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ANIMA
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
By
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
Duke University Press
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7467-1
Publication date:
2016
Book Chapter
Staging Smallpox: Reanimating Variola in the Iraq War
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Published:April 2016
This chapter argues that the global eradication of smallpox in the 1970s helped produce a key justification for the neoconservative U.S. war against Iraq in 2003. The war was partially justified by the claim that Iraq had the wherewithal to spread epidemic smallpox against an unvaccinated U.S. population. In health planning scenarios, journalism, and fiction depicting such use of smallpox as a bioweapon, visions of American Indian viral susceptibility and Islamic terrorism buttressed a militarized logic of preemptive intervention against disease, which was spectacularly performed through the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein from the Iraqi presidency. The ability to mobilize...
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