The narrativisation of imaginary events: simulations of the real

In this section I want to provide a brief sketch of Don DeLillo's brilliant novel, White Noise.Footnote ¹² In the novel, the ‘white noise’ of everyday life is disrupted by a major industrial accident that turns life in the small college town upside down, spewing toxic pollutants into the air, and causing the population to evacuate. My purpose is to draw a comparison between the fictional ‘airborne toxic event’ and the non-fictional event named ‘September 11’. Without wishing to downplay the moral and political horrors of the latter, my intention is to show that both events, the fictional and the real, unavoidably depend on narrative. The value in closely reading DeLillo's literary handling of ‘the event’ is that he shows the extent to which our experience of events is shaped by the narrativisation of reality.

White Noise is a difficult book to categorise. On the one hand, we might categorise it as modern in that it utilises the ‘middle voice’ that several great modern writers of the twentieth century used. Erich Auerbach sketches some of the key features of this modern writing style, noting the stylistic device employed by writers like Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, to completely erase the ‘writer as narrator of objective facts’. Instead, everything in the novel ‘appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae’. There is no all-seeing position outside the novel's text. The story's ‘reality’ is inseparable from the ‘consciousness of the characters’.Footnote ¹³ This condemns the novel to a particular point of view, however coherent it may be. It also removes the possibility of arriving at a true account of reality which the reader (or the author) can somehow verify.

On the other hand, because of the novel's setting, we might categorise White Noise as postmodern in the senses elaborated by Frederic Jameson and Anne Norton.Footnote ¹⁴ As Frederic Jameson notes of postmodern society, it is a society fashioned around technologies with in-built obsolescence, social saturation of advertising, mass media and telecommunications, and the spread of suburbanisation and car culture.Footnote ¹⁵ It is a society that reproduces the logic of consumer capitalism, as Jameson argues. A society where, to use Marxist terms, exchange value replaces use value. Therefore, a society built around ‘an economy of artificial value’.Footnote ¹⁶ These features shape the universe of White Noise, making up the background hum or ‘white noise’, like the supermarkets, the highways, the television commercials and quiz shows, the radio voice-overs and other random sounds that intersperse the text. White Noise is saturated with random, apparently unconnected and meaningless sound bytes: ‘MasterCard, Visa, American Express’, ‘Toyota Celica’, ‘Panasonic’.Footnote ¹⁷ These fragments and the constant presence of consumerism tend to confirm Peter Euben's observation that White Noise dramatises the postmodern condition, without necessarily endorsing it.Footnote ¹⁸

In the postmodern condition events tend to be experienced as images, where the distinctions between image and reality, presence and representation, sign and signified break down. In this condition, where people are constantly bombarded with signifiers often bereft of meaning, as sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry argue, ‘What is [sic] increasingly being produced are not material objects, but signs’.Footnote ¹⁹ Take, for instance, the scene where the novel's lead character and narrator, Jack Gladney, travels with a friend and colleague, Murray Jay Suskind, to a nearby tourist attraction – ‘THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA’, as the many signs announce.Footnote ²⁰ Jack and Murray are among scores of tourists there to see America's most photographed barn and to reconfirm the claim by taking photographs themselves. “No one sees the barn,” says Murray. “Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn,” he says.Footnote ²¹ Signs, which point or refer to absent things, announce their primacy in this scene. Murray continues, enquiring,

Whatever Murray means by the aura's inescapability, his curiosity at the confusion of signifiers and signifieds seems understandable. The barn has lost its sense of reality and has instead become ‘a simulacrum mediated by signs’.Footnote ²³ The barn can no longer, if it ever could, be experienced directly and immediately through sensory perception. It can only be experienced as a sign. Signs, both the literal signposts pointing to the barn and the photographic images that represent the timber structure, become more important than the barn itself (the signified) in DeLillo's postmodern world.

DeLillo writes with great irony and dark humour by playing on the characters' difficulty in distinguishing representations and simulations from real events in this postmodern universe. In White Noise simulations are employed to train and prepare emergency services for future ‘real’ disasters, yet when confronted with the ‘real’ disaster of the ‘airborne toxic event’ (ATE) it is dealt with as if it were a simulation.

