Bio-Imperialism

Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781978814783, 9781978814790
• eBook ISBN: 9781978815162
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Bio-Imperialism focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror—the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and raced discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. It demonstrates that the U.S. government and mass media amplified Orientalist tropes of Arabs, Muslims, and other racially marginalized communities as terrorists and disease carriers, and also circulated metaphors of white feminine fragility to stoke a sense of national fragility against bioterrorism and other germ threats. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense, and further, bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of global south nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.

1

The Making of the Technoscientific Other

Tales of Terrorism, Development, and Third World Morality

Bioterrorism is a real threat to our country. It’s a threat to every nation that loves freedom. Terrorist groups seek biological weapons; we know some rogue states already have them.… It’s important that we confront these real threats to our country and prepare for future emergencies.

—President George W. Bush, “President Signs Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Bill,” June 12, 2002

The bioterrorist is an active agent, a sophisticated hybrid of primitive and modern who seizes “our” biotechnology—a symbol of American modernity and economic might—and transforms it into a political weapon.

—Historian of medicine Nicholas B. King, “The Influence of Anxiety” (2003, 438)

Biological warfare invokes long-standing anxieties about disease spread; the use of infectious diseases such as anthrax, smallpox, and plague as “biological weapons” conjures a picture of widespread devastation. Such a weapon, comprising living organisms, can spread indiscriminately and unpredictably, and thus may produce prolonged and untold suffering. In fact, the morality of germ weapons has drawn debate since their earliest usage. The development of large-scale national programs during both world wars was followed by contentious dispute among the military, politicians, and scientists. Science writer Robin Clarke (1968) tracked the range of views: some highlighted that biological warfare entails a low proportion of casualties and disability and is thus more humane than other methods of waging warfare, while others argued that it disproportionately harms civilians and the weakest of the target population and that germs should only be approached in medical terms—that is, as something to be eliminated (not deployed for warfare).

Opposition to biological weapons ramped up in the post–World War II period, when scientists internationally began to oppose all three forms of unconventional weapons as inhumane—nuclear (because of their use against Japan), chemical (used against Vietnam), and biological, by virtue of their grouping with chemical weapons. By the mid-1960s, the UK, among other nations, sought to expand the targets of existing prohibitions. The 1925 Geneva Protocol had banned first use of chemical and bacteriological—but not microbiological and other biological—weapons or their toxins. These were included in a new, stricter international ban on offensive biological weapons programs—the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Its full moniker was the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. The text of the ban described biological weapons as “repugnant to the conscience of mankind”—cinching the view of biological warfare as immoral. In the United States, President Richard Nixon had instituted a ban a few years prior, in 1969, a result of concerns among scientists, politicians, and military commanders about not only the ethics of biological weapons, but also their questionable efficacy in comparison with the proven power of nuclear weapons (Cole 1997; Tucker and Mahan 2009).¹

The dwindling of large-scale biological warfare programs was followed by the implementation of defensive programs. In the United States, biodefense ebbed and flowed under different administrations, getting a substantial boost under Clinton. In the late 1990s Clinton instituted far-reaching domestic preparedness measures and monitored carefully the weapons capacity of the former Soviet Union and other nations and groups. During this renewed attention, Clinton rallied moral discourse—particularly potent in the wake of the post-sixties ban—to code nations such as Iraq (who were accused of possessing offensive biological weapons) as uncivilized: Clinton described the UN, which was engaging in weapons inspections of Iraq, as “the eyes and ears of the civilized world” (Clinton 1998). This framing of biological warfare in moral terms would continue in the Bush era.

In a speech to the United Nations elaborating the rationale for the war on terror, President Bush stated: “Terrorists are searching for weapons of mass destruction.… They can be expected to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so” (Bush 2001d). This construction of certain groups as prone to violence, as if they lacked moral restraint, was central to how “terrorism” became the primary marker of Arabs, Muslims, and the Middle East in the post-9 / 11 period. National security narratives positioned Arabs and Muslims as the primary antagonists, and discourses about biological warfare played a pivotal role in shaping anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment. Before elaborating on this biological warfare component of U.S. narratives on Arabs, Muslims, and terrorism, I turn to the origins of this sentiment in the late Cold War period.

