“The Effacement of Place? US Foreign Policy and the Spatiality of the Gulf Crisis.” by Gearoid Ò Tuathail

This paper describes the spatial conception of the US role in the first Gulf War and the discourse of Persian Gulf geography and history by the Bush administration. Additionally, Ò Tuathail focuses on the consequences of imaging technology on the ethics of war. He argues that the security issues recognized under the Bush administration were an attempt to recode global threats to US interests in the vacuum following communism’s collapse. Conspicuously ignoring the precedent of the Carter doctrine, Ò Tuathail attributes the US response to Kuwait’s invasion to some desperate search for a new model to sustain US hegemony engineered by the Bush administration. Kuwait’s description as “less a country than a family owned oil company” belittles its sovereignty and therefore the legitimacy of the US reaction.

Ò Tuathail also suggests that visual technology, whether that be aerial reconnaissance or GIS, has led to the dematerialization of space in conflict. Therefore the US military campaign in Iraq had the moral implications of a video game on the American participants. This article contains a lot of ancillary details and unqualified (and in my estimation, unscholarly) statements. For example, the non-sequitur on pg. 143 seems to suggest that the white, male, conservative makeup of the Bush administration contributed to the continuation of anachronistic foreign policy. Furthermore, Ò Tuathail never justifies his characterization of US military action as a “techno-frenzied slaughter”. This paper is more an emotional rant than a logical exposition.