The ‘real’ ATE here becomes a rehearsal for the simulation. So intertwined are the real and the simulated that it becomes difficult to separate the one from the other in the ‘precession of simulacra’ depicted by DeLillo.Footnote ²⁵ But it is not only in novels where the distinction between reality and simulation needs clarifying. In the middle of the September 11 attacks an exchange took place which indicates the intrusion of simulation into reality.

In the ‘real world’, where exercises and simulations are normal, it is not always apparent when ‘real’ events rather than simulations present themselves. A further instance of this blurring of the real and the simulated during the September 11 terrorist attacks has been noted by Richard Jackson. Many onlookers, he notes, felt as though they were watching a Hollywood movie, such was the cinematic experience of the spectacle. The man who filmed the second plane crash into the World Trade Centre, Clifton Cloud, is reported to have said, ‘I looked up and saw this hole in the World Trade Centre building. And I-I couldn't believe it. I thought, you know, this can't be happening. This is a special effect; it's a movie’.Footnote ²⁷ For everyone aside from the New Yorkers who witnessed the event with their own eyes, September 11 was and remains predominantly a cinematic, televisual or pictorial experience. The images, moving or still, of crashing planes or collapsing buildings, are the medium through which September 11 was experienced by many. This was as true for the US administration as it was for everyone else. As the 9/11 Commission Report states, ‘Most federal agencies learned about the crash in New York from CNN’.Footnote ²⁸ Even Vice-President Cheney kept a close eye on events by watching a TV in one of the White House's tunnels.Footnote ²⁹

The strikingly visual character of September 11 still requires narrative framing for the images to convey meaning. There is, as Thomas Keenan notes, a misguided assumption ‘that an image's content or meaning is self-evident’, that it speaks for itself and therefore requires no interpretation.Footnote ³⁰ But as his analysis of media coverage of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War shows, it is a ‘naïve consolation’ to suppose that images contain or convey self-evident meaning. Rather, he insists, they require ‘interpretation and reinscription’ into a context which can ascribe meaning and significance to an image.Footnote ³¹

DeLillo's construction of the ATE

What DeLillo does to wonderful effect in White Noise is highlight the interaction between the physical and social, material and immaterial dimensions of the ‘airborne toxic event’. His novel reveals the way that the event is mediated and enacted through narrative. It is the stories people tell to themselves and to others – relayed through conversation and rumour as much as through official statements and news reports – that constitutes the event. The system of signs and the flows of information, data and images are inseparable from the event as it is experienced by the story's characters. Narrative thus functions as a productive power at two levels here: it produces the imaginary world contained within the pages of the novel, and within the imaginary world it produces the event at the heart of the novel's narrative, the ‘airborne toxic event’.

Fragments of information are gathered by individuals and families as they try to grasp the nature of the ATE, but the event remains elusive. ‘True, false and other kinds of news radiated through the dormitory’ where evacuees took refuge,Footnote ³² but it was impossible to discriminate between reliable and unreliable news fragments. In the midst of the ‘event’, all knowledge became uncertain. ‘In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one's knowledge is less secure than your own’, Jack confides to the reader.Footnote ³³ It is not simply that personal insecurity has always prompted Jack to seek authority elsewhere, it is that an individual's experience of events or social reality will always be mediated by what Shapiro calls ‘pre-texts of apprehension’. As he explains, ‘the meaning and value imposed on the world is structured not by one's immediate consciousness but by the various reality-making scripts one inherits or acquires from one's surrounding cultural/linguistic condition’.Footnote ³⁴ When statements are made by public officials or broadcast by news agencies they appear to carry a degree of authoritativeness which then frames the way in which the event is interpreted or meaning is attached to it by others.

In White Noise, DeLillo plays on the constantly evolving description of the ‘chemical event’ to disclose its ‘man-made’ or social construction.Footnote ³⁵ To begin with, the spill produces what Jack describes, looking through binoculars, as a ‘heavy black mass hanging in the air … more or less shapeless’.Footnote ³⁶ An hour later, again looking through binoculars, Jack describes it as ‘a slightly larger accumulation, a towering mass in fact, maybe a little blacker now’.Footnote ³⁷ Over time Jack's children provide him with regular updates on how radio broadcasts are describing it. First, it's a ‘feathery plume’, then later it's described as a ‘black billowing cloud’.Footnote ³⁸ Finally Jack is informed that it's no longer being called a black billowing cloud, instead, it is ‘The airborne toxic event’ – a name that not only partly describes the nature of the accident, but also auto-ascribes its status as an ‘event’.Footnote ³⁹

