Within hours of the September 11, 2001, attacks, pundits scrambled to explain what they signified. “Perhaps,” Naomi Klein wrote days later, 9/11 will “mark the end of the shameful era of the video game war.” By that she meant, for Americans, the bloodless entertainment — familiar since the 1991 Gulf War — of watching precision bombs pulverize distant targets.
Americans now knew what the video game war, enabled by a nationalist media, concealed: the devastation, especially for civilians, when terrible violence strikes. This suffering, Klein felt, was the point of the terror: “The era of the video game war in which the U.S. is always at the controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. . . . [T]wisted revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share their pain.”
Despite promises of swift victory, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars confirmed for Americans the sentient hell of actual, blood-and-guts war. Both ended when the country had seen enough chaos, loss, and drift. Thereafter, the “Iraq syndrome” limited US aggression, while incentivizing advances in remote killing via drones. That was then.
Now Donald Trump’s attack on Iran has brought the video game war back with frightful vengeance. There is the Pentagon’s puerile mash-up of real bombing footage with scenes from Call of Duty. More than that, Trump has resurrected the military fantasy at the heart of the video game war: armed conflict with (nearly) zero losses, made imaginable by technological advances, chiefly in lethal air power. Equally important is its political premise: that Americans will scarcely object to, or even care much about, any war so long as victory is certain and costs are low.
It barely feels like the Iran War is happening at all, save on TV or social media. This is by design.
The Trump administration has largely dispensed with the dismal rituals by which the nation marches to major…
Auteur: Jeremy Varon
