The 1AC’s impact scenarios reinscribes the visibility of a televised war that demands viewership to manipulate public consciousness to accept American exceptionalism as justice.

The media response to the recent assassination by American MQ-9 Reaper drones of Qassem Suleimani and several Iraqi officials shows the unanimity of the Trump administration and his liberal ‘opposition’ in America’s weapons-centred foreign policy. According to Secretary of State Mark Esper, for the administration, Iraqis should not be angry about these murders on their soil, for ‘the American people have been extraordinarily generous … to the people of Iraq’.1 The New York Times, while voicing some demurs over the strategic wisdom of the action, affirms that ‘what should not be in doubt is the justice’, for ‘he was an evil man’.2 The New Yorker describes the killing as the result of an imaginary legal process – ‘A drone strike … executed Major General Qassem Suleimani’ (emphasis added) – and blames him for the ‘roadside bombings and other attacks … that had killed at least six hundred Americans during the Iraq War’.3 Neither side weighs these allegations against the hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths caused by that invasion carried out under false pretences, that the handmade Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) were weapons used by native Iraqis in response to that devastating attack, or that Suleimani’s ‘evil’ work was done in aid of resistance to US and US-sponsored aggression in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Yemen. None of these justifications mentions the thousands of others killed by the US drone programme or that the policy of killing by remote control people who appear somehow threatening to a very distant America, along with many innocent bystanders, might be morally suspect.

Thus, the liberal media demonstrate the same poor logic as does Condoleezza Rice, who stated in 2010 that the way to end the continuing war in Iraq is to stop the flow of ‘foreign arms’ and ‘foreign fighters’ into that country, with no sense of the irony of the statement considering the overwhelming presence there of heavily armed American troops. Noam Chomsky cites Rice’s statement as illustrating the paradox of an American identity that makes them indigenous everywhere (since they own the world) while the natives who oppose their conquests are always ‘renegades’.4 This article seeks to explain this inability of American discourse to make sense in terms of the influence of the internet by means of Jean Baudrillard’s psycho-social analysis of technological (American) man.

The murder of Suleimani is one of many carried out by the US ‘on the screen’, and these extrajudicial killings are supported by a large majority of Americans.5 These unprovoked attacks on distant individuals and groups have increased steadily since the 2003 war on Iraq, and, at the time of Rice’s ingenuous statement in 2010, were killing an estimated 1,000 people a year in Pakistan alone.6 Obama carried out 572 ‘strikes’, while Trump has so far carried out at least 262.7 These assassinations have been made part of the media spectacle by both Obama and Trump, with the famous photograph of Obama and his cabinet watching the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011 (viewable on Wikipedia under ‘Situation Room’) and one of Trump and his aides watching the killing of Abu-Bakrai al-Baghdadi in 2019. The New York Times published both images recently and instructed readers to consider the two presidents’ differing styles of presentation in their video announcements: ‘gritty details’ for Trump, ‘light on details’ for Obama.8 The New Yorker branded Trump’s performance his ‘“Baghdadi Died Like a Dog” victory tour’ and quoted him on his viewing experience: it was ‘as though you were watching a movie’. (The bin Laden raid was made into a movie, Zero Dark Thirty, in 2012.) Of the terrorist enemies on his screen, Trump said, ‘they use the internet better than almost anybody else in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump’.9 Beyond superficial matters of style, American media outlets support and publicise these internet-enabled murders enacted before their leaders as ‘images … on a large television screen in the operations center’,10 while ignoring the broader question of why we have to see them watching these murders. As viewers of the American Spectacle, we must see them watching because the only reality is virtual reality. It is watching that makes it real and that constitutes justice in a regime of compulsory spectatorship. According to Baudrillard, in American hyperreality, everything will come to take the form of simulation, since ‘without this perpetual video, nothing has any meaning today’.11 Not presented for viewing, obscured behind these images of leaders watching murders, are the thousands of ordinary people killed by the drone programmes and the horrific human effects of the ‘Shock and Awe’ attacks on Iraq. In the context of such a militarised response to the world, American writers on the left and right, entranced by their own false self-image, can still consider the specious question, ‘Which Way to the City on a Hill?’; that is, how to best fulfil America’s destiny as the model for all nations.12