As Paul Patton notes, ‘much of the irony and humour in DeLillo's account derives from the implicit claim that there is no social reality outside or unaffected by the forms of representation of events’.Footnote ⁴⁰ To put this into my terms, White Noise plays with and upon the narrativisation of reality; it isolates and dramatises the social significance of story-telling to amusing affect. But there is a deeper and more serious philosophical upshot of DeLillo's handling of the event's narrative construction – that experience of reality is not given in any immediate or direct sense, but is always mediated through language in general and stories in particular. In telling his story, DeLillo dramatises the way that the event is ‘performatively’ constituted. In other words, DeLillo's White Noise demonstrates ‘how to do things with words’, to borrow the title of J. L. Austin's marvellous book.Footnote ⁴¹ This is the point Patton makes in a passage worth quoting at length.

Patton argues that any event, as a complex political phenomenon, has both a material and an immaterial existence. It is constituted by the ‘attributes of bodies and states of affairs’: real human bodies, real planes, real buildings, real collisions, real collapse. But it cannot be reduced to the material dimension. It is also constituted by written, verbal and visual statements. The immaterial dimension of what people see, hear, read and say, plus the media reports and coverage, government statements and actions, and the fears and hopes all combine to produce the event. This applies equally to the perpetrators of September 11 as much as to the victims, the onlookers, and the governmental authorities. Patton believes that DeLillo's novel confirms that narrative and other modes of representation give effect or actualisation to events.Footnote ⁴³ Worlds, real or imaginary, are always already shot through with narrative. Narratives do not stand apart from the events they represent, but are folded back into them, becoming part of the assemblage of ‘facts’, including ‘True, false and other kinds of news’, vivid rumours and chilling tales.Footnote ⁴⁴

This implies that there are no events independent of the narratives in which they are depicted, analysed and judged. We should not suppose that first there is an independent historical event and then follows its narration. Events do not precede narrative, but are articulated through them. Narrative helps ‘to actualise particular events in the social field’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Outside of narrative there are no events because there is no ‘pattern of uniformity’, no ‘pattern of other events’ which allows an historical fact to rise to the ‘rank of event’, as historians Veyne and Furet explained. This is a commonplace of contemporary constructivism, that social and political reality is constituted in part at least by representations, including narrative.

DeLillo's narrative reveals the event, the ATE, both as a construction and as something which changes the way the novel's characters experience everyday reality. The ATE ruptures normal, everyday experience: “Isn't the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it's not an everyday occurrence?” asks Jack's wife Babette.Footnote ⁴⁶ After the ATE nothing remains the same, not the sky, not the sunsets, not the supermarkets, and not even Jack's body, which now carries death around inside it. “That little breath of Nyodene has planted death in my body. It's now official, according to the computer. I've got death inside me,” Jack confides to Murray after being diagnosed by a SIMUVAC official.Footnote ⁴⁷ Jack says of the ATE: “It's an event all right. It marks the end of uneventful things”.Footnote ⁴⁸ In short, the ATE is a caesura after which nothing appears to be the same; it changes how Jack experiences reality, modifying his relationship to himself and to others in the process.

DeLillo charts one aspect of the change in experience with some humour, and in so doing reveals the lack of any causal determinism when it comes to the ATE's effects. Against the tendency to imply that an event necessarily causes certain effects, DeLillo shows how even the effects, in this case symptoms, are constructed and disconnected from the ‘cause’. After the event, the symptoms of exposure to the ATE are updated and revised regularly. ‘At first they said skin irritations and sweaty palms. But now they say nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Later reports say exposure to the ATE causes ‘heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu’.Footnote ⁵⁰ But by the time his daughter starts to display these symptoms the medical experts have again changed their view; she should have been displaying ‘coma, convulsions, and miscarriage’.Footnote ⁵¹ Jack wonders whether ‘she was in a position to be tricked by her own apparatus of suggestibility’.Footnote ⁵² After all, she had been lagging all day with the symptoms. ‘Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion? Is there a true déjà vu and a false déjà vu?’.Footnote ⁵³ The symptoms thought to arise from exposure to the ATE are far from certain in White Noise. Experience becomes overshadowed by shifting theories about the after-effects of the ATE, creating confusion in the minds and bodies of its victims. DeLillo's novel suggests that the symptoms cannot be detached from the event's representation in narrative. How the senses respond to an event will partly depend on what is being said about it.

