton, genocide
is not a product, but a process. It may appear sudden, but it is actually linked to a series of distinct but progressive stages, each
integral to the “genocidal process” (1996). Classification, symbolization, and dehumanization are followed by organization, polarization,
identification, extermination and finally denial of the genocidal act. The language and imagery through
which the enemy-Other is represented in the news media play a key role
in these stages; once the enemy is consistently represented as less than human, it becomes
psychologically acceptable to engage in genocide or other atrocities (Frank &
Melville, 1988: 15). Historical precedents include Nazi propaganda films that interspersed scenes of Jewish immigration with shots of
teeming rats. Jews were also compared to cross-bred mongrel dogs, insects and parasites requiring elimination; Nazi propaganda insisted that
“in the case of Jews and lice, only a radical cure helps” (Mieder, 1982). The more recent Rwandan genocide was also fueled by widely-
disseminated media voices in print and radio repeatedly calling the Tutsi ethnic community serpents and cockroaches (Kagwi-Ndungu,
2007).

AND, KATO:

THE AFFIRMATIVE’S REPRESENTATION OF A FUTURE NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE MASKS THE ONGOING

EXTERMINATION OF THE PERIPHERY, EMBODIED IN THE NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE’S TARGETTING OF INDIGENOUS
PEOPLES. THIS FANTASY OF NUCLEAR EXTINCTION CREATES A DISCURSIVE HIERARCHY OF RECOGNIZABLE
VIOLENCE, A FANTASY ALL TOO OFTEN PERPETUATED BY NUCLEAR CRITICS THEMSELVES.

KATO, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, 1993 [MASAHIDE, “NUCLEAR
GLOBALISM: TRAVERSING ROCKETS, SATELLITES, AND NUCLEAR WAR VIA THE STRATEGIC GAZE,”
ALTERNATIVES 18 (1993), 339-360]
Nuclear War Imagined and Nuclear War as Real

The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last
vestige of relatively autonomous space in the periphery under late capitalism
is propelled not only by the desire for incorporating every fabric of the
society into the division of labor but also by the desire for "pure"
destruction/extermination of the periphery." The penetration of capital into the social fabric
and the destruction of nature and preexisting social organizations by capital are not separable. However, what
we have " witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a rapid intensification
of the destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer
interested in incorporating some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of
such "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery can be explained, at least partially, by another
problematic of late capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass production of the means of destruction.'
the latest phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from the earlier
Particularly,
phases in its production of the "ultimate means of destruction/extermination,
i.e., nuclear weapons
Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed
its nature and became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the
The only instances of
perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically contextualized.
real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due recognition by the
First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which
occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose
meaning is relevant .only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe
is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet
how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in
the name of "nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in
1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth. The major
perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former
Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times),
and China (36 times). The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak
terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and
Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars
against the Marshall Islands (66. times), French Polynesia (175 times),
Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone
Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island,
also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467
times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times). Moreover although I focus
primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare
to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle
(particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must
enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho,
Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a
whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth
World, and 'Indigenous Nations. The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity
intervention,." or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a
form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus, from the perspectives- of the
the nuclear catastrophe has never been the
Fourth World and Indigenous Nations,
"unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and
ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing
nuclear wars have been, subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe.by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history
and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped
out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a
discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the
domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart
Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear
testing" in the Pacific:Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect The winds and seas
carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival
and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature
the
itself.Although Firth's book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific,
problematic division/distinction between the "nuclear explosions" and the
nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the
problematic use of the subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of
nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the
ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations
by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The
discursive containment/obliteration of the "real" of nuclear warfare has been
accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism,
with its firm commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable
authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear
catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on
a daily basis.