The affirmative’s need to boost the defense base is rooted in American exceptionalism.

Very little of the scholarship generated by Said’s classic work has dealt with war and violent conflict. Yet, war has always been fundamental to Orientalist discourses. Indeed, the very idea of the West, along with its History, is born in Orientalist war. Herodotus elaborated a vision of the Greeks through contrast with the Persian Empire they fought.15 Back then, of course, the Greeks were the weaker party, fighting for their existence on an imperial periphery. A long line of scholars and political and military commentators, not to mention Hollywood, have twisted Herodotus‟ plural readings of the Other into Orientalism: the Persians as a multitudinous mass who threatened to overwhelm the Greeks; their lack of individuality and „freedom‟; their hierarchical social and political arrangements; their indolence and sensuality; their capacity for, indeed enjoyment of, unreasoning, passionate violence, and so on.16 Orientalism subsequently has been marked by this extremism, and by this fear, even as the poles of power shifted to favor the putative West of the day. The renaissance recoveries of Greek and Roman texts, and their subsequent employment in Orientalisms of diverse kind, took place in a Europe poised to begin its modern rise to world dominance. The birth of Orientalist traditions in a context of Western weakness and existential crisis, but subsequently flowering in one of strength and dominance marks also the American experience. Outnumbered and threatened by Indians at the beginning, Puritan Indian hating became basic to the Frontier, the American West, and beyond to the ground wars in Asia.17 There is a tension between such an unstable realm as war and the rigid identity constructions of a totalizing Orientalism, a tension evinced in the fraught and extremist character of its representations of war. Events at the war front can resist Orientalist representations, and conspire to set limits on and expose contradictions in them. Here is where the space is created for debates, contestations and crises at home. Things can and sometimes do turn out much differently than expected. The shocks and surprises of war are stark reminders of the contingencies of political military histories. At the same time, the identity of the Westerner is intimately bound up with constructions of Orientalized others. In order for Americans to “liberate” Iraq, and hence conceive themselves as liberators, Iraqis must desire liberation. For Americans, this is not misperception but a form of identity politics. To conceive the Iraqis differently, say as a people who regard the US as a violent and unpredictable imperial overlord allied with Zionist interests, requires abandoning the notion that Americans are liberators. That is, it requires abandoning a cherished and precious element of American self-understanding. Such a reversal marked the crises generated in American society by the Vietnam War. Many Americans eventually did come to see the US as a murderous imperial aggressor in Vietnam, in part in and through media representations of the war. Events at the front entangled narratives of Self and Other at home, for elites and publics. An example of these processes is provided by a report filed by Morley Safer for CBS in August 1965 concerning a search and destroy mission conducted by US marines near Danang.18 Unlike most news coverage of US forces in Vietnam at this time, Safer reported on the systematic burning down of a village. Crucially accompanied by film footage broadcast on national television, the report showed marines rousting Vietnamese villagers, young and old, at bayonet point and setting fire to their homes. As Thomas Engelhardt realizes, this report was a flaming arrow headed for the heart of the Frontier narrative, reversing it. It was not the Indians who were now burning down the log cabin, the fort, or the settlement, inflicting pain and suffering on innocent inhabitants, but Americans. CBS‟ switchboard was deluged with calls from outraged viewers when the report aired. President Johnson called the president of CBS to complain (“Frank, are you trying to fuck me?”) and refused to accept the camera footage was real, believing Safer had bribed a marine officer to get the shots he wanted (“They got to one of our boys”). Johnson urged that Safer be investigated, and his staff had the FBI, CIA, and finally the Royal Canadian Mounted Police look at Safer. Informed that Safer was a Canadian, not a communist, Johnson commented, “Well, I knew he wasn‟t an American.”