The proliferating accounts of the ATE and its effects generate confusion in Jack's mind. Most of all, the ATE generates fear. ‘The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous’, said someone Jack encountered during the ATE.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is certainly true for Jack. He had always been afraid of death, but the ATE intensified this fear, no doubt robbing him of his powers of reasoning and judgment as we shall see below.

September 11 as trauma

In his first major speech after the events of September 11, President George W. Bush spoke emotionally of the harm inflicted on the USA by the terrorist attacks. ‘I will not forget this wound to our country’, he promised.Footnote ⁵⁷ The event was traumatic; leaving a wound that could not and would not be forgotten for a long while. Not only was a gaping hole cut into the Pentagon and into the ground where the Twin Towers used to stand, a deep and painful wound was inflicted on the American psyche. September 11 left its marks both physically and mentally on America. A similar feeling was expressed by Jonathan Schell who, writing in The Nation three weeks after the event, tells of how ‘a piece was torn out of our world’.Footnote ⁵⁸ A leading Australian journalist, Paul Kelly, wrote, ‘It has left a permanent gap in the sky and an enduring hole in the American soul.’Footnote ⁵⁹ These are but different ways of noting the traumatic character of the event, of recognising the physical and psychic harm inflicted by the events of September 11.

These reflections on September 11 are hardly surprising given the violence and destruction enacted on that specific day. But Jacques Derrida, in an interview on the topic of September 11, has remarked on the relation between trauma and event in general.Footnote ⁶⁰ Trauma and the event are indissolubly linked: ‘An event always inflicts a wound in the everyday course of history.’ On this view, events, insofar as they are traumatic, cut into or across the ordinariness of everyday life; and have the potential to cut new historical paths, not least by appearing to cut off alternatives. Jenny Edkins makes a similar point, saying that trauma ‘alters the linearity of historical, narrativized time’.Footnote ⁶¹ In both cases, events and traumas are thought to disrupt time or, more accurately, the experience of time. Australian novelist Peter Carey made the same point more poetically when in the wake of the event he wrote, ‘Time is broken’.Footnote ⁶² This cannot fail to evoke Shakespeare's Hamlet: ‘the time is out of joint’.

September 11 as a world-changing event

Before the sun rose on September 12, 2001 there was a palpable sense that the world had fundamentally changed; ‘night fell on a different world’ said President George W. Bush.Footnote ⁶³ Several similar remarks were made by the President and members of his administration in the days following September 11. In his Bush at War, Bob Woodward reports a remark by the President in a September 12th NSC meeting, ‘This is a new world’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The terrorist acts that damaged the Pentagon and destroyed the Twin Towers of the WTC, cutting a gaping hole in Manhattan that would become known as ‘Ground Zero’, had decisively opened the world to the prospect of what the White House liked to call the ‘first war of the twenty-first century’. Immediately, September 11 was hailed as a defining moment for America, comparable to the 7 December 1941 Pearl Harbour attacks. With this in mind President Bush entered in his diary: ‘The Pearl Harbour of the 21st century took place today’.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Bush and many others, these two events are thought to abide by a similar historical sequencing and to entail the same moral grammar, as Cynthia Weber points out.Footnote ⁶⁶ They are both presented as dramatic surprise attacks that shattered America's isolation and innocence, demanding a forceful response.

Yet what would very quickly become a defining moment, was initially characterised by President Bush in very matter-of-fact terms. ‘Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Centre in an apparent terrorist attack on our country’, he said in brief remarks made at the school where he was when the attacks took place.Footnote ⁶⁷ At this point in time (9.30am EDT, September 11, 2001), the attacks were already identified as ‘an apparent terrorist attack’. This wasn't obvious until the second plane crashed into the South Tower at 9.03am. Before the second plane crashed into the WTC, live on television before a global audience, it appeared that a terrible accident had occurred when the first plane crashed; after all, nobody outside of the Federal Aviation Administration knew the plane had been hijacked.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, the first information received by the President was that ‘a small, twin-engine plane had crashed into the World Trade Center’. ‘The President's reaction’, naturally enough, ‘was that the incident must have been caused by pilot error’.Footnote ⁶⁹ It was only on the second plane crashing into the South Tower that the first gloss of the incident could be dismissed. Until then however, as reported by the 9/11 Commission, ‘the prospect of another plane hitting the second building was beyond the contemplation of anyone […] such a scenario was unimaginable’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Because the unimaginable happened, unimaginable outside a literary or cinematic imagination perhaps, the event was quickly appropriated as world-changing.

