Postcolonial laboratories

I was at a Holiday Inn just off a Los Angeles highway when the Gulf War started.

We were on holiday in the US for the first time, and I was looking forward to everything that a nine-year-old who lived in Sweden dreamt of: Disneyland, seeing Kindergarten Cop before any of my friends, a pair of Levi 501s. But as soon as the first cruise missiles had landed in western Iraq, visible to us through green-hued night vision footage, we spent most of that holiday at the hotel glued to CNN’s 24hr broadcast.

It wasn’t the first time there was a war in an area where I had family members, but those other wars weren’t shown on TV – they were barely mentioned on the news other than through faraway radio signals that every now and again could be separated from the static. For the first time, the war on TV was fought in what, to us, seemed like real time.

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The aerial footage that the Pentagon allowed CNN to broadcast during the Gulf War was presented as unmediated reality (even though it was, in reality, highly censored), which created a simulation of war without bloodshed or human casualties. A simulation which insisted on the superiority of the American military possessing the ability to eradicate its enemies from its God’s-eye vantage point. The fact that CNN used the actor James Earl Jones, known for voicing Darth Vader, to intone the channel’s tagline, ‘This is CNN’, reinforced the artificial, cinematic quality of the war. W. J. T. Mitchell states that American media and politicians wanted to portray the conflict as a ‘war of faceless enemies marching in anonymous ranks to be vaporized by superior weapons from a safe distance’.1 The American technological advantage was such that the war could barely be said to have taken place at all.2 Even as it was starting, this ultramodern war was already won.

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Darth Vader’s voice may have been intrinsically interwoven with the Western coverage of the war, but Star Wars also provided inspiration for Saddam Hussein’s army. Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son who was for a time responsible for Iraq’s paramilitary organization Fedayeen, is said to have been a huge fan of the movies, and was instrumental in making the unit’s helmet a replica of Darth Vader’s. In the build-up to the Gulf War, he also televized a segment showing Fedayeen soldiers marching back and forth under Qaws an-Naṣr (the Victory Arch) to the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that both sides of this conflict chose to be associated with the movies’ evil empire.

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The Death Star, a weapon as large as a moon possessing the ability to destroy an entire planet was said to have inspired Reagan’s planned Strategic Defense Initiative – a space weapon nicknamed the Star Wars programme. Meanwhile Project Babylon, Saddam’s own planned super weapon, was inspired by both the Death Star and Jules Verne’s Columbiad.

The rhetoric surrounding these imaginary sci-fi weapons overshadowed the more prosaic but very real weapons that were used against enemies and civilians. When Saddam’s regime began to use chemical weapons against the Kurds, those who witnessed the attacks didn’t know what was being released over their villages. To this day it remains unclear what the gas consisted of (though probably it was a mix of Tabun, Sarin, VX and mustard gas). The Kurds called it hek taybat, the ‘special thing’.

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After over 5,000 Kurds had been gassed to death in Halabja in 1988, the CIA spread disinformation indicating that Iran was responsible for the attack. The Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, who managed to make his way there and document the massacre, later said that it was a ‘new form of death’ that he had witnessed. The world could now see, through his black and white photographs, what the effects of the ‘special thing’ were. As a child my parents were sending out postcards of Golestan’s photos to politicians and governments around the world, and whenever I would see the photos around the apartment I would turn them over so as to avoid looking at the parent who had tried to protect their infant child; the dead girl with open eyes; the corpses, frozen in the moment of their death. I tried my best to avoid looking at them, but the images still gave me nightmares for years.

What was shown on CNN a few years later did not lead to feelings of abhorrence. The Gulf War was packaged as entertainment.

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The Gulf War was not only the first televisual war and the first conflict we got to experience ‘live’ as though it were reality television, it was also the first war in which the Stealth F117-bomber was a protagonist. This was the first appearance of an invisible – almost mythological – power that could strike from above, inspiring associations of divine retribution; the war in Afghanistan was initially called Operation Infinite Justice and George W. Bush repeatedly referred to the war on terror as a ‘crusade’. As opposed to Reagan’s Star Wars and Saddam’s Project Babylon, the Stealth bomber was very much a reality.

The photographs that exist of F117’s and B-2 Spirits in the air are mostly PR-images distributed by the manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. They resemble nothing so much as dead pixels, a black geometric hole in the sky, reinforcing a sense of the war’s artificiality.