Orientalism, Gender, and the War on Terror

In 1953, the U.S. CIA backed a coup to topple Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had taken control of Iran’s ample oil reserves. This was one of numerous instances where the U.S. government interfered in the governments of Middle Eastern nations for the sake of U.S. interest in the region’s oil in the period after World War II. U.S. interventions in the Middle East intensified during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War when the United States definitively backed Israel as its strategic ally in the region. As the United States and Europe engaged in economic and military interventions for oil resources in the Middle East, Arabs and Arab Americans protested U.S. imperialism. To suppress this resistance, the FBI spied on Arab Americans via Operation Boulder in 1972 (Naber 2000). At the same time, popular media such as TV narratives depicted Arab men as greedy oil sheiks and bearded terrorists, and Arab women in harems and as belly dancers (Shaheen 1984). These narratives served to portray Arab peoples—and the Middle East—as backward, uncivilized, exotic, and dangerous.

As is well described by Edward Said (1978), depictions of the “Orient” have served as ideological tools aiding empires since the late eighteenth century—first the British and French, subsequently the United States. The role of knowledge production in the colonial project has relied primarily on producing images of the “Orient” in dualistic terms that serve to affirm Western² cultural superiority—for example, backward / civilized, superstitious /scientific, irrational / rational, archaic / modern, evil / good, violent /peaceful. Said called this Orientalism, tracing its production to the discipline of geography, biblical texts, armies, colonial administration, and scholarship.

In the United States, Orientalism linked up with racism to not only bolster U.S. policy in the Middle East, but also, as Arab American studies scholars have demonstrated, to negatively racialize Arabs within U.S. society. Arabs, who had been immigrating to the United States since the late nineteenth century, experienced a downgrading of social status during the post–World War II period via public policies, mainstream representations, social patterns of discrimination, separation, and exclusion (Cainkar 2008). By the 1960s, Arab Americans had lost many of the privileges that their previous near-white status had afforded them,³ and were increasingly viewed as innately culturally different from—and inferior to—whites. Cultural essentialism, then, was fundamental to this racialization of Arabs. It marked a distinct mode of racialization that drew on existing Orientalist dualisms, but contrasted with the biologically, phenotypically based racism that has marked blacks and other people of color since the advent of scientific racism in the late 1800s.⁴

No cultural marker has been as key to Arab racialization as Islam. The U.S. state has viewed Islam as a symbol of political subversion since the 1930s, when black Americans began to turn to it as a tool of black liberation. U.S. state surveillance and prosecution of black Muslim organizations escalated during the 1960s, when the FBI utilized aggressive counterintelligence, most notably COINTELPRO, to spy on and infiltrate the Nation of Islam and other black liberation groups that threatened the white supremacist status quo (Curtis 2013). During the late Cold War period, the United States began to focus on Muslims outside the country—the Islamic Republic that took power in Iran in 1979 and the increasingly powerful Islamists in the 1990s, both of which vociferously criticized the United States and its global hegemony.⁵ The United States began to view Islam as a threat and also as the main signifier of Arabs and Arab Americans (Hatem 2011). Nadine Naber (2000) describes how popular films such as Not without My Daughter (1991) and The Siege (1998) portrayed Islam as the driver of Arab backwardness and violence. Although there had been some conflation of “Arab” and “Muslim” (both in negative terms) in earlier colonial contexts,⁶ the late Cold War period saw the solidification of the Arab / Muslim terrorist figure.

The late Cold War construction of an Arab / Muslim threat intensified cultural essentialisms that pivoted on the notion of a clash of values, ideology, and religion (Jamal 2008; Muscati 2002; Shyrock 2008). This ideology continued to gain clout throughout the post–Cold War period. Conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington’s treatise in 1993 on the “clash of civilizations” became wildly popular. It posited that Arabs and Muslims were the cultural Other of the West—inherently and incommensurably culturally different. This cultural essentialism racialized Arabs and Muslims, but in a seemingly race-neutral manner. As Arab American studies scholar Louise Cainkar (2008) has argued, the focus on essentialized cultural and religious differences effectively obscured the racial dimensions of this worldview in a post–civil rights era where blatant racism was no longer acceptable (48).

This thesis of inalterable cultural difference would culminate in the war on terror: rather than pursue criminal prosecution of the September 11 perpetrators, the Bush administration used the attacks as an opportunity to augment U.S. presence in the Middle East. On October 7, 2001, the United States launched an invasion of Afghanistan. This was followed by an invasion of Iraq in 2003. Domestic counterterrorism policies worked in tandem with this military action to target Arabs and Muslims: on October 26, 2001, President Bush signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), which enhanced the ability of the U.S. government to surveil and criminalize foreign nationals, disproportionately impacting Arabs and Muslims.⁷