From an act of terrorism to an act of war

After the event the Bush administration put its effort into devising and disseminating an ideologically and politically-driven narrative of what had happened on September 11, 2001. There is a temptation to presume that the meanings of events in the social and political worlds are transparently revealed by the facts, that the ‘facts speak for themselves’.Footnote ⁷¹ But although what happened on that date is widely known and key facts are largely indisputable, it is far from clear what September 11 means or signifies or reveals.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, its meanings have to be assigned or appropriated, its significations and significance have to be induced, and its revelations have to be interpreted. Giving meaning to an event is thus an active process.

According to Richard Jackson, the Bush administration embarked on a mission to ‘fix the exact nature and meaning of the events’.Footnote ⁷³ In what he describes as ‘probably the most important discursive move’ made by the Bush administration, the terrorist attacks were constructed, or as he puts it, ‘grammatically reconstructed’, as acts of war. Closely reading post-September 11 speeches made by President Bush and other senior White House figures, he shows how this shift was made. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's words are especially telling in this regard. Of the September 11 attacks he said, sixteen days after the event: ‘They were acts of war, military strikes against the United States of America. As such, those Department of Defense employees who were injured or killed were not just victims of terror. They were combat casualties’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Rumsfeld is here adding a new layer of meaning to the event. No longer simply terrorist attacks, as the President's words of the morning of September 11, 2001 attested, the attacks were now construed as acts of war. Subsequent events reaffirmed the construction of September 11 as an act of war, including the decision by Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to invoke the ANZUS agreement on 14 September 2001, committing Australia to support any American military response.Footnote ⁷⁵

September 11 as an act of evil

The day after the terrorist attacks, the headline of the Australian tabloid, The Herald Sun, screamed: ‘Pure evil’ (13 September 2001). Evil was a word that quickly, and perhaps understandably, came to mind. It certainly came to President Bush's mind, over and again. ‘Today our nation saw evil’, he told the American public on the day of the attacks.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the months and years ahead he would repeatedly invoke the word to describe America's enemies as ‘evil-doers’ or ‘evil folks’. His infamous ‘axis of evil’ State of the Union address, and several subsequent speeches portrayed the post-September 11 world as driven by a conflict between good and evil.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, so unsparing was Bush with this discourse, that the philosopher Peter Singer has named him the President of Good and Evil.Footnote ⁷⁸ President Bush used the term in some 319 speeches between January 2001 and June 2003, according to Singer.Footnote ⁷⁹ Moreover, he tended to use the word as a noun rather than adjective, creating the impression that evil was a force of nature, something with an existence independent of the actions of human beings.Footnote ⁸⁰ For neoconservatives, September 11 was a salutary reminder that ‘evil exists in this world’.Footnote ⁸¹ It was also a clarion call to rid the world of evil. There can be little doubt that labelling the enemy as evil was psychologically reassuring for many Americans, including the principals in the White House, but it tended to foreclose attempts to understand the sources of terrorist anger. It also gave rise to the forlorn hope that evil was eliminable.

Counter-narratives of September 11

The naming of an event seems a trivial matter. But there may be more to it. Jacques Derrida says that naming an event after a date (like September 11) indicates that ‘we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this “thing” that has just happened, this supposed “event”’.Footnote ⁸² Calling it an ‘act of “international terrorism”’, Derrida suggests, would not help us to grasp the event's singularity.Footnote ⁸³ It is perhaps for this reason that some, like David Campbell and Jenny Edkins, have suggested retaining the non-specific designation, ‘the event’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The idea behind this suggestion is that naming an event inevitably fixes its meaning, whereas Campbell and Edkins hesitate, for political reasons, to assign meaning to an event which cannot be represented, that ‘exceeds experience’.Footnote ⁸⁵ It is this ‘inexperiencability’ of the event that Derrida also wants recognised.Footnote ⁸⁶ An event worthy of the name is first ‘experienced’ as something that cannot be comprehended, something that eludes the grasp of our extant concepts. An event calls for an effort of appropriation; it calls for attempts to make sense of it, to recognise it, to comprehend it, to identify it, and to describe it. And yet, precisely because it is an event worthy of the name, it will resist, elude or exceed all such attempts at appropriation.Footnote ⁸⁷

