Hiding Death: Contextualizing the Dover Ban

ABSTRACT

Following the terrorist attacks against the US in 2001, the Bush administration reaffirmed the Dover ban, the policy that prohibited press coverage of military coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base from conflicts abroad. Conventional wisdom holds that the Bush administration enforced the ban in the hope of maintaining public support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This understanding, though, is incomplete. If the Dover ban were enforced only in response to eroding public opinion, then other coalition states would have responded likewise to this shared incentive. I argue instead that maintaining public support is only one factor among many that led the US to uphold this policy. In addition to considering the influence of factors such as perceived media bias and casualty aversion, I focus on necropolitics and the related impetus for governments to regulate the observation of death. Through this interpretation, part of the American response to the involuntary loss of sovereignty on 9/11 was to exercise control over the observation of death by enforcing the Dover ban. Through comparing the press policies of the US, the UK, and Canada, I show that the necropolitical blow to sovereignty that only the US experienced triggered a repressive policy that only the US was able to maintain.

KEYWORDS:

• US national security
• Dover ban
• necropolitics
• sovereignty
• media

Notes on contributor

Kayce Mobley (PhD, The University of Georgia) is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences at Pittsburg State University. She broadly researches foreign policy and conflict while focusing on disproportionate responses to security crises.

Notes

1 Similarly, when assistants pleaded with Jackie Kennedy to change out of her blood-spattered suit after the assassination of her husband in 1963, she refused, insisting instead, “Let them see what they’ve done” (Horyn 2013).

2 In the same six-month time period, those prominent news outlets collectively published 79 photographs of dead Iraqis (Rainey 2005), suggesting that war coverage of ‘enemy’ deaths has not been as sanitized as coverage of “ally” deaths.

3 This inclination results from the belief that democratic publics are generally casualty-intolerant; this so-called “Vietnam syndrome” (Balshaw 2001, 110; Lacquement 2004, 41) causes elites to assume that public support for war decreases as casualties increase. Literature indicates that, in reality, elites from the US (Feaver and Gelpi 1999; Feaver and Gelpi 2004; Lacquement 2004), the UK (Balshaw 2001; Strachan 2003), and Canada (Boucher 2010) all tend to over-estimate and over-simplify casualty aversion among their publics. Instead of decreasing with increased casualties, public support for war is likely to decrease more when elite consensus regarding war breaks down (Larson 1996; Burk 1999; Balshaw 2001; Berinsky 2007) and when the perceived chance of success, as communicated by elites, decreases (Gelpi, Reifler, and Feaver 2005/2006). Strachan (2003) argues that elites over-estimate public casualty aversion because they compare ongoing conflicts to the experience of the US in the Vietnam War, in which public opinion dramatically dropped as casualties increased. According to Strachan, this is a misleading analogy because the Vietnam War was fought under conscription, whereas the contemporary War on Terror has been fought by volunteers; publics are more willing to let volunteers die in war.

4 Presumably, leaders may also decline to ban the media because of personal beliefs about freedom of the press, the importance of projecting the reality of war, etc. For simplicity's sake, though, in this paper I assume that democratic leaders seek public approval above other incentives.

5 Mbembe (2003) draws on a slew of authors covering the politics of bodies, including Foucault (1997) and Arendt (1966).

6 As Mbembe (2003) notes, Schmitt (1992, 2000) likewise claims that one of the components of sovereignty is the waging of war, which is roughly defined as taking life.

7 The UK lost 453 troops in Afghanistan (BBC 2014; CNN 2015) and 179 in Iraq (BBC 2010; CNN 2015).

8 Originally, the Imperial War Graves Commission proposed that all new military grave markers be uniform rather than individualized. Military families petitioned the Commission, contending that the rights of the dead passed to their kin, not to the state. Eventually the Commission compromised by allowing distinct inscriptions on standardized stone markers (King 2010). This episode mirrors the discussion of the privacy rights of fallen soldiers in contemporary America, discussed above. During the Bush administration, the government argued that the Dover ban upheld the privacy of soldier dead and their families, whereas some families argued that those rights (and related decisions) should be held by families, not the state (Annas 2005).

9 The sanctioned mortuary of the US military is located on Dover Air Force Base, so the US does not have a similar procession (Seelye 2009b).

10 In addition to instituting the media ban, the Harper administration simultaneously decided not to lower the flags at government buildings to half-mast following military deaths. Provincial premiers immediately distanced themselves from the administration, declaring that they would not follow the mandate (Fletcher and Hove 2012).