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The recent war in Iraq invites observations that are at once very familiar to sociology, but also entirely new. The nature of power and the legitimacy of state is immediately drawn into any analysis of the Gulf War. As Weber once specified, one of the core features of a state is that it has 'a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory' (Weber in Gerth and Mills: 78). The need for a state to keep a standing army and to protect itself against aggressors is often justified in these terms. The modern system of nation states, an outcome of the colonial period of globalisation (see chapter 13), is built on this principle of state sovereignty. As is enshrined in the United Nations, no state ought interfere with the affairs of another, regardless of the political constitution of that state. By this principle, Iraqi aggression in 1991 toward Kuwait was expelled with the assent of the UN. However, Gulf War Two is very different. Three states, the US, UK and Australia, who upheld the UN charter in 1991, turned to act against that charter in 2003, even in spite of the global protests in the first months of the year. The implications this has for the social bond are thoroughly postmodern, in both Western and Eastern society. In Lyotardian terms, a far-reaching cynicism toward the Western Grand Narratives of Freedom, Democracy and the moral superiority of the 'rule of law' is consummated by this action. Such cynicism is countered by a new discourse promoted by Western states -- fear of 'terrorism'. The moral panic of the 1990s (see chapters 12 and 14) about globalisation threatening the power of nation states, has today transformed into a panic about 'terrorism', and in a post-cold-war and post-colonial period (see chapters 2 and 5) Iraq provides a ready-made Orientalist 'Other' for quick retribution to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. These shifting 'definitions of the situation' prove the importance of the power of discourse, and the way it can divide communities, states and the entire world into Same and Other. Western media are key players in this new dynamic of 'othering' in which imaginary conditions can rapidly transform into real ones. Was the 'clash of civilisations' thesis, which circulated in the press in the late 1990s, 'reflecting' social reality, or helping to produce it? Certainly the legitimate/illegitimate actions of the Anglo-American forces have 'pre-empted' an answer to such a question, where imaginary and hypothetical relationships have become real ones, particularly for the victims of war. Questions:
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