This is certainly true of attempts to appropriate September 11 as an act of war. In truth, the White House has oscillated between constructions of the event as an act of terrorism and an act of war, but for strategic reasons it made sense to the White House to revert to the language of war. Despite the well-documented drawbacks of this rhetoric, the war narrative was intended to provide the US with a more conventional range of policy responses; most importantly, it would allow the US to target sovereign states rather than elusive terrorist networks in its ‘War on Terrorism’.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was imperative to broaden the war on terror beyond terrorists to include states, Vice-President Cheney insisted, because ‘it's easier to find them than it is to find Bin Laden’.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, the White House also argued that a ‘new type of war’ was instigated by September 11, rendering old war-fighting methods dangerously passé. This created confusion in US policy to the extent that rules governing the War on Terror became unclear. To Bush's mind, the enemy was fighting without any constraint, free of agreed international rules.Footnote ⁹⁰ Doubt was therefore cast over the relevance of the Geneva Conventions and other rules meant to ‘humanise’ or at least limit the destructiveness of war. Such rules were thought to be ‘quaint’ or antiquated in an asymmetrical war where only one side was a traditional military force. At any rate, as the US legislated to remove limits on interrogation methods, a certain symmetry was established – America's moral authority was in tatters as it descended to the tactics and techniques of its enemy.

Attempts to construct September 11 as world-changing are equally elusive. There is no doubt that the terrorist attacks were profoundly felt around the world and that they deeply and traumatically affected the US. But the question of whether the world changed is a different matter. No doubt it is too early to tell. But already some things are clear. First, it is clear that there is now a widespread belief that September 11 has changed the world.Footnote ⁹¹ This alone may be significant insofar as it is a view held by decision-makers in the White House; however, it needs to be balanced against a second, converse factor, namely, that, as David Campbell argues, it is clear that the US response is strongly informed by Cold War narratives of heightened insecurity and militarised responses.Footnote ⁹² A world-changing response, he argues,

Campbell's main point is that Western governments and media have shown no hesitation in adopting narratives that reproduce Cold War tendencies. This applies equally to the construction of September 11 as an act of evil, after all, during the Cold War President Reagan famously called the USSR the ‘evil empire’. For both Reagan and Bush and their neoconservative supporters, America embodies a transcendental apotropaic power, a power capable of defeating evil. Indian writer Arundhati Roy is doubtless correct to say that President Bush ‘can no more “rid the world of evil-doers” than he can stock it with saints’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Jean Bethke Elshtain is among the most prominent of those commentators who accept the President's narrative of a battle between good and evil and believe in America's apotropaic powers.Footnote ⁹⁵ She wants us to believe that when confronted with competing narratives of the same event we must decide on the basis of trust or moral authority.Footnote ⁹⁶ Who is the more trustworthy narrator of September 11, she asks, Pope John Paul II or Osama bin Laden? Elshtain implies that the more trustworthy description of the event will issue from the more trustworthy person. Now as far as we know, neither man was an eyewitness to the event itself, if by that we mean, experiencing ‘first-hand’ the crashing planes in New York, Washington or Pennsylvania. That does not worry Elshtain because her intention is not to set out the facts, but simply to decide whether it is better to describe the events of September 11 as an ‘unspeakable horror’ or a ‘glorious deed’. Indeed, the facts are not actually in question;Footnote ⁹⁷ John Paul II, Osama bin Laden and Jean Bethke Elshtain all agree that planes were flown into buildings killing thousands. What is in question is how to interpret certain facts, how to decide which facts are most salient in constructing a narrative, and how to normatively judge the actors for their decisions and actions both during and after the events. It is indeed a question of ‘politics and the capacity for judgment’, to borrow from Elshtain, because it involves choosing between competing interpretations.Footnote ⁹⁸

