Exceptionalism,metaphor and hybrid warfare

I argue that, in American public discourse after the attacks of 9/11, the myth of World War II has become the dominant justificatory metaphor for the United States’ (already metaphorical) War on Terror, as broad-brushed analogies between the ‘Good War’ and recent US military adventures in Africa and the Middle East implicitly transfer the ethical values associated in national memory with America’s iconic just war onto our contemporary conflicts and counterinsurgencies. My examination of recent political and strategic discourses and practices suggests, specifically, that the ideological entrenchment the World War II metaphor has helped to shape a language of national security that rests on an unacknowledged logical and ethical contradiction: a tendency, on the one hand, to tout the humanitarianism of current asymmetrical military actions relative to the degenerate total-war engagements of the past yet, on the other hand, to figure the aims and strategies of today’s low-intensity operations in terms that are more appropriate to total warfare, for which the ‘Good War’ serves as moral alibi. By collapsing historical time and erasing, along with it, crucial distinctions between the conflicts that it brings together, this anachronistic cross-mapping of ethically and strategically incompatible structures of violence serves to naturalise what I call a hybrid culture of warfare, a fetishistic conception and practice of war that regressively mimics features of the total-war ethos while also testing the laws of war in unprecedented ways, through the use and the abuse of new weapons technologies.