The reports on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction decided that the US invasion of Iraq could start. Today, we know that these weapons were fiction, an image produced to justify the war. Discussing Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war, Cathy Caruth shows that this type of political imagery has a long tradition in the US.
Cathy Caruth
is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. Her publications include Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996); Trauma: Explorations in Memory, (ed.) (1995); and Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (1990).