Elshtain wants to argue that any description of events must inherently carry a moral evaluation.Footnote ⁹⁹ The factual world has a moral nature, she says, rather evoking the natural law theology of early modern Christendom.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But if we put to one side her natural law theology, Elshtain's point is a reasonable one: facts and values are difficult to separate. The facts we select, the interpretations we give, and the narrative shape we give to the events will betray a moral perspective and even a moral judgment. In her own words, ‘Our depiction of the event carries our moral evaluation’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ I fully agree with Elshtain on this. But interestingly, her example from Albert Camus is notable for its lack of explicit moral judgment. In his story about a mother forced at gunpoint to choose which of her three sons should not be murdered, told with ‘admirable economy’, says Elshtain, Camus withholds explicit condemnation. He writes without the self-righteous, moralistic tone of Elshtain. Why? Because there is no need. His ‘spare description of events’ can still convey the horror of the mother's choice. The author does not need to tell the reader what kinds of emotional sensibility or moral reaction should be provoked, the modern imagination is capable enough.Footnote ¹⁰²

For Elshtain, deciding on the truth of an experience appears to depend on appeal to an appropriate authority. Should we take the word of a Pope or a terrorist? she asks. But this is a disingenuous question. For I know of not a single Western academic critic of the War on Terror who would agree with Osama that the events of September 11 were a glorious deed. So why does Elshtain persist? Because she wants to insinuate an affinity between critics of the War on Terror and the terrorists themselves. She wants to create the impression that if you are critical of the War on Terror, whether you like it or not, you are taking sides with terrorism; you must have accepted Osama's normative depiction of events. Readers can decide for themselves whether that line of argument deserves their trust, but refusing Elshtain's quasi-Manichaean discourse of good and evil allows distance to be gained from both President Bush and Osama bin Laden.Footnote ¹⁰³ What this brief discussion of Elshtain shows is that interpretative conflict is unavoidable. It is not at the level of the ‘facts’ that this conflict plays out. Rather, it is at the level on which the narrative emplots the sequence of event, characterising the story in a particular way.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The Iraq War: the madness of President Bush?

After the terrorist attacks neoconservatives knew a more amenable environment had been created to drum up support for war against Iraq. If Halper and Clark are correct, it was a kind of post-September 11 ‘neurosis’, contrived they think, which shaped the context in which ‘disparate and uncorroborated fragments of information about Iraq [were] formed into a mosaic of specific threats and dangers’. Worst-case scenarios became the norm in the White House.Footnote ¹¹⁵ ‘There was a growing respect for the vivid rumour, the most chilling tale’, to use DeLillo's words, which allowed for flimsy and unverified claims to be used to sell the war against Iraq. Countless unverified claims were made regarding Saddam Hussein's Iraq – about the existence of an Iraqi WMD programme, about Iraq's ability to launch chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, about Iraq purchasing uranium from Niger, about operational links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, about Iraqi culpability for the September 11 attacks – all later proven to be false.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Whether an honest mistake or the figment of a neurotic imagination, these erroneous claims which formed the pretext of the war against Iraq suggest a disconcerting inability of the US and UK governments to distinguish fact from fiction. After the event of September 11, the White House took a turn away from reality much like DeLillo's Jack Gladney, believing that words created truths. Apocryphal intelligence, suggestio falsi and worst-case scenarios stood in for serious analysis.

Even if it is true that neoconservatives in Washington viewed deposing the Iraqi dictator as ‘unfinished business’ after the first Gulf War, it was the sense of post-September 11 fear and anger that spurred the White House into action and that imparted to it a veneer of legitimacy. As early as September 13, it had become apparent to Secretary of State Colin Powell, that President Bush ‘was tired of rhetoric. The president wanted to kill somebody’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He was not alone. Many Americans felt the urge to kill someone in revenge. Lance Morrow, writing in Time magazine in the days after September 11, pronounced: ‘A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This ‘war psychosis’ as Michael Howard calls it, was perhaps a natural response to an event conceived as world-changing and traumatic, but as Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker argue, the political manipulation of fear and anger after traumatic events almost inevitably leads to violence and vengeance.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This may soothe fears of annihilation, as Michael Ure points out, but it does so by creating an illusory feeling of power.Footnote ¹²⁰ That, at least, is how Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud viewed the matter, showing their debt to Stoics such as Seneca, for whom ‘mental raving’ is the ‘outcome of violent anger’.Footnote ¹²¹

The Iraq War has proven to be a great folly. Born out of anger and a desire for revenge after the event of September 11, it has plunged the US into a ‘long war’ from which it will be difficult to exit. Achieving victory is likely to be even more difficult. In any case, it has done nothing to eliminate terrorism or evil. In fact, if anything, it has exacerbated the problem of terrorism, doing more harm than good in Adam Roberts' judgment.Footnote ¹²²