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Paul Virilio claimed in an interview that the Gulf War was ‘a worldwide war’ … ‘thanks to the satellite acquisition of targets, thanks to the tele-command of the war.’3 That the war could be ‘tele-commanded’ was a consequence of what admiral Arthur Cebrowski described as Network-Centric Warfare, a web-like structure where planes, drones and other units could communicate through a central processor – the inspiration was Wal-Mart’s centralized cash register system that communicated directly with the supply chain.4 In the early 1990s, network-centric warfare required advanced computational tools based around Intel’s Pentium III microprocessor, which countries under American sanctions didn’t have access to.

A decade later American intelligence services began investigating whether Saddam Hussein was trying to circumvent sanctions by importing thousands of PlayStation 2s and use their processors to build his own missile-guiding supercomputer.5

The video game war had thus inspired a war powered by a video game console.

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The first aerial weapon is thought to have been a flying kite used by Chinese soldiers as early as 200 BCE. The gunpowder-filled kite had an incense-stick fuse and was dragged across the walls of the enemy’s fortresses.6 Two thousand years later, during the American Civil War, the kite was used again, this time as a rudimentary surveillance apparatus with a glued-on camera that could take images of the enemy’s positions.7 With time, the development of weapons and cameras brought them ever closer, until they became the movie camera and the machine gun through Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic gun from 1874. The gun’s photographic plates were installed on a rotating drum to take several photographs of a moving object. The same mechanism that was used to take photographs was used to fire bullets. Or, in the words of Friedrich Kittler, ‘the transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets’.8 During the First World War, the British Air Force practiced with chronophotographic guns, not only because celluloid was cheaper than bullets but also because the pictures allowed superiors to assess the soldiers’ aim.

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Ever more advanced weaponry meant that empires could win wars without even having to risk the lives of their own citizens: during the Gulf War, 20,000 Iraqis were killed, in stark contrast to the 148 American soldiers who died, 70 of whom perished in accidents or friendly fire. A war against a technologically underdeveloped army became an opportunity to show off new fighter jets and bombs – a performance of violence with the rest of the world as spectators, with free marketing courtesy of global news broadcasts.

When the Maxim gun was developed, a few years after Marey’s chronophotographic gun, it was used by the British as part of their colonial conquests such as the invasion of Sudan in 1896. While only 48 British soldiers died during the Battle of Omdurman, more than 10,000 Sudanese were killed. The battle lasted only a few hours. The superiority of this new gun, compared with the weaponry at the disposal of native populations, was devastating. As poet Hilaire Belloc wrote: ‘Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not.’ Meanwhile, the camera became a way to document this superiority, with British colonialists regularly sending back photos in their reports to the Colonial Office and the War Office.

Despite its growing popularity in Hollywood, colour film was initially seen as tasteless and vulgar by European audiences. Nevertheless, Joseph Goebbels saw it as a potent form of propaganda, with German Agfacolor’s competitiveness with US Technicolor his proud aim. A war of images was underway.9

After the Second World War, the value of the image kept increasing: the enormous defense budgets that the war demanded had ramped up production of radio-related infrastructure by 1,500% between 1942 and 1944.10 While commercial radio had no need for the advanced facilities that had been built, television did. As the television started to become a consumer device, reality was increasingly represented via the image. War no longer simply required the most advanced weapons, it also needed the most advanced images.

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A rumor that was circulating in Iraq during Saddam’s reign was that the television was used to relay messages to the Fedayeen. If the Egyptian belly dancer Sohair Zaki appeared on state TV, something was about to go down.

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The dated night-vision war game with its simplistic overhead viewpoint in 2D has been replaced by an immersive 3D spectacle, a gamified hyper-reality. The TV screen has since shrunk into a screen that fits into our palm and we’re encouraged to ‘react’ to what we are seeing; ‘heart’, ‘haha’, ‘wow’, ‘sad’ and ‘angry’ are the alternatives that Facebook gives us. This is how I experienced the Battle of Mosul in 2016: with a row of emoji bouncing across the screen, past the smoke, over the sand and the soldiers. This flow of immediate images provides no context, no background, no explanation for what we are seeing. It is both thrilling and dull, and in many ways technology is playing catch-up to war. The contemporary experience of war is clearly crying out for wide-spread virtual reality experiences, wherein we can truly ‘be there’ and partake in conflicts from the safe confines of our homes, unable to think about what the images mean since their flow is endless, immediate, live.

And the space where we can test the development of these new experiences and technologies is the same geographic area as usual.