Suad Joseph, Benjamin D’Harlingue, and Alvin Ka Hin Wong (2008) demonstrate how Arab Americans and Muslim Americans were represented in the mass media after the September 11 attacks—as more intimately tied to their countries of origin than other immigrants are, and as more tied to their countries of origin than they are to the United States (234). They cite New York Times journalist Laurie Goodstein’s September 12, 2001, article “In U.S., Echoes of Rift of Muslims and Jews” as an example: Goodstein depicts Muslims in the United States as affected by terrorist attacks because they have “kin in the Middle East” and thus have “struggled to assert their identities as loyal Americans” (241). Such mass media portrayals intensified a mainstream view of Arabs and Muslims as dangerous and unassimilable, and as having foreign—and thus assumed potentially terrorist—ties. In choosing to perpetuate notions of Arabs and Muslims as an enemy within, these media portrayals largely sidestepped analysis of U.S. imperialism and the social and historical context of violence against the United States by neofundamentalist Islamic groups like Al Qaeda.

U.S. government and media marking of Arabs and Muslims as terrorist Others fueled societal violence. Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, has documented an increase in hate crimes, violent incidents, and discrimination in airline passenger seating, employment, housing, and so on in the year following the September 11 attacks (2003). Meanwhile, the Bush administration, despite waging war against Arabs and Muslims abroad and targeting them within the United States, issued disingenuous statements against the violence Muslims faced from fellow U.S. residents. As early as September 17, President Bush had urged that Muslims “need to be treated with respect” and “must not be intimidated in America” (Bush 2001b). This denouncement, in addition to being rather mild, also reproduced the notion of a binary between the United States and Muslims: the statement started with Bush addressing “both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens” as if the two were nonoverlapping categories. His statement also linked Islam with terrorism: “The face of terror is not the true face of Islam” (Bush 2001b; emphasis added). In making the point that not all Muslims were terrorists, Bush indelibly linked Islam with terror—until proven otherwise.

The clash of civilizations worldview emerged more forcefully in the speeches to follow. President Bush stated in November 2001: “This new enemy seeks to destroy our freedom and impose its views. We value life; the terrorists ruthlessly destroy it” (Bush 2001c). Here, a clear demarcation is being drawn between the “civilized” and the “barbaric.” The notion that death and violence are values, and not tactics, reinforced the notion of a civilizational binary dividing terrorists (read: Arabs and Muslims) from nonterrorists (read: the United States and the West in general). Puar and Rai (2002) describe how, in arenas as diverse as academic discourses of “terrorism studies” to popular TV shows, there was a generalized post-9 / 11 sentiment about a “terrorist psyche” and “terrorist culture” that purportedly reflected a fundamental divergence from U.S. norms of morality.

News media further entrenched this clash of civilizations worldview. In 2003, a journalist from the Wall Street Journal voiced his support for the war on terror: “If Mr. Bush had not declared war on global terrorism and had not declared his willingness to strike first,” then “the civilized world would be staring down the test tubes of barbarism, with no better strategy than waiting for some Saddam [Hussein], Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Laden or any of the other nihilists along the spectrum of WMD acquisition to annihilate large numbers of some nation’s civilian population” (Henninger 2003; emphasis added). The phrase “test tubes of barbarism” served not only to evoke alarming germ-inflected imagery but also to reveal the dualistic terms by which the West / Global North justifies its waging of imperialist wars through constructions of itself as civilized, in contrast to those it characterizes in opposite terms (typically those designated by the overlapping categories of the “East,” Global South, and formerly and currently colonized countries). In April 2004 the Los Angeles Times featured the following commentary: “Muslim leaders need to accept the fact that their religion has been infected by a virus that embraces death and delivers it with cold, unfeeling calculation” (Los Angeles Times 2004). This quote mirrored Bush’s rhetoric: it disarmingly gestured to an Islam that may have been innocent at one time, while employing the metaphor of uncontrollable infection to depict Islam, and thus Muslims, as death-loving and nefariously calculating.

In addition to being markedly racialized and Orientalist, the war on terror was distinctly gendered. Long-standing tropes of Arab and Muslim mascu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Bio-Imperialism and the Entanglement of Bioscience, Public Health, and National Security
• 1. The Making of the Technoscientific Other: Tales of Terrorism, Development, and Third World Morality
• 2. From Practicing Safe Science to Keeping Science out of “Dangerous Hands”: The Resurgence of U.S. “Biodefense”
• 3. Co-opting Caregiving: Softening Militarism, Feminizing the Nation
• 4. Preparedness Migrates: Pandemics, Germ Extraction, and “Global Health Security”
• Epilogue: Repurposing Science and Public Health
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author