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All throughout the 1920s, the British bombed the civilian population of what is now Iraq. British technology was expected to tame rebellious Arabs and Kurds. Arthur Harris, then Squadron Leader of the Royal Air Force, wrote a report from 1924 in which he claimed that ‘The Arab and the Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village’ … ‘can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.’11

To perform a military test, there needs to be something, someone to target. Kurds have time and time again been shown to be very useful targets; without any of the protections that a nation state provides, without access to media attention, they are barely deemed human in the eyes of the world. Colonial powers have always waged asymmetrical warfare in this manner, selecting battlefields as though they were laboratories, sites of experimentation for new weapons.12 As Sven Lindqvist writes: ‘When is one allowed to wage war against savages and barbarians? Answer: always. What is permissible in wars against savages and barbarians? Answer: anything.’13

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When a war becomes so asymmetrical that one side’s army can remote-control drones from bunkers outside their own hometowns half a world away from any war zone, the concept of a battlefield becomes redefined. That terror organizations like IS and Al-Qaeda use suicide bombers is one way to hit a target with limited means that matches that of the all-powerful drone. The sociologist Talal Asad writes in his overview of suicide bombers that ‘aerial bombing does give at least some warning (sirens, searchlights, the drone of airplanes, the distant explosions), however ineffective the immediate possibilities of shelter may be.’ Meanwhile, ‘the bomber appears as it were in disguise; he appears anonymously, like any member of the public going about his normal business. An object of great danger, he is unrecognized until it is too late.’ The asymmetrical war thus engenders a new form of warfare, which becomes increasingly brutal.

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In lieu of reliable news sources, I have begun to use the website Live Universal Awareness Map to follow developments in the Kurdistan region. The website shows maps of a few dozen conflict zones where circles of different colours represent different factions and armies where air strikes are marked with an illustration of a falling missile, ground offensives with a rifle and so forth. In 2024 the map of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Northern Iraq contained only dark blue circles, meaning Turkish forces. Over the city of Duhok, the marks were so numerous that you had to zoom in to differentiate the blue dots that represent different bombings and drone attacks.

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The organization Community Peacemaker Teams has estimated that in the first six months of 2024 alone, Turkey was responsible for 1,076 attacks in the Iraqi Kurdish territory, and Turkish troops had moved their positions 15 km into Iraq. Despite the precision with which each attack was documented, it is unclear how many died. Every now and again an individual strike receives media attention, like when the Turkish Ministry of National Defense announced that army officer Abdullah Cem Demirkan perished on 19 July due to an improvized explosive device. This then becomes a reason for Erdogan to ‘vow revenge’, allowing the cycle of warfare to continue and careen further out of control.14

The Turkish invasion of Iraq has barely been commented upon by the international community. This could be due to so many other conflicts taking place concurrently. But this isn’t simply a case of disinterested media, as the Iraqi government’s own silence in this matter makes clear. A nation state has invaded another: that, if anything, should still count as an act of war. But the people who live in Shive, Kani Tuia and Zireze are Kurds. Whether these people lie and die under the Turkish or Iraqi flag isn’t deemed important. The space they inhabit isn’t real, not in the way that nation states are real. It is a borderland, a form of limbo. Yes, real people live there: people with dreams and hopes and fears. But the land they live on, that they’re geographically bound to, is and has been a no man’s land where nation states can act with impunity – a laboratory for war and its associated technologies.

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At the end of the nineteenth century, world powers didn’t hold Kurds in particularly high regard: the French ethnographer Ernest Chantre wrote in 1897 that ‘the physiognomy of the Kurds breathes savagery’. Behçet Coma, an official Ottoman state intellectual, described the Kurds as a ‘primitive horde’ which had yet not ‘grasped humanity’. He continued: ‘This horde, which considered existence to be nothing beyond a handful of millet and a handful of barley, knew nothing of what a republic was, or even what lay on the other side of the mountain they happened to live on, nor did they have any desire to know.’15

When the British contemplated using gas to quash rebellion in Kurdish areas in the 1920s, it wasn’t deemed particularly controversial. The British War Manual stated that international laws of combat only applied when war was being waged ‘between civilized nations’. Churchill, who at the time was at the War Office, wrote that he was ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes’. To wage war against uncivilized people was so uncontroversial that Charles Dilke, a British imperialist, could write a bestselling book in which he claimed ‘the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind.’16

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Once the British had given up their mandates for Mesopotamia and Palestine, the experiments did not abate. Kurdistan became what İsmail Beşikçi has called an ‘international colony’, split between different nations – a colony where Saddam’s regime could use its own Scud-missiles that were not precise enough to be effective in war but which worked perfectly well as weapons of fear in civilian populations. Fear was also the main purpose of the Project Babylon super weapons, even though they were never developed, as the project’s head architect Gerald Bull was murdered. The regime continued its experiments in fear by testing a range of chemical weapons against the Kurdish population, including the attacks on Halabja in 1988.

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My aunt, who survived the chemical attack on Halabja, says that what she remembers the most from that day was the smell of rotten apples. To this day she is repulsed by the fruit. Amongst those who were in Halabja that day, the association with apples is widespread. I cannot find any other reports of chemical attacks that are said to have smelt like apples.

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Fifteen years after he photographed the Halabja massacre, Kaveh Golestan was with a BBC crew in the Kifri region of Iraqi Kurdistan to document the Iraq war of 2003. He died after stepping on a landmine.

The millions of landmines that were buried in the Kurdish region during the Iran-Iraq War – more landmines than there are Kurds in the area – are one of the most long-lasting experiments. Iraq was one of the world’s largest importers of landmines. Once it began manufacturing, it quickly became important for Iraq to develop technology that made its landmines competitive in a crowded marketplace. Valsella Meccanotecnica, the Italian company that built the most popular models, initially made plastic televisions and factory equipment before they pivoted to landmines that were nigh on impossible to detect since they don’t contain any metal. They also developed the VS-AR, a mine that explodes if anyone tries to move it, which makes them extremely dangerous to disable or dispose of. Today, a quarter of the world’s unexploded mines are buried in the Kurdish region between Iran and Iraq. Entire fields are covered by the United Nations Mine Action Strategy programme’s small red triangles, warning signs that this land no longer belongs to us, that it has been conquered by machines.

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In 1937, at Franco’s request, Nazi aircraft bombed the civilian population of Guernica. The German Luftwaffedoktrin, the theoretical underpinning of the bombing, reads as a blueprint of British reports from Iraq, or Saddam’s justifications for missile attacks against civilians: the aim was to demoralize opponents. Yet only Guernica has nestled into our collective memory. In the words of Sven Lindqvist, the truth about Chechaouen – a city in Morocco that was bombed by the US during the Spanish war on the Berbers – ‘required no coverup. Bombing natives was considered quite natural.’ He continues: ‘The Italians did it in Libya, the French did it in Morocco, and the British did it throughout the Middle East, in India, and East Africa, while the South Africans did it in Southwest Africa.’ … ‘Of all these bombed cities and villages, only Guernica went down in history. Because Guernica lies in Europe. In Guernica, we were the ones who died.’17

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Kurdistan and other borderlands may be the laboratories where these experiments take place, but the results of the experiments always get traded in the local marketplace. Aimé Césaire writes of the boomerang-effect that takes place when the methods of colonizers are turned onto one’s own population, methods that hitherto had been absolved and legitimized because ‘until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples’.18

Michel Foucault further developed this notion in a lecture he held in 1976. Colonial warfare, he claimed, had an effect on the ‘mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.’19

This internal colonialism is visible in the militarization of the police in the US, which for decades has undergone a process of what sociologist Julian Go calls ‘imperialist feedback’. This feedback spans from the counterterrorism strategies used against the Occupy-movement, the riot control methods derived from the invasion of Afghanistan that were used against protestors in Ferguson, and the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles that were developed by the army during the Iraq war that are now being used by over 500 local police departments in the US. And the reach of the boomerang keeps expanding: the spyware Pegasus, developed by the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO to combat terrorism, is being used for the surveillance of journalists and aid workers all over the world. Gulf states have signed agreements with private security firms – the ones that revolutionized warfare in the Middle East since the US was not legally responsible for their actions – enabling them, in the event of internal turmoil, to take over military duties. The methodologies of war are now everywhere.

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In Ireland, a company by the name of Manna delivers food, medicine and books via drone.

Facial recognition software, used by drones in war zones all over the world, initially developed by the US Department of Defense – a rudimentary version of which could identify Vietcong soldiers by their pyjamas – is being used to log into websites and apps.

The GPS, developed by the military and used at scale for the first time during the Gulf War, now helps us to order cabs and allows for the Manna-drone’s delivery of pad thai.

The victims of all the wars that were not deemed to have taken place haunt our devices. So many of the technologies we now use in our daily life are the results of brutal experiments on stateless bodies. Behind every screen, at the very bottom of the eternal technological promise of a simpler life, the Gulf War still flickers.

Gulf War USAF image from ground attack missile targeting camera. Taken from CNN webpage. Original source supposed to be US government/military agency. Image via Wikimedia Commons

This article was first published in Glänta 2/2024, reviewed in Eurozine.